He didn’t care. He only thought of his mother.
The jungle shivered. Something shifted, quickly.
A woman ran through the deep grass!
She ran away from Roby, slipped, cried out, and fell.
Something glittered in the sunlight. The woman was running towards that silvery glittering thing. The spheroid. The silver star ship! And where had she come from? And why was she running towards the sphere? And why had she fallen as he looked up? She didn’t seem to be able to get up. Roby leaped from his rock, gave chase. He caught up with her and stood over the woman.
‘Mother!’ he screamed.
Her face shivered and changed, like melting snow, then took on a hard cast, became definite and handsome.
‘I’m not your mother,’ she said.
He didn’t hear. He only heard his own breath moving over his shaking lips. He was so weak with shock he could hardly stand. He put out his hands towards her.
‘Can’t you understand?’ Her face was cold. ‘I’m not your mother. Don’t label me! Why must I have a name! Let me get back to my ship! I’ll kill you if you don’t!’
Roby swayed. ‘Mother, don’t you know me? I’m Roby, your son!’ He wanted only to cry against her, tell her of the long months of imprisonment. ‘Please, remember me!’
Sobbing, he moved forward and fell against her.
Her fingers tightened on his throat.
She strangled him.
He tried to scream. The scream was caught, pressed back into his bursting lungs. He flailed his legs.
Deep in her cold, hard, angry face, Roby found the answer even as her fingers tightened and things grew dark.
Deep in her face he saw a vestige of the Sandman.
The Sandman. The star falling on the summer sky. The silver sphere, the ship towards which this ‘woman’ had been running. The disappearance of the Sandman, the appearance of the red ball, the vanishing of the red ball and now the appearance of his mother. It all fitted.
Matrixes. Moulds. Thought habits. Patterns. Matter. The history of man, his body, all things in the universe.
She was killing him.
She would make him stop thinking, then she would be free.
Thoughts. Darkness. He could barely move, now. Weak, weak. He had thought ‘it’ was his mother. It wasn’t. Nevertheless ‘it’ was killing him. What if Roby thought something else? Try, anyway. Try it. He kicked. In the wild darkness he thought hard, hard.
With a wail, his ‘mother’ withered before him.
He concentrated.
Her fingers dwindled from his throat. Her bright face crumbled. Her body shrank to another size.
He was free. He rose up, gasping.
Through the jungle he saw the silver sphere lying in the sun. He staggered towards it, then cried out with the sharp thrill of the plan that formed in his mind.
He laughed triumphantly. He stared once more at ‘it’. What was left of the woman form changed before his eyes, like melting wax. He reshaped it into something new.
The garden wall trembled. A vacuum cylinder was hissing up through the tube. Mr Grill was coming. Roby would have to hurry or his plan would be ruined.
Roby ran to the spheroid, peered in. Simple controls. Just enough room for his small body – if the plan worked. It had to to work. It would work!