Clifford D.Simak. All flesh is grass ---------------------------------------------------------------------- First published: 1965 Date of e-text: June 26, 1999 Prepared by: Anada Sucka ---------------------------------------------------------------------- All flesh is grass Clifford D. Simak 1 When I swung out of the village street onto the main highway, there was a truck behind me. It was one of those big semi jobs and it was really rolling. The speed limit was forty-five on that stretch of road, running through one corner of the village, but at that time in the morning it wasn't reasonable to expect that anyone would pay attention to a posted speed. I wasn't too concerned with the truck. I'd be stopping a mile or so up the road at Johnny's Motor Court to pick up Alf Peterson, who would be waiting for me, with his fishing tackle ready. And I had other things to think of, too - principally the phone and wondering who I had talked with on the phone. There had been three voices and it all was very strange, but I had the feeling that it may have been one voice, changed most wonderfully to make three voices, and that I would know that basic voice if I could only pin it down. And there had been Gerald Sherwood, sitting in his study, with two walls lined by books, telling me about the blueprints that had formed, unbidden, in his brain. There had been Stiffy Grant, pleading that I not let them use the bomb. And there had been, as well, the fifteen hundred dollars. Just up the road was the Sherwood residence, set atop its hill, with the house almost blotted out, in the early dawn, by the bulking blackness of the great oak trees that grew all around the house. Staring at the hill, I forgot about the phone and Gerald Sherwood in his book-lined study with his head crammed full of blueprints, and thought instead of Nancy and how I'd met her once again, after all those years since high school. And I recalled those days when we had walked hand in hand, with a pride and happiness that could not come again, that can come but once when the world is young and the first, fierce love of youth is fresh and wonderful. The road ahead was clear and wide; the four lanes continued for another twenty miles or so before they dwindled down to two. There was no one on the road except myself and the truck, which was coming up behind me and coming fairly fast. Watching the headlights in my rear vision mirror, I knew that in just a little while it would be swinging out to pass me. I wasn't driving fast and there was a lot of room for the truck to pass me, and there was not a thing to hit and then I did hit something. It was like running into a strong elastic band. There was no thump or crash. The car began slowing down as if I had put on the brakes. There was nothing I could see and for a moment I thought that something must have happened to the car - that the motor had gone haywire or the brakes had locked, or something of the sort. I took my foot off the accelerator and the car came to a halt, then started to slide back, faster and faster, for all the world as if I'd run into that rubber band and now it was snapping back. I flipped the drive to neutral because I could smell the rubber as the tires screeched on the road, and as soon as I flipped it over, the car snapped back so fast that I was thrown against the wheel. Behind me the horn of the truck blared wildly and tires howled on the pavement as the driver swung his rig to miss me. The truck made a swishing sound as it went rushing past and beneath the swishing, I could hear the rubber of the tires sucking at the roadbed, and the whole thing rumbled as if it might be angry at me for causing it this trouble. And as it went rushing past, my car came to a halt, over on the shoulder of the road. Then the truck hit whatever I had hit. I could hear it when it struck. It made a little plop. For a single instant, I thought the truck might break through whatever the barrier might be, for it was heavy and had been going fast and for a second or so there was no sign that it was slowing down. Then it began to slow and I could see the wheels of that big job skidding and humping, so that they seemed to be skipping on the pavement, still moving forward doggedly, but still not getting through. It moved ahead for a hundred feet or so beyond the point where I had stopped. And there the rig came to a halt and began skidding back. It slid smoothly for a moment, with the tires squealing on the pavement, then it began to jackknife. The rear end buckled around and came sideways down the road, heading straight for me. I had been sitting calmly in the car, not dazed, not even too much puzzled. It all had happened so fast that there had not been time to work up much puzzlement. Something strange had happened, certainly, but I think I had the feeling that in just a little while I'd get it figured out and it would all come right again. So I had stayed sitting in the car, absorbed in watching what would happen to the truck. But when it came sliding back down the road, jackknifing as it slid, I slapped the handle of the door and shoved it with my shoulder and rolled out of the seat. I hit the pavement and scrambled to my feet and ran. Behind me the tires of the truck were screaming and then there was a crash of metal, and when I heard the crash, I jumped out on the grassy shoulder of the road and had a look behind me. The rear end of the truck had slammed into my car and shoved it in the ditch and now was slowly, almost majestically, toppling into the ditch itself, right atop my car 'Hey, there!' I shouted. It did no good, of course, and I knew it wouldn't. The words were just jerked out of me. The cab of the truck had remained upon the road, but it was canted with one wheel off the ground. The driver was crawling from the cab. It was a quiet and peaceful morning. Over in the west some heat lightning was skipping about the dark horizon. There was that freshness in the air that you never get except on a summer morning before the sun gets up and the beat closes down on you. To my right, over in the village, the street lights were still burning, hanging still and bright, unstirred by any breeze. It was too nice a morning, I thought, for anything to happen. There were no cars on the road. There were just the two of us, the trucker and myself, and his truck in the ditch, squashing down my car. He came down the road toward me. He came up to me and stopped, peering at me, his arms hanging at his side. 'What the hell is going on?' he asked. 'What did we run into?' 'I don't know,' I said. 'I'm sorry about your car,' he told me. 'I'll report it to the company. They'll take care of it.' He stood, not moving, acting as if he might never move again. 'Just like running into nothing,' he declared. 'There's nothing there.' Then slow anger flared in him. 'By God,' he said, 'I'm going to find out...' He turned abruptly and went stalking up the highway, heading toward whatever we had hit. I followed along behind him. He was grunting like an angry hog. He went straight up the middle of the road and he hit the barrier, but by this time he was roaring mad and he wasn't going to let it stop him, so he kept ploughing into it and he got a good deal farther than I had expected that he would. But finally it stopped him and he stood there for a moment, with his body braced ridiculously against a nothingness, leaning into it, and with his legs driving like well-oiled pistons in an attempt to drive himself ahead. In the stillness of the morning I could hear his shoes chuffing on the pavement. Then the barrier let him have it. It snapped him back. It was as if a sudden wind had struck him and was blowing him down the road, tumbling as he rolled. He finally ended up jammed half underneath the front end of the cab. I ran over and grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him out and stood him on his feet. He was bleeding a little from where he'd rubbed along the pavement and his clothes were torn and dirty. But he wasn't angry any more; he was just plain scared. He was looking down the road as if he'd seen a ghost and he still was shaking. 'But there's nothing there,' he said. 'There'll be other cars,' I said, 'and you are across the road. Hadn't we ought to put out some flares or flags or something?' That seemed to snap him out of it. 'Flags,' he said. He climbed into the cab and got out some flags. I walked down the road with him while he set them out. He put the last one down and squatted down beside it. He took out a handkerchief and began dabbing at his face. 'Where can I get a phone?' he asked. 'We'll have to get some help.' 'Someone has to figure out a way to clear the barrier off the road,' I said. 'In a little while there'll be a lot of traffic. It'll be piled up for miles.' He dabbed at his face some more. There was a lot of dust and grease. And a little blood. 'A phone?' he asked. 'Oh, any place,' I told him. 'Just go up to any house. They'll let you use a phone.' And here we were, I thought, talking about this thing as if it were an ordinary road block, as if it were a fallen tree or a washed-out culvert. 'Say, what's the name of this place, anyhow? I got to tell them where I am calling from.' 'Millville,' I told him. 'You live here?' I nodded. He got up and tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket. 'Well,' he said, 'I'll go and find that phone.' He wanted me to offer to go with him, but I had something else to do. I had to walk around the road block and get up to Johnny's Motor Court and explain to Alf what had happened to delay me. I stood in the road and watched him plod along. Then I turned around and went up the road in the opposite direction, walking toward that something which would stop a car. I reached it and it stopped me, not abruptly, nor roughly, but gently, as if it didn't intend to let me through under any circumstances, but was being polite and reasonable about it. I put out my hand and I couldn't feel a thing. I tried rubbing my hand back and forth, as you would to feel a surface, but there was no surface, there was not a thing to rub; there was absolutely nothing, just that gentle pressure pushing you away from whatever might be there. I looked up and down the road and there was still no traffic, but in a little while, I knew, there would be. Perhaps, I told myself, I should set out some flags in the east-bound traffic lane to convey at least some warning that there was something wrong. It would take no more than a minute or two to set up the flags when I went around the end of the barrier to get to Johnny's Motor Court. I went back to the cab and found two flags and climbed down the shoulder of the road and clambered up the hillside, making a big sweep to get around the barrier - and even as I made the sweep I ran into the barrier again. I backed away from it and started to walk alongside it, climbing up the hill. It was hard to do. If the barrier had been a solid thing, I would have had no trouble, but since it was invisible, I kept bumping into it. That was the way I traced it, bumping into it, then sheering off, then bumping into it again. I thought that the barrier would end almost any time, or that it might get thinner. A couple of times I tried pushing through it, but it still was as stiff and strong as ever. There was an awful thought growing in my mind. And the higher up the hill I climbed, the more persistent grew the thought. It was about this time that I dropped the flags. Below me I heard