He finally reached the diner and crossed the parking lot in front of it, climbed the short flight of stairs to the door. The place was empty. The counter gleamed from polishing, the chrome of the coffee urn shone brightly in the light of the lamps that marched across the ceiling.
“How are you?” asked the Diner. The voice was that of a brassy, wise-cracking waitress. “What will it be this morning?”
Blake looked around, seeing no one, then realized the situation. Another robotic installation, like the flying houses.
He went across the floor and sat down on one of the stools.
“Cakes,” he said, “and some bacon. And coffee.”
He let the knapsack slip off his shoulder and lowered it to the floor beside the stool.
“Out early, aren’t you?” asked the Diner. “Don’t tell me you have walked all night.”
“Not all night,” said Blake. “Up early, that is all.”
“Don’t see many of you fellows any more,” the Diner said. “What is your racket, friend?”
“I do a little writing,” said Blake. “At least, I try to do it.”
“Well,” said the Diner, “at least you get to see some of the country. Me, I’m stuck here all the time. I never get to see anything at all. All I get is a lot of talk. Not,” said the Diner, hastily, “that I dislike hearing talk. At least it’s something to occupy my mind.”
A spout poured a gob of batter on the griddle, moved along a traveling track to pour a second and a third, then snapped swiftly back to its original position. A metal arm mounted beside the coffee urn unfolded, extended itself and tripped a lever above the griddle. Three slices of bacon slid out and flopped upon the griddle. Deftly the arm descended and separated them, nudging them into a neat row.
“Want your coffee now?” asked the Diner.
“If you please,” said Blake.
The metallic arm grasped a cup, held it under the faucet of the urn and raised it to activate the spout. Coffee poured out, the cup filled, the arm swung around and deposited it before Blake, then dipped down underneath the counter, came up with silverware, politely pushed the sugar dispenser closer to his reach.
“Cream?” the Diner asked.
“No, thanks,” said Blake.
“Heard a good story the other day,” the Diner said. “Fellow in here the other day sprung it on me. It seems that …” Behind Blake, the door came open.
“No! No!” screamed the Diner. “You cut out of here. How often do I have to tell you never to come in when I got customers.”
“I came in to see your customer,” said a squeaky voice.
The sound of the voice spun Blake around.
A Brownie stood just inside the door, the bright, beady eyes glittering above the rodent snout, the high-domed skull flanked by the tasseled ears. Its trousers were striped green and pink.
“I feed it,” wailed the Diner. “I put up with it. People say it’s good luck to have one of them around, but this one never brings me anything but trouble. It is full of tricks. It is impertinent. It has no respect for me …”
“That’s because you put on human airs,” the Brownie said, “forgetting that you are not a human, but a stand-in for a human, taking away an honest job that a human might perform. I ask you why anyone should have respect for you?”
“No more handouts for you!” screamed the Diner. “No more sleeping in here when the nights are cold. Nothing more for you. I’ve had my fill of you.”
The Brownie disregarded the tirade, came briskly across the floor. He stopped and made a formal bow to Blake.
“Good morning, honored sir. I hope I find you well.”
“Very well,” said Blake, amusement struggling with a deep sense of foreboding. “Would you have some breakfast with me?”
“Gladly,” said the Brownie, leaping to the stool next to Blake. He perched on it, with his feet dangling above the floor.
“Sir,” he said, “I will have whatever you are having. It is most generous and courteous of you to ask me, for I hunger greatly.”
“You heard my friend,” said Blake, speaking to the Diner. “He will have what I am having.”
“And you will pay for it?” asked the Diner.
“Most certainly I will.”
The mechanical arm scooped up and flipped the baking cakes, moved them toward the griddle’s front. The sprout began spraying out new gobs of batter.
“It is a treat to eat a regular meal,” said the Brownie, speaking confidentially to Blake. “Most people give me scraps. And while hunger cannot choose, the inner creature sometimes craves more consideration.”
“Don’t let him take you in,” the Diner cautioned Blake. “Buy him this breakfast, if you must, but then shake free of him. Don’t let him fasten onto you, or he will suck you dry.”
“Machines,” the Brownie said, “have no sensibilities. They are ignorant of the finer instincts. They are callous to the suffering of the very ones they are meant to serve. And they have no souls.”
“Neither have you, you heathen alien,” raged the Diner. “You are a chiseler and a moocher and you are a parasite. You use humankind most unmercifully and you have no gratitude and you don’t know when to stop.”
The Brownie slanted his rodent eyes at Blake and lifted both of his hands, palms upward, in a hopeless gesture.
“Well, you don’t,” the Diner said, aggrieved. “There is solemn truth in every word I said.”
The arm scooped up the first three cakes, put them on a plate, ranged the bacon alongside them, punched a button and caught, with great dexterity, the three pats of butter ejected from a chute. The arm set the plate in front of Blake, darted down underneath the counter and came up with a jug of syrup.
The Brownie’s nose twitched with pleasure. “They smell delicious,” he said.
“No snitching!” screamed the Diner. “You wait till yours are done.”
