Over the River and Through the Woods, Page 8

  The colonel stood up, seething. “You’ll have a lot to answer, Taine. There’ll be a lot of things the government will want to know. First of all, they’ll want to know just how you engineered this. Are you ready to tell that?”

  “No,” said Taine, “I don’t believe I am.”

  And he thought with some alarm: They think that I’m the one who did it and they’ll be down on me like a pack of wolves to find out just how I did it. He had visions of the FBI and the State Department and the Pentagon and, even sitting down, he felt shaky in the knees.

  The colonel turned around and marched stiffly from the kitchen. He went out the back and slammed the door behind him.

  Henry looked at Taine speculatively.

  “Do you really mean it?” he demanded. “Do you intend to stand up to them?”

  “I’m getting sore,” said Taine. “They can’t come in here and take over without even asking me. I don’t care what anyone may think, this is my house. I was born here and I’ve lived here all my life and I like the place and—”

  “Sure,” said Henry. “I know just how you feel.”

  “I suppose it’s childish of me, but I wouldn’t mind so much if they showed a willingness to sit down and talk about what they meant to do once they’d taken over. But there seems no disposition to even ask me what I think about it. And I tell you, Henry, this is different than it seems. This isn’t a place where we can walk in and take over, no matter what Washington may think. There’s something out there and we better watch our step—”

  “I was thinking,” Henry interrupted, “as I was sitting here, that your attitude is most commendable and deserving of support. It has occurred to me that it would be most unneighborly of me to go on sitting here and leave you in the fight alone. We could hire ourselves a fine array of legal talent and we could fight the case and in the meantime we could form a land and development company and that way we could make sure that this new world of yours is used the way it should be used.

  “It stand to reason, Hiram, that I am the one to stand beside you, shoulder to shoulder, in this business since we’re already partners in this TV deal.”

  “What’s this about TV?” shrilled Abbie, slapping a plate of cakes down in front of Taine.

  “Now, Abbie,” Henry said patiently, “I have explained to you already that your TV set is back of that partition down in the basement and there isn’t any telling when we can get it out.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Abbie, bringing a platter of sausages and pouring a cup of coffee.

  Beasly came in from the living room and went bumbling out the back.

  “After all,” said Henry, pressing his advantage, “I would suppose I had some hand in it. I doubt you could have done much without the computer I sent over.”

  And there it was again, thought Taine. Even Henry thought he’d been the one who did it.

  “But didn’t Beasly tell you?”

  “Beasly said a lot, but you know how Beasly is.”

  And that was it, of course. To the villagers it would be no more than another Beasly story—another whopper that Beasly had dreamed up. There was no one who believed a word that Beasly said.

  Taine picked up the cup and drank his coffee, gaining time to shape an answer and there wasn’t any answer. If he told the truth, it would sound far less believable than any lie he’d tell.

  “You can tell me, Hiram. After all, we’re partners.”

  He’s playing me for a fool, thought Taine. Henry thinks he can play anyone he wants for a fool and sucker.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Henry.”

  “Well,” Henry said, resignedly, getting to his feet, “I guess that part of it can wait.”

  Beasly came tramping and banging through the kitchen with another load of cans.

  “I’ll have to have some gasoline,” said Taine, “if I’m going out for Towser.”

  “I’ll take care of that right away,” Henry promised smoothly. “I’ll send Ernie over with his tank wagon and we can run a hose through here and fill up those cans. And I’ll see if I can find someone who’ll go along with you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I can go alone.”

  “If we had a radio transmitter. Then you could keep in touch.”

  “But we haven’t any. And, Henry, I can’t walk. Towser’s out there somewhere—”

  “Sure, I know how much you thought of him. You go out and look for him if you think you have to and I’ll get started on this other business. I’ll get some lawyers lined up and we’ll draw up some sort of corporate papers for our land development—”

  “And, Hiram,” Abbie said, “will you do something for me, please?”

  “Why, certainly,” said Taine.

  “Would you speak to Beasly. It’s senseless the way he’s acting. There wasn’t any call for him to up and leave us. I might have been a little sharp with him, but he’s so simple-minded he’s infuriating. He ran off and spent half a day helping Towser at digging out that woodchuck and—”

  “I’ll speak to him,” said Taine.

  “Thanks, Hiram. He’ll listen to you. You’re the only one he’ll listen to. And I wish you could have fixed my TV set before all this came about. I’m just lost without it. It leaves a hole in the living room. It matched my other furniture, you know.”

  “Yes I know,” said Taine.

  “Coming, Abbie?” Henry asked, standing at the door.

  He lifted a hand in a confidential farewell to Taine. “I’ll see you later, Hiram. I’ll get it all fixed up.”

  I just bet you will, thought Taine.

  He went back to the table, after they were gone, and sat down heavily in a chair.

  The front door slammed and Beasly came panting in, excited.

  “Towser’s back!” he yelled. “He’s coming back and he’s driving in the biggest woodchuck you ever clapped your eyes on.”