the sound of skidding tires and swung around to look. A car on the east-bound lane had slammed into the barrier, and in sliding back, had skidded broadside across both lanes. Another car had been travelling behind the first and was trying to slow down. But either its brakes were bad or its speed had been too high, for it couldn't stop. As I watched, its driver swung it out, with the wheels upon the shoulder, skinning past the broadside car. Then he slapped into the barrier, but his speed had been reduced, and he didn't go far in. Slowly the barrier pushed back the car and it slid into the other car and finally came to rest. The driver had gotten out of the first car and was walking around his car to reach the second car. I saw his head tilt up and it was clear he saw me. He waved his arms at me and shouted, but I was too far away to make out what he said. The truck and my car, lying crushed beneath it, still were alone on the west-bound lanes. It was curious, I told myself, that no one else had come along. There was a house atop the hill and for some reason I didn't recognize it. It had to be a house of someone that I knew, for I'd lived all my life in Millville except for a year at college and I knew everyone. I don't know how to explain it, but for a moment I was all mixed up. Nothing looked familiar and I stood confused, trying to get my bearings and figure where I was. The east was brightening and in another thirty minutes the sun would be poking up. In the west a great angry cloud bank loomed, and at its base I could see the rapier flickering of the lightning that was riding with the storm. I stood and stared down at the village and it all came clear to me exactly where I was. The house up on the hill was Bill Donovan's. Bill was the village garbage man. I followed along the barrier, heading for the house and for a moment I wondered just where the house might be in relation to the barrier. More than likely, I told myself, it stood just inside of it. I came to a fence and climbed it and crossed the littered yard to the rickety back stairs. I climbed them gingerly to gain the stoop and looked for a bell. There wasn't any bell. I lifted a fist and pounded on the door, then waited. I heard someone stirring around inside, then the door came open and Bill stared out at me. He was an unkempt bear of a man and his bushy hair stood all on end and he looked at me from beneath a pair of belligerent eyebrows. He had pulled his trousers over his pajama, but he hadn't taken the time to zip up the fly and a swatch of purple pajama cloth stuck out. His feet were bare and his toes curled up a bit against the cold of the kitchen floor. 'What's the matter, Brad?' he asked. 'I don't know,' I told him. 'There is something happening down on the road.' 'An accident?' he asked. 'No, not an accident. I tell you I don't know. There's something across the road. You can't see it, but it's there. You run into it and it stops you cold. It's like a wall, but you can't touch or feel it.' 'Come on in,' said Bill. 'You could do with a cup of coffee. I'll put on the pot. It's time for breakfast anyhow. The wife is getting up.' He reached behind him and snapped on the kitchen light, then stood to one side so that I could enter. Bill walked over to the sink. He picked a glass off the counter top and turned on the water, then stood waiting. 'Have to let it run a while until it gets cold,' he told me. He filled the glass and held it out to me. 'Want a drink?' he asked. 'No, thanks,' I told him. He put the glass to his mouth and drank in great slobbering gulps. Somewhere in the house a woman screamed. If I live to be a hundred, I'll not forget what that scream was like. Donovan dropped the glass on the floor and it broke, spraying jagged glass and water. 'Liz!' he cried. 'Liz, what's wrong?' He charged out of the room and I stood there, frozen, looking at the blood on the floor, where Donovan's bare feet had been gashed by the broken glass. The woman screamed again, but this time the scream was muffled, as if she might be screaming with her mouth pressed against a pillow or a wall. I blundered out of the kitchen into the dining-room, stumbling on something in my path - a toy, a stool, I don't know what it was and lunging halfway across the room to try to catch my balance, afraid of falling and hitting my head against a chair or table. And I hit it again, that same resistant wall that I'd walked into down on the road. I braced myself against it and pushed, getting upright on my feet, standing in the dimness of the dining-room with the horror of that wall rasping at my soul. I could sense it right in front of me, although I no longer touched it. And whereas before, out in the open, on the road, it had been no more than a wonder too big to comprehend, here beneath this roof, inside this family home, it became an alien blasphemy that set one's teeth on edge. 'My babies!' screamed the woman. 'I can't reach my babies!' Now I began to get my bearings in the curtained room. I saw the table and the buffet and the door that led into the bedroom hallway. Donovan was coming through the doorway. He was half leading, half carrying the woman. 'I tried to get to them,' she cried. 'There's something there - something that stopped me. I can't get to my babies!' He let her down on the floor and propped her against the wall and knelt gently beside her. He looked up at me and there was a baffled, angry terror in his eyes. 'It's the barrier,' I told him. 'The one down on the road. It runs straight through the house.' 'I don't see no barrier,' he said. 'Damn it, man, you don't see it. It just is there, is all.' 'What can we do?' he asked. 'The children are OK,' I assured him, hoping I was right. 'They're just on the other side of the barrier. We can't get to them and they can't get to us, but everything's all right.' 'I just got up to look in on them,' the woman said. 'I just got up to look at them and there was something in the hall...' 'How many?' I asked. 'Two,' said Donovan. 'One is six, the other eight.' 'Is there someone you can phone? Someone outside the village. They could come and take them in and take care of them until we get this thing figured out. There must be an end to this wall somewhere. I was looking for it . . .' 'She's got a sister,' said Donovan, 'up the road a ways. Four or five miles.' 'Maybe you should call her.' And as I said it, another thought hit me straight between the eyes. The phone might not be working. The barrier might have cut the phone lines. 'You be all right, Liz?' he asked. She nodded dumbly, still sitting on the floor, not trying to get up. 'I'll go call Myrt,' he said. I followed him into the kitchen and stood beside him as he lifted the receiver of the wall phone, holding my breath in a fierce hope that the phone would work. And for once my hoping must have done some good, for when the receiver came off the hook I could hear the faint buzz of an operating line. Out in the dining-room, Mrs Donovan was sobbing very quietly. Donovan dialled, his big, blunt, grease-grimed fingers seemingly awkward and unfamiliar at the task. He finally got it done. He waited with the receiver at his ear. I could hear the signal ringing in the quietness of the kitchen. 'That you, Myrt? said Donovan. 'Yeah, this is Bill. We run into a little trouble. I wonder could you and Jake come over.... No, Myrt, just something wrong. I can't explain it to you. Could you come over and pick up the kids? You'll have to come the front way; you can't get in the back.... Yeah, Myrt, I know it sounds crazy. There's some sort of wall. Liz and me, we're in the back part of the house and we can't get up to the front. The kids are in the front.... No, Myrt, I don't know what it is. But you do like I say. Them kids are up there all alone and we can't get to them.... Yes, Myrt, right through the house. Tell Jake to bring along an axe. This thing runs right straight through the house. The front door is locked and Jake will have to chop it down. Or bust a window, if that's easier.... Sure, sure, I know what I'm saying. You just go ahead and do it. Anything to get them kids. I'm not crazy. Something's wrong, I tell you. Something's gone way wrong. You do what I say, Myrt.... Don't mind about the door, just chop the damn thing down. You just get the kids any way you can and keep them safe for us.' He hung up the receiver and turned from the phone. He used his forearm to wipe the sweat off his face. 'Damn woman,' he said. 'She just stood there and argued. She's a flighty bitch.' He looked at me. 'Now, what do we do next?' 'Trace the barrier,' I said. 'See where it goes. See if we can get around it. If we can find a way around it, we can get your kids.' 'I'll go with you.' I gestured toward the dining-room. 'And leave her here alone?' 'No,' he said. 'No, I can't do that. You go ahead. Myrt and Jake, they'll come and get the kids. Some of the neighbours will take Liz in. I'll try to catch up with you. Thing like this, you might need some help.' 'Thanks,' I said. Outside the house, the paleness of the dawn was beginning to flow across the land. Everything was painted that ghostly brightness, not quite-white, not quite any other colour either, that marks the beginning of an August day. On the road below, a couple of dozen cars were jammed up in front of the barrier on the east-bound lane and there were groups of people standing around. I could hear one loud voice that kept booming out in excited talk - one of those aggressive loudmouths you find in any kind of crowd. Someone had built a small campfire out on the boulevard between the lanes - God knows why, the morning was surely warm enough and the day would be a scorcher. And now I remembered that I had meant to get hold of Alf and tell him that I wasn't coming. I could have used the phone in the Donovan kitchen, but I'd forgotten all about it. I stood undecided, debating whether to go back in again and ask to use the phone. That had been the main reason, I realized, that I'd stopped at Donovan's. There was this pile of cars on the east-bound lane and only the truck and my battered car on the west-bound lane and that must mean, I told myself, that the west-bound lane was closed, as well, somewhere to the east. And could that mean, I wondered, that the village was enclosed, was encircled by the wall? I decided against going back to make the phone call, and moved on around the house. I picked up the wall again and began to follow it. I was getting the hang of it by now. It was like feeling this thing alongside me, and following the feeling, keeping just a ways away from it, bumping into it only now and then. The wall roughly skirted the edge of the village, with a few outlying houses on the other side of it. I followed along it and I crossed some paths and a couple of bob-tailed, dead-end streets, and finally came to the secondary road that ran in from Coon Valley, ten miles or so away. The road slanted on a gentle grade in its approach into the village and on the slant, just on the other side of the wall, stood an older model car, somewhat the worse for wear. Its motor was still running and the door on the driver's side was open, but there was no one in it and no one was around. It looked as if the driver, once he'd struck the barrier, might have fled in panic. As I stood looking at the car, the brakes began to slip and the car inched forward, slowly at first, then faster, and finally the brakes gave out entirely and the car plunged down