Three days—and in that time the building had grown a thousand stories high and now covered a hundred acres.
He went along, not hurrying too much now, his feet a heavy ache, his belly pinched with hunger.
He had to get back to the building—somehow he had to get back there. It was a sudden need, realized and admitted now, but the reason for it, the source of it, was not yet apparent. It was as if there had been something he had left behind and he had to go and find it. Something I left behind, he thought. What could he have left behind? Nothing but the pain and the knowledge that he walked with a dark companion and the little capsule that he carried in his pocket for the time when the pain grew too great.
He felt in his pocket and the capsule was no longer there. It had disappeared along with his wallet and his pocket knife and watch. No matter now, he thought. I no longer need the capsule.
He heard the hurrying footsteps behind him and there was an urgency about them that made him swing around.
“Peter!” Mary cried out. “Peter, I thought I recognized you. I was hurrying to catch you.”
He stood and looked at her as if he did not quite believe it was she whom he saw.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Hospital,” Peter said. “I ran away from them. But you …”
“We were evacuated, Peter. They came and told us that we had to leave. Some of us are at a camp down at the other end of the park. Pa is carrying on something awful and I can’t blame him—having to leave right in the middle of haying and with the small grain almost ready to be cut.”
She tilted back her head and looked into his face.
“You look all worn out,” she said. “Is it worse again?”
“It?” he asked, then realized that the neighbors must have known—that the reason for his coming to the farm must have been general knowledge, for there were no such things as secrets in a farming neighborhood.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” Mary said. “Terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have …”
“It’s all right,” said Peter. “Because it’s gone now, Mary. I haven’t got it any more. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve gotten rid of it in some way.”
“The hospital?” she suggested.
“The hospital had nothing to do with it. It had cleared up before I went there. They just found out at the hospital, that is all.”
“Maybe the diagnosis was wrong.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t wrong, Mary.”
Still, how could he be sure? How could he, or the medical world, say positively that it had been malignant cells and not something else—some strange parasite to which he had played the unsuspecting host?
“You said you ran away,” she reminded him.
“They’ll be looking for me, Mary. The colonel and the major. They think I had something to do with the machine I found. They think I might have made it. They took me to the hospital to find out if I was human.”
“Of all the silly things!”
“I’ve got to get back to the farm,” he said. “I simply have to get back there.”
“You can’t,” she told him. “There are soldiers everywhere.”
“I’ll crawl on my belly in the ditches, if I have to. Travel at night. Sneak through the lines. Fight if I’m discovered and they try to prevent me. There is no alternative. I have to make a try.”
“You’re ill,” she said, anxiously staring at his face.
He grinned at her. “Not ill. Just hungry.”
“Come on then.” She took his arm.
He held back. “Not to the camp. I can’t have someone seeing me. In just a little while, I’ll be a hunted man—if I’m not one already.”
“A restaurant, of course.”
“They took my wallet, Mary. I haven’t any money.”
“I have shopping money.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll get along. There’s nothing that can beat me now.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?”
“It just occurred to me,” Peter admitted, confused and yet somehow sure that what he had said was not reckless bravado, but a blunt fact.
“You’re going back?”
“I have to, Mary.”
“And you think you have a chance?”
He nodded.
“Peter,” she began hesitantly.
“Yes?”
“How much bother would I be?”
“You? How do you mean? A bother in what way?”
“If I went along.”
“But you can’t. There’s no reason for you to.”
She lifted her chin just a little. “There is a reason, Peter. Almost as if I were being called there. Like a bell ringing in my head—a school bell calling in the children …”
“Mary,” he said, “that perfume bottle—there was a certain symbol on it, wasn’t there?”
“Carved in the glass,” she told him. “The same symbol, Peter, that was carved into the jade.”
And the same symbol, he thought, that had been on the letterheads.
“Come on,” he decided suddenly. “You won’t be any bother.”
“We’ll eat first,” she said. “We can use the shopping money.”
They walked down the path, hand in hand, like two teen-age sweethearts.
“We have lots of time,” said Peter. “We can’t start for home till dark.”
They ate at a small restaurant on an obscure street and after that went grocery shopping. They bought a loaf of bread and two rings of bologna and a slab of cheese, which took all of Mary’s money, and for the change the grocer sold them an empty bottle in which to carry water. It would serve as a canteen.
They walked to the edge of the city and out through the suburbs and into the open country, not traveling fast, for there was no point in trying to go too far before night set in.
They found a stream and sat beside it, for all the world like a couple on a picnic. Mary took off her shoes and dabbled her feet in the water and the two of them felt disproportionately happy.
Night came and they started out. There was no Moon, but the sky was ablaze with stars. Although they took some tumbles and at other times wondered where they were, they kept moving on, staying off the roads, walking through the fields and pastures, skirting the farmhouses to avoid barking dogs.