  Taine leaped to his feet.

  “Woodchuck! That’s an alien planet. It hasn’t any woodchucks.”

  “You come and see,” yelled Beasly.

  He turned and raced back out again, with Taine following close behind.

  It certainly looked considerably like a woodchuck—a sort of man-size woodchuck. More like a woodchuck out of a children’s book, perhaps, for it was walking on its hind legs and trying to look dignified even while it kept a weather eye on Towser.

  Towser was back a hundred feet or so, keeping a wary distance from the massive chuck. He had the pose of a good sheepherding dog, walking in a crouch, alert to head off any break that the chuck might make.

  The chuck came up close to the house and stopped. Then it did an about-face so that it looked back across the desert and it hunkered down.

  It swung its massive head to gaze at Beasly and Taine and in the limpid brown eyes Taine saw more than the eyes of an animal.

  Taine walked swiftly out and picked up the dog in his arms and hugged him tight against him. Towser twisted his head around and slapped a sloppy tongue across his master’s face.

  Taine stood with the dog in his arms and looked at the man-size chuck and felt a great relief and an utter thankfulness.

  Everything was all right now, he thought. Towser had come back.

  He headed for the house and out into the kitchen.

  He put Towser down and got a dish and filled it at the tap. He placed it on the floor and Towser lapped at it thirstily, slopping water all over the linoleum.

  “Take it easy, there,” warned Taine. “You don’t want to overdo it.”

  He hunted in the refrigerator and found some scraps and put them in Towser’s dish.

  Towser wagged his tail with doggish happiness.

  “By rights,” said Taine, “I ought to take a rope to you, running off like that.”

  Beasly came ambling in.

  “That chuck is a friendly cuss,” he announced. “He’s waiting for someone.”

  “That’s nice,” said Taine, paying no attention.

  He
glanced at the clock.

  “It’s seven-thirty,” he said. “We can catch the news. You want to get it Beasly?”

  “Sure. I know right where to get it. That fellow from New York.”

  “That’s the one,” said Taine.

  He walked into the living room and looked out the window. The man-size chuck had not moved. He was sitting with his back to the house, looking back the way he’d come.

  Waiting for someone, Beasly had said, and it looked as if he might be, but probably it was all just in Beasly’s head.

  And if he were waiting for someone, Taine wondered, who might that someone be? What might that someone be? Certainly by now the word had spread out there that there was a door into another world. And how many doors, he wondered, had been opened through the ages?

  Henry had said that there was a big new world out there waiting for Earthmen to move in. And that wasn’t it at all. It was the other way around.

  The voice of the news commentator came blasting from the radio in the middle of a sentence:

  “…finally got into the act. Radio Moscow said this evening that the Soviet delegate will make representations in the U.N. tomorrow for the internationalization of this other world and the gateway to it.

  “From that gateway itself, the home of a man named Hiram Taine, there is no news. Complete security had been clamped down and a cordon of troops form a solid wall around the house, holding back the crowds. Attempts to telephone the residence are blocked by a curt voice which says that no calls are being accepted for that number. And Taine himself has not stepped from the house.”

  Taine walked back into the kitchen and sat down.

  “He’s talking about you,” Beasley said importantly.

  “Rumor circulated this morning that Taine, a quiet village repairman and dealer in antiques, and until yesterday a relative unknown, had finally returned from a trip which he made out into this new and unknown land. But what he found, if anything, no one yet can say. Nor is there any further information about this other place beyond the fact that it is a desert and, to the moment, lifeless.

  “A small flurry of excitement was occasioned late yesterday by the finding of some strange object in the woods across the road from the residence, but this area likewise was swiftly cordoned off and to the moment Colonel Ryan, who commands the troops, will say nothing of what actually was found.

  “Mystery man of the entire situation is one Henry Horton, who seems to be the only unofficial person to have entry to the Taine house. Horton, questioned earlier today, had little to say, but managed to suggest an air of great conspiracy. He hinted he and Taine were partners in some mysterious venture and left hanging in midair the half impression that he and Taine had collaborated in opening the new world.

  “Horton, it is interesting to note, operates a small computer plant and it is understood on good authority that only recently he delivered a computer to Taine, or at least some sort of machine to which considerable mystery is attached. One story is that this particular machine had been in the process of development for six or seven years.

  “Some of the answers to the matter of how all this did happen and what actually did happen must wait upon the findings of a team of scientists who left Washington this evening after an all-day conference at the White House, which was attended by representatives from the military, the State Department, the security division and the special weapons section.

  “Throughout the world the impact of what happened yesterday at Willow Bend can only be compared to the sensation of the news, almost twenty years ago, of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. There is some tendency among many observers to believe that the implications of Willow Bend, in fact, may be even more earthshaking than were those of Hiroshima.

  “Washington insists, as is only natural, that this matter is of internal concern only and that it intends to handle the situation as it best affects the national welfare.