the hill, through the barrier wall, and crashed into a tree. It slowly toppled over on its side and a thin trickle of smoke began to seep from underneath the hood. But I didn't pay much attention to the car, for there was something more important. I broke into a run, heading up the road. The car had passed the barrier and had gone down the road to crash and that meant there was no bather. I had reached the end of it! I ran up the road, exultant and relieved, for I'd been fighting down the feeling, and having a hard time to fight it down entirely, that the barrier might run all around the village. And in the midst of all my exultation and relief, I hit the wall again. I hit it fairly hard, for I was running hard, sure that it wasn't there, but in a terrible hurry to make sure it wasn't there. I went into it for three running strides before it tossed me back. I hit the roadbed flat on my back and my head banged upon the pavement. There were a million stars. I rolled over and got on my hands and knees and stayed there for a moment, like a gutted hound, with my head hanging limp between my shoulders, and I shook it now and then to shake the stars away. I heard the crackle and the roar of flames and that jerked me to my feet. I still was fairly wobbly, but wobbly or not, I got away from there. The car was burning briskly and at any moment the flames would reach the gas tank and the car would go sky high. But the explosion, when it came, was not too spectacular -just an angry, muffled whuff and a great gout of flame flaring up into the sky. But it was loud enough to bring some people out to see what was going on. Doe Fabian and lawyer Nichols were running up the road, and behind them came a bunch of yelling kids and a pack of barking dogs. I didn't wait for them although I had half a mind to, for I had a lot to tell and here was an audience. But there was something else that stopped me from turning back - I had to go on tracking down the barrier and try to find its end, if it had an end. My head had begun to clear and all the stars were gone and I could think a little better. There was one thing that stood out plain and clear: a car could go through the barrier when there was no one in it, but when it was occupied, the barrier stopped it dead. A man could not go through the barrier, but he could pick up a phone and talk to anyone he wanted. And I remembered that I had heard the voices of the men shouting in the road, had heard them very clearly even when they were on the other side. I picked up some sticks and stones and tossed them at the barrier. They went sailing through as if nothing had been there. There was only one thing that the barrier would stop and that single thing was life. And why in the world should there be a barrier to shut out, or shut in, life? The village was beginning to stir to life. I watched Floyd Caldwell come out on his back porch, dressed in his undershirt and a pair of pants with the suspenders hanging. Except for old Doc Fabian, Floyd was the only man in Millville who ever wore suspenders. But while old Doc wore sedate and narrow black ones, Floyd wore a pair that was broad and red. Floyd was the barber and he took a lot of kidding about his red suspenders, but Floyd didn't mind. He was the village smart guy and he worked at it all the time and it probably was all right, for it brought him a lot of trade from out in the farming country. People who might just as well have gone to Coon Valley for their haircuts came, instead, to Millville to listen to Floyd's jokes and to see him clown. Floyd stood out on the back porch and stretched his arms and yawned. Then he took a close look at the weather and he scratched his ribs. Down the street a woman called the family dog and in a little while I heard the flat snap of a screen door shutting and I knew the dog was in. It was strange, I thought, that there'd been no alarm. Perhaps it was because few people as yet knew about the barrier. Perhaps the few who had found out about it were still a little numb. Perhaps most of them couldn't quite believe it. Maybe they were afraid, as I was, to make too much fuss about it until they knew something more about it. But it couldn't last for long, this morning calm. Before too long, Millville would be seething. Now, as I followed it, the barrier cut through the back yard of one of the older houses in the village. In its day it had been a place of elegance, but years of poverty and neglect had left it tumbledown. An old lady was coming down the steps from the shaky back porch, balancing her frail body with a steadying cane. Her hair was thin and white and even with no breeze to stir the air, ragged ends of it floated like a fuzzy halo all around her head. She started down the path to the little garden, but when she saw me she stopped and peered at me, with her head tilted just a little in a bird-like fashion. Her pale blue eyes glittered at me through the thickness of her glasses. 'Brad Carter, isn't it?' she asked. 'Yes, Mrs Tyler,' I said. 'How are you this morning?' 'Oh, just tolerable,' she told me. 'I'm never more than that. I thought that it was you, but my eyes have failed me and I never can be sure.' 'It's a nice morning, Mrs Tyler. This is good weather we are having.' 'Yes,' she said, 'it is. I was looking for Tupper. He seems to have wandered off again. You haven't seen him, have you?' I shook my head. It had been ten years since anyone had seen Tupper Tyler. 'He is such a restless boy,' she said. 'Always wandering off I declare, I don't know what to do with him.' 'Don't you worry,' I told her. 'He'll show up again.' 'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose he will. He always does, you know.' She prodded with her cane at the bed of purple flowers that grew along the walk. 'They're very good this year,' she said. 'The best I've ever seen them. I got them from your father twenty years ago. Mr Tyler and your father were such good friends. You remember that, of course.' 'Yes,' I said. 'I remember very well.' 'And your mother? Tell me how she is. We used to see a good deal of one another.' 'You forget, Mrs Tyler,' I told her, gently. 'Mother died almost two years ago.' 'Oh, so she did,' she said. 'It's true, I am forgetful. Old age does it to one. No one should grow old.' 'I must be getting on,' I said. 'It was good to see you.' 'It was kind of you to call,' she said. 'If you have the time, you might step in and we could have some tea. It is so seldom now that anyone ever comes for tea. I suppose it's because the times have changed. No one, any more, has the time for tea.' 'I'm sorry that I can't,' I said. 'I just stopped by for a moment.' 'Well,' she said, 'it was very nice of you. If you happen to see Tupper would you mind, I wonder, to tell him to come home.' 'Of course I will,' I promised. I was glad to get away from her. She was nice enough, of course, but just a little mad. In all the years since Tupper's disappearance, she had gone on looking for him, and always as if he'd just stepped out the door, always very calm and confident in the thought that he'd be coming home in just a little while. Quite reasonable about it and very, very sweet, no more than mildly worried about the idiot son who had vanished without trace. Tupper, I recalled, had been something of a pest. He'd been a pest with everyone, of course, but especially with me. He loved flowers and he'd hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he'd tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on. Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers - God knows why he did it as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes. The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I'd been travelling on the inside of a curve. Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot. And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns. Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood - Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns? Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade. There was, I told myself, no sense in going farther. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in. I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season. I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch. I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother's swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers. The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn't see the swing until I reached the gate. I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks. There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird. He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. 'Hi, there,' he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted. And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before. 2 Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been embarrassed. 'I'm sorry, Brad,' he said. 'I don't want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston.' Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he'd been no friend of mine or of anybody else's. He'd been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man. That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a troubleshooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent. Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang - how were they getting on? And I couldn't answer, for I didn't know. They all had drifted off. There wasn't much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around. I probably wouldn't have stayed myself if it hadn't been for Mother. I'd come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother bad joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave. 'Ed,' I had asked, 'do you ever hear from any of the fellows? 'No, I don't,' said Ed. 'I don't know where any of them are.' I said: 'There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson, and Marty Hall and Alf. I can't remember Alf's last name.' 'Peterson,' said Ed. 'Yes, that's it,' I said. 'It's a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together.' Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand. 'What are you going to do now?' he asked me. 'Lock the door, I guess,' I said. 'It's not just the phone. It's everything. I'm behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it.' 'You could run the business from the house.' 