Mastodonia

FOUR

Hiram was perched on one of the lawn chairs in front of the house with Bowser laid out on the grass beside him. The front-yard robin stood impertinently a few paces off, eyeing their intrusion of its territory with perky belligerence.

Hiram explained, “Bowser said he didn’t want to stay in the house, so I carried him out.”

“He used you,” I told him. “He could have walked himself.”

Bowser beat an apologetic tail.

“The robin feels sorry for him,” said Hiram.

The robin had no look of sorrow.

“I ain’t got nothing to do,” said Hiram. “You go about your business. I’ll watch over Bowser till he’s well. Day and night, if you want me to. If he wants anything, he can tell me.”

“All right, then, you watch over him,” I said. “We have things to do.”

At the barn, I had a hell of a time getting the sagging door open again. Someday, I promised myself, I would get it fixed. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours work, but somehow I had never quite gotten around to it.

The interior of the barn, redolent of ancient horse manure, had a pile of junk stacked haphazardly in one corner, but was mostly filled by two long tables I had set up with boards laid across sawhorses. Ranged on the tables were all the pieces of metal I had found or dug out of the pit. At the far end of one of the tables lay two hollow hemispherical pieces of bright metal I had found when I had cleaned out the barn.

Rila walked over to one of the tables and picked up a jagged piece of metal. She turned it over and over in her hands. She said, in some amazement, “Just as you said, there isn’t any rust. Just some slight discoloration here and there. There’s some iron in it, isn’t there?”

“Quite a lot,” I told her. “At least, that’s what the university people said.”

“Any ferric metal rusts,” she said. “Some alloys will stand up for a long time, but they finally show some rust. When oxygen gets to them.”

“More than a hundred years,” I told her. “Probably, a great deal more than that. Willow Bend celebrated its centenary several years ago. That crater was formed before the town was founded. The crater has to be much older than that. There are several feet of loam in the bottom of it. It would have taken some time for that loam to form. It takes a lot of leaves over many years to form a foot of soil.”

“Have you tried to fit some of these fragments together?”

“I’ve tried, and there are a few pieces that can be fit together, but they don’t tell you anything.”

“What do you do next?”

“Probably nothing. Keep on with the digging. Keep quiet about it. You’re the only one I’ve told. If I said anything to anyone else, all I’d get would be ridicule.

Suddenly there’d be all sorts of instant experts who could explain everything away.”

“I suppose so,” she said, “but here you have at least tentative evidence that there is, at least, one other intelligence in the galaxy, and that Earth has been visited. This would seem important — important enough to face up to some ridicule.”

“But, don’t you see,” I argued, “that any sort of premature announcement would blur, if not kill off, any significance. The human race seems to have a strange, instinctive defensiveness against admitting there is anyone but ourselves. Maybe that’s because we are afraid, deep down inside of us. We may have a basic fear of any other kind of intelligence. Maybe we are afraid that another intelligence would show us up as second rate, make us feel inferior. We talk, at times, about the loneliness of our situation in the universe, voicing a fear that we are alone, but sometimes, it seems to me that that is no more than philosophical posturing.”

“But if it’s the truth,” Rila said, “sooner or later, we’ll have to face up to it. There would be some advantage in facing facts early. Then we’d have some time to get used to the idea, to get our feet planted more firmly under us if the time ever comes when we have to meet them.”

“A lot of people would agree with you,” I said, “but not that faceless mob, the public. We may be intelligent and fairly level-headed, but collectively we can be pig-headed in a lot of different ways.”

Rila moved down the table and stopped opposite the two shiny hemispheres. She tapped one of them with her fingers. “These? They came out of the dig?”

“Not out of the dig,” I said. “I don’t know what they are. They fit together to form a hollow sphere.

The skin is about an eighth of an inch thick and extremely hard. At one time, I was going to send one of them along with the metal I sent the university, then decided not to. For one thing, I’m not sure they tie in with any of the rest of this mystery. I found them here, in this barn. I wanted to set up the tables, but there was a pile of junk in the center of the floor. Old pieces of harness, some odds and ends of lumber, a couple of packing cases, a few worn-out tires, things like that.

I moved everything into that stall over there. That’s when I found the two hemispheres at the bottom of the pile.”

Rila lifted one of the hemispheres and fitted it over the other, running her hand around the area where they came together.

“They do fit,” she said, “but they can’t be fastened back together. There is no thread arrangement, nothing. A hollow ball that came apart somehow, sometime. You have the slightest idea what it is?”

“Not the faintest.”

“It could be something fairly simple, something in relatively common use.”

I looked at my watch. “How about some lunch?”

I asked. “There is not too bad a place about twenty miles up the road.”

“We can eat right here. I could cook up something.”

“No,” I said. “I want to take you out. Do you realize that I never took you out to eat?”