They Walked Like Men

I cheated on the lights and went fasterthan the law allowed and wondered all the way what I would tell a cop if one came roaring after me. But none did and I pulled up in front of Joy’s house with the brakes full on and the tires whining on the pavement and the Dog piled up against the windshield quite surprised by it.

The house sat back some distance from the street and was surrounded by an ancient picket fence, which enclosed a yard half choked with trees and shrubs and zigzag, wandering flower beds. The front gate stood open, as it had stood ever since I’d known the place, sagging on its rusty hinges. I saw that the porch light was on and that there were lights in the front hall and living room.

I jumped out of the car, dragging the rifle with me, and raced around the car. The Dog beat me to the gate and went tearing through it, plunging madly into the shrubbery jungle off the brick-paved walk. I caught one glimpse of him as he disappeared, and his ears were laid back tight against his skull, his lips were parted in a snarl, and his tail was at full mast.

I went through the gate and pounded up the walk, while off to the left, in the direction in which the Dog had gone, there suddenly erupted a most unholy and bloodcurdling racket.

The front door came open and Joy ran across the porch. I met her on the steps She hesitated for a moment, looking off into the yard from where all the noise Was coming.

The racket had grown louder now. It was a hard thing to describe. It sounded something like a calliope that had gone raving mad, and intermingled with it Was the undertone of something large running angrily and swiftly through a field of tall, dry grass.

I grabbed Joy’s arm and shoved her down the walk.

“Dog!” I shouted. “Dog!”

The racket still kept on.

We reached the sidewalk and I pushed Joy into the front seat and slammed the door.

There still was no sign of the Dog.

Lights were going on in a few of the houses up and down the street and I heard a door bang as someone came out on a porch.

I ran back to the gate.

“Dog!” I shouted once again.

He came charging out of the shrubbery, tail tucked tight against his rump and slobbery foam streaming from his wetted whiskers. There was something running close behind him—a black and knobby 0methinig with the entire front of it a gaping hungry mouth.

I had no idea what it was. I had no idea what to do.

What I did I did instinctively, without any thought at all.

I used the rifle like a golf club. Why I didn’t shoot, I don’t know. Perhaps there was no time to; perhaps there was another reason. Perhaps I sensed that a bullet would be useless against the charging maw.

Before I knew what I was about, I had hands around the barrel and the butt was back behind my shoulders and was swinging forward.

The Dog was past me and the knobby shape was coming through the gate and the rifle was a vicious club that almost whistled as it swung. Then it hit and there was no shock. The black thing spattered and the butt went though it—I mean through it, like a knife through butter—and there Was a gummy mess running on the sidewalk and the pickets dripped.

There was a floundering in the shrubbery and I knew that there were others Coming, but I didn’t wait. I turned and ran. I ran around the car and tossed the rifle into the seat alongside Joy, then leaped in myself. I had left the motor run fling and I gunned the car out from the curb and went up the street with the accelerator tight against the floor.

Joy was huddled in the seat, sobbing softly.

“Cut it out,” I told her.

She tried to but she couldn’t.

“They always do it short,” the Dog said from the back seat. “They always do it half. They do not acquire the intestines to do it as they should.”

“You mean the guts,” I told him.

Joy stopped her bawling.

“Carleton said you had a talking dog,” she said half angrily, half frightened, “and I don’t believe it. ‘What kind of trick is this?”

“No trick, my fair one,” said the Dog. “Do you not think I enunciate most clearly?”

“Joy,” I told her, “drop everything you ever knew. Get rid of all convictions. Forget everything that’s right and logical and proper. Imagine yourself in a sort of ogre-land, where anything can happen, and mostly for the worst.”

“But—” she said.

“But that’s the way it is,” I said. “What you knew this morning isn’t true tonight. There are talking dogs that aren’t really dogs. And there are bowling balls that can be anything they choose. They’re buying up the Earth, and Man, perhaps, no longer owns it, and you and I, even now, may be hunted rats.”

In the glow of the instrument panel, I could see her face, the puzzle and the wonderment and hurt, and I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her close and try to wipe away some of the puzzlement and hurt. But I couldn’t do it. I had a car to drive and I had to try to figure out what we would do next.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and she kept her voice calm, but there was strain and terror just beneath the calmness. “There was the car . . .”

She reached out a hand and grabbed my arm.

“There was the car,” she said.

“Take it easy, gal,” I told her. “Take it very easy. All that is behind us. What worries me is what is up ahead.”

“You were afraid to go out to the car,” she said. “You thought you were a coward. It worried you—that fear. And yet it saved your life.”

The Dog said from the back seat: “It might- interest you that there is a car behind us.”

She nodded, “If we could take his boat and get out in the lake.”

“They’d turn into a Loch Ness monster.”

I looked into the rear-vision mirror and the Dog was right. There was a car behind us. It was a one-eyed car.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing,” I said. I slowed down and made a left-hand turn. The car behind us also made the turn. I made another left and then a right and so did the other car.

“Might be the police,” said Joy.

“With just one light?” I asked. “And if it were, they’d have the siren and the red light going the speed we were hitting back there.”

I made a few more turns. I got on a boulevard and opened up and the car behind us matched our speed.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “I had intended to go back to the university and up to Stirling’s lab. We need to talk with him. But we can’t do it now.”

“How’s the gas?” asked Joy. “Better than a half a tank.” “The cabin,” Joy said. “You mean Stirling’s cabin?”

“Maybe not. Maybe they have never heard of the Loch Ness monster.”

“Then into some other aquatic monster from some other world.”

“But we can’t stay in the city, Parker. Stay here and the police will get into the act.”

“Maybe,” I told her, “that would be the best thing that could happen.”

But I knew it wasn’t. The police would haul us in and we’d lose a lot of time and we could talk from now till doomsday and they’d not believe a word we said about the bowling balls. And I shivered to think of what would happen if they found a talking dog. They’d figure I was a ventriloquist and was playing tricks on them and they’d be really sore.

I switched over a half a dozen blocks or so until I hit a highway leading north and out of town. If I had to head for anywhere, maybe Stirling’s cabin was as good as any.

There wasn’t any traffic, just a truck every now and then, and I really opened up. The needle hit eighty-five and hung there. I could have pushed it harder, but I Was afraid to do it. There were some tricky curves up ahead and I had a hard time remembering exactly where they were.

“Still following?” I asked.

“Still following,” said the Dog, “but they have fallen off. They are not so near.”

I knew then that we weren’t going to shake them. We could build up some distance on them, but they would still be there. Unless they missed us at the turnoff for the cabin they’d come piling in behind us—no more than two or three minutes behind us. And I couldn’t be sure we could duck them at the turnoff.

If I was going to shake them, there was going to have to be another way to do it.

The character of the land was changing now. We had left behind us the flat agricultural area and were entering the humpy sand hills covered by evergreens and dotted with small lakes. And it was just beyond, if my memory were not wrong, that the road began to curve—several miles of wicked curves that snaked in and out between the jagged hillocks and the swamps and lakes that lay between them.

“How far are they behind us?” I asked.

“A mile or so,” said Joy.

“Listen.”

“I am listening.”

“I’ll stop the car when we hit the curves ahead I’ll get out. You take the wheel. drive on for a ways, then stop and wait. Then you hear me shoot, come back.”

“You’re crazy,” she told me angrily. “You can’t tangle with them. You don’t know what they’ll do.”

“We’re even, then,” I said. “They don’t know what I’ll do.”

“But you alone—”

“Not me alone,” I told her. “I have old Betsy there. She’ll drop a moose. She’ll stop a charging grizzly.”

We hit the first of the curve and ground around it. I had hit it too fast and I had to fight the wheel while the tires screamed in shrill protest.

Then we hit the second, still too fast, and finally the third. I put on the brakes, hard, and the car skidded to a halt, half slewed across the road. I grabbed the rifle and, opening the door, slid out.

“All yours,” I said to Joy.

She didn’t argue or protest. She didn’t say a word. She had made her protest and I had brushed it off and that was the end of it. She was an all-right gal.

She slid underneath the wheel. I stepped to one side and the car gunned off. The taillights winked around the curve and I was alone.

The quiet was frightening. There was fl sound except the faint rustling of the few remaining leaves in an aspen tree that stood among the pines and the ghostly sighing of the pines themselves. The hills loomed jagged black against the paler sky. And there was the smell of wilderness and the feel of autumn.

The gun felt gummy and I rubbed my hand along it. It was greasy, sticky greasy. And it had a smell—the shaving lotion smell I first had smelled that morning.

This morning, I thought—good God, had it only been this morning! I tried to track it back and it was a thousand years ago. It could not have been this morning.

I moved a bit off the road and stood on the shoulder. I rubbed my hand along the rifle stock, trying to rub off the gummy grease. But it would not wipe off. My palm slid over it.

In a few more seconds a car would come around that curve, probably traveling fast. And when I fired, the shooting would be fast and almost by instinct, for I’d be shooting in the dark.

And what, I wondered, if it should turn out to be a regular car, a normal, human car carrying law—abiding humans? What if it were not following us at all, but by some odd happenstance had simply taken the same route that I had taken in attempting to escape it?

I thought about it and the sweat broke out of my armpits and trickled hotly down y ribs.

But it couldn’t be, I told myself. I had done a lot of turning and a lot of twisting, and none of that turning and that twisting bad made any sense at all. And yet the one-eyed car had followed us on every twist and turn.

The road curved to the top of one of the hillocks, then curled along its side. When the car came around the curve it would be silhouetted for a moment against the paler sky, and it was in that instant that I had to shoot.

I half raised the gun and I found my hands were trembling, and that was the worst thing that could happen. I lowered the gun again and fought to get control, to stop the trembling, but it was no use.

I made another try. I raised the gun again and, even as I did the car came around the curve, and in that single instant I saw the thing that stopped the trembling, that froze me in my tracks and turned me Steady as a rock.

I fired and worked the bolt and fired again and worked the bolt once more but did not shoot the third time, for there Was no need. The car had left the road and Was tumbling down the hillside, crashing through the thickets, banging into trees. And as it rolled the light from the single headlight still miraculously burning, swept across the sky like a probing searchlight.

Then the light was gone and the silence closed in once again. There was no further sound of something crashing down the hill.

I lowered the rifle and released the bolt and eased it back in place with the trigger held.

I let out the breath that I had been holding and took another one, a deep breath.

For it had been no human car; there’d not been humans in it.

When it had come around the curve, in that fleeting second when I could see the outline of it, I had seen that the single light had been not on either side but positioned directly in the center of the windshield.

A car stood in the little yard in front of the cabin as I pulled up before it.

“What is going on?” I asked of no one in particular.

“Is there anyone,” asked Joy, “that Carleton would loan the cabin to?”

“Not that I know about,” I told her.

I got out and walked around in front of the car.

The wind was swaying the small pine trees and they were talking back. The waves chuckled on the beach and I could hear the chunk-chunk sound of Stirling’s boat as it pounded gently against the pier.

Joy and the Dog came from the car and stood there beside me. I had kept the engine running, and the headlights bathed the cabin in their light.

The cabin’s door opened and a man came out. Apparently he had dressed hastily, for he was still buckling his belt. He stood and stared at us and then came Slowly down the steps off the little porch. He Wore pajama tops and he had bedroom slippers on his feet.

We stayed and waited for him and he came toward us hesitantly, across the yard, blinking in the light. He probably was no more than middle-aged, but he looked older. His face was rough with stubble and his uncombed hair stuck out in all directions.

“You folks looking for someone?” he asked.

He stopped about six feet away and peered at us, the light bothering his vision.

“We came up to spend the night,” I said. “We didn’t know anyone was here.”

“You own the cabin, mister?”

“No, a friend of mine.”

