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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 58995 ***
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+                           SELLER OF THE SKY
+
+                            BY DAVE DRYFOOS
+
+            _No one took Old Arch seriously; he was just an
+         ancient, broken-down wanderer who went about seeking
+          alms and spreading tales of the great Outside. But
+           sometimes children are curious and believing when
+                 adults are cynical and doubting...._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+             Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1955.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+There have always been the touched, the blessés, God's poor. Such a one
+was Old Arch. Archer Jakes, the Wanderer of the Plains.
+
+They say he was born on Earth in 3042 and taken to Mazzeppa as a child.
+That he learned pilotage and mining. But that he was injured in a
+cave-in on Hurretni in 3068 or thereabouts, and then his wife died in a
+landing accident and his child was taken from him and adopted by people
+he never could find.
+
+Those things are too far distant in time and space to be verified now.
+But it is a fact that by 4000, when my grandfather Hockington Hammer
+was growing up in New Oshkosh, Old Arch was a familiar figure in all
+the Domed Cities of the Plains.
+
+He looked ancient then, with his deformed back that people touched for
+luck, and his wild hair and beard, and ragged castoff clothing. On his
+back he carried a roll of cloth he called his bed, though it looked
+like no bed any City man had ever seen. In his right hand he carried
+a staff of wood, unless someone bought it from him and gave him a
+plastic rod in its place. And in his left he carried what he called a
+billy can, which was a food container with a loop of wire across the
+top for a handle, and the bottom blackened by what he said was fire.
+
+It would have been like no fire any City man had ever seen. Even the
+water in the can would be poison to a City man. When he came in the
+airlocks the guards would make him throw it away.
+
+"Why the lock?" he'd demand, coming into a City. "Why the lock and why
+the plastic bubble over all and why the guards? There's no pollution.
+Am I not alive?"
+
+The guards would touch his hump and make circular motions at the sides
+of their heads and raise their eyebrows as if to say, "Yes, you're
+alive. But are you not crazy?"
+
+Still they would admit him, the only nonresident to walk between the
+Domed Cities of the Plains and enter all of them; the only man to pass
+unharmed through the camps of the Outsiders who lived in the open on
+the Plains at the heart of the North American Continent of Earth.
+
+And Old Arch would go to the residence buildings and he'd knock on
+someone's door--any door, chosen at random--and he'd say, "Have you
+seen the sky and do you know it's blue? Have you felt the soft kiss of
+the breezes? I can show you where to breathe fresh air."
+
+Maybe the people would say, "Phew! Does it smell like you, this fresh
+air?" and slam the door in his face.
+
+Or maybe they'd say, "Come on around to the back, Old Man, and we'll
+find you something to eat."
+
+Then Old Arch would shoulder his bed and pick up his billy can and his
+staff and walk down the stairs and go around to the back and walk up
+the stairs to the rear door.
+
+It might be an hour before he appeared there--it might be two. When he
+did, the people would ask, "Why didn't you say something? You should
+have known they wouldn't let you in the elevator! And twenty flights
+down and twenty flights up again is too much for a man of your years."
+
+Then, the next time he came they would do the same thing again.
+
+In the kitchen he would refuse all the pills and potions and shots, and
+insist on bulky foods. These he would eat neatly, holding aside the
+long white hair around his mouth and brushing the crumbs from it often.
+What he couldn't eat right away would go into his blackened billy can.
+
+The children would come before he finished--those of the household,
+and neighbor kids too. First they'd stand shyly and watch him from a
+doorway. Then they'd press closer. By the time he got through they'd
+be fighting to sit on his lap.
+
+The winner would climb up and sit there proudly. One of the losers,
+trying to prove he hadn't lost much, might wrinkle up his nose and say,
+"What's that awful stink, Old Man?"
+
+And Arch would answer mildly, "It's only wood smoke, son."
+
+Then the children would ask, "What's wood, please? And what's smoke?"
+
+And he would tell them.
