I lay quiet for a moment, letting where I was soak into me —for now I knew I was somewhere in the woods. The keening noise was the sound of wind blowing in the treetops, and the dampness underneath me was the dampness of woodland moss, and the smell was the smell of woods in autumn.
If it had not been for the cold and hurt, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad. For it was a pleasant place. And I hurt only when I moved. Maybe if I could suck the blackness inside of me again, it would be all right.
I tried, but the darkness wouldn’t come, and now I was beginning to remember about the car that had gone hurtling off the narrow curve and how the car had gone away and left me all alone, flying through the dark.
I am alive, I thought, aghast that I should be alive—remembering the tree that I had seen or sensed and that had seemed to come rushing out of the dark at me.
I opened up the fingers that had grabbed the moss and leaves and shook my hand to get rid of them. I put out both my hands to raise me up. I moved both my legs, pulling them beneath me. Both my arms and legs worked, so there was nothing broken, but my belly was a mass of soreness and there was a pain that went skittering through my chest.
So they had failed, after all, I thought—the Atwoods, the bowling balls, whatever one might call them. I was still alive, and I was free of them, and if I could reach a phone, there still was time to carry out my plan.
I tried to stand, but I couldn’t make it. I pushed myself to my feet and stood there for an instant while waves of pain washed over me. My nerve gave out and my knees folded and I slid to the ground and sat there, with my arms wrapped around me to hold in the pain that threatened to burst out.
I sat there for a long time and the edge of the hurt was dulled. It remained as a leaden lump of misery that settled somewhere in my middle.
Apparently I was on some sort of steep hillside and -the road must lay above me. I had to reach the road, I knew, for if I could reach it, there would be a chance that someone would come along and find me. I had no idea how far it might be up to the road—how far I had been thrown before I hit the tree or how far I might have rolled or slid once I hit the ground.
I had to reach the road, and if I couldn’t walk there, I’d have to creep or crawl. I couldn’t see the road; I couldn’t see a thing. I existed in a world of utter darkness. There were no stars. There was no light at all.
I got to my hands and knees and started creeping up the hill. I couldn’t go far at a time. I seemed to have no strength. I didn’t seem to hurt as much as I had before, but I petered out.
It was slow going and hard going. I ran into a tree and had to creep around it. I got entangled in a clump of what I took to be blackberry bushes and had to crawl some distance along the hill before I could bypass them. I came to the moldering trunk of a fallen tree and managed to claw my way over it and keep going.
I wondered what the time might be and felt along my wrist to see if I still had my watch. I did. I cut my fingers on the broken crystal. I held it to my ear and it wasn’t ticking. Not that it would have done me any good if it had been, for I couldn’t see it.
From far off I heard a murmur, different than the moaning of the wind blowing through the treetops. I lay still and strained my ears to identify it. Then suddenly it was louder and unmistakably a car.
The noise served like a goad and I scrambled madly up the hillside, but the mad scrambling was only motion mostly. It did little to speed up my progress.
The noise increased, and to my left I saw the blur of light thrown by the oncoming machine. The light dipped and disappeared, then appeared again closer.
I began to yell—not words, just yelling to attract attention —but the car swept around the curve above me, and no one seemed to hear me, for it kept going on. For an instant the light and the rushing body of it filled the horizon above the hill, and then it was gone, and I was left alone, crawling up the slope.
I closed my mind to everything except getting up the slope.
There would be, sometime, another car coming along the road, or the one that had passed would be coming back.
After a time—it seemed to me a long time—I finally made it.
I sat on the shoulder of the road and rested, then carefully got on my feet. The hurt still was there, but it didn’t seem as bad as it had been before. I was able to stand up, not too solid on my feet, but still able to stay standing.
It was a long way I had come, I thought. A long way since that night when I had found a trap set before my door. And yet, thinking back on it, the time bad not been long perhaps no more than forty hours or so.
And in that time I had played a futile game of chess with the thing that had been the trap. This night the game was meant to end, for I should be dead. The aliens, undoubtedly, had intended that I should be killed and at this moment, more than likely, believed that I was dead.
But I wasn’t dead. I probably had a cracked rib or two, and my midriff had taken a beating as it had slammed into the tree, but I was up and standing and I wasn’t beaten yet
In not too long there’d be another car. If I was lucky, there would be another car.
I was hit by a terrifying thought: What if the next car to come along this road should be another fashioned out of bowling balls?
I thought about it and it seemed unlikely. They only turned themselves into things for a certain purpose and it would not be reasonable to suppose they’d need a car again.
For they did not need a car to travel. They had their burrows for that. Through them they could travel from whatever place they were to anywhere on Earth and, more than possibly, from one place to another on the Earth. It was not too imaginative, I told myself, to envision the space occupied by Earth as laced and interlaced with a vast system of their burrows. Although I realized that “burrows” was, perhaps, not quite an accurate word.
I tried a step or two and found that I could walk. Perhaps, instead of waiting for a car, I should start walking on the road, out toward the main highway. There I would be sure of picking up some help. The rest of the night might pass upon this road without another car.
