“Mr. Mayor,” piped up Daniel Willoughby, “there is one thing I think we’ve overlooked. No matter what we say, this stuff isn’t money.”
“But it looks like money. Once it’s grown to proper size, no one could tell the difference.”
“I know,” the banker said, “that it looks like money. It probably would fool an awful lot of people. Maybe everyone. Maybe no one could ever tell that it wasn’t money. But if the source of it should be learned, how much value do you think it would have then? Not only that, but all the money in this village would be suspect. If we can grow fifty-dollar bills, what is there to stop us from growing tens and twenties?”
“I don’t see what this fuss is all about,” shouted Charley Hutton. “There isn’t any need for anyone to know. We can keep quiet about it. We can keep the secret. We can pledge ourselves that we’ll never say a word about it.”
The crowd murmured with approval. Daniel Willoughby looked as if he were on the verge of strangling. The thought of all that phony money shrivelled up his prissy soul.
“That’s something,” said the mayor, blandly, “that my committee can decide.”
The way the mayor said it one knew there was no doubt at all in his mind as to how the committee would decide.
“Higgy,” said lawyer Nichols, “there’s another thing we’ve overlooked. The money isn’t ours.”
The mayor stared at him, outraged that anyone could say a thing like that.
“Whose is it, then?” he bellowed.
“Why,” said Nichols, “it belongs to Brad. It’s growing on his land and it belongs to him. There is no court anywhere that wouldn’t make the finding.”
All the people froze. All their eyes swiveled in on me. I felt like a crouching rabbit, with the barrels of a hundred shotguns leveled at him.
The mayor gulped. “You’re sure of this?” he asked.
“Positive,” said Nichols.
The silence held and the eyes were still trained upon me.
I looked around and the eyes stared back. No one said a word.
The poor, misguided, blinded fools, I thought. All they saw here was money in their pockets, wealth such as not a single one of them had ever dared to dream. They could not see in it the threat (or promise?) of an alien race pressed close against the door, demanding entrance. And they could not know that because of this alien race, blinding death might blossom in a terrible surge of unleashed energy above the dome that enclosed the town.
“Mayor,” I said, “I don’t want the stuff.”
“Well, now,” the mayor said, “that’s a handsome gesture, Brad. I’m sure the folks appreciate it.”
“They damn well should,” said Nichols.
A woman’s scream rang out—and then another scream. It seemed to come from behind me and I spun around.
A woman was running down the slope that led to Doc Fabian’s house—although running wasn’t quite the word for it. She was trying to run when she was able to do little more than hobble. Her body was twisted with the terrible effort of her running and she had her arms stretched out so they would catch her if she fell—and when she took another step, she fell and rolled and finally ended up a huddled shape lying on the hillside.
“Myra!” Nichols yelled. “My God, Myra, what’s wrong?”
It was Mrs. Fabian, and she lay there on the hillside with the whiteness of her hair shining in the sunlight, a startling patch of brilliance against the green sweep of the lawn. She was a little thing and frail and for years had been half-crippled by arthritis, and now she seemed so small and fragile, crumpled on the grass, that it hurt to look at her.
I ran toward her and all the others were running toward her, too.
Bill Donovan was the first to reach her and he went down on his knees to lift her up and hold her.
“Everything’s all right,” he told her. “See—everything’s all right. All your friends are here.”
Her eyes were open and she seemed to be all right, but she lay there in the cradle of Bill’s arms and she didn’t try to move. Her hair had fallen down across her face and Bill brushed it back, gently, with a big, grimed, awkward hand.
“It’s the doctor,” she told us. “He’s gone into a coma…”
“But,” protested Higgy, “he was all right an hour ago. I saw him just an hour ago.”
She waited until he’d finished, then she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “He’s in a coma and I can’t wake him up. He lay down for a nap and now he won’t wake up.”
Donovan stood up, lifting her, holding her like a child. She was so little and he was so big that she had the appearance of a doll, a doll with a sweet and wrinkled face.
“He needs help,” she said. “He’s helped you all his life. Now he needs some help.”
Norma Shepard touched Bill on the arm. “Take her up to the house,” she said. “I’ll take care of her.”
“But my husband,” Mrs. Fabian insisted. “You’ll get some help for him? You’ll find some way to help him?”
“Yes, Myra,” Higgy said. “Yes, of course we will. We can’t let him down. He’s done too much for us. We’ll find a way to help him.”
Donovan started up the hill, carrying Mrs. Fabian. Norma ran ahead of him.
Butch Ormsby said, “Some of us ought to go, too, and see what we can do for Doc.”
“Well,” asked Charley Button, “how about it, Higgy? You were the one who shot off his big fat face. How are you going to help him?”
“Somebody’s got to help him,” declared Pappy Andrews, thumping his cane upon the ground by way of emphasis. “There never was a time we needed Doc more than we need him now. There are sick people in this village and we’ve got to get him on his feet somehow.”
