They Walked Like Men

They Walked Like Men

Clifford D. Simak

It was Thursday night and I’d had too much to drink and the hall was dark and that was the only thing that saved me. If I hadn’t stopped beneath the hall light just outside my door to sort out the keys, I would have stepped into the trap, just as sure as hell.

Its being Thursday night had nothing to do with it, actually, but that’s the way I write. Fm a newspaperman, and newspapermen put the day of the week and the time of day and all the other pertinent information into everything they write.

The hall was dark because Old George Weber was a penny-pinching soul. He spent half his time fighting with the other tenants about cutting down the heat or not installing air conditioning or the plumbing’s being on the fritz again or why he never got around to redecorating. He never fought with me because I didn’t care. It was a place to sleep and eat occasionally and to spend what spare time I had, and I wasn’t fussy. We thought an awful lot of one another, did Old George and I. We played pinochle together and we drank beer together and every fall we went out to South Dakota for the pheasant hunting. But we wouldn’t be going this year, I remembered, because that very morning I had driven Old George and Mrs. George out to the airport and had seen them off on a trip to California. And even if Old George had stayed at home, we wouldn’t have been going, for next week I’d be off on the trip the Old Man had been after me to make for the last six months.

I was fumbling for the keys and I was none too steady-handed, for Gavin Walker, the city editor, and I had got into an argument about should science writers be required to cover stuff like council meetings and P.T.A.’s and such. Gavin said that they should and I said that they shouldn’t, and first he’d buy some drinks and then I would buy some drinks, until it came closing time and Ed, the bartender, had to throw us out. I’d wondered, when I left the place, if I should risk driving home or maybe call a cab. I had decided finally that probably I could drive, but I took the back streets, where it was unlikely there’d be any cops. I’d got home all right and had got the car maneuvered into the lot back of the apartment building, but I hadn’t tried to park it. I’d just left it sitting out in the center of the lot. I was having a hard time getting the right key. They all seemed to look alike, and while I was fumbling them around they slipped out of my fingers and fell onto the carpeting.

I bent down to pick them up and I missed them on the first swipe and I missed them on the second, so I got down on my knees to make a new approach to them.

And it was then I saw it.

Consider this: If Old George had not been a tight man with the buck, he’d put in bigger lights out there in the hall, so that one could walk right up to his door and pick out his key instead of going over to the center of the hall and fumbling around underneath that misplaced lightning bug that functioned as a light bulb. And if I hadn’t gotten into the argument with Gavin and taken on a load, I’d never have dropped the keys to Start with. And even if I had, I probably could have picked them up without getting on my knees. And if I hadn’t gotten on my knees, I never would have seen that the carpeting was cut.

Not torn, you understand. Not worn out. But cut. And cut in a funny way—cut in a semicircle in front of my door. As if someone had used the center of my door as a focal point and, with a knife tied to a three-foot string, had cut a semicircle from the rug. Had cut it and left it there—for the rug had not been taken. Someone had cut a semicircular chunk out of it and then had left it there.

And that, I told myself, was a damn funny thing to do—a senseless sort of thing. For why should anyone want a piece of carpeting cut in that particular shape? And if, for some unfathomable reason, someone had wanted it, why had he cut it out, then left it lying there?

I put out a cautious finger to be sure that I was right—that I wasn’t seeing things. And I was right, except it wasn’t carpet. The stuff that lay inside that three-foot semicircle looked for all the world like the other carpeting, but it wasn’t carpeting. It was some sort of paper—the thinnest sort of paper—that looked exactly like the carpeting.

I pulled back my hand and stayed there on my knees, and wasn’t thinking so much of the cutout carpeting and the paper that was there as I was thinking how I’d explain being on my knees if someone in one of those other apartments should come out in the hall.

But no one came out. The hail stayed empty and it had that musty smell one associates with apartment halls. Above me I heard the tiny singing of the tiny light bulb and I knew by the singing that it was on the verge of burning out. And the new caretaker maybe would replace it with a bigger light bulb. Although, I told myself on second thought, that was most unlikely, for Old George probably had briefed him in minute detail on economic maintenance.

I put out my hand once more and touched the paper with a fingertip, and it was paper—just as I had thought it was—or, at least, it felt very much like paper.

And the idea of that cutout carpeting and the paper in its place made me sore as hell. It was a dirty trick and it was a dirty fraud and I grabbed the paper and jerked it out of there.

Underneath the paper was the trap.

I staggered to my feet, with the paper still hanging from my fingers, and stared at the trap.

I didn’t believe it. No man in his right mind would have. People just simply don’t go around setting traps for other people—as if those other people might be a bear or fox.

But the trap stayed there, lying on the floor exposed by the cutout carpeting and until this moment covered by the paper, just as a human trapper would cover his trap with a light sprinkling of leaves or grass to conceal it from his quarry.

It was a big steel trap. I had never seen a bear trap, but I imagine it was as big or bigger than a bear trap. It was a human trap, I told myself, for it had been set for humans. For one human in particular. For there was no doubt it had been set for me.

I backed away from it until I bumped into the wall. I stayed there against the wall, looking at the trap, and on the carpeting between myself and the trap lay the bunch of keys I’d dropped.

It was a gag, I told myself. But I was wrong, of course. It wasn’t any gag. If I’d stepped over to the door instead of stopping underneath the light, it would have been no gag. I’d have a mangled leg—or perhaps both legs mangled and perhaps some broken bones—for the jaws were equipped with jagged, offset teeth. And no one in God’s world could have forced the jaws apart once they’d snapped upon their victim. To free a man from a trap like that would call for wrenches to take the trap apart.

I shivered, thinking of it. A man could bleed to death before anyone could get that trap apart.

I stood there, looking at the trap, with my hand crumpling up the paper as I looked. And then I raised an arm and hurled the wad of paper at the trap. It hit one jaw and rolled off and barely missed the pan and lay there between the jaws.

I’d have to get a stick or something, I told myself, and spring the trap before I could get into my place. I could call the cops, of course, but there’d be no sense in that. They’d create a terrible uproar and more than likely take me down to headquarters to ask me a lot of questions, and I didn’t have the time. I was all tuckered out and all I wanted was to crawl into my bed.

More than that, a ruckus of that sort would give the apartment a bad name, and that would be a dirty trick to play on Old George when he was out in California. And it would give all my neighbors something to talk about and they’d want to talk to me about it and I didn’t want that. They left me alone and that was the way I wanted it. I was happy just the way it was.

I wondered where I could find a stick, and the only place I could think of was the Closet down on the first floor where the brooms and mops and the vacuum cleaner and the other junk were kept. I tried to remember if the closet might be locked, and I didn’t think it was, but I couldn’t be positively sure.

I stepped out from the wall and started for the stairs. I had just reached the top of them when something made me turn around. I don’t think I heard anything. I’m fairly sure I didn’t. But the effect was the same as if I had.

There was something said for me to turn around, and I turned around so fast my feet got tangled up and threw me to the floor.

And even as I fell I saw the trap was wilting.

I tried to ease my fall by putting out my hands, but I didn’t do so well. I hit with quite a thud and banged my head, and my brain was full of stars.

I got my hands under me and hoisted up my front and shook the stars away and the trap had gone on wilting.

The jaws were limp and the whole contraption was humped up in a most peculiar way. I watched it in some wonder, not doing anything, just lying there, with the front of me propped up on my arms.

The trap got limper and limper and began to hump together. It was as if a piece of mashed-out, mangled plastic putty was trying to put itself into shape again. And it did put itself into shape. It made itself into a ball. All this time that it has been humping itself together, it had been changing color, and when it finally was a ball it was as black as pitch.

It lay there for a moment in front of the door and then it began rolling slowly, as if it took a lot of effort to get itself to rolling.

And it rolled straight for me!

I tried to get out of its way, but it built its speed up fast and I thought for an instant it would crash straight into me. It was about the size of a bowling ball, maybe just a little bigger, and I had no way of knowing how heavy it might be.

But it didn’t hit me. It brushed me, that was all.

I twisted to watch it go down the stairs, and that was a funny thing. It bounced down the steps, but not the way a normal ball would bounce. It bounced short and fast, not high and lazy—as if there were a law which said it must hit every tread but make the best speed that it could. It went down the flight, hitting every tread, and it went around the corner post so fast you could almost see the smoke.

I scrambled to my feet and got to the banister and leaned over to see the flight below. But the ball was out of sight. There was no sign of it.

I went back down the hail and there, underneath the light, lay the bunch of keys, and there was the three-foot semicircle cut out of the carpet.

I got down on my knees and picked up the keys and found the right one finally and got over to the door. I unlocked it and went into the apartment and locked the door, real fast, behind me before I even took the time to turn on a light.

I got the light turned on and made it to the kitchen. I sat down at the breakfast table and remembered there was a pitcher almost half full of tomato juice in the refrigerator and that I should drink some of.

But I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I gagged just thinking of it. What I really needed was another slug of booze, but I’d had too much of that already.

I sat there, thinking about the trap and why anyone would set a trap for me. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of. If I hadn’t seen that trap myself, I’d never have believed it.

It was no trap, of course—no regular trap, that is. For regular traps do not wilt and roil into a ball and go rolling away when they’ve failed to catch their quarry.

I tried to reason it all out, but my brain was fuzzy and I was sleepy and I was safe at home and tomorrow was another day. So I gave up everything and staggered off to bed.

Something jerked me out of sleep.

I came up straight, not knowing where I was, not knowing who I was—entirely disoriented, not fuzzy, not sleepy, not con- fused, but with that terrible, cold clarity of mind that makes an emptiness of everything in its sudden flash of being.

I was in a silence, in an emptiness, in a lightless nowhere, and that clear, cold mind speared out like a striking snake, seeking, finding nothing, and horrified at the nothingness.

Then the clamor came—the high, shrill, insistent, insane clamor, which was entirely mindless in that it was not meant for me or for anything but clamored solely for itself.

The silence fell again and there were shadows that were shapes—a square of half-light that turned out to be a window, a faint gleam from the kitchen where the light still burned, a crouched, dark monstrosity that was an easy chair.

The phone screamed again through the morning darkness and I tumbled out of bed, heading blindly for a door that I could not see. Groping, I found it, and the phone was silent now.

I went across the living room, stumbling in the darkness, and was putting out my hand when it began to ring again.

I jerked it from the cradle viciously and mumbled into it. There was something the matter with my tongue. It didn’t want to work.

“Parker?”

“Who else?”

“This is Joe—Joe Newman.”

“Joe?” Then I remembered. Joe Newman was the dogwatch man on the night desk at the paper.

“Hate to get you up,” said Joe. I mumbled at him wrathfully. “Something funny happened. Thought you ought to know.”

“Look, Joe,” I said. “Call Gavin. He’s the city editor. He gets paid for being gotten out of bed.”

“But this is down your alley, Parker. This is—”

“Yeah, I know,” I told him. “A flying Saucer landed.”

“Not that. You ever hear of Timber Lane?”

“Out by the lake,” I said. “Way out west of town.”

“That’s it. The old Belmont place is at the end of it. House closed up. Ever since the Belmont family moved out to Arizona. Kids use the road as a lovers’ lane.”

“Now, look, Joe . .

“I was getting to it, Parker. Some kids were parked out there tonight. They saw a bunch of balls rolling down the road. Like bowling balls, one behind the other.”

I’m afraid I yelled at him: “They what?”

“They saw these things in the headlights when they were driving out and got panicky. Put a call in to the cops.”

I got myself in hand and made my voice calm. “Cops find anything?”

“Just tracks,” said Joe.

“Bowling ball tracks?”

“Yeah, I guess you could call them that.” I told him: “Kids been drinking, maybe.” “Cops didn’t say so. They talked with these kids. They just saw the balls rolling down the road. They didn’t stop to investigate. They just got out of there.”

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what I ought to say. And I was scared. Scared stiff.

“What do you think of it, Parker?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Imaginationmaybe. Or ribbing the cops.”

“The cops found tracks.”

“Kids could have made them. Could have rolled some bowling balls up and down the road, picking out the dusty places. Figured they’d get their names into the papers. They get bored and crazy. . .”

“You wouldn’t use it, then?”

“Look, Joe—I’m not the city editor. It’s not up to me. Ask Gavin. He’s the man who decides what we publish.”

“And you don’t think there’s anything to it? Maybe it’s a hoax?”

“How the hell would I know?” I yelled at him.

He got sore at me. I don’t blame him much.

“Thanks, Parker. Sorry that I troubled you,” he said, and then hung up, and the phone began its steady drone.

“Good night, Joe,” I said into the drone. “I’m sorry that I yelled.”

It helped, saying it, even if he wasn’t there to hear.

And I wondered why I’d tried to downgrade the story, why I’d tried to suggest it Was no more than some teen-age prank.

Because, you slob, you’re scared, said that inner man who sometimes talks to You. Because you’d give almost anything to make yourself believe there is nothing to it. Because you don’t want to be reminded of that trap out in the hail.

I put the receiver back into the cradle, and my hand was shaking, so that it made a clatter when I put it down.

I stood in the darkness and felt the terror closing in. And when I tried to put a finger on the terror, there was nothing there. For it wasn’t terrible; it was comic—a trap set outside a door, a pack of bowling balls trundling sedately down a country lane. It was the stuff cartoons are made of. It was something that was too ridiculous to believe. It was something that would send you off into helpless guffaws even as it killed you.

If it meant to kill.

And that was the question, certainly. Was it meant to kill?

Had that trap outside the door actually been a trap, made of honest steel or its equivalent? Or had it been a toy, made of harmless plastic or its equivalent?

And the hardest question of them all—had it actually been there? I knew it had, of course. For I had seen it there. But my mind kept trying to reject it. For my comfort and my sanity, my mind pushed it away and the logic in me screamed against the very thought of it.

I had been drunk, of course, but not as drunk as that. Not falling-down drunk, not seeing-things drunk just a little shaky in the hands and weakish in the knees.

Now I was all right except for that terrible, lonely coldness of the mind. Type three hangover—and, in many ways, the worst of all of them.

By now my eyes had become somewhat dark-adapted and I could make out the formless shape of furniture. I made my way to the kitchen without stumbling over anything. The door was open a crack and a shaft of light streamed through.

I had left the ceiling light on when I’d gone pottering off to bed, and the clock on the wall said it was three-thirty.

I discovered that I was still better than half dressed and rather badly rumpled. My shoes were off and my tie was untied but still trailing from the collar, and I was a mess.

I stood there, taking counsel with myself. If I went back to bed at this hour of the morning, I’d sleep like a sodden lump until noon or better and wake up feeling terrible.

But if I got cleaned up now and got some food inside of me and went to the office early, before anyone else arrived, I’d get a lot of work done and could knock off early in the day and have a decent weekend.

And it was a Friday and I had a date with Joy. I stood there for a while without doing anything, feeling good about Friday night and Joy.

I planned it all—there’d just be time to boil the coffee water while I took a shower, and I’d have toast and eggs and bacon and I’d drink a lot of tomato juice, which might do something for the lonely coldness of the mind.

But first of all, before I did anything at all, I’d look out in the hall and see if the semicircle still was gone from the carpeting.

I went to the door and looked.

In front of it lay the preposterous semicircle of bare flooring.

I jeered thinly at my doubting mind and my outraged logic and went back into the kitchen to put on the coffee water.

A newsroom is a cold and lonely place early in the morning. It is big and empty, and it’s neat, so neat that it is depressing. Later in the day it takes on the clutter that makes it warm and human—the clipped, dismembered papers littered on the desks, the balls of scrunched-up copy paper tossed onto the floor, the overflowing spikes. But in the morning, after the maintenance crew has it tidied up, it has something of the pallor of an operating room. The few lights that are burning seem far too bright and the stripped-down desks and chairs so precisely placed that they spell a hard efficiency—the efficiency that later in the day is masked and softened when the staff is hard at work and the place is littered and that strange undertone of bedlam which goes into each edition of the paper is building to a peak.

The morning staff had gone home hours before and Joe Newman also was gone. I had rather expected that I might find him there, but his desk was as straight and neat as all the rest of them and there was no Sign of him.

The pastepots, all freshly scraped and cleaned and filled with fresh, new paste, stood in solemn, shiny rows upon the city and the copydesks. Each pot was adorned with a brush thrust into the paste at a jaunty angle. The copy off the wire machines was laid out precisely on the news desk. And from the cubby hole over in the corner came the muted chuckle of the wire machines themselves, busily grinding out the grist of news from all parts of the world.

Somewhere in the tangled depths of the half-dark newsroom a copyboy was whistling—one of those high-pitched, jerky tunes that are no tunes at all. I shuddered at the sound of it. There was something that was almost obscene about someone whistling at this hour of the morning.

I went over to my desk and sat down. Someone on the maintenance crew had taken all my magazines and scientific journals and stacked them in a pile. Only the afternoon before, I’d gone through them carefully and set aside the ones I would be using in getting out my columns. I looked sourly at the stack and swore. Now I’d have to paw through all of them to find the ones I wanted.

A copy of the last edition of the morning paper lay white and naked on the clean desk top. I picked it up and leaned back in the chair and began running through the news.

There wasn’t much of anything. There still was trouble down in Africa, and the Venezuela mess was looking fairly nasty. Someone had held up a downtown drugstore just before closing time, and there was a picture of a buck-toothed clerk pointing out to a bored policeman where the holdup man had stood. The governor had said that the legislature, when it came back next year, would have to buckle down to its responsibility of finding some new sources of tax revenue. If this wasn’t done, said the governor, the state would be going down the drain. It was something that the governor had said many times before.

Over in the top, left-hand corner of page one was an area economic roundup by—lined by Grant Jensen, business editor of the morning staff. Grant was in one of his Professionally optimistic moods. The upward business trend, he wrote, was run- fling strong and steady. Store sales were holding well, industrial indexes all were on the up side, there was no immediate prospect of any labor trouble things were looking rosy. This was especially true, the article went on to say, in the home construction field. The demand for housing had outrun supply, and all the home builders in the entire federal reserve district were booked to full capacity for almost a year ahead.

I am afraid I yawned. It all was true, undoubtedly, but it still was the same old crud that jerks like Jensen were forever handing out. But the publisher would like it, for it made the advertisers feel just fine and it promoted boom psychology, and the old war-horses of the financial district would talk about the piece that had been in the morning paper when they went to lunch this noon at the Union Club.

Let it run the other way, I told myself—let the store sales drop off, let the housing boom go bust, let factories start to turn away their workers—and until the situation became inescapable, there’d be not a word about it.

