Other Times, Other Worlds

But Not To Dream

Hobbies are funny; and you can really get lost in them.

Sara, the virtuous wife of Dr. Morgan Nestor of the Lavery College faculty, situated in Willowville, Ohio, planted sensible heels on the worn gray paint of the side porch and thrust off, the rocking chair tipping back almost to the point of no return.

Each time the chair rocked forward, the low heels thumped on the boards. Dr. Nestor sat ten feet away, and with each thump his head sank a millimeter lower over the paper he was reading. An interesting document — published by a fellow entomologist at an eastern university. But he couldn’t concentrate on it. Being of a statistical frame of mind, he knew that after fifty determined thumps, his good wife would start a conversation. And he knew that the odds against the conversation being pleasant were roughly ten thousand to one.

Often he tried to associate Sara with the deliciously helpless and winsome little female who had occupied the second seat in the third row in the first classroom of his teaching career, twenty-three years before.

He remembered wide gray eyes, fragile bones, cobweb hair and hands that fluttered. He gave Sara a sidelong glance. The wide gray eyes had narrowed. The fragile bones were buried in all too solid flesh. The cobweb hair had acquired the consistency of fine copper wire, and had turned steel gray. The hands no longer fluttered.

Her voice had the thin sharpness of a fractured flute.

“Who wrote that?” she demanded.

“This?” he asked weakly, waving the paper he had been reading. Morgan Nestor was a big man who had not become soft through years of sedentary life. He had faraway eyes and a lock of hair that consistently fell across the broad dreamer’s forehead. Though he did not realize it, he still caused frequent heart flutters among the coed population of Lavery College.

He licked his lips. “Why Brunhardt wrote this. Good man.”

“Ha!” she said. The explosive little sound blasted across the porch and seemed to whip down the quiet, shady street, disturbing the leaves of the silent maples.

With great caution and a too innocent expression, Morgan Nestor stood up, taking one step toward the screen door.

“Sit down!” Sara said. He sat. “Something has got to be done, Morgan.”

“About what?” He knew very well what she meant.

“About getting your son a job, that’s what. Robert is a delicate and sensitive boy, and in the right department he’d be a credit to the faculty. Also, he would probably do a whole lot better in twenty-four years of it than you’ve managed to do.”

Morgan Nestor ran a hand through his hair. During the brief moment that his palm touched his forehead he wondered if he were feverish.

“Sara,” he said, “I’ve explained this a dozen times. We sent Robert to four colleges before we found one that would graduate him. One of the colleges he flunked out of was Lavery. Why it’s... I... it’s unthinkable that the faculty should take on as an instructor a person who could not make the grade here as an undergraduate. Besides, Robert isn’t the type for...”

“How do you know what type he is? Have you given him a chance? Have you? I certainly know he’s brighter than a lot of fools instructing over there on the hill. Haven’t you any influence? What good is it to teach about bugs for twenty-four years if you can’t even do a small favor for your own family? What do they have you doing? I thought you were a full professor. Apparently you’ve been deceiving me, Morgan. Apparently they have you cutting grass or rolling the tennis courts.”

“Sara, dear, I tell you that I can’t in all honesty...”

She suddenly stopped rocking and fixed him with a narrow gray eye, as penetrating as an insect pin. “You can and you will,” she said in a low voice, “Even if I have to go see the dean with you. Make no mistake about that.”

At that moment Robert appeared in the side yard with a seven iron and a cotton golf ball. He smiled up at the side porch. “Hello, soaks,” he said. A psychologist would label Robert as socially immature, with a low attention factor. He was blonde, with a stubble of beard on his ripe jaw, a band of fat around his middle.

He dropped the ball, swung heartily at it. The ball arched just a bit further than the divot he slashed out of the lawn.

Morgan shut his eyes. The lawn had become a sort of retreat. While encouraging and working on the velvety growth, it was sometimes possible to forget... many things.

“Robert,” he said hesitantly. “The lawn...”

“You want to deny him every pleasure,” Sara said. “You go right ahead, Robert.”

Robert came up onto the porch and collapsed onto the swing. It creaked under his weight. “Too hot, anyway.”

“Your father,” Sara said, “has promised to speak to the dean about taking you on as an instructor.”

