The Project Gutenberg eBook of The laugh
    
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Title: The laugh

Author: Robert Abernathy

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: February 15, 2026 [eBook #77941]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

Credits: Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAUGH ***




                               The Laugh

                          by Robert Abernathy




  _If a lad of eight should get an urge to go tramping into a cosmic
  shoestore in search of a giant’s boots his egotism might become a
  frightening thing. Robert Abernathy probably hopes it won’t happen.
  But he here plants such grave doubts in_ our _mind that we wonder if
  it’s safe to spoil children._

  =To Dicky grownups were absurdly like ants. They worked hard for no
  good purpose. But some day a big, big change would be coming!=




Dicky lay comfortably on his stomach in the high backyard weeds,
watching the ants. His eyes darted back and forth, trying to see what
all of them were doing at the same time--all around their hill on the
sun-warmed bare slope by the weed patch.

But there were too many of them and they ran too fast in too many
different directions. They skirmished, climbed, and slid. They pushed,
lifted, and tugged at bits of straw, at seeds, and even the leg of a
beetle. They labored mightily and inefficiently to transport these
treasures to their nest. Dicky gazed at them in rapt absorption
obscurely awed by their incomprehensible fervor of dedication.

They reminded him-- He searched the teeming storehouse of a
five-year-old’s memories, and thought that the ants reminded him of the
lawn-tender which, every evening when it wasn’t raining, crept out of
its little kennel behind the house to see if the grass needed cutting
or watering. If it did, the dutiful machine went clicking and buzzing
up and down on its fat wheels, pivoting precisely at the edge of the
yard. It never came down here, where the ground sloped toward the brook
thirty yards away, and the weeds grew rank--where Dicky the courageous
wasn’t supposed to go either.

He glanced up the slope, suddenly conscious of the naked sun blazing
down on him through the thin cover of foliage and of the nearness of
the house beyond its clipped green rectangle of lawn. The cooling
intake on the house roof turned slowly, flaring to snare an unreliable
faint breeze. The windows had half-shuttered themselves against the
July afternoon brilliance, and they now resembled squinting eyes. The
eyes were dark with indoor shadow and you couldn’t tell whether they
were looking at you or not.

But if Mother did look out, she couldn’t possibly see him here. She
would think he was sitting in the sun by the wall of the house, playing
as he was supposed to do with his toy cars or his toy helicopter. The
cars would run just to the edge of the yard, and the helicopter would
fly only as high as the house. So naturally Dicky had grown bored with
them.

He wriggled closer to the busy ants, to the very edge of the weed
forest. The ants went on behaving as if Dicky wasn’t there. Softly,
Dicky said, “Boo! Woo? _You!_” But the ants didn’t notice.

Judicially, he decided that he would never be an ant, even if the
opportunity should be offered him. Ants were like grownups. They worked
hard for no good reason which Dicky could understand and they paid no
attention to more important things.

But it _would_ be fun to be very small, and live here among weeds like
giant trees. It would be fun to hide under the leaves when people came
looking for him. He scanned the ground minutely, picturing himself
walking here and there among the wonders of the little world--climbing
on a straw that was a fallen log, and looking up to see an insect
go whirring past with iridescent wings. Then the slope would be a
mountain, and the brook at its foot would become a vast shining ocean.

Not an ant, though. He would rather be a frog.

Vividly, for life, Dicky would remember the day when he’d first seen
the frog. It had been back when there’d been a hole in the fence,
hidden by weeds. It had been a hole which only he knew about, and
several times he’d crawled through and visited the forbidden shores
beyond. The brook flowed there dark, deep, and quiet between cement
banks, severely walled like almost all the world. But under the
footbridge a little way below the house lived the frog.

Dicky had known he was there, had heard him at twilight--_krraak!
krraak!_ But for a long time he hadn’t known who made the sound. And
then, one rain-washed afternoon, he’d crept stealthily along the wet
grass of the bank and peered into the shadows beneath the bridge.

The frog was sitting on the slimed rubble close to the water--fat,
green, self-important. He was squatting there with his tiny forefeet
accurately tucked up under him. He had lazy jewel eyes, and was
ballooning his mottled throat to send out his _krraak_. Smugly happy he
seemed, in his confidence that the world had only been waiting to hear
his frog noise.

The revelation had been too much for Dicky, and he had burst out
laughing. Then he had looked quickly around, alarmed, to see if anyone
had heard him. But nobody had except the frog, who promptly went
_gchonk!_ into the water.

Now the fence had been repaired and there was no way through. If Dicky
so much as went near it--forbidden as he was to go that far--his
father’s voice came to his ears, just as if his father were not away at
work. It said: “Dicky, go home!”

But Dicky didn’t grieve unduly. Having found the way blocked, he
dismissed it from his thoughts. After all, he had seen the frog, and he
could remember it any time he wanted to.