From far off came a faint moaning bleat.
The Brownie stiffened, its ears stretched up and flaring.
The moaning came again.
“It’s another one of them!” the Diner yelled. “They are supposed to warn us well ahead of time, not come sneaking up on us like this. And you, you no-good chiseler, are supposed to be out there, listening for the first sign of them. That’s what I feed you for.”
“It’s way too soon for another one,” the Brownie said. “There shouldn’t be another one through until late this evening. They are supposed to spread themselves out, to use different roads so one road doesn’t have to put up with them all the time.”
The moaning came again, louder and closer—a lonesome, wailing sound trailing off the hills.
“What is it?” asked Blake.
“It’s a cruiser,” the Brownie told him, “One of these big sea-going freighters. It has a load of something that it’s carried all the way from Europe, maybe from Africa, and it came ashore an hour or so ago and is coming up the road.”
“You mean it doesn’t stop when it reaches shore?”
“Why should it?” asked the Brownie. “It travels on the same principle as the ground cars, on a cushioned jet stream. It can travel on either land or water. It comes up to shore and never hesitates—just goes booming down a road.”
Metal screeched and thudded on metal. Blake saw that great steel shutters were creeping across the outside of the windows. Clamps swivelled out of the wall and moved against the door, snugging it tight.
The moaning filled the room now and far off there was a terrible howling, as if a gigantic storm moved across the land.
“All battened down!” The Diner screamed to be heard above the noise. “You guys better hit the floor. This sounds like a big one.”
The building was shaking and the noise was a numbing cataract that poured from all directions to fill the room to bursting.
The Brownie had nipped beneath the stool and was hanging tightly, both arms wrapped about the metal standard on which the stool was mounted. His mouth was open and it was ev
ident that he was yelling at Blake, but his voice was engulfed and drowned out by the howling that was coming up the road.
Blake threw himself off the stool and hugged the floor. He tried to hook his fingers into the floor, but the floor covering was a hard, smooth plastic and he could get no grip on it.
The diner seemed to buck and the howling of the cruiser was almost unendurable. Blake felt himself sliding on the floor.
Then the howling tapered off and died away, became a faint, long-drawn and distorted moaning.
Blake picked himself off the floor.
A lake of coffee lay upon the counter where his cup had been and there was no sign of the cup. The plate on which the cakes and bacon had rested was on the floor, smashed and scattered. The cakes lay limply on the stool. The cakes meant for the Brownie still were on the griddle, but were smoking and had turned black around the edges.
“I’ll start over,” said the Diner.
The arm reached out and snatched up a spatula, scraped the burned cakes off the griddle, flipped them into a garbage can underneath the burner.
Blake looked over the counter and saw that the space behind it was littered with broken crockery.
“Yeah, look at it!” the Diner screeched. “There ought to be a law. I’ll notify the boss and he’ll slap a claim against that outfit and he’ll see they pay—he always has so far. You guys might want to file claims as well. Allege mental agony or something. I got claim forms if you want to do it.”
Blake shook his head. “What about motorists. What if you met that thing on the road?”
“You saw those bunkers along the road, ten feet high or so, with exit lanes leading up to them?”
“Yes, I did,” said Blake.
“The cruiser has to sound its horn as soon as it leaves water and starts traveling on land. It has to keep on sounding it all the time it’s traveling. You hear that siren and you head for the nearest bunker and you duck behind it.”
The spigot traveled deliberately along its track, pouring out the batter.
“How come, mister,” asked the Diner, “you didn’t know about the cruisers and the bunkers? You come from the backwoods, maybe?”
“It’s none of your business,” said the Brownie, speaking for Blake. “Just get on with our breakfast.”
23
“I’ll walk you a piece down the road,” said the Brownie when they left the diner.
The morning sun was topping the horizon behind them and their elongated shadows bobbed along the road in front of them. The paving, Blake noted, was broken and eroded.
“They don’t keep up the roads,” he said, “the way I remember them.”
“No need to,” said the Brownie. “No wheels. No need of a smooth surface since there isn’t any contact. The cars all ride on cushions of air. They only need roads as designation strips and to keep the traffic out of people’s hair. Now, when they lay out a new road, they just set out a double row of stakes, to show the drivers the location of the highway.”
They jogged along, not hurrying. A flock of blackbirds rose in a blue of flashing wings out of a marshy swale off to the left.
“Flocking up,” the Brownie said. “They’ll be leaving soon. Cheeky things, the blackbirds. Not like larks or robins.”
“You know about these wild things?”
“We live with them,” the Brownie said. “We get to understand them. Some we get so we can almost talk with them. Not birds, though. Birds and fish are stupid. But raccoons and foxes, muskrats and mink—they are all real people.”
“You live out in the woods, I understand.”
“In the woods and fields. We conform to ecology. We take things as we find them. We adapt to circumstances. We are blood brothers to all life. No quarrels with anyone.”
