Lester Del Rey - Return Engagement.pdf - Lester Del Rey - margozap

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RETURN ENGAGEMENT By Lester Del Rey

IT WAS later than Daniel Shawn had thought when they filially came out of the little farm house and

headed for the big car of Tommy Rogers. It was almost sundown. And there had been a light rain.

He took a slow breath, almost tasting the vigour of the air.

Strange that it should be late, though. Time had seemed to go so slowly. The whole visit of Professor

Rogers had been a mistake that was hard on both of them. Now it was ending clumsily, as it had begun

and continued in awkwardness. Once Tommy had been his friend. But that was before Tommy went into

Administration and Shawn had given it all up to come back here to the little Minnesota farm where he

had been born.

'A rainbow!' Tommy exclaimed suddenly. 'I haven't seen one in years.'

'Nor missed it, I'll warrant,' Shawn guessed, raising his eyes to see it. It lay in the gap between the locust

trees, adding a jewelled light to their dark greenness.

Tommy laughed his administrator's unoffended laugh and glanced back over the little farmyard before

climbing into the car. 'What do you find here, Dan? Kerosene lamps, outdoor plumbing, not even a

radio. I still say it's no place for you -when you could take over the Chair of History if you'd be sensible.'

'I was born here,' Shawn replied, evading the part of the question he didn't want to answer.

' But that was forty-five years ago!'

Shawn nodded. 'Yes. And sometimes, I think, so was the reality of myself. Let it be, Tommy, and I'll

ride into Utica with you.'

Tommy couldn't let it go, of course. There was that in the

man which hated any way of life he could not understand. Maybe that was why he'd once studied

sociology, only to find that the science could never supply enough answers. He repeated his question as

the motor started.

'I don't know,' Shawn answered slowly, fumbling for his pipe as he tried again to answer it to himself.

'Something I almost saw as a child and then lost. Maybe all of us lost it once. That's why I turned to

history, to find where it went. But I never found it. You used to do a lot of reading once, Tommy. You

tell me. What was in Spencer, in Coleridge a little, in Orlando - only like an echo, but now it's gone from

all our writing.'

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'I never thought there was anything like that,' Tommy said flatly.

Shawn sighed. He should have known the answer that was a part of the man. Then they reached the little

village, no more than a mile from the farm. He got out, putting out a hand.

But Tommy wasn't ready to end it yet. 'If you're going to eat here, I'll join you,' he suggested.

Shawn shrugged, then nodded. He was sorry that he had given in to the man's importunings over the

phone and let him make the useless drive from Chicago. There should have been an end to it now. Yet

Shawn had intended to dine here, since his own cooking was no better than it should be.

He picked up tobacco and the paper at a little store before leading the other to the restaurant beside the

gas station. They ordered and waited for the food, with nothing to say between them.

The paper, Shawn saw from the headlines, had been another mistake, but he glanced at it while

consuming the tasteless food. There was a dark ugliness in the news. As there always was. The lilt of life

was lacking in every part of it. It was heavy and ponderous, even when it tried to be witty. And around

him, the few diners were filled with a heaviness that made their laughter' a deliberate effort and gave

them no pleasure in the stories they told endlessly to each other.

'Why?' Shawn asked abruptly, pointing to the headlines.

'You're still a sociologist, Tommy. Tell me, why all the dark ugliness ?'

For a moment, it seemed that there was a measure of understanding in the man. He sighed. 'Sociologists

don't know much more about the present cultural matrix than anyone else, Dan. Too much technology,

maybe, before the culture can absorb it. Or maybe this is just one of the plateaux in an evolution towards

a sense of group maturity.' 'Maturity?' Shawn questioned bitterly.

'It could be.' And now the administrator's optimism was creeping back into the face. 'Oh, I know, there's

still hate and ugly conflict. But think of the earlier ages, Dan. Look at the superstitious panics, the

persecutions, the witch-burnings. There was a time when anything different from what was considered

human was to be killed on sight. Children ostracize or fight with anyone who differs from the group

norm. Seems to me we've improved a lot in that respect - at least in this country. We're trying to

understand other peoples. Why right now, Dan, if little green men got out of a saucer, most people

would be delighted to meet them. Lots of men are hoping to find alien races - look at Project Ozma. Or

look at the case of that priest who is writing about the question of redemption for non-human beings. If

there were werewolves today, I'll bet that there'd be a lot more scientific interest in them than fear or

hatred. There wouldn't even be any persecution of witches, unless they went in for criminal activity.

That could be considered a form of maturity.'

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Or maybe the human race was so unconsciously sick of its own sordiness that it would welcome even

alien relief, Shawn thought.

But he let the conversation die. There was as little answer to the problem,in sociology as in history - as

he had known all along.

He went out with Tommy at last, putting out his hand awkwardly in silence as the other reached his car.

'You sure you won't come back, Dan?' Tommy asked for the last time. 'You're definitely turning

President Schuyler down?'

'I won't come back, Tommy.'

He stepped back from the car and stood watching it drive away. Then he sighed and dismissed the whole

unfortunate business from his mind.

It was already so far into dusk that the stars were shining as he turned to walk homeward. The Moon was

full and start-lingly white in the dark sky. Wisps of clouds fleeced its path. The night was going to be

one of loveliness. For a moment he was glad he had ridden in, since it gave him an excuse to travel back

through the beauty of it.

