Small World Read Free Page B

from the government before to build gadgets in his cellar and this time it was halfway legitimate. His work was an underground extension of the project; in due time, the government would get the good of it. In fact, he was looking forward to presenting the completed project to his former superiors.
    The first device had been the size of a wardrobe. The second one, four months later, had been the size of a color television set. The third, completed in a six-week frenzy, had been a little smaller than a hand-held instant camera.
    It was exhaustively tested. Over three weeks, Roger had used up two dozen mice, bought in pairs in a dozen shopping-center pet stores. The neighborhood experienced a puzzling series of petnappings. The Lutzes missed their two tomcats; after a couple of weeks, it appeared they had moved on to softer suckers. The Treats’ miniature poodle disappeared from his sunporch basket. Eunice Gold’s bob-tailed kitten, last seen wearing Baby Wet ’n’ Dry s T-shirt and the bracelet Eunice’s grandmother had given her that spelled out E-U-N-I-C-E (for the tea party Eunice was running that afternoon), was among the missing. Andy Stevens’s r'eagle Gilligan, fat and wobbly at six years, failed to turn up for supper three nights running. His mom tried not to hear Andy trying in his closet.
    It has been a busy, satisfying time for Roger. The organic residue was rather amusing. Roger played with it for hours before, reluctantly, flushing it down the toilet.
    The exhilaration had passed soon enough. What next time was at -.ind. With sudden certainty, Roger knew the project was over, not just his part in it, or his secret project in the cellar, but the project, period. The government wasn’t going to call again. And if they weren’t going to rehire him, he was finished as a working scientist. He knew what it was like in the private sector for guys with papers. With his background, he would be invisible.
    If he didn’t turn over the device, what was he going to do with it? It had never been his job to decide to what ends a specific piece of work might be turned. Could he use it for himself, and if so, how? It was a relief to go back to the device. It had been his past for so long, it was inconceivable it should not be his future. It was his, by all that’s just.
    Coming to that conclusion hadn’t solved the what’s next problem. He couldn’t go on making the device smaller. Sooner or later he would have to do something with it.
    His mother had brought home the answer in a box of out-dated magazines, the old ones from the gynecologist’s office in which she worked as a receptionist. She did this every month, when all the new copies had come in. It was mildly embarrassing to Roger, but his mother was frequently mildly embarrassing to him.
    It was embarrassing to drop her off or pick her up, as it meant going into an office full of women on the most intimate of errands, and the staff all cheerfully unembarrassed about their work. He might encounter the gynecologist himself, a small, gray-haired man with a twinkle in his eye, seemingly always taking off or putting on a pair of rubber gloves. Then Roger would have to decide whether to offer to shake hands with the good doctor. He couldn’t help wondering if the doctor liked his work, and then if the doctor suspected Roger of so wondering.
    Since he had been out of work, Roger was sure his mother’s coworkers, those relentlessly clean-scrubbed, smiling women, thought he was a lazy good-for-nothing, content to live off his mother and read their old secondhand magazines. It was true enough, but they spent little time discussing Roger and his sins. His mother’s endless repetitions of the platitudes and the dullest details of her own life fell on their ears, as they did on Roger’s, as background noise, rain on a tin roof. Roger’s mom was liked for her good humor and kindliness, but nobody took her seriously.
    Still, he’d been delighted when he’d turned up a