'Ed,' I told him shortly, 'there isn't any business. I just never had a business. I couldn't make a start. I lost money from the first.' I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the kerb and a dog was smelling of a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink. I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that everything's all right and will work out in the end, but always something comes up that you can't kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take away the phone had been that final thing I couldn't kid away. I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town - not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place. The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners. I turned down the street, away from the dusty business section and made my way down to the little river that flowed dose against the east edge of the town. There I found the ancient footpath underneath the trees and walked along, listening in the summer silence to the gurgle of the water as it flowed between the grassy banks and along the gravel bars. And as I walked the lost and half forgotten years came crowding in upon me. There, just ahead, was the village swimming hole, and below it the stretch of shallows where I'd netted suckers in the spring. Around the river's bend was the place we had held our picnics. We had built a fire to roast the wieners and to toast the marshmallows and we had sat and watched the evening steal in among the trees and across the meadows. After a time the moon would rise, making the place a magic place, painted by the lattice of shadow and of moonlight. Then we talked in whispers and we willed that time should move at a slower pace so we might hold the magic longer. But for all our willing, it had never come to pass, for time, even then, was something that could not be slowed or stopped. There had been Nancy and myself and Ed Adler and Priscilla Gordon, and at times Alf Peterson had come with us as well, but as I remembered it he had seldom brought the same girl twice. I stood for a moment in the path and tried to bring it back, the glow of moonlight and the glimmer of the dying fire, the soft girl voices and the soft girl-flesh, the engulfing tenderness of that youthful miracle, the tingle and excitement and the thankfulness. I sought the enchanted darkness and the golden happiness, or at least the ghosts of them; all that I could find was the intellectual knowledge of them, that they once had been and were not any more. So I stood, with the edge worn off a tarnished memory, and a business failure. I think I faced it squarely then, the first time that I'd faced it. What would I do next? Perhaps, I thought, I should have stayed in the greenhouse business, but it was a foolish thought and a piece of wishfulness, for after Dad had died it had been, in every way, a losing proposition. When he had been alive, we had done all right, but then there'd been the three of us to work, and Dad had been the kind of man who had an understanding with all growing things. They grew and flourished under his care and he seemed to know exactly what to do to keep them green and healthy. Somehow or other, I didn't have the knack. With me the plants were poor and puny at the best, and there were always pests and parasites and all sorts of plant diseases. Suddenly, as I stood there, the river and the path and trees became ancient, alien things. As if I were a stranger in this place, as if I had wandered into an area of time and space where I had no business being. And more terrifying than if it had been a place I'd never seen before because I knew in a chill, far corner of my mind that here was a place that held a part of me. I turned around and started up the path and back of me was a fear and panic that made me want to run. But I didn't run. I went even slower than I ordinarily would have, for this was a victory that I needed and was determined I would have any sort of little futile victory, like walking very slowly when there was the urge to run. Back on the street again, away from the deep shadow of the trees, the warmth and brilliance of the sunlight set things right again. Not entirely right, perhaps, but as they had been before. The street was the same as ever. There were a few more cars and the dog had disappeared and Stiffy Grant had changed his loafing place. Instead of propping up the Happy Hollow tavern, he was propping up my office. Or at least what had been my office. For now I knew that there was no point in waiting. I might as well go in right now and clean out my desk and lock the door behind me and take the key down to the bank. Daniel Willoughby would be fairly frosty, but I was beyond all caring about Daniel Willoughby. Sure, I owed him rent that I couldn't pay and he probably would resent it, but there were a lot of other people in the village who owed Daniel Willoughby without much prospect of paying. That was the way he'd worked it and that was the way he had it and that was why he resented everyone. I'd rather be like myself, I thought, than like Dan Willoughby, who walked the streets each day, chewed by contempt and hatred of everyone he met. Under other circumstances I would have been glad to have stopped and talked a while with Stiffy Grant. He might be the village bum, but he was a friend of mine. He was always ready to go fishing and he knew all the likely places and his talk was far more interesting than you might imagine. But right now I didn't care to talk with anyone. 'Hi, there, Brad,' said Stiffy, as I came up to him. 'You wouldn't happen, would you, to have a dollar on you? It had been a long time since Stiffy had put the bite on me and I was surprised that he should do it now. For whatever else Stiffy Grant might be, he was a gentleman and most considerate. He never tapped anyone for money unless they could afford it. Stiffy had a ready genius for knowing exactly when and how he could safely make a touch. I dipped into my pocket and there was a small wad of bills and a little silver. I hauled out the little wad and peeled off a bill for him. 'Thank you, Brad,' he said. 'I ain't had a drink all day.' He tucked the dollar into the pocket of a patched and flapping vest and hobbled swiftly up the street, heading for the tavern. I opened the office door and stepped inside and as I shut the door behind me, the phone began to ring. I stood there, like a fool, rooted to the floor, staring at the phone. It kept on ringing, so I went and answered it. 'Mr Bradshaw Carter?' asked the sweetest voice I have ever heard. 'This is he,' I said. 'What can I do for you? I knew that it was no one in the village, for they would have called me Brad. And, besides, there was no one I knew who had that kind of voice. It had the persuasive purr of a TV glamour girl selling soap or beauty aids, and it had, as well, that dear, bright timbre one would expect when a fairy princess spoke. 'You, perhaps, are the Mr Bradshaw Carter whose father ran a greenhouse?' 'Yes, that's right,' I said. 'You, yourself, no longer run the greenhouse? 'No,' I said, 'I don't.' And then the voice changed. Up till now it had been sweet and very feminine, but now it was male and businesslike. As if one person had been talking, then had gotten up and gone and an entirely different person had picked up the phone. And yet, for some crazy reason, I had the distinct impression that there had been no change of person, but just a change of voice. 'We understand,' this new voice said, 'that you might be free to do some work for us.' Why, yes, I would,' I said. 'But what is going on? Why did your voice change? Who am I talking with?' And it was a silly thing to ask, for no matter what my impression might have been, no human voice could have changed so completely and abruptly. It had to be two persons. But the question wasn't answered. We have hopes,' the voice said, 'that you can represent us. You have been highly recommended.' 'In what capacity?' I asked. 'Diplomatically,' said the voice. 'I think that is the proper...' 'But I'm no diplomat. I have no...' 'You mistake us, Mr Carter. You do not understand. Perhaps I should explain a little. We have contact with many of your people. They serve us in many ways. For example, we have a group of readers...' 'Readers?' 'That is what I said. Ones who read to us. They read many different things, you see. Things of many interests. The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford dictionary and many different textbooks. Literature and history. Philosophy and economics. And it's all so interesting.' 'But you could read these things yourself. There is no need of readers. All you need to do is to get some books...' The voice sighed resignedly. 'You do not understand. You are springing at conclusions.' 'All right, then,' I said, 'I do not understand. We'll let it go at that. What do you want of me? Remembering that I'm a lousy reader.' 'We want you to represent us. We would like first to talk with you, so that you may give us your appraisal of the situation, and from there we can...' There was more of it, but I didn't hear it. For now, suddenly, I knew what had seemed so wrong. I had been looking at it all the while, of course, but it was not until this moment that a full realization of it touched my consciousness. There had been too many other things - the phone when there should have been no phone, the sudden change of voices, the crazy trend of the conversation. My mind had been too busy to grasp the many things in their entirety. But now the wrongness of the phone punched through to me and what the voice might be saying became a fuzzy sound. For this was not the phone that had been on the desk an hour before. This phone had no dial and it had no cord connected to the wall outlet. 'What's going on?' I shouted. 'Who am I talking to? Where are you calling from?' And there was yet another voice, neither feminine nor male, neither businesslike nor sweet, but an empty voice that was somehow jocular, but without a trace of character in the fibre of it. 'Mr Carter,' said the empty voice, 'you need not be alarmed. We take care of our own. We have much gratitude. Believe us, Mr Carter, we are very grateful to you.' 'Grateful for what?' I shouted. 'Go see Gerald Sherwood,' said the emptiness. 'We will speak to him of you.' 'Look here,' I yelled, 'I don't know what's going on, but...' 'Just talk to Gerald Sherwood,' said the voice. Then the phone went dead. Dead, completely dead. There was no humming on the wire. There was just an emptiness. 'Hello, there,' I shouted. 'Hello, whoever you may be.' But there was no answer. I took the receiver from my ear and stood with it in my hand, trying to reach back into my memory for something that I knew was there. That final voice - I should know that voice. I had heard it somewhere. But my memory felled me. I put the receiver back on the cradle and picked up the phone. It was, to all appearance, an ordinary phone, except that it had no dial and was entirely unconnected. I looked for a trademark or a manufacturer's designation and there was no such thing. Ed Adler had come to take out the phone. He had disconnected it and had been standing, with it dangling from his hand, when I'd gone out for my walk. When I had returned and heard the ringing of the phone and seen it on the desk, the thing that had run through my mind (illogical, but the only ready explanation), had been that for some reason Ed had reconnected the phone and had not taken it. Perhaps because of his friendship for me; willing, perhaps, to disregard an order so that I could keep the phone. Or, perhaps, that Tom Preston might have reconsidered and decided to give me a little extra time. Or even that some unknown benefactor had come forward to pay the bill and save the phone for me. But I knew now that it had been none of these things. For this phone was not the phone that Ed had disconnected. I reached out and took the receiver from the cradle and put it to my ear. The businesslike voice spoke to me. It didn't say hello, it did not ask who called. It said: 'It is clear, Mr Carter, that you are suspicious of us. We can understand quite well your confusion and your lack of confidence in us. We do not blame you for it, but feeling as you do, there is no use of further conversation. Talk first to Mr Sherwood and then come back and talk with us.' The line went dead again. This time I didn't shout to try to bring the voice back. I knew it was no use. I put the receiver back on the cradle and shoved the phone away. See Gerald Sherwood, the voice had said, and then come back and