So he patrolled up and down behind the shadowy counters, ignoring the noises off and with most of his attention concentrated in his nose, thinking the sort of thoughts he always thought around this time of night He thought about his job, which was easy and, because few people would work the hours he worked, very well paid. Then he would think about the day job at the counter which was not so well paid and which he had held for so many years without getting any farther up the ladder. He had been good at his job, but then so had about two thousand others in the store, and he must have lacked that extra bit of push which would have led to promotion. Finally he would think about himself.
He was an intelligent, well-read—he by no means restricted himself to science fiction although he preferred it—and essentially lazy person. His few close friends credited him with high intelligence by inference and did not because they were his friends, mention laziness at all. But others came straight out and asked him if he was so intelligent why didn’t he have a better job? Tully had asked himself the same question often without finding a satisfactory answer. Apparently there were no jobs which demanded a calm, easygoing disposition allied with detailed, but not specialist, knowledge on such widely varied subjects as Stellar Evolution, the history of the Roman Empire, the latest work being done on the psychology of worms and similar unrelated items. At the moment his job gave him plenty of time to read and think, and gave him security while he was doing these things, so he had no real cause for complaint. Tully now knew that he had not been happy in his job at the counter. The pay had been lower even though the chance of promotion had been much higher. But basically all he had had was a chance, and Tully’s reading had included data on the Laws of Chance, so after due consideration he had gone after the job which was a fairly well paid dead end—he had chosen Security.
Pun unintentional, he thought wryly.
His watch said eight-thirty and he was just finishing the Third floor, walking from the brightly lit well towards the staff stairway. Around the well everything stood out bright and sharp and clear, but as he moved away from it objects began to throw long shadows, which eventually grew so hazy that the objects themselves became shadows. The vast, unlighted portion of the shop seemed to have become unreal, as if God had switched it off because nobody was using it. This was a very fanciful line of thought for Tully, but he sometimes indulged in such thinking when he wanted to mentally change the subject.
He did not like to think that he was a highly intelligent, well-read failure . . .
On the way to the Fourth floor he checked his thread and found it unbroken. The sight of the thin black thread turned dusty white by the narrow beam of his torch sent the odd business of the dolls rushing back into his mind, and immediately his dark mood lifted. He had been given a problem which he did not think any ordinary night watchman could solve. Mr. Steele had suggested as much, although there was the possibility that the Store Manager had simply been making a crack about his taste in literature. This doll business was a challenge and Tully felt that, if he met it successfully, he might be able to stop thinking of himself as a complete failure.
Tully spent longer than usual on the Fourth, particularly in Mr. Steele’s office. His reason for that was that he wanted to have a closer look at the mutilated doll. He found it in Mr. Steele’s wastebasket rescued it and placed it on Mr. Steele’s blotter. Then he switched on Mr. Steele’s desklamp and, with a slight qualm of something he couldn’t put a name to, he sat down in Mr. Steele’s chair.
His second examination of the doll told him nothing new, at first It was still just a one-eyed, one-legged, armless black doll with a lot of its hair missing. But then he noticed that the hair might have been pulled out accidentally, that it had not simply been yanked out but rather that somebody had been trying to twist it into all-over pig-tails. Tully grunted; it seemed a useless bit of information. Almost automatically he lifted the doll and smelt its hair.
And got a faint, almost indetectable odor of something which could have been peppermint.
Suddenly impatient with himself Tully threw the doll back into the wastebasket. He was imagining things, either that or his nose was suffering from persistence of smell. It was stupid to suppose that his dolls and Tyson’s missing lawnmower had any connection . . .
On the Fifth floor, which housed the store’s administrative offices, and on the roof above it there were no smoldering cigarette ends or signs of anyone skulking in the elevator housings. By the time he had finished the roof check it was nine-twenty, so he hurried down to the Time Office to make coffee for his first supper and watch the overtime men clocking out Ten minutes later he was standing at the only unlocked exit from the store, with the floor supervisor in charge of Lock-up and Overtime, watching the late workers troop out Tully did not know what exactly he was looking for, but he did know that nobody left the place chewing peppermints or with a lawnmower under their coat. He chatted for a few minutes with the supervisor, offered him a cup of coffee which was accepted, then let him out.
By nine-forty-five Tully was alone inside a tightly sealed department store.
After his coffee and sandwiches, he did his second round, then set up a folding chair in the Book department. He sat down, drew the magazine which had arrived that morning out of his pocket and prepared to face the night He was supposed to make his rounds at random intervals, the theory being that nobody would know where lie was going to be at any given time. It being next to impossible to devise completely random intervals, Tully mixed business with pleasure by reading his magazine for the night and patrolling between stories. Sometimes he read the short stories first, sometimes last, just to make it more difficult for any hypothetical observer who might be trying to beat his system . . .
He began his third round at eleven-fifty-eight, thinking that there were some people who could handle psi—Bester, Sturgeon and a few others—and some who most definitely could not. When they tried, their stories read like fantasy; instead of natural laws and controlled experiments, there was chaos and a sort of aseptic witchcraft. Still seething quietly, Tully finished his round and read another story. He had his second supper, it being close to one-thirty, then made his fourth patrol.
