“Why, you…” I said. I jumped to my feet and I would have slugged him, but Joe came fast around the desk and grabbed hold of me and pushed me back.
“Cut it out!” he said, exasperated. “We got trouble enough without you two tangling.”
“If the bombing rumor does get out,” said Higgy, viciously, “I wouldn’t give a nickel for your life. You’re too mixed up in it. Folks will begin to wonder…”
Joe grabbed hold of Higgy and shoved him against the wall. “Shut your mouth,” he said, “or I’ll shut it for you.” He balled up a fist and showed it to Higgy and Higgy shut his mouth.
“And now,” I said to Joe, “since you’ve restored law and order and everything is peaceable and smooth, you won’t be needing me. I’ll run along.”
“Brad,” said Joe, between his teeth, “just a minute, there…”
But I went out and slammed the door behind me.
Outside, the dusk had deepened and the street was empty. Light still burned in the village hall, but the few loungers at the door were gone.
Maybe, I told myself, I should have stayed. If for no other reason than to help Joe keep Higgy from making some fool move.
But there had, it seemed to me, been no point in staying. Even if I had something to offer (which I didn’t), it would have been suspect. For by now, apparently, I was fairly well discredited. More than likely Hiram and Tom Preston had been busy all afternoon lining people up in the Hate Bradshaw Carter movement.
I turned off Main Street and headed back toward home. All along the street lay a sense of peacefulness. Shadows flickered on the lawns quartering the intersections as a light summer breeze set the street lamps, hung on their arms, to swaying. Windows were open against the heat and to catch the breeze and soft lights shone within the houses, while from the open windows came snatches of muttering from the TV or radio.
Peaceful, and yet I knew that beneath that quiet exterior lay the fear and hate and terror that could turn the village into a howling bedlam at a single word or an unexpected action.
There was resentment here, a smouldering resentment that one little group of people should be penned like cattle while all the others in the world were free. And a feeling of rebellion against the cosmic unfairness that we, of all the people in the world, should have been picked for penning. Perhaps, as well, a strange unquiet at being stared at by the world and talked of by the world, as if we were something monstrous and unkempt. And perhaps the shameful fear that the world might think we had brought all this on ourselves through some moral or mental relapse.
Thrown into this sort of situation, it was only natural that the people of the village should be avid to grasp at any sort of interpretation that might clear their names and set them right, not only with themselves, but with the aliens and the world; that they should be willing to believe anything at all (the worst or best), to embrace all rumors, to wallow in outlandish speculation, to attempt to paint the entire picture in contrasting black and white (even when they knew that all of it was gray), because in this direction of blackness and of whiteness lay the desired simplicity that served an easier understanding and a comfortable acceptance.
They could not be blamed, I told myself. They were not equipped to take a thing like this in stride. For years they had lived unspectacularly in a tiny backwash off the mainstream of the world. The small events of village life were their great events, the landmarks of their living—that time the crazy Johnson kid had rammed his beat-up jalopy into the tree on Elm Street, the day the fire department had been called to rescue Grandma Jones’ cat, marooned on the roof of the Presbyterian parsonage (and to this day no one could figure out how the cat had got there), the afternoon Pappy Andrews had fallen asleep while fishing on the river bank, and had tumbled down into the stream, to be hauled out, now thoroughly awakened, but with water in his lungs, spewing and gasping, by Len Streeter (and the speculation as to why Len Streeter should have been walking along the river bank). Of such things had their lives been made, the thin grist of excitement.
But now they faced a bigger thing, something they could not comprehend, a happening and a situation that was, for the moment, too big for the world to comprehend. And because they could not reduce this situation to the simple formula of aimless wonder that could be accorded a cat that had somehow attained the parsonage roof, they were uneasy and upset and their tempers were on edge, ready to flare into an antagonistic attitude, and very probably into violence—if they could find something or someone against which such a violence could be aimed. And now I knew that Tom Preston and Hiram Martin had provided them with a target for their violence—if and when the violence came.
I saw now that I was almost home. I was in front of the house of Daniel Willoughby, a big brick house, upstanding and foursquare, the kind of house you’d know, without even thinking of it, that a man like Daniel Willoughby would own. Across the street, on the corner, was the old Perkins house. New people had moved into the place a week or so ago. It was one of the few houses in the village that was put up for rent, and people moved in and out of it every year or so. No one ever went out of their way to get acquainted with these renters; it wasn’t worth one’s while. And just down the street was Doc Fabian’s place.
A few minutes more, I thought, and I would be home, back in the house with the hole punched in the roof, back with the echoing emptiness and the lonely question, with the hatred and suspicion of the town performing sentry-go just outside the gate.
Across the street a screen door slammed and feet tramped across the porch boards.
A voice yelled: “Wally, they’re going to bomb us! It was on television!”
A shadow hunched up out of the darkness of the earth—a man who had been lying on the grass or sitting in a low-slung lawn chair, invisible until the cry had jerked him upright.
He gurgled as he tried to form some word, but it came out wrong.
“There was a bulletin!” the other one shouted from the porch. “Just now. On television.”
The man out in the yard was up and running, heading for the house.
And I was running, too. Heading for home, as fast as I could go, my legs moving of their own accord, unprompted by the brain.
I’d expected I’d have a little time, but there’d been no time. The rumor had broken sooner than I had anticipated.
For the bulletin, of course, had been no more than rumor, I was sure of that—that a bombing might take place; that, as a last resort, a bomb might be dropped on Millville. But I also knew that so far as this village was concerned, it would make no difference. The people in the village would not differentiate between fact and rumor.
