I switched off the light and slid swiftly along the wall, just on the chance that someone or something had been hiding among the sheeted furniture and might decide to have a go at me.
Nothing did.
I waited some more.
The room went on being nothing but a room.
I soft-footed across it and went out into the entrance hall. I found the kitchen and the dining room and a study, where empty bookshelves gaped back at me like an old man with a toothless grin.
I didn’t find a thing.
The dust was heavy on the floor and I left tracks across it. The furniture all was sheeted. The place held a slightly musty smell. It had the feel of a house that had been left behind, a house that people had unaccountably walked away from and then never had come back to.
I had been a fool to come, I told myself. There was nothing here. I had simply allowed my imagination to run away with me.
But so long as I was here, I figured, I should make a job of it. Foolish as it all had been, it would be senseless to leave until I had seen the rest of the house, the upstairs and the basement.
I trailed back to the entry hall and started up the staircase, a spiral affair with gleaming rail and posts.
I had gotten three treads up when the voice stopped me.
“Mr. Graves,” it said.
It was a smooth and cultivated voice and it spoke in normal tones. And while it had some question in it, it was conversational. It brought my hair up straight, stiff upon my head, prickling at my scalp.
I spun around, scrabbling for the gun weighing down my pocket.
I had it halfway out when the voice spoke again. “I’m Atwood,” said the voice. “I’m sorry that the bell is broken.”
“I also knocked,” I said.
“I didn’t hear your knock. I was downstairs working.”
I could see him now, a dark figure in the hall. I let the gun slide back into the pocket.
“We could go downstairs,” saia Atwood, “and have a pleasant talk. This hardly is the place for an extended conversation.”
“If you wish,” I told him.
I came down the stairs and he led the way, down the hall and to the basement door. Light flooded up the stairway and I saw him now. He was a most ordinary-looking man, the quiet, pleasant, business type.
“I like it down here,” said Atwood, going easily and unconcernedly down the stairs. “The former owner fixed up this amusement room, which to my mind is far more livable than any other part of the house. I suppose that may be because the rest of the house is old and the room down here is a fairly new addition.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner and were in the amusement room.
It was a large place, running the entire length of the basement, with a fireplace at each end and some furniture scattered here and there on the red tile floor. A table stood against one wall, its top Uttered with papers; opposite the table, in the outer wall, was a hole-^a round hole bored into the wall, about the size to accommodate a bowling ball—and from it a cold wind swept and blew across-my ankles. And there was in the air, as well, the faintest suggestion of the shaving lotion smell.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Atwood watching me, and I tried to freeze my face—not into a frozen mask, but into the kind of mask that I imagined was my everyday appearance. And I must have done it, for there was no smile on Atwood’s face, as there might have been if he’d trapped me into some expression of bewilderment or fear.
“You are right,” I told him. “It is very livable.”
I said it simply to be saying something. For the place was not livable, not by human standards. Dust lay almost as deep in this room as it had upstairs, and there was small junk of all descriptions scattered all about and stacked into the corners.
“Won’t you have a chair?” said Atwood. He waved toward a deeply cushioned one that stood slantwise of the table.
I walked across the floor to reach it and the floor rustled underneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that I had walked across a large sheet of almost transparent plastic that lay crumpled on the floor.
“Something that the former owner left,” said Atwood carelessly. “Someday I’ll have to get around to cleaning up the place.”
I sat down in the chair.
“Your coat,” said Atwood.
“I believe that I will keep it. There seems to be a draft in here.”
I watched his face and there was no expression in it.
“You catch on quick,” said Atwood, but there was no menace in this tone. “Perhaps a bit too quick.”
I said nothing and he said, “Although I’m glad you came. It is not often that one meets a man of your fine perception.”
I kidded him: “Meaning that you’re about to offer me a job in your organization?”
“The thought,” said Atwood quietly, “has passed across my mind.”
I shook my head. “I doubt you have any need of me. You’ve already done a fair job of buying up the city.”
“City!” Atwood cried, outraged.
I nodded at him. -
He spun a chair out from the desk and sat down carefully.
“I see that you do not comprehend,” he told me. “I must put you right.”
“Please do,” I told him. “That is what I’m here for.”
Atwood leaned forward earnestly.
“Not the city,” he said quietly, tensely. “You must not sell me short. Far more than a city, Mr. Graves. Much more than a city. I think it’s safe to say it, for now no one can stop me. I am buying up the Earth!”
XVII
There are some ideas so monstrous, so perverted, so outrageous that one’s mind must take a little time to become accustomed to them.
And one of these ideas is that anyone should even think of trying to buy up the Earth. Conquer it—most certainly, for that is an old and fine and traditional idea that has been held by many men. Destroy it—that also is understandable, for there have been madmen who have used the threat of such destruction as an adjunct, if not the backbone, of their policy.
But buying it was unthinkable.
