WHEN I GROW UP

Originally published in Other Worlds Science Stories, November 1955.

He was twelve and he had a secret place in the woods behind the house.

It was a clearing that was surrounded by just enough obstacles to keep out stray grown-ups. There had been a storm years ago that sent young trees crashing down in a tangle of branches. Elsewhere at the borders of the secret place were bramble patches and a rocky cliff that fell away sharply.

But Ronnie was a boy, and to him these things were not a deterrent but a challenge. So he found the clearing one spring day, bright under the sun, with bushes and wildflowers still sparkling with the morning dew.

Ronnie spent the Saturday morning there, exploring his private kingdom. Once his mother called. Her voice from the house was so faint that it might have been only a freak of the wind—and so his conscience permitted him to ignore her.

He returned to the house for lunch. He hadn’t been able to find the way he’d gone in and he’d scratched his face and arms as he forced his way through a tangle of branches and thorns to the familiar part of the woods.

“How did you scratch yourself like that?” his mother asked, “Where have you been? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“No,” said Ronnie, answering the question at random. “I was in the woods. I fell, that’s all.”

“Well, wash your hands and face and eat your lunch,” she said. “And stay around the house this afternoon. Your uncle’s coming over. He said something about taking you to the city.”

“Aw, phooey,” said Ronnie. “I don’t want to go to the city.”

“Well,” his mother said, “that certainly is a nice way to talk. You don’t see your uncle so often that you can’t be polite about it when he does come. Goodness knows he does enough for you.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll go. I just sort of planned to go back down to the woods.”

“Time enough for that another day.”

* * * *

They copted to the city in his uncle’s three-seater. Uncle Dan, his mother’s brother, had to go to the Buy-All and Ronnie tagged along dutifully through the ordering of tractor parts and ponic supplements. Uncle Dan was a farm manager and Ronnie thought his business was very dull. Ronnie wanted to be a Moon pilot, himself.

Finally Uncle Dan had placed his last order. He took Ronnie’s hand and headed, grinning, toward Games & Toys. Ronnie wriggled his hand free—after all, he was twelve—and said innocently:

“Where we going. Uncle Dan?”

“Never you mind, boy. You’ll see in good time.”

“It was a ritual. Both new perfectly well that Ronnie’s reward would be something his widowed mother couldn’t afford to buy for him. Sometimes it was clothing, unfortunately, but more often it was something worth while. There’d be a skimmer, once—a junior copter with an altitude governor that kept it under twenty feet. And once Uncle Dan had got him an equipoid, a faithful copy by the Robotics Trust of the extinct horse.

A lot of things had become extinct since The War, in which the Earth people finally succeeded in wiping themselves out—except for the Moon colony.

Ronnie hadn’t been born on the Moon. He regretted that. His mother and father had been, and his Uncle Dan. His grandfather hadn’t, but Grandpa had been one of the first colonists. He’d told many a story, Grandpa had, of The War, and how it began. And how it ended, with Earth a dead world.

* * * *

A missile had come over, from the East. A robot missile. It hadn’t been planned as an attack. It was to have been a show of force, merely another persuader in the propaganda war against the West. It was to have set out, well heralded, not to destroy but to warn, to swoop low over cities on its pre-appointed course and to return to its base in the East.

But a Western plane had shot it down, and Chicago had been destroyed in the explosion.

The cities vanished swiftly after that. Kiev, Juneau, Stalingrad, Paris, Moscow, London, Washington, Kharkov, San Francisco, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Odessa, Oslo, Tokyo, Peking.

And so it went. The Moon colonists watched the lights flare up and wink out, one by one, as the cities died, and then the places between the cities. At last only the colonists were left of all those who had lived on the third planet.

They’d waited ten years, after the last radio message had been heard, before they sent out a ship. They worked, in that decade, as they never had before. They’d just achieved self-sufficiency—a hairline between extinction and the continuation of humanity—and there was nothing they could do for Earth before they did for themselves.

Years fled by as they studied the problem. It was no longer a smoking world, the dead Earth, but a challenge. Though it was dead, it was more alive than Mars or Venus. They had been to the second and fourth planets but neither offered the hope of a reborn Earth—if Earth could be reborn.

Earth’s embers had cooled but the radioactivity had not. Earth was a hot world, a deadly world.

A farmer found the answer. Plow it.

They laughed, at first. But as other suggestions were made and rejected the farmer’s answer stayed with them, became part of the language.

“I don’t see any other way,” they said. “We’ll just have to plow.”