The man swallowed. I could see him swallow. “We ain’t got no right here,” he said. “We just moved in because it seemed the thing to do. There was no one using it.”

“You just moved in without asking anyone?”

“Look, mister,” said the man, “I don’t want no trouble. There were other cabins here we could have moved into, but it just so happens that we picked this one. We had no place to go and the missus, she was sick. From worry, mostly, I’d suppose. she never was a hand to be sick before.”

“How come no place to go?”

“Lost my job,” he said, “and there was O other work and we lost the house. The bank foreclosed on us. And the sheriff threw US out. The sheriff didn’t want to, but he had to. The sheriff felt real bad about it.

“The people in the bank?”

“New people,” he said. “Some new people came in and bought the bank. The other people, the folks that were there before, they’d not have thrown us out. They would have given us some time.”

“And new people bought the place you worked,” I said. He looked at me, surprised. “How did you know that?” he asked.

“It figures,” I told him.

“Hardware store,” he said. “Just up the road a piece. Up by the all-night service station. Sold sports stuff mostly. Hunting and fishing stuff and bait. Not much of a job. Didn’t pay too much, but it made us a living.”

I didn’t say anything more, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’m sorry about the lock,” he said. “We had to break the back-door lock. If we Could have found a cabin that wasn’t locked, we would have used that one. But they all were locked.”

“One of the bedroom windows was u latched,” I told him. “It shoves a little hard, but you could have got it up. Stirling always left it that way so friends of his could get in if they wanted to. You had to stand on a chunk of wood or something to reach the window, but you could have gotten in.”

“This Stirling? He’s the man who owns the place?”

I nodded.

“You tell him we are sorry. Sorry about moving in and busting up the lock. I’ll wake the others now and we’ll get out right away.”

“No,” I said. “You stay right where you are. If you had a place where the lady could catch a bit of sleep.”

“I’m all right,” said Joy. “I can sleep out in the car.”

“You’ll get cold,” said the man. “This time of year it gets right chilly out.”

“Some blankets on the floor, then. We’ll make out.”

“Look,” asked the man, “why ain’t you sore at me?”

“Friend,” I told him, “this isn’t any time for anyone to be getting sore at anyone. The time is here when we have to work with one another and take care of one another. We have to hang together.” He peered at me suspiciously, a bit uneasily.

“You a preacher or something of the sort?” he asked me.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

I said to Joy: “I want to drive up to the service station and phone Stirling. To tell him we’re all right. He might have been expecting us back at the laboratory.”

“I’ll go back in,” said the man, “and figure out a way so you can spend the night. If you want us to get out, we will.”

“Not at all,” I said.

We got back into the car and I turned around. The man stood watching us.

“What is going on?” asked Joy as we started up the road toward the main highway.

“It’s just the beginning,” I told her. “There’ll be more and more of it. More who lose their jobs and more who lose their homes. Banks bought up to shut off credit. Business places bought and closed to destroy jobs. Houses and apartment buildings purchased and the people evicted and no place for them to go.”

“But it’s inhuman,” she protested.

“Of course, it is inhuman.” And, of Course, it was. These things weren’t human.

They didn’t care what happened to the human race. The human race was nothing to them, nothing more than a form of life cluttering up a planet that could be used for other things. They would use the humans just as the humans once had used the animals that had cluttered up the land. They’d get rid of them, any way they could. They’d shove them to one side. They’d squeeze them tight together. They’d fix it so they’d die.

I tried to envision how it all would work and it was a hard thing to envision. The basic pattern was there, but the scope was far too large to grasp. To be effective, the scope of the operation must necessarily be worldwide. And if the operation had filtered down to a small-town bank and a crossroads store, then it must mean that, in the United States, at least, the operation—so far as industry, business, and finance were concerned—must be nationwide. For no one would buy up a crossroads business until he had in hand as well the mighty industrial complexes which were the lifeblood of the country. And no one would bother with a small-town bank unless he had the bigger banks under his control as well. For years the bowling balls bad been buying stock or taking options on it had been, more than likely, infiltrating pseudohumans, such as Atwood, into strategic positions. For they could not afford to move so openly as they now were moving until they had the basic business of the country held within their hands.

And there were places, of course, where the operation wouldn’t work. It would be effective only in those nations where private enterprise had flourished, where the people owned the industrial and financial institutions, and where natural resources came under private ownership. It would not work in Russia and it would not work in China, but perhaps it didn’t have to. Perhaps it didn’t have to work anywhere except in the majority of the great industrial nations. Close down the bulk of the world’s industry and shut up the world’s financial institutions and the world was whipped. There would be no trade and no flow of currency or credit and the thing that we called civilization would grind to a shuddering halt.

But there was still a question to which there was no answer—a question that bobbed just beneath the surface, popping into view a dozen times a thought: Where had the money come from?

For it would take money, perhaps more money than there was in all the world.

And there was another question just as pertinent: When and how had the money all been paid?

The answer was that it couldn’t have been paid. For if it had, the banks would be overflowing with it and the banking systems would be aware that there was something wrong.

Thinking of that, I remembered something that Dow Crane had said just that afternoon. The banks, he had said, were bursting at their seams with money. Overflowing with it. Cash money that people had been bringing in for a week or so.

So maybe it had been paid, or a big part of it. All at once, all engineered so the payments would span no more than a week, all the sales and options and agreements set up in such a fashion that there would have been nothing to disturb the financial picture, to tip off anyone that there was something going on.

And if it had reached that point, I told myself, then mankind’s position was impossible, or very close to it.

But even after all the conjecture, all the hinted answers, there was still the question: Where had all the money come from?

Certainly not from anything the bowling balls had brought from their alien planet and had sold on Earth. For if they had sold out of it, whatever it might be, to get together the working capital they needed, there would have been some sign of it. Unless, of course, it were something of such fantastic value, something, perhaps, that no one had ever thought of as existing—5omething so valuable that it would appeal to the man who bought certain secret treasures and hugged them close against him, not sharing them, knowing they would decrease in value if he ever dared to share them. Unless it was something like that, it would be impossible to introduce to Earth any trade goods of an alien nature without notice being given them.

“We now communicate,” said the Dog, “with the biologist in his laboratory.”

“That is right,” I told him. “He’ll be wondering where we are.”

“We must warn him,” said the Dog, “to be very careful. I cannot recall if we did or not. Those things in the sack we handed him can be extremely tricky.”

“Never fear,” I reassured the Dog. ’stirling will take due care. He probably more about them now than either of Us.”

“So we make the call,” said Joy, “and then we get some sleep and tomorrow dawns and what do we do then?”

“Damned if I know,” I confessed. “We’ll think of something. We’ll have to think of something. We’ve got to let the people know what is going on. We’ll have to figure out a way to tell them so they will understand and so they will believe.”

We reached the main highway, and down ahead of us was the glow of the all—night service station.

I pulled into it and up in front of a pump.

The man came out.

“Fill her up,” I said. “You got a pay phone in there?”

He gestured with his thumb. “Right over in the corner, next to the cigarette machine.”

I went inside and dialed and fed in the coins when the operator told me to. I heard the buzzing of the signal at the other end.

Someone answered—a gruff, official voice that was not Stirling’s voice.

“Who is this?” I asked. “I was calling Carleton Stirling.”

The voice didn’t tell me. “Who are you?” it asked.

It burned me. Something like that always burns me, but I held my temper and told him who I was.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Now, look—”

“Mr. Graves,” the voice said, “this is the police. We want to talk with you.”

“Police! What’s going on down there?”

“Carleton Stirling’s dead. The janitor found him an hour or so ago.”

I pulled the car up in front of the biology building and got out.

“You better stay here,” I told the Dog. “The janitor doesn’t like you and I would rather not explain a talking dog to the policeman who is waiting up there.”

The Dog sighed gustily, his whiskers blowing out. “I suppose,” he said, “it would be somewhat of a shock. Although the now dead biologist took me very calmly. Somewhat better, I might say, than you did yourself.”

“He had the advantage of me,” I told the Dog. “He had the true scientific outlook.”

And I wondered a second later how I could come even close to joking, for Stirling had been my friend and it might well be that I had brought about his death, although at the moment I had no idea of how he might have died.

I remembered him that morning, sprawled upon the chair in the monitoring room with less than another day of life left to him, and how he’d come awake without rancor or surprise and how he’d talked the crazy kind of talk one knowing him had come to expect of him.

“Wait for us,” I told the Dog. “We shouldn’t be too long.”

Joy and I climbed the steps and I was ready to pound upon the door when I found the door to be unlocked. We climbed the stairs and the door to Stirling’s lab was open.

Two men were perched upon the lab bench, waiting for us. They had been talking, but when they had heard us coming down the hail they had stopped their talking—we had heard them stop their talking—and sat there waiting for us.

One of them was Joe Newman, the kid who had called me about the bowling balls rolling down the road.

“Hi, Parker,” he said, hopping off the bench. “Hi, Joy.”

“Hi, yourself,” said Joy.

“Meet Bill Liggett,” said Joe Newman. He s from homicide.

“Homicide?” I asked.

“Certainly,” said Joe. “They think Someone bumped Stirling off.”

I Swung around to the detective.

He nodded at me. “He was asphyxiated. As if he had been choked. But there wasn’t a mark upon him.”

“You mean—”

“Look, Graves, if someone strangles a man, he leaves marks on his throat. Bruises, discolorations. It takes a lot of pressure to choke a man to death. Usually there is considerable physical damage.”

“And there wasn’t?”

“Not a mark,” said Liggett.

“Then he could have simply strangled. On something that he ate or drank. Or from muscular contraction.”

“The doc says not.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“Maybe it will,” said Liggett, “after the autopsy.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” I said. “I saw him just this evening.”

“Far as we can tell,” said Liggett, “you were the last man to see him alive. He was alive when you saw him, wasn’t he?”

“Very much alive.”

“What time?”

“Ten-thirty or so. Maybe close to eleven.”

“The janitor said he let you in. You and a dog. He remembers because he told you no dogs were allowed. Says you told him the dog was a specimen. Was be, Graves?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “That was just a gag.”

“Why did you bring the dog up? The janitor told you not to.”

“I wanted to show him to Stirling. We bad talked about him. He was a remarkable dog in many ways. He’d been hanging around my apartment building for days and was a friendly dog.”

“Stirling like dogs?”

“I don’t know. Not especially, I guess.”

“Where is this dog now?”

“Down in the car,” I said.

“Your car blow up tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard on the radio it did. They thought that I was in it.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Well, that’s apparent, isn’t it? You guys find out who it was?”

Liggett nodded. “Young punk who’d been pulled in a couple of times before for stealing cars. Just for the rides. Drive them a few blocks, then leave them.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Yeah, isn’t it,” said Liggett. “You driving a car now?”

“He’s driving my car”, said Joy.

“You’ve been with him all evening, lady?”

“We had dinner,” Joy said. “I’ve been With him ever since.”

Good gal, I thought. Don’t tell this cop a thing. All he’ll do is just muck up the situation.

“You waited down in the car while he and the dog came up?”

Joy nodded.

“Seems,” said Liggett, “there was a ruckus of some sort out in your neighborhood tonight. You know anything about it?”

“Not a thing,” said Joy.

“Don’t mind him,” said Joe. “He asks a lot of questions. He looks suspicious, too. He has to. That’s how he earns a living.”

“It does beat hell,” said Liggett, “how you two could be mixed up in so many things and still come out so clean.”

“It’s the way we live,” said Joy. “Why were you up at the lake?” asked Liggett.

“Just for the ride,” I said.

“And the dog was with you?”

“Sure, he was. We took him along. He’s good company.”

The bag was gone from the hook where Stirling had hung it and I couldn’t see it anywhere. I couldn’t look too hard or Liggett would have noticed.

