A newly created B.Sc. doesn’t step right into the kind of challenging project he hopes for, especially when he’s older than the average graduate. I had to start out with what I could get. By luck—we believed then—that was unexpectedly good.
The Nornwell Scryotronics Corporation was among the new outfits in the booming postwar communications and instrument business. Though small, it was upward bound on an exponential curve. Besides manufacture, it did R & D, and I was invited to work on the latter. This was not simply fascinating in itself, it was a long step toward my ultimate professional goal. Furthermore, an enlightened management encouraged us to study part time for advanced degrees, on salary. That pay wasn’t bad, either. And before long, Barney Sturlason was my friend as much as he was my boss.
The chief drawback was that we had to stay in this otherwise dull city and endure its ghastly Upper Midwestern winters. But we rented a comfortable suburban house, which helped. And we had each other, and little Valeria. Those were good years. It’s just that nobody else would find an account of them especially thrilling.
That’s twice true when you consider what went on meanwhile at large. I suppose mankind has always been going to perdition in a roller coaster and always will be. Still, certain eras remind you of the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times!”
Neither Ginny nor I had swallowed the propaganda guff about how peace and happiness would prevail forevermore once the wicked Caliphate had been defeated. We knew what a legacy of wretchedness all wars must leave. Besides, we knew this conflict was more a symptom than a cause of the world’s illness. The enemy wouldn’t have been able to overrun most of the Eastern Hemisphere and a chunk of the United States if Christendom hadn’t been divided against itself. For that matter, the Caliphate was nothing but the secular arm of a Moslem heresy; we had plenty of good Allah allies.
It did seem reasonable, though, to expect that afterward people would have learned their lesson, put their religious quarrels aside, and settled down to reconstruction. In particular, we looked for the Johannine Church to be generally discredited and fade away. True, its adherents had fought the Caliph too, had in fact taken a leading role in the resistance movements in the occupied countries. But wasn’t its challenge to the older creeds—to the whole basis of Western Society—what had split and weakened our civilization in the first place? Wasn’t its example what had stimulated the rise of the lunatic Caliphist ideology in the Middle East?
I now know better than to expect reasonableness its; human affairs.
Contrary to popular impression, the threat didn’t appear suddenly. A few men warned against it from a the beginning. They pointed out how the Johnnies had become dominant in the politics of more than one nation, which thereupon stopped being especially friendly to us, and how in spite of this they were making converts throughout America. But most of us hardly listened. We were too busy repairing war damage, public and personal. We considered those who sounded the alarm to be reactionaries and would-be tyrants (which some, perhaps, were). The Johannine theology might be nuts, we said, but didn’t the First Amendment guarantee its right to be preached? The Petrine churches might be in trouble, but wasn’t that their problem? And really, in our scientific day and age, to talk about subtle, pervasive dangers in a religious philosophical system . . . a system which emphasized peacefulness almost as strongly as the Quakers, which exalted the commandment to love thy neighbor above every other-well, it just might be that our materialistic secular society and our ritualistic faiths would benefit from a touch of what the Johnnies advocated.
So the movement and its influence grew. And then the activist phase began: and somehow orderly demonstrations were oftener and oftener turning into riots, and wildcat strikes were becoming more and more common over issues that made less and less sense, and student agitation was paralyzing campus after campus, and person after otherwise intelligent person was talking about the need to tear down a hopelessly corrupt order of things so that the Paradise of Love could be built on the ruins . . . and the majority of us, that eternal majority which wants nothing except to be left alone to cultivate its individual gardens, wondered how the country could have started to disintegrate overnight.
Brother, it did not happen overnight. Not even over Walpurgis Night.
XX
I came home early that June day. Our street was quiet, walled in between big old elms, lawns, and houses basking in sunlight. The few broomsticks in view were ridden by local women, carrying groceries in the saddlebags and an infant or two strapped in the kiddie seat. This was a district populated chiefly by young men on the way up. Such tend to have pretty wives, and in warm weather these tend to wear shorts and halters. The scenery lightened my mood no end.
I’d been full of anger when I left the turbulence around the plant. But here was peace. My roof was in sight. Ginny and Val were beneath it. Barney and I had a plan for dealing with our troubles, come this eventide. The prospect of action cheered me. Mean while, I was home!
I passed into the open garage, dismounted, and racked my Chevvy alongside Ginny’s Volksbesen. As came out again, aimed at the front door, a cannonball whizzed through the air and hit me. “Daddy! Daddy!”
I hugged my offspring close, curly yellow hair, enormous blue eyes, the whole works. She was wearing her cherub suit, and I had to be careful not to break the wings. Before, when she flew, it had been at the end of a tether secured to a post, and under Ginny’s eye. What the deuce was she doing free?
Oh. Svartalf zoomed around the corner of the house on a whisk broom. His back was arched, his tail was raised, and he used bad language. Evidently Ginny had gotten him to supervise. He could control the chit fairly well, no doubt, keep her in the yard and out of trouble . . . until she saw Daddy arrive.
“Okay!” I laughed. “Enough. Let’s go in and say boo to Mother.”
“Wide piggyback?”
For Val’s birthday last fall I’d gotten the stuff for an expensive spell and had Ginny change me. The kid was used to playing with me in my wolf form, I’d thought; but how about a piggyback ride, the pig being fat and white and spotted with flowers? The local small fry were still talking about it. “Sorry, no,” I had to tell her. “After that performance of yours, you get the Air Force treatment.” And I carried her by her ankles, squealing and wiggling, while I sang,
Ginny came into the living room, from the workroom, as we did. Looking behind her, I saw why she’d deputized the supervision of Val’s flytime. Washday. A three-year-old goes through a lot of clothes, and we couldn’t afford self-cleaning fabrics. She had to animate each garment singly, and make sure they didn’t tie themselves in knots or something while they soaped and rinsed and marched around to dry off and so forth. And, since a parade like that is irresistible to a child, she had to get Val elsewhere.
Nonetheless, I wondered if she wasn’t being a tad reckless, puffing her familiar in charge. Hitherto, she’d done the laundry when Val was asleep. Svartalf had often shown himself to be reliable in the clutch. But for all the paranatural force in him, he remained a big black tomcat, which meant he was not especially dependable in dull everyday matters . . . Then I thought, What the blazes, since Ginny stopped being a practicing witch, the poor beast hasn’t had much excitement; he hasn’t even got left a dog or another cat in the whole neighborhood that dares fight him; this assignment was probably welcome; Ginny always knows what she’s doing; and—