The Revolving Boy Read online

  Man had always sought a meaning beyond Earth. Lonely, even with the company of his fellow Man, he had sought another spark of life, somewhere Out There. But by the end of the Twentieth Century the gates of space exploration had shut. The Earth was constricted by a radioactive belt of Man’s own making: self-enclosed Man was truly Earthbound.

  Yet scientists still searched the skies through radio probes for a signal, a hope that intelligent life beyond our galaxy might exist. But the Universe yielded no emissions to the listening devices.

  And unless a strange young boy was allowed to develop and understand the baffling “wild talent” he possessed—a talent with no apparent purpose, yet subtly frightening for just that reason—they might never find an answer.

  GERTRUDE FRIEDBERG:

  Although The Revolving Boy is Gertrude Friedberg’s first novel, her short stories have appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Story Magazine and New World Writing, She was also the author of the play Three Cornered Moon, which was produced in 1933 with Ruth Gordon in die lead; it was later adapted for a film starring Claudette Colbert

  When she is not writing, Mrs. Friedberg, who graduated from Barnard College, enjoys substitute teaching of mathematics in the New York public schools. She is married and has two children.

  THE REVOLVING BOY

  Gertrude Friedberg

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  the revolving boy

  Copyright ©, 1966, by Gertrude Friedberg

  An Ace Book, by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  author’s dedication:

  To Richard and Barbara and

  To Charles.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  PART ONE

  I

  The first time Mrs. Nagy ever noticed anything was at the beach when Derv was three. Had she known what to look for, she might have seen that he was that way from the start. But what mother ever measured an infant’s random moves and reverses around a crib or even a playpen?

  They were at the beach. Derv had been playing happily with the sand, pouring it from one to another of an assortment of colored plastic cups, a modest pastime in contrast to the motorized constructions being operated by most of the children there.

  Mrs. Nagy, sitting against a back rest, faced the parade of bathers. It was the first year of the recoil from the excesses of the 1960s and both men and women were covered from neck to foot in the new skintight, ankle-length bathing suits, relieved by metalsil flutters around the waists of the women and great spans of cautin across the shoulders of the men. Parasols had recently been resurrected from the past, and the starkly dressed women moved everywhere, flirting the gaily covered ornaments over this shoulder and that and wearing them even into the water where, strong enough to resist any buffet, they served as life preserver, signal, or, inverted, as a floating shell for the children.

  Nearby, on a paved square, a troop of Service Corps Junior Scouts were being instructed in elementary maneuvers by an exasperated young corpsmaster.

  “Left face!” he shouted.

  Some turned left, some turned right, some stood indecisively or craned around to look at the others.

  “Right face!” he offered. “Left about face!”

  Derv looked up and watched, letting the stream of sand, unheeded, flow back on the beach. Mrs. Nagy plunged a reading stick into the sand, perched a book, at its top, adjusted the electric page-turner and settled back to read. She had a square, strong face with a slightly upturned broad nose which suited it well and serene green eyes under a cap of tight black curls. Her body was compactly heavy, her movements relaxed and slow, but precise.

  “I said, ‘Left about face,’” shrieked the corpsmaster in a frustrated squeal. “What’s the matter with you fellows? Now let’s take it from the beginning.”

  He stared beseechingly, his eyes encircling them to press them into precise response.

  “Atten-tion!”

  The water lapped softly, the corpsmaster shouted and the sun beat down while Mrs. Nagy read on. After a while some unexpected sound of rustling feet or perhaps a laugh drew her back into the scene. A small group of bathers had gathered to watch, their faces all fixed in the same wondering amusement. Her eyes followed theirs and she sat up abruptly, knocking over her book and its support. It was not the faltering, wheeling, marching scouts nor their clucking corpsmaster they watched but a small boy who stood behind the entire troop. It was Derv.

  “Left face!” shouted the corpsmaster, unaware of the new recruit attached to his company. “Right face. Left about face. Right about face. Mark time. Forward march. Left, right, left, right. Company, left…march! Left, right, left, right. Company, right…march!”

  And as the squad blundered in incoherent patterns, Derv responded to each command with instant precision, his short plump legs turning virtuous right angles and straight angles, marching to binary measures and halting in complete intervals on the right foot. His face, with a wide, high forehead and a small, delicately indented chin, wore a beatific smile. His luminous far-fixed green eyes seemed to watch neither the flustered master, the discordant puppets nor the astounded audience. He did not even seem to listen. Whatever made his legs move might have been some finely perceptive device buried deep within himself.

  “Never saw anything like it in my life,” said a man who wore a blue and silver shoulder span as high as his ears. Several of the women, in order to see better, impatiently sheathed their parasols in their waist scabbards. The scouts, each time a correctly performed about-face put Derv in front of them, giggled and pointed with generous admiration.

  It took but a moment for pride to swell and burst in Mrs. Nagy. Then cold reason supervened and she knew what she must do. She stood up and buckled a yellow flutter about her waist. Waiting only until a flurry of commands had collapsed into “At ease,” she moved to Derv’s side.

