“Maybe you won’t be here for long,” I said, doing my best to make him feel a little better. “Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn’t, I imagine that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it’s not your…”
He made an insulting, disgusted noise. “Not that bunch,” he said. “Not that gang of chiselers.”
“It’s too soon to start worrying,” I told him. “We don’t know what has happened and until we do…”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Of course, I’m not the only one. I been talking to a lot of people and I’m not the only one. I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while ago and his wife is in the hospital over at—what’s the name of that town?”
“Elmore,” Nancy said.
“Yes, that was it. She’s in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his mind, afraid he can’t go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town. Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She’ll be expecting him, he says, and maybe she won’t understand why he doesn’t come. Talked as if a good part of the time she’s not in her right mind. And there was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone, and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they’ll be all tired out from traveling and now they can’t reach their home after they have traveled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home early in the afternoon. He’s planning to go out on the road and wait for them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are a lot of people who work out of town and now they can’t get to their jobs, and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get married tomorrow and now, of course, they can’t.”
“You must have talked to a lot of people,” I said.
“Hush,” said Nancy.
Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his arms to get the people quiet.
“Fellow citizens,” yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that makes you sick at heart. “Fellow citizens, if you’ll just be quiet.”
Someone yelled, “You tell ’em, Higgy!” There was a wave of laughter, but it was a nervous laugh.
“Friends,” said Higgy, “we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably have heard about it. I don’t know what you heard, for there are a lot of stories. I don’t know, myself, everything that’s happened.
“I’m sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it seemed the quickest way.”
“Ah, hell,” yelled someone. “Get on with it, Higgy.”
No one laughed this time.
“Well, all right,” said Higgy, “I’ll get on with it. I don’t know quite how to say this, but we’ve been cut off. There is some sort of fence around us that won’t let anybody in or anybody out. Don’t ask me what it is or how it got there. I have no idea. I don’t think, right now, that anybody knows. There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only temporary; it may go away.
“What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We’re all in this together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven’t got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can’t go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn’t stop things that are not alive.”
“Just a minute, mayor,” someone shouted.
“Yes,” the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt him.
“Was that you, Len?” he asked.
“Yes, it was,” said the man.
I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science teacher.
“What did you want?” asked Higgy.
“I suppose you’re basing that last statement of yours—about only non-living matter getting through the barrier—on the car that was parked on the Coon Valley road.”
“Why, yes,” said Higgy, condescendingly, “that is exactly what I was basing the statement on. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing,” Len Streeter told him. “Nothing about the car itself. But I presume you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon within well restricted bounds of logic.”
“That’s right,” said Higgy, sanctimoniously. “That’s exactly what we intend to do.”
And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
“In that case,” said Streeter, “I might caution you against accepting facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no human in the car, there was nothing living in it.”
“Well, there wasn’t,” Higgy argued. “The man who had been driving it had left and gone away somewhere.”
“Humans,” said Streeter, patiently, “aren’t the only forms of life. We can’t be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life, just the same as we are.”
Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn’t know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.
“You know, Higgy,” said a voice I recognized as Doc Fabian’s, “our young friend is right. Of course there would be micro-organisms. Some of the rest of us should have thought of it at once.”
“Well, all right, then,” said Higgy. “If you say so, Doc. Let’s say that Len is right. It don’t make any difference, does it?”
“At the moment, no,” said Doc.
“The only point I wanted to make,” said Streeter, “is that life can’t be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get a right start at it. We shouldn’t begin with a lot of misconceptions.”
“I got a question, mayor,” said someone else. I tried to see who it was, but couldn’t.
“Go ahead,” said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to break up this Streeter business.
“Well, it’s like this,” said the man. “I’ve been working on the highway job south of town. And now I can’t get to it and maybe they’ll hold the job for me for a day or two, but it isn’t reasonable to expect the contractor to hold it very long. He’s got a contract he has to meet—a time limit, you know, and he pays a penalty for every day he’s late. So he’s got to have men to do the job. He can’t hold no job open for more than a day or two.”
“I know all that,” said Higgy.
“I ain’t the only one,” said the man. “There are a lot of other fellows who work out of town. I don’t know about the rest of them, but I got to have my pay. I ain’t got any backlog I can fall back on. What’s going to happen to us if we can’t get to our jobs and there isn’t any pay check and no money in the bank?”
“I was coming to that,” said Higgy. “I know exactly what your situation is. And the situations of a lot of other men. There isn’t enough work in a little town like this for everyone who lives here, so a great many of our residents have work outside of town. And I know a lot of you haven’t too much money and that you need your pay checks. We hope this thing clears up soon enough that you can go back and
your jobs will still be there.
“But let me tell you this. Let me make a promise. If it doesn’t clear up, there aren’t any of you going to go hungry. There aren’t any of you who are going to be turned out of your homes because you can’t make your payments or can’t manage to scrape the rent together. There won’t nothing happen to you. A lot of people are going to be without jobs because of what has happened, but you’ll be taken care of, every one of you. I am going to name a committee that will talk with the merchants and the bank and we’ll arrange for a line of credit that will see you through. Anyone who needs a loan or credit can be sure of getting it.”
Higgy looked down at Daniel Willoughby, who was standing a step or two below him.
“Ain’t that right, Dan?” he demanded.
“Yes,” said the banker. “Yes. Sure, it’s quite all right. We’ll do everything we can.”
But he didn’t like it. You could see he didn’t. It hurt him to say it was all right. Daniel liked security, good security, for each dollar he put out.