Someone composed a ballad that swept the colony. Plowing Time. Everybody sang it. A group of scientists formed a Springtime Society, advocated spring plowing. They were dead serious. Not with horses, which had not been brought to the Moon and were therefore extinct, or with tractors, but with the Moon ships. From above, far away from the contamination, with the force beams.

They tried it, finally, after experimenting with a stretch of Moonland.

It worked.

When all the radioactivity had been plowed under they sent out a suicide ship, manned by volunteers.

They lived.

More than that, they thrived. The soil was fertile as it had never been. The seedlings and transplanted vegetables from the ponic gardens of the Moon shot up to heights unprecedented. The yield of an acre of land was triple what it had been. The corn was high as a giraffe’s eye, instead of an elephant’s, and even the runt cobs were a foot long.

The old land, the hot land, the radioactivity, was far under. Far enough down to be harmless, close enough up to be useful.

The colonists came home.

* * * *

“You might be interested in this,” the Buy-All salesman said. “We call it a Buildit.”

Ronnie turned it over in his hands, it was shaped like a long-barreled pistol. It had no trigger, but a notch-and-dial arrangement on the thumb-rest.

“What does it do?” Uncle Dan asked the salesman.

“Just about everything. It’s a universal tool, you might say, though only for woodworking. It saws, planes, bevels, joins and so on. Hammers, too, if you want the antique nail-finish.”

“Here, son, try it on this.”

Ronnie took the plank of synthowood and sliced the end off it, zip, with the Buildit. He moved a notch over one place with his thumb and planed smooth the detached end. Another notch, and the end was firmly reattached to the plank. Another, and the Buildit studded a section of the plank with carvings of Ronnie’s inspiration, easy as finger-painting.

“This is terrific, Uncle Dan,” Ronnie said. “Boy!”

“Check it off,” his uncle said. “We’ll take it.”

* * * *

They’d had a late supper in the city and by the time Ronnie got home it was time to go to bed. He put the Buildit on the table next to the night-light so it would be the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes and the first thing when he opened them.

Sunday was Church. The survivors were devout and strict. There was no work and no play on Sunday. There were family devotions and Church and devotions again and rest and reading and watching religious programs on video.

The Buildit lay on the night table, untouched, all Sunday.

Monday was school, of course. Ronnie decided against pretending to be sick. He might have to keep on being sick after three o’clock and not get to use the Buildit till Tuesday. He went dutifully to school, raced home afterwards, wolfed down a snack, shoved the Buildit into his pocket and was off to his secret place.

He was both pleased and annoyed that it took him so long to find a way in. Annoyed because he was impatient to put his new possession to work; pleased because if he, who knew the hidden place, had trouble finding it, others would never discover it.

Inside the glade at last, with a new scratch or two, Ronnie sat down on a sun-warmed rock and pulled the Buildit out of his pocket. He held it this way and that, admiring it from different angles, deferring the delicious pleasure of putting it to work for the first time.

There was something he hadn’t seen. Etched into the butt of the device were the words: “Global law forbids use of this tool for digging.”

Well, obviously. Everybody knew you weren’t allowed to dig. It was the First Law. He could even recite it:

“Anyone who digs in the earth capriciously; or who, having obtained permission by reason of his trade or profession exceeds the permitted limits shall be subject to such punishment as the Council may decide, not to exceed life imprisonment; and anyone who digs treasonably shall be condemned to death.”

He learned that in school. Everybody learned it. He ought to know it better than anybody. Hadn’t his father died because of digging?

His father had been a mining engineer and his profession had exempted him from the law. But it hadn’t exempted him from death. The mine had been a shallow one, as mines went, but even so there’d been Geigers in it. His father had got a big dose of them and they couldn’t help him. He died in the hospital a month later. That had been years ago. His mother had lived ever since on an RA pension.

So Ronnie knew all about radioactivity, and the digging taboo. Of course he wasn’t going to dig with the Buildit. He was going to build a hut.

He had the frame up before suppertime. The Buildit sliced magically through the trunks of the young trees he’d selected and they came down with wonderful earthshaking crashes. He trimmed them, notched them and joined them. The hardest part was hoisting them into place as the walls grew higher. He added the trimmed-off branches to the wall of brush and thorn-bushes around his glade.

There were no doors or windows yet. He’d slice them out later, when and where he needed them.

As the sun started going down his mother called, ringing the old clapper bell that meant mealtime. He realized he’d become enormously hungry and hesitated only for a last look at his hut before shoving the Buildit in his pocket and working his way through the barrier.

He ran all the way. He didn’t remember ever feeling so good, except maybe the first time he’d soloed in his skimmer.

