The Monitor

Startling Stories – January 1954

(1954) *

Margaret St. Clair

The Eaithlings were either too young or too old to look after themselves …

-

“I WOULD die on the ship,” Mona said. She held out her elderly, shaking fingers to the fire. The smoke rose in a thin vertical thread through the still night air to make a sluggish haze above her head. “Would it give you so much satisfaction, Rex, to have me die there instead of here, at home —on earth?”

Rex’s thin face burned red. “Mother!” he said bitterly and then, controlling himself with an effort, “I suppose there’s no use arguing with you. Why do you make me out a brute? Do you think I want to leave Earth? Why, I’d rather lose an arm or leg! I didn’t realize until now just how hard it was going to be. You women talk so much about your feelings—do you think, because we men are less vocal, that we don’t have them too?

“But we have to go. The Methwyn have found a fine new planet for us, and we couldn’t get through another winter. And your idea of staying on here, all alone—it’s craziness. I won’t have it. You’ve simply got to get over it.”

Mona was silent for a moment. Across the fire Helen, her daughter-in-law, was looking at her sympathetically. “I’d be all right,” Mona said slowly. “You could leave me some food, and I’d pick nuts and berries. I could live in one of the huts, and burn wood from the others.”

“It—you wouldn’t last three months,” Rex said with the brutality of exasperation. “Why are you so determined to stay, mother? All this—” his gesture included the trees, the night, the other fires, the earth —“is over with.”

“Not for me,” Mona answered. “All I ever had was here on earth.

“Rex, can’t you understand how it is? You’re young, you can talk about a ten-year voyage into space and not mind it. But my life’s nearly over. I worked hard—”

“The Smyth tables,” Rex said warmly. “Mother, you don’t realize what an achievement that was. The Methwyn are helping us. They’ve found a refuge for us. But without your tables we couldn’t even think about going into space.”

“You’re proud of the tables, aren’t you?” Mona answered, smiling. “You’ve been a good son. But it doesn’t seem to matter any more . It’s far away from me. I worked hard, I had children. One of them, a little girl named Doris, died that year we had so little food. And your father, Rex, has been dead for nearly twenty years. All my ties are with Earth. Haven’t I—haven’t I earned the right to choose where I’ll end my life?”

Rex’s dark brows contracted savagely. “Be quiet!” he said in a shaking voice. He got up from the fire and walked away.

“He doesn’t mean to be unkind ,” Helen said softly. “He’d stay—we all would—if we could. But the Methwyn are right, Mona. If we stay here any longer, we won’t have power enough for the voyage.”

Mona rubbed her thin hands together. “The Methwyn.” She sighed. “I can’t get used to them. That’s another reason why I don’t want to go.”

“Are you afraid of them?” Helen asked curiously.

“No, not afraid. But it seems so strange, Helen, for, us to be taking orders from creatures that we sent out two hundred years ago!”

“They aren’t orders,” Helen said quickly. “Only suggestions. We’d all be dead, Mona, if the Methwyn hadn’t come back when they did. And they act only for our good. Our welfare. They keep us from making mistakes.”

“I know. I know. But before we made our own-mistakes.”

“So many mistakes!” Helen said quizzically.

“Yes. Looking back over our history, it seems like nothing but mistakes. We fought, we suffered, we destroyed. But always we wanted something better. Even in our worst mistakes, we tried.

“Now, whatever happens, whatever triumphs we have on the new planet where the Methwyn say they’re taking us, they won’t be our triumphs. Not ours. A new phase …”

“A better phase,” Helen said u rgently. “It was planned that way, two hundred years ago. It’s got to be better.”

“Perhaps. It doesn’t seem real to me. Now that we’re leaving earth, finally and forever, oughtn’t somebody to stay? For the sake of earth. Because of all the mistakes.”

Helen got up to put another timber on the fire. Mona said, “You’re going to have a child, aren’t you, Helen?”

”Why … how did you know? It’s so soon.”

“From your eyes.”

Helen sank down beside the fire and clasped her hands together ^over her knees. “Doesn’t that make any difference, Mona? The baby, I mean. You’d be a grandmother.”

“You’ll have your own mother, dear. I want to stay. Helen, I can’t tell you how much I want to stay.”

“Yes. Listen. Mona. You’d better hide.”

“You mean that Rex—oh, surely not. Not his own mother.”

“I think he would, though. But we have to leave within the next few days, the Methwyn say. Rex won’t endanger all of us to hunt for you.”

“I suppose not. Thank you, Helen, for telling me.”

-

MONA was old, and perhaps her hiding place was not well chosen. Rex found her on the second day and carried her back like a sack of wheat to the ship the Methwyn had helped to build. They passed Helen in the corridor; she looked at Mona with a shocked face. Then Rex had bundled Mona into one of the tiny cabins and was locking the door.