It was shortly after midnight that they saw the first of the campfires and swung wide around them. From the top of a ridge, they looked down upon the camp and saw the outlines of tents and the dull shapes of the canvas-covered trucks. And, later on, they almost stumbled into an artillery outfit, but got safely away without encountering the sentries who were certain to be stationed around the perimeter of the bivouac.
Now they knew that they were inside the evacuated area, that they were moving through the outer ring of soldiers and guns which hemmed in the building.
They moved more cautiously and made slower time. When the first false light of dawn came into the east, they holed up in a dense plum thicket in the corner of a pasture.
“I’m tired,” sighed Mary. “I wasn’t tired all night or, if I was, I didn’t know it—but now that we’ve stopped, I feel exhausted.”
“We’ll eat and sleep,” Peter said.
“Sleep comes first. I’m too tired to eat.”
Peter left her and crawled through a thicket to its edge.
In the growing light of morning stood the Building, a great blue-misted mass that reared above the horizon like a blunted finger pointing at the sky.
“Mary!” Peter whispered. “Mary, there it is!”
He heard her crawling through the thicket to his side.
“Peter, it’s a long way off.”
“Yes, I know it is. But we are going there.”
They crouched there watching it.
“I can’t see the bomb,” said Mary. “The bomb that’s hanging over it.”
“It’s too far off to see.”
“Why is it us? Why are we the ones who are going back? Why are we the only ones who are not afraid?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter, frowning puzzledly. “No actual reason, that is. I’m going back because I want to—no, because I have to. You see, it was the place I chose. The dying place. Like the elephants crawling off to die where all other elephants die.”
“But you’re all right now, Peter.”
“That makes no difference—or it doesn’t seem to. It was where I found peace and an understanding.”
“And there were the symbols, Peter. The symbols on the bottle and the jade.”
“Let’s go back,” he said. “Someone will spot us here.”
“Our gifts were the only ones that had the symbols,” Mary persisted. “None of the others had any of them. I asked around. There were no symbols at all on the other gifts.”
“There’s no time to wonder about that. Come on.”
They crawled back to the center of the thicket.
The Sun had risen above the horizon now and sent level shafts of light into the thicket and the early morning silence hung over them like a benediction.
“Peter,” said Mary, “I just can’t stay awake any longer. Kiss me before I go to sleep.”
He kissed her and they clung together, shut from the world by the jagged, twisted, low-growing branches of the plum trees.
“I hear the bells,” she breathed. “Do you hear them, too?”
Peter shook his head.
“Like school bells,” she said. “Like bells on the first day of school—the first day you ever went.”
“You’re tired,” he told her.
“I’ve heard them before. This is not the first time.”
He kissed her again. “Go to sleep,” he said and she did, almost as soon as she lay down and closed her eyes.
He sat quietly beside her and his mind retreated to his own hidden depths, searching for the pain within him. But there was no pain. It was gone forever.
The pain was gone and the incidence of polio was down and it was a crazy thing to think, but he thought it, anyhow:
Missionary!
When human missionaries went out to heathen lands, what were the first things that they did?
They preached, of course, but there were other things as well. They fought disease and they worked for sanitation and labored to improve the welfare of the people and tried to educate them to a better way of life. And in this way they not only carried out their religious precepts, but gained the confidence of the heathen folk as well.
And if an alien missionary came to Earth, what would be among the first things that he was sure to do? Would it not be reasonable that he, too, would fight disease and try to improve the welfare of his chosen charges? Thus he would gain their confidence. Although he could not expect to gain too much at first. He could expect hostility and suspicion. Only a pitiful handful would not resent him or be afraid of him.
And if the missionary—
And if THIS missionary—
Peter fell asleep.
The roar awakened him and he sat upright, sleep entirely wiped from his mind.
The roar still was there, somewhere outside the thicket, but it was receding.
“Peter! Peter!”
“Quiet, Mary! There is something out there!”
The roar turned around and came back again, growing until it was the sound of clanking thunder and the Earth shook with the sound. It receded again.
The midday sunlight came down through the branches and made of their hiding place a freckled spot of Sun and shade. Peter could smell the musky odor of warm soil and wilted leaf.
They crept cautiously through the thicket and when they gained its edge, where the leaves thinned out, they saw the racing tank far down the field. Its roar came to them as it tore along, bouncing and swaying to the ground’s unevenness, the great snout of its cannon pugnaciously thrust out before it, like a stiff-arming football player.
A road ran clear down the field—a road that Peter was sure had not been there the night before. It was a straight road, absolutely straight, running toward the building, and it was of some metallic stuff that shimmered in the Sun.