The Buildit gave him a scare when he was slicing out the door. He’d carelessly got his left hand behind a section of the frame and his right thumb flicked on the slicer before he meant to.

In a heart-stopping panic he jerked his left hand away, expecting to see some fingers missing, at least. But they were all there. He sobbed in relief.

Ronnie decided he’d better learn the limits of the Buildit. He set it for drill and pointed it close to a rock. Nothing happened. But at the same setting, it mowed down a bush. And beyond the bush the Buildit had churned up the soil.

Ronnie looked around guiltily. No one had seen, of course. And it wasn’t really digging. It had been an accident. Quickly he stamped down the soil he’d disturbed.

To take his mind off the involuntary infraction, he propped up a row of discarded lengths of branch to test the range of the Buildit. He set the dial to slice, and sliced.

There were eight lengths of wood. The beam had sliced through six of them and part way through the seventh. It had a range of about a yard. So that was why, when he sliced out the doorway, the beam hadn’t gone on and cut out part of the back wall.

By Saturday, the hut was finished. It looked like a log cabin and he was pleased with it. He set the Buildit on carve and fancied up the cabin a bit with a secret design over the doorway.

He puttered around adding sills to the windows and making a rustic chair and table and tamping down the earth inside. But then there wasn’t much more that could be done.

He’d taken a book on the Old West out of the school library and lazed away the rest of the morning, sitting at his table just inside the cabin door.

He became bored with the hut and wished he’d built something else instead. A model Moon ship maybe. But he wasn’t going to make it today. The heck with that. He’d worked hard enough for one week.

As the long Saturday wore on he lost interest in his book. He was just sitting there, munching on a sandwich and sipping a cup of soup from the lunch his mother had packed for him, when he heard the voice.

He didn’t hear it, exactly. It was more as if he were thinking words that weren’t his.

“Hello, up there,” said the words. “Hello, up there.”

Ronnie took another bite of sandwich and another sip of soup, thoughtfully. He concentrated. The words still came: “Hello, up there.”

“Hello,” said Ronnie thinking the words, not saying them.

The other words stopped.

“Shucks,” Ronnie thought. “I ruined it.”

“No you didn’t,” the other words said, “I’m still here. A bit surprised somebody heard me, that’s all.”

“Where are you?” Ronnie thought the words. He would have felt foolish talking out loud to somebody he couldn’t see.

“Underground. Not far.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Not you in particular, necessarily. But someone who’d hear me, finally. I’ve been down here about fifty years. Fifty or sixty, I estimate. You lose track after a while.”

“You wouldn’t kid me, would you?” Ronnie asked.

“Not for the world.” There was a pause. “You’re a man, aren’t you? It’s a bit hard to tell.”

“Well,” said Ronnie, “yes. I’m twelve—going on thirteen.”

“Oh.” The voice seemed disappointed. Then; “Maybe it’s just as well. Are you strong?”

“Strong enough. Why?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure. Why? Who are you?”

“I’ll tell you about it,” the voice said. “Listen.”

Ronnie listened, skeptically at first. No one was going to kid him. His skepticism ebbed as the words continued to sound inside his head. But he finished his sandwiches and his soup as he listened. Eating was pretty important, too. And the voice had said he had to be strong. The voice sounded like his father’s, from what he remembered.

The name of the man underground was Allison Temple. Sure he was a man. He wasn’t a ghost yet. And he’d got there by burying himself before The War. Not in a grave, or anything spooky like that, but scientifically, in a lead-lined steel container.

He’d been in the metalworking business before The War, subcontracting for General Electric. Made lead-lined containers for GE’s hot stuff. He’d had a premonition when the first bombs fell that there’d be enough more of them to kill off the world, or at least make a pretty thorough shambles of it. So he’d adapted one of the containers for himself and others for a few other people who’d wanted them. Not many; maybe a dozen.

One of the other people had been in secret research and he’d developed something that might have the same effect on human beings as it had on laboratory animals. It was a kind of impregnated plasma that induced suspended animation.

Somebody else in the group had been playing around with extrasensory perception and telepathy. A vaudeville performer, he’d been, in self-defense. Organized science hadn’t been interested.

So they pooled their talents and skills and worked like mad at their preparations in the early days of The War until the time came when they had to take a chance with what they’d got by then. They couldn’t afford to wait any longer. They’d drawn lots to see who would be last and then, one by one, they dug deep pits and buried each other in the containers. The last one would have to depend on outsiders to bury him. Temple didn’t know if he’d managed to persuade anyone to do it for him.