First of all, it was impossible, for no one had the money. And even if one had, it still was crazy—for what would one do with it once one got it bought? And, thirdly, it was unethical and a perversion of tradition, for one does not kill off utterly all his competitors if he’s a businessman. He may absorb them, or control them, but he does not kill them off.
Atwood sat there, poised on the edge of his chair, like an anxious hawk, and he must have read some censure into my very silence.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he told me. “It is entirely legal.”
“I suppose there’s not,” I said. Although I knew there was. If only 1 could have pulled the words together, I could have told him what was wrong with it.
“We are operating,” Atwood said, “within the human structure. We are operating within and abiding by your rules and regulations. Not only the rules and regulations, but even by your customs. We have violated not a single one of them. And I tell you, my friend, that is not an easy thing. It is rare that one can operate without violating custom.”
I tried to get some words out, but they gurgled in my throat and died. It was just as well. I was not even sure what I had meant to say.
“There’s nothing wrong,” said Atwood, “with our money or our securities.”
“Just one thing,” I said. “You have too much money, far too much of it.”
But it was not the idea of too much money that was bothering me. It was something else. Something far more important than having too much money.
It was the words he used and the way he used them. The way he said “our” to include himself and whoever was leagued with him; the way he used “your” to include all the world exclusive of his group. And the stress he’d put upon the fact that he had operated within the human structure.
It was as if my brain had split in two. As if one side of it sh
outed horror and the other pleaded reason. For the idea was too monstrous to even think about.
He was grinning at me now and J was filled with sudden rage. The shouting of the one side of my brain drowned out the reason and I came out of the chair, with my hand snaking the gun out of my pocket.
I would have shot him in that instant. Without mercy, without thinking, I would have shot to kill. Like stamping on a snake, like swatting at a fly—it was no more than that
But I didn’t get the chance to shoot.
For Atwood came unstuck.
I don’t know how to tell it. There is no way to tell it. It was something that no human had ever seen before. There are no words in any human language for the thing that Atwood did.
He didn’t fade or flicker. He didn’t suddenly melt down. Whatever it was he did, he did it all at once.
One second he was sitting there. And the next second he was gone. I didn’t see him go/
There was a tiny click, as if someone had dropped a light metallic object, and there was a flock of jet-black bowling balls that had not been there before bouncing on the floor.
My mind must have gone through certain acrobatics, but I was not aware of them. What I did, I seemed to do instinctively, without even thinking of it—unaware of the interplay of cause and effect, of fact, surmise, and hunch that must I have gone flashing through my brain to spur me into action.
I dropped the gun and stooped, grabbing up the sheet of plastic off the floor. And even as I grabbed it and began to shake it out, I moved toward the outer wall, heading for the hole from which blew the chilly breeze.
The bowling balls were coming at me, heading for the hole, and I was ready for them, with the plastic centered on the hole, a trap that waited for them.
The first one hit the hole and drove the plastic in and the second followed close behind—and the third and fourth and fifth.
I made a grab to bring the ends of the plastic sheet I together and pulled it from the hole, and inside of it the I jet-black bowling balls clicked excitedly as they knocked together.
There were others of them rolling in that basement room —the ones that had been scared off and had escaped the net and now were rolling frantically, seeking for a place to hide. I lifted up the bag of plastic and gave it a shake to settle the balls I’d caught well into its bottom. I twisted the neck of plastic tightly to hold them in and swung the bag thus formed across my shoulders. And all around me ran the whispering and the slithering as the other balls sought for shadowed corners.
“All right,” I yelled at them, “back into your hole! Back to where you came from!”
But there was no answer. They all were hidden now. Hidden in the shadow and among the junk and watching me from there. Not seeing me, perhaps. More like sensing, likely. But, no matter how they did it, watching.
I took a forward step and my foot came down on something. I jumped in sudden fright.
It was nothing but my gun, lying on the floor, dropped when I had grabbed the plastic.
I stood and looked at it and felt the shaking and the trembling that was inside of me, held inside of me and struggling to begin, but unable to begin because my body was too tight and tense to tremble. My teeth were trying to chatter and they couldn’t chatter, for my jaws were clamped together with such fanatic desperation that the muscles ached.
There were watchers everywhere and the cold wind blowing from the hole and the excited, not quite angry clicking of the balls in the sack across my shoulder. And the emptiness— the emptiness of a basement where there’d been two men and now was only one. And, worse than that, the howling emptiness of a universe insane and an Earth that had lost its meaning and a culture that now was lost and groping, although it did not know it yet.
Over and above it all was the smell—the scent I’d smelled that morning—the odor of these creatures, whoever they might be, wherever they might come from, whatever was their purpose. But certainly nothing of the Earth, not of our old, familiar planet—nothing that man had ever known before.
I fought against admitting what I knew—that here I faced a life form from outside, from somewhere other than this planet where I at this moment stood. But there was no other answer.
