The Happy Clown

								


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                            The Happy Clown



                        BY ALICE ELEANOR JONES



              This was a century of peace, plethora and

              perfection, and little Steven was a misfit,

                a nonconformist, who hated perfection.

                   He had to learn the hard way....



           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

             Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.

         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Steven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first
five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely
unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable
child did not like perfection.
The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse
him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft
rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered,
were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but
though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face
wore an expression of pure distaste.
A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies,
and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the
jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly
Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He
turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his
mother to tears and his father to frightened anger.
The doctor said cheerily, "There's nothing the matter with him. He'll
eat when he gets hungry enough," and Steven did, to a degree, but not
as if he enjoyed it.
One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie
Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in
it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were
old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more
than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, "I couldn't give
them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!"
They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what
they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one
small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's
great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished
them and furtively put them back.
This year Steven cried, "Ma!" stretching out his hands toward the
silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly
clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head.
"No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old
things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart."
Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth