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or so into the mass of flowers. His trail was clearly shown, for the plants
had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were
a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.
The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it
the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.
There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and
then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight
into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken
wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.
But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he
played, he couldn't leave the village. For the village was closed in by some
sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.
A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible
sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it
made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the
sky and it didn't stop, but kept on and on.
Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for
long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had
been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had
been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost
unendurable.
Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.
And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the
siren down at the village hall.
By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the
street - a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of
them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were
the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats
which must not be left behind.
There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the
surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long
chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her
sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which
floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim
determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all
the world) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in
wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a
somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came
Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face,
but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy
Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals
yelling, and cat-calling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to
contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.
I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn't run like
all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed
down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper
Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For
insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had
somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.
I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big
to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to
grab a hold of. So I didn't hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me.
The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.
I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.
'Come on, Brad,' she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren
noise.
I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was
a big and powerful thing. The top was down and if felt funny to be riding in
a car that didn't have a top.
The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting
with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment
there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and
in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed
within one's mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved
away.
One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd
feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that
now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.
'This is a nice car you have,' I said, not knowing what to say, but
knowing that I should say something.
'Father gave it to me,' she said, 'on my last birthday.'
It moved along and you couldn't hear the motor. All you could hear was
the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.
'Brad,' she asked, 'what's going on? Someone told me that your car was
wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren
blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road...'
I told her. 'There's a fence of some sort built around the town.'
'Who would build a fence?'
'It's not that kind of fence. You can't see this fence.'
We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They
were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the
road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.
'You said there was a fence.'
'There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a
man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It's the kind of fence you'd
expect in fairyland.'
'Brad,' she said, 'you know there is no fairyland.'
'An hour ago I knew,' I said. 'I don't know any more.'
We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of
the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at
the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked
up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard,
the receptionist at Doc Fabian's office, was standing on a box out on the
sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the
owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was
standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of
waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on
trying.
Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and
shut off the motor.
A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He
leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.
'How are things going, pal?' he asked.
I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then
suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.
'Yeah,' he said, 'the guy who smacked your car.' He straightened and
reached out his hand. 'Name is Gabriel Thomas,' he said. 'You just call me
Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there.'
I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.
'Mr Thomas,' Nancy said, 'I heard about the accident. Brad won't talk
about it.'
'Well,' said Gabe, 'it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing
there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of
stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it.'
'Did you phone your company?' I asked.
'Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I'm
drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn't dare to drive and I'm holing up
somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up.'
'Did they say so, Mr Thomas?'
'No, miss,' he said, 'but I know how them jokers think. And the thing
that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain't a drinking
man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a
row.'
He said to me, 'I don't know what to do. I can't get out of here.
There's no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five
hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest
one a baby. I don't know what she'll do. She's used to it, of course, with
me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time
it takes for me to make a run. What if I can't get back for two or three
weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won't be any
money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six
kids to feed.'
'Maybe you won't be here for long,' I said, doing my best to make him
feel a little better. 'Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something
about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine
that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your...'
He made an insulting, disgusted noise. 'Not that bunch,' he said. 'Not
that gang of chisellers.'
'It's too soon to start worrying,' I told him. 'We don't know what has
happened and until we do...'
'I guess you're right,' he said. 'Of course, I'm not the only one. I
been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one.
I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while
ago and his wife is in the hospital over at - what's the name of that town?'
'Elmore,' Nancy said.
'Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his
mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe
it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town.
Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be
expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come.
Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind. And there
was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone,
and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out
from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have
travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home
early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for
them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them
out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are
a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs,
and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to
marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get
married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't.'
'You must have talked to a lot of people,' I said. 'Hush,' said Nancy.
Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of
the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his
arms to get the people quiet.
'Fellow citizens,' yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that
makes you sick at heart. 'Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet.'
Someone yelled, 'You tell 'em Higgy!' There was a wave of laughter, but
it was a nervous laugh.
'Friends,' said Higgy, 'we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably
have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of
stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened.'
'I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it
seemed the quickest way.'
'Ah, hell,' yelled someone. 'Get on with it, Higgy.'
No one laughed this time.
'Well, all right,' said Higgy. 'I'll get on with it. I don't know quite
how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around
us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how
it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows.
There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only
temporary; it may go away.'
'What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this
together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't
got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't
go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our
telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty
of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run
short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we
need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the
truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things
that are not alive.'
'Just a minute, mayor,' someone shouted.
'Yes,' the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt
him.
'Was that you, Len?' he asked.
'Yes, it was,' said the man.
I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science
teacher.
'What did you want?' asked Higgy.
'I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours - about only
non-living matter getting through the barrier - on the car that was parked
on the Coon Valley road.'
'Why, yes,' said Higgy, condescendingly, 'that is exactly what I was
basing the statement on. What do you know about it?'
'Nothing,' Len Streeter told him. 'Nothing about the car itself. But I
presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon
within well restricted bounds of logic.'
'That's right,' said Higgy, sanctimoniously. 'That's exactly what we
intend to do.'
And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what
Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
'In that case,' said Streeter. 'I might caution you against accepting
facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no
human in the car, there was nothing living in it.'