“It’s too early yet,” said Higgy, “to know what has happened to us. By tonight maybe we’ll know a whole lot more about it. The main thing is to keep calm and not start going off half-cocked.
“I can’t pretend to know what is going to happen. If this barrier stays in place, there’ll be some difficulties. But as it stands right now, it’s not entirely bad. Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village that wasn’t too well known. There wasn’t, I suppose, much reason that we should have been well known. But now we’re getting publicity over the entire world. We’re in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. I’d like Joe Evans to come up here and tell you all about it.”
He looked around and spotted Joe in the crowd.
“You folks,” he said, “make way, won’t you, so Joe can come up here.”
The editor climbed the steps and turned around to face the crowd.
“There isn’t much to tell so far,” he said. “I’ve had calls from most of the wire services and from several newspapers. They all wanted to know what was going on. I told them what I could, but it wasn’t much. One of the TV stations over in Elmore is sending a mobile camera unit. The phone was still ringing when I left the house and I suppose there are calls coming into the office, too.
“I think we can expect that the news media will pay a lot of attention to the situation here and there’s no question in my mind that the state and federal governments will take a hand in it, and if I understand it rightly, more than likely the scientific community will have a considerable interest, as well.”
The man who had the highway job spoke up again. “Joe, you think them science fellows can get it figured out?”
“I don’t know,” said Joe.
Hiram Martin had pushed his way through the crowd and was crossing the street. He had a purposeful look about him and I wondered what he could be up to.
Someone else was asking a question, but the sight of Hiram had distracted me and I lost the gist of it.
“Brad,” said someone at my elbow.
I looked around.
Hiram was standing there. The trucker, I saw, had left.
“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”
“If you got the time,” said Hiram, “I’d like to talk with you.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “I have the time.”
He jerked his head toward the village hall.
“All right,” I said.
I opened the door and got out.
“I’ll wait for you,” said Nancy.
Hiram moved off around the crowd, flanking it, heading for the side door of the hall. I followed close behind him.
But I didn’t like it.
9
Hiram’s office was a little cubbyhole just off the stall where the fire engine and ladder rig were housed. There was barely room in it for two chairs and a desk. On the wall above the desk hung a large and garish calendar with a naked woman on it.
And on the desk stood one of the dialless telephones.
Hiram gestured at it. “What is that?” he asked.
“It’s a telephone,” I said. “Since when did you get so important that you have two phones?”
“Take another look,” he said.
“It’s still a telephone,” I said.
“A closer look,” he told me.
“It’s a crazy looking thing. It hasn’t any dial.”
“Anything else?”
“No, I guess not. It just doesn’t have a dial.”
“And,” said Hiram, “it has no connection cord.”
“I hadn’t noticed that.”
“That’s funny,” Hiram said.
“Why funny?” I demanded. “What the hell is going on? You didn’t get me in here just to show me a phone.”
“It’s funny,” Hiram said, “because it was in your office.”
“It couldn’t be. Ed Adler came in yesterday and took out my phone. For non-payment of my bill.”
“Sit down, Brad,” he said.
I sat down and he sat down facing me. His face was still pleasant enough, but there was that odd glitter in his eyes—the glitter that in the olden days I’d seen too often in his eyes when he’d cornered me and knew he had me cornered and was about to force me to fight him, in the course of which endeavor he would beat the living Jesus out of me.
“You never saw this phone?” he asked.
I shook my head. “When I left the office yesterday I had no telephone. Not this one or any other.”
“That’s strange,” he said.
“As strange to me as to you,” I told him. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. Suppose you try to tell me.”
I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he couldn’t tie me to the telephone.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw it. He’d sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might have made him sore.”
“Yes,” I said. “Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore.”
“He’d sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of was that you’d talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends.”
“I suppose he was so sore that he broke in and took it.”
“No,” said Hiram, “he never did break in. He went down to the bank and talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key.”
“Without considering,” I said, “that I was renting the office.”
“But you hadn’t paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me, I’d figure Daniel had the right.”
“In my book,” I told him, “Tom and Daniel broke into my place and robbed me.”
“I told you. They didn’t do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it. Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you’d never seen this phone, that you never owned it.”
“That’s beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn’t walk away with some other stuff?”
“You know damn well he didn’t,” Hiram told me. “You said you wanted to hear about this.”
“So go ahead and tell me.”
“Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away that it was a different kind of phone. It didn’t have a dial and it wasn’t connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached the door, the phone rang.”
“It what?”
“It rang.”
“But it wasn’t connected.”
“I know, but anyhow, it rang.”
“So he answered it,” I said, “and there was Santa Claus.”
“He answered it,” said Hiram, “and th
ere was Tupper Tyler.”
“Tupper! But Tupper…”
“Yeah, I know,” said Hiram. “Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so. But Tom said it was Tupper’s voice. He said he couldn’t be mistaken.”
“And what did Tupper tell him?”
“Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you’re not authorized to use it. Then the phone went dead.”
“Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you.”
“No, he wasn’t. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to get even with him.”
“But that’s crazy,” I protested. “Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?”
“I know,” said Hiram.
“You mean you believe all this?”
“You bet I believe it. There’s something wrong, something awfully wrong.”
But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn’t worked that way and now he was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while he’d start getting sore. He was that kind of jerk.
“When did Tom tell you all of this?”
“This morning.”
“Why not last night? If he thought it was so important…”
“But I told you. He didn’t think it was important. He thought it was a joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn’t think it was important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and heard Tupper’s voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the joke, you see. He thought you’d gone to a lot of work…”