“But enough of that,” the voice from the radio declared, in a lighter tone, now. “You’ll hear more about the man who saved us all; I’ll keep you posted, from time to time … old Walt isn’t going to forget. Meanwhile, let’s have a little music. What about a little authentic five-string banjo music, friends? Genuine authentic U.S. American old time folk music… ‘Out on Penny’s Farm,’ played by Pete Seeger, the greatest of the folk music men.”
There was a pause, and then, from the speaker, came the sound of a full symphony orchestra.
Thoughtfully, Bonny said, “Hoppy doesn’t have it down quite right. There’re a few circuits left he hasn’t got control of.”
The symphony orchestra abruptly ceased. Silence obtained again, and then something spilled out at the incorrect speed; it squeaked frantically and was chopped off. In spite of herself, Bonny smiled. At last, belatedly, there came the sound of the five-string banjo.
Hard times in the country,
Out on Penny’s farm.
It was a folksy tenor voice twanging away, along with the banjo. The people in the room sat listening, obeying out of long habit; the music emanated from the radio and for seven years they had depended on this; they had learned this and it had become a part of their physical bodies, this response. And yet—Bonny felt the shame and despair around her. No one in the room fully understood what had happened; she herself felt only a numbed confusion. They had Dangerfield back and yet they did not; they had the outer form, the appearance, but what was it really, in essence? It was some labored apparition, like a ghost; it was not alive, not viable. It went through the motions but it was empty and dead. It had a peculiar preserved quality, as if somehow the cold, the loneliness, had combined to form around the man in the satellite a new shell. A case which fitted over the living substance and snuffed it out.
The killing, the slow destruction of Dangerfield, Bonny thought, was deliberate, and it came—not from space, not from beyond—but from below, from the familiar landscape. Dangerfield had not died from the years of isolation; he had been stricken by careful instruments issuing up from the very world which he struggled to contact. If he could have cut himself off from us, she thought, he would be alive now. At the very moment he listened to us, received us, he was being killed—and did not guess.
He does not guess even now, she decided. It probably baffles him, if he is capable of perception at this point, capable of any form of awareness.
“This is terrible,” Gill was saying in a monotone.
“Terrible,” Bonny agreed, “but inevitable. He was too vulnerable up there. If Hoppy hadn’t done it someone else would have, one day.”
“What’ll we do?” Mr. Hardy said. “If you folks are so sure of this, we better—”
“Oh,” Bonny said, “we’re sure. There’s no doubt. You think we ought to form a delegation and call on Hoppy again? Ask him to stop? I wonder what he’d say.” I wonder, she thought, how near we would get to that familiar little house before we were demolished. Perhaps we are too close even now, right here in this room.
Not for the world, she thought, would I go any nearer. I think in fact I will move farther on; I will get Andrew Gill to go with me and if not him then Stuart, if not Stuart then someone. I will keep going; I will not stay in one place and maybe I will be safe from Hoppy. I don’t care about the others at this point, because I am too scared; I only care about myself.
“Andy,” she said to Gill, “listen. I want to go.”
“Out of Berkeley, you mean?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Down the coast to Los Angeles. I know we could make it; we’d get there and we’d be okay there, I know it.”
Gill said, “I can’t go, dear. I have to return to West Marin; I have my business—I can’t give it up.”
Appalled, she said, “You’d go back to West Marin?”
“Yes. Why not? We can’t give up just because Hoppy has done this. That’s not reasonable to ask of us. Even Hoppy isn’t asking that.”
“But he will,” she said. “He’ll ask everything, in time; I know it, I can foresee it.”
“Then we’ll wait,” Gill said. “Until then. Meanwhile, let’s do our jobs.” To Hardy and Stuart McConchie he said, “I’m going to turn in, because Christ—we have plenty to discuss tomorrow.” He rose to his feet. “Things may work themselves out. We mustn’t despair.” He whacked Stuart on the back. “Right?”
Stuart said, “I hid once in the sidewalk. Do I have to do that again?” He looked around at the rest of them, seeking an answer.