'Well, there wasn't,' Higgy argued. 'The man who had been driving it
had left and gone away somewhere.'
'Humans,' said Streeter, patiently, 'aren't the only forms of life. We
can't be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty
sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut
up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It
was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many
different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life,
just the same as we are.'
Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn't
know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his
life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.
'You know, Higgy,' said a voice I recognized as DocFabian's, 'our young
friend is right. Of course there would be microorganisms. Some of the rest
of us should have thought of it at once.'
'Well,' all right, then,' said Higgy. 'If you say so, Doc. Let's say
that Len is right. It don't make any difference, does it?'
'At the moment, no,' said Doc.
'The only point I wanted to make,' said Streeter, 'is that life can't
be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get
a right start at it. We shouldn't begin with a lot of misconceptions.'
'I got a question, mayor,' said someone else. I tried to see who it
was, but couldn't.
'Go ahead,' said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to
break up this Streeter business.
'Well, it's like this,' said the man. 'I've been working on the highway
job south of town. And now I can't get to it and maybe they'll hold the job
for me for a day or two, but it isn't reasonable to expect the contractor to
hold it very long. He's got a contract he has to meet - a time limit, you
know, and he pays a penalty for every day he's late. So he's got to have men
to do the job. He can't hold no job open for more than a day or two.'
'I know all that,' said Higgy.
'I ain't the only one,' said the man, 'There are a lot of other fellows
who work out of town. I don't know about the rest of them, but I got to have
my pay. I ain't got any backlog I can fall back on. What's going to happen
to us if we can't get to our jobs and there isn't any pay cheque and no
money in the bank?'
'I was coming to that,' said Higgy. 'I know exactly what your situation
is. And the situations of a lot of other men. There isn't enough work in a
little town like this for everyone who lives here, so a great many of our
residents have work outside of town. And I know a lot of you haven't too
much money and that you need your pay cheques. We hope this thing clears up
soon enough that you can go back and your jobs will still be there.'
'But let me tell you this. Let me make a promise. If it doesn't clear
up, there aren't any of you going to go hungry. There aren't any of you who
are going to be turned out of your homes because you can't make your
payments or can't manage to scrape the rent together. There won't nothing
happen to you. A lot of people are going to be without jobs because of what
has happened, but you'll be taken care of, every one of you. I am going to
name a committee that will talk with the merchants and the bank and we'll
arrange for a line of credit that will see you through. Anyone who needs a
loan or credit can be sure of getting it.'
Higgy looked down at Daniel Willoughby, who was standing a step or two
below him.
'Ain't that right, Dan?' he demanded.
'Yes,' said the banker. 'Yes. Sure, it's quite all right. We'll do
everything we can.'
But he didn't like it. You could see he didn't. It hurt him to say it
was all right. Daniel liked security, good security, for each dollar he put
out.
'It's too early yet,' said Higgy, 'to know what has happened to us. By
tonight maybe we'll know a whole lot more about it. The main thing is to
keep calm and not start going off half- cocked.
'I can't pretend to know what is going to happen. If this barrier stays
in place, there'll be some difficulties. But as it stands right now, it's
not entirely bad. Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village
that wasn't too well known. There wasn't, I suppose, much reason that we
should have been well known. But now we're getting publicity over the entire
world. We're in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. I'd like Joe Evans
to come up here and tell you all about it.'
He looked around and spotted Joe in the crowd.
'You folks,' he said, 'make way, won't you, so Joe can come up here.'
The editor climbed the steps and turned around to face the crowd.
'There isn't much to tell so far,' he said. 'I've had calls from most
of the wire services and from several newspapers. They all wanted to know
what was going on. I told them what I could, but it wasn't much. One of the
TV stations over in Elmore is sending a mobile camera unit. The phone was
still ringing when I left the house and I suppose there are calls coming
into the office, too.
'I think we can expect that the news media will pay a lot of attention
to the situation here and there's no question in my mind that the state and
federal governments will take a hand in it, and if I understand it rightly,
more than likely the scientific community will have a considerable interest,
as well.'
The man who had the highway job spoke up again. 'Joe, you think them
science fellows can get it figured out?'
'I don't know,' said Joe.
Hiram Martin had pushed his way through the crowd and was crossing the
street. He had a purposeful look about hint and I wondered what he could be
up to. Someone else was asking a question, but the sight of Hiram had
distracted me and I lost the gist of it.
'Brad,' said someone at my elbow.
I looked around.
Hiram was standing there. The trucker, I saw, had left.
'Yes,' I said. 'What is it?'
'If you got the time,' said Hiram. 'I'd like to talk with you.'
'Go ahead,' I said. 'I have the time.'
He jerked his head toward the village hall.
'All right,' I said.
I opened the door and got out.
'I'll wait for you,' said Nancy.
Hiram moved off around the crowd, flanking it, heading for the side
door of the hail. I followed close behind him.
But I didn't like it.
Hiram's office was a little cubbyhole just off the stall where the fire
engine and ladder rig were housed. There was barely room in it for two
chairs and a desk. On the wall above the desk hung a large and garish
calendar with a naked woman on it.