+
+He would tell of the wind and the rain and the snow; of the cattalo
+herds that roamed to the west and the cities that lay to the east and
+the stars and the Moon that they never had seen. He would claim to have
+been in the endless forests and on the treeless plains and to have
+tasted the salt ocean and drunk of the freshwater lakes and rivers.
+
+The children would have heard, in their lessons and from their elders,
+enough to know what he was talking about. Sometimes they would tire of
+it, and ask him to tell of the distant planets and their far-off suns.
+But this he would not do.
+
+"You already hear too much about them," he'd say. "I want you to know
+Earth. Your own country. The one planet on which these plastic-covered
+cities are unnecessary, where you can actually go out and roll on the
+grass."
+
+Then the children might ask, "What's grass?"
+
+But their fathers would pointedly say, "What about the radioactivity,
+Old Man?"
+
+"I'm alive," he'd reply. "There's no radioactivity out there."
+
+But they'd say, "How can we be sure? There are individual differences
+of susceptibility. Probably you are unhurt by dosages that would kill
+any normal person."
+
+And the mothers would say, "Eat some more, Old Man. Eat--and go. Bring
+our babies dreams, if you like, but don't try to tempt them Outside.
+Even if it isn't radioactive there, you've admitted it gets hot and it
+gets cold and the wind blows fiercely hard. Our babies were born under
+shelter, and under shelter they must stay, like us and our parents
+before us."
+
+So Old Arch would brush off his whiskers one last time and maybe put on
+an old shirt the father dug up for him and then go out the back way. In
+spite of what might have been said, he would have to walk the twenty
+flights down to the ground because he wouldn't be invited to walk
+through the apartment to the front hall where the elevator was.
+
+Sometimes people were hostile when he spoke to their children, and they
+would have him arrested. He was then bathed and barbered in the jail,
+and was given all new clothes. But they'd always burn his bed, and he'd
+have trouble getting a new one. And sometimes a jailor might covet the
+pocketknife he carried, or take away his billy can. On the whole I
+think he preferred not to go to jail except perhaps in winter, when it
+was cold outside the City.
+
+There were always those ready to talk of asylums, and the need to
+put him away for his own good. But nobody was sure where his legal
+residence was, so he wasn't really eligible for public hospitalization.
+
+He kept to his rounds. My grandfather remembers standing in his
+mother's kitchen listening to Old Arch. It was like meeting one of
+Joseph's brethren and being told exactly what the coat looked like.
+Something exciting out of a dream from the remote past, when all the
+worlds had on them those bright moist diamonds Arch described as
+morning dew.
+
+My grandfather wanted to see the morning dew, though he knew better
+than to say so.
+
+Old Arch understood. He tried to make the thing possible. But an
+opportunity to see the morning dew was something he just couldn't give
+to my grandfather or anybody else.
+
+So he decided to sell it.
+
+He persuaded a charitable lithographer to make him a batch of stock
+certificates. They looked very authentic. Each said plainly it was good
+for one share of blue sky, though the fat half-draped woman portrayed
+in three colors stood outside a Domed City pointing not at the sky but
+at a distant river with forested hills behind it.
+
+Arch sold his certificates for a stiff price; ten dollars apiece. He
+could do it because by this time his wanderings followed a fairly
+definite route. The people who hated or feared or despised him
+were pretty well eliminated from it, and most of his calls were at
+apartments where he was known and expected and even respected a little.
+
+My grandfather's was one of these--or rather, my great-grandfather's.
+When Arch first brought his stock certificates my grandfather was a
+little fellow everybody called Ham, maybe seven years old. He had a
+sister named Annie who was five. He's given me a mental picture of the
+two of them standing close together for reassurance, and from an open
+doorway shyly watching the old man eat and listening to him talk.
+
+When my great-grandfather bought a ten dollar stock certificate in my
+grandfather's name, my grandfather took it as a promise. And his little
+sister Annie was so jealous that the next time Old Arch came around my
+great-grandfather had to buy a share for her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As they grew to be nine, ten, eleven, twelve, every winter when Old
+Arch would come around, my grandfather and his sister Annie would ask,
+"When are you going to take us to see the sky, Arch?" And he would say,
+"When you're older. When your folks say you can go." And, "When it's
+summer, and not too cold for these old bones."
