The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (74 page)

"I'll be glad to do that," said Beasly. "I am
good and strong. I don't mind work at all. I just don't like people jawing at me."

They finished breakfast and then carried the furniture down
into the basement. They had some trouble with the Governor Winthrop, for it was
an unwieldy thing to handle.

When they finally horsed it down, Taine stood off and looked
at it. The man, he told himself, who slapped paint onto that beautiful
cherrywood had a lot to answer for.

He said to Beasly: "We have to get the paint off that
thing there. And we must do it carefully. Use paint remover and a rag wrapped
around a spatula and just sort of roll it off. Would you like to try it?"

"Sure, I would. Say, Hiram, what will we have for
lunch?"

"I don't know," said Taine. "We'll throw
something together. Don't tell me you're hungry."

"Well, it was sort of hard work, getting all that stuff
down here."

"There are cookies in the jar on the kitchen
shelf," said Taine. "Go and help yourself."

When Beasly went upstairs, Taine walked slowly around the
basement. The ceiling, he saw, was still intact. Nothing else seemed to be
disturbed.

Maybe that television set and the stove and radio, he
thought, was just their way of paying rent to me. And if that were the case, he
told himself, whoever they might be, he'd be more than willing to let them stay
right on.

He looked around some more and could find nothing wrong.

He went upstairs and called to Beasly in the kitchen.

"Come on out to the garage, where I keep the paint.
We'll hunt up some remover and show you how to use it."

Beasly, a supply of cookies clutched in his hand, trotted
willingly behind him.

As they rounded the corner of the house they could hear
Towser's muffled barking. Listening to him, it seemed to Taine that he was
getting hoarse.

Three days, he thought—or was it four?

"If we don't do something about it," he said,
"that fool dog is going to get himself wore out."

He went into the garage and came back with two shovels and a
pick.

"Come on," he said to Beasly. "We have to put
a stop to this before we have any peace."

Towser had done himself a noble job of excavation. He was
almost completely out of sight. Only the end of his considerably bedraggled
tail showed out of the hole he had clawed in the forest floor.

Beasly had been right about the tanklike thing. One edge of
it showed out of one side of the hole.

Towser backed out of the hole and sat down heavily, his
whiskers dripping clay, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.

"He says that it's about time that we showed up,"
said Beasly.

Taine walked around the hole and knelt down. He reached down
a hand to brush the dirt off the projecting edge of Beasly's tank. The clay was
stubborn and hard to wipe away, but from the feel of it the tank was heavy
metal.

Taine picked up a shovel and rapped it against the tank. The
tank gave out a clang.

They got to work, shoveling away a foot or so of topsoil
that lay above the object. It was hard work and the thing was bigger than they
had thought and it took some time to get it uncovered, even roughly.

"I'm hungry," Beasly complained.

Taine glanced at his watch. It was almost one o'clock.

"Run on back to the house," he said to Beasly.
"You'll find something in the refrigerator and there's milk to
drink."

"How about you, Hiram? Ain't you ever hungry?"

"You could bring me back a sandwich and see if you can
find a trowel."

"What you want a trowel for?"

"I want to scrape the dirt off this thing and see what
it is."

He squatted down beside the thing they had unearthed and
watched Beasly disappear into the woods.

A man, he told himself, might better joke about it—if to do
no more than keep his fear away.

Beasly wasn't scared, of course. Beasly didn't have the
sense to be scared of a thing like this.

Twelve feet wide by twenty long and oval shaped. About the
size, he thought, of a good-size living room. And there never had been a tank
of that shape or size in all of Willow Bend.

He fished his jackknife out of his pocket and started to
scratch away the dirt at one point on the surface of the thing. He got a square
inch free of dirt and it was no metal such as he had ever seen. It looked for
all the world like glass.

He kept on scraping at the dirt until he had a clean place
as big as an outstretched hand.

It wasn't any metal. He'd almost swear to that. It looked
like cloudy glass—like the milk-glass goblets and bowls he was always on the
lookout for. There were a lot of people who were plain nuts about it and they'd
pay fancy prices for it.

He closed the knife and put it back into his pocket and
squatted, looking at the oval shape that Towser had discovered.

And the conviction grew: Whatever it was that had come to
live with him undoubtedly had arrived in this same contraption. From space or
time, he thought, and was astonished that he thought it, for he'd never thought
such a thing before.

He picked up his shovel and began to dig again, digging down
this time, following the curving side of this alien thing that lay within the
earth.

And as he dug, he wondered. What should he say about this—or
should he say anything? Maybe the smartest course would be to cover it again
and never breathe a word about it to a living soul.

Beasly would talk about it, naturally. But no one in the
village would pay attention to anything that Beasly said. Everyone in Willow
Bend knew Beasly was cracked.

Beasly finally came back. He carried three inexpertly-made
sandwiches wrapped in an old newspaper and a quart bottle almost full of milk.

"You certainly took your time," said Taine,
slightly irritated.

"I got interested," Beasly explained.

"Interested in what?"

"Well, there were three big trucks and they were
lugging a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. Two or three big cabinets
and a lot of other junk. And you know Abbie's television set? Well, they took
the set away. I told them that they shouldn't, but they took it anyway."

"I forgot," said Taine. "Henry said he'd send
the computer over and I plumb forgot."

Taine ate the sandwiches, sharing them with Towser, who was
very grateful in a muddy way.

Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.

"Let's get to work," he said.

"But you got all that stuff down in the basement."

"That can wait," said Taine. "This job we
have to
finis
h."

It was getting dusk by the time they finished.

Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.

Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep—and
all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell
when you whacked it with a shovel.

They'd have to be small, he thought, if there were many of
them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very
long. And that fitted in, of course, for it they weren't small they couldn't now
be living in the space between the basement joists.

If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it
wasn't all just a lot of supposition.

Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the
house, they might be there no longer—for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow
sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he'd paid them no attention.

Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the
pick.

"Come on," he said, "let's go. We've put in a
long, hard day."

They tramped out through the brush and reached the road.
Fireflies were flickering off and on in the woody darkness and the street lamps
were swaying in the summer breeze. The stars were hard and bright.

Maybe they still were in the house, thought Taine. Maybe
when they found out that Towser had objected to them, they had fixed it so he'd
be aware of them no longer.

They probably were highly adaptive. It stood to good reason
they would have to be. It hadn't taken them too long, he told himself grimly,
to adapt to a human house.

He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put
the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there
was no garage.

There was no garage and there was no front on the house and
the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of
what apparently had been the end of the garage.

They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting
unbelieving in the summer dark.

There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all.
It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house
and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the
building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.

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

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

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

There was no front to the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Beasly," he gasped, "look out there in
front!"

Beasly looked.

"What place is that?" he asked.

"That's what I'd like to know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maybe," Taine told him, kindly, "you'd
better go back in and start making us some supper."

"But, Hiram-"

"It's all right," said Taine. "It's bound to
be all right."

"If you say so, Hiram."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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