18

Four of them were waiting for me on the pavement just beyond the barrier. A short distance down the road several cars were parked. A number of state troopers were scattered about in little groups. Half a mile or so to the north the steam shovel was still digging.

I felt foolish walking down the road toward them while they waited for me. I knew that I must look as if the wrath of God had hit me.

My shirt was torn and the left side of my face felt as though someone had sandpapered it. I had deep gashes on the knuckles of my right hand where I’d smacked Hiram in the teeth and my left eye felt as if it were starting to puff up.

Someone had cleared away the windrow of uprooted vegetation for several rods on either side of the road, but except for that, the windrow was still there.

As I got close, I recognized the senator. I had never met the man, but I’d seen his pictures in the papers. He was stocky and well-built and his hair was white and he never wore a hat. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit and he had a bright blue tie with white polka dots.

One of the others was a military man. He wore stars on his shoulders. Another was a little fellow with patent leather hair and a tight, cold face. The fourth man was somewhat undersized and chubby and had eyes of the brightest china blue I had ever seen.

I walked until I was three feet or so away from them and it was not until then that I felt the first slight pressure of the barrier. I backed up a step and looked at the senator.

‘You must be Senator Gibbs,’ I said. ‘I’m Bradshaw Carter. I’m the one Sherwood talked with you about.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr Carter,’ said the senator. ‘I had expected that Gerald would be with you.’

‘I wanted him to come,’ I said, ‘but he felt he shouldn’t. There was a conflict of opinion in the village. The mayor wanted to appoint a committee and Sherwood opposed it rather violently.’

The senator nodded. ‘I see,’ be said. ‘So you’re the only one we’ll see.’

‘If you want others…’

‘Oh, not at all,’ he said. ‘You are the man with the information.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘Excuse me,’ said the senator. ‘Mr Carter, General Walter Billings.’

‘Hello, General,’ I said.

It was funny, saying hello and not shaking hands.

‘Arthur Newcombe,’ said the senator.

The man with the tight, cold face smiled frostily at me. One could see at a glance he meant to stand no nonsense. He was, I guessed, more than a little outraged that such a thing as the barrier could have been allowed to happen.

‘Mr Newcombe,’ said the senator, ‘is from the State Department. And Dr Roger Davenport, a biologist - I might add, an outstanding one.’

‘Good morning, young man,’ said Davenport. ‘Would it be out of line to ask what happened to you?’

I grinned at him, liking the man at once. ‘I had a slight misunderstanding with a fellow townsman.’

‘The town, I would imagine,’ Billings said, ‘is considerably upset. In a little while law and order may become something of a problem.’

‘I am afraid so, sir,’ I said.

‘This may take some time?’ asked the senator.

‘A little time,’ I said.

‘There were chairs,’ the general said. ‘Sergeant, where are…?’

Even as he spoke a sergeant and two privates, who had been standing by the roadside, came forward with some folding chairs.

‘Catch,’ the sergeant said to me.

He tossed a chair through the barrier and I caught it. By the time I had it unfolded and set up, the four on the other side of the barrier had their chairs as well.

It was downright crazy - the five of us sitting there in the middle of the road on flimsy folding chairs.

‘Now,’ said the senator, ‘I suppose we should get started. General, how would you propose that we might proceed?

The general crossed his knees and settled down. He considered for a moment.

‘This man,’ he finally said, ‘has something we should hear. Why don’t we simply sit here and let him tell it to us?

‘Yes, by all means,’ said Newcombe. ‘Let’s hear what he has to say. I must say, Senator…’

‘Yes,’ the senator said, rather hastily. ‘I’ll stipulate that it is somewhat unusual. This is the first time I have ever attended a hearing out in the open, but…’

‘It was the only way,’ said the general, ‘that seemed feasible.’

‘It’s a longish story,’ I warned them. ‘And some of it may appear unbelievable.’

‘So is this,’ said the senator. ‘This, what do you call it, barrier.’

‘And,’ said Davenport, ‘you seem to be the only man who has any information.’

‘Therefore,’ said the senator, ‘let us proceed forthwith.’ So, for the second time, I told my story. I took my time and told it carefully, trying to cover everything I’d seen. They did not interrupt me. A couple of times I stopped to let them ask some questions, but the first time Davenport simply signalled that I should go on and the second time all four of them just waited until I did continue.