I folded the paper and put it to one side. Opening up a drawer, I got out a batch of notes I’d made the afternoon before and started going through them.

Lightning, the early-morning copyboy, came out of the shadows and stood beside my desk.

“Good morning, Mr. Graves,” he said.

“Was that you whistling?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess it was.”

He laid a proof on my desk.

“Your column for today,” he said. “The one about how come the mammoth and all those other big animals happened to die out. I thought you’d like to see it.”

I picked it up and looked at it. As usual, some joker on the copydesk had written a smart-aleck headline for it.

“You’re in early, Mr. Graves,” said Light- fling.

I explained: “I have to get my columns out for a couple of weeks ahead. I’ll be going on a trip.”

“I heard about it,” said Lightning eagerly. “Astronomy.”

“Well, yes, I guess you could say that. All the big observatories. Have to write a series about outer space. Way out. Galaxies and stuff.”

“Mr. Graves,” said Lightning, “do you think maybe they’ll let you look through some of the telescopes?”

“I doubt it. Telescope time is pretty tightly scheduled.”

“Mr. Graves . .

“What is it, Lightning?”

“You think there are people out there? Out on them other stars?”

CJ wouldn’t know. No one knows. It stands to reason there must be other life somewhere.”

“Like us?”

“No, I don’t think like us.”

Lightning stood there, shuffling his feet; then he said suddenly: “Gosh, I forgot to tell you, Mr. Graves. There’s someone here to see you.”

“Someone here?”

“Yeah. He came in a couple of hours ago. I told him you wouldn’t be in for a long time yet. But he said he’d wait.”

“Where is he, then?”

“He went into the monitoring room and took the easy chair in there. I guess he fell asleep.”

I heaved myself out of the chair. “Let’s go and see,” I said.

I might have known. There was no one else who would do a thing like that. There was no one else to whom the time of day meant nothing.

He lay back in the chair, with a silly smile pasted on his face. From the radio panel issued the low-voiced gabble of the various police departments, the highway patrol, the fire departments, and the other agencies of law and order, forming a back—ground of gibberish for his polite snoring.

We stood and looked at him.

Lightning asked: “Who is he, Mr. Graves? Do you know him, Mr. Graves?”

“His name,” I said, “is Carleton Stirling. He’s a biologist over at the university and a friend of mine.”

“He don’t look like no biologist to me,” said Lightning firmly.

“Lightning,” I told the skeptic, “you will find in time that biologists and astronomers and physicists and all the rest of that ungodly tribe of science are just people like the rest of us.”

“But coming in at three o’clock to see you. Expecting you’d be here.”

“That’s the way he lives,” I said. “It wouldn’t occur to him that the rest of the world might live differently. That’s the kind of man he is.”

And that’s the kind of man he was, all right.

He owned a watch, but he never used it except to time off the tests and experiments he happened to be doing. He never, actually, knew what time of day it was. When he got hungry, he scrounged up Some food. When he couldn’t keep awake, he found a place to curl up and hammered off some sleep. When he had finished what he Was doing or, maybe, got discouraged, he’d set off for a cabin that he owned on a lake up north and spend a day or week loafing.

He so consistently forgot to go to classes, so seldom turned up for scheduled lectures, that the university administration finally gave up. They no longer even bothered to pretend that he instructed. They let him keep his lab and let him hole up there with his cages of guinea pigs and rats and his apparatus. But they got their money’s worth. He was forever coming up with something that spelled publicity—not only for himself but for the university. So far as he, himself, was concerned, the university could have had it all. In the public eye or the public print, or out of it—there was no difference so far as Carleton Stirling was concerned.

The only things he lived for were his experiments, his ceaseless delvings into the mysteries that lay like a challenge to him. He had an apartment, but there were times when he didn’t visit it for days. He tossed paychecks into drawers and left them accumulating there until the university’s accounting people phoned him urgently to find out what could have happened to them. Once he won a prize—not one of the big, imposing ones, but still one full of honor and with some cash attached—and forgot entirely to attend the dinner where it was to have been awarded to him.

And now he lay back in the chair, with his head rolled against its back and his long legs outthrust into the shadow underneath the radio console. He was snoring gently and he looked not like one of the world’s most promising research men but like a transient who might have wandered in to find a place to sleep. He needed not only a shave but a haircut as well. His tie was knotted unevenly and pulled around to one side, and there were spots upon it, more than likely from the cans of soup he had heated up and spooned down absentmindedly while he continued to wrestle with whatever problem he currently was concerned with.

I stepped into the room and put a hand down on his shoulder and shook him gently.

He came awake easily, not startled, and looked up at me and grinned.

“Hi, Parker,” he said to me.

“Hi, yourself,” I said. “I would have let You finish out your sleep, but I was afraid You’d break your neck the way you had it twisted.”

He uncoiled and got up and followed me out into the newsroom.

“Almost morning,” he said, nodding at the windows. “Time to get awake.”

I looked and saw that the windows were no longer black but beginning to get gray.

He ran his fingers through his shock of hair, went through the motions of wiping off his face with an open hand. Then he dug into a pocket and brought out a fistful of crumpled bills. He selected two of them and handed them to me.

“Here,” he said. “Just happened to remember. Thought I’d better do it before I forgot again.”

“But, Carl . . .”

He shook the two bills impatiently, shoving them at me.

“A couple of years ago,” he told me. “That weekend up at the lake. I ran out of money playing slot machines.”

I took the bills and put them in my pocket. I could just vaguely remember the incident.

“You mean you stopped by just to pay me off?”

“Sure,” he said. “Was passing the building and there was a parking place. Thought I’d run up and see you.” don’t work at night.”

He grinned at me. “Didn’t matter, parker. It got me some sleep.”

“I’ll stand you breakfast. There’s a joint across the street. Ham and eggs are good.”

He shook his head. “Must be getting back. Wasted too much time. I have work to do.”

“Something new?” I asked him. He hesitated for a moment, then he said:

“Nothing publishable. Not yet. Maybe later, but not yet. A long way yet to go.”

I waited, looking at him. “Ecology,” he said. “I don’t get you.”

“You know what ecology is, Parker.”

“Sure. The interrelation of life and conditions in a common area.”

He asked me: “You ever wonder what kind of life pattern it would take to be independent of all surrounding factors—a nonecological creature, so to speak?”

“It’s impossible,” I told him. “There is food and air—”

“Just an idea. Just a hunch. A puzzle, let us say. A conundrum in adaptability. It’ll Probably come to nothing.”

“Just the same, I’ll ask you every now and then.”

“Do that,” he said. “And the next time You come over, remind me about the gun.

The one you loaned me to take up to the lake.”

He’d borrowed it a month before to do some target shooting when he’d gone up to his cabin. No one in his right mind, no one but Carleton Stirling, would want to do target practice with a .303.

“I used up your box of cartridges,” he said. “I bought another box.”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“Well, hell,” he said, “I had a lot of fun.”

He didn’t say good-bye. He just turned on his heels and strode out of the newsroom and down the corridor. We heard him go clattering down the stairs.

“Mr. Graves,” said Lightning, “that guy is plumb nuts.”

I didn’t answer Lightning. I went back to my desk and tried to get to work.

Gavin Walker came in. He pulled out his assignment book and looked at it. He made a disrespectful noise.

“Shorthanded again,” he told me bitterly. “Charlie called in sick. Hangover, more than likely. Al is tied up with the Melburn case down in district court. Bert is trying to finish up that series of his on the freeway progress. The brass is screaming for it. It’s overdue right now.”

He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. He threw his hat into a copy basket. He stood there, in the glare of the lights, pugnaciously rolling up his sleeves.

“Someday, by God,” he said, “Franklin’s will catch fire, jammed with a million shoppers, who turn into a screaming, panic-stricken mob—”

“And you won’t have a man to send there.”

Gavin blinked at me owlishly. “Parker,” he said, “that is exactly it.”

It was a favorite speculation of his in moments of great stress. We all knew it by heart.

Franklin’s was the city’s biggest department store and our best advertising account.

I walked over to the window and looked out. It was beginning to get light outside. The city had that bleak, frosty look of a thing not quite alive, a sort of sinister fairyland that is on the verge of winter. A few cars went drifting past in the street below. There was a pedestrian or two. Scattered early lights burned in the windows of some of the downtown buildings.

“Parker,” said Gavin.

I swung around to face him. “Now, look,” I said, “I know you are shorthanded. But I have work to do. I have a bunch of columns to get up. I came in early so I could get them done.”

“I notice,” he said nastily, “you’re working hard on them.”

“Damn it,” I told him, “I have to get woke up.”

I went back to my desk and tried to get to work.

Lee Hawkins, the picture editor, came in. He was virtually frothing at the mouth. The color lab had bollixed up the picture for page one. Foaming threats, he went downstairs to get it straightened out.

Other members of the staff came in and the place took on some warmth and life. The copy editors began to bawl for Lightning to go across the street and get their morning coffee. Protesting bitterly, Light- fling went to get it.

I settled down to work. It came easy now. The words rolled out and the ideas came together. For now there was the atmosphere for it, the feel for writing—the clamor and the bustle that spelled newspaper office.

I had one column finished and was starting on the second when someone stopped beside my desk.

I looked up and saw that it was Dow Crane, a writer on the business desk. I like Dow. He’s not a jerk like Jensen. He writes it as he sees it. He butters up no one. He polishes no apples.

He was looking glum.

I told him that he was.

“I got troubles, Parker.”

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to me. He knows that I don’t smoke them, but he always offers one. I waved them off. He lit one for himself.

“You do something for me, maybe?”

I said that I would.

“A man phoned me at home last night. He’s coming in this morning. Says he can’t find a house.”

“What house does he want to find?”

“A house to live in. Almost any house. Says he sold his home three or four months ago and now he can’t find one to buy.”

“Well, that’s tough luck,” I said unfeelingly. “What can we do about it?”

“He says he’s not the only one. Claims there are a lot of others. Says there isn’t a house or apartment to be had in town.”

“Dow, the guy is crazy.”

“Maybe not,” said Dow. “You been looking at the want ads?”

I shook my head. “No reason to,” I told him.

“Well, I did. This morning. Column after column of ads by people who want a place to live—any place to live. Some of them sound desperate.”

“Jensen’s piece this morning . . .”

“You mean about the housing boom?”

“That’s it,” I said. “It doesn’t add up, Dow. Not that piece and what this man was telling you.”

“Maybe not. I’m sure it doesn’t. But, look, I have to go out to the airport and meet a big wheel who is coming in. It’s the only way I can get an interview in time for the first edition. If this guy who phoned me comes in about the house and I’m not here, will you talk to him?”

“Sure thing,” I said.

“Thanks,” said Dow, and walked off to his desk.

Lightning showed up, carrying the coffee orders in the battered, stained wire service paper box that he kept, when not in use, beneath the picture desk. All hell broke loose immediately. He’d gotten one coffee with cream and no one wanted cream. He’d gotten three with sugar and there were only two men who could drink the stuff with sugar. He’d fouled up on the doughnuts.

I turned back to my machine and got to work again.

The place had hit its normal stride.

Once the daily coffee battle between Lightning and the copydesk had taken place, one knew the place was grooved, that the newsroom at last had slipped into high gear.

I didn’t work for long.

A hand fell on my shoulder.

I looked up and it was Gavin.

“Park, old boy,” he said.

“No,” I told him sternly.

“You’re the only man in the place who can handle this,” he told me. “It’s Franklin’s.”

“Don’t tell me there’s a fire and a million shoppers—”

“No, not that,” he said. “Bruce Montgomery just phoned. He’s calling a press conference for nine o’clock.”

Bruce Montgomery was the president of Franklin’s.

“That is Dow’s department.”

“Dow left for the airport.”

I gave up. There was nothing else to do. The guy was practically in tears. I hate city editors who cry.

“All right, then,” I said. “I’ll be there. ‘What’s it all about?”

“I don’t know,” said Gavin. “I asked Bruce and he wouldn’t say. It’s bound to be important. Last time they called a press conference was fifteen years ago, when they announced that Bruce was taking over. First time an outsider ever held a top office in the store. It had been all family up till then.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He turned around and trotted back to the city desk.

I yelled for a boy and, when one finally showed up, sent him out the library to get me the clips on Franklin’s for the last five years or so.

I took the clips out of the envelopes and thumbed through them. There wasn’t much in them that I didn’t know. Nothing of importance. There were stories about style shows at Franklin’s and about art exhibits at Franklin’s and about Franklin’s personnel taking part in a host of civic endeavors.

Franklin’s was an ancient place and tradition-ridden. It had, just the year before, celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It had been a household word almost since the day the city had been founded. It had been (and still was) a family institution, with its precepts fostered as carefully as is possible only in a family institution. Generation after generation had grown up with Franklin’s, shopping there almost from the cradle to the grave, and it was a byword for fairness in its dealings and in the quality of its merchandise.

Joy Kane came walking past the desk.

“Hi, beautiful,” I said. “What’s the deal this morning?”

“Skunks,” she said.

“Mink is more your style.”

She stopped and stood close beside me. I could smell just the faintest hint of some perfume that she was wearing and, more than that, I could feel the presence of her beauty.

She put out a hand and ruffled my hair, just a quick, impulsive move, and then she was proper once again.

“Tame skunks,” she said. “Pet skunks. They are the newest thing. Deodorized, of course.”

“Naturally,” I said. And I was thinking—cute and hydrophobia.

“I was sore at Gavin when he chased me out there.”

“Out into the woods?”

“No. Out to this skunk farm.”

“You mean they raise them just like pigs and chickens?”

“Certainly they do. I was telling you these skunks are pets. This man says they make the swellest pets. Clean and cuddly and a lot of fun. He’s getting stacks of orders for them. Pet dealers in New York and Chicago and a lot of other places.”

“I suppose that you have pictures.”

“Ben went out with me. He took a lot of them.”

“Where does this man get his skunks?”

“I told you. He raises them.”

“To start with, I mean.”

“Trappers. Farm boys. He pays good prices for the wild ones. He’s building up his business. He needs wild breeding stock. He’ll buy all that he can get.”

“Which reminds me,” I told her. “Payday today. You’re going to help me spend the check?”

She said, “Certainly I am. Don’t you remember that you asked me?”

“There’s a new joint opening out on Pinecrest Drive.”

“That sounds like fun,” she said.

“Seven?”

“Not a minute later. I get hungry early.” She went on to her desk and I went back to the clips. But even on a second look there was nothing in them. I shuffled them together and put them back into the envelopes.

I sat back in my chair and thought about skunks and hydrophobia and the crazy things that some people do.

The man who sat at the head of the table beside Bruce Montgomery was bald aggressively bald, as if he took a pride in baldness, so completely bald that I found myself wondering if he’d ever grown hair. There was a fly crawling on his head and he paid no attention to it. It made me cringe just to watch that fly, walking jauntily and unconcerned across the pinkness of the naked scalp. I could almost feel the slow and maddening prickliness as it pranced along its way.

But the man sat there, unconcerned, not looking at us but staring out above our heads, as if there were something on the rear wall of the conference room that fascinated him. So far as he seemed to be concerned, we weren’t even there. He was impersonal and had a touch of coldness, and he never moved. If you hadn’t noticed he was breathing, you would have been convinced that Bruce had hauled one of the window mannequins into the room and set it at the table.

The fly walked over the dome of baldness and disappeared from view, crawling out of sight down the rear exposure of that shining skull.

The television boys still were fiddling around with their equipment, getting it set up, and Bruce glanced at them with some impatience.

The room was fairly well filled up. There were the television and the radio people and the AP and UPI reporters and the man who was a stringer for the Wall Street Journal.

Bruce looked over at the TV setups once again.

“Everybody set?” he asked.

“Just a minute, Bruce,” said one of the TV crowd.

So we waited while the cameras were adjusted and the cords were strung and the technicians messed around. That’s the way it goes with these TV jerks. They insist on being in on everything and scream if you leave them out, but let them in and they bollix up the detail beyond all imagination. They have the place all cluttered up and you have to wait for them and they take a lot of time.

I sat there and, for some reason, got to thinking about all the fun Joy and I had had the last few months. We’d gone on picnics and we’d gone fishing and she was one of the finest gals I had ever known. She was a good newspaperwoman, but in becoming a newspaperwoman she had stayed a woman, and that’s not always true. Too many of them think they have to get rough and tough to uphold tradition, and that, of course, is a total canard. Newspapermen never were as rough and tough as the movies tried to make them. They are just a bunch of hardworking specialists who do the best they can.

The fly came crawling back over the horizon of the gleaming skull. It stood on the skyline for a moment, then tipped up on its head and brushed its wings with its rearward pair of feet. It stayed there for a while, looking the situation over, then wheeled around and went back out of sight.

Bruce tapped the table with his pencil.

“Gentlemen,” he said.

The room became so quiet that I could hear the breathing of the man who was sitting next to me.

And in that moment while we waited I sensed again the depth of that dignity and decorum which was implicit in this room, with its thick carpeting and its richly paneled walls, the heavy draperies and the pair of paintings on the wall behind the table.

Here, I thought, was the epitome of the Franklin family and the store that it had built, the position that it held and what it meant to this certain city. Here was the dignity and the foursquare virtue, here the civic spirit and the cultural standard.

“Gentlemen,” said Bruce, “there is no use employing a lot of preliminaries. Something has happened that, a month ago, I would have said never could have happened. I’ll tell you and then you can ask your questions . .

He stopped talking for a moment, as if he might be searching for the proper words. He halted in the middle of his sentence and he did not drop his voice. His face was bleak and white.

Then he said it slowly and concisely:

“Franklin’s has been sold.”

We sat silent for a moment, every man of us, not stunned, not stricken, but completely unbelieving. For of all the things that one might have conjured up in his imagining, this was the last thing that any of us would have hit upon. For Franklin’s, and the Franklin family, was a tradition in the town. It, and the family, had been there almost as long as the town had been. To sell Franklin’s was like selling the courthouse or a church.

Bruce’s face was hard and expressionless and I wondered how he could have said the words, for Bruce Montgomery was as much a part of Franklin’s as the Franklin family—probably in these later years more a part of it, for he’d managed it and coddled it and worried over it for more years than most of us could readily recall.

Then the silence broke and the questions came, all of them at once.

Bruce waved us all to silence.

“Not me,” he told us. “Mr. Bennett will answer all your questions.”

The bald man for the first time now took notice of us. He lowered his eyes from the spot on the back wall of the room. He nodded slightly at us.