All the threads were intact, he saw nothing unusual, not a thing was stirring, not even a . . . But then, he reminded himself, the store did not have mice.
It was during his third story that Tully heard something—something unusual, that was. The floors and lighting fixtures still ticked and creaked at intervals, but this sounded exactly like a bolt being drawn. As he strained his ears to listen it was followed by the sounds of a door being opened and closed quietly and a muffled, slapping sound. It seemed to be coming from the Dugout entrance.
Tully put down his magazine, sheer habit making him mark his place with a used bus ticket and moved from behind the counter. He glanced quickly at the department telephone, which at night was connected to an outside line in case he suddenly needed to call the Police or the Fire Department then shook his head—he didn’t need help, at least not yet. With his torch In one hand and his shoes in the other he sprinted silently toward the Dugout entrance, pausing only long enough to check that the Toy door was still bolted and its thread unbroken.
The other door had been opened and the thread pulled from its anchoring gum. For a moment Tully dithered between entering the Dugout and checking where the person who had entered it had come from, then he made up his mind and ran up the stairs.
The threads were dislodged from the First to the Fourth floors, but not the Fifth. Whoever it was must have been hiding on the fourth floor, although Tully didn’t see how anyone could have remained hidden after the going over he had given the place. On the way downstairs again his light picked out a small, damp patch on one of the stairs, as if someone had spat and scuffed over it with their shoe. He paused, sniffing There was a distinct smell of peppermint.
So Steele had been wrong Tully thought wildly; the dolls and Tyson’s missing lawnmower and now even the spitti
ng on the staff stairway were all part of the same problem. He hurried down the stairs with the pieces of what he thought had been three separate puzzles whirling around in his mind, trying to form a picture of the person who was responsible for the disappearance of various tools and one large, motorized lawnmower, who mutilated black dolls, who was fond of eating peppermints and who spat.
It was as well that in a few minutes he would be meeting this person face to face, Tully thought grimly; otherwise he thought that he would have died out of sheer curiosity . . .
Still in his stockinged feet Tully opened the Dug-out door. Fanning the beam of his torch he painted the room with fast zigzags of light. It was empty. But there was a narrow, vertical band of light coming from the corridor leading to the Toys. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that someone had partly closed the door halfway along the connecting corridor, the door which had been dogged open for so long that Tully had almost forgotten it had hinges. He moved forward carefully, keeping the door between the source of light and himself, until he was just behind it Then he looked into the Toy department.
There were enough lights switched on to show him the scene in detail. The mouth of the corridor framed the comer of a counter, a large square of floor, and something on the floor that was five feet long and black and sluglike. The sluglike something was curled around a large black doll, pulling one of its arms off . . .
Tully staggered back against the wall, instinctively seeking a prop for his shaking body while he tried to steady his whirling mind.
The wall wasn’t there.
Tully opened his mouth, to scream, and grunted instead as his shoulder hit a hard, sloping surface and he began to roll. The roll lasted only for a few yards before he crashed into an irregular metal object which knocked the breath out of him. His shoes and torch thudded gently against his body, and when he could breathe again he groped for the flash and switched it on.
He was lying close to the bottom of a hollow sphere twenty-five feet in diameter which had been cut out of the store’s foundation material. He could see where the concrete, masonry and even the steel reinforcing had been sheered off along a perfect, spherical plane, and where the loose earth and clay was kept from falling into it by a thin film of hard, transparent material. The only break in the sphere was the opening which Tully had fallen through.
A smaller spherical object rested at the bottom of the hollow, surrounded thickly by metal objects some of which he recognized as having once been powered hand tools. There was also a six-foot circle of brickwork which was obviously the plug for the entrance, and the motorized lawnmower which he had collided with on the way in. All the tools had been . . . changed . . . in days that would have given their designers nightmares, and what had been done to the lawnmower verged on the obscene. The smell of peppermint was overpowering. Tully climbed to his feet and, carefully, began to explore.
The beam of his flash bobbed and vibrated along the hull of the small, spherical ship with its not quite transparent shell and alien internal plumbing. It jerked because his hands were shaking, because his whole body was shaking. He had the shakes because part of him was afraid, the part which was thinking like a store night-watchman, but mostly he was shaking with sheer excitement as his mind stretched and his imagination soared to accept the reality of what was before him.
An alien ship, probably forcelanded and needing repairs, skillfully concealed while the repairs were being carried out. The evidence lay all around him—tools, human tools, modified and used to make other tools which made other tools which might be capable of making the repairs. It was a unique situation, probably the first time such a thing had happened on Earth, but at the same time it was one that was very familiar to Tully.
Many times he had discussed just this situation with those few friends who shared his taste in literature. What would you do, the question usually went, if an alien spaceship landed in your back yard? Would you try to talk, would you run, or would you call out the militia? The answer which Tully and his friends preferred had invariably been the first one—you would try to talk, try to work out a method of communication. Then if the visitor needed help, or was trying to help you, you would be able to discover which. Of course, there might be a third alternative—it might be hostile, completely inimical . . .