  “But abroad there is a rising storm of insistence that this is not a matter of national policy concerning one nation, but that it necessarily must be a matter of worldwide concern.

  “There is an unconfirmed report that a U.N. observer will arrive in Willow Bend almost momentarily. France, Britain, Bolivia, Mexico and India have already requested permission of Washington to send observers to the scene and other nations undoubtedly plan to file similar requests.

  “The world sits on edge tonight, waiting for the word from Willow Bend and—”

  Taine reached out and clicked the radio to silence.

  “From the sound of it,” said Beasly, “we’re going to be overrun by a batch of foreigners.”

  Yes, thought Taine, there might be a batch of foreigners, but not exactly in the sense that Beasly meant. The use of the word, he told himself, so far as any human was concerned, must be outdated now. No man of Earth ever again could be called a foreigner with alien life next door—literally next door. What were the people of the stone house?

  And perhaps not the alien life of one planet only, but the alien life of many. For he himself had found another door into yet another planet and there might be many more such doors and what would these other worlds be like, and what was the purpose of the doors?

  Someone, something, had found a way of going to another planet short of spanning light-years of lonely space—a simpler and a shorter way than flying through the gulfs of space. And once the way was open, then the way stayed open and it was as easy as walking from one room to another.

  But one thing—one ridiculous thing—kept puzzling him and that was the spinning and the movement of the connected planets, of all the planets that must be linked together. You could not, he argued, establish solid, factual links between two objects that move independently of one another.

  And yet, a couple of days ago, he would have contended just as stolidly that the whole idea on the face of it was fantastic and impossible. Still it had been done. And once one impossibility was accomplished, what logical man could say with sincerity that the second could not be?

  The doorbell rang and he got up to answer it.

  It was Ernie, the oil man.

  “Henry said you wanted some gas and I came to tell you I can’t get it until morning.”

  “That’s all right,” said Taine. “I don’t need it now.”

  And swiftly slammed the door.

  He leaned against it, thinking: I’ll have to face them sometime. I can’t keep the door locked against the world. Sometime, soon or late, the Earth and I will have to have this out.

  And it was foolish, he thought, for him to think like this, but that was the way it was.

  He had something here that the Earth demanded; something that Earth wanted or thought it wanted. And yet, in the last analysis, it was his responsibility. It had happened on his land, it had happened in his house; unwittingly, perhaps, he’d even aided and abetted it.

  And the land and house are mine, he fiercely told himself, and that world out there was an extension of his yard. No matter how far or where it went, an extension of his yard.

  Beasly had left the kitchen and Taine walked into the living room. Towser had won the right to sleep anywhere he wished.

  He walked past the chair to the window and the desert stretched to its far horizon and there before the window sat the man-size woodchuck and Beasly side by side, with their backs turned to the window and staring out across the desert.

  Somehow it seemed natural that the chuck and Beasly should be sitting there together—the two of them, it appeared to Taine, might have a lot in common.

  And it was a good beginning—that a man and an alien creature from this other world should sit down companionably together.

  He tried to envision the setup of these linked worlds, of which Earth was now a part, and the possibilities that lay inherent in the fact of linkage rolled thunder through his brain.

  There would be contact between the Earth and these other worlds and what would come of it?

  And come to think of it, the
contact had been made already, but so naturally, so undramatically, that it failed to register as a great, important meeting. For Beasly and the chuck out there were contact and if it all should go like that, there was absolutely nothing for one to worry over.

  This was no haphazard business, he reminded himself. It had been planned and executed with the smoothness of long practice. This was not the first world to be opened and it would not be the last.

  The little ratlike things had spanned space—how many light-years of space one could not even guess—in the vehicle which he had unearthed out in the woods. They then had buried it, perhaps as a child might hide a dish by shoving it into a pile of sand. Then they had come to this very house and had set up the apparatus that had made this house a tunnel between one world and another. And once that had been done, the need of crossing space had been canceled out forever. There need be but one crossing and that one crossing would serve to link the planets.

  And once the job was done the little ratlike things had left, but not before they had made certain that this gateway to their planet would stand against no matter what assault. They had sheathed the house inside the studdings with a wonder-material that would resist an ax and that, undoubtedly, would resist much more than a simple ax.

  And they had marched in drill-order single file out to the hill where eight more of the space machines had rested in their cradles on the hill, and the ratlike things were gone and, perhaps, in time to come, they’d land on another planet and another doorway would be opened, a link to yet another world.

  But more, Taine thought, than the linking of mere worlds. It would be, as well, the linking of the peoples of those worlds.

  The little ratlike creatures were the explorers and the pioneers who sought out other Earthlike planets and the creature waiting with Beasly just outside the window must also serve its purpose and perhaps, in time to come, there would be a purpose which man would also serve.

  He turned away from the window and looked around the room and the room was exactly as it had been ever since he could remember it. With all the change outside, with all that was happening outside, the room remained unchanged.