And on the desk stood one of the dialless telephones.
Hiram gestured at it. 'What is that?' he asked.
'It's a telephone,' I said. 'Since when did you get so important that
you have two phones?'
'Take another look,' he said.
'It's still a telephone,' I said.
'A closer look,' he told me.
'It's a crazy looking thing. It' hasn't any dial.'
'Anything else?'
'No, I guess not. It just doesn't have a dial.'
'And,' said Hiram, 'it has no connection cord.'
'I hadn't noticed that.'
'That's funny,' Hiram said.
'Why funny?' I demanded. 'What the hell is going on? You didn't get me
in here just to show me a phone.'
'It's funny,' Hiram said, 'because it was in your office.'
'It couldn't be. Ed Adler came in yesterday and took out my phone. For
non-payment of my bill.'
'Sit down, Brad,' he said.
I sat down and he sat down facing me. His face was still pleasant
enough, but there was that odd glitter in his eyes - the glitter that in the
olden days I'd seen too often in his eyes when he'd cornered me and knew he
had me cornered and was about to force me to fight him, in the course of
which endeavour he would beat the living Jesus out of me.
'You never saw this phone?' he asked.
I shook my head. 'When I left the office yesterday I had no telephone.
Not this one or any other.'
'That's strange,' he said.
'As strange to me as to you,' I told him. 'I don't know what you're
getting at. Suppose you try to tell me.'
I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the
moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he
couldn't tie me to the telephone.
'All right,' he said, 'I'll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw
it. He'd sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was
walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone
standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might
have made him sore.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore.'
'He'd sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of
was that you'd talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of
failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends.'
'I suppose, he was so sore that he broke in and took it.'
'No,' said Hiram, 'he never did break in. He went down to the bank and
talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key.'
'Without considering,' I said, 'that I was renting the office.'
'But you hadn't paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me,
I'd figure Daniel had the right.'
'In my book,' I told him, 'Tom and Daniel broke into my place and
robbed me.'
'I told you. They didn't do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it.
Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you'd
never seen this phone, that you never owned it.'
'That's beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no
right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn't walk
away with some other stuff?'
'You know damn well he didn't,' Hiram told me. 'You said you wanted to
hear about this.'
'So go ahead and tell me.'
'Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away
that it was a different kind of phone. It didn't have a dial and it wasn't
connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached
the door, the phone rang.'
'It what?'
'It rang.'
'But it wasn't connected.'
'I know, but anyhow, it rang.'
'So he answered it,' I said, 'and there was Santa Claus.'
'He answered it,' said Hiram, 'and there was Tupper Tyler.'
'Tupper! But Tupper...'
'Yeah, I know,' said Hiram. 'Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so.
But Tom said it was Tupper's voice. He said he couldn't be mistaken.'
'And what did Tupper tell him?'
'Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he
was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you're not authorized to use it.
Then the phone went dead.'
'Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you.'
'No, he wasn't. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and
Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to
get even with him.'
'But that's crazy,' I protested. 'Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag
like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?'
'I know,' said Hiram.
'You mean you believe all this?'
'You bet I believe it. There's something wrong, something awfully
wrong.'
But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had
hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn't worked that way and now he
was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while
he'd start getting sore.
He was that kind of jerk.
'When did Tom tell you all of this?'
'This morning.'
'Why not last night? If he thought it was so important...'
"But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a
joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was
important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and
heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the
joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work...'
'Yes, I see,' I said. 'But now he thinks that it was really Tupper
calling and that the call actually was for me.'
'Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times
early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no
one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It
bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see.'
'And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me.'
Hiram's face hardened. 'I know you're up to something,' he said. 'I
know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken
Stiffy in to Elmore.'
'Yes, I did,' I said. 'I found his keys where they had fallen out of
his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and
everything was all right.'
'You sneaked in,' Hiram said. 'You turned off your lights to go up
Stiffy's lane.'
'I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them
fixed before I left the shack.'
It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram
didn't press the point.
'This morning,' he said, 'me and Tom went out to the shack.'
'So it was Tom who was spying on me.'
Hiram grunted. 'He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of
you.'
'And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left.'
'Yeah,' said Hiram, 'we broke in. And we found more of them telephones.
A whole box full of them.'
'You can quit looking at me like that,' I said. 'I saw no telephones. I
didn't snoop around.'
I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in
full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could
not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were
neck-deep in it.
And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself
were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all
about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused.
And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he
hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.
Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in
Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in
the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used
the phones for communication.
Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever
know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide
them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of
the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few
hours' time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.
Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.
Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the
phones - and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor
unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the
aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures
and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.
For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood
had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced
financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with
me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who
seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.
'Well?' asked the constable.
'You want to know what I know about it?'
'Yes, I do,' said Hiram, 'and if you know what's good for you...'
'Hiram,' I told him, 'don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look
as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do...'
Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.
'It's moving!' he yelled at us. 'The barrier is moving!'
Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside
people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the
middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on
her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.
I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She
had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the
kerb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and
vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there
the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed.
There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy
cut around them with a burst of speed.
'Do you know what happened?' she asked.
I shook my head. 'Just that the barrier is moving.'
We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't
even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no
traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.
