by Tim Powers
“Sorry I shouted at you when I got home,” he said when he had finished describing the ordeal. “I was pretty shook up.”
“I guess you would be. I wish you would have told me, though. Someone should have called the police.”
“Wouldn’t have done any good. I didn’t even get the guy’s license number. Happened too fast.”
“One of those people in Norm’s must have got it.”
Wilkins shrugged. Right then he didn’t give a flying damn about the guy in the Torino. In a sense there had not been any guy in the Torino, just a … a force of nature, like gravity or cold or the way things go to hell if you don’t look out. He hacked little gaps in his mashed potatoes, letting the gravy leak down the edges like molten lava out of a volcano, careful not to let it all run out. He shoveled a forkful into his mouth and then picked up a pork chop, holding it by the bone, and nibbled off the meat that was left. “No harm done, “he said. “A few bucks …”
“What you ought to have done after you’d got home and put on another pair of pants was drive up Seventeenth Street. Your pants are probably lying by the roadside somewhere, in a heap.”
“First thing in the morning,” he said, putting it off even though there was still a couple hours worth of daylight left.
But then abruptly he knew she was right. Of course that’s what he should have done. He had been too addled. A man didn’t like to think of that sort of embarrassment, not so soon. Now, safe in the kitchen, eating a good meal, the world was distant enough to permit his taking a philosophical attitude. He could talk about it now, admit everything to Molly. There was no shame in it. Hell, it was funny. If he had been watching out the window at Norm’s, he would have laughed at himself, too. There was no harm done. Except that his inventor’s pants were gone.
Suddenly full, he pushed his plate away and stood up.
“Sit and talk?” Molly asked.
“Not tonight. I’ve got a few things to do yet, before dark.”
“I’ll make you a cup of coffee, then, and bring it out to the garage.”
He smiled at her and winked, then bent over and kissed her on the cheek. “Use the Melitta filter. And make it in that big, one-quart German stein, will you? I want it to last. Nothing tastes better than coffee with milk and sugar in it an hour after the whole thing has got cold. The milk forms a sort of halo on the surface after a while. A concession from the Brownian motion.”
She nodded doubtfully at him, and he winked again before heading out the back door. “I’m just going down to Builders Emporium,” he said at the last moment. “Before they close. Leave the coffee on the bench, if you don’t mind.”
Immediately he set out around toward the front, climbing into his car and heading toward Seventeenth Street, five blocks up.
He drove east slowly, ignoring the half a dozen cars angrily changing lanes to pass him. Someone shouted something, and Wilkins hollered “That’s right!” out the window, although he had no idea what it was the man had said.
The roadside was littered with rubbish – cans and bottles and disposable diapers. He had never noticed it all before, never really looked. It was a depressing sight. The search suddenly struck him as hopeless. His pants were probably caught on a tree limb somewhere up in the Santa Ana mountains. The police could put their best men on the search and nothing would come of it.
He bumped slowly over the railroad tracks, deliberately missing the green light just this side of the freeway underpass, so that he had to stop and wait out the long red light. Bells began to ring, and an Amtrak passenger train thundered past right behind him, shaking his car and filling the rear window with the sight of hurtling steel. Abruptly be felt cut off, dislocated, as if he had lost his moorings, and he decided to make a U-turn at the next corner and go home. This was no good, this futile searching.
But it was just then that he saw the pants, bunched up like a dead dog in the dim, concrete shadows beneath the overpass. He drove quickly forward when the light changed, the sound of the train receding into the distance, and he pulled into the next driveway and stopped in the parking lot of a tune-up shop closed for the night.
Getting out, he hitched up his dinner pants and strode back down the sidewalk as the traffic rushed past on the street, the drivers oblivious to him and his mission.
The pants were a living wreck, hopelessly flayed after having polished three blocks of asphalt. The wallet and keys were long gone.
He shook the pants out. One of the legs was hanging, pretty literally, by threads. The seat was virtually gone. What remained was streaked with dried gutter water. For a moment he was tempted to fling them away, mainly out of anger.