“One at a time, if you please,” he said.

“Mr. Bennett,” asked someone from the back of the room, “are you the new owner?”

“No. I simply represent the owner.”

“Who is the owner, then?”

“That is something I can’t tell you,” Bennett said.

“You mean that you don’t know who the owner is, or—”

“It means that I can’t tell you.”

“Could you tell us the consideration?”

“You mean, of course, how much was paid for it.”

“Yes, that is—”

“That, too,” said Bennett, “is not for publication.”

“Bruce,” said a disgusted voice.

Montgomery shook his head. “Mr. Bennett, please,” he said. “He will answer all your questions.”

“Can you tell us,” I asked Bennett, “what the new owner’s policy may be? Will the store continue as it has before? Will the same policies as to quality and credit and civic—”

“The store,” said Bennett flatly, “will be closed.”

“You mean for reorganization . . .”

“Young man,” said Bennett, clipping off his words, “I don’t mean that at all. The store will be closed. It will not reopen. There will be no Franklin’s. Not any more, there won’t.”

I caught a glimpse of Bruce Montgomery’s face. If I live to be a million, I’ll never erase from memory the shock and surprise and anguish that was on his face.

I was finishing the last page of the story, with Gavin hovering over me, breathing down my neck, and the copydesk a-howl that it was way past deadline, when the publisher’s secretary phoned.

“Mr. Maynard would like to talk with you,” she told me, “as soon as you are free.”

“Almost immediately,” I said, hanging up the phone.

I finished the final paragraph and whipped out the sheet. Gavin grabbed it and rushed it to the copydesk.

He came back to me again. He nodded at the phone.

“The Old Man?” he asked.

I said it had been. “He wants to ask me all about it, I suppose. Another third degree.”

It was a way the Old Man had. Not that he didn’t trust us. Not that he thought we were goofing off or holding back on anything or distorting anything. It was the newspaperman in him, I’d guess—the screaming need for detail, hoping that by talking with us he might discover some angle we had missed, a raking over of the gravel of raw facts in a maddening look for gold. I suppose it made him feel he was keeping his hand in.

“It’s a terrible blow,” said Gavin. “There goes a fat contract. The boy down in advertising who was handling the account probably is off in some dark corner cutting his throat.”

“Not only tough for us,” I said. “Tough for the entire town.”

For Franklin’s was not a shopping center only; it was likewise an unofficial social center. Old ladies, with their neatly tailored suits and their prim and careful coiffures, made a quiet and regular celebration in the tearoom on the seventh floor. Housewives out for a day of shopping invariably would meet old friends at Franklin’s—likewise on a shopping mission and would block the aisles with impromptu reunions. People were always meeting other people there by prearranged appointment. And there were the art shows and the uplift lectures and all the other trappings that are the hallmark of genteel America. Franklin’s was a marketplace and a rendezvous and a sort of club for the people of all classes and all walks of life.

I got up from my desk and went down the corridor to the boss’s office.

His name is William Woodruff Maynard and he is not a bad guy. Not nearly so bad as the name would make you think.

Charlie Gunderson, who headed up retail advertising, was in the office with him, and the both of them looked worried.

The Old Man offered me a cigar out of the big box that stood on the corner of his desk, but I refused it and sat down in a chair alongside Charlie, facing the Old Man, who sat behind the desk.

“I phoned Bruce,” the Old Man said, “and he was noncommittal. I might even say evasive. He doesn’t want to talk.”

“I don’t imagine that he does,” I said. “I think it was as great a shock to him as to the rest of us.”

“I don’t understand you, Parker. Why should it be a shock? He must have been the one who negotiated and arranged the sale.”

“The closing of the store,” I explained. “That’s what we are talking about, I take it. I don’t think Bruce knew the new owner planned to close the store. I think if he’d suspected that, there would have been no sale.”

“What makes you think that, Parker?”

“The look on Bruce’s face,” I told him. “When Bennett said they’d close down the store. Surprised and shocked and angry and, perhaps, a little sick. Like a man whose four kings bump up against four aces.”

“But he said nothing.”

“What was there for him to say? He had closed the deal and the store was sold. I don’t imagine it ever crossed his mind that someone would buy a prosperous business and then simply close it down.”

“No,” said the Old Man thoughtfully, “it doesn’t make much sense.”

“It might be just a publicity gag,” said Charlie Gunderson. “Just a public come-on. You’ll have to admit that never in its history has Franklin’s ever gotten the publicity it is getting now.”

“Franklin’s,” said the Old Man stiffly, “never sought publicity. They didn’t need publicity.”

“In just a day or two,” persisted Charlie, “there’ll be a big announcement the store is opening up again. The new management will say they’re giving in to the public clamor that Franklin’s should go on.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and realized immediately that I should have kept my mouth shut. For I didn’t have a thing to go on, just a sort of hunch. The whole deal smelled. There was more to it, I could have sworn, than just a gag some publicity man had thought up in an idle moment.

But they didn’t ask me, either one of them, why I thought it was no gag.

“Parker,” said the Old Man, “you have no inkling at all as to who’s behind this deal?”

I shook my head. “Bennett wasn’t saying. The store had been purchased—building, stock, goodwill, everything—by the man, or men, he was representing, and it is being closed. No reason for its being closed. No plans to use the building for something else.”

“I imagine he was questioned rather closely.”

I nodded.

“And he wasn’t talking?”

“Not a word,” I said.

“Strange,” the Old Man said. “It’s most devilish strange.”

“This Bennett?” asked Charlie. “What do you know about him?”

“Nothing. He refused to identify himself except as the agent of the buyer.”

“You tried, of course,” the Old Man said.

“Not me. I had to write the story to catch the first edition and there was only twenty minutes. Gavin has a couple of people checking the hotels.”

“I’ll lay you twenty dollars,” the Old Man offered, “they’ll find no trace of him.”

I suppose I looked surprised.

“It’s a funny business,” the Old Man said, “from the first to last. A negotiation such as this is most difficult to keep entirely under cover. And yet there was no leak, no rumor, not a breath of it.”

“If there had been,” I pointed out. “Dow would have known about it. And if he’d known about it, he’d been working on it, instead of going to the airport. . . .”

“I quite agree with you,” the Old Man said. “Dow knows the most of everything that’s going on downtown.”

“Was there anything about this Bennett,” Charlie asked me, “that might give you a clue—any kind of clue?”

I shook my head. All I could remember of him was the total baldness of his head and the fly crawling on that baldness and his paying no attention to it.

“Well, thank you, Parker,” said the Old Man. “I would imagine you did your usual job. Highly competent. With men like you and Dow and Gavin out there in the city room we don’t have any worries.”

I got out of there before he broke down to the point where he might have tried to raise my salary. That would have been an awful thing.

I went back to the newsroom.

The papers had just come up from the pressroom and there on the front page was my story with a twelve-point by-line and the headline spread across eight columns.

Also on the front page was a picture of Joy holding a skunk and seeming charmed about it. Underneath the picture was the story she had written, and one of the jokers on the copydesk had achieved one of the standard sappy headlines on it.

I went over to the city desk and stood alongside Gavin.

“Any luck,” I asked him, “in your hunt for Bennett?”

“No luck at all,” he told me wrathfully. “I don’t think there was ever such a man. I think you made him up.”

“Maybe Bruce—”

“I called Bruce. Bruce says he figured Bennett was staying at one of the hotels. Said the man never talked anything but business. Never once mentioned personalities.”

“The hotels?”

“No, and he never has been. None of them has had a Bennett for the last three weeks. We’re working on the motels now, but I tell you, Parker, it’s a waste of time. There isn’t such a man.”

“Maybe he’s registered under a different name. Check on bald men. . .”

“That’s a hot one,” snarled Gavin. “Have you any idea how many bald men register in our hotels each day?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

Gavin was in his usual home-edition lather, and there wasn’t any use in talking further with him. I walked away and started across the room to have a word with Dow. But I saw he wasn’t there, so I stopped off at my desk.

I picked up the paper that was lying there and sat down to look at it. I read through my story and was furious with myself over a couple of paragraphs that read jumbled up and jerky. It always happens that way when you write a story under pressure. You get it down the best way that you can and then, for the next edition, you get it all smoothed out.

So I jerked the typewriter over to the desk and rewrote the paragraphs. I used a straightedge to tear the printed story from the page and pasted it up on two sheets of Copy paper. I crossed out the two offending paragraphs and marked them for a sub. I went through the story again and caught a couple of typos and fixed up another place or two to make the language better.

It was a wonder, I told myself, that I’d got the story down at all with the copydesk leaning back and hollering that it was way past deadline and Gavin there beside me, jigging from one foot to the other and panting out each line.

I took the inserts and the marked-up copy over to the city desk and dropped them in the basket. Then I went back to my desk again and picked up the mangled paper. I read Joy’s story, and it was a lulu. Then I looked for the story Dow had gone out to the airport to get and it wasn’t in the paper. I looked around again and Dow wasn’t anywhere in sight.

I dropped the paper on the desk top and sat there, doing nothing, idly remembering what had happened in Franklin’s conference room that morning. But all I could remember was the fly crawling on the skull.

Then, suddenly, there was something else.

Gunderson had asked me if there had been anything about Bennett that might be a clue to his identity and I had said there wasn’t.

But I had told him wrong. For there had been something. Not a clue exactly, but something damned peculiar. I remembered now—it was the smell of him. Shaving lotion, I had thought when I first got a whiff of it. But not any kind of lotion I had ever smelled before. Not the kind of lotion any other man would ever tolerate. Not that it was loud or strong—for there had been no more than that correct, faint suggestion of it. But it had been the kind of odor one does not associate with a human being.

I sat there and tried to classify it, tried to think of something with which I might compare it. But I couldn’t, because, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember exactly what it had smelled like. But I was mortally certain I would recognize it if I ever came in contact with it again.

I got up and walked over to Joy’s desk. She stopped typing as I came up to her. She lifted her head to look at me, and her eyes were bright and shiny, as if she had been trying to keep herself from crying.

“What’s the matter here?” I asked.

“Parker,” she said. “Those poor people! It’s enough to break one’s heart.”

“What poor—” I started to say, and then I had a hunch what had happened to her.

“How did you get hold of that one?” I demanded.

“Dow wasn’t here,” she said. “They came in asking for him. And everyone else was busy. So Gavin brought them over.”

“I was going to do it,” I told her. “Dow told me about it and I said I would. Then this Franklin’s thing came up and I forgot everything about it. There was supposed to be just a man. You said them . .

“He brought his wife and children and they sat down and looked at me with those big, solemn eyes of theirs. They told me how they had sold their home because it wasn’t big enough for a growing family and now they can’t find another one. They have to be out of their house in another day or two and they have nowhere at all to go. They sit there and tell their troubles to you and they look so hopeful at you. As if you were Santa Claus or the Good Fairy or something of the sort. As if your pencil were a wand. As if they were confident you can solve their problems and make everything all right. People have such funny ideas about newspapers, Parker. They think we practice magic. They think if they can get their stories into print, something good will happen. They think that we are people who can make miracles. And you sit there and look back at them, and you know you can’t.”

“I know,” I told her. “Just don’t let it get you. You mustn’t be a bleeder. You’ve got to harden up.”

“Parker,” she said, “get out of here and let me finish this. Gavin has been yelling for it for the last ten minutes.”

She wasn’t kidding me a second. She wanted me out of there so she could burst out crying quietly.

“OK,” I said. “Be seeing you tonight.”

Back at my desk, I put away the columns I had written earlier in the morning. ThenI got my hat and coat and went out to have a drink.

Ed was alone in his place, standing behind the bar with his elbows on it and his hands holding up his face. He didn’t look so good.

I got up on a stool and laid five dollars down.

“Give me a quick one, Ed,” I said. “I really need it bad.”

“Keep your money in your pocket,” he told me gruffly. “The drinks are all on me.”

I almost fell off the stool. He’d never done a thing like that before.

“You out of your mind?” I asked him. “Not that at all,” said Ed, reaching for my brand of Scotch. “I’m going out of business. I’m setting them up for my old, loyal customers whenever they come in.”

“Made your pile,” I said carelessly, for the guy is always joking, anything at all just to get a yak.

“I’ve lost my lease,” he told me.

I sympathized with him. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said. “But there must be a dozen places you can get, right here in the neighborhood.”

Ed shook his head dolefully. “I’m closed up,” he said. “I have no place to go. I’ve checked everywhere. If you want to know what I think, Parker, it’s dirty pool down at the city hail. Someone wants my license. Someone slipped a couple of aldermen a little extra dough.”

He poured the drink and shoved it over to me.

He poured one for himself, and that is something that no bartender ever does. It wasn’t hard to see that Ed just didn’t give a damn.

“Twenty-eight years,” he told me mournfully. “That’s how long I’ve been here. I always run a respectable joint. You know, Parker, that I did. You’ve been a regular customer. You’ve seen how I run the place. You never saw no rowdy stuff and you never saw no women. And you seen the cops in here, plenty of times, lined up and drinking on the house.”

I agreed with him. Everything he’d said was the gospel truth. “I know that, Ed,” I said. “Christ, I don’t see how that gang of ours will get the paper out if you have to close. The boys won’t have a place to go to get the taste out of their mouths. There isn’t another bar within eight blocks of the office.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said. “I’m too young to quit and I haven’t got the money. I have to earn a living. I could work for someone else, of course. Almost anyone in town would find a place for me. But I’ve always owned my own joint and it would take some getting used to. I don’t mind telling you it would come a little hard.”

“It’s a stinking shame,” I said.

“Me and Franklin’s,” he said. “We’ll go out together. I just read it in the paper. The story that you wrote. The town won’t be the same without Franklin’s.”

I told him the town wouldn’t be the same without him, either, and he poured me another drink, but this time he didn’t take one for himself.

He stood there and I sat there and we talked it over about Franklin’s closing and the lease he’d lost and neither of us knowing what the goddamn world might be coming to. He set up a couple more and had another one himself and we had some more after that and I made him let me pay for them. I told him even if he was going out of business he couldn’t just give away his liquor and he said he’d made enough off me in the last six or seven years that he could afford an afternoon of some free ones.

Some customers came in and Ed went to take care of them. Since they were strangers, or maybe just poor customers, he let them pay him for their drinks. He rang up the tab on the register and gave them their change and then came back to me. So we talked the situation over once again, repeating ourselves a good deal without noticing or caring.

It was two o’clock before I got out of there.

I promised Ed, somewhat sentimentally, that I’d come back for one last talk before he closed up the place.

I should have been drunk, the amount of liquor I’d poured into me. But I wasn’t drunk. I was just depressed.

I started back to the office, but halfway there I decided that it wasn’t worth it. I had only an hour or so to go to fill out the day, and this late in the afternoon, with most of the editions put to bed, there’d be nothing I could do. Except maybe write some columns, and I didn’t feel like writing any columns. So I decided I’d go home. I’d work over the weekend, getting out the columns, to make up for goofing off.

So I went to the parking lot and got my car untangled and headed home, driving slow and carefully so no cop would pick me up.

I pulled into the alley and swung into the area back of the apartment building, parking the car in the stall that was reserved for it.

It was peaceful back there and I sat for awhile in the car before getting out. The sun was warm and the building, wrapped around three sides of the area, kept out any wind. A scrubby poplar tree grew in one angle of the building, and the sun was full upon it, so that, with its autumn-colored leaves, it glowed like a tree of promise. The air was drowsy, filled with sun and time, and I could hear the clicking toenails of a dog trotting up the alley. The dog came in sight and saw me. He sat down and cocked anxious ears at me. He was half the size of a horse and he was so shaggy he was shapeless. He lifted a ponderous hind leg and solemnly scratched a flea.

“Hi, pup,” I said.

He got up and trotted down the alley. Just before he went out of sight, he stopped for a second and looked back at me.

I got out of the car and went down the alley and around the corner to the building’s entrance. The lobby was hushed and empty and my footsteps echoed in it. There were a couple of letters in my mailbox and I jammed them in my pocket, then trudged slowly up the stairs to the second floor.

First of all, I told myself, I would have a nap. Getting up as early as I had was catching up with me.

The semicircle of carpeting still was missing from before my door and I stopped and stared at it. I’d almost forgotten it, but now last night’s incident came back with a rush. I shivered looking at it, fumbling in my pocket for the keys so I could get inside and shut the semicircle in the hail behind me.

Inside the apartment, I shut the door behind me and tossed my hat and coat into a chair and stood there and looked around me. And it was all right. There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing stirring in it. There was nothing strange.

It wasn’t a fancy place, but I was satisfied with it. It was my very own and it was the first place for a long time that I’d lived in long enough to really count as home. I had been there six years and I fitted into it. I had my gun cabinet against one wall and the hi-fl in the corner, and one entire end of the front room was filled with books piled into a monstrous bookcase I’d cobbled up myself.

I went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator and found tomato juice. I poured a glass of it and sat down at the table and, as I did, the letters in my pocket rustled, so I pulled them out. One was from the Guild, and I knew it was another warning about delinquent dues. The second was from some firm with a many- jointed name.

I opened that one up and pulled out a single sheet.

I read: Dear Mr. Graves: This is to notify you that under the provisions of clause 31 we are terminating your lease on apartment 210, Wellington Arms, effective January 1.

There was a signature at the bottom of it that I was unable to make out.

And there was something terribly fishy about it, for these people who had sent the letter didn’t own the building. Old George owned it—Old George Weber, who lived down on the first floor in apartment 116.

I started to get up, intending to go charging down the stairs and ask Old George just what the hell this meant. Then I remembered that Old George and it.”

Mrs. George were out in California.

Maybe, I told myself, Old George had turned the operation of the building over to these people for the time that he was gone. And if that were the case, there was some mistake. Old George and I were pals. He’d never throw me out. He sneaked up to my place to have a drink or two every now and then, and every Tuesday evening the two of us played pinochle, and almost every fall he went out to South Dakota with me for some pheasant shooting.

I took another look at the letterhead and saw that the name of the firm was Ross, Martin, Park Gobel. In little letters under the firm name was another line, which said “Property Management.”

I wondered exactly what clause 31 might be. I thought of looking it up, then realized that I had no idea where I’d put the copy of my lease. It was probably in the apartment somewhere, but I had not the leastidea.

I went into the living room and dialed the number of Ross, Martin, Park Gobel.

A telephone voice answered—a professionally trained, high-pitched, feminine, how-happy-that-you-called voice.

