“It’s a trip, this time anyway. I’ll get in my car and drive across the country and visit friends. I’ll rest and get a lot of sleep and read.”
“Can I go with you?”
So Winifred was again where she had been before she made her decision; torn between wanting to get out of the mad security of the estate, and wanting to stay and protect one thin little boy who needed a friend. She kissed him and promised to bring presents back with her, but she knew that when she walked away from him, tears had already welled up into those pale eyes, and two fingers were in his mouth.
The next day Winifred drove up to Matt Daniels’ house in the new suburb of Cincinnati where she spent at least part of each vacation.
Matt and Lisa had been expecting her and were both delighted at her arrival. Lisa was a pretty thing, Winifred had decided at their first meeting, and she and Matt had something going for them. Considering herself a three-time loser in the marriage maze, Winifred was always astounded when two intelligent people could stand to live together more than a few months. It seemed perfectly natural to her that diversive influences would lead them apart after the first blaze was dampened by the rains of revelations that living together precipitated out of the rosy clouds of premarital bliss. She had written that to her third, no, her second, husband after filing suit, making him so angry that he gave all the linens, and her cutlery set, and blender to his mother and then filed a counter suit, charging her with unnatural cruelty. But the Daniels had managed to stay together and to give every appearance of happiness. With what was almost a sense of satisfaction followed swiftly by an analysis of the feeling, and the determination that it was the human and acceptable feeling of vindication of one’s own belief, Winifred realized that the bubble had burst. Or at least some of the air had seeped from it. Lisa looked strained and Matt was jumpy. This was in the brief time of giving hellos and kisses and handing out presents to the children, and eyeing the new dog with suspicion. It was a mop of no discernible breed that weighed one hundred pounds, simply dog with much gray hair and a wagging tail that swept the room from wall to wall.
“Blake’s dog,” Lisa said and pointed sternly toward the door. The dog whined, hung its head and slouched outside, obviously wounded and offended.
Blake grinned at Winifred and she felt better about the dog. Blake was a handsome kid, she decided, realizing with a start that he was the perfect control for her studies of the Star Child. Born on the same day, growing up in a normal family, owner of a dirty dog, a boy in sneakers that would give out in a couple of days, grimy knuckles, and deep sunburn that made his blond hair look whiter, he was the obvious opposite of what the Star Child was growing into.
Dinner with the Matt Daniels’ family was always an experience. The kids talked, Lisa talked, and Matt talked, and it was very nice if confusing. They all had things to say, down to Blake, who probably would have talked more than the others if allowed to.
Derek went to a special school for bright kids, and loved it, and had mountains of books with reports to be made, and special projects to complete, and field trips to plan and execute. His chief concern now was with fossils, and a trip to the fossil beds on the Ohio River in the Louisville area was his next project. Blake listened intently, and when Derek hesitated over a name, or classification, Blake supplied the right word. No one seemed to find this exceptional. When Lorna talked about her approaching piano recital and stumbled over Rachmaninoff, Blake murmured it, and Lorna continued at a whirlwind pace without a glance toward him. And Winifred felt a pang of jealousy that she examined minutely with great interest. How human of her, she thought, and how maternal! The Star Child was nothing to her, but here she was playing the role of a bitchy mother envying the three remarkable children of someone else, comparing them to her own disappointingly average child. She thought it was amusing of herself to take the Star Child that seriously.
After dinner was over and the children were in bed, she asked point blank what the trouble was with Matt and Lisa. Matt glanced at his wife, who shrugged slightly and then said, “Obie’s in town. He always makes us nervous when he shows up. And he was in the neighborhood last week.”
“Oh. Have you told Blake yet?”
Lisa shook her head miserably. “I know,” she said before Winifred could say anything. “I said soon, and I meant as soon as he was five or six. We’re going to, but not until Obie is gone again. There’s time.”
Winifred frowned. “There’s never as much time as you think,” she said. “You should have done it as soon as he could understand what you were saying.” She lighted a cigarette. “Where’s the mother?”
Matt lifted his hands helplessly. “I wish I knew. That’s what’s really held us up on telling him. We wanted to make it all legal and air-tight first, but we haven’t been able to find her. She left that summer, for Louisville, she said, to study at a beauty school. I had detectives trace her to Chicago, then she simply dropped out of sight, and that’s it.”
“Her family? Don’t they know?”
“If they do, they aren’t telling. They pretend that she never had a baby. Her father met me with a shotgun the last time I approached them and threatened to blow my head off if I didn’t stop smearing his daughter.”
Winifred blew smoke toward the ceiling and watched it “It seems that you’re safe enough, if she doesn’t show up. Obie has no claim on him. Probably just curious. What’s he up to these days?”
“You mean you haven’t heard about him?” Lisa asked. And they talked about Obie, “He preys on fear. It’s contemptible the way he fingers people and drags out their nastiest, meanest faults and then exploits them.”
“Vile,” Winifred agreed, “but in the end he’s relatively harmless. This church of his, the Voice of God Church…?” Matt nodded and she swept it away with one hand. “It’s one of thousands. He’ll make a pile of money naturally, but so what? Lots of people do.”
“I went to one of the revivals,” Lisa said, unconvinced. “It’s frightening to see how they respond to him.”
“Relax, honey,” Matt said. “It’s all a negative thing. He doesn’t have anything to offer. He’s an echo. That’s all. Now if he ever comes up with a new world plan, or a cosmological system, no matter how incoherent, or, even better, a self-help plan for health and/or sanity, then we’ll all start to worry about him.”
He did, and they did. But later.
INTERLUDE TWO
So Says Conan Woosley—
Happy Anniversary! Five years ago this month the alien ship came from a blue sky, and changed the history of our world. What changes did it make? One, the war in Asia has become a memory. So the government went a bit left, but lust a little bit. And besides, it’s no concern of this nation if another country decides to go socialist. But the anomaly here is that we have more armed forces deployed on foreign soil than we did five years ago,
Change number two is the unification of major powers In a common cause. How picayune the penetration of a nation’s border for a few miles when the aliens penetrated millions on millions of miles of space. The common goal is space exploration. Or is it to prepare a defensive system in the event aliens return? Or could it be to prepare to meet extraterrestrials as equals, but just a touch of superiority here or there? Well, no matter, whatever the goal is, it’s common.
Another change is the shoring-up of the U.N. Expeditionary Forces: UNEF. That most of UNEF’s members speak American-English, are white, and use weapons made in the States is secondary. The primary purpose for their being Is served daily whenever there is raised a grumbling voice of an insignificant government protesting the arbitrary methods being used to extract from its country its dwindling resources. Of course, no one may be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause, therefore UNEF.