He didn’t, though.
Would a sailor toss out a sail torn to pieces by a storm? No he wouldn’t. He would wearily take out the needle and thread, is what he would do, and begin patching it up. Who cared what it looked like when it was done? If it caught the wind, and held it…. A new broom sweeps clean, he told himself stoically, but an old broom knows every corner.
He took the pants with him back to the car. And when he got home, five minutes later, there was the cup of coffee still steaming on the bench. He put the pants on the corner of the bench top, blew across the top of the coffee, and swallowed a big slug of it, sighing out loud.
The moon was high and full. That would mean he could see, and wouldn’t have to mess with unrolling the hundred-foot extension cord and hanging the trouble-light in the avocado tree. And he was fairly sure that moonlight brought out the tomato worms, too. The hypothesis wasn’t scientifically sound, maybe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. He had studied the creatures pretty thoroughly, and had come to know their habits.
He set down the styrofoam ice chest containing the ice-encased ether bunnies, studied the nets for a moment, and then opened a little cloth-covered notebook, taking out the pencil clipped inside the spine. He had to gauge it very damned carefully. If he tied on the ice-encased bunnies too soon or too late, it would all come to nothing, an empty net ascending into the stratosphere. There was a variation in air temperature across the backyard – very slight, but significant. And down among the vines there was a photosynthetic cooling that was very nearly tempered by residual heat leaking out of the sun-warmed soil. He had worked through the calculations three times on paper and then once again with a pocket calculator.
And of course there was no way of knowing the precise moment that the worms would attempt to cross the nets. That was a variable that he could only approximate. Still, that didn’t make the fine-tuning any less necessary. All the steps in the process were vital.
He wondered, as he carefully wired the ether bunnies onto the nets, if maybe there wasn’t energy in moonlight, too – a sort of heat echo, something even his instruments couldn’t pick up. The worms could sense it, whatever it was – a subtle but irresistible force, possibly involving tidal effects. Well, fat lot of good it would do him to start worrying about that now. It clearly wasn’t the sort of thing you could work out on a pocket calculator.
He struggled heavily to his feet, straightening up at last, the ice chest empty. He groaned at the familiar stiffness and shooting pains in his lower back. Molly could cook, he had to give her that. One of these days he would take off a few pounds. He wondered suddenly if maybe there weren’t a couple of cold pork chops left over in the fridge, but then he decided that Molly would want to cook them up for his breakfast in the morning. That would be good – eggs and chops and sourdough toast.
She had come out to the garage only once that evening, to remonstrate with him again, but he had made it clear that he was up to his neck in what he was doing, and that he wasn’t going to give himself any rest. She had looked curiously around the garage and then had gone back inside, and after several hours she had shut the light off upstairs in order to go to sleep.
So the house was dark now, except for a couple of sconces burning in the living room. He could see the front porch light, too, shining through the window beyond the
m.
The sky was full of stars, the Milky Way stretching like a river through trackless space. He felt a sudden sorrow for the tomato worms, who knew nothing of the ether. They went plodding along, inexorably, sniffing out tomato plants, night after night, compelled by Nature, by the fleeing moon. They were his brothers, after a fashion. It was a hard world for a tomato worm, and Wilkins was sorry that he had to kill them.
He fetched a lawn chair and sat down in it, very glad to take a load off his feet. He studied the plants. There was no wind, not even an occasional breeze. The heavy-bodied tomato worms would make the branches dip and sway as they came along, cutting through the still night. Wilkins would have to remain vigilant. There would be no sleep for him. He was certain that he could trust the ether bunnies to do their work, to trap the worms and propel them away into the depths of space, but it was a thing that he had to see, as an astronomer had to wait out a solar eclipse.