“Miss,” I told her, “someone at your office has pulled a boner. I have a letter here throwing me out of my apartment.”

There was a click and a man came on. I told him what had happened.

“How come your firm is mixed up in this?” I asked him. “The owner, to my knowledge, is my good neighbor and old friend, George Weber.”

“You are wrong there, Mr. Graves,” this gent told me in a voice that for calmness and pomposity would have done credit to a judge. “Mr. Weber sold the property in question to a client of ours several weeks ago.”

“Old George never told me a word about“Maybe he simply overlooked it,” said the man at the other end, and his voice held a tone just short of a sneer. “Maybe he didn’t get around to it. Our client took possession the middle of the month.”

“And immediately sent out a notice canceling my lease?”

“All the leases, Mr. Graves. He needs the property for other purposes.”

“Like a parking lot, for instance.”

“That’s right,” said the man. “Like a parking lot.”

I hung up. I didn’t even bother to say good-bye to him. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere talking to that joker.

I sat quietly in the living room and listened to the sound of traffic on the street outside. A couple of chattering girls went walking past, giggling as they talked. The sun shone through the westward-facing windows and the light was warm and mellow.

But there was a coldness in the room—a terrible iciness that crept from some far dimension and seeped not into the room but into my very bones.

First it had been Franklin’s, then it was Ed’s bar, and now it was this place that I called my home. No, that was wrong, I thought: first it had been the man who had phoned Dow and who had finally talked with Joy, telling her how he had been unable to find a house to buy. He and all those others who were being quietly desperate in the classified columns—they had been the first.

I picked up the paper from the desk where I had thrown it when I came into the room and folded it back to the want ads and there they were, just as Dow had told me. Column after column of them under the headings of “Houses Wanted” or “Apts. Wanted.” Little pitiful lines of type crying out for shelter.

What was going on? I wondered. What had happened so suddenly to all the living space? Where were all the new apartments that had sprouted, the acre after acre of suburban building?

I dropped the paper on the floor and dialed a realtor I knew. A secretary answered and I had to hold the line until he finished with another call.

Finally he came on.

“Parker,” he asked, “what can I do for you?”

“I’m being thrown out,” I said. “I need a roof above my head.”

“Oh my God!” he said.

“A room will do,” I told him. “Just one big room if that’s the best there is.”

“Look, Parker, how long have you got?”

“Until the first of the year.”

“Maybe in that time I can do something for you. The situation may ease up a bit. I’ll keep you in mind. Almost anything, you say?”

“Is it really that bad, Bob?”

“I got them in the office. I got them on the phone. People hunting homes.”

“But what happened? There are all those flew apartment houses and the big developments. They had signs out front, advertised for rent or sale all summer.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and he sounded frantic. “I wouldn’t even try to answer. I just can’t understand it. I could sell a thousand homes. I could rent any number of apartments. But I haven’t got a one. I’m sitting here, going stony broke, because I have no listings. They all ran down to zero a good ten days ago. I have people pleading with me. They offer bribes to me. They think I’m holding out. I have more customers than I ever had before and there’s no way I can do business with them.”

“New people coming into town?”

“God, I don’t think so, Parker. Not this many of them.”

“New couples starting out?”

“I tell you, honest, half of the folks waiting for me are older people who sold their homes because the families had grown up and they didn’t need a big house any more. And a lot of the others are people who sold their places because their families were increasing and they needed room.”

“And now,” I said, “there is no room at all.”

“That’s the size of it,” he said. There was nothing more to say. I said it.

“Thanks, Bob.”

“I’ll keep watch for you,” he said. He didn’t sound too hopeful.

I hung up and sat there and wondered what was going on. There was something going on—I was sure of that. This was not just a situation brought about by an abnormal demand. Here was something that defied all rules of economics. There was a story somewhere; I could almost smell it. Franklin’s had been sold and Ed had lost his lease and Old George had sold this building and people were storming realty offices in a mad attempt to find a place to live.

I got up and put on my hat and coat. I tried not to notice the semicircle out of the carpeting when I went out the door.

I had a terrible hunch—a terrifying hunch.

The apartment building stood on the edge of a neighborhood shopping area, one that had developed years before, long before anyone had thought of sticking shopping centers helter-skelter way out in the sticks.

If my hunch was right, the answer might lie in the shopping area—in any shopping area.

I set out, hunting for that answer.

Ninety minutes later I had my answer and I was scared stone cold.

Most of the business houses in the area had lost their leases or were about to lose them. Several with long leases had sold their businesses. Most of the buildings apparently had changed hands within the last few weeks.

I talked with men who were desperate and others who had become resigned. And a few who were angry and another few who admitted they were licked.

“I tell you,” one druggist said, “maybe it is just as well. With the tax structure as it stands and all the regulations and the governmental interference, I sometimes wonder just how smart it is to remain in business. Sure, I looked for another location. But that was pure reflex. Habit dies hard in almost any man. But there’s no location. There’s nowhere for me to go. So I’ll just sell out my stock as best I can and get this monkey off my back, then wait and see what happens.”

“Any plans?” I asked.

“Well, the wife and I have been talking for some time about a long vacation. But we never took it. Never got around to taking it. This business tied me down and it’s hard to get good help.”

And there was the barber who had waved his scissors and snipped them angrily.

“Christ,” he said, “a man can’t make a living any longer. They won’t let you.”

I wanted to ask him who they were, but he didn’t give me a chance to get in a single word.

“God knows I make a poor enough living as it is,” he said. “Barbering isn’t what it used to be. Haircuts are all you get. Now and then a shampoo, but that is all. We used to shave them and give them facials and all of them wanted stickum on their hair. But now all we get is haircuts. And now they won’t even let me keep the little that I have.”

I managed to ask who they were, and he Couldn’t tell me. He was angry that I asked. He thought I was smarting off.

Two old family establishments (among Others), each of which owned its building, had held out against the offers which had been made them, each more attractive than the last.

“You know, Mr. Graves,” said an old gentleman at one of the hold-out business houses, “there might have been a time when I would have taken one of the offers. I suppose that I am foolish that I didn’t. But I’m too old a man. Me and this store have become so entangled we’re a part of one another. To sell out the business would be like selling out myself. I don’t suppose that you can understand that.”

“I think I do,” I said.

He put up a pale old hand, with the startling blue of veins standing out against the porcelain of his skin, and smoothed the thin white thatch of hair that clung plastered to his skull.

“There’s such a thing as pride,” he told me. “Pride in a way of doing business. No one else, I can assure you, would carry on this business in the same manner that I do. There are no manners in the world today, young man. There isn’t any kindness. And no consideration. There’s no such thing as thinking the best of one’s fellowmen. The business world has become a bookkeeping operation, performed by machines and by men who are very like machines in that they have no soul. There is no honor and no trust and the ethics have become the ethics of a wolf pack.”

He reached out the porcelain hand and laid it on my arm so lightly I couldn’t feel its touch.

“You say all my neighbors have lost their leases or sold out?”

“The most of them.”

“Jake up the street—he hasn’t? The one in the furniture business. He’s a thieving old scoundrel, but he thinks the same as I.”

I told him he was right. Jake wasn’t selling out, one of the half dozen or so who hadn’t.

“He’s the same as me,” the old man said. “We look on business as a trust and privilege. These others only see it as a way of making money. Jake has his sons he can leave the business to, and that may make a difference. Maybe that’s another reason he is hanging on. It is different with me. I have no family. There is just my sister. Just the two of us. When we are gone, the business will go with us. But so long as we live, we stay here, serving the public as honorably as we can. For I tell you, sir, that business is more than just a counting of the profits. It is a chance for service, a chance to make a contribution. It is the glue that keeps our civilization stuck together, and there can be no prouder profession for any man to follow.”

It sounded like a muted trumpet call from some other era, and that, perhaps, was exactly what it was. For a moment I sensed the thrill of proud-bright banners waving in the blue and I felt the newness and the clearness that was gone forever now.

And the old man may have seen the same thing that I had seen, for he said: “It is all tarnished now. Only here and there, in a few secluded corners, can we keep it shining bright.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “You’ve done me a lot of good.”

As we shook hands in parting, I wondered why I should have told him that. Wondering why, I knew it was the truth—that somehow he’d done something, or said something, to put back some faith in me. Faith in what? I wondered, and I wasn’t sure. Faith in Man, perhaps. Faith in the world. Perhaps, even, some faith in myself.

I went out of the store and stood on the sidewalk and shivered, cold in the last warmness of the day.

For now it was not just happenstance, whatever it might be that was going on. It wasn’t only Franklin’s or the apartment in which I lived. It wasn’t only Ed who had lost his lease. It wasn’t only people who could find no place to live.

There was a pattern here—a pattern and a vicious purpose. And a thoroughness and a method that were diabolic.

And somewhere behind it all, a smooth- working organization that moved with secrecy and speed. For apparently all the transactions had been concluded within the last few months and all of them aimed at a roughly coincidental closing date.

One thing I didn’t know, and could only guess at, was whether one man or a small group of men or a vast army of them had been needed to do the dickering, to make the offers, to finally close the deals. I had tried to find out, but no one seemed to know. Most of the men I had talked with were those who had leased their quarters and had no way of knowing.

I walked to a corner and went into a drugstore. I squeezed into a phone booth and dialed the office. When a phone gal answered, I asked to speak with Dow.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“Goofing off,” I told him.

“We’ve been going wild up here,” Dow said. “Hennessey’s announced they had lost their lease.”

“Hennessey’s!” Although I don’t know why I should have been surprised, knowing what I knew.

“It isn’t possible,” said Dow. “Not the two of them in a single day.”

Hennessey’s was the second loop department store. With both it and Franklin’s gone; the downtown shopping district would become a desert.

“You missed the first edition with your airport interview,” I told him, stalling for time, wondering how much I ought to tell him.

“The plane was late,” he said.

“How did they keep it so quiet?” I demanded. “There wasn’t a single rumor about the Franklin’s deal.”

“I went over to see Bruce,” said Dow. “I asked him that. He showed me the contract—not for publication, just between the two of us. There was a clause in there which automatically canceled out the sale in case of premature announcement.”

“And Hennessey’s?”

“First National owned the building. They probably had the same clause in their contract. Hennessey’s can stay on for another year, but there’s no other building—”

“The price would have to be good. At least good enough for them not to want to lose the sale. To keep that quiet, I mean.”

“In the Franklin’s case, it was. Again, not for publication, in strictest confidence,

it was twice as much as anyone in their right mind would pay. And after paying that much, the new owner shuts it down. That’s what hurts Bruce the worst. As if someone hated Franklin’s so much they’d pay twice what it was worth just to shut it down.”

Dow hesitated for a moment; then he said: “Parker, it makes no sense at all. No business sense, that is.”

And I was thinking: That explained all the secrecy. Why there had been no rumors. Why Old George had failed to tell me he had sold the building—scurrying off to California so his friends and tenants couldn’t ask him why he hadn’t told them he had sold the building.

I stood there in the booth, wondering if it could be possible that there had been restrictive clauses in each one of the contracts and if the dates of those restrictive clauses could have been the same.

It seemed incredible, of course, but the whole thing was incredible.

“Parker,” asked Dow, “are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m still here. Tell me one thing, Dow. Who was it that bought Franklin’s?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some property management outfit called Ross, Martin, Park Gobel had some hand in drawing up the papers. I called them—”

“And they told you they were handling it for a client. They were not at liberty to tell you who the client was.”

“Exactly. How did you know that?”

“Just a guess,” I said. “This whole thing stinks to heaven.”

“I checked up on Ross, Martin, Park Gobel,” said Dow. “They have been in business a sum total of ten weeks.”

I said a silly thing. “Ed lost his lease today. It is going to be lonesome.”

“Ed?”

“Yeah. Ed’s bar.”

“Parker, what is going on?”

“Darned if I know,” I said. “So what else is new?”

“Money. I checked. The banks are overflowing with money. Cash money. They’ve been busy for the last week scooping it in. People come in loaded and are socking it away.”

“Well, well,” I said, “it is nice to know the area’s economy is in such good condition.”

“Parker,” snapped Dow, “what in hell is the matter with you?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

I hung up quick, before he could ask me any more.

I stood there and wondered why I hadn’t told him what I knew. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have. There was, in fact, probably every reason that I should have, for it fell in line of duty.

And yet I hadn’t done it, because I had been unable to, couldn’t bring myself to do it. Almost as if by not saying it, I’d keep it from being true. Almost as if I didn’t say it, there’d be no truth in it.

And that, of course, was silly.

I got out of the booth and went down the street. I stood on the corner and dug into my pocket and brought out the notice I had gotten in the mail. Ross, Martin, Park Gobel was located in the loop in the old McCandless Building, one of those ancient brownstone tombs that were marked for early razing by the city’s redevelopment authority.

I could see the setup—the creaking elevators and the stairs with marble treads and with great bronze railings, blackened now with age; the solemn corridors with their wainscoting of oak so old it shone with the polish of its aging, with the ceilings high and the doors with great squares of frosted glass reaching halfway down them. And on the first floor the arcade with the stamp shop and the tobacco shop, with the magazine counter and the shoeshine corner and a dozen other little businesses.

I looked at my watch and it was after five o’clock. The street was packed with a solid stream of cars, the beginning of the homeward rush, with the traffic streaming westward, heading for one of the two great highways that led out into the area of huge housing developments and cozy little neighborhoods tucked away among the lakes and hills.

The sun had set and it was that moment when daylight is beginning to fade and twilight has not quite yet set in. The nicest part of the day, I thought, for people who weren’t troubled or had nothing on their minds.

I walked slowly down the street, turning over slowly what was frying in my brain. I didn’t like it much, but it was a hunch, and I’d learned from long experience not to turn my back on hunches. Too many had paid off in the past to allow me to ignore them.

I found a hardware store and went into it. I bought a glass cutter, feeling guilty as I did it. I put it in my pocket and went out on the street again.

There were more people on the sidewalk now and more cars honking in the street. I stood well up against a building and watched the crowd flow past.

Perhaps, I told myself, I should drop it now. Perhaps the smart thing to do was simply to go home and then in an hour or so get dressed and go and pick up Joy.

I stood there undecided and I almost dropped it, but there was something in me nagging, something that would not let me drop it.

A cab came down the street, hemmed in by the cars. It stopped with the stream of traffic, caught by a changing traffic light, almost in front of me. I saw that it was empty and I didn’t stop to think, I didn’t give myself a chance to make a real decision. I stepped out to the curb and the cabby saw me and swung the door open so I could get in.

“Where to, mister?”

I gave him the intersection just beyond the McCandless Building.

The light changed and the cab edged along.

“Have you noticed, mister,” said the cabby, by way of starting a conversation, “how the world has gone to hell?”

The McCandless Building was just the way I had imagined it, the way all the old brownstone office buildings were.

The third-floor corridor was hushed, with the faint light of the dying day filtering into the windows at its end. The carpet was worn and the walls were stained; the woodwork, for all its ancient shine, had a tired and beaten look.

The office doors were frosted glass, with the peeling, tattered gold of firm names fixed upon them. Each door, I noted, was fitted with a lock independent of the ancient lock built into the knob assembly.

I paced the length of the hall to be sure there was no one around. All the offices apparently were deserted. This was a Friday night and the office workers would have gotten out as soon as possible to begin their weekend. It was too early yet for the cleaning women to come in.

The office of Ross, Martin, Park Gobel was near the end of the corridor. I tried the door and it was locked, as I knew it would be. I took out the glass cutter and settled down to work. It was not an easy job. When you cut a piece of glass, you’re supposed to lay it on a flat surface and work at it from above. That way you can manage, if you’re careful, to get a sure and steady pressure so that the little wheel can score the glass. And here I was, trying to cut a piece of glass that was standing on its edge.

It took me quite a while, but I finally got the glass scored and put the cutter back into my pocket. I stood for a moment, listening, making sure there was no one in the corridor or coming up the stairs. Then I bumped the glass with my elbow and the scored piece cracked and broke, leaning at an angle, still held within the doorframe. I nudged it again and it broke and fell inside the room. And I had a fist-size hole just above the lock.

Being careful not to come in contact with the jagged bits of broken glass still held within the frame, I put in my hand and found the knob that turned the lock. I twisted and the lock came back. With my other hand, I turned the outside knob and Pushed and the door came open.

I oozed into the place and shut the door behind me, then slid along the wall and stood there for a long moment, with my back against the wall.

I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck and my heart was thumping, for the smell was there—the smell of Bennett’s shaving lotion. Just the faint suggestion of a smell, but unmistakable, as if the man had put it on that morning and in the afternoon had brushed past me on the street. I tried once again to define it, but there was nothing I could compare it with. It was the kind of odor I had never smelled in all my life. Nothing wrong with it—not very wrong, that is—but a kind of smell I had never known before.

Out in the space beyond where I stood against the wall were dark shapes and humps, and as I stared at them and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the place I could see that it was just an office and not a thing unusual. The dark shapes and black humps were desks and filing cabinets and all the other furniture you expect to find inside a business office.

I stood tensed and waiting, but absolutely nothing happened. The grayness of deep twilight seeped in through the windows, but it seemed to stop just beyond the windows; it did not penetrate into the room. And the place was quiet, so utterly quiet that it was unnerving.

I looked around the room and now, for the first time, I noticed something strange. In one corner of the room an alcove was curtained off—a strange arrangement, certainly, for a business office.

I looked around the rest of the office, forcing my eyes to go over it almost inch by inch, alert to the slightest thing out of the ordinary. But there was nothing else—nothing strange at all except the curtained alcove. And the lotion smell.

Cautiously, I moved out from the wall and across the room. I didn’t know exactly what I was afraid of, but there was a fear of some sort crouching in the room.

I halted at the desk in front of the alcove and snapped on a desk lamp. I knew it wasn’t smart. I had broken into this office, and now I was advertising it by turning on the light. But I took the chance. I wanted to see, immediately and without question, what was back of the drapes closing off the alcove.

In the light I could see that the drapes were of some heavy, dark material and that they were hung on a traverse rod. Moving to one side and groping, I found the cords. I pulled and the drapes parted, folding Smoothly out to either side. Behind the drapes was a row of garments, all neatly ranged on hangers which were hung upon a pole.

I stood there, gaping at them. And as I looked at them I began to see them, not as a mass of garments, but as separate garments. There were men’s suits and topcoats; there were half a dozen shirts; there was a hanger full of ties. On the shelf above the rack, hats were primly ranged. There were women’s suits and dresses and some rather frilly garments that I suppose you would call gowns. There was underclothing, both men’s and women’s; there were socks and stockings. Underneath the clothing, on a long rack standing on the floor, shoes were precisely placed, again both men’s and women’s.