The road went across the railroad tracks that led to all the earth, and yet the rails seemed to lead nowhere

in the moonlight. It carried him on, past the school where once a teacher had touched his mind, then past

the old cemetery, shaded with hollows of darkness. For a moment, there was a touch of the spiritual hush

he had felt long before as he moved by the quiet place. Then it was shattered by a coarse laugh, and a

burst of smut-tinged words of a juke song on a transistor radio.

Superstition was dying, as Tommy had said. At least, the older superstitious fear of things in the night.

But the darkness of it was being replaced by an even darker veil of sordid ugliness.

Even the dead had no peace. A couple had found the retreat for their own use, but without even the

respect of silence. And maybe these dead could never feel the lack, if they could know. Yet he felt his

soul rubbed in dirt as he guessed the ages of the couple. They were using the time for what should have

been an opening outward in them for things better reserved for later years.

The houses thinned out and were behind him, except for a single light back from the road half a mile

ahead. Here the land dipped down, carrying the road with it. It had been a gravelled road once. Shawn

missed the sound of the pebbles. But the Moon was the same he had known long ago, its light like a kiss

across the fields. Even crops cultivated by great machines instead of horses could take on a difference in

the silvering from above.

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Where had men lost whatever they had lost? History had

taught him nothing, though he had searched. And the keys in literature were too elaborately carved to fit

the lock. Books were written to bury the feelings of a past generation, not to reveal what might be

happening in the present.

There had been a magic iri men once. Oh, to be sure, it had been rare enough, and whole areas had

missed it. Rome had been mighty in valour without it. Much of Greece had lost it, though it lay

somewhere in the soft hint of legends older than Olympus. But there had been Persia. There had been

Queen Maev and the Isle of Avalon, the sea warriors of Ys and the dreams that misted across man's rise

from a beast. No time had ever been without it before.

Yet this time was lacking whatever it was. Save for a few bits borrowed from the past in Yeats, there

was no song or dream in the poetry now; and nobody even read poetry to look for such things. The art

was as ugly and machine-sym-boled as the thoughts of the little minds that made it.

The music was noise and the only legend was the legend of power.

A car filled with teenagers passed him. The top was down, but none of them were seeing the moonlight.

Shawn passed the sandstone ridge at the edge of his farm, lifted a wire gate and left the road. The woods

still stretched along the road. They were his woods, as they had been once when he was a boy. There,

along the little rutted trail through them, was the hazel bush, or one like the one he remembered. The

wild grapes were ripe and sweet, beaded with the rain or dew. He fasted them and went meditatively on.

There had been a lilting in a few men's thoughts once -enough to lighten the others, and to echo still,

faintly, out of the filter of older literature and legendry. It had gone. Maybe the industrial revolution?

But that was a poor answer, since the revolution had touched only lightly on much of the world, yet the

wonder had vanished just as quickly. Maybe the drive towards power? And yet, there had been power

before without the death of the glamour he could sense without defining.

Something had gone out of men. In its place was only the body of man's work - the machines, the dark

forces that drove

him on to bombs and destiny, the rockets that could lift him towards outer space but hide the dancing of

the stars. Hundreds of years before, the lilt - and there was no other word -had vanished.

History had failed to show a reason why.

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Shawn had come back here, looking for the threads he had lost in childhood. He was still seeking them.

He walked on through the stubble left from the harvested barley . . . and something seemed to whisper in

his veins.

There was the feeling in him that he should go on. He went, past the sagging barn and down the lane

towards the orchard. The pump at the old well creaked and gave forth water that was reddened with rust,

but cold and tingling on his palate. He stopped to pluck an apple from an unpruned tree and munched on

it.

And now the tingling was stronger, and there was a faint singing of the blood in his ears, as if a horn

were being blown somewhere. It became louder as he crossed a stile into the meadow.

The grass was faintly damp. There was the smell of clover in the air, over the faint, rich musk of the

earth itself. He moved across it, listening to the bending of the grass and the soft scuttling sounds of the

little creatures that lived in it. From a pond beyond the orchard lane, the croaking of frogs reached him,

the eerie call of a screech owl, the chirping of crickets.

The bugling of the strange excitement in his mind was stronger now.

He headed for the little dip near the centre of the meadow. As a boy, he had lain there in the sunlight out

of the wind and read Princess of Mars and Haggard and Dunsany, or crouched in the moonlight at times

when he was too restless to sleep and too filled with unremembered plans. It was too damp now for a

man of forty-five to return to the earth, but the spot drew him.

And then he saw the thing, centred in the spot towards which he was headed, and his heart seemed to

leap with shock and then with expectancy.

He moved to it slowly.

He tried to tell himself it was something left behind by some wooing couple or as a practical joke by his

neighbours. But he knew better.

It looked like a shell made of something milky-white. Half was almost buried in the grass. The other half

of the opened shell was resting backwards against a rock. It seemed to be lined with a softness like the

packed down of a milkweed pod. And it was perhaps eight feet long.

But it was the sweep of the lines and the rightriess of the form that held his eyes. There was a fluting of

the milky substance that lifted something in him as he had felt it lift before at an ancient jade screen or a

phrase of Mozart.

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