He was suddenly hungry again. That’s what had come of thinking about the pork chops. He was reminded of the tomato, nearly invisible down in the depths of the vines. How many people could that Better Boy feed, Wilkins wondered, and all at once it struck him that he himself was hardly worthy to eat such a tomato as this. He would find Bob Dodge, maybe, and give it to him. “Here,” he would say, surprising the old man in his booth at Norm’s. “Eat it well.” And he would hand Dodge the tomato, and Dodge would understand, and would take it from him.
He got up out of his chair and peered into the vines. The ice was still solid. The night air hadn’t started it melting yet. But the worms hadn’t come yet either. It was too soon. He found a little cluster of Early Girls, tiny things that didn’t amount to anything and weren’t quite ripe yet. Carefully, he pulled a few of them loose and then went back to his chair, sucking the insides out of one of the tomatoes as if it were a Concord grape. He threw the peel away, tasting the still-bitter fruit.
“Green,” he said out loud, surprised at the sound of his own voice and wishing he had some salt. And then, to himself, he said, “It’s nourishing, though. Vitamin C.” He felt a little like a hunter, eating his kill in the depths of a forest, or a fisherman at sea, lunching off his catch.
He could hear them coming. Faintly on the still air he could hear the rustle of leaves bending against vines, even, he’d swear, the munch-munch of tiny jaws grinding vegetation into nasty green pulp in the speckled moonlight. It was a steady susurration – there must have been hundreds of them out there. Clearly the full moon and the incredible prize had drawn the creatures out in an unprecedented way. Perhaps every tomato worm in Orange County was here tonight to sate itself.
And the ice wasn’t melting fast enough. He had miscalculated.
He forced himself up out of the lawn chair and plodded across the grass to the plants. He couldn’t see the worms – their markings were perfect camouflage, letting them blend into the shifting patches of moonlight and shadow – but he could hear them moving in among the Early Girls.
Crouched against the vines, he blew softly on the ice blocks at the outside corners of the net. If only he could hurry them along. When they warmed up just a couple of degrees, the night air would really go to work on them. They’d melt quickly once they started. Abruptly he thought of heading into the garage for a propane torch, but he couldn’t leave the tomato alone with the worms now, not even for a moment. He kept blowing. Little rivulets of water were running down the edges of the ice. Cheered at the sight of this, he blew harder.
Dimly, he realized that he had fallen to his knees.
Maybe he had hyperventilated, or else had been bent over so long that blood had rushed to his head. He felt heavy, though, and he pulled at the collar of his shirt to loosen it across his chest. He heard them again, close to him now.
“The worms!” he said out loud, and he reached out and took hold of the nearest piece of string-bound ice in both hands to melt it. He didn’t let go of it even when he overbalanced and thudded heavily to the ground on his shoulder, but the ice still wasn’t melting fast enough, and his hands were getting numb and beginning to ache.
The sound of the feasting worms was a hissing in his ears that mingled with the sound of rushing blood, like two rivers of noise flowing together, into one deep stream. The air seemed to have turned cold, chilling the sweat running down his forehead. His heart was pounding in his chest, like a pickaxe chopping hard into dirt.
He struggled up onto his hands and knees and lunged his way toward the Better Boy. He could see them.
One of the worms was halfway up the narrow trunk, and two more were noodling in along the vines from the side. A cramp in his chest helped him to lean in closer, although he gasped at the pain and clutched at his shirt pocket. Now he could not see anything human or even mammalian in the faces of the worms, any more than he had been able to see the driver of the hit-and-run Torino behind the sun-glare on the windshield.
He made his hand stretch out and take hold of one of the worms. It held on to the vine until he really tugged, and then after tearing loose it curled in a muscular way in his palm before he could fling it away. In his fright and revulsion he grabbed the next one too hard, and it burst in his fist – somehow, horribly, still squirming against his fingers even after its insides had jetted out and greased Wilkins’s thumb.
He spared a glance toward the nearest chunk of ice, but he couldn’t see it; perhaps they were melting at last.
Just a little longer, he told himself, his breath coming quick and shallow. His hands were numb, but he seized everything that might have been a worm and threw it behind him. He was panting loud enough to drown out the racket of the feasting worms, and the sweat stung in his eyes, but he didn’t let himself stop.