She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up
ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a mass of jam-packed cars.
And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with
my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the
truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently
had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the
process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had
moved.
The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether
it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was
evidence of it.
Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an
invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a
long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, masses of
uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far
as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a
life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the masses
of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.
The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.
Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint
rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper
of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the
branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.
I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road,
working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the
road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running -
well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways
and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing
windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't
run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.
It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering
in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds,
retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the
surface of the land.
The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except
two leafless trees. And they, I thought - they would be left behind. For
they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it
was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been
right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a
certain condition of life.
But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.
There was no grass upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All
that was green was gone.
I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my
fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and
harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it
ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting
of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root
existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had
been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here
was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before
the barrier.
Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along
the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm
which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a
ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing
through the upper emptiness.
'Nancy,' I said, but she did not answer.
I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me
when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of
her.
I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that
was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out
on the pavement - and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how
I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was
not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.
The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match
its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited
commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the
door behind me.
'...called out the national guard and had officially informed
Washington. The first units will move out in another - no, here is word just
now that they have already moved out...'
'That,' said Nancy, 'is us he's talking about.'
I reached out and twisted the dial. '... just came in. The barrier is
moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast
it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward
from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing
wildly from it. And here is more - the barrier is moving no faster than a
man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile...'
And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile
from its starting point.
'... question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is
there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end
to it?'
'Brad,' Nancy said, 'do you think it will push everyone off the earth?
Everyone but the people here in Millville?'
'I don't know,' I said, rather stupidly.
'And if it does, where will it push them'? Where is there to go?'
'... London and Berlin,' blared the radio speaker. 'Apparently the
Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been
no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something
about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if
there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a
situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But
there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of
defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it
be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place
in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy.'
The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been
listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so
behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great
windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the
people still retreated.
I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back
toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on
the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally
arrived to watch the moving barrier.
'...sweeping everything before it,' screamed the radio.
I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.
'Careful there,' I warned. 'Don't run into it.'
'I'll be careful,' said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.
'... like a wind,' the announcer said, 'blowing a long line of grass
and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind...'
And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning
dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a
solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal
and glass.
It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since
early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned
my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than
ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.
The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the
road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was
fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the
direction of the wind.
'Brad!' she shouted.
But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering
sound of raindrops splashing on the car.
The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over,
that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But
suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one
corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the
wind and that it was being held there.
With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with
astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.
They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming
sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.
'Hail,' Nancy shouted at me.
But it wasn't hail.
Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and
danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.
'Seeds!' I shouted back. 'Those things out there are seeds!' It was no
regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the
storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by
a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather;
There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face
of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had
ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and prepared it for the
seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.
The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing
silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of
sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something
had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain
and a wind blew out of nowhere.
'Brad,' said Nancy, 'I think I'm beginning to get scared.'
She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened,
hanging onto me.
'It makes me mad,' she said, 'I've never been scared, never my life.
Never scared like this.'
'It's all over now,' I said. 'The storm is ended and the barrier has
stopped moving. Everything's all right.'
'It's not like that at all,' she told me. 'It's only just beginning.'
A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in
sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no
longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when
the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.
The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at
us as he run.
We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there,
waiting for him.
He came up to us, panting with his running.
'Brad,' he gasped, 'maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom
Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with
what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something.'
'Why, that's crazy!' Nancy cried.
'Sure it is,' said Ed, 'but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take
too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything.
They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think
if it's right or wrong.'
I asked him: 'What do you have in mind?'
'You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or
two . . .'
I shook my head. 'I have too many things to do.'
'But, Brad...'
'I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a
thing to do with it.'
'That don't make no difference.'
'Yes, it does,' I said.
'Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones...'
Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut
her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it. '
'I know about those phones,' I said. 'Hiram told me all about them. Ed,
take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else
entirely.'
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.
'Forget about the phones,' I said.
I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a
thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I
had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I
couldn't take a chance.
'Brad,' warned Ed, 'you're walking into it.'
'I can't run away,' I told him. 'I can't run somewhere and hide. Not
from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram.'
He looked me up and down.
'No, I guess you can't,' he said. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a
thing or two to do.'
I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me. 'It's all right, Brad, but the
car's just down the road. I could drive you home.'
'I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of
being seen.'
'I'll stay with her,' said Ed, 'until she's inside the house.'
Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this - to a
state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the
street.
Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this
morning - a thing I probably should have done last night - get in touch with
Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for
in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some
connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange
research project down in Mississippi.
I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not
a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the
business section.
I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he
might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he
might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.
But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone
was ringing and Alf was on the line.
'I've been trying for an hour to get you,' he said. 'I wondered how you
were.'
'You know what happened, Alf?'
He told me that he did. 'Some of it,' he said.
'Minutes earlier,' I said, 'and I would have been with you instead of
penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first
appeared.'
I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the
barrier. Then I told him about the phones.
'They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to
them...'
'A way of getting information.'
'I gathered that was it.'
'Brad,' he said, 'I've got a terrible hunch.'
'So have I,' I said.
'Do you think this Greenbriar project...?'