“You’ll have to go down to headquarters Liggett told me. “The both of you. There are some things we want to get cleared up.”

“The Old Man knows about all this,” said Joe. “The city desk phoned him about it as soon as you called in to the laboratory.”

“Thanks, Joe,” I told him. “I imagine we’ll be able to take care of ourselves.”

Although I wasn’t as sure of that as I made it sound. If we went downstairs and the Dog began shooting off his mouth so that Liggett could hear him, there would be hell to pay. And there was the rifle in the car, with its magazine half full and the barrel fouled with powder from the shots I’d taken at the car. I’d have a rough time explaining what I’d been shooting at, even why I carried a rifle in the car at all. And in my pocket was a loaded pistol, and another pocket was loaded down with mixed-up pistol and rifle ammunition. No one—no good citizen went around in perfect peace and the best intentions with a loaded rifle in his car and a loaded pistol in his pocket.

There was more, too—a whole lot more that they could trip us up on. There was the phone call Joy had made to Stirling. If the cops really got down to business and in earnest, they’d soon know about that call. And there was every likelihood that whoever had stepped out of his house up in Joy’s neighborhood to see about the uproar would have seen the car parked in front of her house and how it had zoomed off down the street, with the accelerator pressed against the floor.

Maybe, I told myself, we should have told Liggett a bit more than we had. Or been a bit more frank in our answers to him. For if he wanted to trip us up, he could trip us up but good.

But if we had, if we’d told him a quarter of the truth, it was a cinch that they’d keep us cooped up for hours down at headquarters while they sneered at the things we told them or tried to rationalize it all into good, solid, modern explanations.

It still might happen, I told myself—all of it might happen—but so long as we could hold it off, we still had a chance that something might pop up that would forestall it.

When I had opened the box of rifle cartridges, some of them had fallen to the floor. Stirling had picked them up. But had he given them to me or had he put them in his pocket or had he laid them on the bench? I tried to remember, but for the life of me I couldn’t. If the police had found those cartridges, then they could tie up the rifle in my car with this laboratory, and that would be something else to contribute to their tangle of suspicion.

If there were only time, I thought, I could explain it all. But there wasn’t time, and the explanation, in itself, would trigger a rat race of investigation and of questions and of skepticism that would gum up everything. When I came to explain what was going on, it had to be to something other than a room full of police.

There was no hope, I knew, that I could untangle all the mess myself. But I did have to find someone who could. And the police, most emphatically, were not the ones to do it.

I stood there, looking around the laboratory, looking for the bag. But there was something else, just for a moment there was something else. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the motion and the image the furtive, sneaking sense of motion in the sink, the distinct impression that for an instant an outsize, black angleworm had thrust a questing head above the edge of the sink and then withdrawn it.

“Well, shall we go?” said Liggett.

“Certainly,” I agreed.

I took Joy’s arm and she was shivering—not so you could notice, but when I took her arm I could feel the shiver.

“Easy, gal,” I said. “The lieutenant herejust wants a statement.”

“From the both of you,” he said. “And from the dog?” I asked. He was sore. I could see that he was sore. I should have kept my mouth shut.

We started for the door. When we got to it, Joe said, “You’re sure, Parker, there’s nothing you want me to tell the Old Man?”

I swung around to face him and the lieutenant. I smiled at both of them.

“Not a thing,” I said.

Then we went out the door, with Joe following us and the detective following him. The detective closed the door and I heard the latch snap shut.

“You two can drive downtown,” saidLiggett. “To headquarters. I’ll follow in my car.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We went down the stairs and out through the front door and down the steps to the sidewalk.

“The Dog,” Joy whispered to me.

“I’ll shut him up,” I said.

I had to. For a time he could be no more than a happy, bumbling dog. Things were bad enough without him shooting off his face.

But we needn’t have worried.

The back seat was empty. There was no sign of the Dog.

The lieutenant escorted us to a room not much larger than a cubbyhole and left us there.

“Be back in just a minute,” he said.

The room had a small table and a few uncomfortable chairs. It was colorless and chilly and it had a dark, dank smell to it.

Joy looked at me and I could see that she was scared but doing a good job of trying not to be.

“Now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her. Then I said:

“I’m sorry I got you\into this.”

“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” she said.

And that was the hell of it. We had done nothing wrong and yet here we were, into it clear up to our necks, and with valid explanations for everything that had happened, but explanations that no one would believe.

“I could use a drink,” said Joy.

I could have, too, but I didn’t say so.

We sat there and the seconds dragged their feet and there was nothing we could say and it was miserable.

I sat hunched in a chair and thought about Carleton Stirling and what a swell guy he had been and how I would miss dropping in on him over at the lab and watching him work and listening to him talk.

Joy must have been thinking about the same thing, for she asked: “Do you think that someone killed him?”

“Not someone,” I said. “Something.”

For I was positive that it had been the thing or things I’d carried to him in the sheet of plastic that had done him in. I had walked into the laboratory, carrying death for one of my best friends.

“You’re blaming yourself,” said Joy. “Don’t blame yourself. There was no way you could know.”

And, of course, there wasn’t, but that didn’t help too much.

The door opened and the Old Man walked in. There was no one with him.

“Come along,” he said. “It’s all straightened out. No one wants to see you.”

We got up and walked over to the door.

I looked at him, a little puzzled.

He laughed, a short, chuckling laugh. “I Pulled no strings,” he said. “Not a mite of influence. I flung no weight around.”

“Well, then?”

“The medical examiner,” he said. “The verdict’s heart attack.”

“There was nothing wrong with Stirling’s heart,” I said.

“Well, there was nothing else. And they had to put down something.”

“Let’s go someplace else,” said Joy. “This place gets me down.”

“Come up to the office,” the Old Man said to me, “and get outside a drink. There is a thing or two I want to talk with you about. You want to come along, Joy, or are you anxious to get home?”

Joy shivered. “I’ll come along,” she said. I knew what was the trouble. She didn’t want to go back to that house and hear things in the yard—hear them prowling there even if there weren’t any.

“You take Joy,” I said to the Old Man. “I will drive her car.”

We went outside and we didn’t talk too much. I expected the Old Man would ask me about my car blowing up and perhaps a lot of other things, but he barely said a word.

He didn’t even say a great deal in the elevator going up to his office. When we got into the office he went to the liquor cabinet and got out the makings.

“Scotch for you, Parker,” he remembered. “How about you, Joy?”

“The same for me,” she said.

He fixed the drinks and handed them to us. But he didn’t go back of his desk and sit down. Instead he sat down on one of the other chairs with us. Probably he was trying to let us know that he was not the boss but just another member of the staff. There were times when he went to ridiculous lengths to point out his humility, and there were other times, of course, when he had no humility at all.

He had something that he wanted to talk with me about, but he was having trouble getting around to it. I didn’t help him any. I sat there, working on the drink, and let him go about it the best way that he could. I wondered just how much he knew or whether he had the slightest idea of what Was going on.

And suddenly I knew that the verdict had not necessarily been heart attack and that the Old Man had swung a lot of Weight, and the reason that he’d gone to bat for us was because he knew, or thought, I had something and that maybe it Was big enough for him to save my neck.

“Quite a day,” he said.

I agreed it had been.

He said something about the stupidity of police and I made agreeing noises.

Finally he got around to it. “Parker,” he said, “you have got your hooks into some thing big.”

“Could be,” I told him. “I don’t know what it is.”

“Big enough, maybe, for someone to try to kill you.”

“Someone did,” I said.

“You can come clean with me,” he told me. “If it’s something that has to be kept under cover, I can help you keep it there.”

“This is something I can’t tell you yet,” I said. “For if I did, you’d think that I was crazy. You wouldn’t believe a word of it. It’s something I have to have more proof on before I can tell anyone.”

He made his face go startled. “As big as that,” he said.

“That big,” I agreed.

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to talk to someone about it. I wanted to share the worry and the terror of it, but with someone who was willing to believe it and who would be equally as willing to have at least a try at doing something that could be effective.

“Boss,” I said, “can you suspend all disbelief? Can you tell me that you’d be ready to at least accept as possible anything I told you?”

“Try me,” he said.

“Damn it, that’s not good enough.”

“Well, all right, then, I will.”

“What if I should tell you that aliens from some distant star are here on Earth and are buying up the Earth?”

His voice turned cold. He thought I was kidding him.

He said: “I’d say that you were crazy.”

I got up and put the glass down on the desk top.

“I was afraid of that,” I said. “It’s what I had expected.”

Joy had risen, too. “Come on, Parker,” she said. “There’s no use staying here.”

The Old Man yelled at me: “But, Parker, that’s not it. You were kidding me.”

“The hell I was,” I said.

We went out the door and down the corridor. I thought that maybe he’d come to the door and call us back, but he didn’t. I caught a glimpse of him as we turned to go down the stairs, not waiting for the elevator, and he still was sitting in his chair,

Staring after us, as if he were trying to decide whether to be sore at us, or whether it might not be best to fire us, or whether, after all, there might have been something in the thing I’d told him. He looked small and far away. It was as if I were looking at him through binoculars turned the wrong way around.

We went down three flights of stairs to reach the lobby. I don’t know why we didn’t take the elevator. Neither of us, apparently, even thought about it. Maybe we just wanted to get out of there the quickest way there was.

We went outside and it was raining. Not much of a rain, just the beginning of a rain, cold and miserable.

We walked over to the car and stood beside it, not getting in just yet, standing there undecided and confused, not knowing what to do.

I was thinking of what had been in the closet back in the apartment (not that I actually knew what had been in there) and what had happened to the car out in the parking lot. I knew that Joy must be thinking about the things that had prowled around the house and might still be prowling there—that, whether they were or not, would keep on prowling from this time forward in her imagination.

She moved over closer and stood tight against me and I put an arm around her, without saying anything, there in the rainy dark, and held her even closer, thinking bow we were like two lost and frightened children, huddling in the rain. And afraid of the dark. For the first time in our lives, afraid of the dark.

“Look, Parker,” said Joy.

She was holding out a hand, with the palm cupped upward, and there was something in the palm, something she had been carrying in a tight-clenched fist.

I bent to look at it, and in the faint light cast by the streetlamp at the end of the block I saw it was a key.

“It was sticking in the lock on Carleton’s laboratory door,” she said. “I slipped it out when no one was looking. That stupid detective closed the door without ever thinking of the key. He was so sore at you that he never thought about it. You asking him if he wanted a statement from the dog.”

“Good work,” I said, and caught her face between my hands and kissed her. Although, even now, I can’t imagine why I Was so elated at finding we had the laboratory key. It was simply, I guess, that it was a final outwitting of authority, that in a rather grim and terrible game we had won a trick.

“Let’s have a look,” she said.

I opened the door and ushered her into the car, then walked around it and got I on the other side. I found the key and thrust it in the lock and turned it to start the motor, and even as the engine coughed and caught I tried to jerk it from the lock, realizing even as I did that it was too late.

But nothing happened. The motor purred and there was nothing wrong. There had been no bomb.

I sat there, sweating.

“What’s the matter, Parker?”

“Nothing,” I said. I put the machine in gear and moved out from the curb. And I remembered those other times I had started up the car, out at the Belmont house, in front of the biology building (twice on that one), again in front of the police station, never thinking of the danger—so maybe it was safe. Maybe the bowling balls never tried something a second time if it failed the first.

I swung into a side street to cut over to University Avenue.

“Maybe it’s a wild-goose chase,” said Joy. “Maybe the front door will be locked.”

“It wasn’t when we left,” I said.

“But the janitor might have locked it.”

He hadn’t, though.

We went through the door and climbed the stairs as quietly as we could.

We came to Stirling’s door and Joy banded me the key. I fumbled a little but finally got the key inserted and turned it, pushing the door open.

We walked inside and I closed the door, listening to the latch click shut.