They’d chosen out-of-the-way spots, far from the prime targets—cities—and scattered themselves all over the country, to increase their chances of survival. Oh, yes, some of them were women. And each of them swore that if he survived and were dug up, somehow, he’d devote the rest of his life, if necessary, to freeing the others.

“Wow!” said Ronnie. “That’s terrific!”

“It sure is. What amazes me,” Temple said, “is that everything worked. I am in suspended animation, except for my mind, and I did survive the bombings, and I have developed telepathy. I hope the others were as lucky. You haven’t heard of any of them being dug up, have you? Telepathy doesn’t work over long distances.”

“No, I haven’t heard of anybody,” Ronnie said. “What I want to know is, why didn’t you go to the Moon?”

“Couldn’t. That was a long time before you were born, of course, and I guess nobody ever told you, but it was total war in a big hurry and nobody could go to Canada and Mexico, even, let alone the Moon. Your folks were already up there, of course. I’ve read enough of your mind to know they came back and fixed up the world again. I’d like to know more about that, of course, but right now what interests me most is getting out of here.”

“Natch,” said Ronnie. “How are you going to do that?”

“That’s where I need your help,” Temple said. “You’ll have to dig, I’m afraid. But once you reach the container it’ll be easy. I’ll tell you how to open it and revive my body.”

Ronnie pushed breadcrumbs around on the table top. He didn’t know what to say.

“What you do,” Temple went on, intensely now, in a rush of thoughts, “is walk around and think to me. When your thoughts are strongest you’ll be directly over me and I’ll let you know. Then you dig right there. It’ll take a little time and it’ll be dull work. It’ll be harder on me than on you, though, just waiting. But I’ve waited a half a century or more, so I guess I can be patient another day or so.”

Ronnie was still avoiding the thought that must come out.

“What’s the matter, son?” Temple asked. “We seem to be out of touch.” There was a trace of panic now. “You haven’t gone away, have you?”

“No,” said Ronnie. “It’s just that…”

And he explained to the buried man the taboo against digging. He recited the law, with its penalties for capricious digging.

“But this isn’t capricious!”

Or treasonable, Ronnie told him. It might be treasonable. He didn’t know.

It was a dilemma, Temple admitted. He appeared to be calm again, and thinking hard. Ronnie had an impression of thoughts, too fast for words, whirling past him.

“Look,” the buried man said finally. “I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. I can’t control your mind; I can only communicate with it. So all I can do is put it to you man to man: I need you. Without you I can’t get out. I’ll be buried here for the rest of your life, and God knows how many other people’s lifetimes, So all I can do is appeal to you. I need help; you can help me. Will you?”

“I don’t know,” Ronnie said. He was miserable.

“There’s no hurry, Lord knows,” Temple said. “Think about it. Go home and consider it. If you decide to do it, wonderful. Ill be in your debt forever. If you decide you can’t—well, that’s tough. Maybe you’d know of someone else who would—though I’d rather it were you. Think about it and come back tomorrow and let me know.”

“I can’t tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“Oh. Special day, I suppose, for the survivors. Well, Monday, then. I’m good at waiting. But please come back. Please.”

“I will,” Ronnie promised. “I will, Mr. Temple.”

* * * *

Ronnie thought about it all day Sunday. He thought about it during family devotions. At Church, as he knelt, he prayed about it and listened hard for an answer. There was none. But in bed that night, as he lay looking out the window at the Moon—the Moon his parents had come from, with others, courageously, to reclaim the Earth—he knew he had the answer. He didn’t know where it came from, but he had it. Mr. Temple did remind him of his father.

Monday morning he pushed his Buildit into his pants pocket as he dressed, covered the end of it with his handkerchief, gulped his breakfast and ran off as if toward school. Then he doubled back and went to his secret place.

He was panting as he stood in front of his hut and studied the ground underfoot.

“Hello, Mr. Temple,” he said. “Let me know where you are so I can start digging.”

* * * *

They communicated telepathically as Ronnie dug.

Of course he wasn’t radioactive, Temple said. In the first place he’d been buried deep enough to be safe. And in the second, he’d been there long enough to have cooled off even if he had been hot. When he said he, he meant the outside of the container. Obviously, he was safe inside the lead lining.

Ronnie experimented with the Buildit till he found the best way to adapt it to digging. That seemed to be to set the dial to drill and churn up the soil, get it loose. Then switch over to hammer and knock the dirt out.

But it was slow work. At times he put the Buildit aside in disgust and scooped out the dirt by the handful.

