He wondered how it would look if it were long, long enough to flow over his shoulders. Then he pictured what his father would say. Or scream.
There was some dark brown fuzz on his chin, so Ron rubbed in a palmful of shaving powder and rinsed it all off. Now even his mother would agree that he looked clean and sanitary.
Pulling on a t-shirt and shorts, Ron noticed how quiet the house was. The alarm stereo had shut off, of course, as soon as he’d gotten up from the bed. It’s early, he told himself. His mother stayed in bed most of the time; doctor’s orders, she said. Dad didn’t have to leave for his office for another hour. Ron slid his feet into his plastic sandals and went downstairs.
His father was already in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast counter with a cup of steaming coffee in front of him, watching the morning news on the wall TV.
“You’re up early,” said Ron’s father. “Nervous?”
Nodding, Ron answered, “Guess so.”
Mr. Morgan was nearly fifty years old. His hair was gray and thin, with a bald spot showing no matter how he combed it. Ron had seen photos of his father when he had been much younger—he had been tall and trim and he was grinning happily in those pictures. Now he was heavy, almost fat. And he seldom smiled.
Someday I’ll be just like him, Ron thought. Rich and overweight and old. Unless . . .
The wall TV showed a handful of soldiers walking slowly, painfully, through some jungle growth. They looked all worn out: shoulders sagging, mouths hanging open, shirts dark with sweat, eyes red and puffy. One of them had a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his middle. His arms were draped over the shoulders of two buddies, who were half carrying, half dragging him along. All but two of the soldiers on the screen were black. The only black people Ron had ever seen were on TV.
The TV newscaster was saying: “. . . and only sixteen Americans were lost in this skirmish near the Amazon River delta. Fifty-four enemy dead were counted and verified, and . . .”
He sounded so damned cheerful! Ron stared at the soldiers. He knew they were his own age, or maybe a year older, at most. But they looked like old men—old, old men who had seen death so often and so close that nothing else mattered to them.
The TV picture suddenly snapped off. Ron felt himself jerk back a little in surprise. His father had turned it off.
“You don’t have to worry about things like that,” his father said.
Ron looked at him. “If I didn’t do well in the Exams—”
“You won’t be drafted, don’t worry,” Mr. Morgan insisted. “Even if you flunked the Exams, I can buy your way out of the draft. The draft’s not for kids like you, anyway. It’s for those poor slobs—those bums who couldn’t hold down a decent job even if you handed it to them on a platinum platter.”
“But—”
“Don’t worry about it, I’m telling you.” The older man’s voice went up a notch, which meant he wasn’t going to listen to anything Ron had to say on the subject.
“Okay, sure.” For a moment Ron stared at the now-dead TV screen. He could still see the young-old soldiers.
Then he went around the breakfast counter and pulled a package from the freezer. The cold metal foil made his fingers tingle. He put the package in the microwave cooker and thirty seconds later out slid the package, sizzling hot. Ron grabbed it and put it in front of his father quickly, before the heat could get to his fingers.
Mr. Morgan peeled back the metal foil to reveal steaming eggs, pancakes, and sausages. He looked up at his son. “Where’s yours?”
“I’m not hungry,” Ron said.
His father huffed. “You ought to eat something. Get me some juice, will you? At least have a glass of milk. You shouldn’t start the day on an empty stomach.”
Ron got the juice and the milk. He drank half a glass of ice-cold milk and watched his father eating. But he kept glancing at the clock on the wall, next to the TV screen. The call will come at nine o’clock, he knew. They always call at nine sharp.
An hour and a half to go, and the seconds-counter on the digital clock was crawling like a wounded soldier dragging himself through jungle mud.
“I . . . I’m going out to the garage,” Ron said.
His father stared at him a moment, then said, “All right. I’ll call you when the Examiner phones.”
“You’re not going to work today?”
With a tight smile, Ron’s father said, “I’ll wait until the Examiner calls.”
Ron nodded and headed for the back door.
It was cool and pleasant outside. The night’s rain had washed the sky a clean and cloudless blue.
The garage was really more of a workshop than anything else. The family electric car always stayed out on the driveway where the neighbors could see how big and new it was. It took so much electrical power to run it that Mr. Morgan had to keep it plugged in to the garage’s special power-charger all night. Once he had backed out of the driveway without disconnecting the cable. It snapped across the windshield like a whip, crazing it into a million spiderwebs of cracks. Mr. Morgan spent an hour hopping up and down on the driveway next to his car, screaming at everybody about everything except his own forgetfulness.
Ron had fixed the cable and the plug. He had also wanted to try to put in the new windshield, but his father wouldn’t let him. Mr. Morgan took the car to a repair shop, where they charged him six times what Ron thought the job was worth. But Ron did change the socket in the car, so that it would automatically disengage and release the cable when the car began to move.
“That’s pretty good, son,” Mr. Morgan had said, with genuine astonishment in his voice.
So Ron clanked around in the garage workshop for more than an hour. He deliberately avoided looking at his wristwatch. Instead, he worked on the electronic image booster that he was building for his telescope. It would allow the instrument to pick out stars that were far too faint for an unboosted telescope to register. With this electronics package, Ron’s telescope would be almost the equal of the big reflector in the school’s observatory.
“Ron!” His father’s voice.
He suddenly felt hot and cold at the same time. His guts seemed to go rigid, and he could hear the blood pounding in his ears. Stiffly, Ron walked back to the house. Through the back door into the kitchen, across the dining area, and into the family room.
His father was sitting on the big plastic sofa. The full-wall TV screen was connected to the phone, so the Examiner’s face looked out at them, huge and frightening.
But he was smiling. The Examiner had a thin face, with absolutely white hair that was cropped so close to his slightly square skull that it looked like baby fuzz. But his face wasn’t a baby’s. It was lined and lean and leathery.
But he was smiling!
“Ahh . . . and this is our young man,” said the Examiner.