talk. And what in the world could Gerald Sherwood have to do with it? I considered Gerald Sherwood and he seemed a most unlikely person to be mixed up in any business such as this. He was Nancy Sherwood's father and an industrialist of sorts who was a native of the village and lived in the old ancestral home on top of the bill at the village edge. Unlike the rest of us, he was not entirely of the village. He owned and ran a factory at Elmore, a city of some thirty or forty thousand about fifty miles away. It was not his factory, really; it had been his father's factory, and at one time it had been engaged in making farm machinery. But some years ago the bottom had fallen out of the farm machinery business and Sherwood had changed over to the manufacturing of a wide variety of gadgets. Just what kind of gadgets, I had no idea, for I had paid but small attention to the Sherwood family, except for a time, in the closing days of high school, when I had held a somewhat more than casual interest in Gerald Sherwood's daughter. He was a solid and substantial citizen and he was well accepted. But because he, and his father before him, had not made their living in the village, because the Sherwood family had always been well-off, if not exactly rich, while the rest of us were poor, they had always been considered just a step this side of strangers. Their interests were not entirely the interests of the village; they were not tied as tightly to the community as the rest of us. So they stood apart, perhaps not so much that they wanted to as that we forced them to. So what was I to do? Drive out to Sherwood's place and play the village fool? Go barging in and ask him what he knew of a screwy telephone? I looked at my watch and it was only four o'clock. Even if I decided to go out and talk with Sherwood, I couldn't do it until early evening. More than likely, I told myself he didn't return from Elmore until six o'clock or so. I pulled out the desk drawer and began taking out my stuff. Then I put it back again and closed the drawer. I'd have to keep the office until sometime tonight because I'd have to come to it to talk with the person (or the persons?) on that nightmare phone. After it was dark, if I wanted to, I could walk out with the phone and take it home with me. But I couldn't walk the streets in broad daylight with a phone tucked beneath my arm. I went out and closed the door behind me and started down the street. I didn't know what to do and stood at the first street corner for a moment to make up my mind. I could go home, of course, but I shrank from doing it. It seemed a bit too much like hunting out a hole to hide in. I could go down to the village hall and there might be someone there to talk with. Although there was a chance, as well, that Hiram Martin, the village constable, would be the only one around. Hiram would want me to play a game of checkers with him and I wasn't in the mood for playing any checkers. Hiram was a rotten loser, too, and you had to let him win to prevent him from getting nasty. Hiram and I had never got along too well together. He had been a bully on the schoolground and he and I had fought a dozen times a year. He always licked me, but he never made me say that I was licked, and he never liked me. You had to let Hiram lick you once or twice a year and then admit that you were licked and he'd let you be his friend. And there was a chance, as well, that Higman Morris would be there, and on a day like this, I couldn't stomach Higgy. Higgy was the mayor, a pillar of the church, a member of the school board, a director of the bank, and a big stuffed shirt. Even on my better days, Higgy was a chore; I ducked him when I could. Or I could go up to the Tribune office and spend an hour or so with the editor, Joe Evans, who wouldn't be too busy, because the paper had been put out this morning. But Joe would be full of county politics and the proposal to build a swimming pool and a lot of other things of lively public interest and somehow or other I couldn't stir up too much interest in any one of them. I would go down to the Happy Hollow tavern, I decided, and take one of the booths in back and nurse a beer or two while I killed some time and tried to do some thinking. My finances didn't run to drinking, but a beer or two wouldn't make me much worse off than I was already, and there is, at times, an awful lot of comfort in a glass of beer. It was too early for many people to be in the place and I could be alone. Stiffy Grant, more than likely, would be there, spending the dollar that I had given him. But Stiffy was a gentleman and a most perceptive person. If he saw I wanted to be by myself, he wouldn't bother me. The tavern was dark and cool and I had to feel my way along, after coming in from the brilliance of the street. I reached the back booth and saw that it was empty, so I sat down in it. There were some people in one of the booths up front, but that was all there were. Mae Hutton came from behind the bar. 'Hello, Brad,' she said. 'We don't see much of you.' 'You holding down the place for Charley?' I asked her. Charley was her father and the owner of the tavern. 'He's catching a nap,' she said. 'It's not too busy this time of day. I can handle it.' 'How about a beer?' I asked. 'Sure thing. Large or small?' 'Make it large,' I told her. She brought the beer and went back behind the bar. The place was quiet and restful not elegant, and perhaps a little dirty, but restful. Up front the brightness of the street made a splash of light, but it faded out before it got too far, as if it were soaked up by the quiet dusk that lurked within the building. A man got up from the booth just ahead of me. I had not seen him as I came in. Probably he'd been sitting in the corner, against the wall. He held a half-filled glass and he turned and stared at me. Then he took a step or two and stood beside my booth. I looked up and I didn't recognize him. My eyes had not as yet become adjusted to the place. 'Brad Carter?' he asked. 'Could you be Brad Carter?' 'Yes, I could,' I said. He put his glass down on the table and sat down across from me. And as he did, those fox-like features fell into shape for me and I knew who he was. 'Alf Peterson!' I said, surprised. 'Ed Adler and I were talking about you just an hour or so ago.' He thrust his hand across the table and I grabbed it, glad to see him, glad for some strange reason for this man out of the past. His handclasp was firm and strong and I knew he was glad to see me, too. 'Good Lord,' I said, 'how long has it been?' 'Six years,' he told me. 'Maybe more than that.' We sat there, looking at one another, in that awkward pause that falls between old friends after years of not seeing one another, neither one quite sure of what should be said, searching for some safe and common ground to begin a conversation. 'Back for a visit?' I inquired. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Vacation.' 'You should have looked me up at once.' 'Just got in three or four hours ago.' It was strange, I thought, that he should have come back to Millville, for there was no one for him here. His folks had moved away, somewhere east, several years ago. They'd not been Millville people. They'd been in the village for only four or five years, while his father worked as an engineer on a highway project. 'You're going to stay with me,' I said. 'There's a lot of room. I am all alone.' 'I'm at a motel west of town. Johnny's Motor Court, they call it.' 'You should have come straight to my place.' 'I would have,' he said, 'but I didn't know. I didn't know that you were in town. Even if you were, I thought you might be married. I didn't want to just come barging in.' I shook my head. 'None of those things,' I said. We each had a drink of beer. He put down his glass. 'How are things going, Brad?' My mouth got set to tell a lie, and then I stopped. What the hell, I thought. This man across from me was old Alf Peterson, one of my best friends. There was no point in telling him a lie. There was no pride involved. He was too good a friend for pride to be involved. 'Not so good,' I told him. 'I'm sorry, Brad.' 'I made a big mistake,' I said. 'I should have gotten out of here. There's nothing here in Millville, not for anyone.' 'You used to want to be an artist. You used to fool around with drawing and there were those pictures that you painted.' I made a motion to sweep it all away. 'Don't tell me,' said Alf Peterson, 'that you didn't even try. You were planning to go on to school that year we graduated.' 'I did,' I said. 'I got in a year of it. An art school in Chicago. Then Dad passed away and Mother needed me. And there wasn't any money. I've often wondered how Dad got enough together to send me that one year.' 'And your mother? You said you are alone.' 'She died two years ago.' He nodded. 'And you still run the greenhouse.' I shook my head. 'I couldn't make a go of it. There wasn't much to go on; I've been selling insurance and trying to handle real estate. But it's no good, Alf. Tomorrow morning I'll close up the office.' 'What then?' he asked. 'I don't know. I haven't thought about it.' Alf signalled to Mae to bring another round of beers. 'You don't feel,' he said, 'there's anything to stay for.' I shook my head. 'There's the house, of course. I would hate to sell it. If I left, I'd just lock it up. But there's no place I want to go, Alf, that's the hell of it. I don't know if I can quite explain. I've stayed here a year or two too long; I have Millville in my blood.' Alt nodded. 'I think I understand. It got into my blood as well. That's why I came back. And now I wonder if I should have. Of course I'm glad to see you, and maybe some other people, but even so I have a feeling that I should not have come. The place seems sort of empty. Sucked dry, if you follow me. It's the same as it always was, I guess, but it has that empty feeling.' Mae brought the beers and took the empty glasses. 'I have an idea,' Alf said, 'if you care to listen.' 'Sure,' I said. 'Why not?' 'I'll be going back,' he said, 'in another day or so. Why don't you come with me? I'm working with a crazy sort of project. There would be room for you. I know the supervisor pretty well and I could speak to him.' 'Doing what?' I asked. 'Maybe it would be something that I couldn't do.' 'I don't know,' said All, 'if I can explain it very logically. It's a research project - a thinking project. You sit in a booth and think.' 'Think?' 'Yeah. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? But it's not the way it sounds. You sit down in a booth and you get a card that has a question or a problem printed on it. Then you think about that problem and you're supposed to think out loud, sort of talking to yourself, sometimes arguing with yourself. You're self-conscious to start with, but you get over that. The booth is soundproofed and no one can see or hear you. I suppose there is a recorder of some sort to take down what you say, but if there is, it's not in sight.' 'And they pay you for this?' 'Rather well,' said Alf. 'A man can get along.' 'But what is it for?' I asked. 'We don't know,' said Alf. 'Not that we haven't asked. But that's the one condition of the job - that you don't know what it's all about. It's an experiment of some sort, I'd guess. I imagine that it's financed by a university or some research outfit. We are told that if we knew what was going on it might influence the way we are thinking. A man might unconsciously pattern his thinking to fit the purpose of the research.' 