  “Get your colored cups into each other, Derv,” she said quietly. “Were going home.”

  She smiled pleasantly, but she looked at none of them as she led Derv quickly past their “Is that your boy?”

  “That’s his mother.” “It’s die strangest thing I ever…” “You must be mighty proud to have a…”

  The scouts never came back to the beach, and to avoid running into any renewal of comment on the incident Mrs. Nagy took up her daily sand and sea relaxations on a different stretch of strand. In the 1970s, when artificial beaches were being spread everywhere, this was not difficult.

  The Nagys lived in the district of New England. Their home was painted a deep rose, which had its place in the spread from pink to crimson assigned to the area by the bird’s-eye-viewers. Otherwise the street, tree-lined and artificially grass-lawned, looked much as it had for many years. A faint cobwebby appearance might be traced to the almost invisible net which stretched its gossamer duraloy filaments high above the street to protect it from falling air traffic.

  Inside the house, all the room walls had been scooped out, since the ceiling could drop a wall, opaque or transparent, wherever you wanted one. The tyranny of draperies and curtains had given way to patterned borders about the permawindows, which admitted dustless air without opening and proper light without shading.

  One rainy day when Mrs. Nagy and her little boy were forced to stay at home, Derv said, “I want to march like those boys.”

  She did not mind as long as there were no strangers to watch and wonder. She threw up the wall she had drawn down behind them for coziness against the rainy windows. The room with its wide bare stretches was ideal for marching.

  “You say the things,” said Derv, taking hi
s position stalwartly before her.

  Mrs. Nagy good-naturedly took command. Derv fixed his eyes on his mother’s mobile vigorous face. Her thickset figure in the long loose dress she wore gave her a comfortable dependable look which Derv, in particular, found most appealing.

  After a while Mrs. Nagy thought she was doing quite well. Derv was perfect. From the pleased intensity with which he fulfilled each order, one would have thought that to turn left or turn right would be the only choices he would ever find worth making in his whole life. Mrs. Nagy interpolated a comedy interpretation of the corps-master, conjuring up imaginary blundering scouts on every side of Derv, at whom she shouted, citing Derv as the splendid example to shame them. Derv, smothered in giggles, never missed a step. But gradually his giggling faltered to a stop and an uneasy look came over his face.

  Mrs. Nagy, full of remorse that she had led him too far, said, “Company, disband.”

  “No,” said Derv.

  “It’s enough.”

  “No. No.” His bottom lip began to tremble.

  “You’re tired.”

  “But you didn’t finish.”

  “I did. I said, ‘Company, halt,’ and I said, ‘Company disband.’ Now you’re allowed to do anything you want.”

  “It’s wrong! I’m not finished!” He was crying and stamping his foot. It was quite unlike him.

  “Baby, what’s the matter?”

  “You’re bad! You did it wrong. You turned me too much.”

  “Dizzy? Are you dizzy? Derv, what’s the matter?”

  “Too much left. Left and left. You didn’t say enough right. I’m all turned around and around and around and…”

  He was sobbing little baby sobs.

  “Right about face!” said Mrs. Nagy, distraught.

  He executed the maneuver, a brokenhearted soldier.

  “Again!” he sobbed.

  “Right about face!”

  Back went the right foot, swivel and click. His crying stopped quite suddenly.

  “One more!”

  “Right about face.”

  He swiveled again, sighed, hiccuped and smiled.

  “Again?” asked Mrs. Nagy.

  “No more.”

  Without further instruction—and she might have been at a loss as to what command to give at this moment, short of “Company, wipe nose!”—he broke ranks and sat down to his pegboard as though nothing had happened.

  In the bedroom that evening Mrs. Nagy debated whether or not to tell her husband.

  Mr. Nagy was a tall, restless man with long arms and large hands, a high bony forehead and deep frowning cuts between disheveled blond eyebrows. When he looked at somebody, he thrust his head forward and squinted, causing the tiny white scar at the comer of the half-closed eye to disappear. His chin was indented in the center, a minor fault of tissue which softened his otherwise rugged, bony face.

  Mr. Nagy worked in a communications transfer terminal, his job being to withdraw requested data from the various information vaults dotted’ about the country and reroute the information electronically to where it was needed.

  “Don’t tell me anything,” Mr. Nagy said frequently. “And don’t ask me anything. They’re telling me and asking me things all day.”

  His way of pacing restlessly about, his hands on the back of his hips, coming almost smack up against a wall before turning the other way, gave him a look of perpetually chafing against some imagined confinement.

  Fortunately, bedrooms at this time were bare and neat and this one gave Mr. Nagy adequate range. Along one wall ran the inevitable storage units. Halfway up the other was a deceptive shelflike arrangement. If you dropped anything on it, the section thus assaulted tipped back into the wall and reappeared empty, its burden remaining in a file tray until summoned for removal.

  An embedded mirror over the automatic shelf looked and behaved as mirrors always have.

