The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  He now had a curved-front house. Although it was, actually, not as simple as all that, for the curvature was not in proportion to what actually would have happened in case of such a feat. The curve was long and graceful and somehow not quite apparent. It was as if the front of the house had been eliminated and an illusion of the rest of the house had been summoned to mask the disappearance.

  Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there.

  And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit.

  There was no front to the house.

  Then he was running around the house, hardly knowing he was running, and there was a fear inside of him at what had happened to the house.

  But the back of the house was all right. It was exactly as it had always been.

  He clattered up the stoop with Beasly and Towser running close behind him. He pushed open the door and burst into the entry and scrambled up the stairs into the kitchen and went across the kitchen in three strides to see what had happened to the front of the house.

  At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room.

  It was night outside. There could be no doubt of that. He had seen the fireflies flickering in the brush and weeds and the street lamps had been lit and the stars were out.

  But a flood of sunlight was pouring through the windows of the living room and out beyond the windows lay a land that was not Willow Bend.

  “Beasly,” he gasped, “look out there in front!”

  Beasly looked.

  “What place is that?” he asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Towser had found his dish and was pushing it around the kitchen floor with his nose, by way of telling Taine that it was time to eat.

  Taine went across the living room and opened the front door. The garage, he saw, was there. The pickup stood with its nose against the open garage door and the car was safe inside.

  There was nothing wrong with the front of the house at all.

  But if the front of the house was all right, that was all that was.

  For the driveway was chopped off just a few feet beyond the tail end of the pickup and there was no yard or woods or road. There was just a desert – a flat, far-reaching desert, level as a floor, with occasional boulder piles and haphazard clumps of vegetation and all of the ground covered with sand and pebbles. A big blinding sun hung just above a horizon that seemed much too far away and a funny thing about it was that the sun was in the north, where no proper sun should be. It had a peculiar whiteness, too.

  Beasly stepped out on the porch and Taine saw that he was shivering like a frightened dog.

  “Maybe,” Taine told him, kindly, “you’d better go back in and start making us some supper.”

  “But, Hiram –”

  “It’s all right,” said Taine. “It’s bound to be all right.”

  “If you say so, Hiram.”

  He went in and the screen door banged behind him and in a minute Taine heard him in the kitchen.

  He didn’t blame Beasly for shivering, he admitted to himself. It was a sort of shock to step out of your front door into an unknown land. A man might eventually get used to it, of course, but it would take some doing.

  He stepped down off the porch and walked around the truck and around the garage corner and when he rounded the corner he was half prepared to walk back into familiar Willow Bend – for when he had gone in the back door the village had been there.

  There was no Willow Bend. There was more of the desert, a great deal more of it.

  He walked around the house and there was no back to the house. The back of the house now was just the same as the front had been before – the same smooth curve pulling the sides of the house together.

  He walked on around the house to the front again and there was desert all the way. And the front was still all right. It hadn’t changed at all. The truck was there on the chopped-off driveway and the garage was open and the car inside.

  Taine walked out a ways into the desert and hunkered down and scooped up a handful of the pebbles and the pebbles were just pebbles.

  He squatted there and let the pebbles trickle through his fingers.

  In Willow Bend there was a back door and there wasn’t any front. Here, wherever here might be, there was a front door, but there wasn’t any back.

  He stood up and tossed the rest of the pebbles away and wiped his dusty hands upon his britches.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught a sense of movement on the porch and there they were.

  A line of tiny animals, if animals they were, came marching down the steps, one behind the other. They were four inches high or so and they went on all four feet, although it was plain to see that their front feet were really hands, not feet. They had ratlike faces that were vaguely human, with noses long and pointed. They looked like they might have scales instead of hide, for their bodies glistened with a rippling motion as they walked. And all of them had tails that looked very much like the coiled-wire tails one finds on certain toys and the tails stuck straight up above them, quivering as they walked.

  They came down the steps in single file, in perfect military order, with half a foot or so of spacing between each one of them.

  They came down the steps and walked out into the desert in a straight, undeviating line as if they knew exactly where they might be bound. There was something deadly purposeful about them and yet they didn’t hurry.

  Taine counted sixteen of them and he watched them go out into the desert until they were almost lost to sight.

  There go the ones, he thought, who came to live with me. They are the ones who fixed up the ceiling and who repaired Abbie’s television set and jiggered up the stove and radio. And more than likely, too, they were the ones who had come to Earth in the strange milk-glass contraption out there in the woods.

  And if they had come to Earth in that deal out in the woods, then what sort of place was this?

  He climbed the porch and opened the screen door and saw the neat, six-inch circle his departing guests had achieved in the screen to get out of the house. He made a mental note that some day, when he had the time, he would have to fix it.

  He went in and slammed the door behind him.