'And the results?' I asked. 'We aren't told results. Each thinker must have a certain kind of pattern and if you knew that pattern it might influence you. You might try to conform to your own personal pattern, to be consistent, or perhaps there'd be a tendency to break out of it. If you don't know the results, you can't guess at the pattern and there is then no danger.' A truck went by in the street outside and its rumble was loud in the quietness of the tavern. And after it went past, there was a fly buzzing on the ceiling. The people up in front apparently had left - at least, they weren't talking any more. I looked around for Stiffy Grant and he wasn't there. I recalled now that I had not seen him and that was funny, for I'd just given him the dollar. 'Where is this place?' I asked. 'Mississippi. Greenbriar, Mississippi. It's just a little place. Come to think of it, it's a lot like Millville. Just a little village, quiet and dusty and hot. My God, how hot it is. But the project centre is air conditioned. It isn't bad in there.' 'A little town,' I said. 'Funny that there'd be a place like that in a little town.' 'Camouflage,' said All. 'They want to keep it quiet. We're asked not to talk about it. And how could you hide it better than in a little place like that? No one would ever think there'd be a project of that sort in a stuck-off village.' 'But you were a stranger...' 'Sure, and that's how I got the job. They didn't want too many local people. All of them would have a tendency to think pretty much alike. They were glad to get someone from out of town. There are quite a lot of out-of-towners in the project.' 'And before that?' 'Before that? Oh, yes, I see. Before that there was everything. I floated, bummed around. Never stayed too long in any spot. A job for a few weeks here, then a job for a few weeks a little farther on. I guess you could say I drifted. Worked on a concrete gang for a while, washed dishes for a while when the cash ran out and there was nothing else to do. Was a gardener on a big estate down in Louisville for a month or two. Picked tomatoes for a while, but you can starve at that sort of work, so I moved on. Did a lot of things. But I've been down in Greenbriar for eleven months.' 'The job can't last forever. After a while they'll have all the data they need.' He nodded. 'I know. I'll hate to have it end. It's the best work I ever found. How about it, Brad? Will you go back with me?' 'I'll have to think about it,' I told him. 'Can't you stay a little longer than that day or two?' 'I suppose I could,' said All. 'I've got two weeks' vacation.' 'Like to do some fishing?' 'Nothing I'd like better.' 'What do you say we leave tomorrow morning? Go up north for a week or so? It should be cool up there. I have a tent and a camping outfit. We'll try to find a place where we can get some wall-eyes.' 'That sounds fine to me.' 'We can use my car,' I said. 'I'll buy the gas,' said All. 'The shape I'm in,' I said, 'I'll let you.' 3 If it had not been for its pillared front and the gleaming white rail of the widow walk atop its roof, the house would have been plain and stark. There had been a time, I recalled, when I had thought of it as the most beautiful house in the entire world. But it had been six or seven years since I had been at the Sherwood house. I parked the car and got out and stood for a moment, looking at the house. It was not fully dark as yet and the four great pillars gleamed softly in the fading light of day. There were no lights in the front part of the house, but I could see that they had been turned on somewhere in the back. I went up the shallow steps and across the porch. I found the bell and rang. Footsteps came down the hall, a hurrying woman's footsteps. More than likely, I thought, it was Mrs Flaherty. She had been housekeeper for the family since that time Mrs Sherwood had left the house, never to return. But it wasn't Mrs Flaherty. The door came open and she stood there, more mature than I remembered her, more poised, more beautiful than ever. 'Nancy!' I exclaimed. 'Why, you must be Nancy!' It was not what I would have said if I'd had time to think about it. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm Nancy. Why be so surprised?' 'Because I thought you weren't here. When did you get home?' 'Just yesterday,' she said. And, I thought, she doesn't know me. She knows that she should know me. She's trying to remember. 'Brad,' she said, proving I was wrong, 'it's silly just to stand there. Why don't you come in.' I stepped inside and she dosed the door and we were facing one another in the dimness of the hail. She reached out and laid her fingers on the lapel of my coat. 'It's been a long time, Brad,' she said. 'How is everything with you? 'Fine,' I said. 'Just fine.' 'There are not many left, I hear. Not many of the gang.' I shook my head. 'You sound as if you're glad to be back home.' She laughed, just a flutter of a laugh. 'Why, of course I am,' she said. And the laugh was the same as ever, that little burst of spontaneous merriment that bad been a part of her. Someone stepped out into the hall. 'Nancy,' a voice called, 'is that the Carter boy? Why,' Nancy said to me, 'I didn't know that you wanted to see Father.' 'It won't take long,' I told her. 'Will I see you later?' 'Yes, of course,' she said. 'We have a lot to talk about.' 'Nancy!' 'Yes, Father.' 'I'm coming,' I said. I strode down the hall toward the figure there. He opened a door and turned on the lights in the room beyond. I stepped in and he closed the door. He was a big man with great broad shoulders and an aristocratic head, with a smart trim moustache. 'Mr Sherwood,' I told him, angrily, 'I am not the Carter boy. I am Bradshaw Carter. To my friends, I'm Brad.' It was an unreasonable anger, and probably uncalled for. But he had burned me up, out there in the hall. 'I'm sorry, Brad,' he said. 'It's so hard to remember that you all are grown up - the kids that Nancy used to run around with.' He stepped from the door and went across the room to a desk that stood against one wall. He opened a drawer and took out a bulky envelope and laid it on the desk top. 'That's for you,' he said. 'For me?' 'Yes, I thought you knew.' I shook my head and there was something in the room that was very close to fear. It was a sombre room, two walls filled with books, and on the third heavily draped windows flanking a marble fireplace. 'Well,' he said, 'it's yours. Why don't you take it?' I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and I flipped up the flap. Inside was a thick sheaf of currency. 'Fifteen hundred dollars,' said Gerald Sherwood. 'I presume that is the right amount.' 'I don't know anything,' I told him, 'about fifteen hundred dollars. I was simply told by phone that I should talk with you.' He puckered up his face, and looked at me intently, almost as if he might not believe me. 'On a phone like that,' I told him, pointing to the second phone that stood on the desk. He nodded tiredly. 'Yes,' he said, 'and how long have you had the phone?' 'Just this afternoon. Ed Adler came and took out my other phone, the regular phone, because I couldn't pay for it. I went for a walk, to sort of think things over, and when I came back this other phone was ringing.' He waved a hand. 'Take the envelope,' he said. 'Put it in your pocket. It is not my money. It belongs to you.' I laid the envelope back on top the desk. I needed fifteen hundred dollars. I needed any kind of money, no matter where it came from. But I couldn't take that envelope. I don't know why I couldn't. 'All right,' he said, 'sit down.' A chair stood angled in front of the desk and I sat down in it. He lifted the lid of a box on the desk. 'A cigar?' he asked. 'I don't smoke,' I told him. 'A drink, perhaps?' 'Yes. I would like a drink.' 'Bourbon?' 'Bourbon would be fine.' He went to a cellaret that stood in a corner and put ice into two glasses. 'How do you drink it, Brad?' 'Just ice, if you don't mind.' He chuckled. 'It's the only civilized way to drink the stuff' he said. I sat, looking at the rows of books that ran from floor to ceiling. Many of them were in sets and, from the looks of them, in expensive bindings. It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have enough so you didn't have to worry when there was some little thing you wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf. He handed me the glass of whisky and walked around the desk. He sat down in the chair behind it. Raising his glass, he took a couple of thirsty gulps, then set the glass down on the desk top. 'Brad,' he asked, 'how much do you know?' 'Not a thing,' I said. 'Only what I told you. I talked with someone on the phone. They offered me a job.' 'And you took the job?' 'No,' I said, 'I didn't, but I may. I could use a job. But what they whoever it was had to say didn't make much sense.' 'They?' Well, either there were three of them - or one who used three different voices. Strange as it may sound to you, it seemed to me as if it were one person who used different voices.' He picked up the glass and gulped at it again. He held it up to the light and saw in what seemed to be astonishment that it was nearly empty. He hoisted himself out of the chair and went to get the bottle. He slopped liquor in his glass and held the bottle out to me. 'I haven't started yet,' I told him. He put the bottle on the desk and sat down again. 'OK,' he said, 'you've come and talked with me. It's all right to take the job. Pick up your money and get out of here. More than likely Nancy's out there waiting. Take her to a show or something.' 'And that's all?' I asked. 'That is all,' he said. 'You changed your mind,' I told him. 'Changed my mind?' 'You were about to tell me something. Then you decided not to.' He looked at me levelly and hard. 'I suppose you're right,' he said. 'It really makes no difference.' 'It does to me,' I told him. 'Because I can see you're scared.' I thought he might get sore. Most men do when you tell them they are scared. He didn't. He just sat there, his face unchanging. Then he said: 'Start on that drink, for Christ's sake. You make me nervous, just roosting there and hanging onto it.' I had forgotten all about the drink. I had a slug. 'Probably,' he said, 'you are thinking a lot of things that aren't true. You more than likely think that I'm mixed up in some dirty kind of business. I wonder, would you believe me If I told you I don't really know what kind of business I'm mixed up in.' 'I think I would,' I said. 'That is, if you say so.' 'I've had a lot of trouble in life,' he said, 'but that's not unusual. Most people do have a lot of trouble, one way or the other. Mine came in a bunch. Trouble has a way of doing that.' I nodded, agreeing with him. 'First,' he said, 'my wife left me. You probably know all about that. There must have been a lot of talk about it.' 'It was before my time,' I said. 'I was pretty young.' 'Yes, I suppose it was. Say this much for the two of us, we were civilized about it. There wasn't any shouting and no nastiness in court. That was something neither of us wanted. And, then, on top of that I was facing business failure. The bottom went out of the farm machinery business and I feared that I might have to shut down the plant. There were a lot of other small farm machinery firms that simply locked their doors. After fifty or sixty or more years as going, profitable concerns, they were forced out of business.' He paused, as if he wanted me to say something. There wasn't anything to say. He took another drink, then began to talk again. 