A tiny flame burned on the laboratory bench—a small alcohol lamp that I was sure had not been lit before. And beside the bench, perched upon a stool, was a strangely twisted figure.

“Good evening, friends,” he said. There was no mistaking the clear, cultivated intonations of that voice.

It was Atwood sitting on the stool.

We stood and stared at him and he tittered at us. He probably meant it to be a chuckle, but it came out as a titter.

“If I look a little strange,” he told us, “it’s because not all of me is here. Some of me got home.”

Now that we could see him better, our eyes becoming accustomed to the feeble light, it was apparent that he was twisted and lopsided and that he was somewhat smaller than a man should be. One arm was shorter than the other and his body was far too thin and his face was twisted out of shape. And yet his clothing fit him, as if it had been tailored to fit his twisted shape.

“And another thing,” I said. “You haven’t got your model.”

I fished around in my topcoat pocket and found the tiny doll I’d picked up off the floor of the basement room in the Belmont house.

“Far be it from me,” I said, “to make it tough on you.”

I tossed the doll toward him and he lifted the shortened arm and, despite the feeble light, caught it unerringly. And as he caught it, during that second when it touched his fingers, it melted into him—as if his body, or his hand, had been a mouth that had sucked it in.

His face became symmetrical and his arms became the same length and the lopsided quality went entirely out of him. But his clothing was a bad fit now and the short sleeve of his jacket was halfway up his arm. He still was smaller, much smaller than I had remembered him.

“Thanks,” he said. “It helps. One doesn’t have to concentrate so hard to hold his shape.”

The sleeve was growing down his arm; you could see it grow. And the rest of his clothes were changing, too, so that they would fit him.

“The clothes are a bother, though,” he said conversationally.

“That’s why you had racks of them in the downtown office.”

He looked a little startled; then he said:

“Yes, you were there, of course. It had Slipped my mind. I must say, Mr. Graves, that you surely get around.”

“It’s my business,” I told him.

“And the other with you?”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I should have introduced you. Miss Kane, Mr. Atwood.”

Atwood stared at her. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he said, “it occurs to me that you people have the damnedest reproductive setup I have ever seen.”

“We like it,” Joy said.

“But so cumbersome,” he said. “Or, rather, made so cumbersome and so intricate by the social customs and the concepts of morality you have woven round it. I suppose that otherwise it is perfectly all right.”

I said: “You wouldn’t know, of course.”

“Mr. Graves,” he said, “you must understand that while we ape your bodies, we need not necessarily subscribe to all the activity connected with those bodies.”

“Our bodies,” I said, “and perhaps some other things. Like bombs placed in a car.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Such simple things as that.”

“And traps set before a door?”

“Another simple thing. Not intricate, you know. Complex things are very much beyond us.”

“But why the trap?” I asked him. “You tipped your hand on that one. I didn’t know about you. I didn’t even dream there were such things as you. If there had been no trap—“You’d still have known,” he said. “You were the one who could have put two and two together. You see, we knew about you. We knew you, perhaps, a good deal better than you knew yourself. We knew what you could do, what you most probably would do. And we know, as well, a little of the happenings immediately ahead. Sometimes we do not always. There are certain factors—”

“Now wait,” I said, “just a goddamn minute. You mean you knew about me. Not just me alone, of course?”

“Certainly not just you alone. But something of every one of you who might at some time be placed in such a position as to become aware of us. Like newsmen and officers of the law and certain public officials and key industrialists and—”

“You studied all of these?”

He almost smirked at us. “Every one of them,” he said.

“And there were others than myself?”

“Oh, of course, there were. Quite a number of them.”

“And there were traps and bombs—”

“A wide variety of things,” he told me.

“You murdered them,” I said.

“If you insist. But I must remind you not to be self-righteous. When you came in here tonight you had full intention to Pour some acid down the sink.”

“Of course,” I said, “but now I realize it would have done no good.”

“Just possibly,” said Atwood, “it would have gotten rid of me—or, at least, the major part of me. I was down that drain, you know.”

“Rid of you,” I said. “But not of all the others.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Get rid of you and there could be another Atwood. Any time you want, there could be another Atwood. Frankly, there’s no point to interminably getting rid of Atwoods when there’s always, if necessary, another one on tap.”

“I do not know,” said Atwood thoughtfully. “I can’t figure you folks out. There is an undefinable something about you that makes no sense at all. You set up your rules of conduct and you fabricate your neat little social patterns, but you have no patterns of yourselves. You can be incredibly stupid one moment and incredibly brilliant the next. And the most vicious thing about you the most awful thing about you—is your unspoken, ingrained faith in destiny. Your destiny, not someone else’s. It’s an appalling quality to even think about.

“And you,” I said. “You’d have borne me ill will if I had poured the acid.”

“Not particularly,” said Atwood.

“There,” I told him, “is a point of difference between us that you should possibly consider. I bear you—or your kind—considerable ill will for your attempts to kill me. And I bear you as much or more, ill will for the murder of my friend.”

“Prove it,” said Atwood defiantly.

“What’s that?”

“Prove I killed your friend. I believe,” he said, “that is the proper human attitude. You get away with anything if no one proves you did it. And, likewise, Mr. Graves, you may be confusing viewpoints. Conditions modify them.”

“Meaning that in certain other places murder is no crime.”

“That,” said Atwood, “is the point exactly.”

The flame of the alcohol lamp flickered fitfully and set up fleeing shadows that raced around the room. And it was so ordinary, so commonplace, I thought, that we Should be here, two products of different Planets and of different cultures, talking as if we might have been two men. Perhaps this were so because this other thing, what... ever it might be, had assumed the shape of man and had schooled itself in human speech and action and, perhaps, to some extent as well in the human viewpoint. I wondered if the same condition would exist if it were one of the bowling balls, unshaped to human or to any other form, which rested on the stool and talked to us, perhaps as the Dog talked, without the human movement of a mouth. Or if the thing which had become at least a momentary Atwood could talk so easily and well if it had not absorbed so great a knowledge, despite the fact that knowledge might be no more than superficial, of the ways of Earth and Man.

How long, I wondered, had these aliens been upon the Earth and how many of them? For years, perhaps, patiently working themselves into not only the knowledge but the feel of Earth and Man, studying the social patterns and the economic systems and the financial setup. It would take a long time, I realized, because they would not only be starting cold on the bare knowledge in itself but probably would be facing not only an unfamiliar but probably an unknown factor in our maze of property laws and our legal and our business systems.

Joy put her hand on my arm. “Let’s leave,:: she said. “I don’t like this character.

“Miss Kane,” said Atwood, “we are quiteprepared to accept your dislike of us. To tell you the truth, we simply do not care.”

“I talked to a family this morning that was worried sick,” said Joy, “because they had no place to go. And this evening I saw another family that had been evicted from its home because the father had lost his job.”

“Things like that,” said Atwood, “have been going on through all your history. Don’t challenge me on that. I have read your history. This is no new condition we’ve created. It is a very old one in your human terms. And we have done it honestly and, believe me, with all due attention to legality.”

It was almost, I thought, as if we, the three of us, were acting out an old morality play, with the basic sins of mankind enlarged a millionfold to prove a point by exaggeration.

I felt Joy’s grip tighten on my arm and knew that this was perhaps the first time she had realized the true amorality of the creature that we faced. And perhaps, as well, a realization that this creature, this Atwood, was no more than a visual projection of a great, vast horde of others, of an alien force which intended to take the Earth from us. Behind the thing that sat upon the stool one could almost see the ravening blackness which had come from some far star to put an end to Man. And, worse than that, not to Man alone, but to all his works and all his precious dreams, imperfect as all those dreams might be.

The great tragedy, I realized, was not the end of Man himself but the end of all that Man had stood for, all that Man had built and all that he had planned.

“Despite the fact,” said Atwood, “that the human race may resent us and, perhaps, even hate us, there is nothing that’s illegal, even in your own concept of right and wrong, in anything we’ve done. There is nothing in the law which restricts anyone, even aliens, from acquiring or from holding property. You, yourself, my friend, or the lady with you, have a perfect right to buy all the property you wish. To purchase and to hold, if that should be your aim, all the property that exists in the entire world.”

“Two things would,” I said. “One of them is the lack of money.”

“And the other?”

“It would be damn poor taste,” I told him. “It simply isn’t done. And, also, a possible third thing. Something that is called an antitrust law.”

“Oh, those,” said Atwood. “We are well aware of them; we have taken certain measures.”

“I am sure you have.”

“When you get right down,” said Atwood, “to the nub of it, the only qualification one needs to do what we have done is to have the money.”

“You talk as if money is a new idea to you,” I said, for the way he’d said it, that was the way it sounded. “Could it be that money is unheard of elsewhere than Earth?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Atwood. “There is commerce of a sort, and there are mediums of exchange. Mediums of exchange, but not money possibly as you know it here. Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else that I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and Somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.”

He would have gone on if I’d let him. He was all ready to preach a full—scale sermon But I didn’t let him.

“Look at this business practically,” I said. “You’re going to lay out, before you’re through with it, more cash than the Earth has cost you, much more than it’s worth. You’ll throw people out of jobs and drive them from their homes and someone will have to try at least to take care of them. Every government on Earth will establish great relief programs and set up doles to help their people, and taxes will go up to pay for all of this. Taxes, mind you, levied on the very property you’ve bought. You throw the people out of work, you take their homes from them—OK, so you’ll take care of them, you’ll have to pay the taxes to take care of them.”

“I see,” said Atwood, mocking, “that your heart bleeds for us, and it’s very human of you and I thank you for it. But you need not bother. We’ll pay the taxes. We’ll very gladly pay them.”

“You could overthrow the governments,” I said, “and then there’d be no taxes. Perhaps you’ve thought of that.”

“Of course not,” said Atwood firmly.

“That is something we would not think of doing. That would be illegal. We do not, y friend, overstep the law.”

And it was no good, I knew. There was nothing any good.

For the aliens would control the land and the natural resources and all the things that were built upon the land, and they would not use the land in its proper usage—or anything else in the proper way. They would plow no furrow and they would grow no crop. No factory wheel would turn. No metal would be mined. No timber would be cut.

The people would be dispossessed, not alone of their property, but of their heritage. Gone with the land and houses, with the factory and the job, with the retail store and the merchandise, would be the hope and the aspiration and the opportunity—and perhaps the faith—that shaped humanity. It did not matter greatly how much of the property of Earth the aliens actually bought. They need not buy it all. All that would be necessary would be to stop the wheels of industry, to halt the flow of commerce, to destroy the effectiveness of the financial structure. When that had been done, there’d be an end to jobs and an end to credit and an end to business. And the human dream was dead.

It did not really matter that the aliens buy the homes or the apartment houses for if all the rest were done, then the four walls that a man called home would be just a place in which to die. Either the purchasing of the homes was a pure campaign of terror or, equally as likely, an indication that the aliens even now did not understand how little they would really have to do to strike the fatal blow.

There would be doles, of course, or some sort of relief program, to keep food in the people’s mouths and, where possible, a roof above their heads. And there’d be no lack of money for the doles, for the taxes would be paid most cheerfully by this alien tribe. But in a situation such as this, money would be the cheapest thing there was, and the least effective. What the price of a potato or a loaf of bread when we had reached the last potato and there was no flour for bread?

There would be fighting back, once the situation should be known. Fighting back, not only by the people, but by the governments as well. But by that time the aliens undoubtedly would have set up some sort of defense, perhaps of a kind and nature no one now could guess. Perhaps it would be a scorched-earth defense, with the factories and the homes and all the rest of it going up in flames or otherwise destroyed so that Man could not regain the things with which he’d forged a livelihood. There would then be only the land to fight for, and the bare land in itself would not be enough.