And this was stark crazy. A place to hang topcoats, raincoats, jackets, a place to put the hats—if there were no closet, it would be very likely that some fussbudget in the office might fix up a place like this. But here were complete wardrobes for everyone in the entire office, from the boss down to the lowliest of the secretaries.

I racked my brains for an explanation, but there wasn’t any.

And the craziest thing about it was that the office now was empty, that everyone bad gone and they had left their clothes behind. Certainly they would not have left the office without wearing any clothes.

I moved slowly along the line of clothing, putting out my hand to touch them, to make sure they were really fabric, that they were really there. They were ordinary fabrics. And they were really there.

As I walked along the line, I felt a sudden draft of coldness at the level of my ankles. Someone had left a window open—that was the way it felt. As I took another step, the draft as suddenly was gone.

I made my way to the end of the rack of clothing, turned around, and walked back again. Once again the coldness hit my ankles.

There was something wrong here. There was no window open. For a draft from an open window does not creep along the floor at ankle height; nor is it channeled so that with one step you are in it and the next step out.

There was something behind the rack of clothes. And what, in the name of God, could be cold behind a rack of clothes?

Unthinking, I hunkered down and swept the clothes apart and found where the coldness came from.

It came from a hole, a hole that went through the McCandless Building, but not outside the building, not clear through the building, for if it had been a simple hole knocked clear through the wall, I would have seen the lights on the Street outside.

There were no lights. There was an utter darkness and a giddiness and a cold that was more than simple cold—more like the complete lack of any heat at all. Here, I sensed—and I don’t know how I sensed it—was a lack of something, perhaps the lack of everything, a complete negation of the form and light and heat that was upon the Earth. I sensed a motion, although I could see no motion a sort of eddying of the darkness and the cold, as if the two were being stirred by some mysterious mixer, a sucking whirlpool of the darkness and the cold. As I stared into the hole, the giddiness that was in it tried to tip me forward and to suck me in and I jerked back in terror, sprawling on the floor.

I lay there, stiff and tense with fright, and felt the seeping cold and watched the motion of the clothing as it fell back in place to mask the hole punched in the wall.

Slowly I got to my feet and edged toward the desk, putting the barrier of the desk between myself and what I’d found behind the curtain.

And what was it I had found?

The question hammered at me and there was no answer, as there was no answer to the clothing hanging in a row.

I put out a hand to grab the desk, seeking something solid to which I might anchor against this unknown menace. But instead of the desk, my fingers grasped a basket and tipped it so that the papers in it fell onto the floor. I got down on hands and knees and scrabbled for the papers, stacking them together. They were all neatly folded and they had a legal feel, that funny, important texture that legal papers have.

I got off my knees and dumped them on the desk top and ran quickly through them, and every one of them—every single one—was a property transfer. And every one of them was made out to a Fletcher Atwood.

The name rang a distant bell and I stood there groping, fumbling back through a cluttered—and a faulty—memory for some clue that would let me peg the man.

Somewhere in the past the name of Fletcher Atwood had meant something to me. Somewhere I’d met the man, or Written about him, or talked to him on the telephone. He was a name filed away deep inside the brain, but so long forgotten, perhaps even at the time of so little moment, that the fact and place and time had slipped clean away from me.

It was something that Joy had said to me, it seemed. Walking past my desk and stopping to say a word or two—the little idle talk of a busy newsroom where no name may live for long in the headlong rush of hourly happenings.

Something about a house, it seemed—a house that Atwood had bought.

And just like that I had it. Fletcher Atwood was the man who’d bought the storied Belmont place out on Timber Lane. A man of mystery who had never fitted in with the horsey set in that exclusive area. Who had never, actually, lived in the house he’d bought; who might spend a night or week there but had never really lived there; who had no family and no friends; who, furthermore, seemed to have no wish for friends.

Timber Lane had resented him at first, for the Belmont place at one time had been the center of that elusive thing which Timber Lane had called society. He was never mentioned now—not in Timber Lane. He was a moldy skeleton that had been shoved aside into a dusty cupboard.

And was this revenge? I wondered, spreading out the transfers underneath the lamp. Although it scarcely could be that, for there’d been no evidence, one way or the other, that Atwood had ever cared what Timber Lane might have thought of him.

Here were properties that ran into billions. Here were proud business firms, hoary with tradition and gemmed with family names; here small industries; here the ancient buildings that had been a byword in the town as long as the oldest man remembered. All of them transferred to Fletcher Atwood in ponderous, precise legal language—all stacked here and waiting to be processed and filed.

Waiting here, perhaps, I speculated, because no one as yet had had the time to file them. Waiting because there was too much other work to do. Too much, I wondered, of what kind of other work?

It seemed incredible, but here it was—the very legal proof that one man had bought up, in a bundle as it were, a more than respectable segment of the city’s business district.

No man could have the amount of money that was represented in this batch of papers. Nor, perhaps, any group of men. But if, indeed, some men had, what could be their purpose?

To buy up a city?

For this was but one small group of papers, left lying in a naked basket atop the desk as if the papers were of small importance. In this very office there were undoubtedly many times their number. And if Fletcher Atwood, or the men he represented, had bought out this city, what did he mean to do with it?

I put the papers back into the basket and moved out from the desk back to the rack of clothes. I stared up at the shelf where the hats were ranged in line and I saw, among the hats, what seemed to be a shoe box.

Perhaps a box with more papers in it?

I stood on tiptoe and worked the box out with my fingertips until it tipped and I could get a grip on it. It was heavier than I had expected. I carried it back to the desk and placed it underneath the lamp and took the cover off.

The box was filled with dolls—and yet something more than dolls, without the studied artificiality one associates with dolls. Here were dolls so human that one wondered if they might not be actual humans, shrunken down to something like four inches long but shrunken in such an expert manner that their proportions were unchanged.

And lying on top of that mass of dolls was a doll that was the perfect image of that Bennett who had sat with Bruce Montgomery at the conference table!

I stood there thunderstruck, staring at the doll. And the more I looked at it, the more it looked like Bennett, a stark-naked Bennett, a little Bennett doll that waited for someone to dress him and sit him in a chair behind a conference table. He was so realistic that I could imagine the fly crawling on his skull.

Slowly, almost afraid to touch the doll—afraid that when I touched it, it might turn out to be alive—I reached down into the shoe box and lifted Bennett out. He was heavier than I had expected, heavier than any normal, four-inch doll should be. I held him underneath the light, and there was no question that this thing I held between my fingers was an exact replica of the living man. The eyes were cold and stony and the lips as thin and straight. The skull looked not simply bald but sterile, as if it had never grown a hair. The body was the kind of body that a man near the end of middle age would have—a body tending toward flabbiness, but with the flabbiness held in check by planned exercise and a close attention to very careful living.

I laid Bennett on the desk and reached into the box again, and this time I picked up a girl doll—a very lovely blonde. I held her underneath the lamp, and there was no doubt of it: here was no doll as such, but the faithful model of a woman with no detail of anatomy ignored. She was so close to living that it seemed one would only have to speak a certain magic word to bring her back to life. Delicate and dainty and lovely to the fingertips, she had about her none of the mechanical irregularities or grotesqueness of a manufactured article.

I laid her down alongside Bennett and put my hand into the box and stirred the dolls around. There were a lot of them, perhaps twenty or thirty, and there were many types. There were alert young eager beavers and old staid business beagles and the slick, smooth maleness of the accomplished operator; there were the prim career girls, the querulous old maids, the Young things in the office.

I quit stirring them around and went back to the blonde again. I was fascinated by her.

I picked her up and had another look at her and tried to be professional about it by puzzling at the material with which the doll was made. It might have been a plastic, although, if so, a type I’d never seen before. It was hard and heavy yet had a yielding quality. If you squeezed hard enough, it dented and then sprang back again when the pressure was released. And it had the faintest feel of a certain warmth. The funny thing about it was that it seemed to have no texture, or so fine a texture it could not be detected.

I rummaged through the box again, picking up the dolls, and they were all the same in the skill and artistry of their manufacture.

I put Bennett and, the blonde back with the rest of them and put the box back on the shelf, carefully inserting it into the space between the hats.

I backed away and looked around the office and there was a roaring in my brain at the madness of it—the dolls upon the shelf and the clothes upon the rack, the hole with the giddiness of cold and the stack of papers that bought out half a city.

Reaching out my hand, I closed the drapes. They slid easily into place with the faintest rustle, closing in the dolls and the clothes and the hole, but not closing in the madness, for the madness still was there.

You could almost feel it, as if it were a shadow moving in the darkness outside the circle of the lamplight.

Whatever does one do, I asked myself, when he stumbles into something that is impossible of belief and yet with its surface facts entirely evident? For they were evident; one thing one might have imagined or misinterpreted, but there was no possibility of imagining all the things within this office.

I turned on the lamp and the darkness closed in, muffling the room. With my hand still on the lamp switch, I stood unmoving, listening, but there was no sound.

Tiptoeing, I made my way among the desks back to the door, and every step I took I sensed the creeping danger at my back—an imagined danger, but strong and terrifying. Perhaps it was the thought that there had to be a danger and a threat, that the things I had uncovered were not meant to be uncovered, that there must, in all logic, be a certain built-in protection for them.

I went out into the corridor, closed the door behind me, and stood a moment with my back against the wall. The corridor itself was dark. Lights had been turned on in the stairwell and faint light, reflected from the Street below, filtered through the window.

There was nothing stirring, no sign of life at all. The squeal of braking wheels, the honking of a car horn, the gay laughter of a girl came up faintly from the street.

And now, for some reason I could not understand, it became important that I should leave the building without being seen. As if it were a game, a most important game with very much at stake, and I could not risk the ending of it by being apprehended.

I went cat-footing down the corridor and had nearly reached the stairs when I felt the rush.

Felt is not the word, perhaps, nor is sensed. For it was not sensing; it was knowing. There was no sound, no movement, no flicker of a shadow, nothing that could have warned me—nothing except the inexplicable danger bell that clanged within my brain.

I wheeled about in frantic haste, and it was almost upon me, black in the shadow, man-sized, man-shaped, coming in a rush without the slightest sound. As if it trod on air so it would make no sound to cancel out the sound of footsteps.

I moved so suddenly that I spun back against the wall and the thing rushed past me but pivoted with a whiplash swiftness and launched itself toward me. I caught the paleness of a face as the faint lights of the stairwell outlined the massive body. Without conscious thought, my fist was coming up, aiming at the paleness in the black outline. There was a spattering smack as the fist slammed against the paleness, and my knuckles stung with the violence of the blow.

The man, if it were a man, was staggering back, and I followed, swinging once again, and once again there was the hollow smack.

The man was going over, falling, the small of his back caught against the iron railing that protected the open stairwell above the flight below pivoting over the rail and falling free, spread-eagled, into the gaping space above the marble stairs.

I caught one glimpse of the face as it turned into the light, the mouth wide open for the scream that did not come. Then the man had fallen out of sight and there was a heavy thud as he smashed onto the staircase a dozen feet below.

There had been fear and desperation when I had faced the man, and now there was a sickness from knowing that I had killed a man. For no one, I told myself, could have survived the fall and landing on the staircase stone.

I stood and waited for a sound to come up from the stairwell. But there was no sound. The building was so still that it seemed to hold its breath.

I moved toward the stairs and my knees were shaky and my hands were clammy. At the railing, I looked down, braced for the sight of the sprawling body which must lie broken on the stairs.

And there was nothing there.

There was no sign of the man who had fallen to almost certain death.

I whirled around and went clattering down the stairs, no longer intent on maintaining silence. And mingled with the relief at not having killed a man there was a vague beginning of another fear—that, having failed to kill him, he still remained a stalker and an enemy.

Even as I ran, I wondered if I might have been mistaken, if the body might have been there and my eyes had missed it. But one, I told myself, does not miss a body broken on the stairs.

I was right. The stairs were empty as I came around the first flight and started down the second.

Now I stopped my running and went more cautiously, staring at the treads, as if by doing this I might catch some clue as to exactly what had happened.

And as I came down the stairs, I smelled the lotion smell again—the same scent I had caught on Bennett and in the office, where I’d found Bennett’s doll.

There was a smear of liquid, thinly spread, on the first steps and on the landing floor—as if someone had spilled some water. I stooped and ran my fingers through the wetness and it was simply wetness. I lifted my fingers and smelled of them, and the lotion smell was there, but stronger than it had been before.

I could see that two trails of wetness ran across the landing and went down the following flight, as if someone had carried a glass of water and the water had been dripping. This, then, I told myself, was the track of the one who should have died; this wetness was the trail that he had left behind him.

There was horror in that stairwell, a place so quiet and empty that it would have seemed that any emotion, even horror, would have been impossible. But the emptiness itself, perhaps, was a portion of the horror, the emptiness where there should have been a body, and the trail of smelly liquid to show the way that it had gone.

I went charging down the stairs, with the horror howling in my brain, and as I ran I wondered what I’d do or what would happen should I meet that shape, waiting on the stairs; but, even thinking of it, I could not halt my fleeing and went hammering down the stairs until I reached the ground floor.

There was no one on the floor except the shoe-shine boy, dozing in a chair tipped back against the wall, and the cigar- counter man, who leaned against the counter, reading a paper he had spread flat before him.

The cigar man looked up and the shoeshine boy crashed forward in his chair, but before either of them could move or shout, I was through the revolving door and outside on the street. The street was becoming crowded with shoppers, who flocked downtown two nights each week for the evening store hours.

Once in the street, I ran no longer, for here I felt that I might be safe. At the corner, I stopped and looked back at theMcCandless Building, and it was just a building, an old and time-stained building that had stood too long and would be torn down before too many years had passed. There was nothing mysterious about it, nothing sinister.

But as I looked at it I shivered, as if a cold wind had come out of somewhere to blow across my soul..

I knew just what I needed and I went down the street to find it. The place was just beginning to fill up, and somewhere in the dimness toward the back someone was playing a piano. Well, not really playing it, just fooling around, every once in a while fingering a snatch of melody.

I went toward the back, where there wasn’t so much traffic, and found myself a stool.

“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the bar.

“Scotch on ice,” I said. “And while you’re about it, you might make it double. It’ll save wear and tear on you.”

“What brand?” he asked.

I told him.

He got a glass and ice. He picked a bottle off the back bar.

Someone sat down on the stool that was next to mine.

“Good evening, miss,” the bartender said. “What can we do for you?”

“A Manhattan, please.”

I turned around at the sound of the voice, for there was something in it that jerked me to attention.

And something about the girl as well. She was a stunning person, with a beauty that did not erase her personality.

She stared back at me. She was as cool as ice.

“Have we met somewhere?” she asked. “I believe we have,” I told her. She was the blonde I had picked out of the shoe box—now incredibly grown up and clothed.

The bartender set my drink before me and began fixing her Manhattan.

He had a bored look on his face. He’d heard a lot of pickups made, most likely, at this very bar.

“Not too long ago,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “Just a little time. At an office, I believe.”

If she knew what I was talking about, she surely didn’t show it. And yet she was too cold, too icy, too sure of herself.

She opened a cigarette case and took out a smoke. She tapped it and stuck it in her mouth and waited.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t smoke. I don’t carry fire.”

She reached into her bag and took out a lighter. She handed it to me. I snapped it and the flame licked out. She leaned to get the light, and as she did I smelled the scent of violets—or, at least, of some floral perfume. I imagined it was violet.

And suddenly I became aware of something I should have thought of at the very first. Bennett had not smelled the way he did because he had used shaving lotion but because he had failed to use it. The scent of him had been the smell of the sort of thing he was.

The girl got her light and leaned back, dragging in the first lungful of the smoke. She let it trickle from her nostrils very daintily.

I handed her the lighter. She dropped it in her bag.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

The bartender put her Manhattan on the bar. It was a pretty thing, with the stemmed red cherry exactly positioned.

I gave him a bill.

“The both of them,” I said.

“But, sir,” she protested.

“Don’t thwart me,” I pleaded. “It’s a passion with me—providing pretty girls with booze.”

She let it pass. She eyed me, still a little coldly.

“You’ve never smoked?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“To keep your sense of smell?” she asked.

“My what?”

“Your sense of smell. I thought you might be in some sort of work where a sense of smell might be an asset.”

“I had never thought of it that way,” I said, “but perhaps I am.”

She picked up her drink and looked at me closely above the top of it.

“Sir,” she said calmly, evenly, “would you like to sell yourself?”

I’m afraid that that one got me, I didn’t even stammer. I )U5t stared at her. For she wasn’t kidding; she was businesslike.

“We could start at a million,” she said, “and bargain up from there.”

I got my mental feet back under me again. “My soul?” I asked. “Or is the body all? With the soul, it would come just a little higher.”

“You could keep your soul,” she told me. “And the offer comes from you?” She shook her head. “Not me. I have no use of you.”

“You represent someone? Someone, perhaps, who’d buy anything at all. A store and close it down. Or an entire city.”

“You catch on fast,” she said.

“Money’s not everything,” I told her. “There are other things.”

“If you prefer,” she said, “we could consider other things.”

She put down her drink and reached into her bag. She handed me a card.

“If you should reconsider, you can hunt me up,” she said. “The offer’s still wide open.”

She was off the stool and moving out into the gathering crowd before I could answer or do a thing to stop her.

The bartender drifted past and looked at the untouched drinks.

“Something wrong with the liquor, bud?” he asked.

“Not a thing,” I told him.

I put the card on the bar and it was upside down, I turned it over and bent above it to make out what it said, because the light was dim.

I needn’t have read it. I already knew what it would say. There was one difference only, in a single line. Instead of “Property Management,” it said “We Deal in Everything.”

I sat there cold and huddled, perched upon the stool. The place was so dim that it had a foggy look, and there was a rumble of disconnected human talk that somehow sounded not too human but like the gabbling of monsters or the hoots of idiots. And through it, and above it, and in between the talk, the piano still was tinkling like a dirty joke.

I gulped the Scotch and sat there with the glass cradled in my hand. I looked around for the man behind the bar to get another one, but he had suddenly gotten busy with new customers.

Someone leaned on the bar beside me, and his elbow jogged the Manhattan and the glass went over. The drink spread out like a coat of dirty oil across the polished wood and the stem of the glass snapped off close up against the bowl and the bowl was shattered. The cherry rolled along the bar and stopped at its very edge.

