Dark Benediction

“Travel through the centuries with the master of the clock!” the announcer was chanting.

“Hi, kid,” I said to the hunched-up figure who sat before the set, worshiping his hero.

“Sssshhhhhhhh!” He glanced at me irritably, then transferred his individual attention back to the title film.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t know you listened to the opening spiel. It’s always the same.”

He squirmed, indicating that he wanted me to scram—to leave him to his own devices.

I scrammed to the library, but the excited chant of the audio was still with me. “…Captain Chronos, Custodian of Time, Defender of the Temporal Passes, Champion of the Temporal Guard. Fly with Captain Chronos in his time-ship Century as he battles against those evil forces who would—”

I shut the door for a little quiet, then went to the encyclopedia shelf and took down “LAC-MOE.” An envelope fell out of the heavy volume, and I picked it up. Kenny’s.

He had scrawled “Lebanon, do not open until 1964; value in 1954: 38¢,” on the face. I knew what was inside without holding it up to the light: stamps. Kenny’s idea of buried treasure; when he had more than one stamp of an issue in his collection, he’d stash the duplicate away somewhere to let it age, having heard that age increases their value.

When I finished reading the brief article, I went out to the kitchen. Cleo was bringing in a basket of clothes. She paused in the doorway, the basket cocked on her hip, hair disheveled, looking pretty but anxious.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

I nodded, unable to look at her, poured myself a drink. She waited a few seconds for me to say something. When I couldn’t say anything, she dropped the basket of clothes, scattering underwear and linens across the kitchen floor, and darted across the room to seize my arms and stare up at me wildly.

“Rod! It isn’t—”

But it was. Without stopping to think, she rushed to the living room, seized Kenny in her arms, began sobbing, then fled upstairs when she realized what she was doing.

Kenny knew he was sick. He knew several specialists had studied his case. He knew that I had gone down to talk with Doc Jules this afternoon. After Cleo’s reaction, there was no keeping the truth from him. He was only fourteen, but within two weeks, he knew he had less than a year to live, unless they found a cure. He pieced it together for himself from conversational fragments, and chance remarks, and medical encyclopedias, and by deftly questioning a playmate’s older brother who was a medical student.

Maybe it was easier on Kenny to know he was dying, easier than seeing our anxiety and being frightened by it without knowing the cause. But a child is blunt in his questioning, and tactless in matters that concern himself, and that made it hell on Cleo.

“If they don’t find a cure, when will I die?”

“Will it hurt?”

“What will you do with my things?”

“Will I see my real father afterwards?”

Cleo stood so much of it, and then one night she broke down and we had to call a doctor to give her a sedative and quiet her down. When she was settled, I took Kenny out behind the house. We walked across the narrow strip of pasture and sat on the old stone fence to talk by the light of the moon. I told him not to talk about it again to Cleo, unless she brought it up, and that he was to bring his questions to me. I put my arm around him, and I knew he was crying inside.

“I don’t want to die.”

There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.

“Kenny, I want you to try to have faith. The research institutes are working hard. I want you to try to have faith that they’ll find a cure.”

“Mack says it won’t be for years and years.”

Mack was the medical student. I resolved to call him tomorrow. But his mistake was innocent; he didn’t know what was the matter with Kenny.

“Mack doesn’t know. He’s just a kid himself. Nobody knows—except that they’ll find it sometime. Nobody knows when. It might be next week.”

“I wish I had a time-ship like Captain Chronos.”

“Why?”

He looked at me earnestly in the moonlight. “Because then I could go to some year when they knew how to cure me.”

“I wish it were possible.”

“I’ll bet it is. I’ll bet someday they can do that too. Maybe the government’s working on it now.”

I told him I’d heard nothing of such a project.

“Then they ought to be. Think of the advantages. If you wanted to know something that nobody knew, you could just go to some year when it had already been discovered.”

I told him that it wouldn’t work, because then everybody would try it, and nobody would work on new discoveries, and none would be made.