+
+But when my grandfather was fourteen he followed Old Arch out and down
+the stairs after the old man had paid his annual call, and he stopped
+him on a landing to ask, "Arch, have you ever taken anyone Outside?"
+
+"No," Arch said, sighing. "People won't go."
+
+"I'll go," said my grandfather, "and so will my sister Annie."
+
+Arch looked at him and put a hand on him and said, "I don't want to
+come between any boy and his parents."
+
+"Well," said my grandfather, "you sold them a share of sky for each of
+us. Do you really want us to have that, or do you just want to talk
+about it?"
+
+"Of course I want you to. But I can't take you Outside, boy."
+
+My grandfather was disgusted. "There isn't any sky," he said sadly.
+"It's all talk. The certificates were just for begging."
+
+"No," said Arch. "It's not all talk and I'm not a beggar. I'm a guide.
+But it's hard to see the sky right now because it's winter, and there
+are clouds all over."
+
+"Let's see the clouds, then," my grandfather said stubbornly. "I've
+never seen a cloud."
+
+The old man sat down on the stairs to consider the matter.
+
+"I can't do this thing to your parents," he said at last.
+
+"But you can do it to me and my sister," my grandfather charged wildly.
+"You can come to the house year after year after year, and tell us
+about the sky and the wind and the moon and the dew and the grass and
+the sun. You can even take money for our share of them. But when it
+comes time to produce--when we're old enough to go where these things
+are supposed to be--you think of excuses.
+
+"I don't believe there are any such things," he shouted. "I think
+you're a liar. I think you ought to be arrested for gypping my dad on
+the stock deal, and I'm going to turn you in."
+
+"Don't do that, boy," Arch said mildly.
+
+"Then take us Outside--today!"
+
+"It's winter, my boy. We'd freeze."
+
+"You've said it's pretty in winter! You took the money for the
+certificate."
+
+"I suppose you'll grow away from your parents soon anyhow; I suppose
+you have to.... Get your warmest clothes and meet me at emergency exit
+four."
+
+My grandfather talked it over with his sister Annie and of course they
+didn't have any warm clothes, but they'd heard so often from Old Arch
+about the cold that they put on two sets of tights apiece, and two
+pairs of sox, and then they hunted for the emergency exit.
+
+They'd never been there before. They didn't know anyone who had. The
+signs pointing to it were all worn and defaced.
+
+And it was a long way to go. After a while Annie began to hang back.
+
+"How do we know the exit will work?" she asked. "And how will we get
+back in if we ever do get out?"
+
+"You don't have to come," my grandfather said. "But you'll have to find
+your own way home from here."
+
+"I'll bet I could," she said. "But I'm not going to. I don't think Old
+Arch will even be at the exit."
+
+But he was.
+
+He looked at them carefully to see how they were dressed. "You mean
+trouble for me, girl," he told Annie. "They'll think I took you along
+to make love to."
+
+She had just reached that betwixt and between stage where she was
+beginning to look like a woman but didn't yet think like one. "Pooh!"
+she said. "I can run faster and hit harder than you can, Arch. You
+don't worry me a bit."
+
+Old Arch sighed and led them through the lock. They stepped out into a
+raging snowstorm, which soon draped a cloak of invisibility over them.
+
+Neither my grandfather nor Annie had ever smelled fresh air before. It
+threatened to make them drunk. Their nostrils tingled and their eyes
+misted over and their breath steamed up like bathwater. For the first
+time in their lives, they shivered.
+
+When the City was out of sight in the storm, they stopped for a moment
+in the ankle-deep snow and just listened. They held their breaths and
+heard silence for the first time in their lives.
+
+Old Arch reached down and picked up some soft snow and threw it at
+them. They pelted him back, and then, because he was so old, attacked
+each other instead, shouting and throwing snowballs and running
+aimlessly.
+
+Old Arch soon checked them. "Don't get lost," he said. "We're walking
+down hill. Don't forget that. We're going into a draw where there are
+some trees."
