But their fathers would pointedly say, "What about the radioactivity,
Old Man?"
"I'm alive," he'd reply. "There's no radioactivity out there."
But they'd say, "How can we be sure? There are individual differences
of susceptibility. Probably you are unhurt by dosages that would kill
any normal person."
And the mothers would say, "Eat some more, Old Man. Eat--and go. Bring
our babies dreams, if you like, but don't try to tempt them Outside.
Even if it isn't radioactive there, you've admitted it gets hot and it
gets cold and the wind blows fiercely hard. Our babies were born under
shelter, and under shelter they must stay, like us and our parents
before us."
So Old Arch would brush off his whiskers one last time and maybe put on
an old shirt the father dug up for him and then go out the back way. In
spite of what might have been said, he would have to walk the twenty
flights down to the ground because he wouldn't be invited to walk
through the apartment to the front hall where the elevator was.
Sometimes people were hostile when he spoke to their children, and they
would have him arrested. He was then bathed and barbered in the jail,
and was given all new clothes. But they'd always burn his bed, and he'd
have trouble getting a new one. And sometimes a jailor might covet the
pocketknife he carried, or take away his billy can. On the whole I
think he preferred not to go to jail except perhaps in winter, when it
was cold outside the City.
There were always those ready to talk of asylums, and the need to
put him away for his own good. But nobody was sure where his legal
residence was, so he wasn't really eligible for public hospitalization.
He kept to his rounds. My grandfather remembers standing in his
mother's kitchen listening to Old Arch. It was like meeting one of
Joseph's brethren and being told exactly what the coat looked like.
Something exciting out of a dream from the remote past, when all the
worlds had on them those bright moist diamonds Arch described as
morning dew.
My grandfather wanted to see the morning dew, though he knew better
than to say so.
Old Arch understood. He tried to make the thing possible. But an
opportunity to see the morning dew was something he just couldn't give
to my grandfather or anybody else.
So he decided to sell it.
He persuaded a charitable lithographer to make him a batch of stock
certificates. They looked very authentic. Each said plainly it was good
for one share of blue sky, though the fat half-draped woman portrayed
in three colors stood outside a Domed City pointing not at the sky but
at a distant river with forested hills behind it.
Arch sold his certificates for a stiff price; ten dollars apiece. He
could do it because by this time his wanderings followed a fairly
definite route. The people who hated or feared or despised him
were pretty well eliminated from it, and most of his calls were at
apartments where he was known and expected and even respected a little.
My grandfather's was one of these--or rather, my great-grandfather's.
When Arch first brought his stock certificates my grandfather was a
little fellow everybody called Ham, maybe seven years old. He had a
sister named Annie who was five. He's given me a mental picture of the
two of them standing close together for reassurance, and from an open
doorway shyly watching the old man eat and listening to him talk.
When my great-grandfather bought a ten dollar stock certificate in my
grandfather's name, my grandfather took it as a promise. And his little
sister Annie was so jealous that the next time Old Arch came around my
great-grandfather had to buy a share for her.
* * * * *
As they grew to be nine, ten, eleven, twelve, every winter when Old
Arch would come around, my grandfather and his sister Annie would ask,
"When are you going to take us to see the sky, Arch?" And he would say,
"When you're older. When your folks say you can go." And, "When it's
summer, and not too cold for these old bones."
But when my grandfather was fourteen he followed Old Arch out and down
the stairs after the old man had paid his annual call, and he stopped
him on a landing to ask, "Arch, have you ever taken anyone Outside?"
"No," Arch said, sighing. "People won't go."
"I'll go," said my grandfather, "and so will my sister Annie."
Arch looked at him and put a hand on him and said, "I don't want to
come between any boy and his parents."
"Well," said my grandfather, "you sold them a share of sky for each of
us. Do you really want us to have that, or do you just want to talk
about it?"
"Of course I want you to. But I can't take you Outside, boy."
My grandfather was disgusted. "There isn't any sky," he said sadly.
"It's all talk. The certificates were just for begging."
"No," said Arch. "It's not all talk and I'm not a beggar. I'm a guide.
But it's hard to see the sky right now because it's winter, and there
are clouds all over."
"Let's see the clouds, then," my grandfather said stubbornly. "I've
never seen a cloud."
The old man sat down on the stairs to consider the matter.
"I can't do this thing to your parents," he said at last.
"But you can do it to me and my sister," my grandfather charged wildly.
"You can come to the house year after year after year, and tell us
about the sky and the wind and the moon and the dew and the grass and
the sun. You can even take money for our share of them. But when it
comes time to produce--when we're old enough to go where these things
are supposed to be--you think of excuses.
"I don't believe there are any such things," he shouted. "I think
you're a liar. I think you ought to be arrested for gypping my dad on
the stock deal, and I'm going to turn you in."
"Don't do that, boy," Arch said mildly.
"Then take us Outside--today!"
"It's winter, my boy. We'd freeze."
"You've said it's pretty in winter! You took the money for the
certificate."
