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to have been my own first novel. When I first began writing professionally I conceived the notion of a
science-fiction novel to be entitled Sex Dream of a Precocious Twelve-Year-Old. I am no longer sure of
what it was to be about, except that it had something to do with everyone's dreams of flying, and
something to do with the dying fantasies of a child. I told Cyril about it he volunteered to collaborate, he
went home and produced a first chapter and we lost it When it turned up again, after his death, I had
long since forgotten whatever it was I intended for the novel, but I saw a short story in it ... and this is it.
ELPHEN DeBeckett lay dying. It was time. He had lived in the world for one hundred and nine years,
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though he had seen little enough of it except for the children. The children, thank God, still came. He
thought they were with him now: "Coppie," he whispered hi a shriveled voice, "how nice to see you."
The nurse did not look around, although she was the only person in the room besides himself, and knew
that he was not addressing her.
The nurse was preparing the injections the doctor had ordered her to have ready. This little capsule for
shock, this to rally his strength, these half-dozen others to shield him from his pain. Most of them would
be
used. DeBeckett was dying in a pain that once would have been unbearable and even now caused him to
thresh about sometimes and moan.
DeBeckett's room was a great twelve-foot chamber with hanging drapes and murals that reflected scenes
from his books. The man himself was tiny, gnomelike. He became even less material while death
(prosey biology, the chemistry of colloids) drew inappropriately near his head. He had lived his life
remote from everything a normal man surrounds himself with. He now seemed hardly alive enough to
die.
DeBeckett lay in a vast, pillared bed, all the vaster for the small burden he put on it, and the white linen
was whiter for his merry brown face. "Darling Ved-die, please don't cry," he whispered restlessly, and
the nurse took up a hypodermic syringe. He was not hi unusual pain, though, and she put it back and sat
down beside him.
The world had been gentle with the gentle old man. It had made him a present of this bed and this linen,
this great house with its attendant horde of machines to feed and warm and comfort him, and the land on
which stood the tiny, quaint houses he loved better. It had given him a park in the mountains, well
stocked with lambs, deer and birds of blazing, spectacular color, a fenced park where no one ever went
but DeBeckett and the beloved children, where earth-moving machines had scooped out a Very Own
Pond ("My Very Own Pond/Which I sing for you in this song/Is eight Hippopotamuses Wide/And
twenty Elephants long.") He had not seen it for years, but he knew it was there. The world had given
him, most of all, money, more money than he could ever want. He had tried to give it back (gently,
hopefully, in a way pathetically), but there was always more. Even now the world showered him with
gifts and doctors, though neither could prevail against the stomping pitchfire arsonist in the old man's
colon. The disease, a form of gastroenteritis, could have been cured; medicine had
come that far long since. But not in a body that clung so lightly to life.
He opened his eyes and said strongly, "Nurse, are the children there?"
The nurse was a woman of nearly sixty. That was why she had been chosen. The new medicine was
utterly beyond her in theory, but she could follow directions; and she loved Elphen DeBeckett. Her love
was the love of a child, for a thumbed edition of Cop-pie Brambles had brightened her infancy. She said,
"Of course they are, Mr. DeBeckett."
He smiled. The old man loved children very much. They had been his whole life. The hardest part of his
dying was that nothing of his own flesh would be left, no son, no grandchild, no one. He had never
married. He would have given almost anything to have a child of his blood with him now-almost
anything, except the lurid, grunting price nature exacts, for DeBeckett had never known a woman. His
only children were the phantoms of his books . . . and those who came to visit him. He said faintly, "Let
the little sweet-lings in."
The nurse slipped out and the door closed silently behind her. Six children and three adults waited
patiently outside, DeBeckett's doctor among them. Quickly she gave him the dimensions of the old
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man's illness, pulse and temperature, and the readings of the tiny gleaming dials by his pillow as well,
though she did not know what they measured. It did not matter. She knew what the doctor was going to
say before he said it: "He can't last another hour. It is astonishing that he lasted this long," he added, "but
we will have lost something when he goes."
"He wants you to come in. Especially you-" She glanced around, embarrassed. "Especially you
children." She had almost said "little sweetlings" herself, but did not quite dare. Only Elphen DeBeckett
could talk like that, even to children. Especially to children.
Especially to these children, poised, calm, beautiful, strong and gay. Only the prettiest, sweetest children
visited Elphen DeBeckett, half a dozen or a score every day, a year-in, year-out pilgrimage. He would
not have noticed if they had been ugly and dull, of course. To DeBeekett all children were sweet,
beautiful and
bright.
They entered and ranged themselves around the bed, and DeBeckett looked up. The eyes regarded them
and a dying voice said, "Please read to me," with such resolute sweetness that it frightened. "From my
book," it added, though they knew well enough what he
meant.
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