If something could be done immediately, I knew, there was every chance that, even flow, the aliens could be beaten. But to do anything soon enough required a willingness to believe in what was going on. And there was no one who’d believe. Bitterly, I realized that acceptance of the situation in its full and brutal force would have to wait until the world had been plunged in chaos, and by that time it well could be too late.

And, standing there, I knew that I was licked and that the world was licked.

Wells had written, long ago, of aliens who had invaded Earth. And many, after him, had written other imaginary versions of alien invasions. But not a one of them, I thought, not a single one, had come even Close to what had really happened. Not one had foreseen how it could be done, how the very system which we had constructed so painfully through the ages Should now be turned against us—how freedom and the right of property had turned out to be a trap we’d set to catch ourselves.

Joy pulled at my arm. “Leave us go,” she said.

I turned with her and headed for the door.

Behind me I heard Atwood chuckling.

“Come see me tomorrow,” he said. “You and I maybe can do business.”

Outside it was raining more heavily than ever. Not a downpour, but a steady drip that was discouraging. There was a definite edge of chill in the air. It was the kind of night, I thought, for the world we knew to come crashing down. No, not crashing down, for that was too dramatic. Sagging, rather. The kind of a night for the world to come sagging down, weakened without knowing it was being weakened or what had weakened it, and falling so smoothly and so steadily it did not know that it was falling until it had collapsed.

I opened the door of the car for Joy, then slammed it shut again before she could get in.

“I forgot,” I said. “There could be a bomb in there.”

She looked at me and raised a hand to push away a lock of hair that had blown across her eyes.

“No,” she said. “He wants to talk with You. Tomorrow.”

“That was just talk,” I said. “His way of being funny.”

“And even if there is a bomb in there, I’m not walking back to town. Not at this hour and in this rain. And there wasn’t One before.”

“Let me get in and start it. You stand off—”

“No,” she said emphatically. She reached out and jerked the door open.

I walked around the car and got in. j turned the key and the engine started.

“See,” she said.

“There could have been,” I told her.

“Even if there were, we can’t live in continual fear of it,” she said. “There are a million ways that they can kill us if that is what they want.”

“They killed Stirling. There probably are others they have killed. They made two tries at me.”

“And failed each time,” she said. “I have a feeling they’ll not try again.”

“Intuition?”

“Parker, they may have intuition, too.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said. “It’s not really what I meant to say. What I meant was that no matter how much they learn about us, how much they try to be like us to carry out their project, they can never learn to think like us.”

“So you believe they’ll give up if they don’t kill someone in two tries.”

“Well, not that exactly, although maybe so. But they won’t try the same thing twice.”

“So I am safe from traps and bombs and 50mething in the closet.”

“It may be a superstition with them,” she said. “It may be a way of thinking. It may be a logic we don’t even know.”

She had been thinking about it all the time, I knew. Trying to get it figured out. That pretty little head had been filled with speculation, and the few facts, or quasi facts, that we had in our possession had gone round and round. But there was no way, I thought, to get it figured out. Because you didn’t know enough. You were thinking as a human thought and trying to think as an alien thought without knowing how he thought. And even if you did know there was no guarantee that you could twist the human thought processes into an alien channel.

Joy had put it the other way around. The aliens, she had said, no matter how much they wanted, could never think like us. But they had a better chance to think like u than we to think like them. They had Studied us, how long no one could know.

And there had been many of them; no one knew how many. Or was that the correct way to say it? Might there not be no more than a single one of them, with that One fractionated into units the size of bowling balls, so that a single one of them could be in many places and be many things at once?

Even if they were individuals, if each bowling ball were a complete and single thing, they still were closer to one another than it was possible for human beings to be close to one another. For it took many of them to make a thing like Atwood or like the girl who’d sat beside me at the bar: it took a lot of them to shape themselves into the simulation of a human being. And in doing that, in taking human form, or any other form, they then must work as one; then must, in very fact, the many become as one.

We rolled down the last of the campus streets and came out on a deserted University Avenue and I headed back for town.

“Now what?” I asked.

“I can’t go home,” said Joy. “Not back to the house. They might still be there.”

I nodded, knowing how it was. And I wondered what the things that had prowled the yard might be. Perhaps some ferocious beast, or, rather, the simulation of some ferocious beast from some other planet. Perhaps many kinds of ferocious beasts from many other planets. Perhaps a great menagerie of terrible life-forms, meant, perhaps, to terrify rather than to harm. No more than bait, perhaps, to pull the three of us together—Joy, the Dog, and I—to get us in one spot. But if they bad meant to kill the three of us, then it bad been another plan that had failed.

The Dog had said something about the bowling balls’ never going far enough, never pushing hard enough, dealing in half measures. I tried to remember what he actually had said, but my memory was hazy. Too much had happened.

And I wondered, too, where the Dog had gone.

“Parker,” Joy said, “we have to get some rest. We have to get in out of the rain and get a few hours sleep.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. My place—”

“I didn’t mean your place. It’s as bad as mine. We could find a motel, maybe.”

“Joy, I have only a dollar or two in my pocket. I forgot to pick up my check.”

“I cashed mine,” she said. “I have some money, Parker.”

“Joy…”

“Yes, I know. Don’t worry. It’s all right.” We drove on down the street.

“What time is it?” I asked.

She held her wrist down so that the light from the dash shone on her watch.

“It’s almost four,” she told me.

“Quite a night,” I said.

She leaned back wearily against the seat, turned her head to look at me.

“Wasn’t it,” she said. “One car blown up and some poor kid with it, but thank the Lord, not you; one friend killed without a mark upon him by something from another world; one gal’s reputation gone to hell because she is so sleepy she’s willing to shack up—”

“Just keep quiet,” I said. I turned off the avenue.

“Where you going, Parker?”

“Back to the office. I have to make a call. Long distance. Might as well let the paper pay for it.”

“Washington?” she asked.

I nodded. “Senator Roger Hill. It’s time to talk to Rog.”

“At this hour of the morning?”

“At any time of day. He’s a public servant, isn’t he? That’s what he tells the people. Around election time. And the country—the whole damn country—needs a public servant now.”

“He won’t love you for it.”

“I don’t expect him to.”

I pulled the car up to the curb across from the darkened building. There was a faint light from the third floor and a dim glow from the first-floor pressroom.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“No,” she said, “I’ll stay. I’ll lock the doors and wait. I’ll watch that no one bombs the car.”

The office was deserted and had that cold, expectant air that newspaper offices take on when there’s no one there. There were janitors, of course, but I saw none of them, and Lightning, the dog-trick office boy, should have been on duty, too, but he, more than likely, was off on some mysterious unofficial errand of his own or had found some corner where he could snatch an hour or two of sleep.

A few lights were burning, but they did no more than add to the ghostly shadow of the place, like distant streetlamps shining on a foggy boulevard.

I went to my desk and sat down in my chair and put out my hand to pick up the phone, but I didn’t lift it right away. I sat there, quiet and listening, but for the life of me I didn’t know what I was listening to, although it may have been the silence. The room was quiet. There wasn’t a whisper of a sound. And it seemed to me that, at this moment, the world was quiet as well that the silence of this place stretched out beyond these walls to envelop the entire planet and that all the Earth was hushed.

Slowly I lifted the receiver and dialed the operator. She came on in a sleepy voice. There was a bit of polite surprise when I told her who I wanted, as if she, too, was of a mind to rebuke me for calling so great a man as a senator at this time of night. But her training kept her from doing it and she told me she would call me back.

I replaced the receiver in its cradle and leaned back in the chair and tried to do some thinking, but the hours were catching up with me and my brain refused to think. For the first time I realized just how tired I was.

I sat there in a fog, with the few lights shining like distant streetlamps and with not a sound around me. And, maybe, said my foggy mind that had refused to think, this is the way the Earth is on this night a silent planet sitting, tired and beaten, in the silence of not-caring, a planet going to its doom and no one to give a damn.

The phone rang.

“We have your party, Mr. Graves,” said the operator.

“Hello, Rog,” I said.

“This you, Parker?” said the distant Voice. “What the hell’s the matter with you at this time of night?”

“Rog,” I said, “it’s important. You know I wouldn’t call you if it were not important.”

“I should hope it is. I just got to sleep a couple of hours ago.”

“Something keeping you up, Senator?”

“A little get-together. Some of us were talking over several matters.”

“Someone worried, Rog?”

“Worried over what?” he asked, as smooth and slick as ice.

“Too much money in the banks, for one thing.”

“Look, Parker,” he said, “if you’re trying to worm something out of me, it’s a waste of time.”

“Not to worm something out of you. To tell you something. If you’ll just listen, I can tell you what is going on. It’s a little hard to tell, but I want you to believe me.”

“I am listening.”

“There are aliens here on Earth,” I told him. “Creatures from the stars. I’ve seen them and I’ve talked with them and—”

“Now I get it,” said the senator. “It’s Friday night and you have hung one on.”

“You’re wrong,” I protested. “I’m sober“You picked up your check and you went out and—”

“But I didn’t pick up my check, I was too busy and forgot it.”

“Now I know you’re drunk. You never miss a check. You are there, standing in line, with your hand out—”

“Goddamn it, Rog, just listen to me.”

“Get back to bed,” said the senator, “and sleep it off. Then, if you still want to talk to me, call me in the morning.”

“To hell with you,” I yelled, but he didn’t hear me. He already had hung up.

The line buzzed dead and empty.

I felt like slamming the receiver down, but I didn’t slam it. Something kept me from slamming it, perhaps a deep sense of defeat that chewed away the anger.

I sat there, gripping the receiver in my hand, with the far-off, mosquito buzzing of the empty line, and knew there was no hope—that no one would believe me, that no one would listen to what I had to tell.

Almost, I told myself, as if all of them were p Atwoods, as if every single one of them was a simulated human, built out of the alien stuff that had invaded Earth.

Come to think of it, I told myself, it Wasn’t so damn funny. It was something that could happen. It would be exactly the kind of thing the aliens would have done.

Icy insect feet went walking up my spine and I sat there, clutching the receiver, the loneliest human being on the entire Earth.

For I might, I thought, be in truth alone. What if Senator Roger Hill were not a man, not the same man he had been, Say, five years ago? What if what remained of the body of the real, the authentic, the human Roger Hill lay in some hidden place and the bogus, the alien Roger Hill were the man who had just talked with me? What if the Old Man were not the real Old Man at all, but a hideous thing which walked in Old Man form? What if the chairman of some great steel company were no longer human? What if keyman after keyman had been done away with and their places had been taken by something from another world, so formed, so briefed, so perfect that all of them were accepted by their own associates and by their families?

What if the woman who waited in the car outside were not .

But that, I told myself, was crazy. That was ridiculous. That could be nothing more than the frustrated fantasy of a mind too worn out, too sick, too shocked to think the way it should think.

I put the receiver back into its cradle and pushed the phone away. I got slowly to my feet and stood shivering in the emptiness and silence.

Then I went downstairs and out into the street, where Joy waited for me.

The “No Vacancy” sign was flashing, throwing green and red shadows across the black slick of wet street. On and on it flashed, a warning to the world. And back of it loomed the dark huddle of the units, each with its tiny light above the door and with the soft, fleeting gleam of parked cars picking up the flashing sign.

“No room in the inn,” said Joy. “It makes you feel unwanted.”

I nodded. It was the fifth motel that we had passed where there was no vacancy. The sign had not always been a flashing sign, but it had been there, glowing in the night. And the flashing of the sign carried no meaning greater than the others, but it was more emphatic and aggressive. As if it were spelling out in grim and final detail that there was no lodging.

Five motels with the forbidding signs and one with no sign at all, but dark and closed and untenanted—a place shut against the world.