His left arm exploded in pain when he took hold of another one of the creatures, and he half believed the thing had somehow struck back at him, and then at that moment his chest was crushed between the earth and the sky.
He tried to stand, but toppled over backward.
Against the enormous weight he managed to lift his head – and he was smiling when he let it fall back onto the grass, for he was sure he had seen the edges of the nets fluttering upward as the ether bunnies, freed at last from the ice, struggled to take hold of the fabric of space – struggled inadequately, he had to concede, against the weight of the nets and the plants and the worms and the sky, but bravely nevertheless, keeping on tugging until it was obvious that their best efforts weren’t enough, and then keeping on tugging even after that.
He didn’t lose consciousness. He was simply unable to move. But the chill had gone away and the warm air had taken its place, and he was content to lie on the grass and stare up at the stars and listen to his heart.
He knew that it had probably been a heart attack that had happened to him – but he had heard of people mistaking for a heart attack what had merely been a seizure from too much caffeine. It might have been the big mug of coffee. He’d have to cut down on that stuff. Thinking of the coffee made him think of Molly asleep upstairs. He was glad that she didn’t know he was down here, lying all alone on the dewy grass.
In and out with the summer night air. Breathing was the thing. He focused on it. Nothing else mattered to him. If you could still breathe you were all right, and he felt like he could do it forever.
When the top leaves of his neighbor’s olive tree lit gold with the dawn sun he found that he could move. He sat up slowly, carefully, but nothing bad happened. The morning breeze was pleasantly cool, and crows were calling to each other across the rooftops.
He parted the vines and looked into the shadowy depths of the tomato plants.
The Better Boy was gone. All that was left of it was a long shred of orange skin dangling like a deflated balloon from its now foolish-looking stout stem. The ether bunnies, perhaps warped out of the effective shape by the night of strain, lay inert along the edges of the nets, which were soiled with garden dirt now and with a couple of crushed worms and a scattering of avocado leaves.
&nbs
p; He was all alone in the yard – Molly wouldn’t wake up for an hour yet – so he let himself cry as he sat there on the grass. The sobs shook him like hiccups, and tears ran down his face as the sweat had done hours earlier, and the tears made dark spots on the lap of his dinner pants.
Then he got up onto his feet and, still moving carefully because he felt so frail and weak, walked around to the front of the house.
The newspaper lay on the driveway. He nearly picked it up, thinking to take a look at the sports page. He had been so busy yesterday evening that he had missed the tail end of the ballgame. Perhaps the Angels had slugged their way into first place. They had been on a streak, and Wilkins wanted to think that their luck had held.
He turned and went into the silent house. He didn’t want to make coffee, so he just walked slowly from room to room, noticing things, paying attention to trifles, from the bright morning sun shining straight in horizontally through the windows to the familiar titles of books on shelves.
He felt a remote surprise at seeing his inventor’s pants on the top of the dirty clothes in the hamper in the bathroom, and he picked them up.
No wonder it had been late when Molly had finally turned out the bedroom light. She had sewn up or patched every one of the outrageous tears and lesions in the old pants, and now clearly intended to wash them. Impulsively he wanted to put them on right then and there … but he wouldn’t. He would let Molly have her way with them, let her return the pants in her own good time. He would wear them again tomorrow, or the day after.
There was still a subtle magic in the morning.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Samoa.
He let the pants fall back onto the pile, and then he walked slowly, carefully, into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He would make breakfast for her.
Night Moves
WHEN a warm midnight wind sails in over the mountains from the desert and puffs window shades inward, and then hesitates for a second so that the shades flap back and knock against the window frames, southern Californians wake up and know that the Santa Ana wind has come, and that tomorrow their potted plants will be strewn up and down the alleys and sidewalks; but it promises blue skies and clean air, and they prop themselves up in bed for a few moments and listen to the palm fronds rattling and creaking out in the darkness.