It was an unnerving business worse than being interrupted. I talked into a silence and I tried to read their faces, tried to get some clues as to how much of it they might be accepting.

But there was no sign from them, no faintest flicker of expression on their faces. I began to feel a little silly over what I was telling them.

I finished finally and leaned back in my chair.

Across the barrier, Newcombe stirred uneasily. ‘You’ll excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘if I take exception to this man’s story. I see no reason why we should have been dragged out here…’

The senator interrupted him. ‘Arthur,’ he said, ‘my good friend, Gerald Sherwood, vouched for Mr Carter. I have known Gerald Sherwood for more than thirty years and he is, I must tell you, a most perceptive man, a hard-headed businessman with a tinge of imagination. Hard as this account, or parts of it, may be to accept, I still believe we must accept it as a basis for discussion. And, I must remind you, this is the first sound evidence we have been offered.’

‘I,’ said the general, ‘find it hard to believe a word of it. But with the evidence of this barrier, which is wholly beyond any present understanding, we undoubtedly stand in a position where we must accept further evidence beyond our understanding.’

‘Let us,’ suggested Davenport, ‘pretend just for the moment that we believe it all. Let’s try to see if there may not be some basic…’

‘But you can’t!’ exploded Newcombe. ‘It flies in the face of everything we know.’

‘Mr Newcombe,’ said the biologist, ‘man has flown in the face of everything he knew time after time. He knew, not too many hundreds of years ago, that the Earth was the centre of the universe. He knew, less than thirty years ago, that man could never travel to the other planets. He knew, a hundred years ago, that the atom was indivisible. And what have we here - the knowledge that time never can be understood or manipulated, that it is impossible for a plant to be intelligent. I tell you, sir…’

‘Do you mean,’ the general asked, ‘that you accept all this?’

‘No,’ said Davenport, ‘I’ll accept none of it. To do so would be very unobjective. But I’ll hold judgement in abeyance. I would, quite frankly, jump at the chance to work on it, to make observations and perform experiments and…’

‘You may not have the time,’ I said.

The general swung toward me. ‘Was there a time limit set?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t mention it.’

‘No. But they have a way to prod us. They can exert some convincing pressure any time they wish. They can start this barrier to moving.’

‘How far can they move it?

‘Your guess is as good as mine. Ten miles. A hundred miles. A thousand. I have no idea.’

‘You sound as if you think they could push us off the Earth.’

‘I don’t know. I would rather think they could.’

‘Do you think they would?’

‘Maybe. If it became apparent that we were delaying. I don’t think they’d do it willingly. They need us. They need someone who can use their knowledge, who can make it meaningful. It doesn’t seem that, so far, they’ve found anyone who can.’

‘But we can’t hurry,’ the senator protested. ‘We will not be rushed. There is a lot to do. There must be discussions at a great many different levels - at the governmental level, at the international level, at the economic and scientific levels.’

‘Senator,’ I told him, ‘there is one thing no one seems to grasp. We are not dealing with another nation, nor with other humans. We are dealing with an alien people…’

‘That makes no difference,’ said the senator. ‘We must do it our way.’

‘That would be fine,’ I said, ‘if you can make the aliens understand.’

‘They’ll have to wait,’ said Newcombe, primly. And I knew that it was hopeless, that here was a problem which could not be solved, that the human race would bungle its first contact with an alien people. There would be talk and argument, discussion, consultation - but all on the human level, all from the human viewpoint, without a chance that anyone would even try to take into account the alien point of view.

‘You must consider,’ said the senator, ‘that they are the petitioners, they are the ones who made the first approach, they are asking access to our world, not we to theirs.’

‘Five hundred years ago,’ I said, ‘white men came to America. They were the petitioners then…’

‘But the Indians,’ said Newcombe, ‘were savages, barbarians…’

I nodded at him. ‘You make my point exactly.’

‘I do not,’ Newcombe told me frostily, ‘appreciate your sense of humour.’

‘You mistake me,’ I told him. ‘It was not said in humour.’