I slowed the car and we crunched to a5iiding halt. We sat, looking at the sign. “We should have known,” said Joy. “We should have realized. All those people who can’t find a place to live. They’re ahead of us. Maybe some of them for weeks.”

The rain still was sifting down. The windshield wipers whined.

“Maybe it was a bad idea,” I told her. “Maybe . .

“No,” said Joy. “Neither of our places.

Parker, I would die”

We drove on. Two more motel signs announced no vacancies.

“It’s impossible,” said Joy. “There isn’t any place. The hotels would be as bad.”

“There just might be,” I said. “There might be a place. That motel back there. The one that had no sign. The one that was closed up.”

“But it was dark. There was no one there.”

“There is shelter there,” I told her.

“There would be a roof above our heads. The man up at the lake had to break a lock. We can do the same.”

I swung the car around in the middle of the block. There was no one coming either Way and there was no danger.

“You remember where it is?” she asked.

“I think I do,” I said.

I missed it by a block or two and do bled back and there it was—no sign, n light of any kind, not anyone around.

“Bought and closed up,” I said. “Closed up quick and easy. Not like an apartment house, where notice must be given.”

“You think so?” asked Joy. “You think Atwood bought this place?”

“Why else would it be closed?” I demanded. “If it were owned by someone else, don’t you think it would be open? With business as it is.”

I turned into the driveway and went down a little incline. The headlights swept across another car, parked before a unit.

“Someone ahead of us,” said Joy.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s perfectly all right.” I drove across the courtyard and stopped the car with its lights full on the second car. Through the rain-blurred glass I saw the smudge of white and startled faces, looking out at us.

I sat there for a moment, then stepped out of the car. The driver’s door of the other car came open and a man got out. He walked toward me in the fan of headlamp light.

“You looking for a place to stay?” he asked. “There isn’t any place.”

He was middle-aged and he was well dressed although a little rumpled. His topcoat was new and his hat was an expensive piece of headgear, and beneath the topcoat lie wore a business suit. His shoes were newly shined and the fine raindrops clung to them, shining in the light.

“I know there isn’t any place,” he said. “I’ve looked. Not just tonight, but every other night.”

I shook my head at him and my stomach tried to roll into a hard and shrunken ball. I was sick at the sight of him. Here was another one.

“Sir,” he said, “can you tell me what is going on? You’re not a police officer, are you? I don’t care if you are.”

“I’m not a cop,” I told him.

His words were edged with something that was close to hysteria—the voice of a man who had taken about everything he could. A man who had seen his own personal world fall to pieces, bit by bit, a little more each day, and absolutely helpless to do anything about it.

“I’m just a man like you,” I said. “Looking for a stable.” For I’d suddenly recalled what Joy had said about no room in the inn.

It was a screwy thing to say, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“My name,” he said, “is John A. Quinn and I’m a vice-president of an insurance company. My salary is close to forty thou sand, and here I stand without a place to live, without a place for my family to get out of the rain. Except in the car, that is.”

He looked at me. “That’s a laugh,” he said. “Go ahead and laugh.”

“I wouldn’t laugh,” I said. “You couldn’t make me laugh.”

“We sold our house almost a year ago,” Quinn said. “Long-term occupancy. Got a better price for it than I had any hope of getting. We needed a bigger place, you see. The family was growing up. Hated to sell our place. Nice place. Used to it. But we needed room.”

I nodded. It was the same old story.

“Look,” I said, “let’s not stand out here in the rain.”

But it was as if he hadn’t heard me. He felt the need to talk. He was full of talk that needed to get out. Maybe I was the first man he could really talk to, another man like himself, hunting for a shelter.

“We never thought about it,” he said. “We thought it would be simple. With long-term occupancy, we had a lot of time to go out and find the kind of place we wanted. But we never found one. There were ads, of course. But we always were too late. The places had been sold before we even got there. So we tried a builder, and there wasn’t any builder who could promise us a house quicker than two years. I even tried a bribe or two and it did no good. All booked up, they said. There were a lot of them who had a hundred or more houses waiting to be built. That seems incredible, doesn’t it?”

“It surely does,” I said.

“They said if they could get more workmen, they could build for me. But there weren’t any workmen. All of them were busy. All of them had jobs.

“We put off the occupancy date, first thirty days, then sixty, and finally ninety, but there came the day we had to give possession. I offered the purchaser five thousand if he’d cancel the sale, but he wouldn’t do it. Said that he was sorry but that he’d bought the house and that he needed it. Said he’d given me three months longer than had been agreed. And he was right, of course.

“We had nowhere to go. No relatives we Could ask to take us in. None here, at least. We could have sent the kids to some relatives out of town, but we hated to break up the family, and some of the relatives were having troubles of their own. Lots of friends, of course, but you can’t ask Your friends to let you share their house. You can’t even let them know what sort of shape you’re in. There’s such a thing as pride. You keep up the best face that you can and hope it will blow over.

“I tried everything, of course. The hotels and motels were filled up. There were no apartments. I tried to buy a trailer. There was a waiting list. God Almighty, a five- year waiting list.”

“So you are here tonight,” I said.

“Yes,” he told me. “At least it’s off the street and quiet. No passing cars to wake you up. No people walking by. It’s tough. Tough on the wife and kids. We’ve been living in this car for almost a month. We eat in restaurants when we can, but they usually are full up. Mostly we eat at drive- ins or sometimes we buy some stuff and go out into the country and have a picnic. Picnics once were fun, but they aren’t now. Even the kids don’t seem to care for them. We use service stations for sanitary purposes. We do our wash at launderettes. I drive to work each morning; then the wife drives the kids to school. Then she hunts for a place to live until it’s time to pick UP the kids again. Then they all come to the office and pick me up and we look for a place to eat.

“We’ve stood it for a month,” he said. “We can’t take it too much longer. The kids are asking when we’ll have a house again and winter’s coming on. We can’t live in a car when the weather turns cold, when it starts to snow. If we can’t find someplace to live, we’ll have to move to some other city where we can find a house, an apartment, almost anything. I’ll have to give up my job and—”

“It won’t do you any good,” I told him. “There is no place to go. It’s the same all over. It’s like this everywhere.”

“Mister,” said Quinn, desperation pushing his voice to a higher pitch, “tell me what is wrong. What is going on?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, for I couldn’t tell him. It would have only made it worse. Tonight he would be better not to know.

And this, I thought, is the way it is going to be, all over. The world’s population would become nomadic, wandering here and there to try to find that better place when there was no better place. First in family groups, and later, maybe, banding into tribes. Eventually a lot of them would be herded into reservations, or what would amount to reservations, as the only way that existing governments could take care of them. But until the end there would be wanderers, fighting for a roof, scrounging for a scrap of food. To start with, in the first mad rush of anger, they might seize any kind of shelter—their own houses or someone else’s house. At first they would fight for food, would steal it and would hoard it. But the aliens would burn the houses or otherwise destroy them. They would destroy them as their rightful owners and there would be little that could be done about it since it would not be done openly. But the aliens would salve their social conscience because they’d consider it to be legal and the burning would go on. And there was no way to fight back against them, or at least no way that could be found immediately. For you could not fight the Atwoods, you could not battle bowling balls. You could only hate them. They would be hard to catch and they would be hard to kill and they’d have nearby ratholes into another world to which they could retreat.

There would come a time when there were no houses and when there was no food, although Man, perhaps, would linger on in spite of everything. But where there’d been a thousand men there’d now be only one, and when that day arrived the aliens would have won a war that never had been fought. Man would become a skulker on the planet he had owned.

“Mister,” said the man, “I don’t know your name.”

“My name is Graves,” I said.

“All right, Graves, what is the answer? What are we to do?”

“What you should have done from the very first,” I said. “We’re going to break in. You and your family will sleep beneath a roof, have a place to cook, have a bathroom of your own.”

“But breaking in!” he said.

And there it was, I thought. Even in the face of desperation, a man still held regard for the laws of property. You do not steal you don’t break in, you don’t touch a thing that belongs to someone else. And it was this very thing which had brought us where we were. It was these very laws, so revered that we still obeyed them even when they had turned into a trap that would take our birthright from us.

“You need a place for your kids to sleep,” I said. “You need a place to shave.”

“But someone will be around and—”

“If someone comes around,” I said, “and tries to push you out, use a gun on them.”

“I haven’t got a gun,” he said.

“Get one, then,” I told him. “First thing in the morning.”

And I was surprised at how smoothly and how easily I had slipped from a law abiding citizen into another man, quite ready to write another law and stand or fall by it.

The sun was slanting down between the slats on the Venetian blinds, shining into the silence and the warmth and comfort of a room I could not immediately recall.

I lay there with my eyes half open, not thinking, not wondering, not doing anything, just glad to be lying there. There was the sunlight and the silence and the softness of the bed and faint hint of perfume.

And that perfume, I thought to myself, was the kind that Joy wore.

“Joy!” I said suddenly, sitting up in bed, for now it all came back—the night and the rain and everything that had happened.

The door to the adjoining room stood open, but there was no sign of anyone.

“Joy!” I cried, tumbling out of bed.

The floor was cold when I put my feet on it, and there was a bit of chilliness in the breeze that blew through the barely open window.

I went to the door of the adjoining room and looked in. The bed had been slept in and had not been made, except that someone had pulled up the blanket. There was no sign of Joy. And then I saw the note on the door, stuck there with a pin.

I jerked it off and read:

Dear Parker: I took the car and went to the office. A story for the Sunday paper that I have to check. I’ll be back this afternoon. And where is that vaunted manhood? You never even made a pass at me. Joy.

I went back and sat down on the edge of the bed, still holding the note. My trousers and shirt and jacket were draped across a chair and my shoes, with the socks stuffed inside of them, sat underneath it. Over in one corner was the rifle that I had picked up from Stirling’s lab. It had been, I remembered, in the car. Joy must have gotten it out of there and brought it in and left it before she set out for the office.

I’ll be back this afternoon, she’d written. And her bed was still unmade. As if she had accepted that this was the way we’d live from now on. As if there were, in fact, no other way of life. As if she already had adjusted to the changes that had come.

And Man, himself, perhaps would adjust as easily as at first, happy to find any solution out of the bitter harassment and the shattering of his hope. But after that first temporary adjustment would come the anger and the bitterness and the realization of his loss and hopelessness.

Joy had gone back to the office to check on a Sunday story. The man next door had kept on working at his insurance job even at a time when his personal world had been falling apart about him. And, of course, one had to do these things, for one had to eat, one had to live somehow, one had to have the money. But it was, I thought, perhaps a great deal more than that. It was one way, perhaps the only way that was left, to hang on to reality, to tell one’s self that only a part of life had changed, that some of the old and ordered routine of one’s life had not been disturbed.

And I, I asked myself—what was I to do?

I could go back to the office and sit down at my desk and try to turn out a few more columns against my coming trip. It was funny when I thought about the trip, for I’d forgotten all about it. It was almost as if it were something new, something I’d never known about before, or, if I had known of it, something from so long ago that it was natural I should have forgotten it.

I could go back to the office, but what would be the purpose? To write columns that would be never read in a paper that in a few more days might be no longer printed?

It all was so damned futile. It was some thing you didn’t want to think about. And maybe that was why no one would listen, for if people didn’t know about it, they need not think of it.

I dropped Joy’s note and it fluttered to the floor. I reached out to the chair and got my shirt. And even then I didn’t know what I was going to do, but before I did anything I had to get my clothes on.

I went outside and stood on the stoop and it was a fine, sunshiny day, more like a summer than an autumn day. The rain had disappeared and the court was dry again, with only a tiny puddle here and there to show it had ever rained.

I looked at my watch and it was almost noon.

The insurance man’s car stood before the second unit down, but there was no sign of him or his family. It was Saturday and probably his day off and the family must be sleeping late. They had it coming to them, I told myself—a little decent rest with a roof above their heads.

