The Project Gutenberg EBook of Native Son, by T. D. Hamm

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Title: Native Son

Author: T. D. Hamm

Release Date: September 17, 2009 [EBook #30014]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

NATIVE SON

_By
T. D. Hamm_

Tommy hated Earth, knowing his mother
might go home to Mars without him. Worse,
would a robot secretly take her place?...

Tommy Benton, on his first visit to Earth, found the long-anticipated
wonders of twenty-first-century New York thrilling the first week,
boring and unhappy the second week, and at the end of the third he was
definitely ready to go home.

The never-ending racket of traffic was torture to his abnormally acute
ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and
stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly
against the heavy gravity that made all his movements clumsy and
uncoordinated.

The endless canyons of towering buildings, with their connecting
Skywalks, oppressed and smothered him. Remembering the endless vistas of
_rabbara_ fields beside a canal that was like an inland sea,
homesickness flooded over him.

He hated the people who stared at him with either open or hidden
amusement. His Aunt Bee, for instance, who looked him up and down with
frank disapproval and said loudly, "For Heavens sake, Helen! Take him to
a _good_ tailor and get those bones covered up!"

Was it his fault he was six inches taller than Terran boys his age, and
had long, thin arms and legs? Or that his chest was abnormally developed
to compensate for an oxygen-thin atmosphere? I'd like to see _her_, he
thought fiercely, out on the Flatlands; she'd be gasping like a
canal-fish out of water.

Even his parents, happily riding the social merry-go-round of Terra,
after eleven years in the Martian flatlands, didn't seem to understand
how he felt.

"Don't you _like_ Earth, Tommy?" queried his mother anxiously.

"Oh ... it's all righ