Remembering now, he rose to a crouching position among the weeds, and
said, “_Krraak, krraak!_” He said it softly under his breath, and
smiled to himself.

A sudden commotion on the sunlit ground recalled his attention to the
ants. Two of them had seized hold of a tiny leaf, one on each side,
but they seemed unable to agree on which way it should go. They tugged
in opposite directions. First one of them found firm footing in a
half-buried pebble and dragged the other one, its feet scrabbling madly
in loose sand. Then the second ant got a purchase on the pebble and in
turn triumphantly wrestled the leaf, and its struggling rival for a
fraction of an inch in _its_ chosen direction. Both ants kept skidding.

Dicky bent close to watch them, a well of pure, delighted amusement
bubbling up inside him. Suddenly it all seemed irresistibly funny--that
grim Lilliputian determination see-sawing across a pebble just when
he’d been thinking of the frog and how he’d laughed at the funny frog--

Dicky felt the spasm starting in his stomach, and ascending sneezelike
into his throat, making his nose twitch and his eyes half-close. He
felt the laughter coming and couldn’t stop it, and suddenly he was
laughing uncontrollably, loudly, gleefully....

“_Dicky!_”

He heard his mother’s shocked voice and scrambled to his feet, the
laughter dying into indrawn sobs. The shining afternoon whirled about
him into cataclysm.

“What are you doing down there?” she demanded. She stood on the edge of
the lawn above him, her voice quivering with anger. “Dicky, answer me!”

“Looking at ants,” he gulped. “I was just--” He crumbled under her
reproachful eyes. “I couldn’t help it, Mommie,” he pleaded. “I
couldn’t--”

“Come here,” she said in the same strained tone. “What if the neighbors
heard you! Do you want them to think crazy people live here? Do you?”
She broke off with an effort, and took a deep breath.

“Come straight in the house now. And just you wait until your father
comes home!”

The next day Dicky’s father didn’t go to work at the yeast plant.
Instead, all three of them went for a ride. They went in a coptercab,
which meant downtown, instead of in the car which would have meant a
picnic in the country.

The night before there had been a consultation which Dicky had
overheard only in snatches: “Laughing at _ants!_ I caught him at it.”

“...At people next, I suppose!”

“But what can we have done wrong?”

Since then, happily, Dicky’s fall from grace hadn’t been mentioned, and
in the excitement of a ’copter trip he forgot it altogether.

The automatic pilot set them down on the roof of a building that loomed
large even in a neighborhood of huge buildings. Below were long halls
with slick tiles and rubber runners. There were also many doors, and a
great many people, dressed entirely in white, and all hurrying.

Without knowing quite how it happened, Dicky became separated from his
parents in a big room with two men and a lady in white, and a lot of
gleaming and mysterious apparatus. He’d been told not to be scared, and
he wasn’t--quite.

“Sit right here, Dicky. Just hold still, now....”

They tapped his knees with little mallets, tickled the soles of his
bare feet, and shone dazzling lights into his eyes.

“Say ‘black bugs’ blood,’ Dicky.”

“Black bugs’ blood,” stammered Dicky, and looked around anxiously to
see what, if anything, the strange incantation might have summoned up.

“That’s a good boy,” said the lady in white soothingly.

“Somatically okay,” said the biggest man in white at last. He nodded to
the other two, and they went out.

The big man sat down opposite Dicky and regarded him gravely, but not
sternly. He reminded Dicky of his own father in one of his good moods.

“Now, that didn’t hurt, did it?” inquired the big man.

“N-no,” said Dicky.

“We had to give you some tests to make sure you were all right. You
_are_ all right. But your parents seem to be a little upset about you.
Hmm. Why’s that?” The question was gently authoritative.

“I--I--” Dicky stumbled painfully over the truth. “I guess I _laughed_.”

The man nodded soberly, and Dicky was aware, with a sudden rush of
confidence, that he wasn’t surprised or shocked. It was plain that he
wouldn’t be, even if Dicky were to laugh right in his face. Not that
Dicky felt like doing that.

“Why did you laugh? Tell me, Dicky.”

“At some ants.” Dicky’s face felt hot, but the big man’s manner was
unchanged.

“Do you feel like telling me about the ants?” the big man asked. And
Dicky realized that he did.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dicky’s mother demanded shakily, “But, Doctor, _what_ did we do wrong?”

“We’ve tried to bring the boy up with every scientific advantage,” his
father muttered uncertainly.

The man in white sighed imperceptibly. Here were two normally
intelligent and well-intentioned people. But obviously the explanations
he had just given them in terms of reality had not conveyed a great
deal to them. Public education, even in this day and age, left much to
be desired.

He said patiently, “So far as I can tell you haven’t done anything
_seriously_ wrong. You’ve provided the child with approved play
materials, and you’ve proceeded quite properly in supplying him with
safely limited opportunities for aggression against authority. Perhaps
you’ve left him alone a little too much. What has happened is that in
the absence of adult guidance an unhealthy fantasy element has crept
into his play.

“When you come back tomorrow, we’ll go over the home environment in
detail and I may suggest a few changes. Then, with the prescription
I’ve given you, and with Dicky coming to see me once a week, I think
we’ll have him entirely straightened out by the time school starts.”

“Oh, I hope so!” exclaimed the mother prayerfully.

The psychologist cast an approving glance at her, and said
reassuringly, “You shouldn’t be unduly alarmed. It’s important
to remember that at Dicky’s age an occasional emotional
explosion--laughter, tears, rage, or the like--isn’t necessarily a sign
of dangerous emotional instability. After all,” he smiled faintly, “a
hundred years ago your Dicky’s behavior would have been considered
quite normal.”

“Normal?” said the father with corrugated brow.

“Ideas of normality differ in different eras. Our ancestors considered
laughter--even violent laughter in public--quite permissible ... though
they would have frowned on various other types of emotional exhibition.
At sundry times and places there have been societies which condoned
or even encouraged orgies of grief and guilt--megalomaniac outbursts,
religious ecstasies, public sexual excesses.

“Our own forebears continued to laugh right into the twentieth
century, at a time when psychiatry had already taken its first great
steps forward--steps hampered, naturally, by the cultural bias....
The popular psychology of the period even worked out a theory of the
alleged value of ‘emotional outlets,’ disregarding, of course, the fact
that energy going into such outlets was wasted. The steam that blows
the whistle doesn’t turn the wheels.”

The parents nodded with an understanding that pleased the psychologist.
Maybe there was still hope for public education.

“No doubt,” he went on, “some of those immature societies I referred
to--when population was sparse and resources under-developed--could
_afford_ their eccentricities. But modern civilization requires that
all the individual’s inborn aggressive energy be channeled into
effective action, directed by the reality principle.

“Before we could accomplish that, we had to get rid of our forefathers’
sterile idea of ‘happiness,’ ideas which the early psychiatrists
actually regarded as a therapeutic goal. They tried to alleviate human
misery without realizing that it was only one face of the coin, and
that to succeed they must also study the causes and cure of happiness!

“So--” The psychologist caught himself with a glance at his watch,
which had begun to buzz quietly but insistently to remind him of an
appointment. “Don’t worry. You see, a century ago Dicky would have gone
without treatment. Upon reaching the age of puberty, he might have
fallen in love, or developed other psychosomatic ills--”

The parents exchanged horrified glances.

“But nowadays we know just what to do. You haven’t a thing to worry
about.”

He ushered them to the door beyond which Dicky waited with the nurse.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fall was coming, a first chill in the air. Dicky stood at the edge of
the green lawn, looking down the bare slope toward the fence and the
brook beyond.

The backyard slope was no longer forbidden to him--hadn’t been since
the day the lawn-tender had clicked and buzzed its way along it, mowing
the weeds. But he no longer felt any particular urge to explore.

Once, a long time ago in the summer, there had been something very
special about the brook and the footbridge over it. But now he couldn’t
remember what had seemed so important. He remembered, of course, that
he had walked along the brook, and had seen a frog. But he’d been much
younger then.

Now summer was over, and in a few days Dicky would be starting to
school.

He scuffed his new shoes down the weedless slope aimlessly--as far as
the fence and back again. Suddenly he stopped, noticing that the ants
were still there. They seemed fewer than they had been, and not so
active as they straggled in thinning lines across a patch of ground
completely denuded of forage.

The ants reminded him of the big man in white, who was so good at
explaining things so that Dicky could understand. One thing he’d
explained on request was why ants couldn’t see you, even when you stood
right over them.

They couldn’t see you because you were too big. That seemed a strange
idea, but the big man, in his patient way, had made it all sound
perfectly reasonable. If ants _could_ see you, they’d be scared, but
only because you were so much bigger that they couldn’t do anything to
help themselves. So it was better for them not even to know you were
there.

Dimly, as an echo, he remembered too how he’d watched the ants on a
sunny afternoon, and wished he could be as small as they were. That was
a silly thought, fit only for little kids that laughed and cried and
wet their pants.

But it _would_ be fun to be a very big giant, so big that all the
people and cars in all the streets would look like little ants running
around. So big they couldn’t even see you, because if they could it
wouldn’t do them any good.

“Black bugs’ blood!” said Dicky abruptly to himself.

The hard sharp heel of his new shoe ground into the anthill,
obliterating the entrance, burying the frantic workers under tumbled
dust. He stamped the anthill flat with careful thoroughness.

Then he turned without another glance, not laughing or crying any more,
and walked sedately up the slope to the house.




Transcriber’s note:


This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, June 1956 (Vol. 5,
No. 5.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors in punctuation have been silently corrected in this
version.






*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAUGH ***


    

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