Robert licked his thumb, moistened the palm of his left hand and hit the spot with a chubby fist. “Coeds, here comes Robert!” he said.

“It’s possible, my boy, that the dean may not see his way clear to...”

“Morgan,” Sara said crisply, “I am not going to give you the chance of speaking too mildly about Robert. I am going to see the dean with you.”

“When?” Morgan asked. His voice had a faintly strangled tone.

“Tomorrow after your ten o’clock class. I’ll meet you in front of the administration building.”

Morgan Nestor found himself wondering if there was any efficient way of guaranteeing a broken leg.

He looked at his son with his usual mild disbelief. Could this vast and amiable child be flesh of his flesh? Surely genetics should not play such a dastardly trick on the one man who had so carefully studied the science as it applied to fruit flies.

From within the house there was a scuffling sound, and the clink of a glass. Sara came to attention like a good bird dog. “Alice!” she shrilled. “What are you doing?”

“Getting a drink of water, Mom,” Alice answered sleepily. Alice had followed her usual schedule of arising at ten, eating lunch at noon and going back to bed until four-thirty.

Alice came scuffling out onto the porch carrying the glass. Ever since she had reached fourteen Morgan had seen her become more and more like the Sadie Thompson in a low budget production of Ram. No power on earth seemed to be able to keep Alice out of shiny black dresses, dangling earrings and a mouth painted to resemble a smashed strawberry.

He had long since decided that her faintly unclean look came from putting makeup on top of makeup ad infinitum.

She carried her glass as though it were the most precious thing in the world, but about which she was obligated to act negligent and casual.

Morgan Nestor swallowed hard and avoided looking at Sara. If she discovered Alice’s latest ruse, there would be a scene. And somehow, at the end of the scene, it would all turn out to be Morgan’s fault. Each day, when Alice got up the second time, she dipped into her secret store of gin, filled a water glass, put an ice cube in it and stayed far enough away from her mother to maintain the illusion that it was water.

Unless she actually caught Alice in the act, Mrs. Nestor blithely ignored any strong odor of alcohol that might hang around her only daughter. She also told friends and acquaintances that Charley Nesbitt, her son-in-law, had brought Alice back and had moved in on them because of the “housing shortage.”

Actually Charley and Alice had maintained a rather trim little white frame house on the other side of town, but Charley had grown weary of trying to sober up Alice after work each day.

Alice knew that her father knew that the glass held gin. She winked at him. Through long practice, she was able to drink it as though it were, in truth, water.

At dinner, Alice would be gay, flushed and jovial. The life of the party.

“Alice has such spirit!” Sara often said.

Morgan knew that his daughter should go to an institution, yet so long as Sara resolutely refused to admit the flaw, there was nothing he could do.

“Charley’s about due?” Alice asked.

Morgan glanced at his watch and nodded. Charley, boisterous and muscular manager of Willowville’s only supermarket, usually came home at five.

A distant brassy horn played the first few bars of “The Old Grey Mare.”

“Here comes Charley,” Alice said in a dull tone.

Charley whipped his coupe into the drive sliding to a stop on the gravel. He bounded out and came up onto the porch steps. He was a balding, florid young man with all his features bunched too closely in the middle of a wide face.

He struck a pose on the top step, slapped himself on the chest. “Promoted again, folks! Whadya know about that? Old Charley comes through, he does.”

“That’s great. That’s dandy,” Alice said in a flat monotone. Charley gave her an angry look.

But he beamed at Sara, because she clapped her hands together and said, “Oh, Charley! How wonderful!”

“Yep, from a hundred a week to a hundred and a quarter. New responsibilities. Got four stores under my wing now. They are sending in a new manager here. Have to travel a little, you know. They know they got a good man in Charles J. Nesbitt.”

Sara turned to Morgan and said, “Charley’s been in that business for five years and now he’s making, let me see, twelve hundred dollars a year more than you are. And you’ve been fooling with those dead bugs of yours for nearly thirty years.”

Before Morgan could answer, Charley swaggered over to him, slapped him on the shoulder. “You tell her, old boy, that the business I’m in would kill you in a year. It’s a high pressure deal, what I mean. Have a cigar?”

Morgan took his pipe out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll smoke this, thanks.”

“Make sure you don’t take that smelly thing in the house, Morgan,” Sara said.