Up the street I saw a restaurant sign and realized that I was hungry. And there probably was a phone there and I should call Joy.

It was just a little quick and greasy, but the place was crowded. I wriggled my waythrough and grabbed a stool up against the counter when a man finished and moved out.

The waitress came and I gave my order then got up and made my way through the crowd again to the phone booth in one corner. I managed to squeeze in and get the door closed behind me. I fed in my coin and dialed. When the operator answered, I asked for Joy.

“Get that story checked?” I asked her.

“Sleepyhead,” she chided. “When did you get up?”

“Just a while ago. What is going on?”

“Gavin’s in a tizzy. There’s a story and he can’t get his mitts on it.”

“Something about—”

“I don’t know,” said Joy, apparently knowing what I was about to ask. “MaybeThere’s a money shortage in the banks. We know—”

“A money shortage! Dow told me yesterday they were knee-deep in money.”

“I guess that was true,” she said. “But not any more. A lot of it is gone. They had it at noon yesterday, but when they closed up last night great chunks of it had simply disappeared.”

“No one will talk,’ I guessed. “That’s exactly it. The ones Gavin and Dow can get hold of stay absolutely mum. They don’t know a thing. A lot of them—the big, important ones—they can’t reach at all. You know how bankers are on Saturday. You can’t get hold of them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Out playing golf or fishing.”

“Parker, do you think Atwood could somehow be involved?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll do some checking.”

“What can you do?” she asked a little sharply.

“I could go out to the Belmont place. Atwood said—”

“I don’t like it,” she told me bluntly. “You were out there once before.”

“I’ll keep out of trouble. I can handle Atwood.”

“You haven’t got a car.”

“I can take a cab.”

“You haven’t money for a cab.”

“The cabby’ll take me out,” I said. “And he’ll bring me back. On the way back, he can stop at the office and I’ll pick up his fare.”

“You think of everything,” she said.

“Well, almost everything.”

I wondered, as I hung up, if I thought of anything.

The first thing that I noticed was that the window had been closed. When I had fled the place the night before I had left it open, but not without the ridiculous feeling that, despite everything, I should go back and shut it.

But the window now was closed and there were draperies at the windows and I tried to recall, but with no success, whether there had been draperies there before.

The house stood old and gaunt in the pale sunlight, and from the east I could hear the distant sound of water lapping on the shore. I stood and looked at the house and there was nothing, I kept telling myself, for me to be afraid of. It was just an old and ordinary house, its gaunt bones softened by the sunlight.

“You want,” the driver asked, “that I should wait for you?”

“I won’t be long,” I told him.

“Look, Mac, it’s up to you. I don’t care. The meter keeps on running.”

I went up the walk. Underneath my feet, the dried and fallen leaves crunched on the paving brick.

First I’d try the door, I decided. I’d do it civilized and decent. And if no one answered when I rang the bell, then I’d go through the window as I had before. The cabdriver, more than likely, would wonderwhat I might be up to. But it was none of his damn business. All he had to do was wait and take me back.

Although, I told myself, someone had closed the window and now it might be locked. But that wouldn’t stop me. There was nothing that was going to stop me now. Although, I realized, if I’d taken time enough to figure out why I wanted to get in, what possible reason I had for wanting to see Atwood, I’d probably find no answers. Instinct? I wondered. Joy had said something about the human instinct—or had it been Atwood who’d said it? I could not remember. Was it, then, instinct that drove me up the walk to see Atwood once again—not knowing why, not with the least idea of what I’d say to him or what purpose I might have in the saying of it?

I mounted the step and rang the bell and waited. And as I put out my finger to ring it once again, I heard footsteps in the hall.

And the bell, I remembered, had been of order when I’d been here the night before. It had been loose and had wobbled underneath my finger when I had tried to ring it. But now it was all right and the window had been closed and there were footsteps in the hall, coming toward the door.

The door came open and a girl stood there, dressed in the stark black-and- whiteness of a maid’s uniform.

I just stood and stared.

The maid stood without moving, waiting for me. There was a pert look on her face.

“I had hoped,” I finally said, “to find Mr. Atwood here.”

“Sir,” she said, “won’t you please come in?”

I stepped into the hail and there was a difference there as well. Last night the house had been dusty and untenanted, with covers over what little furniture there was. But now the place had a lived-in look. The dust was gone and the wood and tile of the hail shone with cleanliness and polish. There was an ancient hail tree, standing lone and empty, and beside it was a full-length mirror that gleamed with recent washing.

“Your hat and coat, sir,” said the maid. “Madam’s in the study.”

“But Atwood. It was Atwood—”

“Mr. Atwood is not here, sir.”

She took my hat Out of my hand. She waited for the coat.

I took it off and handed it to her.

“That way, sir,” she said.

The door was open and I walked through it, into a room where books jammed shelves from floor to ceiling. At the desk beside the windows sat the icy blonde I’d met in the bar, the one who’d handed me the card that said “We Deal in Everything.”

“Good day, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I am glad you came.”

“Atwood told me—”

“Mr. Atwood, unfortunately, is not with us any more.”

“And you, of course, are about to take his place.”

The iciness was there, and the smell of violets. She was part blond goddess, part efficient secretary. And she was, as well, a thing from another world and a tiny, perfect doll I’d held within my hands.

“You are astounded, Mr. Graves?”

“No,” I said. “Not now. Once perhaps. But not any longer.”

“You came to talk with Mr. Atwood. We had hoped that you would come. We have need of people like you.”

“You need me,” I said, “like I need an extra head.”

“Mr. Graves, won’t you have a chair? And please don’t be facetious.”

I sat down in the chair just across the desk from her.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Should I break down and weep?”

“There is no need of your doing anything,” she said. “Please just be yourself. Let us talk exactly as if we were two humans.”

“Which, of course, you’re not.”

“No, Mr. Graves, I’m not.”

We sat there looking at one another and it was damned uncomfortable. There wasn’t a flicker of movement or emotion in her face: it was just graven beauty.

“If you were a different kind of man,” she said, “I’d try to make you forget I am anything but human. But I don’t suppose it would do me any good with you.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry about it, too,” I told her. “Believe me, I am sorry. I would like nothing better than to think of you as human.”

“Mr. Graves, if I were human, that would be the nicest compliment I ever had been paid.”

“And since you’re not?”

“I believe it’s still a compliment.”

I looked sharply at her. It was not only what she’d said but the way she’d said it. “Maybe, after all,” I said, “there may be some human in you.”

“No,” she said. “Let’s not start kidding ourselves, either one of us. Basically youshould hate me, and I suppose you do. Although maybe not entirely. And basically I should have a great contempt for you, but I can’t say honestly I do. And yet, I think, we should talk together, if possible, with some rationality”

“Why be rational with me? There are a lot of others—”

“But, Mr. Graves,” she said, “you know about us. And few of the others do. A very, very few throughout the entire world.

You’d be surprised how few.”

“And I’m to keep my mouth shut.”

“Really, Mr. Graves. You know better than all that. How many people have you found so far who would listen to you?”

“Exactly one,” I told her.

“That would be the girl. You’re in love with her and she’s in love with you.”

I nodded.

“So, you see,” she said, “the only acceptance for your story has been emotional.”

“I suppose that you could say so.” I felt like an utter fool.

“So let’s be businesslike,” she said. “Let us say we’re giving you a chance to make the best bargain that you can. We’d not have approached you if you’d not known of us, but since you do, there’s nothing to be lost.”

“Bargain?” I asked stupidly.

“Why, of course,” she told me. “You’re in on—what do you call it? The ground floor; is that right?”

“But, perhaps, on a deal like this—”

“Listen, Mr. Graves. You must not have illusions. I suspect you do, but you must get rid of them. There is no way you can stop us. There’s nothing that can stop us. The operation has simply gone too far. There was a time, perhaps, when you could have stopped us. But not any longer. Believe me, Mr. Graves, it is far too late.”

“Since it is too late, why do you bother with me?”

“We have use of you,” she said. “There are certain things that you can do for us. The humans, once they know what is going on, are going to resent what is being done to them. Is that not right, Mr. Graves?”

“Sister,” I told her, “you don’t know the half of it.”

“But we, you understand, want to have o trouble. Or as little trouble as is possible. We feel that we stand on firm moral and legal ground, that we have abided by all the injunctions set up by your own society. We have violated none of the rules and we have no wish to be forced to go through a program of pacification. I am sure the humans would not want it, either, for it can become, I must assure you, very, very painful. We want to get this project finished and go on to something else. We want to terminate it as smoothly as lies within our power. And you can help us do that.”

“But why should I?”

“Mr. Graves,” she said, “you would beperforming a service, not for us alone, but for the human race as well. Anything that you can do to make this go smoothly for us would be of benefit to your people, too. For no matter what they do, their fate in the end will be the very same. There is no reason for them to be subjected to unnecessarily harrowing experiences to achieve that end. Consider this: you are an expert in mass communications“Not as expert as you think,” I said.

“But you know the methods and the techniques. You can write convincingly. . .”

“There are others who would be more convincing.”

“But, Mr. Graves, you are the one we have.”

I didn’t like the way she said it.

“What you want me to do,” I said, “is keep the people quiet. Keep them lulled asleep.”

“That, and any counsel you may have about how we should react in different situations. A consultative position, you might say.”

“But you know. You know as well as I do.”

“You are thinking, Mr. Graves, perhaps, that we have absorbed the human viewpoint in its entirety. That we can think as humans think and act as humans act. But this is simply not the case. We know what you call business, certainly. Perhaps you would agree that we know it rather thoroughly. We are well versed in your laws. But there are many areas we have not had the time to study. We know human nature only to a point—insofar as it reacts in the world of commerce. But we know it otherwise most imperfectly. We have no good idea how the humans will react when they learn the truth.”

“Cold feet?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t got cold feet. We are prepared to be as ruthless as may be necessary. But it would take time. We don’t want to take the time.”

“OK. So I write the stuff for you. What good would it do to write it? Who would publish it? How would you get it to the people?”

“Write it,” said this blond iceberg. “We’ll take it on from there. We’ll get it to the people. We’ll distribute it. That is not your worry.”

I was afraid. Perhaps a little angry. But mostly afraid. For not until this moment had I really realized the sheer implacability of these aliens. They were not vindictive and they were not hateful. They were scarcely an enemy in the sense we used the word. They were a malignant force and there was no pleading that would move them. They simply did not care. To them the Earth was no more than a piece of property and the humans less than nothing.

“You’re asking me,” I said, “to be a traitor to my race.”

Even as I said it, I was well aware that the term of traitor was meaningless to them. Recognized in its proper context, more than likely, but without a shred of meaning. For these things would not have the same kind of ethics as the human race; they would have another set of ethics, probably, but a set that would be as far beyond our comprehension as ours had been to them.

“Let’s think of it,” she said, “in practical terms. We’re giving you a choice. You either go along with the rest of humanity and share their common fate or you go along with us and fare a good deal better. If you decline, you will not hurt us greatly. If you accept, you’ll help yourself, to a great extent, and your fellow humans, perhaps to a somewhat less extent. You stand to gain and, believe me, the human race can’t lose.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your bargain?”

“A bargain is a bargain,” she said stiffly.

“You’ll pay well, I suppose.”

“Very well,” she said.

One of the bowling balls, coming out of nowhere I could see, rolled across the floor. It stopped about three feet from where I was sitting in the chair.

The girl got up from behind the desk and came around it. She stood at one corner of it, looking at the bowling ball.

The ball became striated—finely striated, like a diffraction grating. Then it began to split along all those tiny lines. It turned from black to green and split, and instead of a bowling ball, there was a little heap of money piled upon the floor.

I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t say a word.

She stooped and picked up a bill and handed it to me.