Neither Tully nor his friends liked that third alternative. For one thing they had come up against that situation far too often in stories and they thought it corny. Another reason, a much more subtle and complex one, was their feeling that the Universe was such a big place that it was ridiculous to think of anyone coveting one tiny mote in it to such an extent that they would contemplate war to get it, together with a strong, philosophically based belief that anyone who was advanced enough to cross interstellar space must be highly civilized as well. If there was any hostility, any apparent hostility, it would come about through misunderstanding.
Tully would have to see to it that he managed his First Contact without misunderstandings . . .
He shivered again with sheer excitement and swept his torch around the hideout which the alien had built in the middle of the store’s foundations. It had been using and modifying Earth-type tools for its repairs, that seemed obvious. But there were other questions to which Tully itched to have the answers. How had the alien been able to materialize inside the solid foundations and create this place? And how was it able to pick out a place where tools were readily available? Had it detected them, or did it already know they were there? Had the ship been traveling, not through interstellar space but through Time . . .? The answers, he knew, could come only from the alien.
Abruptly Tully came to a decision. He tied his shoes together by their laces, hung them around his neck and with the torch sticking out of his mouth like a metal trunk, scrambled up to the opening. At the lip of the hole he paused, sniffed, then hurried quietly along the corridor and out into the store. He replaced the thread across the door so that he would know if the alien left the basement while he was making his preparations.
Much of the equipment he needed was already in the basement in the shape of children’s blackboards and chalks. And a measure of contact had already been made in that he knew what the alien looked like and, by virtue of its detection gear, the alien was used to the sight of Tully’s species. At the same time he would have to render his general aspect less frightening to the alien. One, the most important, method would be not to carry a weapon or anything which might be mistaken for such. Then there was another, more positive method.
Grinning suddenly, Tully headed for the confectionery counter. There he uncapped the big glass jar that was labeled “Extra Strong Peppermints” and began stuffing his mouth and pockets with the hard, white sweets. The way Tully saw it, the alien’s body odor smelled of peppermint, or of something very like peppermint The smell was not unpleasant to Tully, but the human body smell might be quite distressing to the alien, and if he tried to conceal it with the nearest equivalent he could manage to the alien’s own smell, that should further reassure it of his friendly intentions.
Completely disregarding the bad effects to his teeth, Tully began to crunch and chew. Within minutes his tongue, mouth and throat were practically paralyzed by the hot-cold bum of the peppermints and his breath was stinking up the whole department. Tully popped in a few replacements and hurried back to die Dugout.
He paused on the way to look again at the phone in the Book department, wondering if he should call somebody. Not the Police or the Fire Department. Definitely not Mr. Steele, at least not yet. One of his friends maybe, except that even then what he had to say might not sound believable at three o’clock in the morning. He wasn’t frightened, Tully told himself; just excited and a little worried. He couldn’t help thinking of all those armless dolls and wondering how they fitted into the alien’s purpose.
The theory of a sex-maniac wandering the Toy department had been demolished. Tully now knew what exactly it was that wandered the Toy department at night, but what bo
thered him was its behavior towards the dolls. Had it in some obscure fashion, been trying to communicate with him . . .?
Tully went into the Dugout quietly, closing and locking the door behind him, and along the corridor. At the partly open dividing door he put his torch on the floor and continued towards the Toy department whistling and putting his feet down firmly so as to give the alien warning of his coming. But just before he entered the basement he stopped whistling when it occurred to him that high-pitched sounds might not be pleasant to alien ears—the noise he was making was not even pleasant to his own ears, Tully had to admit Then suddenly he was in the Toy department and the alien was on the floor less than five yards away.
It was long and black and sluglike, with a soft bulginess about its body which suggested that internally it must be nearly all liquid. It moved by altering its center of gravity rapidly back and forwards, in a series of tumbling lurches accompanied by a wet slapping sound. The head section—Tully guessed it was the head by its direction of motion—had a grey, shining bulge which might have been a single eye over a long, conelike proboscis, and five long, thin tentacles sweeping forward. Its direction of motion was away from Tully and it was moving fast. Obviously it was afraid of him.
Tully stuffed more peppermints into his mouth and followed it, but slowly so as not to frighten it further. So far as he could see it wasn’t wearing or carrying anything so that he was in no danger from extraterrestrial weapons. He showed his empty hands continually and made reassuring noises, and tried to attract its attention by drawing non-scale diagrams of the Solar System and Pythagoras’ Thereom on one of the children’s blackboards. But it was no good, it kept running away from him and trying to get back into the corridor where its ship was.
Tully could not allow that, at least, not yet. While the e-t was still excited and afraid of him, he didn’t want it getting its hands on a weapon.
He was standing in the mouth of the corridor trying to think of some other approach when he heard a noise which caused the cold sweat to pop on his forehead.
13 Above the Night Page 28