The Visitors (v1.0)

30. LONE PINE

One of the visitors had fallen behind the others. It was standing still and was not cutting trees. On either side of it, the other visitors were continuing with their cutting, regularly spewing out the bales of cellulose behind them.

Stuffy Grant came to an abrupt halt as he came around the edge of the uncut forest and saw what had happened. He reached up a hand and tipped his hat back on his head, ran a hand across his brow to wipe it dry.

"Now what the hell?" he asked aloud. There seemed to be no answer. Studiously, he focused his eyes, but only with an effort. He reached for his back pocket and took out the bottle, uncapped it and put it to his lips, throwing back his head to drink. Finished with the drink, he eyed the level of the liquor in the bottle with some dismay. There weren't more than another two drinks left in it. It wasn't the best of liquor; in fact, it was the cheapest to be bought, but it was liquor and he mourned its disappearance. He recapped the bottle carefully and eased it into the back pocket, patting the pocket to make certain the bottle was secure.

Walking carefully so he would not fall (for if he fell, he might break the bottle), he set out to find what might be wrong. Maybe it got tired, he told himself, and had stopped to rest, although over all the time that he had kept tab on the visitors, not a one of them had ever stopped to rest or had given any sign of tiredness.

Norton had bought his breakfast for him and that meant that he had enough money left to buy another bottle of the booze. It was good to feel, he told himself, that he had at least another bottle in his future. That Norton, say what you might of him, was a decent man.

The visitor that was standing still turned out to be a greater distance off than he had estimated, but he kept plodding doggedly up the swath that it had cut, warily avoiding the bales that it had dropped, and finally reached it.

"What's the matter, fellow?" he asked, walking up and putting out a hand to rest against its hide. Once he put it there, he leaned against it for a moment to get himself a little steadied.

And as he held his arm straight out against it to gain some steadiness, he knew there was something wrong, something not quite the way it bad been before, although it took a little time for him to pinpoint the wrongness.

Then he knew. The visitor was cold. Gone was the pleasant, friendly warmth that he had always felt before when he had laid a hand upon one of them. He shook his head in amazement and took away his hand. He stumbled along beside it for a dozen feet or so and then hid his hand on it again. The hide was still cold, all the warmth was gone.

Fumbling his way along it, he laid his hand upon its hide time and time again. Always the side was cold, stone cold. He turned and leaned his back against the visitor and slid down, collapsing to a sitting position.

Cold and motionless. No longer floating a few inches off the ground, but resting on the ground.

Could this be death? he asked himself. Could the visitor be dead? Cold and still and that was the way of death. And if it had died, why had it died? What had happened to it? And another thing—if it now were dead, it once had been living, but that was no news to him. For a long time, it had seemed to him, without question, that the visitors were alive. Not only alive, but friends. He wondered about that as he thought it, for it had been a long time since he had had a friend. It was strange, he thought, that he should have found a friend among people other than his own.

Huddled against the cold visitor, without even bothering to cover his face, letting the tears run unhindered down his stubbled cheeks, Stuffy Grant wept bitterly for a friend that he had lost