I let the bag down from my shoulder and stooped to scoop up the gun, and as I reached out my fingers for it I saw that something else lay on the floor a little distance from it.
My fingers let the gun go and darted out and picked up this other object, and as they closed upon it I saw it was a doll. Even before I had a chance to look at it, I knew what kind of doll it was, remembering the tiny metallic click I’d heard as Atwood disappeared.
I was right. The doll was Atwood. Every line upon his face, every feature of him, the very feeling of him. As if someone had taken the living Atwood and compressed him to, perhaps, a hundredth of his size, being careful in the process not to change him, not to distort a single atom of the creature that was Atwood.
I dropped the doll into a pocket and grabbed up the gun. Then I straightened to my feet and slung the bag across my shoulder and went across the basement to the stairs.
I wanted to run. It took every ounce of will power that I had to keep my feet from running. But I forced myself to walk. As if I didn’t care, as if I weren’t scared, as if there were nothing in all God’s world or in the universe that could scare a man, that could make him run.
For I had to show them!
Unaccountably, on the spur of the moment, almost as if by instinct, I knew that I had to show them, that I had to act in this instant for all the rest of mankind, that I had to demonstrate the courage and determination and the basic stubbornness that was in the human race.
I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I walked across’the floor and climbed the stairs, without hurrying, feeling the daggers of their watching pointed at my back. I reached the top of the stairs and closed the door behind me, being careful not to bang it.
Then, free of the watching eyes, free of the need of acting, I stumbled down the hallway and somehow got the front door open and felt the clean sweep of night air from across the lake, cleaning my nostrils and my brain of the stench in the basement room.
I found a tree and leaned against it, weak and winded, as if I’d run a race, and retching, sick to the core and soul of me. I shook and gagged and vomited, and the taste of bile, biting in my throat and mouth, was almost a welcome taste—the taste, somehow, of a basic and a bare humanity.
I stayed there, with my forehead leaning on the roughness of the trunk, and the roughness was a comfort, a contact once again with the world I knew. I heard the booming of the waves upon the lakeshore and the death dance of the leaves, already dead but hanging still upon the parent tree, and from somewhere far off the distance-muffled barking of a dog.
Finally I straightened from the tree and used my sleeve to wipe my mouth and chin. For now it was time to get to doing. Now I had something to support my story, a sack full of things that would support my story, and somehow or other I had to get the story told.
I hoisted the sack back on my shoulder, and as I did so I caught the faint edge of the alien odor once again.
My legs were weak and my gut was sore and I felt cold all over. What I needed more than anything, I told myself, was a slug of booze.
The car was a dark blur in the driveway and I headed for it, none too steady. Behind me the house loomed up, with the moonlight still breaking into sharded silver from the one window, high up in a gable.
A funny thought hit me: I’d left the window open, and maybe I should go back and close it, for the wind could blow leaves into the rooms with their white-shrouded furniture and the rain would drive in on the carpeting and when the snows came there would be little drifts of white running in the room.
I laughed harshly at myself for thinking such a thing when every minute was a minute to be used in getting out and as far away as possible from this house hi Timber Lane.
I reached the car and swung open the door next to the wheel.
Something stirred in the opposite side of the seat, and it said to me: “I am glad to see you back. I was worrying about how you were getting on.”
I froze in unbelieving terror.
For the thing sitting in the seat, the thing that had spoken to me, was the happy, shaggy dog I’d met for the second time that very evening on the sidewalk in front of my apartment house!
XVIII
“I see,” said the Dog, “that you have one of them. Hang onto it tight. I can testify they’re slippery characters.”
And he told me that when I had all that I could do to hang on to the edges of my sanity.
I just stood there, I guess. There was nothing else to do. Get belted over the head often enough and you turn sort of dopey.
“Well,” said the Dog reprovingly, “it would seem that now’s the time for you to ask me who the hell I am.”
“All right,” I croaked. “Just who the hell are you?”
“Now,” said the Dog, delighted, “I am glad you asked me that. For I can tell you frankly that I’m a competitor—I’m sure competitor is the proper term—of the thing you have there in the sack.”
“That tells me a lot,” I said. “Mister, whoever you may be, you had better start explaining.”
“Why,” said the Dog, amazed at my stupidity, “I think it must be perfectly clear exactly what I am. As a competitor of these bowling balls, I must automatically be classified as a friend of yours.”
By this time the numbness had worn off enough for me to climb into the car. Somehow I didn’t seem to care too much what happened any more. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the Dog was another gang of bowling balls, made up like a dog instead of like a man, but if he was, I was set to take him on at any given moment. I had got over being scared, at least to some extent, and I was getting sore. It was a hell of a world, I told myself, when a man would come unstuck and turn into a bunch of jet-black balls and when a dog waited in a car and struck up a sprightly conversation as soon as one showed up.