'That's what I was thinking, too.'
I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth.'
had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were
a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.
The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it
the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.
There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and
then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight
into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken
wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.
But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he
played, he couldn't leave the village. For the village was closed in by some
sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.
A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible
sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it
made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the
sky and it didn't stop, but kept on and on.
Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for
long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had
been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had
been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost
unendurable.
Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.
And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the
siren down at the village hall.
By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the
street - a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of
them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were
the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats
which must not be left behind.
There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the
surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long
chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her
sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which
floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim
determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all
the world) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in
wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a
somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came
Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face,
but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy
Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals
yelling, and cat-calling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to
contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.
I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn't run like
all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed
down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper
Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For
insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had
somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.
I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big
to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to
grab a hold of. So I didn't hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me.
The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.
I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.
'Come on, Brad,' she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren
noise.
I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was
a big and powerful thing. The top was down and if felt funny to be riding in
a car that didn't have a top.
The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting
with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment
there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and
in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed
within one's mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved
away.
One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd
feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that
now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.
'This is a nice car you have,' I said, not knowing what to say, but
knowing that I should say something.
'Father gave it to me,' she said, 'on my last birthday.'
It moved along and you couldn't hear the motor. All you could hear was
the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.
'Brad,' she asked, 'what's going on? Someone told me that your car was
wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren
blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road...'
I told her. 'There's a fence of some sort built around the town.'
'Who would build a fence?'
'It's not that kind of fence. You can't see this fence.'
We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They
were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the
road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.
'You said there was a fence.'
'There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a
man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It's the kind of fence you'd
expect in fairyland.'
'Brad,' she said, 'you know there is no fairyland.'
'An hour ago I knew,' I said. 'I don't know any more.'
We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of
the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at
the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked
up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard,
the receptionist at Doc Fabian's office, was standing on a box out on the
sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the
owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was
standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of
waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on
trying.
Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and
shut off the motor.
A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He
leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.
'How are things going, pal?' he asked.
I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then
suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.
'Yeah,' he said, 'the guy who smacked your car.' He straightened and
reached out his hand. 'Name is Gabriel Thomas,' he said. 'You just call me
Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there.'
I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.
'Mr Thomas,' Nancy said, 'I heard about the accident. Brad won't talk
about it.'
'Well,' said Gabe, 'it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing
there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of
stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it.'
'Did you phone your company?' I asked.
'Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I'm
drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn't dare to drive and I'm holing up
somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up.'
'Did they say so, Mr Thomas?'
'No, miss,' he said, 'but I know how them jokers think. And the thing
that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain't a drinking
man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a
row.'
He said to me, 'I don't know what to do. I can't get out of here.
There's no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five
hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest
one a baby. I don't know what she'll do. She's used to it, of course, with
me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time
it takes for me to make a run. What if I can't get back for two or three
weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won't be any
money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six
kids to feed.'
'Maybe you won't be here for long,' I said, doing my best to make him
feel a little better. 'Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something
about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine
that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your...'
He made an insulting, disgusted noise. 'Not that bunch,' he said. 'Not
that gang of chisellers.'
'It's too soon to start worrying,' I told him. 'We don't know what has
happened and until we do...'
'I guess you're right,' he said. 'Of course, I'm not the only one. I
been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one.
I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while
ago and his wife is in the hospital over at - what's the name of that town?'
'Elmore,' Nancy said.
'Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his
mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe
it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town.
Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be
expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come.
Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind. And there
was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone,
and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out
from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have
travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home
early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for
them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them
out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are
a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs,
and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to
marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get
married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't.'
'You must have talked to a lot of people,' I said. 'Hush,' said Nancy.
Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of
the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his
arms to get the people quiet.
'Fellow citizens,' yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that
makes you sick at heart. 'Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet.'
Someone yelled, 'You tell 'em Higgy!' There was a wave of laughter, but
it was a nervous laugh.
'Friends,' said Higgy, 'we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably
have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of
stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened.'
'I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it
seemed the quickest way.'
'Ah, hell,' yelled someone. 'Get on with it, Higgy.'
No one laughed this time.
'Well, all right,' said Higgy. 'I'll get on with it. I don't know quite
how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around
us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how
it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows.
There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only
temporary; it may go away.'
'What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this
together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't
got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't
go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our
telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty
of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run
short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we
need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the
truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things
that are not alive.'
'Just a minute, mayor,' someone shouted.
'Yes,' the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt
him.
'Was that you, Len?' he asked.
'Yes, it was,' said the man.
I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science
teacher.
'What did you want?' asked Higgy.
'I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours - about only
non-living matter getting through the barrier - on the car that was parked
on the Coon Valley road.'
'Why, yes,' said Higgy, condescendingly, 'that is exactly what I was
basing the statement on. What do you know about it?'
'Nothing,' Len Streeter told him. 'Nothing about the car itself. But I
presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon
within well restricted bounds of logic.'
'That's right,' said Higgy, sanctimoniously. 'That's exactly what we
intend to do.'
And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what
Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
'In that case,' said Streeter. 'I might caution you against accepting
facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no
human in the car, there was nothing living in it.'
