The Tweener - Leigh Brackett, ebook, Temp
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The TweenerLeigh BrackettMagazine of Fantasy and Science FictionFebruary, 1955A taxicab turned the corner and came slowly down the street."Here he is!" shrieked the children, tearing open the white gate. "Mother! Dad! He's here, Uncle Fred's here!"Matt Winslow came out onto the porch, and in a minute Lucille came too, flushed from the purgatory of a kitchen on a July day. The cab stopped in front of the house. Josh and Barbie pounced on it like two small tigers, howling, and from up and down the street the neighbors' young came drifting, not making any noise, recognizing that this was the Winslows' moment and not intruding on it, but wanting to be close to it, to breathe and see and hear the magic."Look at them," said Matt half laughing. "You'd think Fred was Tarzan, Santa Claus, and Superman all rolled into one.""Well," said Lucille proudly, "not many people have been where he has."She went running down the path. Matt followed her. Inside, he was jealous. It was nothing personal, he liked Lucille's brother and respected him. It was only that Josh and Barbie had never had that look in their eyes for him. This was a secret jealousy, that Matt hid carefully, even from himself.Fred got out of the cab, trim and soldierly in his uniform with the caduceus on the collar tabs, but forgetting all about dignity as he tried to hug the kids and kiss his sister and shake Matt's hand all at once. "I'll get your bags," said Matt, and the neighbors' children stared with enormous eyes and sent the name of Mars whispering back and forth between them."Be careful," Fred said. "That one there, with the handle on it?let me." He lifted it out, a smallish box made from pieces of packing case that still showed Army serial numbers. It had little round holes bored in its top and sides. Fred waved the children back. "Don't joggle it, it's a rare Martian vase I brought back for your mother, and I don't want it broken. Presents for you? Now what do you think of that?I clean forgot! Oh well, there wasn't much out there you'd have wanted, anyway.""Not even a rock?" cried Josh, and Fred shook his head solemnly. "Not a pebble." Barbie was staring at the holes in the box. Matt picked up Fred's suitcase. "He hasn't changed," he thought. "Lost some weight, and got some new lines in his face, but with the kids he hasn't changed. He still acts like one himself." He, too, looked at the holes in the box, but with apprehension. "This is going to be good," he thought. "Something special.""God, it's hot," said Fred, screwing up his eyes as though the sunlight hurt them. "Ten months on Mars is no way to train up for an eastern summer. Barbie, don't hang on your old uncle, he's having trouble enough." He glanced at Matt and Lucille, grinning ruefully, and made a pantomime of giving at the knees. "I feel as though I'm wading in glue.""Sit down on the porch," Lucille said. "There's a little breeze?""In a minute," Fred said. "But first, don't you want to see your present?" He set the box down, in a shady spot under the big maple at the corner of the house."Now Fred, what are you up to?" she demanded suspiciously. "Martian vases, indeed!""Well, it's not exactly a vase. It's more of a?I'll open it, Josh, you just stand back. This doesn't concern you.""Oh, Uncle Fred!" wailed Barbie, dancing up and down like a doll on strings. "Open it up, please open it up."Matt had put the suitcase inside the door. Now he came and joined the others under the tree.Fred opened the lid of the box. Then he sat back on his heels, watching the children's faces, and Matt thought, "He's been waiting for this for nearly a year, dreaming it up?he should have married and had kids of his own."Josh and Barbie let out one mingled cry, and then were still. For a moment."Is it really alive?""Can we touch it?""Will it bite?""Oh, Uncle Fred?oh, look?it does belong to us, doesn't it?"Along the fence small boys and girls impaled their meager bellies on the pickets in an effort to see. Matt and Lucille peered down into the box. On a mat of red sand and dry lichens a thing was crouching, a neat furry thing about the size of a big rabbit and not unlike one in outline, except that its ears were cup-shaped, and except that its coat was mottled in the exact rust red and greenish gray of the native sand and lichens. It looked up at the unfamiliar faces with a sort of mild incuriosity, its eyes half shut against the glare, but otherwise it did not move."What on earth is it?" asked Lucille."Nothing," said Fred, "on Earth. On Mars, he's the dominant form of life?or was, until we came. In fact, he's the sole surviving mammal, and almost the sole surviving vertebrate. He doesn't have an official name yet. It'll be years before the zoologists can decide on their classifications. But the boys out there call him