Temple encouraged him from below, told him stories to pass the time, recalled games he had played when he was a boy, made up limericks, quoted poetry—but in time his thought grew less fertile, and still the hole was not deep.

At three o’clock, Ronnie had to go home and pretend he was arriving from school. And eat. By playing hooky he’d gone without lunch. Then he hurried back and dug again until his mother rang the bell for supper.

He skipped school again on Tuesday. He dug all day. He was absent on Wednesday, too, and then Thursday and Friday. And the hole was deep now.

Temple’s thoughts seemed stronger, too, or was that imagination?

But the deeper the hole grew, the more and more difficult it was to get rid of the dirt. Ronnie’s arms and back had ached for days and now, with the hole neck-deep, it was torture to send the dirt high enough so it cleared the mound of fresh earth around the rim and didn’t scatter back on top of him.

He felt dizzy and Temple encouraged him to rest. Ronnie refused to listen. He continued to dig.

Then he fainted.

* * * *

His uncle found him.

It was dark by then. His mother had searched the woods on foot without success and called her brother. Uncle Dan came in his copter and skimmed low over the woods, powerful searchlights stabbing down. He saw the little hut in the clearing, the mound of fresh earth, the hole, and Ronnie’s exhausted, sleeping body.

He landed next to the hut, pulled Ronnie out, took him straight to the hospital. They made Ronnie’s mother stay away till they had tested and found him free of radioactivity.

Ronnie was better in the morning, but the notes on his chart added up to nervous exhaustion. He’d have to stay in the hospital for a while.

His mother was there, and his Uncle Dan, and another man. They all looked pretty serious.

The other man was from the government. He wanted to know all about it. But Ronnie didn’t want to tell. He had to protect Mr. Temple. He didn’t want them filling in the hole again so he’d have to start all over again somehow—maybe from someplace else, with a tunnel…

But his mother said he had to tell, that it was very serious. His Uncle Dan said so, too.

So he told the government man the whole story, and the man took notes.

When he finished, the man snapped his notebook shut and said something about remanding Ronnie to the custody of his mother, after hospitalization, pending disposition of his case in juvenile court. Probably in a judge’s chambers, the government man said. He didn’t think in view of Ronnie’s age and his full cooperation with the authorities, that the judge would do more than give him a good talking to.

They didn’t tell Ronnie what they planned to do about Mr. Temple. He tried to talk to the buried man by telepathy, but the distance must have been too great.

* * * *

Ronnie found out what happened to Temple two nights later. Ronnie had gone to the bathroom down the hall long after lights out and on his way back to bed he heard the radio playing softly in the night nurse’s room. The news program was on. Ronnie tiptoed to the door and listened.

The decontamination corps had dug up Temple’s container. It had taken great earth-moving machines to do it. The thing had been about a quarter mile down. So of course Ronnie never would have reached it.

Temple had talked to them, told them the same story he’d told Ronnie. But he didn’t mention Ronnie till they did, apparently to protect the boy.

The container was hot. There must have been a hit near it, soon after it was buried, which unearthed it and exposed it to radiation. Then, years later, it had been plowed under again by the Moon ships.

The decontamination corps had handled it by remote, with their special devices. Then they mounted a twenty-four hour guard over it while the Council went into extraordinary session. Four hours and twelve minutes later the Council members emerged with their decision.

Ten to two against Temple.

The two council members in their joint dissenting opinion argued for removing the container to a non-populated area and opening it there, using proper safeguards. They argued for Temple on humane grounds, and on the basis of historical value and furtherance of scientific knowledge—but chiefly on grounds of humanity.

But the majority mentioned humanity, too; the humanity they knew and were sworn to protect. In this case the greatest protection lay in disposing of the container, unopened, as safely and speedily as possible.

As for its contents—Temple might be all he said he was…but he might be something utterly different. They had only his word, and it wasn’t enough. Earth had escaped destruction once by a hair’s breadth. Nothing—no one person—was worth the risk again.

Temple’s container was lifted by a huge grapple at the end of a cable from a copter and taken out to sea. There it was dropped, grapple and cable with it, into one of the ocean deeps, far from shipping lanes.

Ronnie’s secret place and an acre of the woods around it was cordoned off as a taboo area until it could be plowed under.

Ronnie crept back to bed. He lay there with clenched fists, trying not to cry. He was twelve—going on thirteen—and big boys don’t cry.

He said into the darkness:

“Sorry, Mr. Temple. Awfully sorry…I can’t do anything now. But when I grow up…I won’t be a Moon pilot. I’ll study science and find a way. I’ll find you…when I grow up…”

His cheeks were wet when he finally fell asleep.