20

No one answered the bell. I rang several times and waited, then finally tried the door and it was unlocked.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. The sound of its closing was muffled by the hushed solemnity of the hail that ran back to the kitchen.

‘Anyone home?’ I called.

Somewhere a lone fly buzzed desperately, as if trying to escape, trapped against a window perhaps, behind a fold of drape. The sun spilled through the fanlights above the door to make a ragged pattern on the floor.

There was no answer to my hail, so I went down the hall and walked into the study. The phone stood on the heavy desk. The walls of books still seemed rich and wondrous. A half. empty whisky bottle and an unwashed glass stood on the liquor cabinet.

I went across the carpeting to the desk and reached out, pulling the phone toward me.

I lifted the receiver and immediately Tupper said, in his businessman’s voice, ‘Mr Carter, it’s good to hear from you at last. Events are going well, we hope. You have made, we would presume, preliminary contact.’

As if they didn’t know!

‘That’s not what I called about,’ I snapped.

‘But that was the understanding. You were to act for us.’

The unctuous smugness of the voice burned me up.

‘And it was understood, as well,’ I asked, ‘that you were to make a fool of me?’

The voice was startled. ‘We fail to understand. Will you please explain?’

‘The time machine,’ I said.

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yes, oh, that,’ I said.

“But, Mr Carter, if we had asked you to take it back you would have been convinced that we were using you. You’d probably have refused.’

‘And you weren’t using me?’

‘Why, I suppose we were. We’d have used anyone. It was important to get that mechanism to your world. Once you know the pattern…’

‘I don’t care about the pattern,’ I said angrily. ‘You tricked me and you admit you tricked me. That’s a poor way to start negotiations with another race.’

‘We regret it greatly. Not that we did it, but the way we did it. If there is anything we can do…’

‘There’s a lot that you can do. You can cut out horsing around with fifty-dollar bills…’

‘But that’s repayment,’ wailed the voice. ‘We told you you’d get back your fifteen hundred. We promised you’d get back much more than your fifteen hundred…’

‘You’ve had your readers read economic texts?’

‘Oh, certainly we have.’

‘And you’ve observed, for a long time and at first hand, our economic practices?’

‘As best we can,’ the voice said. ‘It’s sometimes difficult.’

‘You know, of course, that money grows on bushes.’

‘No, we don’t know that, at all. We know how money’s made. But what is the difference? Money’s money, isn’t it, no matter what its source?’

‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ I said. ‘You’d better get wised up.’

‘You mean the money isn’t good?’

‘Not worth a damn,’ I said.

‘We hope we’ve done no wrong,’ the voice said, crestfallen. I said, ‘The money doesn’t matter. There are other things that do. You’ve shut us off from the world and we have sick people here. We had just one poor fumbling doctor to take care of them. And now the doctor’s sick himself and no other doctor can get in…’

‘You need a steward,’ said the voice.

‘What we need,’ I told them, ‘is to get this barrier lifted so we can get out and others can get in. Otherwise there are going to be people dying who don’t have to die.’

‘We’ll send a steward,’ said the voice. ‘We’ll send one right away. A most accomplished one. The best that we can find.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘about this steward. But we need help as fast as we can get it.’

‘We,’ the voice pledged, ‘will do the best we can.’

The voice clicked off and the phone went dead. And suddenly I realized that I’d not asked the most important thing of all - why had they wanted to get the time machine into our world?

I jiggled the connection. I put the receiver down and lifted it again. I shouted in the phone and nothing happened.

I pushed the phone away and stood hopeless in the room. For all of it, I knew, was a very hopeless mess.

Even after years of study, they did not understand us or our institutions. They did not know that money was symbolic and not simply scraps of paper. They had not, for a moment, taken into consideration what could happen to a village if it were isolated from the world.

They had tricked me and had used me and they should have known that nothing can arouse resentment quite so easily as simple trickery. They should have known, but they didn’t know, or if they knew, had discounted what they knew - and that was as bad or worse than if they had not known.

I opened the study door and went into the hall. And as I started down the hail, the front door opened and Nancy stepped inside.

I stopped at the foot of the stairway that rose out of the hall and for a moment we simply stood there, looking at one another, neither of us finding anything to say.

‘I came to use the phone,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘I should say I’m sorry for the fight with Hiram.’

‘I’m sorry, too,’ she said, misunderstanding me, or pretending that she misunderstood. ‘But I suppose there was no way you could help it.’

‘He threw the phone,’ I told her.

But of course it had not been the phone, not the phone alone. It had been all the times before the phone was thrown.

‘You said the other night,’ I reminded her, ‘that we could go out for drinks and dinner. I guess that will have to wait. Now there’s no place we can go.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘so we could start over.’

I nodded, feeling miserable.

‘I was to dress up my prettiest,’ she said, ‘and we would have been so gay.’

‘Like high school days,’ I said.

‘Brad.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and took a step toward her.

Suddenly she was in my arms.

‘We don’t need drinks and dinner,’ she said. ‘Not the two of us.’

No, I thought, not the two of us.

I bent and kissed her and held her close and there was only us. There was no closed-off village and no alien terror. There was nothing that mattered now except this girl who long ago had walked the street, hand in hand with me, and had not been ashamed.