And far off to the left was another road and to the right another, and in the distance the three roads seemed to draw together, as the rails seem to converge when one looks down a railroad track.
Other roads running at right angles cut across the three roads, intersecting them so that one gained the impression of three far-reaching ladders set tightly side by side.
The tank raced toward one of the intersecting roads, a tank made midget by the distance, and its roar came back to them no louder than the humming of an angry bee.
It reached the road and skidded off, whipping around sidewise and slewing along, as if it had hit something smooth and solid that it could not get through, as if it might have struck a soaped metallic wall. There was a moment when it tipped and almost went over, but it stayed upright and finally backed away, then swung around to come lumbering down the field, returning toward the thicket.
Halfway down the field, it pivoted around and halted, so that the gun pointed back toward the intersecting road.
The gun’s muzzle moved downward and flashed and, at the intersecting road, the shell exploded with a burst of light and a puff of smoke. The concussion of the shot slapped hard against the ear.
Again and again the gun belched out its shells point blank. A haze of smoke hung above the tank and road—and the shells still exploded at the road—this side of the road and not beyond it.
The tank clanked forward once more until it reached the road. It approached carefully this time and nudged itself along, as if it might be looking for a way to cross.
From somewhere a long distance off came the crunching sound of artillery. An entire battery of guns seemed to be firing. They fired for a while, then grudgingly quit.
The tank still nosed along the road like a dog sniffing beneath a fallen tree for a hidden rabbit.
“There’s something there that’s stopping them,” said Peter.
“A wall,” Mary guessed. “An invisible wall of some sort, but one they can’t get through.”
“Or shoot through, either. They tried to break through with gunfire and they didn’t even dent it.”
He crouched there, watching as the tank nosed along the road. It reached the point where the road to the left came down to intersect the cross road. The tank sheered off to follow the left-hand one, bumping along with its forward armor shoved against the unseen wall.
Boxed in, thought Peter—those roads have broken up and boxed in all the military units. A tank in one pen and a dozen tanks in another, a battery of artillery in another, the motor pool in yet another. Boxed in and trapped; penned up and useless.
And we, he wondered—are we boxed in as well?
A group of soldiers came tramping down the right-hand road. Peter spotted them from far off, black dots moving down the road, heading east, away from the building. When they came closer, he saw that they carried no guns and slogged along with the slightest semblance of formation and he could see from the way they walked that they were dog-tired.
He had not been aware that Mary had left his side until she came creeping back again, ducking her head to keep her hair from being caught in the low-hanging branches.
She sat down beside him and handed him a thick slice of bread and a chunk of bologna. She set the bottle of water down between them.
“It was the building,” she said, “that built the roads.”
Peter nodded, his mouth full of bread and meat.
“They want to make it easy to get to the building,” Mary said. “The building wants to m
ake it easy for people to come and visit it.”
“The bells again?” he asked.
She smiled and said, “The bells.”
The soldiers now had come close enough to see the tank. They stopped and stood in the road, looking at it.
Then four of them turned off the road and walked out into the field, heading for the tank. The others sat down and waited.
“The wall only works one way,” said Mary.
“More likely,” Peter told her, “it works for tanks, but doesn’t work for people.”
“The building doesn’t want to keep the people out.”
The soldiers crossed the field and the tank came out to meet them. It stopped and the crew crawled out of it and climbed down. The soldiers and the crew stood talking and one of the soldiers kept swinging his arms in gestures, pointing here and there.
From far away came the sound of heavy guns again.
“Some of them,” said Peter, “still are trying to blast down the walls.”
Finally the soldiers and the tank crew walked back to the road, leaving the tank deserted in the field.
And that must be the way it was with the entire military force which had hemmed in the building, Peter told himself. The roads and walls had cut it into bits, had screened it off—and now the tanks and the big guns and the planes were just so many ineffective toys of an infant race, lying scattered in a thousand playpens.
Out on the road, the foot soldiers and the tank crew slogged eastward, retreating from the siege which had failed so ingloriously.
In their thicket, Mary and Peter sat and watched the Building.
“You said they came from the stars,” said Mary. “But why did they come here? Why did they bother with us? Why did they come at all?”
“To save us,” Peter offered slowly. “To save us from ourselves. Or to exploit and enslave us. Or to use our planet as a military base. For any one of a hundred reasons. Maybe for a reason we couldn’t understand even if they told us.”
“You don’t believe those other reasons, the ones about enslaving us or using Earth as a military base. If you believed that, we wouldn’t be going to the building.”
“No, I don’t believe them. I don’t because I had cancer and I haven’t any longer. I don’t because the polio began clearing up on the same day that they arrived. They’re doing good for us, exactly the same as the missionaries did good among the primitive, disease-ridden people to whom they were assigned. I hope—”
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 15