  Just now it held the image of Mr. Nagy, frowning and preoccupied, moving restlessly around the room, flinging his shoes in the polisher, his suit in the automatic cleaner and other articles on shelves which disappeared.

  *1 think I must have sent or received over a million inches of data today,” he said wearily. “For today, I’ve had it.” And he made a gesture as if sealing off the day from further duress.

  It was not a good moment. Mrs. Nagy decided to say nothing about Derv.

  II

  In the next year the signs in Derv were small but increasing. Often Mrs. Nagy took Derv to the shopping center with her. Pedestrian walks by this time had all gone bridgeward over the carways, but at the approach to the center there was still a vestigial four-comer crossing at which passengers and cars confronted each other in the old way, with only a code of lights to protect them from each other.

  Once, with Derv’s hand tight in hers, Mrs. Nagy had just crossed this street when she remembered an omitted errand. She wheeled about without releasing his hand to return to the other side. As they crossed back, his hand squirmed in hers.

  “Derv!” she said sharply, tightening her grip.

  Children are always impatient to be free, but he knew the rules. The sudden display of willfulness was surprising. She looked around to see what had attracted him. But when they reached the sidewalk and she let go of his hand, there was nothing he wanted to run to. He merely whirled about in place and then placidly gave her his hand again.

  There may have been other instances, but Mrs. Nagy was an inattentive mother. In the community playground or at home if Derv were busy playing and her household work was done, she read. But one day when he was four and she had come out to the playground without a book, she watched.

  He had a set of tenpins on the bench and was setting them one at a time in a row around a tree. Each time that he fetched a tenpin from the bench, he executed a full turn on the way back to the tree. At first she could not believe that the action was invariant, because occasionally he was seduced from his course by a butterfly, or he stopped to watch a passing cloud. But finally there was no doubt.

  “What are you doing, Derv?”

  “Putting them. They’re nice. The blue ones are five and the red ones are three and the yellow one is a baby.”

  “But why do you turn?”

  “I don’t turn. I get straight.”

  It was harmless enough, some small notion the child had. (She had forgotten the earlier manifestations.) She looked around and saw with satisfaction that nobody seemed to notice Derv’s turns, not even the mothers of children who occasionally played with him. Well then, as long as it didn’t attract attention.

  She herself, when she was a girl, used to kick a stone home from school. All the way. The same stone. And some children had to touch each tree they passed, or jump over the arrows in the pedestrian walks.

  On the way home she observed his occasional quick whirls with amusement. Very soon she accepted them as part of Derv, and barely attended to them.

  When Mrs. Nagy went to school to get Derv’s very first report from his preschool teacher, she glowed with pleasure to hear her own good opinion of Derv’s placidity, humor and intelligence confirmed by the teacher. But just when she and the teacher were about to part with an exchange of compliments and credits, the teacher said, “You know we call him ’the boy who whirls.*”

  Mrs. Nagy turned back from the door. “Who calls him that?”

  “The children. I’m sorry this upsets you, Mrs. Nagy. I had no idea it would. I was determined to bring it up because I think he is in physical danger when he stops to whirl on the stairway.”

  “Which stairway? Where?”

  “Let me show you.”

  Mrs. Nagy followed her.

  “You see how narrow the step becomes where the stairway takes a turn? That’s where Derv lets go of the banister and whirls. I hold my breath when he does it. The children don’t mean anything by calling him ’the boy who whirls.’ They don’t know all the names in the group. It’s purely identification. They like Derv. Some of them imitate hi
s whirls, except on the stairway. I didn’t like to speak to him about it until I spoke to you. Some mothers are being told by their psychiatrists not to mention such things to their children, so I…”

  “I’ll talk to him about it,” said Mrs. Nagy.

  As she hurried home, her thoughts reeled in mild panic. She would have to tell Mr. Nagy. They would have to take Derv out of the school. “The boy who whirls.”

  “The boy who whirls.” “That’s Derv Nagy, the boy who whirls.” “Who are the parents?”

  But at home she calmed herself and felt remorse that she had been more concerned with the notoriety Derv might attract than the danger he faced.

  She told Derv in an offhand way that he must not whirl on the stairs and why.

  “But what if I have to?”

  Although she knew he thought of it this way, in terms of coercive physiological need, she was a little taken aback by the straightforward way he put it.

  “How many do you have to take?”

  “Just two on the stairs. I take another when I get outside.”

  “Then suppose you take the three when you get outside.”

  “All right,” he said.

  It was as easy as that.

  Derv continued to whirl to compensate for the turns imposed on him by his world, but the same compromise as that initiated by Mrs. Nagy, applied in larger and larger compass as he grew older, served finally to eliminate whirling from schooltime and from all occasions on which it was dangerous or conspicuous.

  Mrs. Nagy could not imagine how he kept track, but by the time he was seven he was content to take all the necessary whirls at bedtime.

  Mrs. Nagy grew easy in her mind. She had not told her husband about Derv’s idiosyncrasy. It was all right. Nobody was asking questions.