"I suppose you'll grow away from your parents soon anyhow; I suppose
you have to.... Get your warmest clothes and meet me at emergency exit
four."
My grandfather talked it over with his sister Annie and of course they
didn't have any warm clothes, but they'd heard so often from Old Arch
about the cold that they put on two sets of tights apiece, and two
pairs of sox, and then they hunted for the emergency exit.
They'd never been there before. They didn't know anyone who had. The
signs pointing to it were all worn and defaced.
And it was a long way to go. After a while Annie began to hang back.
"How do we know the exit will work?" she asked. "And how will we get
back in if we ever do get out?"
"You don't have to come," my grandfather said. "But you'll have to find
your own way home from here."
"I'll bet I could," she said. "But I'm not going to. I don't think Old
Arch will even be at the exit."
But he was.
He looked at them carefully to see how they were dressed. "You mean
trouble for me, girl," he told Annie. "They'll think I took you along
to make love to."
She had just reached that betwixt and between stage where she was
beginning to look like a woman but didn't yet think like one. "Pooh!"
she said. "I can run faster and hit harder than you can, Arch. You
don't worry me a bit."
Old Arch sighed and led them through the lock. They stepped out into a
raging snowstorm, which soon draped a cloak of invisibility over them.
Neither my grandfather nor Annie had ever smelled fresh air before. It
threatened to make them drunk. Their nostrils tingled and their eyes
misted over and their breath steamed up like bathwater. For the first
time in their lives, they shivered.
When the City was out of sight in the storm, they stopped for a moment
in the ankle-deep snow and just listened. They held their breaths and
heard silence for the first time in their lives.
Old Arch reached down and picked up some soft snow and threw it at
them. They pelted him back, and then, because he was so old, attacked
each other instead, shouting and throwing snowballs and running
aimlessly.
Old Arch soon checked them. "Don't get lost," he said. "We're walking
down hill. Don't forget that. We're going into a draw where there are
some trees."
He coughed and drew his rags about him. "The city is up hill," he said.
"If you keep walking around it you'll find a way in."
His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him
walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn't have enough
clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grandfather.
They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of
anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City's Dome, except
that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only
about fifty yards off.
"Where are the Outsiders?" my grandfather asked. "Aren't there people
here?"
"They're miles away," Arch told him. "And indoors. Only fools and
youngsters are out in this blizzard."
"Fools is right," Annie said tartly. "There was supposed to be sky. And
there isn't."
Old Arch staggered again. To my grandfather he said, "Could--could you
carry my pack?"
My grandfather took it and they went on, stumbling blindly through
knee-deep drifts, getting more and more chilled and less and less
comfortable, 'til they came to a small clump of trees with a solidly
frozen creek running through it.
Here Old Arch made a lean-to shelter of windfallen limbs. Annie and my
grandfather helped as soon as they understood the design. Arch spread
part of his bed over the lean-to, breaking the force of the wind, and
put the rest inside. Just outside, on a place scraped bare of snow, he
built the first wood fire my grandfather and Annie had ever seen.
He chipped ice from the creek and put it in his billy can and hung the
can by its bail over the fire, and in due course they had a little hot
tea.
The youngsters felt cold but happy. The old man shivered and coughed.
He'd kept moving till the tea was made. He sat still to drink it, and
couldn't get up.
"Go to bed," Annie told him. "Ham will get on one side of you and I'll
get on the other. We'll keep you warm."
Old Arch tried to protest but was almost beyond speech. The youngsters
didn't know enough to brush the snow off him or themselves. They helped
him roll up in his bedding and crawled under the lean-to after him.
There they all lay in a heap, getting colder and damper and more
miserable, till finally my grandfather couldn't stand it any more.
He got up and looked around. The inverted cup of visibility was
smaller. Darkness fell like a dye-stuff, turning the white snow to
gray, to black.
It was a bitter night. The first he'd ever had outdoors. It was the
first Annie'd ever had. The first either had ever spent at the futile
task of holding off death.
They knew Old Arch was dying. As the night wore on he sank into
semi-consciousness. They hugged him and rubbed his lean old limbs.
Just before morning the snow stopped. The old man roused a little,
became gradually aware of his surroundings.
"Go look at the sun," he murmured. "Go see the sunrise."
They went out to look. Neither had ever seen a sunrise before. It was
mauve first, then red, then gold, then blue. Venus led the way, and the
sun followed. The moon, deep in the west, was like a tombstone to the
dead night.
A bird chirruped. A clot of snow fell from a tree with a soft ruffle of
cottony drums.
My grandfather held his sister's hand and looked and sniffed at the
great Earth from which he'd been separated by the fear-inspired plastic
over his City, so near, now, in the clear morning light. He climbed
with Annie up the side of the draw and looked out over snow-covered
plains stretching to a horizon farther away than the longest distance
he'd ever imagined.
He went back and took Old Arch's head up on his knees and said, "Is it
like this every day?"