Blake tried to remember what Daniels had told him. A strange sort of little people who had taken a liking to the Earth, not because of the dominant life form that inhabited it, but because of the planet itself. Perhaps, Blake thought, because they found in the non-dominant residents, in the few remaining wild denizens of the woods and fields the sort of simple associations that they liked. Insisting on living their own way of life to go their independent way, and yet beggars and moochers, attaching themselves in a slipshod alliance with anyone who would provide whatever simple needs they had.
“I met another of your people a few days ago,” said Blake. “You’ll pardon me, but I can’t be sure. Could you …”
“Oh, no,” the Brownie said. “That was another one of us. He was the one who spotted you.”
“Spotted me?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. As one who would bear watching. He said that there was more than one of you and that you were in trouble. He sent out word we should, any one of us who could, keep an eye on you.”
“Apparently you’ve been doing a good job of it. It didn’t take you long to pick me up.”
“When we set out to accomplish something,” the Brownie said, with pride, “we can be most efficient.”
“And I? Where do I fit in?”
“I am not sure exactly,” said the Brownie. “We are to keep an eye on you. You only need to know we’re watching. You can count on us.”
“I thank you,” Blake told him. “I thank you very much.”
And that was all he needed, he told himself—to have these crazy little creatures keeping tabs on him.
They walked along in silence for a time and then Blake asked: “He told you, this one that I met, to keep an eye on me …”
“Not just me alone.…”
“I know that,” said Blake. “He told all of you. Would you mind explaining how he told the rest of you? Or maybe it’s a stupid question. There are mail and telephones.”
The Brownie made a clucking sound of immense disgust. “We wouldn’t be caught dead,” he said, “using such contrivances, It would be against our principles and there really is no need to use them. We just pass the word along.”
“You mean you are telepathic.”
“Well, to tell you the honest truth, I don’t know if we are or not. We can’t transmit words, if that is what you mean. But we have a oneness. It gets a bit hard to explain.”
“I would imagine so,” said Blake. “A sort of tribal psychic grapevine.”
“You don’t make any sense to me,” the Brownie said, “but if you want to think of it that way, I guess it does no harm.”
“I suppose,” said Blake, “there are a lot of people that you keep an eye on.”
It would be just like them, he told himself, a bunch of little busybodies very much concerned with other people’s lives.
“There are no others,” said the Brownie. “Not at the moment, anyhow. He told us there were more than one of you and …”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“Why, bless you,” said the Brownie, “that’s the whole of it. How often does one find a creature there is more than one of? Would you mind telling me, I wonder, just how many …”
“There are three of me,” said Blake.
The Brownie jigged in triumph. “I knew there were,” he crowed. “I made a bet with myself that there were three of you. One of you is warm and shaggy, but with a terrible temper. Can you tell me this is so?”
“Yes,” said Blake, “I would suppose it is.”
“But the other one of you,” the Brownie said, “baffles me entirely.”
“Welcome to the club,” said Blake. “He baffles me as well.”
24
When he topped the long, steep hill, Blake saw it in the valley, where the land dipped down and ran level for a mile or so, then climbed another hill. It rested on the level of the valley floor and it seemed to fill half the level space—a great, black bulging structure that looked amazingly like a monstrous bug, humped in its middle and blunted at both ends.
Blake stopped at the sight of it. He had never seen a cruiser, but there could be no doubt that the thing squatting at the bottom of the hill was the cruiser which had shaken up th
e diner.
Cars went whipping past Blake, the gush of wind from their humming jets beating at him.
The Brownie had left him an hour before and since that time he had trudged along, looking for someplace where he might hide away and sleep. But stretching on either side the road was nothing but fields, stripped by the harvest, now lying in their autumn garb of brown and gold. No habitations were located near the road, all of them sitting back from it half a mile or so. Blake wondered if the use of this highway by the cruisers and probably other large conveyances as well might have dictated the position of the homesteads, or if there were some other reason for their off-the-road location.
Far off to the southwest loomed a small group of shimmering towers—perhaps a complex of high-rise apartments, still within easy distance of Washington, but giving their occupants the advantages of a rural life.
Blake, staying well out on the shoulder of the road, went down the hill and finally reached the cruiser. It had pulled off to one side of the highway and had settled down, roosting on stubby, peg-like legs that held it six feet or so above the ground. Close up, it was even larger than it had appeared at a distance, rearing twenty feet or more above Blake’s head.
At its forward end a man sat, leaning against the flight of steps that led up to the cab. He sat flat, with his legs stuck out in front of him and he wore a greasy engineer’s cap pulled down almost to his eyes. His tunic was pulled up and bunched about his middle.
Blake stopped and stood looking down at him.
“Good morning, friend,” said Blake. “It looks to me that you are in trouble.”
“Greetings to you, Brother,” said the man, taking in Blake’s black robe and knapsack. “You are seeing right. Burned out a jet and she began to whipsaw me. Lucky that I didn’t pile it up.”
He spat derisively in the dust. “Now we have to sit and wait. I radioed in for a new jet component and a repair crew and they take their time, of course.”
“You said we.”
“There are three of us,” said the engineer. “Two others are up there, sacking out.”
He jerked his thumb upward toward the small living quarters installed behind the cab.