tweener.""What?" said Lucille."Tweener. Because he's sort of between things. You know?if anyone asked you what he was like, you'd say he was something between a rabbit and a groundhog, or maybe between a monkey and a squirrel. Go ahead, Barbie, pick him up.""Now wait a minute," said Matt. He pushed Barbie back. "Wait just a minute. Fred, are you sure about this thing? Is he safe? I don't want the kids bitten, or catching anything.""Beside him" said Fred, "a rabbit is dangerous. The tweeners have had no enemies for so long they've forgotten how to fight, and they haven't yet acquired any fear of man. I've pulled 'em out of their burrows with my bare hands."He reached into the box and lifted the creature gently, clucking to it. "Anyway, this one has been a pet all his life. I picked him especially because of that. He's acclimated to warmer temperatures and approximately Earth-normal atmosphere, from living in a Base hut, and I thought he'd stand the shock of transplanting better." He held the tweener out. "Here, you take him, Matt. You and Lucille. Set your minds at rest."Matt hesitated, and then received the tweener into his hands. It felt like?well, like an animal. Like any small animal you might pick up. Warm, very thick-furred, perhaps more slight in the bone and light in the muscle than he had expected. It had no tail. Its hind legs were not at all rabbit-like, and its forelegs were longer than he had thought. It placed a paw on his arm, a curious paw with three strong fingers and a thumb, and lifted its head, sniffing. The sunlight was brighter here, falling in a shaft between the branches, and the tweener's eyes were almost shut, giving it a look of sleepy imbecility. Matt stroked it awkwardly, once or twice, and it rubbed its head against his arm. Matt shivered. "That soft fur," he said. "It tickles, sort of. Want him, Lucille?"She looked sternly at Fred. "No germs?""No germs.""All right." She took the tweener the way she would have taken a cat, holding him up under the forelegs and looking him over while he dangled, limp and patient. Finally she smiled. "He's cute. I think I'm going to like him." She set him carefully on his feet in the green grass. "All right, you kids. And be careful you don't hurt him."Once more Josh and Barbie were speechless, if not silent. They lay on the ground and touched and patted and peered and took turns holding, and the ragged fringe of small bodies on the fence dripped and flowed inward until the yard was full of children and the stranger from Mars was hidden out of sight."Kids," said Fred, and laughed. "It's nice to see them again. And normal people.""What do you mean, normal?"Fred said wryly. "I had to be doctor and psychiatrist. I've had xenophobes crawling all over me for ten long months.""Xeno?what?" asked Lucille."A two-dollar word for men who fear the unknown. When chaps got to worrying too much about what was over the horizon, they were dumped on me. But the heck with that. Take me somewhere cool and drown me in beer."It was a long hot afternoon, and a long hot evening, and they belonged mostly to Fred. To the children he seemed ten feet high and shining with the hero-light. To the neighbors who dropped in to say hello, he was a man who had actually visited a place they still did not quite believe in.The children, the whole gaggle of them, hunkered in a circle around the chairs that had been dragged to the coolest spot in the yard."Is it like in the books, Uncle Fred? Is it?"Fred groaned, and pointed to the tweener in Barbie's arms. "Get him to tell you. He knows better than I do.""Of course he does," said Barbie; "John Carter knows everything. But?""Who?" asked Fred."John Carter. John Carter of Mars."Fred laughed. "Good. That's a good name. You get it, don't you, Matt? Remember all those wonderful Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about the Warlord of Mars, and the Swordsman of Mars, and the Gods of Mars?""Sure," said Matt, rather sourly. "The kids read 'em all the time. John Carter is the hero, the kind with a capital H." He turned to the children. "But John Carter was an Earthman, who went to Mars.""Well," said Josh, scornfully impatient of adult illogic, "he's a Martian who came to Earth. It's the same thing. Isn't it, Uncle Fred?""You might say that, like the other John Carter, he's a citizen of two worlds.""Yes," said Barbie. "But anyway, we can't understand his language yet, so you'll have to tell us about Mars.""Oh, all right," said Fred, and he told them about Mars, about the dark canals and the ruined cities, about the ancient towers standing white and lonely under the twin moons, about beautiful princesses and wicked kings and mighty swordsmen. And after they had gone away again to play with John Carter, Matt shook his head and said, "You ought to be ashamed, filling their h...
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