“Yes,” Bonny said.
“Then I will,” he said. “But I came up out of the sidewalk; I didn’t stay there. And I’ll come up again.” He, too, rose. “Gill, you can stay with me in my place. Bonny, you can stay with the Hardys.”
“Yes,” Ella Hardy said, stirring. “We have plenty of room for you, Mrs. Keller. Until we can find a more permanent arrangement.”
“Good,” Bonny said, automatically. “That’s swell.” She rubbed her eyes. A good night’s sleep, she thought. It would help. And then what? We will just have to see.
If, she thought, we are alive tomorrow.
To her, Gill said suddenly, “Bonny, do you find this hard to believe about Hoppy? Or do you find it easy? Do you know him that well? Do you understand him?”
“I think,” she said, “it’s very ambitious of him. But it’s what we should have expected. Now he has reached out farther than any of us; as he says, he’s now got long, long arms. He’s compensated beautifully. You have to admire him.”
“Yes,” Gill admitted. “I do. Very much.”
“If I only thought this would satisfy him,” she said, “I wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“The man I feel sorry for,” Gill said, “is Dangerfield. Having to lie there passively, sick as he is, and just listen.”
She nodded, but she refused to imagine it; she could not bear to.
Hurrying down the path in her robe and slippers, Edie Keller groped her way toward Hoppy Harrington’s house.
“Hurry,” Bill said, from within her. “He knows about us, they’re telling me; they say we’re in danger. If we can get close enough to him I can do an imitation of someone dead that’ll scare him, because he’s afraid of dead people. Mr. Blaine says that’s because to him the dead are like fathers, lots of fathers, and—”
“Be quiet,” Edie said. “Let me think.” In the darkness she had gotten mixed up. She could not find the path through the oak forest, now, and she halted, breathing deeply, trying to orient herself by the dull light of the partial moon overhead.
It’s to the right, she thought. Down the hill. I must not fall; he’d hear the noise, he can hear a long way, almost everything. Step by step she descended, holding her breath.
“I’ve got a good imitation ready,” Bill was mumbling; he would not be quiet. “It’s like this: when I get near him I switch with someone dead, and you won’t like that because it’s—sort of squishy, but it’s just for a few minutes and then they can talk to him direct, from inside you. Is that okay, because once he hears—”
“It’s okay,” she said, “just for a little while.”
“Well, then you know what they say? They say ‘We have been taught a terrible lesson for our folly. This is God’s way of making us see.’ And you know what that is? That’s the minister who used to make sermons when Hoppy was a baby and got carried on his Dad’s back to church. He’ll remember that, even though it was years and years ago. It was the most awful moment in his life; you know why? Because that minister, he was making everybody in the church look at Hoppy and that was wrong, and Hoppy’s father never went back after that. But that’s a lot of the reason why Hoppy is like he is today, because of that minister. So he’s really terrified of that minister, and when he hears his voice again—”
“Shut up,” Edie said desperately. They were now above Hoppy’s house; she saw the lights below. “Please, Bill, please.”
“But I have to explain to you,”
Bill went on. “When I—”
He stopped. Inside her there was nothing. She was empty.
“Bill,” she said.
He had gone.
Before her eyes, in the dull moonlight, something she had never seen before bobbed. It rose, jiggled, its long pale hair streaming behind it like a tail; it rose until it hung directly before her face. It had tiny, dead eyes and a gaping mouth, it was nothing but a little hard round head, like a baseball. From its mouth came a squeak, and then it fluttered upward once more, released. She watched it as it gained more and more height, rising above the trees in a swimming motion, ascending in the unfamiliar atmosphere which it had never known before.
“Bill,” she said, “he took you out of me. He put you outside.” And you are leaving, she realized; Hoppy is making you go. “Come back,” she said, but it didn’t matter because he could not live outside of her. She knew that. Doctor Stockstill had said that. He could not be born, and Hoppy had heard him and made him born, knowing that he would die.
You won’t get to do your imitation, she realized. I told you to be quiet and you wouldn’t. Straining, she saw—or thought she saw—the hard little object with the streamers of hair now above her … and then it disappeared, silently.
