Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58394-756-2
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

Crate

We had to bury the pilot and Mr. Petrilli and the Stein kid, and by the time we were done with that we had to bury Rodney. It was a hell of a job for a bunch of kids but Miss Morin made us. The pilot had no face and not much head and Mr. Petrilli’s chest was all squashed and the Stein kid didn’t seem to have a mark on him, I guess he died of scare before the boat hit. Rodney screamed until Miss Morin gave him that stuff. After that he just lay there until he died. Also Miss Morin was hurt but nobody knew it at the time. She was up and around before anybody, after the crash, telling everybody what to do. She was always a great one for that. You want to be a probation officer, you be like that. Miss Morin, she was a probation officer before she was born, I bet when she was born she had that same set of lines around her mouth old maids get from sucking their own mouth instead of someone else’s.

After we planted the people we wanted to take it easy but she told off Fatty and Pam to drag out some food and set it up while Tommy and Hal and Flip had to get into the hold and bring out a crate. There was a lot of crates in there and most of them was triangles, full of panels for building dome houses, but it wasn’t just any crate she wanted, it was one special one. She give Tommy a paper with the special numbers wrote on it big, and they had to slide half a hundred crates in and out to look before they found the right one. They got it out and it was hard, with the ship tipped over that way and Flip getting under foot all the time. He was nine. Tom was fifteen, big. Hal was fourteen but not much bigger than Flip. The crate weighed about a hundred pounds.

We sat on the ground outside and ate except Miss Morin.

She sat on the crate. That’s the way she was, she always stood or sat a little higher than everyone else, one of her tricks. She was full of tricks. She was the most iron-handed hardmouthed cold-blooded old bitch ever lived. She was always around. She told us what to do and she was around to see it got done. There was other probation officers back on Earth had groups like us, overflow kids that didn’t fit in nowhere and got into trouble and they shipped them off to frontier planets where they could fight cold and heat and animals instead of other people and the “Great As Is” (well that was what they said they was doing, we always thought they was just finding some edge to dump us off); anyway, other probation officers made up stuff for their kids to do and then went off on their own

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