I went limping down the road and it wasn’t bad except that my chest was sore and pains went shooting through it at every step I took.
As I walked, the night seemed to grow a little brighter, as if a heavy bank of clouds had broken and was moving out
I had to stop every now and then to rest, and now, as I did, I glanced back the way I’d come and saw the reason for the light. A fire was burning in the woods behind me, and, as I watched, the flames shot up with a sudden gush, to leap into the sky, and through the redness of the glare I saw the shape of rafters.
It was the Belmont house, I knew; the Belmont house was burning!
I stood and stared at it and hoped to God that some of them would burn. But I knew they wouldn’t, that they would be safe within those burrows that led to some other world. I saw them, in my imagination, scurrying ‘for those holes, with the fire behind them—the simulated humans and the simulated furniture and all the rest of it changing into bowling balls and rolling for the holes.
And it was good, of course, but it didn’t mean a thing, for the Belmont house was a single camp of them. There were many other camps, in all parts of the world—other places where the tunnels stretched out to an unknown place, the home ground of the aliens. And that home ground, perhaps, was so close, through the science and the mystery of the tunnels, that it was but a second’s distance for them to be home. Two spaced lights raced around the curve behind me and bore straight down upon me. I waved my arms and yelled, then jumped awkwardly to one side as the car rushed past. Then the brake lights burned red holes in the night and the tires were screeching on the paving. The car began to back, reversing rapidly, until it came even with me.
A head stuck out of the driver’s window and a voice said: “What the hell? We thought that you were dead!”
Joy was running around the car, sobbing as she ran, and Higgins spoke again. “Talk to her,?
?? he said. “For God’s sake, talk to her. She is off her rocker. She set fire to a house.” Joy reached me with a rush. She put out her hands and grabbed me by the arms, with her fingers tight, as if she wanted to be sure that I was flesh and bone.
“One of them phoned,” she said, and she was choking as she said it, “and said that you were dead. They said nobody could fool around with them and get away with it. They said that you had tried and they had bumped you off. They said if I had any ideas, I better just forget them. They said—”
“What is she talking about, mister?” asked Higgins desperately. “I swear to God she’s nuts. She don’t make no sense to me. She phoned and asked about Old Windy and she was bawling at the time—but mad even when she was bawling …” “Are you hurt?” asked Joy.
“Just staved up a little. Maybe a rib or two is busted. But we haven’t got the time—”
“She talked me into driving out to Windy’s,” Larry Higgins said, “and she told him you were dead but to go ahead and do whatever you had wanted. So he loaded up a batch of skunks—”
“He did what?” I yelled, unable to believe it.
“He loaded up them skunks and then lit out for town.”
“Did I do wrong?” asked Joy. “You told me about the old man with the skunks and you said you’d talked to a cabdriver by the name of Larry Higgins and I—”
“No,” I told her, “you did right. You couldn’t have done righter.”
I put an arm around her and drew her close to me. It hurt my chest a little, but I didn’t give a damn.
“Turn on the radio,” I said to Higgins.
“But, Mister, we better be getting out of here. She set fire to that house. I tell you, I had no idea—”
“Turn on the radio!” I yelled.
Grumbling he pulled his head back into the car and fumbled at the radio.
We waited, and when it came the voice was excited: “… Thousands of them, millions of them! No one knows what they are or where they’re coming from …”
From everywhere, I thought. Not just from this city or this nation, but probably from everywhere on Earth, and they had no more than started, for the news would spread as the night went on.
Out on the hillside that afternoon there had been no way in which quick communication could be established, there was no way in which the good news could be spread. For the thing in the shape of a man that had been following me, and the little fractional thing that had been in my pocket in the guise of money, had been far from any tunnel, far from any line of communication.
But now the good news was going out, to all the aliens on the Earth, and perhaps to those other aliens out beyond the Earth, and it had only started now. Before it ended there would be a mountain of them, seeking to share in the ecstasy of this new perfume.
“First there were the skunks,” said the excited radio. “Someone dropped a large number of skunks at the intersection of Seventh and State, in the heart of town. No one need tell you what that would be like, with the show and the nightclub crowd.
“Police were told that the skunks were dumped by an old
eccentric with a beard, driving a pickup truck. But no sooner mad the police begun their hunt for him than these other :hings began arriving. Whether there is some connection between the skunks and these other things, no one yet can say. There were just a few of them at first, but they have been pouring in steadily ever since they started, appearing in the intersection in steady streams, coming in from all directions. They look like bowling balls—black and about the size of bowling balls—and the intersection and the four streets leading to it now are jammed with them.
“The skunks, when they were dumped out of the truck, were exhausted and confused, and they reacted rather violently against anything which might be close to them. This served to clear the area rather rapidly. Everyone who was there got out as fast as they were able. Cars were piled up for blocks and there were running people everywhere you looked. And then the first of these bowling balls arrived. Eyewitnesses tell us they bounced and skipped and gamboled in the street and that they chased the skunks, The skunks, quite naturally, did some more reacting. By this time the atmosphere in the vicinity of the intersection was becoming somewhat thick. People occupying the cars in the forefront of the traffic jam abandoned their machines and beat a fast retreat. And still the bowling balls poured in.
