Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER Jane had gone and he had washed the dishes, he remembered that he had intended for a week or more to phone Joe about the mice.

"I got mice," Vickers told him.

"You got what?"

"Mice," said Vickers. "Little animals. They run around the place."

"Now that's funny," said Joe. "A well-built place like yours. It shouldn't have no mice. You want me to come over and get rid of them?"

"I guess you'll have to. I tried traps but these mice don't go for traps. Got a cat a while back and the cat left. Only stayed a day or two."

"Now, that's a funny thing. Cats like places where they can catch a mouse."

"This cat was crazy," said Vickers. "Acted like it was spooked. Walked around on tiptoe."

"Cats is funny animals," Joe confided.

"I'm going down to the city today. Figure you could do it while I'm gone?"

"Sure thing," said Joe. "The exterminating business is kind of slack right now. I'll come over ten o'clock or so."

"I'll leave the front door unlocked," said Vickers.

He hung up the phone and got the paper off the stoop. At his desk, he laid down the paper and picked up the sheaf of manuscript, holding it in his hand, feeling the thickness of it and the weight of it, as if by its thickness and its weight he might reassure himself that what it held was good, that it was not labor wasted, that it said the many things he wished to say and said them well enough that other men and women might read the words and know the naked thought that lay behind the coldness of the print.

He should not waste the day, he told himself. He should stay here and work. He should not go traipsing off to meet this man his agent wanted him to meet. But Ann had been insistent and had said that it was important and even when he had told her about the car being in the garage for repairs she still had insisted that he come. That story about the car had been untrue, of course, for he knew even as he told her that Eb would have it ready for him to make the trip.

He looked at his watch and saw he had no more than half an hour until Eb's garage would open and half an hour was not worth his while to spend in writing.

He picked up the paper and went out on the porch to read the morning's news.

He thought about little Jane and what a sweet child she was and how she'd praised his cooking and had chattered on and on.

You aren't married, Jane had said. Why aren't you married, Mr. Vickers?

And he had said: once there was a girl. I remember now. Once there was a girl.

Her name had been Kathleen Preston and she had lived in a big brick house that sat up on a hill, a many-columned house with a wide porch and fanlights above the doors — an old house that had been built in the first flush of pioneer optimism when the country had been new, and the house had stood when the land had failed and ran away in ditches and left the hillsides scarred with gullied yellow clay.

He had been young then, so young that it hurt him now to think of it; so young he could not understand that a girl who lived in an old ancestral home with fanlights above the doors and a pillared portico could not seriously consider a boy whose father farmed a worn-out farm where the corn grew slight and sickly. Or rather, perhaps, it had been her family that could not consider it, for she, too, must have been too young to fully understand. Perhaps she had quarreled with her family; perhaps there had been angry words and tears. That was something he had never known. For between that walk down the enchanted valley and the next time he had called they had bundled her off to a school somewhere in the east and that was the last he had seen or heard of her.

For remembrance sake he had walked the valley again, alert to catch something that would spell out for him the enchantment of that day he had walked with her. But the crab apples had dropped their blossoms and the lark did not sing so well and the enchantment had fled into some never-never land. She had taken the magic with her.

The paper fell out of his lap and he bent to pick it up. Opening it, he saw that the news was following the same drab pattern of all other days.

The latest peace rumor still was going strong and the cold war still was in full cry.

The cold war had been going on for years, of course, and gave promise of going on for many more. The last thirty years had seen crisis after crisis, rumor after rumor, near-war always threatening and big war never breaking out, until a cold-war-weary world yawned in the face of the new peace rumors and the crises that were a dime a dozen.

Someone at an obscure college down in Georgia had set a new record at raw egg-gulping and a glamorous movie star was on the verge of changing husbands once again and the steel workers were threatening to strike.

There was a lengthy feature article about missing persons and he read about half of it, all that he wanted to. It seemed that more and more people were dropping out of sight all the time, whole families at a time, and the police throughout the land were getting rather frantic. There always had been people who had disappeared, the article said, but they had been individuals. Now two or three families would disappear from the same community and two or three from another community and there was no trace of them at all. Usually they were from the poorer brackets. In the past, when individuals had dropped from sight there had usually been some reason for it, but in these cases of mass disappearances there seemed to be no reason beyond poverty and why one would or could disappear because of poverty was something the article writer and the people he had interviewed could not figure out.

There was a headline that read: More Worlds Than One, Says Savant.

He read part of the story:

BOSTON, MASS. (AP) — There may be another earth just a second ahead of us and another world a second behind us and another world a second behind that one and another world a second behind… well, you get the idea.

A sort of continuous chain of words, one behind the other.

That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge.

Vickers let the paper drop to the floor and sat looking out across the garden, rich with flowers and ripe with sunshine. There was peace here, in this garden corner of the world, if there were nowhere else, he thought. A peace compounded of many things, of golden sunshine and the talk of summer leaves quivering in the wind, of bird and flower and sundial, of picket fence that needed painting and an old pine tree dying quietly and tranquilly, taking its time to die, being friends with the grass and flowers and other trees all the while it died.

Here there was no rumor and no threat; here was calm acceptance of the fact that time ran on, that winter came and summer, that sun would follow moon and that the life one held was a gift to be cherished rather than a right that one must wrest from other living things.

Vickers glanced at his watch and saw that it was time to go.