LITTLE BOY

BY HARRY NEAL

There are times when the animal in Mankind savagely asserts itself. Even children become snarling little beasts. Fortunately, however, in childhood laughter is not buried deep.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He dropped over the stone wall and flattened to the ground. He looked warily about him like a young wolf, head down, eyes up. His name was Steven—but he'd forgotten that. His face was a sunburned, bitter, filthy eleven-year-old face—tight lips, lean cheeks, sharp blue eyes with startlingly clear whites. His clothes were rags—a pair of corduroy trousers without any knees; a man's white shirt, far too big for him, full of holes, stained, reeking with sweat; a pair of dirty brown sneakers.

He lay, knife in hand, and waited to see if anyone had seen him coming over the wall or heard his almost soundless landing on the weedgrown dirt.

Above and behind him was the grey stone wall that ran along Central Park West all the way from Columbus Circle to the edge of Harlem. He had jumped over just north of 72nd Street. Here the park was considerably below street level—the wall was about three feet high on the sidewalk side and about nine feet high on the park side. From where he lay at the foot of the wall only the jagged, leaning tops of the shattered apartment buildings across the street were visible. Like the teeth of a skull's smile they caught the late afternoon sunlight that drifted across the park.

For five minutes Steven had knelt motionless on one of the cement benches on the other side of the wall, just the top of his head and his eyes protruding over the top. He had seen no one moving in the park. Every few seconds he had looked up and down the street behind him to make sure that no one was sneaking up on him that way. Once he had seen a man dart out halfway across the street, then wheel and vanish back into the rubble where one whole side of an apartment house had collapsed into 68th Street.

Steven knew the reason for that. A dozen blocks down the street, from around Columbus Circle, had come the distant hollow racket of a pack of dogs.

Then he had jumped over the wall—partly because the dogs might head this way, partly because 

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