Davenport nodded. ‘You may have something there, Mr Carter. You say these plants pretend to have stored knowledge, the knowledge, you suspect, of many different races.’

‘That’s the impression I was given.’

‘Stored and correlated. Not just a jumble of data.’

‘Correlated, too,’ I said. ‘You must bear in mind that I cannot swear to this. I have no way of knowing it is true. But their spokesman, Tupper, assured me that they didn’t lie…’

‘I know,’ said Davenport. ‘There is some logic in that. They wouldn’t need to lie.’

‘Except,’ said the general, ‘that they never did give back your fifteen hundred dollars.’

‘No, they didn’t,’ I said.

‘After they said they would.’

‘Yes. They were emphatic on that point.’

‘Which means they lied. And they tricked you into bringing back what you thought was a time machine.’

‘And,’ Newcombe pointed out, ‘they were very smooth about it.’

‘I don’t think,’ said the general, ‘we can place a great deal of trust in them.’

‘But look here,’ protested Newcombe, ‘we’ve gotten around to talking as if we believed every word of it.’

‘Well,’ said the senator, ‘that was the idea, wasn’t it? That we’d use the information as a basis for discussion.’

‘For the moment,’ said the general, ‘we must presume the worst.’

Davenport chuckled. ‘What’s so bad about it? For the first time in its history, humanity may be about to meet another intelligence. If we go about it right, we may find it to our benefit.’

‘But you can’t know that,’ said the general.

‘No, of course we can’t. We haven’t sufficient data. We must make further contact.’

‘If they exist,’ said Newcombe. ‘If they exist,’ Davenport agreed.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the senator, ‘we are losing sight of something. A barrier does exist. It will let nothing living through it…’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Davenport. ‘There was the instance of the car. There would have been some microorganisms in it. There would have had to be. My guess is that the barrier is not against life as such, but against sentience, against awareness. A thing that has awareness of itself…’

‘Well, anyhow,’ said the senator, ‘we have evidence that something very strange has happened. We can’t just shut our eyes. We must work with what we have.’

‘All right, then,’ said the general, ‘let’s get down to business. Is it safe to assume that these things pose a threat?’

I nodded. ‘Perhaps. Under certain circumstances.’

‘And those circumstances?’

‘I don’t know. There is no way of knowing how they think.’

‘But there’s the potentiality of a threat?’

‘I think,’ said Davenport, ‘that we are placing too much stress upon the matter of a threat. We should first…’

‘My first responsibility,’ said the general, ‘is consideration of a potential danger…’

‘And if there were a danger?’

‘We could stop them,’ said the general, ‘if we moved fast enough. If we moved before they’d taken in too much territory. We have a way to stop them.’

‘All you military minds can think of,’ Davenport said angrily, ‘is the employment of force. I’ll agree with you that a thermonuclear explosion could kill all the alien life that has gained access to the Earth, possibly might even disrupt the time-phase barrier and close the Earth to our alien friends…’

‘Friends!’ the general wailed. ‘You can’t know…’

‘Of course I can’t,’ said Davenport. ‘And you can’t know that they are enemies. We need more data; we need to make a further contact…’

‘And while you’re getting your additional data, they’ll have the time to strengthen the barrier and move it…’

‘Some day,’ said Davenport, angrier than ever, ‘the human race will have to find a solution to its problems that does not involve the use of force. Now might be the time to start. You propose to bomb this village. Aside from the moral issue of destroying several hundred innocent people…’

‘You forget,’ ‘said the general, speaking gruffly, ‘that we’d be balancing those several hundred lives against the safety of all the people of the Earth. It would be no hasty action. It would be done only after some deliberation. It would have to be a considered decision.’

‘The very fact that you can consider it,’ said the biologist, ‘is enough to send a cold shiver down the spine of all humanity.’ The general shook his head. ‘It’s my duty to consider distasteful things like this. Even considering the moral issue involved, in the case of necessity I would…’

‘Gentlemen,’ the senator protested weakly.

The general looked at me. I am afraid they had forgotten I was there.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the general said to me. ‘I should not have spoken in this manner.’

I nodded dumbly. I couldn’t have said a word if I’d been paid a million dollars for it. I was all knotted up inside and I was afraid to move.