This was the trigger that would turn this village into a hate-filled madhouse. I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood—and Stiffy, too, if he were here.
I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness, any movement that might betray a watcher.
From far away I heard a shout and on the street above someone ran, feet pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away, a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make out the words.
There was no sign of Hiram.
I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope. I reached the garden and made my way across it. Ahead of me loomed the shattered greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.
I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me. Then I started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voic
e froze me.
Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there’d been no sound.
Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.
And there was a smell of purpleness—perhaps not a smell, exactly, but a sense of purpleness. It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler’s camp where the Presence had waited on the hillside to walk me back to Earth.
“Yes,” I said. “Where are you?”
The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway, although there was not breeze enough to sway it.
I am here, it said. I have been here all the years. I have been looking forward to this time when I could talk with you.
“You know?” I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.
We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.
“No despair?” I asked, aghast.
If we fail this time, it said, we will try again. Another place, perhaps. Or we may have to wait the—what do you call it?
“The radiation,” I said. “That is what you call it.”
Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.
“That will be years,” I said.
We have the years, it said. We have all the time there is. There is no end of us. There is no end of time.
“But there is an end of time for us,” I said, with a gush of pity for all humanity, but mostly for myself. “There is an end for me.”
Yes, we know, said the purpleness. We feel much sorrow for you.
And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.
But when I tried to say the words, I couldn’t make them come. I couldn’t admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.
It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride. But I had not known until I tried to speak the words that I had the stubbornness and pride.
We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow—a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?
I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.
And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and surety. It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.
A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a color; it was something more than that. It was, perhaps, the odor of immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it could not allow itself to care.
And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.
Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree. Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well—the same life stuff of which I myself was made—that I felt pity for.
“I am sorry for you, too,” I said, but even as I spoke I knew it would not understand the pity any more than it would have understood the pride if it had known about the pride.
A car came screeching around the curve on the street above the swale and the illumination of its headlights slashed across the greenhouse. I flinched away, but the lights were gone before the flinch had finished.
Somewhere out in the darkness someone was calling me, speaking softly, almost fearfully.
Another car came around the curve, turning fast, its tires howling on the turn. The first car was stopping at my house, skidding on the pavement as the brakes spun it to a halt.
“Brad!” said the soft and fearful voice. “Are you out there, Brad?”
“Nancy,” I said. “Nancy, over here.”
There was something wrong, I knew, something terribly wrong. There was a tenseness in her voice, as if she were speaking through a haze of terror. And there was a wrongness, too, about those speeding cars stopping at the house.
“I thought I heard you talking,” Nancy said, “but I couldn’t see you. You weren’t in the house and…”
A man was running around the back of the house, a dark shadow outlined briefly by the street lamp at the corner. Out in front were other men; I could hear their running and the angry mumble of them.
“Brad,” said Nancy.
“Hold it,” I cautioned. “There’s something wrong.”
I could see her now. She was stumbling toward me through the darkness.
Up by the house a voice yelled: “We know you’re in there, Carter! We’re coming in to get you if you don’t come out!”
I turned and ran toward Nancy and caught her in my arms. She was shivering.
“Those men,” she said.
“Hiram and his pals,” I said.
Glass crashed and a streak of fire went arcing through the night.
“Now, damn it,” someone yelled, triumphantly, “maybe you’ll come out.”
“Run,” I said to Nancy. “Up the hill. Get in among the trees…”
“It’s Stiffy,” she whispered back. “I saw him and he sent me…”
A sudden glow of fire leaped up inside the house. The windows in the dining room flared like gleaming eyes. And in the light cast by the flame I saw the dark figures gambolling, screaming now in a mindless frenzy.
Nancy turned and ran and I pelted after her, and behind us a voice boomed above the bawling of the mob.
“There he goes!” the voice shouted. “Down there in the garden!”
Something caught my foot and tripped me and I fell, sprawling among the money bushes. The scraggly branches raked across my face and clawed at my clothes as I struggled to my feet.
A tongue of whipping flame leaped above the house, funneled through the hole the time machine had punched in the roof, and the windows all were glowing now. In the sudden silence I could hear the sucking roar of fire eating through the structure.
They were running down the slope toward the garden, a silent group of men. The pounding of their feet and the ugly gasping of their breath came across the space between us.
I stooped and ran my hand along the ground and in the darkness found the thing that tripped me. My fingers closed about it and I brought it up, a four foot length of two-by-four, old and beginning to rot along its edges, but still sound in the core.
A club, I thought, and this was the end of it. But one of them would die—perhaps two of them—while they were killing me.
“Run!” I screamed at Nancy, knowing she was out there somewhere, although I could not see her.
There was just one thing left, I told myself, one thing more that I must do. And that was to get Hiram Martin with the club before the mob closed over me.
They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the white gash of his teeth shining in the darkness of his face.
Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open. And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.
The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.
The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working my fingers to get a better grip upon it.
But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the others sim
ply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.
Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing—like stampeded cattle racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.
I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.
My God, I thought, they couldn’t wait! They came a little early so they wouldn’t miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.
And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they’d glimpse the awfulness of another earth.
They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a soundless voice I recognized.
Go back, the voice said. Go back. You’ve come too soon. This world isn’t open.
Someone was calling from far away, the call lost in the thundering and the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.
Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a snapped whiplash.
And they were going back—or, at least, they were disappearing, melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.
One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew from an unknown quarter. Fluttering—or were they talking, too? The old, dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different earth?
We’d never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from the very start we’d never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple flowers.
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