'Well, there wasn't,' Higgy argued. 'The man who had been driving it
had left and gone away somewhere.'
'Humans,' said Streeter, patiently, 'aren't the only forms of life. We
can't be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty
sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut
up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It
was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many
different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life,
just the same as we are.'
Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn't
know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his
life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.
'You know, Higgy,' said a voice I recognized as DocFabian's, 'our young
friend is right. Of course there would be microorganisms. Some of the rest
of us should have thought of it at once.'
'Well,' all right, then,' said Higgy. 'If you say so, Doc. Let's say
that Len is right. It don't make any difference, does it?'
'At the moment, no,' said Doc.
'The only point I wanted to make,' said Streeter, 'is that life can't
be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get
a right start at it. We shouldn't begin with a lot of misconceptions.'
'I got a question, mayor,' said someone else. I tried to see who it
was, but couldn't.
'Go ahead,' said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to
break up this Streeter business.
'Well, it's like this,' said the man. 'I've been working on the highway
job south of town. And now I can't get to it and maybe they'll hold the job
for me for a day or two, but it isn't reasonable to expect the contractor to
hold it very long. He's got a contract he has to meet - a time limit, you
know, and he pays a penalty for every day he's late. So he's got to have men
to do the job. He can't hold no job open for more than a day or two.'
'I know all that,' said Higgy.
'I ain't the only one,' said the man, 'There are a lot of other fellows
who work out of town. I don't know about the rest of them, but I got to have
my pay. I ain't got any backlog I can fall back on. What's going to happen
to us if we can't get to our jobs and there isn't any pay cheque and no
money in the bank?'
'I was coming to that,' said Higgy. 'I know exactly what your situation
is. And the situations of a lot of other men. There isn't enough work in a
little town like this for everyone who lives here, so a great many of our
residents have work outside of town. And I know a lot of you haven't too
much money and that you need your pay cheques. We hope this thing clears up
soon enough that you can go back and your jobs will still be there.'
'But let me tell you this. Let me make a promise. If it doesn't clear
up, there aren't any of you going to go hungry. There aren't any of you who
are going to be turned out of your homes because you can't make your
payments or can't manage to scrape the rent together. There won't nothing
happen to you. A lot of people are going to be without jobs because of what
has happened, but you'll be taken care of, every one of you. I am going to
name a committee that will talk with the merchants and the bank and we'll
arrange for a line of credit that will see you through. Anyone who needs a
loan or credit can be sure of getting it.'
Higgy looked down at Daniel Willoughby, who was standing a step or two
below him.
'Ain't that right, Dan?' he demanded.
'Yes,' said the banker. 'Yes. Sure, it's quite all right. We'll do
everything we can.'
But he didn't like it. You could see he didn't. It hurt him to say it
was all right. Daniel liked security, good security, for each dollar he put
out.
'It's too early yet,' said Higgy, 'to know what has happened to us. By
tonight maybe we'll know a whole lot more about it. The main thing is to
keep calm and not start going off half- cocked.
'I can't pretend to know what is going to happen. If this barrier stays
in place, there'll be some difficulties. But as it stands right now, it's
not entirely bad. Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village
that wasn't too well known. There wasn't, I suppose, much reason that we
should have been well known. But now we're getting publicity over the entire
world. We're in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. I'd like Joe Evans
to come up here and tell you all about it.'
He looked around and spotted Joe in the crowd.
'You folks,' he said, 'make way, won't you, so Joe can come up here.'
The editor climbed the steps and turned around to face the crowd.
'There isn't much to tell so far,' he said. 'I've had calls from most
of the wire services and from several newspapers. They all wanted to know
what was going on. I told them what I could, but it wasn't much. One of the
TV stations over in Elmore is sending a mobile camera unit. The phone was
still ringing when I left the house and I suppose there are calls coming
into the office, too.
'I think we can expect that the news media will pay a lot of attention
to the situation here and there's no question in my mind that the state and
federal governments will take a hand in it, and if I understand it rightly,
more than likely the scientific community will have a considerable interest,
as well.'
The man who had the highway job spoke up again. 'Joe, you think them
science fellows can get it figured out?'
'I don't know,' said Joe.
Hiram Martin had pushed his way through the crowd and was crossing the
street. He had a purposeful look about hint and I wondered what he could be
up to. Someone else was asking a question, but the sight of Hiram had
distracted me and I lost the gist of it.
'Brad,' said someone at my elbow.
I looked around.
Hiram was standing there. The trucker, I saw, had left.
'Yes,' I said. 'What is it?'
'If you got the time,' said Hiram. 'I'd like to talk with you.'
'Go ahead,' I said. 'I have the time.'
He jerked his head toward the village hall.
'All right,' I said.
I opened the door and got out.
'I'll wait for you,' said Nancy.
Hiram moved off around the crowd, flanking it, heading for the side
door of the hail. I followed close behind him.
But I didn't like it.
Hiram's office was a little cubbyhole just off the stall where the fire
engine and ladder rig were housed. There was barely room in it for two
chairs and a desk. On the wall above the desk hung a large and garish
calendar with a naked woman on it.
And on the desk stood one of the dialless telephones.