'I'm a fairly stupid man in a lot of ways. I can handle a business. I can keep it going if there's any chance to keep it going and I can wring a profit from it. I suppose that you could say I'm rather astute when it comes to business matters. But that's the end of it. In the course of my lifetime I have never really had a big idea or a new idea.' He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and putting them on the desk. 'I've thought about it a lot,' he said, 'this thing that happened to me. I've tried to see some reason in it and there is no reason. It's a thing that should not have happened, not to a man like me. There I was, on the verge of failure, and not a thing that I could do about it. The problem was quite simple, really. For a number of good economic reasons, less farm machinery was being sold. Some of the big concerns, with big sales departments and good advertising budgets, could ride out a thing like that. They had some elbow room to plan, there were steps that they could take to lessen the effects of the situation. But a small concern like mine didn't have the room or the capital reserve. My firm, and others, faced disaster. And in my case, you understand, I didn't have a chance. I had run the business according to old and established practices and time-tested rules, the same sort of good, sound business practices that had been followed by my grandfather and my father. And these practices said that when your sales dwindled down to nothing you were finished. There were other men who might have been able to figure out a way to meet the situation, but not me. I was a good businessman, but I had no imagination. I had no ideas. Ad then, suddenly, I began to get ideas. But they were not my own ideas. It was as if the ideas of some other person were being transplanted to my brain. 'You understand,' he said, 'that an idea sometimes comes to you in the matter of a second. It just pops from nowhere. It has no apparent point of origin. Try as you may, you cannot trace it back to anything you did or heard or read. Somehow, I suppose, if you dug deep enough, you'd find its genesis, but there are few of us who are trained to do that sort of digging. But the point is that most ideas are no more than a germ, a tiny starting point. An idea may be good and valid, but it will take some nursing. It has to be developed. You must think about it and turn it around and around and look at it from every angle and weigh it and consider it before you can mould it into something useful. 'But this wasn't the way with these ideas that I got. They sprang forth full and round and completely developed. I didn't have to do any thinking about them. They just popped into my mind and I didn't need to do another thing about them. There they were, all ready for one's use. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have a new idea, a new mass of knowledge in my brain. I'd go for a walk and come back with another. They came in bunches, as if someone had sown a crop of them inside my brain and they had lain there for a while and then begun to sprout.' 'The gadgets?' I said. He looked at me curiously. 'Yes, 'the gadgets. What do you know about them?' 'Nothing,' I told him. 'I just knew that when the bottom fell out of the farm machinery business you started making gadgets. I don't know what kind of gadgets.' He didn't tell me what kind of gadgets. He went on talking about those strange ideas. 'I didn't realize at first what was happening. Then, as the ideas came piling in on me, I knew there was something strange about it. I knew that it was unlikely that I'd think of any one of them, let alone the many that I had. More than likely I'd never have thought of them at all, for I have no imagination and I am not inventive. I tried to tell myself that it was just barely possible I might have thought of two or three of them, but even that would have been most unlikely. But of more than two or three of them I knew I was not capable. I was forced, finally, to admit that I had been the recipient of some sort of outside help.' 'What kind of outside help?' 'I don't know,' he said. 'Even now I don't.' 'But it didn't stop you from using these ideas.' 'I am a practical man,' he said. 'Intensely practical. I suppose some people might even say hard-headed. But consider this: the business was gone. Not my business, mind you, but the family business, the business my grandfather had started and my father had handed on to me. It wasn't my business; it was a business I held in trust. There is a great distinction. You could see a business you had built yourself go gurgling down the drain and still stand the blow of it, telling yourself that you had been successful once and you could start over and be successful once again. But it's different with a family business. In the first place, there is the shame. And in the second place, you can't be sure that you can recoup. You were no success to start with. Success had been handed to you and you'd merely carried on. You never could be sure that you could start over and build the business back. In fact, you're so conditioned that you're pretty sure you couldn't.' He quit speaking and in the silence I could hear the ticking of a clock, faint and far off, but I couldn't see the clock and I resisted the temptation to turn my head to see if I could find it. For I had the feeling that if I turned my head, if I stirred at all, I'd break something that lay within the room. As if I stood in a crowded china shop, where all the pieces were precarious and tilted, fearing to move, for if one piece were dislodged, all of them would come crashing down. 'What would you have done?' asked Sherwood. 'I'd have used anything I had,' I said. 'That's what I did,' said Sherwood. 'I was desperate. There was the business, this house, Nancy, the family name - all of it at stake. I took all of those ideas and I wrote them down and I called in my engineers and draughtsmen and production people and we got to work. I got the credit for it all, of course. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't tell them I wasn't the one who'd dreamed up all those things. And you know, strange as it may sound, that's the hardest part of all. That I have to go on taking credit for all those things I didn't do.' 'So that is that,' I said. 'The family business saved and everything is fine. If I were you, I wouldn't let a guilt complex bother me too much.' 'But it didn't stop,' he said. 'If it had, I'd have forgotten it. If there'd just been this single spurt of help to save the company, it might have been all right. But it kept right on. As if there might be two of me, the real, apparent Gerald Sherwood, the one sitting at this desk, and another one who did the thinking for me. The ideas kept on coming and some of them made a lot of sense and some made no sense at all. Some of them, I tell you, were out of this world, literally out of this world. They had no point of reference, they didn't seem to square with any situation. And while one could sense that they had potential, while there was a feeling of great importance in the very texture of them, they were entirely useless. And it was not only the ideas; it was knowledge also. Bits and bursts of knowledge. Knowledge about things in which I had no interest, things I had never thought of. Knowledge about certain things I'm certain no man knows about. As if someone took a handful of fragmented knowledge, a sort of grab-bag, junk-heap pile of knowledge and dumped it in my brain.' He reached out for the bottle and filled his glass. He gestured at me with the bottle neck and I held out my glass. He filled it to the brim. 'Drink up,' he said. 'You got me started and now you hear me out. Tomorrow morning I'll ask myself why I told you all of this. But tonight it seems all right.' 'If you don't want to tell me. If it seems that I am prying...' He waved a hand at me. 'All right,' he said, 'if you don't want to hear it. Pick up your fifteen hundred.' I shook my head. 'Not yet. Not until I know how come you're giving it to me.' 'It's not my money. I'm just acting as an agent.' 'For this other man? For this other you?' He nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'I wonder how you guessed.' I gestured at the phone without a dial. He grimaced. 'I've never used the thing,' he said. 'Until you told me about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had. I make them by the hundreds...' 'You make them!' 'Yes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although,' he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential tone, 'I'm beginning to suspect it's not a second self.' 'What do you think it is?' He leaned slowly back in the chair. 'Damned if I know,' he said. 'There was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but there was no way of knowing. I just don't bother any more. I tell myself there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone - at least, it's good to think so.' 'But the phone?' I asked. 'I designed the thing,' he said. 'Or perhaps this other person, if it is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn't, for the life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn thing shouldn't work.' 'But you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no purpose.' 'A lot of them,' he said, 'but with them I never drew a blueprint, I never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many might be needed and what to do with them.' 'What did you do with them? 'I shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey.' It was utterly insane. 'Let me get this straight,' I pleaded. 'You found the blueprints in your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?' 'Oh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good advice, it had never failed me. You can't turn your back on something that has played good fairy to you.' 'I think I see,' I said. 'Of course you do,' he told me. 'A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have.' He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. 'I brought this one home,' he said, 'and put it on the desk. All these years I've waited for a call, but it never came.' 'With you,' I told him, 'there is no need of any phone.' 'You think that's it?' he asked. 'I'm sure of it.' 'I suppose it is,' he said. 'At times it's confusing.' 'This Jersey firm?' I asked. 'You corresponded with them?' He shook his head. 'Not a line. I just shipped the phones.' 'There was no acknowledgement?' 'No acknowledgement,' he said. 'No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself...' 'Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm? 'I don't know,' he said. 'Christ, I don't know anything. I've lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood.' And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him. He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said. 'Don't let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not forget that I've been well paid. Tell me about yourself. You're in real estate.' I nodded. 'And insurance.' 'And you couldn't pay your phone bill.' 'Don't waste sympathy on me,' I said. 'I'll get along somehow.' 'Funny thing about the kids,' he said. 'Not many of them stay here. Not much to keep them here, I guess.' 'Not very much,' I said. 'Nancy is just home from Europe,' he told me. 