Charley had left matches on Morgan’s chair arm. He filled his pipe, took the packet of matches and struck one. The match burned with a horrid red flame and a chemical snake came writhing out of the end of it. Morgan stared at it in horror and dropped the match. The four of them roared at him. After a few moments he managed a feeble smile.

“Great gag, hey?” Charley said when he could speak. “Picked those up this afternoon. Almost as good as that dribble glass, hey Doc? You remember the glass?”

“How could he forget?” Robert said.

Sara left the porch and went into the kitchen. Alice sat on the swing beside Robert. Her glass was half-empty. Her face was flushed. Charley sat in the rocker that Sara had vacated. Morgan let their conversation wash around him like the sea washing around rocks. He found it puzzling that he was never able to find anything of the slightest interest in their conversation.

He smoked his pipe and waited for dinner. Sara had a knack of achieving the ultimate in tastelessness from even the freshest garden vegetables. The smells that floated out of the kitchen were vaguely sour.

Morgan smoked his pipe and remembered that after dinner he would be able to go into his study, shut the door and be absolutely alone. In the study he could lick the wounds of the day and steel himself for the morrow.

He sat at the table, huddled over his plate, eating from a sense of duty. He thought of the paper he had been working on for three years. A good paper. When it was published he would get letters from over the world, congratulating him on his new classification system for the subspecies of butterfly, classification dependent on the timing of the phases of metamorphosis.

Suddenly he realized that he had been asked a question. He looked up. They were all looking at him. “What was that?”

“I’ll repeat it, Doc. It’s like this. With my new job, I got to have office space. A headquarters. I could rent an office in town, but it would be handier here. I was wondering if you’d give up that room of yours. Hell, you don’t seem to use it for anything that I can see.”

“No!” Morgan said loudly, his eyes wide. “No!” He thought of the unending evenings when he would be trapped in the’ bosom of his family, condemned to sit among them, half alive. How could he work? Where would he find that solitude on which he depended? He looked at Sara with quick appeal. Surely she would stand by him!

“Charles is absolutely correct, Morgan. You use that room as an excuse for being selfish and antisocial. I’ve been waiting for years for a good excuse to root you out of there. This is it. We can turn that room over to someone who will get some practical use out of it.”

Morgan stood up, his hands trembling as he held onto the back of his chair. “No! He can’t have it!” he said desperately.

“Look at him!” Sara said with a savage smile. “A little boy losing his candy cane. For heaven’s sake, Morgan. Grow up! Where are all the papers you were going to write in that study of yours? Where is the wonderful fame you were going to have? You might as well face things. The best thing you can do is try to hold your job until they’re willing to retire you. Now stop acting like a child and march into that study and start packing those silly trays of bugs.”

“I won’t do it!” Morgan said hoarsely. Charley was looking at him with an injured expression. Robert was frankly enjoying the scene. Alice was battling hiccups.

Sara lost her smile. “Take your choice, Morgan. Either pack that nonsense yourself, or I’ll clear that place out tomorrow while you’re at class. And I might not be very careful about what goes in the incinerator.”

Morgan looked into the eyes of his virtuous wife for three seconds. Ail the fight went out of him. With heavy tread he went to his study, bolted the door behind him and drew the shades. He turned on the desk light.

He stood by the desk and his eyes had an unaccustomed sting as he looked around at the small and cluttered room in which he spent so many peaceful and happy hours. The huge desk, the crowded bookshelves he had made, the display trays where, under glass, the insect wings glowed with rare and delicate beauty.

A new specimen was on the spreading board. The desk lamp picked up the ovals of brilliant turquoise at the base of the wings. They were his creatures, the moths and the butterflies. Small living things, intent with instinct, unaccountably beautiful.

He sat for a long time at the desk, staring down into the drawer he had opened. In the drawer was the metallic blue sheen of an automatic. He touched it with his fingertips and the chill of the metal entered his soul.

He envied the insects, envied them in the unthinking beauty of their involuntary death.

There was no insect but what struggled against the net, struggled for its small life. And he, Morgan Nestor, would give up life with no struggle.

He shut the desk drawer violently.

For many years he had watched the life cycles of the moths and butterflies, watched the soft worm become inert and hard, watched the splitting, the emergence of a creature of loveliness which perched and slowly dried its mystic wings before the first flight.