Hiram gestured at it. 'What is that?' he asked.
'It's a telephone,' I said. 'Since when did you get so important that
you have two phones?'
'Take another look,' he said.
'It's still a telephone,' I said.
'A closer look,' he told me.
'It's a crazy looking thing. It' hasn't any dial.'
'Anything else?'
'No, I guess not. It just doesn't have a dial.'
'And,' said Hiram, 'it has no connection cord.'
'I hadn't noticed that.'
'That's funny,' Hiram said.
'Why funny?' I demanded. 'What the hell is going on? You didn't get me
in here just to show me a phone.'
'It's funny,' Hiram said, 'because it was in your office.'
'It couldn't be. Ed Adler came in yesterday and took out my phone. For
non-payment of my bill.'
'Sit down, Brad,' he said.
I sat down and he sat down facing me. His face was still pleasant
enough, but there was that odd glitter in his eyes - the glitter that in the
olden days I'd seen too often in his eyes when he'd cornered me and knew he
had me cornered and was about to force me to fight him, in the course of
which endeavour he would beat the living Jesus out of me.
'You never saw this phone?' he asked.
I shook my head. 'When I left the office yesterday I had no telephone.
Not this one or any other.'
'That's strange,' he said.
'As strange to me as to you,' I told him. 'I don't know what you're
getting at. Suppose you try to tell me.'
I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the
moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he
couldn't tie me to the telephone.
'All right,' he said, 'I'll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw
it. He'd sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was
walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone
standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might
have made him sore.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore.'
'He'd sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of
was that you'd talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of
failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends.'
'I suppose, he was so sore that he broke in and took it.'
'No,' said Hiram, 'he never did break in. He went down to the bank and
talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key.'
'Without considering,' I said, 'that I was renting the office.'
'But you hadn't paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me,
I'd figure Daniel had the right.'
'In my book,' I told him, 'Tom and Daniel broke into my place and
robbed me.'
'I told you. They didn't do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it.
Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you'd
never seen this phone, that you never owned it.'
'That's beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no
right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn't walk
away with some other stuff?'
'You know damn well he didn't,' Hiram told me. 'You said you wanted to
hear about this.'
'So go ahead and tell me.'
'Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away
that it was a different kind of phone. It didn't have a dial and it wasn't
connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached
the door, the phone rang.'
'It what?'
'It rang.'
'But it wasn't connected.'
'I know, but anyhow, it rang.'
'So he answered it,' I said, 'and there was Santa Claus.'
'He answered it,' said Hiram, 'and there was Tupper Tyler.'
'Tupper! But Tupper...'
'Yeah, I know,' said Hiram. 'Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so.
But Tom said it was Tupper's voice. He said he couldn't be mistaken.'
'And what did Tupper tell him?'
'Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he
was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you're not authorized to use it.
Then the phone went dead.'
'Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you.'
'No, he wasn't. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and
Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to
get even with him.'
'But that's crazy,' I protested. 'Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag
like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?'
'I know,' said Hiram.
'You mean you believe all this?'
'You bet I believe it. There's something wrong, something awfully
wrong.'
But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had
hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn't worked that way and now he
was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while
he'd start getting sore.
He was that kind of jerk.
'When did Tom tell you all of this?'
'This morning.'
'Why not last night? If he thought it was so important...'
"But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a
joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was
important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and
heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the
joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work...'
'Yes, I see,' I said. 'But now he thinks that it was really Tupper
calling and that the call actually was for me.'
'Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times
early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no
one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It
bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see.'
'And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me.'
Hiram's face hardened. 'I know you're up to something,' he said. 'I
know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken
Stiffy in to Elmore.'
'Yes, I did,' I said. 'I found his keys where they had fallen out of
his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and
everything was all right.'
'You sneaked in,' Hiram said. 'You turned off your lights to go up
Stiffy's lane.'
'I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them
fixed before I left the shack.'
It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram
didn't press the point.
'This morning,' he said, 'me and Tom went out to the shack.'
'So it was Tom who was spying on me.'
Hiram grunted. 'He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of
you.'
'And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left.'
'Yeah,' said Hiram, 'we broke in. And we found more of them telephones.
A whole box full of them.'
'You can quit looking at me like that,' I said. 'I saw no telephones. I
didn't snoop around.'
I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in
full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could
not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were
neck-deep in it.
And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself
were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all
about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused.
And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he
hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.
Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in
Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in
the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used
the phones for communication.
Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever
know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide
them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of
the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few
hours' time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.
Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.
Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the
phones - and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor
unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the
aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures
and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.
For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood
had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced
financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with
me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who
seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.
'Well?' asked the constable.
'You want to know what I know about it?'
'Yes, I do,' said Hiram, 'and if you know what's good for you...'
'Hiram,' I told him, 'don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look
as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do...'
Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.
'It's moving!' he yelled at us. 'The barrier is moving!'
Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside
people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the
middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on
her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.
I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She
had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the
kerb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and
vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there
the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed.
There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy
cut around them with a burst of speed.
'Do you know what happened?' she asked.
I shook my head. 'Just that the barrier is moving.'
We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't
even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no
traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.