She was alone.
Why go on now? It was over. She turned, walked back up the hillside, her head lowered, eyes shut, feeling her way. Back to her house, her bed. Inside she felt raw; she felt the tearing loose. If you only could have been quiet, she thought. He would not have heard you. I told you, I told you so.
She plodded on back.
Floating in the atmosphere, Bill Keller saw a little, heard a little, felt the trees and the animals alive and moving among them. He felt the pressure at work on him, lifting him, but he remembered his imitation and he said it. His voice came out tiny in the cold air; then his ears picked it up and he exclaimed.
“We have been taught a terrible lesson for our folly,” he squeaked, and his voice echoed in his ears, delighting him.
The pressure on him let go; he bobbed up, swimming happily, and then he dove. Down and down he went and just before he touched the ground he went sideways until, guided by the living presence within, he hung suspended above Hoppy Harrington’s antenna and house.
“This is God’s way!” he shouted in his thin, tiny voice. “We can see that it is time to call a halt to high-altitude nuclear testing. I want all of you to write letters to President Johnson!” He did not know who President Johnson was. A living person, perhaps. He looked around for him but he did not see him; he saw oak forests of animals, he saw a bird with noiseless wings that drifted, huge-beaked, eyes staring. Bill squeaked in fright as the noiseless, brown-feathered bird glided his way.
The bird made a dreadful sound, of greed and the desire to rend.
“All of you,” Bill cried, fleeing through the dark, chill air. “You must write letters in protest!”
The glittering eyes of the bird followed behind him as he and it glided above the trees, in the dim moonlight.
The owl reached him. And crunched him in a single instant.
XVI
Once more he was within. He could no longer see or hear; it had been for a short time and now it was over.
The owl, hooting, flew on.
Bill Keller said to the owl, “Can you hear me?”
Maybe it could, maybe not; it was only an owl, it did not have any sense, as Edie had had. It was not the same. Can I live inside you? he asked it, hidden away in here where no one knows … you have your flights that you make, your passes. With him, in the owl, were the bodies of mice and a thing that stirred and scratched, big enough to keep on trying to live.
Lower, he told the owl. He saw, by means of the owl, the oaks; he saw clearly, as if everything were full of light. Millions of individual objects lay immobile and then he spied one that crept—it was alive and the owl turned that way. The creeping thing, suspecting nothing, hearing no sound, wandered on, out into the open.
An instant later it had been swallowed. The owl flew on.
Good, he thought. And, is there more? This goes on all night, again and again, and then there is bathing when it rains, and the long, deep sleeps. Are they the best part? They are.
He said, “Fergesson don’t allow his employees to drink; it’s against his religion, isn’t it?” And then he said “Hoppy, what’s the light from? Is it God? You know, like in the Bible. I mean, is it true?”
The owl hooted.
“Hoppy,” he said, from within the owl, “you said last time it was all dark. Is that right? No light at all?”
A thousand dead things within him yammered for attention. He listened, repeated, picked among them.
“You dirty little freak,” he said. “Now listen. Stay down here; we’re below street-level. You moronic jackass, stay where you are, you are, you are. I’ll go upstairs and get those. People. Down here you clear. Space. Space for them.”
Frightened, the owl flapped; it rose higher, trying to evade him. But he continued, sorting and picking and listening on.
“Stay down here,” he repeated. Again the lights of Hoppy’s house came into view; the owl had circled, returned to it, unable to get away. He made it stay where he wanted it. He brought it closer and closer in its passes to Hoppy. “You moronic jackass,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
The owl flew lower, hooting in its desire to leave. It was caught and it knew it. The owl hated him.
“The president must listen to our pleas,” he said, “before it is too late.”
With a furious effort the owl performed its regular technique; it coughed him up and he sank in the direction of the ground, trying to catch the currents of air. He crashed among humus and plant-growth; he rolled, giving little squeaks until finally he came to rest in a hollow.
Released, the owl soared off and disappeared.