  “Beasly,” he shouted.

  There was no answer.

  Towser crawled from beneath the love seat and apologized.

  “It’s all right, pal,” said Taine. “That outfit scared me, too.”

  He went into the kitchen. The dim ceiling light shone on the overturned coffee pot, the broken cup in the center of the floor, the upset bowl of eggs. One broken egg was a white and yellow gob on the linoleum.

  He stepped down on the landing and saw that the screen door in the back was wrecked beyond repair. Its rusty mesh was broken – exploded might have been a better word – and a part of the frame was smashed.

  Taine looked at it in wondering admiration.

  “The poor fool,” he said. “He went straight through it without opening it at all.”

  He snapped on the light and went down the basement stairs. Halfway down he stopped in utter wonderment.

  To his left was a wall – a wall of the same sort of material as had been used to put in the ceiling.

  He stooped and saw that the wall ran clear across the basement, floor to ceiling, shutting off the workshop area.

  And inside the workshop, what?

  For one thing, he remembered, the computer that Henry had sent over just this morning. Three trucks, Beasly had said – three truckloads of equipment delivered straight into their paws!

  Tai
ne sat down weakly on the steps.

  They must have thought, he told himself, that he was co-operating! Maybe they had figured that he knew what they were about and so went along with them. Or perhaps they thought he was paying them for fixing up the TV set and the stove and radio.

  But to tackle first things first, why had they repaired the TV set and the stove and radio? As a sort of rental payment? As a friendly gesture? Or as a sort of practice run to find out what they could about this world’s technology? To find, perhaps, how their technology could be adapted to the materials and conditions on this planet they had found?

  Taine raised a hand and rapped with his knuckles on the wall beside the stairs and the smooth white surface gave out a pinging sound.

  He laid his ear against the wall and listened closely and it seemed to him he could hear a low-key humming, but if so it was so faint he could not be absolutely sure.

  Banker Stevens’ lawn mower was in there, behind the wall, and a lot of other stuff waiting for repair. They’d take the hide right off him, he thought, especially Banker Stevens. Stevens was a tight man.

  Beasly must have been half-crazed with fear, he thought. When he had seen those things coming up out of the basement, he’d gone clean off his rocker. He’d gone straight through the door without even bothering to try to open it and now he was down in the village yapping to anyone who’d stop to listen to him.

  No one ordinarily would pay Beasly much attention, but if he yapped long enough and wild enough, they’d probably do some checking. They’d come storming up here and they’d give the place a going over and they’d stand goggle-eyed at what they found in front and pretty soon some of them would have worked their way around to sort of running things.

  And it was none of their business, Taine stubbornly told himself, his ever-present business sense rising to the fore. There was a lot of real estate lying around out there in his front yard and the only way anyone could get to it was by going through his house. That being the case, it stood to reason that all that land out there was his. Maybe it wasn’t any good at all. There might be nothing there. But before he had other people overrunning it, he’d better check and see.

  He went up the stairs and out into the garage.

  The sun was still just above the northern horizon and there was nothing moving.

  He found a hammer and some nails and a few short lengths of plank in the garage and took them in the house.

  Towser, he saw, had taken advantage of the situation and was sleeping in the gold-upholstered chair. Taine didn’t bother him.

  Taine locked the back door and nailed some planks across it. He locked the kitchen and the bedroom windows and nailed planks across them, too.

  That would hold the villagers for a while, he told himself, when they came tearing up here to see what was going on.

  He got his deer rifle, a box of cartridges, a pair of binoculars and an old canteen out of a closet. He filled the canteen at the kitchen tap and stuffed a sack with food for him and Towser to eat along the way, for there was no time to wait and eat.

  Then he went into the living room and dumped Towser out of the gold-upholstered chair.

  “Come on, Tows,” he said. “We’ll go and look things over.”

  He checked the gasoline in the pickup and the tank was almost full.

  He and the dog got in and he put the rifle within easy reach. Then he backed the truck and swung it around and headed out, north, across the desert.

  It was easy traveling. The desert was as level as a floor. At times it got a little rough, but no worse than a lot of the back roads he traveled hunting down antiques.

  The scenery didn’t change. Here and there were low hills, but the desert itself kept on mostly level, unraveling itself into that far-off horizon. Taine kept on driving north, straight into the sun. He hit some sandy stretches, but the sand was firm and hard and he had no trouble.

  Half an hour out he caught up with the band of things – all sixteen of them – that had left the house. They were still traveling in line at their steady pace.

  Slowing down the truck, Taine traveled parallel with them for a time, but there was no profit in it; they kept on traveling their course, looking neither right or left.

  Speeding up, Taine left them behind.