“You can get me for this, Mother,” he said, without looking at her. “Interference with personal freedom is a serious charge. Go ahead. It won’t matter. By the time I let you out, we’ll be in space.” She could hear his heavy, authoritative steps receding in the corridor.

Mona was too sensible to shout, to beat uselessly on the metal door. She lay down on the narrow bunk and tried to rest. She was achingly tired.

After ten minutes she was up again, pacing about the cabin. Two steps and two steps and two steps. Two steps about the cabin for the next ten years. But outside the whole limitless earth was waiting like a virgin for her steps.

She couldn’t bear it. She went to the shutter and tried to open it but Rex, afraid, no doubt, that seeing what she was so reluctant to leave would excite her, had wedged it shut. She worked at the catch until her fingers were raw, but could not open it. And this last denial seemed to her more cruel than his compulsion of her had been.

The hours passed. Mona could feel the vibration of the metal as the last fuel and supplies were taken on. The jet-off would come soon now’. And in her sick longing, her hopelessness, Mona would have liked to hasten it.

A key turned slowly and softly in the lock. It was Helen, looking very white. “Hurry,” she breathed, “don’t make any noise, Mona. Rex will be angry. But I couldn’t stand the look on your face.”

She led the older woman through a passage, down a stair. They reached an exit port. Helen, fumbling uncertainly with the switches, opened it.

“We’re jetting in forty minutes,” she said. “But I don’t think you’ll be missed.” She handed her food tablets.

“Thank you, Helen … if your child is a girl, will you name her after me?”

“Oh, yes.”

The two women kissed. Helen’s cheek was wet. “Good-by,” she said, holding Mona’s hand. “Good-by. Good luck.”

“Good-by, dear.”

Mona slipped through the shadows, regretting the light color of her cloak. But Helen was right, she wasn’t missed. Everyone was busy with the loading, no doubt.

She reached a rise from which she could see the ship. Now that she was free of it, now that she didn’t have to go, she found to her surprise that she wanted to watch the jetting off. She sat down under a pine tree, cushioned on needles. The rough bark against her back was a wonderful voluptuousness.

She was going to stay. Already, in the darkness and the silence, she could feel her heart, that had been so oppressed and confined, expand in anticipation. Time lay before her, a wealth of unspoiled days. And earth, no longer diminished by the presence of humanity, would expand too and breathe deep in freedom and release.

The old woman looked -up at the sky. It was getting colder, in a few days it would snow. The soft white flakes would come down out of the air—not many of them, for earth was dry now—and Mona would catch the crystals on her hands and smile at them. Each one would be different, in the infinite beauty and delight of earth. Each one would belong to her.

The winter would be cold, but she might weather it. It was thinkable. And if that happened, she would get to see the spring. Earth, the great dancer, moving in her whirling circuit about her lord the sun, would tip her cheek toward him again, and all the little lives of earth would respond. There would be new leaves and forest lilies and even birds.

But even if she could not reach the spring, the winter would be wonderful. There would be smoky sunrises and red sunsets and her own footprints in the scanty snow. And each day, each moment, each breath down to the last breath of all, would be full of bliss. She would be on Earth.

“Mona,” a voice behind her said unctuously, “you must go back to the ship.”

Mona whirled about, her heart pounding horribly. John, her husband, who had been dead for twenty years, was speaking to her.

He was badly done. He wavered and wobbled about the edges. It was natural enough.

“Oh, a Methwyn,” Mona said. She spoke scornfully, but her lips were trembling. “Go away. You aren’t wanted here.”

The Methwyn hesitated. Then it shaped itself clumsily into a child four or five years old. Mona realized with a touch of nausea that the Methwyn was trying to project a simulacrum of Doris, the little girl she had lost so many years ago.

“Mama,” the Methwyn piped shrillingly , “let’s go back to the ship. You’ll catch cold out here.”

Mona pressed her fist to her lips. The tears of age and weakness were swimming in her eyes. Was she to be cheated after all, cheated out of the loneliness, the loveliness, the wonderful days of dying? The Methwyn was trying to persuade her, but if persuasion failed … with a desperate effort she controlled herself.

“Go back to the ship,” she said sharply. “The others need you. You must help them. I will stay here. It is my order to you.”

Her voice had rung out commandingly, and the Methwyn hesitated. It hesitated so long that Mona, backing away, had time to think hopefully of making a run for it. Then it shook its head, almost regretfully. The ill-made cranium bobbed about grotesquely on the babyish neck.

“I cannot allow you.” it said in its bland voice. “It is not a part of the plan. To stay here would not—” it seemed to search for words and then come up with a clinching argument—“to stay here would not be good for you.”

Mona’s knees had turned to water. She could not run. A scream might have alarmed the Methwyn. She could not get a sound past the constriction in her throat.

The Methwyn scooped her up easily in its arms. Through the limber smoke of its body she caught a final swirling glimpse of trees, of sky, of earth. “It would not be good for you,” the Methwyn said once more. Then it carried Mona carefully and gently back to the ship.

The End

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