“We can do what we can,” said Streeter, “to make him comfortable. We’ll take care of him, of course, the best that we know how. But there isn’t anyone who has any medical knowledge…”
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Higgy. “Someone can get in touch with some medical people and tell them what’s happened. We can describe the symptoms and maybe they can diagnose the illness and then tell us what to do. Norma is a nurse—well, sort of, she’s been helping out in Doc’s office for the last four years or so—and she’d be some help to us.”
“I suppose it’s the best we can do,” said Streeter, “but it’s not very good.”
“I tell you, men,” said Pappy, loudly, “we can’t stay standing here. The situation calls for action and it behooves us to get started.”
What Streeter had said, I told myself, was right. Maybe it was the best that we could do, but it wasn’t good enough. There was more to medicine than word-of-mouth advice or telephoned instructions. And there were others in the village in need of medical aid, more specialized aid than a stricken doctor—even if he could be gotten on his feet—was equipped to give them.
Maybe, I thought, there was someone else who could help—and if they could, they’d better, or I’d go back somehow into that other world and start ripping up their roots.
It was time, I told myself, that this other world was getting on the ball. The Flowers had put us in this situation and it was time they dug us out. If they were intent on proving what great tasks they could perform, there were more important ways of proving it than growing fifty-dollar bills on bushes and all their other hocus-pocus.
There were phones down at the village hall, the ones that had been taken from Stiffy’s shack, and I could use one of those, of course, but I’d probably have to break Hiram’s skull before I could get at one of them. And another round with Hiram, I decided, was something I could get along without.
I looked around for Sherwood, but he wasn’t there, and neither was Nancy. One of them might be home and they’d let me use the phone in Sherwood’s study.
A lot of the others were heading up toward Doc’s house, but I turned and went the other way.
20
No one answered the bell. I rang several times and waited, then fin
ally 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 hall 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 whiskey 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 hall, 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.
21
The steward came that afternoon, a little, wizened humanoid who looked like a bright-eyed monkey. With him was another—also humanoid—but great, lumbering and awkward, gaunt and austere, with a horse-like face. He looked, at first sight, the perfect caricature of a career diplomat. The scrawny humanoid wore a dirty and shapeless piece of cloth draped about him like a robe, and the other wore a breech-clout and a sort of vest, equipped with massive pockets that bulged with small possessions.
The entire village was lined up on the slope behind my house and the betting had been heavy that nothing would show up. I heard whispers, suddenly cut off, everywhere I went.
Then they came, the two of them, popping out of nowhere and standing in the garden.
I walked down the slope and across the garden to meet them. They stood waiting for me and behind me, on that slope covered by a crowd of people, there was utter silence.
As I came near, the big one stepped forward, the little wizened character trailing close behind.
“I speak your language newly,” said the big one. “If you don’t know, ask me once again.”
“You’re doing well,” I told him.
“You be Mr. Carter?”
“That is right. And you?”
“My designation,” he told me, solemnly, “is to you great gibberish. I have decided you can call me only Mr. Smith.”
“Mr.
Smith,” I said, “we are glad to have you here. You are the steward I was told about?”
“No. This other personage is he. But he has no designation I can speak to you. He makes no noise at all. He hears and answers only in his brain. He is a queerish thing.”
“A telepath,” I said.
“Oh, yes, but do not mistake me. Of much intelligence. Also very smart. We are of different worlds, you know. There be many different worlds, many different peoples. We welcome you to us.”
“They sent you along as an interpreter?”
“Interpreter? I do not snare your meaning. I learn your words very fast from a mechanism. I do not have much time. I fail to catch them all.”
“Interpreter means you speak for him. He tells you and you tell us.”
“Yes, indeed. Also you tell me and I tell him. But interpreter is not all I am. Also diplomat, very highly trained.”
“Huh?”
“Help with negotiations with your race. Be helpful as I can. Explain very much, perhaps. Aid you as you need.”
“You said there are many different worlds and many different people. You mean a long, long chain of worlds and of people, too?”
“Not all worlds have people,” he told me. “Some have nothing. No life of any sort. Some hold life, but no intelligence. Some once had intelligence, but intelligence is gone.” He made a strange gesture with his hand. “It is pity what can happen to intelligence. It is frail; it does not stay forever.”
“And the intelligences? All humanoid?”
He hesitated. “Humanoid?”
“Like us. Two arms, two legs, one head…”
“Most humanoid,” he said. “Most like you and me.”
The scrawny little being tugged excitedly at his vest. The being I had been talking with turned around to face him, gave him close attention.
Then he turned back to me. “Him much upset,” he told me. “Says all people here are sick. Him prostrated with great pity. Never saw such terrible thing.”
“But that is wrong,” I cried. “The sick ones are at home. This bunch here is healthy.”
“Can’t be so,” said Mr. Smith. “Him aghast at situation. Can look inside of people, see everything that’s wrong. Says them that isn’t sick will be sick in little time, says many have inactive sickness in them, others still have garbage of ancient sicknesses still inside of them.”
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