I had not been expecting anything like this, although now that it had come, I knew I should have been. I should have known what the world reaction would be and if I had failed to know, all I had to do would have been to remember what Stiffy Grant had told me as he lay on the kitchen floor.

They’ll want to use the bomb, he’d said. Don’t let them use the bomb…

Newcombe stared at me coldly. His eyes stabbed out at me.

‘I trust,’ he said, ‘that you’ll not repeat what you have heard.’

‘We have to trust you, boy,’ said the senator.’You hold us in your hands.’

I managed to laugh. I suppose that it came out as an ugly laugh. ‘Why should I say anything?’ I asked. ‘We’re sitting ducks. There would be no point in saying anything. We couldn’t get away.’

For a moment I thought wryly that perhaps the barrier would protect us even from a bomb Then I saw how wrong I was. The barrier concerned itself with nothing except life - or, if Davenport were right (and he probably was) only with a life that was aware of its own existence. They had tried to dynamite the barrier and it had been as if there had been no barrier. The barrier had offered no resistance to the explosion and therefore had not been affected by it.

From the general’s viewpoint, the bomb might be the answer. It would kill all life; it was an application of the conclusion Alf Peterson had arrived at on the question of how one killed a noxious plant that had great adaptability. A nuclear explosion might have no effect upon the time-phase mechanism, but it would kill all life and would so irradiate and poison the area that for a long, long time the aliens would be unable to re-occupy it.

‘I hope,’ I said to the general, ‘you’ll be as considerate as you’re asking me to be. If you find you have to do it, you’ll make no prior announcement.’

The general nodded, thin-lipped.

‘I’d hate to think,’ I said, ‘what would happen in this village…’

The senator broke in. ‘Don’t worry about it now. It’s just one of many alternatives. For the time we’ll not even consider it. Our friend, the general, spoke a little out of turn.’

‘At least,’ the general said, ‘I am being honest. I wasn’t pussy-footing. I wasn’t playing games.’

He seemed to be saying that the others were.

‘There is one thing you must realize,’ I told them. ‘This can’t be any cloak-and-dagger operation. You have to do it honestly - whatever you may do. There are certain minds the Flowers can read. There are minds, perhaps many minds; they are in contact with at this very moment. The owners of those minds don’t know it and there is no way we can know to whom those minds belong. Perhaps to one of you. There is an excellent chance the Flowers will know, at all times, exactly what is being planned.’

I could see that they had not thought of that. I had told them, of course, in the telling of my story, but it hadn’t registered. There was so much that it took a man a long time to get it straightened out.

‘Who are those people down there by the cars?’ asked Newcombe.

I turned and looked.

Half the village probably was there. They had come out to watch. And one couldn’t blame them, I told myself. They had a right to be concerned; they had the right to watch. This was their life. Perhaps a lot of them didn’t trust me, not after what Hiram and Tom had been saying about me, and here I was, out here, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road, talking with the men from Washington. Perhaps they felt shut out. Perhaps they felt they should be sitting in a meeting such as this.

I turned back to the four across the bather.

‘Here’s a thing,’ I told them, urgently, ‘that you can’t afford to mull. If we do, we’ll fail all the other chances as they come along…’

‘Chances?’ asked the senator.

‘This is our first chance to make contact with another race. It won’t be the last. When man goes into space…’

‘But we aren’t out in space,’ said Newcombe.

I knew then that there was no use. I’d expected too much of the men in my living-room and I’d expected too much of these men out here on the road.

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn’t change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we travelled.

Although, I thought, perhaps the human race was not alone in this. Perhaps this alien race we faced, perhaps any alien race, travelled a rut that was as deep and narrow as the human rut. Perhaps the aliens would be as arbitrary and as unbending and as blind as was the human race.

I made a gesture of resignation, but I doubt that they ever saw it. All of them were looking beyond me, staring down the road.

I twisted around and there, halfway up the road, halfway between the barrier and the traffic snarl, marched all those people who had been out there waiting. They came on silently and with great deliberation and determination. They looked like the march of doom, bearing down upon us.

‘What do they want, do you suppose?’ the senator asked, rather nervously.