His envy of their escape was a roar in his ears. “Unfair!” he thought. “Unfair!” For within one lifespan they existed twice — once earthbound; once creatures of the warm and fragile air.

He knew so well each stage of the process, each instinctive larval transformation.

All thought of packing was gone. He stood near the desk in strange ecstasy, sensing more clearly than ever before, the mystic sequence of changes encompassed by the small dusty bodies he had pinned to the frames.

He wished suddenly that he had never used a killing jar, a net, the spreading boards, the insect pins. His kinship with them was clear and distinct.

Vaguely he realized that that he was wasting time, that he should try to sort out the things to be saved, the things to be thrown away. He tried to remember what Sara had said, and she seemed an alien being, a creature of another race, another life rhythm. Her features were indistinct.

The green shade of the desk lamp cast a soft light in the room.

All of them out there were alien. He could hear the distant harshness of their voices.

Suddenly he began to undo the buttons of his shirt with fingers that were unruly and awkward. He stripped off all his clothes, stood naked by the desk. He heard a distant humming, as of the vast beating of many wings.

The drone filled his soul, a deep and heady rhythm that spoke to him of freedom and of far places.

He stood very straight, slowly drawing his arms up so that his fists were under his chin, his elbows together at his stomach. There was an itching harshness about his skin, and a sense of urgency.

When he fell it was without shock or pain, and almost without noise. He lay on his stomach on the floor, his arms under him, and both legs had somehow become a unit, a single unit, joined from ankle to hip.

He looked along the floor level, and the fibres of the rug were harsh and strange. Too dry.

They should have been of a moist greenness. He yearned for the grass, dimly remembered some oddly upright creature that had hit at the grass with a club.

A tingling ran down the surface of his skin along the forearms that had merged with his chest, along the tops of the thighs and shins that had joined together.

Holding his head high, he began to cross the rug with a sinuous motion, accepting without question the use of the double row of small legs that had sprouted from the tingling flesh.

The feeling of urgency was great, and yet it carried with it no particular aim or goal. He accepted the domination of the body, let himself be carried along with the body that so obviously knew its function and purpose.

He reached the wall, and without hesitation raised his head, the small sucker legs getting a grip on the smooth surface, carrying him up until his head was within inches of the ceiling.

From the corner of his eyes he saw that his shoulder was sunken, rounded and a pleasing shade of green. He distantly remembered a disgusting pink and white hue. His skin was rapidly growing more harsh and irritating. His mouth, which seemed oddly wider, was pulsating rapidly generating a ropy saliva.

Deftly he fastened one bit of the saliva to the wall, stretched back, seeing it turn firm and silklike on exposure to the air. He made a second rope that was attached a foot or so to the left of the first one.

Where his heels had been, there seemed to be an exceptionally strong clamping device.

With all his strength he dug the clamp into the plaster, fastened it tight. Then, with the two silken ropes held in his teeth, he let himself fall back so that he was at an angle to the wall, supported only by the clamp where his feet had been, the two silk ropes.

The itching and tightness of his skin was rapidly becoming unbearable. He writhed, felt the delicious slackening of pressure as his skin slit down the back. The writhing was difficult, but somehow pleasurable. As he bucked and strained against the ropes, the outer skin gradually rolled down from his body. It took with it his eyes, the myriad legs, leaving him a moist green wetness, vulnerable and helpless.

He was dimly conscious of it falling to the floor below him.

Form was changed. The air brushed the moist inner skin, hardening it rapidly, tightening it, turning it into a protective shell around him.

Sleep was a deep well into which he was slipping. Without ears, he heard the sound of the knocking, and the small part of him that yet retained the ghostly memories of humanity knew it for what it was. They would be shouting and hammering on the door. Soon they would break it down. But by then he would be in the darkness of sleep, protected by the cocoon which would be hard and firm around him.

There would be a time of sleep, and one day the cocoon would split and a shining creature, all memory of manhood gone, would awaken to dry the wide, glowing expanse of wings.

Something inside of him smiled as he thought of how they would stare at him.

To the tiny and distant and unimportant accompaniment of breaking wood, Dr. Morgan Nestor slid down into the deep, unthinking sleep that instinct demands of her creatures.