“Let man’s compassion be witness to this,” he said as he lay in the hollow; he spoke in the minister’s voice from long ago. “It is ourselves who have done this; we see here the results of mankind’s own folly.”
Lacking the owl eyes he saw only vaguely; the illumination seemed to be gone and all that remained were several nearby shapes. They were trees.
He saw, too, the form of Hoppy’s house outlined against the dim night sky. It was not far off.
“Let me in,” Bill said, moving his mouth. He rolled about in the hollow; he thrashed until the leaves stirred. “I want to come in.”
An animal, hearing him, moved further off, warily.
“In, in, in,” Bill said. “I can’t stay out here long; I’ll die. Edie, where are you?” He did not feel her nearby; he felt only the presence of the phocomelus within the house.
As best he could, he rolled that way.
Early in the morning, Doctor Stockstill arrived at Hoppy Harrington’s tar-paper house to make his fourth attempt at treating Walt Dangerfield. The transmitter, he noticed, was on, and so were lights here and there; puzzled, he knocked on the door.
The door opened and there sat Hoppy Harrington in the center of his ’mobile. Hoppy regarded him in an odd, cautious, defensive fashion.
“I want to make another try,” Stockstill said, knowing how useless it was but wanting to go ahead anyhow. “Is it okay?”
“Yes sir,” Hoppy said. “It’s okay.”
“Is Dangerfield still alive?”
“Yes sir. I’d know if he was dead.” Hoppy wheeled aside to admit him. “He must still be up there.”
“What’s happened?” Stockstill said. “Have you been up all night?”
“Yes,” Hoppy said. “Learning to work things.” He wheeled the ’mobile about, frowning. “It’s hard,” he said, apparently preoccupied.
“I think that idea of carbon dioxide therapy was a mistake, now that I look back on it,” Stockstill said as he seated himself at the microphone. “This time I’m going to try some free association with him, if I can get him to.”
The phocomelus continued to wheel abo
ut; now the ’mobile bumped into the end of a table. “I hit that by mistake,” Hoppy said. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to.”
Stockstill said, “You seem different.”
“I’m the same; I’m Bill Keller,” the phocomelus said. “Not Hoppy Harrington.” With his right manual extensor he pointed. “There’s Hoppy. That’s him, from now on.”
In the corner lay a shriveled dough-like object several inches long; its mouth gaped in congealed emptiness. It had a human-like quality to it, and Stockstill went over to pick it up.
“That was me,” the phocomelus said. “But I got close enough last night to switch. He fought a lot, but he was afraid, so I won. I kept doing one imitation after another. The minister one got him.”
Stockstill, holding the wizened little homunculus, said nothing.
“Do you know how to work the transmitter?” the phocomelus asked, presently. “Because I don’t. I tried, but I can’t. I got the lights to work; they turn on and off. I practiced that all night.” To demonstrate, he rolled his ’mobile to the wall, where with his manual extensor he snapped the light switch up and down.
After a time Stockstill said, looking down at the dead, tiny form he held in his hand, “I knew it wouldn’t survive.”
“It did for a while,” the phocomelus said. “For around an hour; that’s pretty good, isn’t it? Part of that time it was in an owl; I don’t know if that counts.”
“I—better get to work trying to contact Dangerfield,” Stockstill said finally. “He may die any time.”
“Yes,” the phocomelus said, nodding. “Want me to take that?” He held out an extensor and Stockstill handed him the homunculus. “That owl ate me,” the phoce said. “I didn’t like that, but it sure had good eyes; I liked that part, using its eyes.”
“Yes,” Stockstill said reflexively. “Owls have tremendously good eyesight; that must have been quite an experience.” This, that he had held in his hand—it did not seem at all possible to him. And yet, it was not so strange; the phoce had moved Bill only a matter of a few inches—that had been enough. And what was that in comparison to what he had done to Doctor Bluthgeld? Evidently after that the phoce had lost track because Bill, free from his sister’s body, had mingled with first one substance and then another. And at last he had found the phoce and mingled with him, too; had, at the end, supplanted him in his own body.