'I'm glad to have her home. It got lonesome here with no one. I haven't seen much of her lately. College and then a fling at social work and then the trip to Europe. But she tells me now that she plans to stay a while. She wants to do some writing.' 'She should be good at it,' I said. 'She got good marks in composition when we were in high school.' 'She has the writing bug,' he said. 'Had half a dozen things published in, I guess you call them little magazines. The ones that come out quarterly and pay you nothing for your work except half a dozen copies. I'd never heard of them before. I read the articles she wrote, but I have no eye for writing. I don't know if it's good or bad. Although I suppose it has to have a certain competence to have been accepted. But if writing keeps her here with me, I'll be satisfied.' I got out of my chair. 'I'd better go,' I said. 'Maybe I have stayed longer than I should.' He shook his head. 'No, I was glad to talk with you. And don't forget the money. This other self, this whatever-you-may-call-it told me to give it to you. I gather that it's in the nature of a retainer of some sort.' 'But this is double talk,' I told him, almost angrily. 'The money comes from you.' 'Not at all,' he said. 'It comes from a special fund that was started many years ago. It didn't seem quite right that I should reap all benefit from all of these ideas which were not really mine. So I began paying ten per cent profits into a special fund...' 'Suggested, more than likely, by this second self? 'Yes,' he said. 'I think you are right, although it was so long ago that I cannot truly say. But in any case, I set up the fund and through the years have paid out varying amounts at the direction of whoever it may be that shares my mind with me.' I stared at him, and it was rude of me, I know. But no man, I told myself, could sit as calmly as Sherwood sat and talk about an unknown personality that shared his mind with him. Even after all the years, it still would not be possible. 'The fund,' said Sherwood, quietly, 'is quite a tidy sum, even with the amounts I've paid out of it. It seems that since this fellow came to live with me, everything I've touched has simply turned to money.' 'You take a chance,' I said, 'telling this to me.' 'You mean that you could tell it around about me? I nodded. 'Not that I would,' I said. 'I don't think you will,' he said. 'You'd get laughed at for your trouble. No one would believe you.' 'I don't suppose they would.' 'Brad,' he said, almost kindly, 'don't be a complete damn fool. Pick up that envelope and put it in your pocket. Come back some other time and talk with me - any time you want. I have a hunch there may be a lot of things we'll want to talk about.' I reached out my hand and picked up the money. I stuffed it in my pocket. 'Thank you, sir,' I said. 'Don't mention it,' he told me. He raised a hand. 'Be seeing you,' he said. 4 I WENT slowly down the hall and there was no sign of Nancy, nor was she on the porch, where I had half expected to find her waiting for me. She had said yes, that I would see her later, that we had a lot to talk about, and I had thought, of course, that she meant tonight. But she might not have meant tonight. She might have meant some other time than this. Or she might have wafted and then grown tired of waiting. After all, I had spent a long time with her father. The moon had risen in a cloudless sky and there was not a breath of breeze. The great oaks stood like graven monuments and the summer night was filled with the glittering of moonbeams. I walked down the stairs and stood for a moment at their foot and it seemed for all the world that I was standing in a circle of enchantment. For this, I thought, could not be the old, familiar earth, this place of ghostly, brooding oaken sentinels, this air so drenched with moonlight, this breathless, waiting silence hanging over all, and the faint, other-world perfume that hung above the soft blackness of the ground. Then the enchantment faded and the glitter went away and I was back once more in the world I knew. There was a chill in the summer air. Perhaps a chill of disappointment, the chill of being booted out of fairyland, the chill of knowing there was another place I could not hope to stay. I felt the solid concrete of the walk underneath my feet and I could see that the shadowed oaks were only oaks and not graven monuments. I shook myself, like a dog coming out of water, and my wits came back together and I went on down the walk. As I neared the car, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, walking around on the driver's side and opening the door. I was halfway in the seat before I saw her sitting there, next to the other door. 'I thought,' she said, 'that you were never coming. What did you and Father find to talk so long about? 'A number of things,' I told her. 'None of them important.' 'Do you see him often?' 'No,' I said. 'Not often.' Somehow I didn't want to tell her this was the first time I had ever talked with him. I groped in the dark and found the lock and slid in the key. 'A drive,' I said. 'Perhaps some place for a drink.' 'No, please,' she said. 'I'd rather sit and talk.' I settled back into the seat. 'It's nice tonight,' she said. 'So quiet. There are so few places that are really quiet.' 'There's a place of enchantment,' I told her, 'just outside your porch. I walked into it, but it didn't last. The air was full of moonbeams and there was a faint perfume...' 'That was the flowers,' she said. 'What flowers? 'There's a bed of them in the curve of the walk. All of them those lovely flowers that your father found out in the woods somewhere.' 'So you have them too,' I said. 'I guess everyone in the village has a bed of them.' 'Your father,' she said, 'was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I'd go walking past and he'd pick a flower or two for me.' Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him. And there had been that day he'd gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap. He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father's special flowers. 'Those flowers of his,' asked Nancy. 'Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?' 'No,' I said, 'he didn't.' 'He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he'd found.' 'He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run.' 'You didn't like it, Brad?' 'I didn't really mind it. I'd grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn't have the knack. Stuff wouldn't grow for me.' She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists. 'It's good to be back,' she said. 'I think I'll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around.' 'He said you planned to write.' 'He told you that?' 'Yes,' I said. 'he did. He didn't act as if he shouldn't.' 'Oh, I don't suppose it makes any difference. But it's a thing that you don't talk about - not until you're well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.' 'And when you write,' I asked, 'what will you write about?' 'About right here,' she said. 'About this town of ours.' 'Millville? 'Why, yes, of course,' she said. 'About the village and its people.' 'But,' I protested, 'there is nothing here to write about.' She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. 'There's so much to write about,' she said. 'So many famous people. And such characters.' 'Famous people?' I said, astonished. 'There are,' she said, 'Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the department of history at...' 'But those are the ones who left,' I said. 'There was nothing here for them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set foot in Millville again, not even for a visit.' 'But,' she said, 'they got their start here. They had the capacity for what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other village of its size.' 'You're sure of that?' I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness, but not quite daring to. 'I would have to check,' she said, 'but there have been a lot of them.' 'And the characters,' I said. 'I guess you're right. Millville has its share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor Higgy...' 'They aren't really characters,' said Nancy. 'Not the way you think of them. I shouldn't have called them characters to start with. They're individualists. They've grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They've not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they've been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this.' In all my life I'd never heard anything like this. Nobody had ever told me that Higgy Morris was an individualist. He wasn't. He was just a big stuffed shirt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he wasn't. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop. 'Don't you think so?' Nancy asked. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I have never thought about it.' And I thought - for God's sake, her education's showing, her years in an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare centre, her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and analyse the place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home; rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village to inspection and analysis and she'd strip us bare and hold us up, flayed and writhing, for the information and amusement of the kind of people who read her kind of book. 'I have a feeling,' she said, 'that there is something here that the world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world. Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger that serves to trigger greatness.' 'That inner hunger,' I said. 'There are families in town who can tell you all you want to know about that inner hunger.' And I wasn't kidding. There were Millville families that at times went just a little hungry; not starving, naturally, but never having quite enough to eat and almost never the right kind of things to eat. I could have named her three of them right off, without even thinking. 'Brad,' she said, 'you don't like the idea of the book.' 'I don't mind,' I said. 'I have no right to mind. But when you write it, please, write it as one of us, not as someone who stands off and is a bit amused. Have a bit of sympathy. Try to feel a little like these people you write about. That shouldn't be too hard; you've lived here long enough.' She laughed, but it was not one of her merry laughs. 'I have a terrible feeling that I may never write it. I'll start it and I'll write away at it, but I'll keep going back and changing it, because the people I am writing of will change, or I'll see them differently as time goes on, and I'll never get it written. So you see, there's no need to worry.' More than likely she was right, I thought. You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book. And I rather doubted that she was as hungry as she thought. 'I hope you do,' I said. 'I mean I hope you get it written. And I know it will be good. It can't help but be.' I was trying to make up for my nastiness and I think that she knew I was. But she let it pass. It had been childish and provincial, I told myself, to have acted as I had. What difference did it make? What possible difference could it make for me, who had stood on the street that very afternoon and felt a hatred for the geographic concept that was called the town of Millville? This was Nancy Sherwood. This was the girl with whom I had walked hand in hand when the world had