“I’m sorry,” said the man. “It was clumsy of me. I’ll buy another one.”

“Never mind,” I told him. “She isn’t coming back.”

I slid off the stool and made it to the door.

A cab was cruising past, and I stepped out and hailed it.

The last light of the day had faded from the sky and the streetlights were on. I saw that a clock set up on a corner in front of a bank said it was almost six-thirty. I’d have to get a hustle on, for I had a date at seven and Joy, more than likely, would be fairly well burned up if I should turn up late.

“Going to be a great night for coon hunting,” said the cabby. “It is warm and soft, and in just a little while the moon will be coming up. I wish I could get out, but I got to work tonight. Me and another fellow, we have got a dog. A black and tan. He has got the sweetest mouth that you’ve ever listened to.”

“You’re a coon hunter,” I said, making it half a question, but not entirely so. Not that I was interested, but it was clear the man expected some reaction from me.

It was all he needed. Probably all he had expected.

“Been one man and boy,” he told me. “My old pappy, he use to take me out when I was nine or ten years old. I tell you, mister, it gets into your blood. Come a night like this and you can hardly stand it wanting to be out there. There’s something about the way the woods smell at this time of year and there’s the special noise the wind makes in the trees when the leaves are loosening and you can feel the frost just around the corner.”

“Where do you go to hunt?”

“Out west, forty or fifty miles. Up the river. Lots of timber in the river bottom.”

“You get lots of coons?”

“Ain’t the coons you get,” he said, “Lots of nights you go out and you come back with nothing. The coons maybe are just an excuse for getting out in the woods at night. There ain’t enough people get out into the woods, at night or any other time. I ain’t the kind of guy that goes around spouting about communing with nature, but I tell you friend, if you spent some time with her you’re a better man.”

I settled back in the seat and watched the blocks slide past. It was still the same old city I had known, and yet it seemed to me that now there was a leering quality about it, as if sly shapes might be peering out at one from the shadowed angles of the darkened buildings.

The driver asked me: “You never went coon hunting?”

“No, I never have. I do some duck hunting and sometimes go out to South Dakota for the pheasants.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I like ducks and pheasants, too. But when you come to coons, they are something special.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said: “I guess, though, it’s each man to his own. With you it’s ducks and pheasants and with me it’s coons. And I know a man, a real gone old geezer, that messes around with skunks. He don’t think there’s nothing like a skunk. He makes friends with them. I swear he talks to them. He clucks and coos at them and they walk right up to him and climb up in his lap and let him pet them like a cat. Then, like as not, they go trailing home with him, like a happy dog. I tell you, it is unbelievable. It would scare you to see how he gets along with them. He lives in a shack out in the river hills and the place plumb crawls with skunks. He’s writing a book about them. He showed me the book. He’s writing it with pencil on a common dime-store tablet—the rough kind of paper that kids use at school. He sits there hunched over the table with a stub of a pencil he has to lick every now and then when it gets too faint, writing away at that book in the light of a smoky old lantern setting on the table. But, I tell you, mister, he can’t write for shucks and his spelling’s something terrible. And it’s a downright pity. For he’s got a book to write.”

“That’s the way goes,” I told him. it He drove along in silence for a while.

“Your place next block, isn’t it?” he asked.

I told him that it was.

He pulled up in front of the apartment and I got out.

“Some night,” he said, “how about a coon hunt with me? Start six o’clock or so.’

“That would be fine,” I said.

“The name is Larry Higgins. You’ll find me in the phone book. Call me any time.”

I told him that I would.

I climbed the stairs, and in front of my door someone had replaced the semicircle that had been cut out of the carpeting. I almost didn’t notice it because the light bulb in the ceiling was dimmer, if possible, than it had been before.

I almost stepped into the semicircle before I saw the carpet had been mended. I wasn’t thinking about the carpeting. There was too much else for a man to think about.

I stopped at the very edge of it and stood there stiffly, as a man may stand who toes a dangerous deadline. And the funny thing about it was that it was not new carpeting, but the same old worn, dirty carpeting as all the rest of it.

Was it possible, I wondered, that the caretaker could have found, hidden in some cranny, the very piece that had been cut out of the carpeting?

I got down on my knees to have a look at it and there was no sign at all that the carpet had been cut. It was as if a man had only imagined that the carpet had been cut. There was no sign of sewing and there weren’t any seams.

I ran my hand over the area where the semicircle once had been and it was carpeting. It wasn’t any phony paper spread across a trap. I felt the texture of it and the yielding thickness of it, and there was no doubt at all that it was honest fabric.

And yet I was leery of it. It had almost fooled me once and I was not inclined to let it fool me once again. I stayed there, kneeling in the hall, and above me and behind me I heard the tiny, gnatlike singing of the light bulb in the ceiling.

Slowly I got to my feet and found the key and leaned across that space of carpeting to unlock the door. Anyone who saw me would have thought that I was crazy—standing just off-center of the hall and leaning across all that space to get the door unlocked.

The lock snicked back and the door came open and I leaped across the space of replaced carpeting, never touching it, and was inside the room.

I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it as I turned on the light.

And the room was there, waiting for me as it always waited, a place that spelled security and comfort, the place that was my home.

But a place, I reminded myself, that would continue to be my home for somewhat less than another ninety days.

And after that? I wondered. What would happen then, not only to myself, but to all those other people? What would happen to the city?

“We Deal in Everything,” the card had said. Like the old junk dealer who bought anything at all—bottles, bones, rags, anything you had. But the junk dealer had been an honest buyer. He had bought for profit. And what were these people buying for? Why was Fletcher Atwood buying? Not for profit, certainly, when he paid more than a business might be worth and then didn’t even use it.

I took off my coat and threw it in a chair. I threw my hat on top of it. At the desk I dug out the phone directory and turned the pages to the Atwoods. There were a lot of them, but no Fletcher Atwood. There wasn’t any Atwood, even, who had an F initial.

So I dialed information.

She had a look then told me, in her singsong voice: “We have no such party listed.”

I hung up the phone and wondered what to do.

Here was an emergency that cried aloud for action, and how did one get action? And if you got the action, what would the action be? What do you do, what can you do, if someone buys a city?

And, first of all, how would you explain it so someone would believe you?

I ran through the list of names and none of them was hopeful. There was the Old Man, of course, and he was the one I should spill my guts to, if for no other reason than that I worked for him. But if I should even hint at what was happening, he probably would fire me as a rank incompetent.

There were the mayor and the police chief or possibly some judicial officer, like the county prosecutor or the attorney general, but if I even breathed it to any one of them, I would either get a quick brush-off as another crackpot or find myself locked up.

There was always, I told myself, Senator Roger Hill. Rog just might listen to me.

I put out my hand to pick up the phone, then pulled it back again.

When I got through to Washington, what exactly was it that I had to tell him?

I reviewed it in my mind: “Look, Rog, someone is trying to buy up the city. I broke into an office and I found the papers and there was this rack of clothes and a shoe box full of dolls and a big hole in the wall . . .”

It was too ridiculous to even think about, too fantastic to hope that anyone would take it seriously. If someone had tried to tell me that sort of story, I would have figured he was some kind of nut or other.

Before I went to anyone, I had to get more evidence. I had to nail it down. I had to be able to show who and how and why and I had to do it fast. There was a place to start and that was Fletcher Atwood. Wherever he might be, he was the man to find. I knew two solid things about him. He had no telephone and years ago he’d bought the Belmont place out on Timber Lane. There was some question, of course, that he had ever lived there, but it would be a place to start. Even if Atwood were not there, even if he never had been there, it was possible one would find something in the house that might be a help in picking up his trail.

My watch said that it was a quarter of seven and I had to pick up Joy and there was no time to change. I’d just put on aclean shirt and pick out a different tie and Joy wouldn’t mind. After all, we weren’t out to paint the town; we were only going out to eat.

I went into the bedroom without bothering to turn on the light, for the lamp in the living room threw a shaft of light clear across the bedroom. I pulled open a dresser drawer and got a shirt. I stripped off the plastic cover that the laundry had put on and pulled out the cardboard. I shook out the shirt and threw it across a chair back, then went to the closet to pick out a tie. And even as I was pulling the knob on the closet door, I realized that I’d not turned on the light and that I’d need to turn it on before I could pick out a tie.

I had the door open, perhaps a foot or so, and as I thought about the light I shut the door again, I don’t know why I did it, I could just as easily have left it open while I crossed the room to trip up the light switch.

And in that instant of opening and closing the door, which took less time than it takes to tell it, I saw or sensed or heardI don’t know which it was—the movement of some sort of life inside the darkness of the closet. As if the clothes had Come to life and had been waiting for me; as if the ties, hanging on their racks, had metamorphosed into snakes, hanging motionless, as ties, until it came the time to strike.

Had I waited for the sensing or the seeing or the hearing of that motion in the closet to slam shut the door, it might have been too late. But the motion in the closet had not a thing to do with my shutting of the door. I had already started to push it shut again before there was any motion—or, at least, before I had become aware of it.

I backed away across the room from the terror that writhed behind the door, with horror welling in me—the bubbling, effervescent horror that can only come when a man’s own home develops fangs against him.

And even as the horror chilled me, I argued with myself—for this was the sort of thing that simply could not happen. A man’s chair may develop jaws and snap him up as he bends to sit in it; his scatter rugs may glide treacherously from beneath his feet; his refrigerator may lie in ambush to topple over on him; but the closet is the place where nothing of the sort can happen. For the closet is a part of the man himself. It is the place where he hangs up his artificial pelts, and as such it is closer to him, more intimate with him than any room within his dwelling place.

But even as I told myself that it could not happen, even as I charged it all against an upset imagination, I could hear the rustling and the sliding and the frantic stealth that was going on behind the closet door. Almost reluctantly, strange as it may sound, half held by a deadly fascination, I backed out of the room and stood in the living room, just beyond the bedroom J door, staring back into the darkness and the slithering. And there was something there: unless I doubted all my senses and my sanity, there was something there. Something, I told myself, that was a piece with the trap beneath the carpet camouflage and with the ordinary shoe box filled with extraordinary dolls.

And why me? I wondered. Since the incident of the dolls and the broken office door and the girl who ordered the Manhattan, it could, of course, logically be me. Stemming from those happenings, I well could be a target. But the trap had been the first—the trap had come before any of the others.

I strained my ears to hear the rustling, but either it had quieted down now that I was gone or I was too far from the closet, for I did not hear it.

I went to the gun cabinet and unlocked the drawer underneath the cabinet and found the automatic. I dug out a box of shells and filled the clip and shoved it home. I dumped out into my hand the cartridges remaining in the box and dropped them in my pocket.

I put on my topcoat and eased the automatic into my right-hand pocket. Then I hunted for my car keys. For I was getting out.

The keys weren’t in the topcoat and they weren’t in my jacket or in the pockets of my trousers. I had my key ring, with the keys to the front door and to the gun cabinet, to my office desk, to my safety-deposit box, plus half a dozen others that belonged to locks long since forgotten—the steady, ridiculous, inevitable collection of useless and forgotten keys that one can never quite bring himself to throw away.

I had all these, but I didn’t have the car keys.

I searched the tabletops and the desk. I went into the kitchen and had a look around. There weren’t any keys.

Standing in the kitchen, I knew just where I’d left them. I knew just where they were. I could see the trunk key and the caddy dangling from the dash, with the ignition key stuck neatly into the ignition lock. When I’d come home that afternoon, I’d left them in the car. Just as sure as shooting, I’d left them in the car, and it was something I almost never did.

I started for the front door. I took two steps and stopped. And I knew, as certainly as I stood there, that I could not go out into the darkness of the parking lot and walk up to the car with the keys already in the lock.

It was illogical. It was crazy. But I couldn’t help it. There was no way to help it. With no keys in the lock—OK, I could have gone out to the lot. But the keys’ hanging in the lock, for some strange, totally illogical, and unknown reason, made a terrifying difference.

I was scared stiff and toothless. I found my hands were shaking, and I hadn’t even realized it until I looked at them.

The clock said it was seven and Joy would be waiting. She’d be waiting and she’d be sore and I couldn’t blame her.

“Not a minute later,” she had told me. “I get hungry early.”

I walked to the desk and stretched out my hand to pick up the phone, but my hand stopped short of touching it. For a sudden terrifying thought came thundering through my brain. What if the phone no longer were a phone? What if nothing in this room were what it appeared to be? What if it all had changed in the last few minutes into booby traps?

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the automatic. I pushed tentatively at the phone with the snout of it and the phone did not erupt into a funny kind of life. It remained a phone.

With the gun still clutched in one hand, I picked up the receiver with the other, laid it on the desk, and dialed the number.

And when I picked up the receiver, I wondered what I’d say.

It was simple enough. I told her who I was.

“What’s keeping you?” she asked just a mite too sweetly.

“Joy, I’m in trouble.”

“What’s the matter this time?”

Only kidding me. I seldom was in trouble.

“I mean real trouble,” I told her. “Dangerous trouble. I can’t take you out tonight.”

“Sissy,” she said. “I’ll come and get you.,,

“Joy!” I shouted. “Listen! For God’s sake, listen to me. Keep away from me. Believe me, I know what I’m doing. Just stay away from me.”

Her voice still was calm, but it had tightened up a bit, it seemed. “What’s the matter, Parker? Just what kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know,” I told her desperately. “There is something going on. Something dangerous and funny. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. No one would believe me. I’ll work it out, but I don’t want you to get mixed up in it. I’ll feel like a fool tomorrow, maybe, but—”

“Parker, are you sober?”

I told her: “I wish to God I weren’t.”

“And you’re all right? Right now, you are all right?”

“I’m all right,” I told her. “But there’s something in the closet and there was a trap outside the door and I found a box of dolls . . .”

I stopped, and I could have cut out my tongue for saying what I had. I hadn’t meant to say it.

“Stay right there,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Joy!” I shouted. “Joy, don’t do it!”

But the phone was dead.

Desperately I hung up and lifted the receiver again to dial her number.

The crazy little fool, I thought. I had to get her stopped.

I could hear the ringing. It rang on and on and there was a terrible emptiness in the sound it made. It rang and rang and rang and there was no answer.

I shouldn’t have said what I said, I told myself. I should have pretended that I was stinking drunk and in no shape to take her out and that would have made her sore and more than likely she’d have hung up on me and it would have been all right. Or maybe I should have thought up some story with at least the sound of plausibility, but there had been no time to think up a really good one. I was too scared to think straight. I still was too scared to think straight.

I put the receiver back into its cradle and grabbed up my hat and started for the door. At the door I stopped for an instant and looked back into the room, and now it had an alien look, as if it were a place I had never seen before, a place I had merely stumbled on, and it was full of slithering and of whispering and almost-silent noise.

I jerked the door open and bolted out into the corridor and went thundering down the stairs. And even as I ran I wondered how much of the almost-silent, stealthy noise I’d heard had actually been in the apartment and how much in my head.

I reached. the lobby and went out onto the sidewalk. The night was quiet and soft and there was the smell of leaf smoke in the air.

From up the street came a clicking noise a queer, rapid, rhythmic clicking—and around the corner of the building, out of the alley that led to the parking lot, came a dog. He was a happy dog, for his tail was wagging and his gait had something close to frolic in it. He was half the size of a horse and so shaggy that he was shapeless and it was almost as if he’d come straight out of the autumn sunlight of that very afternoon.

“Hi, pup,” I said, and he came up to me and sat down happily and beat his ponderous tail in doggish ecstasy upon the concrete of the sidewalk.

I put out my hand to pat his head, but I never got it patted, for a car came humming swiftly down the street and swung in sharply to stop in front of us.

The door came open.

“Get in,” said Joy’s voice, “and let’s get out of here.”

We ate in another world of candlelight, One of those crazy, corny places that Joy seemed to love—not at the new nightclub that was opening out on Pinecrest Drive. That is, Joy ate. I didn’t.

Women are the damnedest people. I told her all about it. I’d already told her so much over the telephone, inadvisedly perhaps, that I had to tell her the rest of it. Actually, of course, there was no reason that I shouldn’t tell her, but I sounded sappy doing it. She went ahead and ate, in her sweet, calm way, as if I’d been telling her no more than the latest office gossip.

It was almost as if she hadn’t believed a word of what I said, although I am sure she did. Maybe she saw I was upset (who wouldn’t be upset?) and was simply doing her womanly duty of getting me calmed down.

“Go ahead and eat, Parker,” she told me. “No matter what is going on, you simply have to eat.”

I looked at my plate and gagged.

At just the thought of food, not at what Was on the plate. In the candlelight there as no way of telling what was on the plate.

“Joy,” I asked her, “why was I afraid to go out into the parking lot?”

That was the thing that bothered me. That was the thing that hurt.

“Because you’re a coward,” she said. She wasn’t helping any.

I dabbled at my food. It tasted the way you’d expect food you couldn’t see to taste.

The tiny, tinny orchestra struck up another tune—the kind of tune that went with a place like that.

I looked around the room and thought about the slithering sound that had come from behind the closet door, and it was impossible, of course. Sitting here, in this kind of atmosphere, it could be nothing more than a thing snatched naked from the middle of a dream.

But it was there, I knew. It was true, I knew. Outside the cloying, muffling influence of this man-made feather bed, there Was a stark reality that no one yet had faced. That I had touched, or glimpsed, Perhaps, but no more than the very edge of it.

“What,” Joy asked me, reading my thoughts, “do you intend to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’re a newspaperman,” she told me, “and there’s a story out there waiting for you. But, Parker, please be careful.”

“Oh certainly,” I said. “What do you think it is?” I shook my head.

“You don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t see, this minute, how anyone can believe it.”

“I believe your own interpretation of it. But it is your interpretation, right?”

“It’s the only one I have.”

“You were drunk that first night. Blind, stinking drunk, you said. The trap—”

“But there was the cutout carpeting. I saw that when I was bright sober. And the office—”

“Let’s take it step by step,” she said. “Let’s get it figured out. You can’t let it throw you. You can’t let it bowl you over.”

“That is it!” I shouted. For I had forgotten.

“Don’t shout,” she said. “You’ll have people looking at us.”

“The bowling balls,” I told her. “I had forgotten them. There were bowling balls rolling down the road.”

“Parker!”

“Out in Timber Lane. Joe Newman called me.”

I saw her face across the table and I saw that she was scared. She’d taken all the rest of it, but the bowling balls had been the final straw. She thought that I was crazy.

