“Yes, dear,” sighed Mater.
At long last, Junior seemed to have resigned himself to making the best of it.
With considerable exertions, hampered by his increasing bottom-heaviness, he was fetching loads of stones, seaweed and other debris to a spot downslope, and there laboring over what promised to be a fairly ambitious cairn. Judging by what they could see of it, his homesite might even prove a credit to the colony (thus Mater mused) and attract a mate who would be a good catch (so went Pater’s thoughts).
Junior was still to be seen at times along the reef in company with his free-swimming friends among the other polyps, at some of whom his parents had always looked askance, fearing they were by no means well-bred. In fact, there was strong suspicion that some of them—waifs from the disreputable shallows district in the hazardous reaches just below the tide-mark—had never been bred at all, but were products of budding, a practice frowned on in polite society.
However, Junior’s appearance and rate of locomotion made it clear he would soon be done with juvenile follies. As Pater repeated with satisfaction, you can’t beat Biology; as one becomes more and more bottle-shaped the romantic illusions of youth must inevitably perish.
“I always knew there was sound stuff in the youngster,” declared Pater expansively.
“At least he won’t be able to go around with those ragamuffins much longer,” breathed Mater thankfully.
“What does the young fool think he’s doing, fiddling round with soapstone?” grumbled Pater, peering critically through the green to try to make out the details of Junior’s building. “Doesn’t he know it’s apt to slip its place in a year or two?”
“Look, dear,” hissed Mater acidly, “isn’t that the little polyp who was so rude once?… I wish she wouldn’t keep watching Junior like that. Our northwest neighbor heard positively that she’s the child of an only parent!”
“Never mind,” Pater turned to reassure her. “Once Junior is properly rooted, his self-respect will cause him to keep riffraff at a distance. It’s a matter of psychology, my dear; the vertical position makes all the difference in one’s thinking.”
The great day arrived.
Laboriously Junior put a few finishing touches to his construction—which, so far as could be seen from a distance, had turned out decent-looking enough, though it was rather questionably original in design, lower and flatter than was customary.
With one more look at his handiwork, Junior turned bottom-end-down and sank wearily onto the finished site. After a minute, he paddled experimentally, but flailing tentacles failed to lift him—he was already rooted, and growing more solidly so by the moment.
The younger polyps peered from the hollows of the reef in roundeyed awe touched with fear.
“Congratulations!” cried the neighbors. Pater and Mater bowed this way and that in acknowledgment. Mater waved a condescending tentacle to the three maiden aunts.
“I told you so!” said Pater triumphantly.
“Yes, dear,” said Mater meekly.
Suddenly there were outcries of alarm from the dwellers down-reef. A wave of dismay swept audibly through all the nearer part of the colony. Pater and Mater looked round and froze.
Junior had begun paddling again, but this time in a most peculiar manner—with a rotary twist and a sidewise scoop which looked awkward, but which he performed so deftly that he must have practiced it. Fixed upright as he was now on the platform he had built, he looked for all the world as if he were trying to swim sidewise.
“He’s gone mad!” squeaked Mater, grasping at the obvious straw.
“I—” gulped Pater, “I’m afraid not.”
At least, they saw, there was method in Junior’s actions. He went on paddling in the same fashion—and now he, and his platform with him, were farther away than they had been, and growing more remote all the time.
Parts of the homesite that was not a homesite revolved in some way incomprehensible to eyes that had never seen the like. And the whole affair trundled along, rocking at bumps in the sandy bottom, and squeaking painfully; nevertheless, it moved.
The polyps watching from the reef swam out and frolicked after Junior, watching his contrivance go and chattering questions, while their parents bawled at them to keep away from that.
The three maiden aunts shrieked faintly and swooned in one another’s tentacles. The colony was shaken as it had not been since the tidal wave.
“COME BACK!” thundered Pater. “You CAN’T do that!”
“Come back!” shrilled Mater. “You can’t do that!”
“Come back!” gabbled the neighbors. “You can’t do that!”
But Junior was past listening to reason. Junior was on wheels.
THE CAVE OF NIGHT
by James E. Gunn
. . . and so we leave behind us the troubled waters of Junior’s native coastal shelf, and with a gentle swish and a graceful swoop we warp through space and time, to find ourselves again on Mother Earth, the last words of our distant friends still ringing in our ears . . .
YOU CAN’T DO THAT!
A new invention is a terrifying thing—on terra firma, underseas, or up above the stratosphere. James Gunn, who has distinguished himself by turning out more good solid “new-idea” stories during the past year than just about any other writer in s-f, here suggests a way to peddle your new product to the old folks at home and make ‘em like it.
The phrase was first used by a poet disguised in the cynical hide of a newspaper reporter. It appeared on the first day and was widely reprinted. He wrote:
“At eight o’clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There’s a man up there where no man has ever been.
“He is lost in the cave of night…”
The headlines demanded something short, vigorous and descriptive. That was it. It was inaccurate, but it stuck.
If anybody was in a cave, it was the rest of humanity. Painfully, triumphantly, one man had climbed out. Now he couldn’t find his way back into the cave with the rest of us.
What goes up doesn’t always come back down.
That was the first day. After it came twenty-nine days of agonized suspense.
The cave of night. I wish the phrase had been mine.
That was it, the tag, the symbol. It was the first thing a man saw when he glanced at the newspaper. It was the way people talked about it: “What’s the latest about the cave?” It summed it all up, the drama, the anxiety, the hope.
Maybe it was the Floyd Collins influence. The papers dug up their files on that old tragedy, reminiscing, comparing; and they remembered the little girl—Kathy Fiscus, wasn’t it?—who was trapped in that abandoned, California drain pipe; and a number of others.
Periodically, it happens, a sequence of events so accidentally dramatic that men lose their hatreds, their terrors, their shynesses, their inadequacies, and the human race momentarily recognizes its kinship.
The essential ingredients are these: A person must be in unusual and desperate peril. The peril must have duration. There must be proof that the person is still alive. Rescue attempts must be made. Publicity must be widespread.
One could probably be constructed artificially, but if the world ever discovered the fraud, it would never forgive.
Like many others, I have tried to analyze what makes a niggling, squabbling, callous race of beings suddenly share that most human emotion of sympathy, and, like them, I have not succeeded. Suddenly a distant stranger will mean more than their own comfort. Every waking moment, they pray: Live, Floyd! Live, Kathy! Live, Rev!