  The sun stayed in the north, unmoving, and that certainly was queer. Perhaps, Taine told himself, this world spun on its axis far more slowly than the Earth and the day was longer. From the way the sun appeared to be standing still, perhaps a good deal longer.

  Hunched above the wheel, staring out into the endless stretch of desert, the strangeness of it struck him for the first time with its full impact.

  This was another world – there could be no doubt of that – another planet circling another star, and where it was in actual space no one on Earth could have the least idea. And yet, through some machination of those sixteen things walking straight in line, it also was lying just outside the front door of his house.

  Ahead of him a somewhat larger hill loomed out of the flatness of the desert. As he drew nearer to it, he made out a row of shining objects lined upon its crest. After a time he stopped the truck and got out with the binoculars.

  Through the glasses, he saw that the shining things were the same sort of milk-glass contraptions as had been in the woods. He counted eight of them, shining in the sun, perched upon some sort of rock-gray cradles. And there were other cradles empty.

  He took the binoculars from his eyes and stood there for a moment, considering the advisability of climbing the hill and investigating closely. But he shook his head. There’d be time for that later on. He’d better keep on moving. This was not a real exploring foray, but a quick reconnaissance.

  He climbed into the truck and drove on, keeping watch upon the gas gauge. When it came close to half full he’d have to turn around and go back home again.

  Ahead of him he saw a faint whiteness above the dim horizon line and he watched it narrowly. At times it faded away and then came in again, but whatever it might be was so far off he could make nothing of it.

  He glanced down at the gas gauge and it was close to the halfway mark. He stopped the pickup and got out with the binoculars.

  As he moved around to the front of the machine he was puzzled at how slow and tired his legs were and then remembered – he should have been in bed many hours ago. He looked at his watch and it was two o’clock and that meant, back on Earth, two o’clock in the morning. He had been awake for more than twenty hours and much of that time he had been engaged in the back-breaking work of digging out the strange thing in the woods.

  He put up the binoculars and the elusive white line that he had been seeing turned out to be a range of mountains. The great, blue, craggy mass towered up above the desert with the gleam of snow on its peaks and ridges. They were a long way off, for even the powerful glasses brought them in as little more than a misty blueness.

  He swept the glasses slowly back and forth and the mountains extended for a long distance above the horizon line.

  He brought the glasses down off the mountains and examined the desert that stretched ahead of him. There was more of the same that he had been seeing – the same floorlike levelness, the same occasional mounds, the self-same scraggy vegetation.

  And a house!

  His hands trembled and he lowered the glasses, then put them up to his face again and had another look. It was a house, all right. A funny-looking house standing at the foot of one of the hillocks, still shadowed by the hillock so that one could not pick it out with the naked eye.

  It seemed to be a small house. Its roof was like a blunted cone and it lay tight against the ground, as if it hugged or crouched against the ground. There was an oval opening that probably was a door, but there was no sign of windows.

  He took the binoculars down again and stared at the hillock. Four or five miles away,
he thought. The gas would stretch that far and even if it didn’t he could walk the last few miles into Willow Bend.

  It was queer, he thought, that a house should be all alone out here. In all the miles he’d traveled in the desert he’d seen no sign of life beyond the sixteen little ratlike things that marched in single file, no sign of artificial structure other than the eight milk-glass contraptions resting in their cradles.

  He climbed into the pickup and put it into gear. Ten minutes later he drew up in front of the house, which still lay within the shadow of the hillock.

  He got out of the pickup and hauled his rifle after him. Towser leaped to the ground and stood with his hackles up, a deep growl in his throat.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” asked Taine.

  Towser growled again.

  The house stood silent. It seemed to be deserted.

  The walls were built, Taine saw, of rude, rough masonry crudely set together, with a crumbling, mudlike substance used in lieu of mortar. The roof originally had been of sod and that was queer, indeed, for there was nothing that came close to sod upon this expanse of desert. But now, although one could see the lines where the sod strips had been fit together, it was nothing more than earth baked hard by the desert sun.

  The house itself was featureless, entirely devoid of any ornament, with no attempt at all to soften the harsh utility of it as a simple shelter. It was the sort of thing that a shepherd people might have put together. It had the look of age about it; the stone had flaked and crumbled in the weather.

  Rifle slung beneath his arm, Taine paced toward it. He reached the door and glanced inside and there was darkness and no movement.

  He glanced back for Towser and saw that the dog had crawled beneath the truck and was peering out and growling.

  “You stick around,” said Taine. “Don’t go running off.”

  With the rifle thrust before him, Taine stepped through the door into the darkness. He stood for a long moment to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.

  Finally he could make out the room in which he stood. It was plain and rough, with a rude stone bench along one wall and queer unfunctional niches hollowed in another. One rickety piece of wooden furniture stood in a corner, but Taine could not make out what its use might be.