She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up
ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a mass of jam-packed cars.
And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with
my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the
truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently
had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the
process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had
moved.
The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether
it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was
evidence of it.
Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an
invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a
long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, masses of
uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far
as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a
life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the masses
of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.
The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.
Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint
rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper
of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the
branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.
I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road,
working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the
road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running -
well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways
and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing
windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't
run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.
It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering
in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds,
retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the
surface of the land.
The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except
two leafless trees. And they, I thought - they would be left behind. For
they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it
was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been
right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a
certain condition of life.
But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.
There was no grass upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All
that was green was gone.
I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my
fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and
harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it
ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting
of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root
existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had
been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here
was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before
the barrier.
Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along
the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm
which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a
ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing
through the upper emptiness.
'Nancy,' I said, but she did not answer.
I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me
when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of
her.
I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that
was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out
on the pavement - and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how
I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was
not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.
The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match
its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited
commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the
door behind me.
'...called out the national guard and had officially informed
Washington. The first units will move out in another - no, here is word just
now that they have already moved out...'
'That,' said Nancy, 'is us he's talking about.'
I reached out and twisted the dial. '... just came in. The barrier is
moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast
it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward
from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing
wildly from it. And here is more - the barrier is moving no faster than a
man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile...'
And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile
from its starting point.
'... question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is
there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end
to it?'
'Brad,' Nancy said, 'do you think it will push everyone off the earth?
Everyone but the people here in Millville?'
'I don't know,' I said, rather stupidly.
'And if it does, where will it push them'? Where is there to go?'
'... London and Berlin,' blared the radio speaker. 'Apparently the
Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been
no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something
about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if
there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a
situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But
there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of
defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it
be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place
in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy.'
The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been
listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so
behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great
windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the
people still retreated.
I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back
toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on
the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally
arrived to watch the moving barrier.
'...sweeping everything before it,' screamed the radio.
I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.
'Careful there,' I warned. 'Don't run into it.'
'I'll be careful,' said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.
'... like a wind,' the announcer said, 'blowing a long line of grass
and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind...'
And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning
dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a
solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal
and glass.
It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since
early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned
my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than
ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.
The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the
road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was
fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the
direction of the wind.
'Brad!' she shouted.
But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering
sound of raindrops splashing on the car.
The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over,
that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But
suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one
corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the
wind and that it was being held there.
With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with
astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.
They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming
sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.
'Hail,' Nancy shouted at me.
But it wasn't hail.
Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and
danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.
'Seeds!' I shouted back. 'Those things out there are seeds!' It was no
regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the
storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by
a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather;
There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face
of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had
ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and prepared it for the
seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.
The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing
silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of
sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something
had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain
and a wind blew out of nowhere.
'Brad,' said Nancy, 'I think I'm beginning to get scared.'
She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened,
hanging onto me.
'It makes me mad,' she said, 'I've never been scared, never my life.
Never scared like this.'
'It's all over now,' I said. 'The storm is ended and the barrier has
stopped moving. Everything's all right.'
'It's not like that at all,' she told me. 'It's only just beginning.'
A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in
sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no
longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when
the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.
The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at
us as he run.
We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there,
waiting for him.
He came up to us, panting with his running.
'Brad,' he gasped, 'maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom
Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with
what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something.'
'Why, that's crazy!' Nancy cried.
'Sure it is,' said Ed, 'but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take
too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything.
They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think
if it's right or wrong.'
I asked him: 'What do you have in mind?'
'You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or
two . . .'
I shook my head. 'I have too many things to do.'
'But, Brad...'
'I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a
thing to do with it.'
'That don't make no difference.'
'Yes, it does,' I said.
'Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones...'
Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut
her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it. '
'I know about those phones,' I said. 'Hiram told me all about them. Ed,
take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else
entirely.'
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.
'Forget about the phones,' I said.
I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a
thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I
had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I
couldn't take a chance.
'Brad,' warned Ed, 'you're walking into it.'
'I can't run away,' I told him. 'I can't run somewhere and hide. Not
from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram.'
He looked me up and down.
'No, I guess you can't,' he said. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a
thing or two to do.'
I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me. 'It's all right, Brad, but the
car's just down the road. I could drive you home.'
'I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of
being seen.'
'I'll stay with her,' said Ed, 'until she's inside the house.'
Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this - to a
state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the
street.
Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this
morning - a thing I probably should have done last night - get in touch with
Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for
in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some
connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange
research project down in Mississippi.
I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not
a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the
business section.
I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he
might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he
might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.
But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone
was ringing and Alf was on the line.
'I've been trying for an hour to get you,' he said. 'I wondered how you
were.'
'You know what happened, Alf?'
He told me that he did. 'Some of it,' he said.
'Minutes earlier,' I said, 'and I would have been with you instead of
penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first
appeared.'
I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the
barrier. Then I told him about the phones.
'They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to
them...'
'A way of getting information.'
'I gathered that was it.'
'Brad,' he said, 'I've got a terrible hunch.'
'So have I,' I said.
'Do you think this Greenbriar project...?'
'That's what I was thinking, too.'
I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth.'