The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (75 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went in and slammed the door behind him.

"Beasly," he shouted.

There was no answer.

Towser crawled from beneath the love seat and apologized.

"It's all right, pal," said Taine. "That
outfit scared me, too."

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

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

Taine looked at it in wondering admiration.

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

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

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

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

And inside the workshop, what?

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

Taine sat down weakly on the steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went up the stairs and out into the garage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come on, Tows," he said. "We'll go and look
things over."

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

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

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

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

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

Slowing down the truck, Taine traveled parallel with them
for a time, but there was no profit in it; they kept on traveling their course,
looking neither right nor left.

Speeding up, Taine left them behind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a house!

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the matter, boy?" asked Taine.

Towser growled again.

The house stood silent. It seemed to be deserted.

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

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

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

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

"You stick around," said Taine. "Don't go
running off."

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

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

An old and deserted place, he thought, abandoned long ago.
Perhaps a shepherd people might have lived here in some long-gone age, when the
desert had been a rich and grassy plain.

There was a door into another room and as he stepped through
it he heard the faint, far-off booming sound and something else as well —the
sound of pouring rain! From the open door that led out through the back he
caught a whiff of salty breeze and he stood there frozen in the center of that
second room.

Another one!

Another house that led to another world!

He walked slowly forward, drawn toward the outer door, and
he stepped out into a cloudy, darkling day with the rain streaming down from
wildly racing clouds. Half a mile away, across a field of jumbled, broken,
iron-gray boulders, lay a pounding sea that raged upon the coast, throwing
great spumes of angry spray high into the air.