“I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could. “But, Parker! Bowling balls rolling down the road!”

“One behind the other. Rolling solemnly.”

“And Joe Newman saw them?”

“No, not Joe. Some high-school kids. They phoned in and Joe called me. I told him to forget it.”

“Out by the Belmont place?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “It all ties in, you see. I don’t know how, but somehow it all is tied together.”

I pushed the plate away and shoved back the chair.

“Where are you going, Parker?”

“First,” I told her, “I’m going to take you home. And, then, if you’ll loan me the car...”

“Certainly, but—oh, I see, the Belmont place.”

The Belmont house was dark, a huge, rectangular blackness reared among the blackness of the trees. It stood upon a high point of land thrust out into the lake, and when I stopped the car I could hear the running of the waves upon the beach. Through the trees I could see the glint of moonlight on the water and high up, in a gable, a window caught the light, but otherwise the house and its sentinel trees were wrapped in blackness. The rustling of the drying leaves, heard in the silence of the night, sounded like the furtive pattering of many little feet.

I got out of the car and closed the door gently so it wouldn’t bang. And once I got the door shut, I stayed standing there, looking at the house. I wasn’t scared exactly. The terror and the horror of the early evening had largely ebbed away. But I didn’t feel too brave.

There might be traps, I thought. Not the kind of trap that had been hidden just outside my door, but other kinds of traps. Very fiendish ones.

And then I chided myself for that kind of foolishness. For simple logic said there’d be no traps outside. For if there were, they’d catch the innocent—someone cutting through the property to get down to the lake, or children playing around that most attractive of all childish things, a vacant house—and thus would attract attention where none need be attracted. If there were any traps, they’d be inside the house. And even so, thinking of it, that seemed unlikely, too. For on their own home grounds they—whoever they might be could deal with an intruder without resorting to traps.

It probably was no more, I told myself, than errant foolishness, this whole idea of mine that the Belmont house was in some way connected with what was going on. And yet I had to go and see, I had to know, I had to run it to the end and eliminate it, or I’d always wonder if the clues had not been there.

I went tensely up the walk, my shoulders hunched against possible attack from an unknown quarter. I tried to unhunch them, but they stayed tightened up no matter how I tried.

I climbed the steps to the front door and Stood there, hesitating, debating with myself. And decided, finally, to do it the honest way, to ring the bell or knock. I hunted for the bell and found it in the darkness by the sense of touch. The button was loose and wobbled underneath my fingers and I knew it wasn’t working, but I pressed it just the same. I could hear no sound of ringing from inside the house. I pressed it once again and held it there, and there was still no sound of ringing. I knocked, and the knocking sounded loud in the quietness of the night.

I waited and nothing happened. Once I thought I heard a footfall, but it was not repeated, and I knew that it could be no more than my imagination.

Back down the steps, I moved around the house. Uncared for through many years, the foundation plantings had grown into thick, dense hedges. Fallen leaves rustled underfoot and there was a queer, almost acid autumn sharpness in the air.

The screen was loose in the fifth window that I tried. And the window was unlocked.

And it was easy, I thought—far too easy. If I were looking for a trap, here could be the trap.

I raised the window to the top and waited, and nothing happened. There was no sound except the sound of the waves upon the shore and the noisy walking of the wind through the dry leaves stillhanging in the trees. I put my hand into my topcoat pocket and the gun was there, and the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of Joy’s car.

I waited a little longer, getting up my nerve. Then I boosted myself through the open window.

I stepped quickly to one side, with my back against the wall, so that I wouldn’t be outlined against the window opening. I stood there for a while, straight against the wall, trying to hold in my breathing so I’d catch the slightest sound.

Nothing happened. Nothing moved. And there was no sound.

I lifted the flashlight out of my pocket and switched it on and swept the room with its shaft of light. There was dust- sheeted furniture, there were paintings on the wall, there was a trophy of some sort standing on the fireplace mantel.

I switched off the light and slid swiftly along the wall, just on the chance that someone or something had been hiding among the sheeted furniture and might decide to have a go at me.

Nothing did.

I waited some more.

The room went on being nothing but a room.

I soft-footed across it and went out into the entrance hail. I found the kitchen and the dining room and a study, where empty bookshelves gaped back at me like an old man with a toothless grin.

I didn’t find a thing.

The dust was heavy on the floor and I left tracks across it. The furniture all was sheeted. The place held a slightly musty smell. It had the feel of a house that had been left behind, a house that people had unaccountably walked away from and then never had come back to.

I had been a fool to come, I told myself. There was nothing here. I had simply allowed my imagination to run away with me.

But so long as I was here, I figured, I should make a job of it. Foolish as it all had been, it would be senseless to leave until I had seen the rest of the house, the upstairs and the basement.

I trailed back to the entry hail and started up the staircase, a spiral affair with gleaming rail and posts.

I had gotten three treads up when the voice stopped me.

“Mr. Graves,” it said.

It was a smooth and cultivated voice and it spoke in normal tones. And while it had some question in it, it was conversational. It brought my hair up straight, stiff upon my head, prickling at my scalp.

I spun around, scrabbling for the gun weighing down my pocket.

I had it halfway out when the voice spoke again.

“I’m Atwood,” said the voice. “I’m sorry that the bell is broken.”

“I also knocked,” I said.

“I didn’t hear your knock. I was downstairs working.”

I could see him now, a dark figure in the hail. I let the gun slide back into the pocket.

“We could go downstairs,” said Atwood, “and have a pleasant talk. This hardly is the place for an extended conversation.”

“If you wish,” I told him.

I came down the stairs and he led the way, down the hail and to the basement door. Light flooded up the stairway and I saw him now. He was a most ordinary- looking man, the quiet, pleasant, business type.

“I like it down here,” said Atwood, going easily and unconcernedly down the stairs. “The former owner fixed up this amusement room, which to my mind is far more livable than any other part of the house. I suppose that may be because the rest of the house is old and the room down here is a fairly new addition.”

We reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner and were in the amusement room.

It was a large place, running the entire length of the basement, with a fireplace at each end and some furniture scattered here and there on the red tile floor. A table stood against one wall, its top littered with papers; opposite the table, in the outer wall, was a hole—a round hole bored into the wall, about the size to accommodate a bowling ball—and from it a cold wind swept and blew across my ankles. And there was in the air, as well, the faintest suggestion of the shaving lotion smell.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Atwood watching me, and I tried to freeze my face—not into a frozen mask, but into the kind of mask that I imagined was my everyday appearance. And I must have done it, for there was no smile on Atwood’s face, as there might have been if he’d trapped me into some expression of bewilderment or fear.

“You are right,” I told him. “It is very livable.”

I said it simply to be saying something.

For the place was not livable, not by human standards. Dust lay almost as deep in this room as it had upstairs, and there was small junk of all descriptions scattered all about and stacked into the corners.

“Won’t you have a chair?” said Atwood. lie waved toward a deeply cushioned one that stood slantwise of the table.

I walked across the floor to reach it and the floor rustled underneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that I had walked across a large sheet of almost transparent plastic that lay crumpled on the floor.

“Something that the former owner left,” said Atwood carelessly. “Someday I’ll have to get around to cleaning up the place.”

I sat down in the chair.

“Your coat,” said Atwood.

“I believe that I will keep it. There seems to be a draft in here.”

I watched his face and there was no expression in it.

“You catch on quick,” said Atwood, but there was no menace in this tone. “Perhaps a bit too quick.”

I said nothing and he said, “Although I’m glad you came. It is not often that one meets a man of your fine perception.”

I kidded him: “Meaning that you’re about to offer me a job in your organization?”

“The thought,” said Atwood quietly, “has passed across my mind.”

I shook my head. “I doubt you have any need of me. You’ve already done a fair job of buying up the city.”

“City!” Atwood cried, outraged.

I nodded at him.

He spun a chair out from the desk and sat down carefully.

“I see that you do not comprehend,” he told me. “I must put you right.”

“Please do,” I told him. “That is what I’m here for.”

Atwood leaned forward earnestly.

“Not the city,” he said quietly, tensely. “You must not sell me short. Far more than a city, Mr. Graves. Much more than a city. I think it’s safe to say it, for now no one can stop me. I am buying up the Earth!”

There are some ideas so monstrous, so perverted, so outrageous that one’s mind must take a little time to become accustomed to them.

And one of these ideas is that anyone should even think of trying to buy up the Earth. Conquer it—most certainly, for that is an old and fine and traditional idea that has been held by many men. Destroy it—that also is understandable, for there have been madmen who have used the threat of such destruction as an adjunct, if not the backbone, of their policy.

But buying it was unthinkable.

First of all, it was impossible, for no one had the money. And even if one had, it still was crazy—for what would one do with it once one got it bought? And, thirdly, it was unethical and a perversion of tradition, for one does not kill off utterly all his competitors if he’s a businessman. He may absorb them, or control them, but he does not kill them off.

Atwood sat there, poised on the edge of his chair, like an anxious hawk, and he must have read some censure into my very silence.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he told me. “It is entirely legal.”

“I suppose there’s not,” I said. Although I knew there was. If only I could have pulled the words together, I could have told him what was wrong with it.

“We are operating,” Atwood said, “within the human structure. We are operating within and abiding by your rules and regulations. Not only the rules and regulations, but even by your customs. We have violated not a single one of them. And I tell you, my friend, that is not an easy thing. It is rare that one can operate without violating custom.”

I tried to get some words out, but they gurgled in my throat and died. It was just as well. I was not even sure what I had meant to say.

“There’s nothing wrong,” said Atwood, “with our money or our securities.”

“Just one thing,” I said. “You have too much money, far too much of it.”

But it was not the idea of too much money that was bothering me. It was something else. Something far more important than having too much money.

It was the words he used and the way he used them. The way he said “our” to include himself and whoever was leagued with him; the way he used “your” to include all the world exclusive of his group. And the stress he’d put upon the fact that he had operated within the human structure.

It was as if my brain had split in two. As if one side of it shouted horror and the other pleaded reason. For the idea was too monstrous to even think about.

He was grinning at me now and I was filled with sudden rage. The shouting of the one side of my brain drowned out the reason and I came out of the chair, with my hand snaking the gun out of my pocket.

I would have shot him in that instant. Without mercy, without thinking, I would have shot to kill. Like stamping on a snake, like swatting at a fly—it was no more than that.

But I didn’t get the chance to shoot.

For Atwood came unstuck.

I don’t know how to tell it. There is no way to tell it. It was something that no human had ever seen before. There are no words in any human language for the thing that Atwood did.

He didn’t fade or flicker. He didn’t suddenly melt down. Whatever it was he did, he did it all at once.

One second he was sitting there. And the next second he was gone. I didn’t see him go.

There was a tiny click, as if someone had dropped a light metallic object, and there was a flock of jet-black bowling balls that had not been there before bouncing on the floor.

My mind must have gone through certain acrobatics, but I was not aware of them. What I did, I seemed to do instinctively, without even thinking of it—unaware of the interplay of cause and effect, of fact, surmise, and hunch that must have gone flashing through my brain to spur me into action.

I dropped the gun and stooped, grabbing up the sheet of plastic off the floor. And even as I grabbed it and began to shake it out, I moved toward the outer wall, heading for the hole from which blew the chilly breeze.

The bowling balls were coming at me, heading for the hole, and I was ready for them, with the plastic centered on the hole, a trap that waited for them.

The first one hit the hole and drove theplastic in and the second followed close behind—and the third and fourth and fifth.

I made a grab to bring the ends of the plastic sheet together and pulled it from the hole, and inside of it the jet-black bowling balls clicked excitedly as they knocked together.

There were others of them rolling in that basement room—the ones that had been scared off and had escaped the net and now were rolling frantically, seeking for a place to hide.

I lifted up the bag of plastic and gave it a shake to settle the balls I’d caught well into its bottom. I twisted the neck of plastic tightly to hold them in and swung the bag thus formed across my shoulders. And all around me ran the whispering and the slithering as the other balls sought for shadowed corners.

“All right,” I yelled at them, “back into your hole! Back to where you came from!”

But there was no answer. They all were hidden now. Hidden in the shadow and among the junk and watching me from there. Not seeing me, perhaps. More like sensing, likely. But, no matter how they did it, watching.

I took a forward step and my foot came down on something. I jumped in sudden fright.

It was nothing but my gun, lying on the floor, dropped when I had grabbed the plastic.

I stood and looked at it and felt the shaking and the trembling that was inside of me, held inside of me and struggling to begin, but unable to begin because my body was too tight and tense to tremble. My teeth were trying to chatter and they couldn’t chatter, for my jaws were clamped together with such fanatic desperation that the muscles ached.

There were watchers everywhere and the cold wind blowing from the hole and the excited, not quite angry clicking of the balls in the sack across my shoulder. And the emptiness the emptiness of a basement where there’d been two men and now was only one. And, worse than that, the howling emptiness of a universe insane and an Earth that had lost its meaning and a culture that now was lost and groping, although it did not know it yet.

Over and above it all was the smell—the scent I’d smelled that morning—the odor of these creatures, whoever they might be, wherever they might come from, whatever was their purpose. But certainly nothing of the Earth, not of our old, familiar planet—nothing that man had ever known before.

I fought against admitting what I knew—that here I faced a life form from outside, from somewhere other than this planet where I at this moment stood. But there was no other answer.

I let the bag down from my shoulder and stooped to scoop up the gun, and as I reached out my fingers for it I saw that something else lay on the floor a little distance from it.

My fingers let the gun go and darted out and picked up this other object, and as they closed upon it I saw it was a doll. Even before I had a chance to look at it, I knew what kind of doll it was, remembering the tiny metallic click I’d heard as Atwood disappeared.

I was right. The doll was Atwood. Every line upon his face, every feature of him, the very feeling of him. As if someone had taken the living Atwood and compressed him to, perhaps, a hundredth of his size, being careful in the process not to change him, not to distort a single atom of the creature that was Atwood.

I dropped the doll into a pocket and grabbed up the gun. Then I straightened to my feet and slung the bag across shoulder and went across the basement to the stairs.

I wanted to run. It took every Ounce of will power that I had to keep my feet from running. But I forced myself to walk. As if I didn’t care, as if I weren’t scared, as if there were nothing in all God’s world or in the universe that could scare a man, that could make him run.

For I had to show them!

Unaccountably, on the spur of the moment, almost as if by instinct, I knew that I had to show them, that I had to act in this instant for all the rest of mankind, that I had to demonstrate the courage and determination and the basic stubbornness that was in the human race.

I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I walked across the floor and climbed the stairs, without hurrying, feeling the daggers of their watching pointed at my back. I reached the top of the stairs and closed the door behind me, being careful not to bang it.

Then, free of the watching eyes, free of the need of acting, I stumbled down the hallway and somehow got the front door open and felt the clean sweep of night air from across the lake, cleaning my nostrils and my brain of the stench in the basement room.

I found a tree and leaned against it, weak and winded, as if I’d run a race, and retching, sick to the core and soul of me. I shook and gagged and vomited, and the taste of bile, biting in my throat and mouth, was almost a welcome taste—the taste, somehow, of a basic and a bare humanity.

I stayed there, with my forehead leaning on the roughness of the trunk, and the roughness was a comfort, a contact once again with the world I knew. I heard the booming of the waves upon the lakeshore and the death dance of the leaves, already dead but hanging still upon the parent tree, and from somewhere far off the distance- muffled barking of a dog.

Finally I straightened from the tree and used my sleeve to wipe my mouth and chin. For now it was time to get to doing. Now I had something to support my story, a sack full of things that would support my Story, and somehow or other I had to get the Story told.

I hoisted the sack back on my shoulder, and as I did 50 I caught the faint edge of the alien odor once again.

My legs were weak and my gut was sore and I felt cold all over. What I needed more than anything, I told myself, was a slug of booze.

The car was a dark blur in the driveway and I headed for it, none too steady. Be- hind me the house loomed up, with the moonlight still breaking into sharded silver from the one window, high up in a gable.

A funny thought hit me: I’d left the window open, and maybe I should go back and close it, for the wind could blow leaves into the rooms with their white-shrouded furniture and the rain would drive in on the carpeting and when the snows came there would be little drifts of white running in the room.

I laughed harshly at myself for thinking such a thing when every minute was a minute to be used in getting out and as far away as possible from this house in Timber Lane.

I reached the car and swung open the door next to the wheel. Something stirred in the opposite side of the seat, and it said to me: “I am glad to see you back. I was worrying about how you were getting on.” I froze in unbelieving terror.

For the thing sitting in the seat, the thing that had spoken to me, was the happy’ shaggy dog I’d met for the second time that very evening on the sidewalk in front of my apartment house!

“I see,” said the Dog, “that you have one of them. Hang onto it tight. I can testify they’re slippery characters.”

And he told me that when I had all that I could do to hang on to the edges of my sanity.

I just stood there, I guess. There was nothing else to do. Get belted over the head often enough and you turn sort of dopey.

“Well,” said the Dog reprovingly, “it would seem that now’s the time for you to ask me who the hell I am.”

“All right,” I croaked. “Just who the hell are you?”

“Now,” said the Dog, delighted, “I am glad you asked me that. For I can tell you frankly that I’m a competitor—I’m sure competitor is the proper term—of the thing you have there in the sack.”

“That tells me a lot,” I said. “Mister, Whoever you may be, you had better start explaining.”

“Why,” said the Dog, amazed at my Stupidity, “I think it must be perfectly clear exactly what I am. As a competitor of these bowling balls, I must automatically be classified as a friend of yours.”

By this time the numbness had worn off enough for me to climb into the car. Somehow I didn’t seem to care too much what happened any more. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the Dog was another gang of bowling balls, made up like a dog instead of like a man, but if he was, I was set to take him on at any given moment. I had got over being scared, at least to some extent, and I was getting sore. It was a hell of a world, I told myself, when a man would come unstuck and turn into a bunch of jet-black balls and when a dog waited in a car and struck up a sprightly conversation as soon as one showed up.

I suppose, at that particular time, I didn’t quite believe it. But the Dog was there and he was talking to me and there wasn’t much that I could do except to go along with it—with the gag, I mean.

“Why don’t you,” asked the Dog, “give the sack to me? I will hang onto it, I assure you, with the utmost concentration and with the grip of death. I will make it very much my business they do not get away.”

So I handed over the sack to him and be reached out a paw and, so help me God, that paw grabbed hold of the sack as neatly if it had sprouted fingers.

I took the gun out of my pocket and laid it in my lap.