George Walker, who ran the Red Owl butcher department, was in the forefront of the crowd, and walking just behind him was Butch Ormsby, the service station operator, and Charley Hutton of the Happy Hollow. Daniel Willoughby was there, too, looking somewhat uncomfortable, for Daniel wasn’t the kind of man who enjoyed being with a mob. Higgy wasn’t there and neither was Hiram, but Tom Preston was. I looked for Sherwood, thinking it unlikely that he would be there.

And I was right; he wasn’t. But there were a lot of others, people I knew. Their faces all wore a hard and determined look.

I stepped off to one side, clear of the road, and the crowd tramped past me, paying no attention.

‘Senator,’ said George Walker in a voice that was louder than seemed necessary. ‘You are the senator, ain’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘That,’ said Walker, ‘is what we’re here to find out. We are a delegation, sort of.’

‘I see,’ said the senator.

‘We got trouble,’ said George Walker, ‘and all of us are taxpayers and we got a right to get some help. I run the meat department at the Red Owl store and without no customers coming into town, I don’t know what will happen. If we can’t get any out-of-town trade, we’ll have to close our doors. We can sell to the people here in town, of course, but there ain’t enough trade in town to make it worth our while and in a little while the people here in town won’t have any money to pay for the things they buy, and our business isn’t set up so we can operate on credit. We can get meat, of course. We’ve got that all worked out, but we can’t go on selling it and…’

‘Now, just a minute,’ said the senator. ‘Let’s take this a little slow. Let’s not go so fast. You have problems and I know you have them and I aim to do all I can…’

‘Senator,’ interrupted a man with a big, bull voice, ‘there are others of us have problems that are worse than George’s. Take myself, for example. I work out of town and I depend on my pay cheque, every week, to buy food for the kids, to keep them in shoes and to pay the other bills. And now I can’t get to work and there won’t be any cheque. I’m not the only one. There are a lot of others like me. It isn’t like we had some money laid by to take care of emergencies. I tell you, Senator, there isn’t hardly anyone in town got anything laid by. We all are…’

‘Hold on,’ pleaded the senator. ‘Let me get a word in edgewise. Give me a little time. The people in Washington know what is going on. They know what you folks are facing out here. They’ll do what they can to help. There’ll be a relief bill in the Congress to help out you folks and I, for one, will work unceasingly to see that it is passed without undue delay. And that isn’t all. There are two or three papers in the east and some television stations that have started a drive for funds to be turned over to this village. And that’s just a start. There will be a lot of…’

‘Hell, Senator,’ yelled a man with a scratchy voice, ‘that isn’t what we want. We don’t want relief. We don’t ask for charity. We just want to be able to get back to our jobs.’

The senator was flabbergasted, ‘You mean you want us to get rid of the barrier?’

‘Look, Senator,’ said the man with the bull-like voice, ‘for years the government has been spending billions to send a man up to the moon. With all them scientists you got, you can spend some time and money to get us out of here. We been paying taxes for a long time now, without getting anything…’

‘But that,’ said the senator, ‘will take a little time. We’ll have to find out what this barrier is and then we’ll have to figure out what can be done with it. And I tell you, frankly, we aren’t going to be able to do that overnight.’

Norma Shepard, who worked as receptionist for Doc Fabian, wriggled through the press of people until she faced the Senator.

‘But something has to be done,’ she said. ‘Has to be done, do you understand? Someone has to find a way. There are people in this town who should be in a hospital and we can’t get them there. Some of them will die if we can’t get them there. We have one doctor in this town and he’s no longer young. He’s been a good doctor for a long, long time, but he hasn’t got the skill or the equipment to take care of the people who are terribly sick. He never has had, he never pretended that he had …’

‘My dear,’ said the senator, consolingly. ‘I recognize your concern and I sympathize with it, and you may rest assured…’

It was apparent that my interview with the men from Washington had come to an end. I walked slowly down the road, not actually down the road, but along the edge of it, walking in the harrowed ground out of which, already, thin points of green were beginning to protrude. The seeds which had been sown in that alien whirlwind had in that short time germinated and were pushing toward the light.

I wondered bitterly, as I walked along, what kind of crops they’d bear.