+
+He coughed and drew his rags about him. "The city is up hill," he said.
+"If you keep walking around it you'll find a way in."
+
+His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him
+walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn't have enough
+clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grandfather.
+
+They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of
+anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City's Dome, except
+that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only
+about fifty yards off.
+
+"Where are the Outsiders?" my grandfather asked. "Aren't there people
+here?"
+
+"They're miles away," Arch told him. "And indoors. Only fools and
+youngsters are out in this blizzard."
+
+"Fools is right," Annie said tartly. "There was supposed to be sky. And
+there isn't."
+
+Old Arch staggered again. To my grandfather he said, "Could--could you
+carry my pack?"
+
+My grandfather took it and they went on, stumbling blindly through
+knee-deep drifts, getting more and more chilled and less and less
+comfortable, 'til they came to a small clump of trees with a solidly
+frozen creek running through it.
+
+Here Old Arch made a lean-to shelter of windfallen limbs. Annie and my
+grandfather helped as soon as they understood the design. Arch spread
+part of his bed over the lean-to, breaking the force of the wind, and
+put the rest inside. Just outside, on a place scraped bare of snow, he
+built the first wood fire my grandfather and Annie had ever seen.
+
+He chipped ice from the creek and put it in his billy can and hung the
+can by its bail over the fire, and in due course they had a little hot
+tea.
+
+The youngsters felt cold but happy. The old man shivered and coughed.
+
+He'd kept moving till the tea was made. He sat still to drink it, and
+couldn't get up.
+
+"Go to bed," Annie told him. "Ham will get on one side of you and I'll
+get on the other. We'll keep you warm."
+
+Old Arch tried to protest but was almost beyond speech. The youngsters
+didn't know enough to brush the snow off him or themselves. They helped
+him roll up in his bedding and crawled under the lean-to after him.
+There they all lay in a heap, getting colder and damper and more
+miserable, till finally my grandfather couldn't stand it any more.
+
+He got up and looked around. The inverted cup of visibility was
+smaller. Darkness fell like a dye-stuff, turning the white snow to
+gray, to black.
+
+It was a bitter night. The first he'd ever had outdoors. It was the
+first Annie'd ever had. The first either had ever spent at the futile
+task of holding off death.
+
+They knew Old Arch was dying. As the night wore on he sank into
+semi-consciousness. They hugged him and rubbed his lean old limbs.
+
+Just before morning the snow stopped. The old man roused a little,
+became gradually aware of his surroundings.
+
+"Go look at the sun," he murmured. "Go see the sunrise."
+
+They went out to look. Neither had ever seen a sunrise before. It was
+mauve first, then red, then gold, then blue. Venus led the way, and the
+sun followed. The moon, deep in the west, was like a tombstone to the
+dead night.
+
+A bird chirruped. A clot of snow fell from a tree with a soft ruffle of
+cottony drums.
+
+My grandfather held his sister's hand and looked and sniffed at the
+great Earth from which he'd been separated by the fear-inspired plastic
+over his City, so near, now, in the clear morning light. He climbed
+with Annie up the side of the draw and looked out over snow-covered
+plains stretching to a horizon farther away than the longest distance
+he'd ever imagined.
+
+He went back and took Old Arch's head up on his knees and said, "Is it
+like this every day?"
+
+And the old man said, "No, each day is different."
+
+And my grandfather said, "Well, I've seen one, anyhow."
+
+"That's what I've lived for," said Old Arch. And he smiled and stopped
+living.
+
+Annie and my grandfather left him there and went back to the City and
+told the guards and their family. A burial party was sent out; guards,
+in their helmeted spacesuits.
+
+People heard about it and followed. Everyone was curious because
+they'd all seen Old Arch and wondered about him.
+
+Hundreds of people went out the gate--so many, the guards couldn't stop
+them. They saw the lean-to and the open fire and the woods and the snow
+and the frozen creek. They smelled the air and the smoke. They heard a
+bird. They tossed snowballs.
+
+And then they went back and flung rocks through their City's Dome.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seller of the Sky, by Dave Dryfoos
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 58995 ***