“They aren’t gamboling or skipping any more; there isn’t room for that. There is just a great, shivering, seething mass of them piled up at the intersection and overflowing down the streets, piling up in front of the jam-packed cars.
“From our position here, on top of the McCandless Building, it is an awful and fear-inspiring sight. No one, I repeat, knows what these things are or where they might have come from or what they might be here for …”
“That was Old Windy,” said Higgins breathlessly. “He was the one who dumped those skunks. And, I guess, from the sound of it, he must have got away.”
Joy looked up at me. “That was what you wanted? The thing that’s happening now?”
I nodded. “Now they know,” I said. “Now everyone will know. Now they will listen to us.”
“But what is going on?” howled Higgins. “Won’t someone explain it all to me? It is another Orson Welles—”
“Get into the car,” Joy said to me. “We’ll have to find a doctor for you.”
“Look, mister,” Higgins pleaded, “I didn’t know what I was getting into. She begged me to go with her. So I parked my hack and went. She said she had to find Old Windy fast. She said it was life or death.”
“Take it easy, Larry,” I told him. “It was a matter of life or death. You won’t get hurt on this one.”
“But she burned that house …”
“That was foolish of me,” Joy said. “Just a blind striking back, I guess. Thinking of it now, it doesn’t make much sense. But I had to hurt them somehow, and it was the only way I knew. When they phoned and said that you were dead—”
“We had them scared,” I said. “Otherwise they never would have phoned. Maybe they were afraid we were up to something they couldn’t even guess. That’s why they tried to kill me; that’s why they tried to scare you off.”
“The police,” shouted the man on the radio, “asks you, please, not to come downtown. There are tremendous traffic jams and you’ll only add to them. Stay home, stay calm . , .”
They had made a mistake, I thought. If they hadn’t phoned Joy, it probably would have been all right with them. I was still alive, of course, but it wouldn’t have taken them too long to have found out I was, and then they could have done me in in a proper style and, this time, without any slipup. But they had panicked and had made this one mistake, and it was all over now.
A ponderous shadow came loping down the road. A joyful, happy shadow that pranced excitedly even as it loped. It was big and shaggy, and out of the front end of it hung a lolling tongue.
It came up in front of us and plumped its bottom in the dust. It beat the ground with an enthusiastic tail.
“Pal, you did it,” said the Dog. “You got them out of hiding. You exposed them to the world. You made them show themselves. Now your people know—”
“But you!” I yelled at him. “You are in Washington!”
“There are many modes of traveling,” said the Dog, “that are faster than your planes and better ways of knowing where to find a being than your telephone.”
And that was right, I thought. For until this very morning he had been with us and then, at sunrise, he had been in Washington.
“Now it’s me that’s crazy,” said Higgins feebly. “There ain’t no such a thing as a talking dog.”
“Please stay calm,” screeched the man on the radio. “There is no need to panic. No one knows what these things are, of course, but there must be an explanation, perhaps a quite logical explanation. The police have the situation well in hand and there is no need to …”
“I thought I heard someone,” sai
d the Dog, “mention a word like doctor. I do not know this doctor.”
“It’s someone,” Joy said, “who fixes other persons’ bodies. Parker has been hurt.”
“Oh,” said the Dog, “so that is it. We have the concept, too, but ours works differently, no doubt. It is amazing, truly, how r^any identical goals are accomplished by many different techniques.”
“The mass of them is growing larger,” yelled the radio. “They are piled up to the sixth-story windows and they reach deep into the streets. And they seem to be coming faster now. The pile grows by the minute . ..”
“Now,” said the Dog, “with the mission finished, I must exclaim adieu. Not that I contributed greatly, but it’s been nice to visit here. You have a lovely planet. Hereafter you must the better hang tightly onto it.”
“But wait a moment,” I said. “There are a lot of things …” I spoke to empty air, for the Dog was gone. Not gone anywhere, just gone.
“I be damned,” said Higgins. “Was he really here or did I imagine it?”
And it was all right, I knew. He had been here, but now he had gone home—to that farther planet, to that strange dimension, to wherever he belonged. And he’d not have gone back, I knew, if there’d been further need of him.
We were all right now. The people knew about the bowling balls and they would listen now—the Old Man and the senator and the President and all the rest of them. They’d take the needed action, whatever that might be. Perhaps to start with they’d declare a moratorium on all business deals until they could separate the purely human deals from the alien deals. For the alien deals were fraudulent on the face of them because of the kind of money they had used. But even if they had not been fraudulent, it would have made no difference, for now the human race knew, or soon would know, what was going on and would move to stop it: right or wrong, they’d do whatever might be necessary to put an end to it.
I reached out and opened the rear door of the car and made a signal for Joy to get in.