“What kind of instrument is that?” asked the Dog, not missing anything.

“This is a weapon called a gun,” I told him, “and with it I can blow a hole clear through you. One wrong move out of you, buster, and I will let you have it.”

“I will try my very best,” said the Dog quite matter-of-factly, “to make no wrong move at all. I can assure you that I am very much on the side of you in this which is transpiring.”

“That is just fine,” I said. “See you keep it that way.”

I started the car and turned around, heading down the lane.

“I am glad that you were agreeable,” said the Dog, “to hand this sack to me. I have had some experience in the handling of these things.”

“Perhaps, then,” I told him, “you might Suggest where we go from here.”

“Oh, there are many ways,” said the Dog, “of disposing of them. I would venture to suggest, sir, that we should choose a method that is sufficiently restrictive and, Perhaps, a little painful.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, “of disposing of them. I went to a lot of trouble to get them in that sack.”

“That is too bad,” said the Dog regret fully. “Believe me, it is poor policy to let these things survive.”

“You keep calling them these things,” I pointed out, “and yet you say you know them. Haven’t they a name?”

“Name?”

“Yes. Designation. Descriptive term. You have to call them something.”

“I get you,” said the Dog. “There are times I do not catch so quick. I require a little time.”

“And before I forget to ask you, how come you can talk to me? There is no such thing as a talking dog.”

“Dog?”

“Yes, the thing you are. You look just like a dog.”

“How marvelous!” cried the Dog, enraptured. “So that is what I am. I had met creatures of my general appearance, but they were so different from me and of so many different types. At first I tried communicating with them, but—”

“You mean you’re really as you are. You aren’t something built out of something else, like our friends there in the sack?”

“I am myself,” the Dog said proudly. “I would be nothing else even if I could.”

“But you haven’t answered how you can talk to me.”

“My friend, if you please, let’s not go into that. It would require so much explanation and we have so little time. I am, you see, not really talking with you. I am communicating, but—”

“Telepathy?” I asked.

“Come again—and slowly.”

I told him what telepathy was, or was supposed to be. I made a bad job of it, principally, I suppose, because I knew very little of it.

“Roughly,” said the Dog. “Not exact, however.”

I let it go at that. There were other things that were more important.

“You’ve been hanging around my place,” I said. “I saw you yesterday.”

“Why, certainly,” said the Dog. “You were let me try to put this right—you Were the focal point.”

“The focal point,” I said, amazed. All this time I had been thinking I’d just fallen into it. Some guys are like that. If lightning hits a tree in a thousand-acre forest, they’ll be standing underneath it.

“They knew,” said the Dog, “and, of course, I knew. You mean that you were ignorant?”

“You said a mouthful, buster.”

We had reached the end of Timber Lane and were out on the highway now, heading back for town.

“You didn’t answer me,” I said, “when I asked what these things are. The name you have for them. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things you haven’t answered.”

“You gave me no chance,” said the Dog. “You ask me things too fast. And you have a funny thinker. It keeps churning round and round.”

The window on his side of the car was open several inches and a sharp breeze was blowing in. It was blowing back his whiskers, smooth against his jaws. They were heavy, ugly jaws, and he kept them closed. They didn’t move as if he had been talking—with his mouth, I mean.

“You know about my thinker?” I asked him feebly.

“How else,” rejoined the Dog, “could I converse with you? And it’s most disorderly and moving very fast. It will not settle down.”

I thought that over and decided maybe he was right. Although I didn’t like the connotations of what he’d said. I had aSeakmg feeling that he might know everything I knew or thought, although, God he didn’t act that way.

“To return to your question about the whatness of these things,” said the Dog, “we do have a designation for them, but it does not translate into anything I can say to make you understand. Among many other things and in the context in which we here are concerned with them, they are realtors. Although you must realize the term is but approximate and has many qualifications I am helpless to express.”

“You mean they sell houses?”

“Oh no,” said the Dog, “they would not think to bother with a thing so trivial as a single building.”

“With a planet, perhaps?”

“Well, yes,” said the Dog, “although it would have to be a most unusual planet, of unusual value. They usually don’t concern themselves with anything much less than a solar system. And it has to be a good one or they won’t even touch it.”

“Now, let us get this straight,” I said. “You say they deal in solar systems.”

“Your understanding,” said the Dog, leaves nothing to be desired. That is the Simple fact alone, however. A complete Understanding of the situation would tend to become just a bit complex.”

“But who do they buy these solar systems for?”

“Now,” said the Dog, “we begin to enter into deepish water. No matter what I told you, you would attempt to equate it with your own economic system, and your economic system—pardon me if I hurt your feelings—is the most outlandish I have ever seen.”

“It just happens that I know,” I told him, “they’re buying up this planet.”

“Ah yes,” said the Dog, “and most dirty in their dealings, as they always are.”

I didn’t answer him, for I got to thinking how ridiculous it was that I should be talking to a thing that was a dead ringer for an outsize dog about another race of aliens that were buying up the Earth and doing it, according to my alien friend, in their usual dirty manner.

“You see,” the Dog went on, “they can be anything. They never are themselves. Their entire mode of operation is based upon deceit.”

“You said they were competitors of yours. Then you must be a realtor yourself.”

“Yes, thank you,” said the Dog, greatly pleased, “and of the highest class.”

“I suppose, then, if these bowling balls, or whatever they may be, had failed to buy the Earth, you’d bought it up yourself.”

“No, never,” the Dog protested. “It would have been unethical. That is why, you understand, I have interested myself. The present operation will give the entire galactic realty field an exceedingly black eye, and this cannot be allowed to happen. Realty is an ancient and an honorable profession and it must retain its pristine purity.”

“Well, that is fine,” I said. “I am glad to hear you say it. What do you intend to do?”

“I really do not know. For you work against me. There is no help in you.”

“Me?”

“No, not you. Not you alone. All of you, I mean. The silly rules you have.”

“But why do they want it? Once they get the Earth, what will they do with it?”

“I see you do not realize,” said the Dog, “exactly what you have. There are, I must inform you, few planets such as this one that you call the Earth. It is, you see, a regular dirt-type planet, and planets such as it are few and far between. It is a place where the weary may rest their aching bones and Solace their aching eyes with a gentle beauty such as one seldom comes across.

There have been built, in certain systems orbiting constructions which seek to simulate such conditions as occur here naturally. But the artificial can never quite approach the actual, and that is why this planet is s valuable as a playground and resort.

“You realize,” he said apologetically, “that I am simplifying and using rough approximations to fit your language and your concepts. It is not, really, as I have told it to you. In many of its facets, it is entirely different. But you gain the main idea, and that is the best that I can do.”

“You mean,” I asked, “that once these things have the Earth they will run it as a sort of galactic resort?”

“Oh no,” said the Dog, “that would be quite beyond them. But they will sell it to those who would. And they’ll get a good price for it. There are many pleasure palaces built in space and a lot of simulated Earth-type planets where beings may go for outings and vacations. But, actually, there is really nothing which can substitute for a genuine dirt-type planet. They can get, I may assure you, whatever they may ask.”

“And this price they’ll ask?”

“Smell. Scent. Odor,” said the Dog. “I do not grasp the word.”

“Perfume?”

“That is it—perfume. An odor for the pleasure. To them the odor is the thing of beauty. In their natural form it is their greate5t perhaps their only, treasure. For in their natural state they are not as you and I—”

“I have seen them,” I told him, “in what I would presume would be their natural state. The ones you have there in the sack.”

“Ah, then,” said the Dog, “perhaps you understand. They are as lumps of nothing.”

He joggled the sack he was holding savagely, bouncing the bowling balls together.

“They are lumps of nothing,” he declared, “and they lie there, soaked in their perfume, and that is the height of happiness, if things like this be happy.”

I sat there and thought about it and it was outrageous. I wondered for a moment if the Dog might not be kidding me, and then I knew he wasn’t. For he, himself, if this were no more than kidding, must then necessarily be a part of the joke. For he Was, in his own way, as grotesque and incongruous as the things imprisoned in the sack.

“I am sorry for you,” said the Dog, not Sounding very sad, “but you have yourself to blame. All these silly rules . . .”

“You said that once before,” I told him.

“What do you mean—all these Silly rules?”

“Why, the ones about each one having things.”

“You mean our property laws.”

“I suppose that is what you term them.”

“But you said the bowling balls would sell the Earth—”

“That’s different,” said the Dog. “I had to say it your way because there was no way of telling you except in your own way. But I can excellently assure you it is a different way.”

And, of course, it would be, I told myself. No two alien cultures, more than likely, ever would arrive at the same way of doing things. The motivations would be different and the methods would be different, because the cultures in themselves could never be parallel. Even as the language—not the words alone, but the concept of the language in itself—could not be parallel.

“This conveyance that you operate,” said the Dog, “has intrigued me from the first, and I have had no opportunity to acquaint myself with it. I have been very busy, as you may well imagine, gathering necessary information about many other things.”

He sighed. “You have no idea—of course, you haven’t; how could you have?—how much there is to learn when one is dropped without preliminary into another culture.”

I told him what I knew about the internal- combustion engine and about the drive mechanism which applied the power created by the engine, but I couldn’t tell him much. I made a bad job of it, but he seemed to catch the principle involved. I gathered from the way he acted that he had never run across such a thing before. But I gained the distinct impression that he was more impressed by the sheer stupidity of such engineering than by its brilliance.

“I thank you very much,” he said, with suavity, “for your lucid explanation. I should not have bothered you with it, but I have the large curiosity. It might have been much better, and somewhat more advantageous, if we had spent the time discussing the disposal of these things.”

He joggled the bag of plastic to let me know just what things he meant.

“I know what I am going to do with them,” I told him. “We’ll take them to a friend of mine by the name of Carleton Stirling. He is a biologist.”

“A biologist?” he asked.

“One who studies life,” I said. “He can take these things apart and tell US What they are.”

“Painfully?” asked the Dog.

“In certain aspects of it, I would imagine so.,,

“Then it is good,” the Dog decided.

“This biologist—it seems to me I’ve heard of other beings that had something similar.”

But, from the way he said it, I was fairly certain that he was thinking of something else entirely. There were, I told myself, a lot of ways in which one could study life.

We rode along for a while without saying anything. We were close to the city now and the traffic was beginning to get heavy. The Dog sat rigid in his seat and I could see that the long string of approaching lights had gotten him on edge. Trying to look at them as something I had never seen before, I could realize just how terrifying they might seem to the creature sitting there beside me.

“Let’s listen to the radio,” I said. I reached out and turned it on.

“Communicator?” asked the Dog.

I nodded. “Must be almost time for the evening news,” I said.

The news had just come on. A violently happy announcer was winding up a commercial about a wonderful detergent. Then the news reporter said: “A man believed to be Parker Graves, science writer for the Evening Herald, was killed just an hour ago by an explosion in the parking lot at the rear of the Wellington Arms. Police believe that a bomb had been placed in his car and exploded when Graves got into it and turned the ignition key. Police are now attempting to make a positive identification of the man, believed to have been Graves, killed in the blast.”

Then he went on to something else. I sat there, startled for a moment, then reached out and turned off the radio.

“What is wrong, my friend?”

“That man who was killed. That was me,” I told him.

“How peculiar,” said the Dog.

I saw the light in his third-floor laboratory and knew Stirling was at work. I pounded on the front door of the building until a wrathful janitor came stumping down the corridor. He motioned for me to leave, but I kept on pounding. Finally he opened the door and I told him who I was. Grudgingly, he let me in. The Dog slipped in beside me.

“Leave the dog outside,” ordered the wrathy janitor. “There ain’t no dogs allowed.”

“That isn’t any dog,” I said.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a specimen,” I told him.

That one stopped him long enough so we could get past him and start up the stairs. Behind us, I could hear him grumbling as he went stumping back down the first-floor corridor.

Stirling was leaning on a lab table, writing in a notebook. He wore a white coat, incredibly dirty.

He looked around at us as we came in and was very casual. He didn’t know what time it was. You could see he didn’t. He wasn’t surprised at our showing up at this earthly hour.

“Come for the gun?” he asked. “Brought you something,” I said, holding out the sack.

“You have to get that dog out of here,” he said. “There are no dogs allowed.”

“That isn’t any dog,” I told him. “I don’t know what he calls himself, or where he may have come from, but he is an alien.”

Stirling turned all the way around, interested. He squinted at the Dog.

“An alien,” he said, not too surprised, “You mean someone from the stars?”

“That,” said the Dog, “is exactly what he means.”

Stirling crinkled up his brow. He didn’t say a word. You could almost hear him thinking.

“It had to happen sometime,” he finally said, as if he were delivering an opinion of Some weight. “No man could foresee, of Course, how it would come about.”

“So you’re not surprised,” I said. “Oh, of course, surprised. By the form of Our visitor’s appearance, however, rather than the fact.”

“Glad to meet you,” said the Dog. “I understand you are a biologist, and that is something I find most interesting.”

“But this sack,” I told Stirling, “is really why we came.”

“Sack? Oh yes, I thought you had a sack” I held it up so he could see it. “They are aliens, too,” I told him.

It was getting damn ridiculous.

He quirked an eyebrow at me.

Quickly, stumbling over my words, I told him what they were, or what I thought they were. I don’t know why I had that terrible sense of urgency to get it blurted out. It was almost as if I thought that we had little time and had to get it done. And maybe I was right.

Stirling’s face was flushed with excitement now and his eyes had taken on a glitter of dark intensity.

“The very thing,” he said, “I talked about this morning.”

I grunted questioningly, not remembering. “A nonenvironmental being,” he explained. “Something that can live anywhere, that can be anything. A lifeform that has a letter-perfect adaptability. Able to adjust to any condition—”

“But that’s not what you talked about,” I told him, for now I remembered what he’d said.

“Well, maybe not,” he admitted. “Maybe exactly what I had in mind. But the result would be the same.”

He turned back to the laboratory bench and pulled out a drawer and burrowed into t, thrusting stuff aside. Finally he came up with what he had been after, a transparent plastic bag.

“Here,” he said, “let’s dump them into this. Then we can have a look at them.”

He held the bag, stretching its mouth as wide as he could. With the help of the Dog, I upended the improvised sack and shook the bowling balls out of it into the. plastic sack. A few scraps and pieces fell out on the floor. Without bothering to shape themselves into balls, they snaked swiftly for the sink, swarmed up its iron legs, and tumbled down into the basin.

The Dog had started to give chase, but they were too fast for him. He came back crestfallen, his ears drooping and his tail at modified half-mast.

“They retreated down the drain,” he told us.

“Oh well,” said Stirling, happy and elated, “we have most of them right here.”

He tied a good stout knot in the top of the sack and hoisted it up. He passed a hook hanging from a standard above the bench through the knot and the sack hung there, suspended in midair. The plastic was so transparent that you could see the bowling balls without any trouble, every line and shade of them.

“You,” the Dog asked anxiously, “intend to take them apart?”

“In time,” said Stirling. “First I’ll watch them and study them and put them through their paces.”

“Tough paces?” the Dog asked anxiously.

“Say, what have we here?” asked Stirling.

“He doesn’t like our friends,” I said. “They’re cutting in on him. They’re lousing up his racket.”

Off to one side of the room, a telephone purred quietly.

We all stood silent, stricken.

The telephone rang again.

There was something horrifying in the tinkling of the bell. We had been standing there, all snug and all alone, and the bowling balls, for the moment, had been no more than academic objects of great curiosity. But the phone’s ring changed all that and the world came crashing in. There now was no aloneness and there was no snugness, for now we were not alone concerned, and the things hanging in the plastic bag were now far from academic: they were now a menace and a threat and something to be feared and hated.

Now I saw the great black of the night outside and could sense the coldness and the arrogance that held the world entrapped. The room contracted to a cold place of gleaming light shattering on the shine of the laboratory bench and the sink and glassware, and I was a feebleness that stood there, and the Dog and Stirling had no more strength than I.

“Hello,” said Stirling on the phone. And he said, “No, I hadn’t heard it. There be some mistake. He is here right here right now.”

He listened for a moment and then cut in. “But he’s right here with me. He and the talking dog.”

“No, he isn’t drunk. No, I tell you, he’s right—”

I strode forward. “Hey, give it to me!” I yelled.

He shoved the receiver at me and I could Joy’s voice: “You, Parker—what is going on? The radio—”

“Yeah, I heard it. Those radio guys are crazy.”

“Why didn’t you phone me, Parker? You knew that I would hear it—”

“No, how could I know? I was busy. I had a lot of things to do. I found Atwood and he broke up into bowling balls and caught him in a sack and there was this dog waiting in the car—”

“Parker, are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I am all right.”

“Parker, I’m so scared.”

“Hell,” I said, “there’s nothing to be scared of now. It wasn’t me in the car, and I found Atwood and—”

“That isn’t what I mean. There are things outside.”

“There are always things outside,” I told her. “There are dogs and cats and squirrels and other people—”

“But there are things that pad. They are all around the place and they are looking in and—please come and get me, Parker!”

She scared me. This wasn’t just a foolish woman frightened by the darkness and her own imagination. There was something in her voice, some restrained quality fighting to hold out against hysteria, that convinced me it was not imagination.

“All right,” I said. “Hold on. I’ll be there as soon as I can make it.”

“Parker, please . . .”

“Get on your coat. Stay by the door and watch for the car. But don’t come out until I come up the walk to get you.”

“All right.” She said it almost calmly.

I banged up the phone and swung around to Stirling. “The rifle,” I said. “Over in the corner.” I saw it leaning there and went to pick it up. Stirling rummaged in a drawer and came up with a box of cartridges and handed them to me. I broke the box and some of the cartridges spilled onto the floor. Stirling bent to pick them up.

I rammed shells into the magazine, dumped the rest of them into my pocket.

“I’m going to get Joy,” I told him.

“There’s something wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I pounded out the door and down the steps.

The Dog followed at my heels.

Joy lived in a small house out in the northwest part of town. For years she had been talking, ever since her mother died, of selling the place and moving into an apartment building closer to the office. But she had never done it. Something held her there—perhaps the old associations and sentimental ties, perhaps the unwillingness to take the chance of moving somewhere else and then not liking it.

I picked a street where I knew the blinking traffic lights would be to my advantage and I made good time.

The Dog, sitting in the seat beside me, with the wind from the partly-open window plastering his whiskers smooth against his face, asked one question only.

“This Joy,” he said, “is a good companion?”

“The very best,” I told him.

He sat considering that. You could almost hear him considering it. But he said no more.