And A wondered, too, how angry Nancy might be at me for my fight with Hiram Martin. I had caught that one look on her face and then she’d turned her back and gone up the walk.

And she had not been with Sherwood when he had come charging down the walk to announce that Gibbs had phoned.

For that short moment in the kitchen, when I had felt her body pressing close to mine, she had been once again the sweetheart out of time - the girl who had walked hand in hand with me, who had laughed her throaty laugh and been an unquestioned part of me, as I had been of her.

Nancy, I almost cried aloud, Nancy, please let it be the same. But maybe it could never be the same, I told myself. Maybe it was Millville - a village that had come between us for she had grown away from Millville in the years she’d been away, and I, remaining here, had grown more deeply into it.

You could not dig back, I thought, through the dust of years, through the memories and the happenings and the changes in yourself-in both yourselves - to rescue out of time another day and hour. And even if you found it, you could not dust it clean, you could never make it shine as you remembered it. For perhaps it never had been quite the shining thing that you remembered, perhaps you had burnished it in your longing and your loneliness.

And perhaps it was only once in every lifetime (and perhaps not in every lifetime) that a shining moment came. Perhaps there was a rule that it could never come again.

‘Brad,’ a voice said.

I had been walking, not looking where I went, staring at the ground. Now, at the sound of the voice, I jerked up my head, and saw that I had reached the tangle of parked cars. Leaning against one of them was Bill Donovan.

‘Hi there, Bill,’ I said. ‘You should be up there with the rest of them.’

He made a gesture of disgust. ‘We need help,’ he said. ‘Sure we do. All the help we can get. But it wouldn’t hurt to wait a while before you ran squealing for it. You can’t cave in the first tune you are hit. You have to hang onto at least a shred or two of your self-respect.’

I nodded, not quite agreeing with him. ‘They’re scared,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but there isn’t any call for them to act like a bunch of bleating sheep.’

‘How about the kids?’ I asked.

‘Safe and sound,’ he told me. ‘Jake got to them just before the barrier moved. Took them out of there. Jake had to chop down the door to reach them and Myrt carried on all the time he was chopping it. You never heard so much uproar in your life about a God damn door.’

‘And Mrs Donovan?’

‘Oh, Liz - she’s all right. Cries for the kids and wonders what’s so become of us. But the kids are safe and that’s all that counts.’

He patted the metal of the car with the flat of his hand. ‘We’ll work it out,’ he said. ‘It may take a little time, but there isn’t anything that men can’t do if they set their minds to it. Like as not they’ll have a thousand of them scientists working on this thing and, like I say, it may take a while, but they’ll get her figured out.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose they will.’

If some muddle-headed general didn’t push the panic button first. If, instead of trying to solve the problem, we didn’t try to smash it.

‘What’s the matter, Brad?’

‘Not a thing,’ I said.

‘You got your worries, too, I guess,’ he said. ‘What you did to Hiram, he had it coming to him for a long time now. Was that telephone he threw…?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was one of the telephones.’

‘Heard you, went to some other world or something. How do you manage to get into another world? It sounds screwy to me, but that’s what everyone is saying.’

A couple of yelling kids came running through the cars and went pelting up the road toward where the crowd was still arguing with the senator.

‘Kids are having a great time,’ said Donovan. ‘Most excitement they’ve ever had. Better than a circus.’

Some more kids went past, whooping as they ran. ‘Say,’ asked Donovan, ‘do you think something might have happened?’

The first two kids had reached the crowd and were tugging at people’s arms and shouting something at them.

‘Looks like it,’ I said.

A few of the crowd started back down the road, walking to start with, then breaking into a trot, heading back for town.

As they came close, Donovan darted out to intercept them. ‘What’s the matter?’ he yelled. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Money,’ one of them shouted back at him. ‘Someone’s found some money.’

By now the whole crowd had left the barrier and was running down the road.

As they swept past, Mae Hutton shouted at me, ‘Come on, Brad! Money in your garden!’

Money in my garden! For the love of God, what next? I took one look at the four men from Washington, standing beyond the barrier. Perhaps they were thinking that the town was crazy. They had every right to think so.

I stepped out into the road and jogged along behind the crowd, heading back for town.