I breathed a happy sigh and got set for a spell of quiet—at least until the centipedes decided to start scuttling—but just then the beetle-man poked his head in and piped politely at Ma. “Good morning. Mrs. Henley, I’m your area med statistician, come to take your blood-pressure and photo-snap your insides and all for posterity, like we arranged for a week ago.”
Ma slowly turned her head and glared at him like a bull that spots the matador, or, more likely, a peanut- vendor strolling across the ring. The red in her face went purple and she slowly reached for the bubbling coffee flask and slowly lifted it. The beetle-man innocently watched the lethal globe ascend with its tip- tilting seething brown hemicore, as if all this were a job-indoctrination demonstration in astrophysics.
Whitey started up, but I pushed him back in his chair, saying rapidly, “Not you. Even being an old friend of the family wouldn’t save you from the horns at this moment.”
Then I rasped loud as ambulance-brakes at Ma, “Hold your hand, you murdering old frump!”
She turned at once, as I’d known she would. I cited her and she charged me with the coffee flask high, very much like a small Miura, but armed in a fashion to have made Manolete himself turn pale. But I slipped her with a half veronica and as she went past I kissed her low on the back of the neck, just at the spot where the matador’s sword goes in. I whisked my arms around her beloved thick waist, and the next instant she and Whitey and I were as happy as tin larks together flitting through a sparkling star cluster, and she was pouring fresh coffee for us.
But the beetle-man, never dreaming the deadly peril he’d been in, advanced another step into the kitchen and called, “Mrs. Henley, it’s very needful you have your medical inspection. You’re distorting area med statistics and there are drastic penalties for evading med census. No need for you to undress, just hold still now—”
I pushed the coffee flask back against the wall and I stroked Ma as I held her tight, so she didn’t go quite as purple as she howled at hun, “You filthy med-spy!—do you think I’ll submit to your peepings and be stuff for your filthy pictures when I’m not granted decent human med service if I do sicken? Here I have four grand sons, supermen ah!—Meaghan here, who’s a master mind doctor, and Harry who’s still in bed, the greatest poet in the world, and Dick the Prince of Personalities, whom you saw speeding to work and I need not comment on, and Tom, who’s a bloody wonder—and the filthy world takes so little note of them that if I go to the clinic it’s only robot doctors who’ll see me and never a flesh-and-blood physician!”
Whatever the topic of her rant, Ma always gets in a commercial for her boys.
The beetle-man quivered back a little at all that, but not very far, and piped soothingly,“Mrs. Henley, there’s nothing vulgar or inferior about robo-med. The Secretary of Mental Health himself prefers—”
He started to take another step into the room.
“That old sham!” Ma roared, palpitating hi my grasp and purpling dark. “He’s the same one whose minions are forever sentencing my genius son Harry to the clutches of the remedial psychiatrists.”
“But Mrs. Henley,” the little fellow went on with rash courage, “I can see with my own eyes you’re not in the best of health. An immediate med-check—”
That gave me my opening and I shoved Ma into Whitey’s arms and advanced on the beetle-man quickly, waving my finger like a sword between his bug eyes. “You watch yourself, lad,” I cried, “or they’ll be terminating you for making diagnoses who are only census-taker. That’s what the licensed psychers did to me for adding only a few words of insight and wisdom to my street-smiling.”
At that very moment a ghostly pattering began and swiftly grew louder. It seemed to come from everywhere.
“What’s that?” the little chap asked wonderingly.
“The giant centipedes,” I told him.
He paled and his zoomered eyes searched the shadows under table and sink as he scuttled backwards, and just at that moment, perhaps from the floor being swayed by our movements, the great spring on the fridge came loose and went klishing across the floor very close to his feet—a twenty-inch coil of gray wire. He leaped for the lintel of the doorway to hoist himself out of reach of the venomous monster of his imagination, but he missed and fell and went leaping off as if old Fu Manchu’s whole blessed menagerie were at his heels. In pure pity I followed him under the great awning, polka-dotted now by the shadows showing through of the stuff pattering down on it, and caught up with him just beyond the mounting flake-drift.
“Don’t be frightened,” I told him, grappling him gently and forcing him to lift his zoomers to the ragged- topped wall behind, now only four to six stories high instead of the thirty it had been a week ago. Along its roller coaster margin two sinuous many-legged great silver beasties scampered, chomping great bites out of it and raining the digested fragments down from their rear ends in concrete cornflakes.
“Those are the giant centipedes,” I explained. “Demolishment robots, only.”
I was thinking of how Harry might make a shuddery poem of them —glittery cosmic crawlers nibbling the gray rim of infinity, eating their way in toward us from the ends of the universe—when at that instant a weightier chunk, rejected by one of the creature’s delicate digestive apparatus, no doubt, came thunking down like a meteor not four feet from us, denting the hard ground and raising a geyser of dust. The beetle-man darted off a dozen more steps while I ducked back under the awning, calling to him, “Now be off with you, little official, and trouble Ma no more. She’s too much for you, but let that not cast you down. Look on her as a revenant from a hardier, crueler age— a duchess out of place.”
I’d no sooner got back in the kitchen, where Ma and Whitey were chatting over their coffee, than Ellie, Dick’s wife, came out of the bed-closets full-dressed with bright suitcases in her hands and a dirty dark look in her eyes. She was saying, “Listen all of you, for I’ll not tell it twice: I’m leaving that one-job no good and going back to my last husband, who’s still got the three jobs I left him with when I thought to better myself by entering this house of mad pride and sloth and poets snoring,” and she brushed past me, the silver spring twinging again as she chanced to kick it.
“Meaghan, let her go, who can’t appreciate the Prince of Personalities,” Ma said to me loftily, her color down to ladylike bright pink again, but I still would have followed and argued with Ellie—Dick didn’t deserve to be deserted when he’d just got a toe on the bottom rung of the ladder, which of course was why she was leaving him though she didn’t know it, a jealous no-job little wifey—except that just then who should appear in the doorway but my eldest brother, Tom, filling it with his big grin and his great shoulders and his aura of three-job success—or would it be four now?—and saying, “Hi, Ma. Ellie leaving Dick again? Who’s the tiny one hanging around outside? Housing official come to coax you once more from this death trap? Hello, Whitey. No, no coffee, Ma, I want to talk to Meaghan here. I’ve got something for the lad!”
I knew what that meant, of course, and I was already hunched on my hands and knees, starting to fix the spring to the fridge again— a job that might easily take the rest of the day, I decided—when I felt Ma’s kindly talons on my shoulder, lifting me up, and she saying, “Whitey’U fix that, Meaghan,” and then her beloved claws were propelling me to a seat at the table flush against the blue flexo, with my cup in front of me and beyond that Tom’s great face as full of a smile of eager elder-brother benignity as my cup was of steaming coffee —Ma having poured again and dropped in a pinch of dexy (I saw her) to give me spirit.