I looked at it. She waited. I looked at it some more.

“Well, Mr. Graves?” she said.

“It looks like money,” I told her.

“It is money. How else do you think we got all the money that we needed?”

“And you did it by the rules,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You broke one rule. The most important rule of all. Money is a measure of what one has done of the road he had built or the picture he had painted or the hours he has worked.”

“It’s money,” she said. “That is all that’s needed.”

She bent again and scooped up the entire pile of it. She put it on the desk and began to stack it.

There was no point, I knew, in trying to make her understand. She wasn’t being cynical. Or dishonest. It was a lack of understanding—an alien blind spot. Money was a product, not a symbol. It could be nothing else.

She made neat piles of it. She Stooped and picked up the few stray bills that had fluttered off the pile when she had picked it up. She put the stray bills on the pile.

The bill I had in my hand was a twenty, and a lot of the others seemed to be twenties, too, although there were some tens and a stray fifty here and there.

She stacked all the piles together and held it out to me.

“It’s yours,” she said.

“But I haven’t said—”

“Whether you work for us or not, it’s yours. And you’ll think about what I’ve been telling you.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

I stood up and took the money from her. I stuffed it in my pockets. The pockets bulged with it.

“There will come a day,” I said, patting the pockets, “when this stuff is no longer any good. There’ll be a time when there’ll be nothing one can buy with it.”

“When that day comes,” she said, “there will be something else. There’ll be whatever you may need.”

I stood there thinking, and the onlything that I could think about was that flow I had the money to pay the taxi driver. Except for that, my mind was a total blank. The enormity of this meeting had wiped me clean of everything except a total sense of loss—that and the fact that now I could pay the driver.

I had to get out of there, I knew. Had to leave this place before the flood of revulsion and emotion should come crashing down upon me. I had to leave while I still could leave with a numbed human dignity. I had to get away and find a place and the time to think. And until I did this thinking, I must appear to go along with them.

“I thank you, miss,” I said. “I don’t seem to know your name.”

“I haven’t got a name,” she told me. .. “There was never any reason I should have a name. Only ones like Atwood had to : have a name.”

“I thank you, then,” I said. “I will think it over.”

She turned and walked out of the room into the entry hall. There was no sign of the maid. Beyond the hall I saw that the living room was clean and shining and filled with furniture. And how much of it, I wondered, was really furniture, and how much of it was bowling balls changed into furniture?

I picked my coat and hat off the hall tree. She opened the front door.

“It was nice of you to come,” she said.

“It was very thoughtful. I trust you’ll come again.”

I walked out of the door and did not see my cab. In its place stood a long, white Cadillac.

“I had a cab,” I said. “It must be down the road.”

“We paid off the driver,” said the girl, “and sent him on his way. You will not need a cab.”

She saw my befuddlement.

“The car is yours,” she said. “If you’re to work with us—”

“With a built-in bomb?” I asked.

She sighed. “How do I make you understand? Let me put it brutally. So long as you can be useful to us, no harm will come to you. Perform this service for us and harm will never come to you. You’ll be taken care of as long as you may live.”

“And Joy Kane?” I asked.

“If you wish. Joy Kane as well.”

She looked at me with her icy eyes. “But try to stop us now, try to cross us now. . .”

She made a sound like a knife going through a throat.

I went down to the car.

At the edge of the city I stopped at a neighborhood shopping center and walked to a drugstore to buy a paper. I wanted to see if Gavin had been able to get his story about the missing bank funds.

I could tell him now, I knew, exactly what had happened. But, just like the others, he wouldn’t listen to me. I could walk into the office and sit down at my desk and write the greatest story the world had ever known. But it would be a waste of time to do it. It would not be published. It would be too ridiculous to publish. And even if it were published, no one would believe it. Or almost no one. A crackpot here and there. Not enough to count.

Before I got out of the car I riffled through the money in my jacket pocket to find a ten. dollar bill. I looked for a five and there weren’t any. And there weren’t any ones.

I wondered, as I riffled through it, how much money I might have. Not that it mattered greatly. Just curiosity.

For money in a few more weeks, perhaps I gave him the bill and he groused about in a few more days, would begin to lose its value. And a short time after that the value would be lost. It would be no more than so much worthless paper. You couldn’t eat j and you couldn’t wear it and it would not shelter you from the wind or weather. For it was no more—had never been more—than a tool devised by Man to carry out his peculiar system of culture and of life. It had no more significance, actually, than the notches on the gun butt or the crude marks chalked upon the wall. It had been no more, at any time, than sophisticated counters.

I walked into the drugstore and picked a paper off the pile on top of the cigar counter and there, staring out at me, all grins and full of happiness, was a picture of the Dog.

There could be no doubt about it. I’d have known him anywhere. He sat there, bubbling with good-fellowship, and behind him was the White House.

The headline beneath the picture was the clincher. It said:

TALKING DOG ARRIVES

TO VISIT PRESIDENT

“Mister,” said the clerk, “do you want that paper?”

I gave him the bill and he groused about it.

“That the smallest that you got?”

I told him that it was.

He gave me the change and I stuffed it and the paper in my pocket and went back to the car. I wanted to read the story, but for some reason I did not understand, or even try to understand, I wanted to get back to the car to do it, to where I could sit and read it without the possibility of someone disturbing me.

The story was cute, just a shade too cute.

It told about this dog that had come to see the President. He’d trotted through the gate before anyone could stop him and he’d tried to get into the White House, but the guards had shoved him out. He went reluctantly, trying to explain, in his doggish manner, that he wanted to make no trouble but would be very much obliged if he could see the President. He tried to get in a couple of more times, and finally the guards put in a call to the dogcatcher.

The catcher came and got the dog, who went along with him willingly enough, without apparent malice. And in a little while the catcher came back and the dog was with him. The catcher explained to the guards that maybe it would be a good idea if they did let the dog see the President. The dog, he said, had talked to him, explaining that it was most important he see the chief executive.

So the guards went to the phone again and in a little while someone came and got the dogcatcher and took him to a hospital, where he still was under observation. The dog was allowed to stay, however, and one of the guards explained to him most emphatically that it was ridiculous of him to expect to see the President.

He was, the story said, polite and well behaved. He sat outside the White House and didn’t bother anything. He didn’t even chase the squirrels on the White House lawn.

“This reporter,” said the story, “tried to talk with him. We asked him several questions, but he never said a word. He just grinned at us.”

And there he was, in the picture on page one, just as big as life—a shaggy, friendly bum that no one for a moment would think of taking seriously.

But, perhaps, I thought, you couldn’t blame the newsman who had written that story or any of the rest of them, for there was nothing quite so outrageous as a shaggy dog that talked. And, perhaps, when you came to think of it, it was no whit more ridiculous than a bunch of bowling balls about to grab the Earth.

If the threat had been bloody or spectacular, then it could be comprehended. But, as it stood, it was neither, and all the more deadly because of that very fact.

Stirling had talked about a nonenvironmental being, and that was what these aliens were. They could adapt to anything; they could assume any sort of shape; they could assimilate and use to their own advantage any kind of thinking; they could twist to their own purposes any economic, political, or social system. They were things that were completely flexible; they could adapt to any condition which might be brought about to fight them.

And it could be, I told myself, that we were not facing here many bowling balls but one giant organism that could divide and split itself into many forms for many purposes, while still remaining its single self, aware of all the things its many parts were doing.

How do you thwart a thing like that? I asked myself. How do you stand against it?

Although, even if it should be one great organism, there were certain facets to it which were hard of explanation. Why had the girl without a name, instead of Atwood, been waiting for me at the Belmont house?

We knew nothing of them and there was no time to know anything of them, or it, whichever it might be. And such a knowledge was something one must have, for surely the life and culture of this enemy must be as complex and as peculiar in its many ways as the human culture.

They could become anything at all. They could see, apparently, in some restricted sense, into future happenings. And they were in ambush and would stay in ambush as long as they were able. Was it possible, I wondered, that mankind could go crashing to its death without ever knowing what had caused its death?

And I, myself, I wondered—what was I to do?

It would have been no more than human to have thrown the money in their faces, to have hurled defiance at them. It would, perhaps, have been an easy thing to do. Although, I remembered, at the time I had been so numb with fear that I’d been able to do nothing of the sort.

And, I realized with a start, I thought of them as them, not as him or her, not as Atwood, not as the girl who had no name because she’d never needed one. And did that mean, I wondered, that their human guise was thinner than it seemed?

I folded the paper and laid it on the seat beside me and slid beneath the wheel.

This was not the time for grand heroics. It was a time a man did what he could, no matter how it seemed. If, by pretending to go along with them, I could gain some fact, some insight, some hint that would help the humans, then, perhaps, that was the thing to do. And if it ever came to a point where I had to write the alien propaganda, might it not escape them if I wrote into it something that they had not intended and might not recognize but that would be crystal-clear to the human readers?

I started the engine and put the car in gear and the car slid out into the stream of traffic. It was a good car. It was the finest thing I had ever driven. In spite of where it came from, in spite of everything, I felt proud of driving it.

Back at the motel, Quinn’s car still was parked in front of his unit, and now there were two other cars parked in front of other units. Soon, I knew, the motel would be full. People would drive in and say to other people there how do you go about getting lodging here. And the people there would say you use a crowbar or sledgehammer and they might even, then, produce a bar or hammer and help them to break in. For the moment, at least, people would stick together. In adversity, they’d help one another. It only would be later that they would fall apart, each one on his own. And later, after that perhaps, come back together, knowing once again that human strength lay in unity.

When I got out of the car, Quinn came out of his unit and walked over to meet me.

“That’s quite a car you have,” he said.

“Belongs to a friend of mine,” I told him. “Get a good night’s sleep?”

He grinned. “Best in weeks. And the wife is happy. It isn’t very much, of course, but it’s the best we’ve had in a good long time.”

“See we have some neighbors.”

He nodded. “They came in and asked. I told them. I went out and got a gun, the way you told me. Felt a little foolish, but it won’t hurt to have it. Wanted a rifle, but all I could get was a shotgun. Just as well, I imagine. I’m no dead eye with a rifle.”

“All you could get?” I asked.

“Went to three hardware stores. All of them were out. Went to a fourth and they had this shotgun. So I bought it.”

So the guns, I thought, were being bought. Soon, perhaps, there’d not be any to be had. Other frightened people who felt a little safer if they could reach out their hand and pick up a weapon.

He looked down at the ground and scrubbed a pattern with the toe of his shoe.

“Funny thing happened,” he said. “I haven’t told the wife about it because it might upset her. Drove out to get some groceries and went out of my way to go past our house—the one we sold, I mean. First time I had driven past it since we left it. Neither had my wife. She told me several times she wanted to but didn’t, because it would make her feel too bad. But, anyhow, I drove past it today. And there it was—empty, like we moved out of it. Even in this short a time beginning to look shabby. They made us get out of it a month ago and they haven’t moved in yet. They said they needed it. They said they had to have it. But they didn’t need it. What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I could have told him. Maybe I should have told him. I know I wanted to. For he might have believed what I had to tell him. He had taken weeks of punishment, he was softened up, he was ready to believe. And, God knows, I needed someone to believe me—someone who could huddle with me in a little pit of fear and misery.

But I didn’t tell him, for it would have served no purpose. At the moment, at least, he was far happier not knowing. Now he still had hope, for he could ascribe all that had happened to an economic malady. A malady that he could not understand of course, but a misadjustment that lay within a familiar framework and one that Man could cope with.

But this other—the true—explanation of it would have left him without hope and facing the unknowable. And that would spell pure panic.

If I could have made a million people understand, then it would have been all right, for out of that million there would have been a few who would have viewed it calmly and objectively and given leadership. But to tell it to a little puddle of people in a single city had no point at all.

“It makes no sense,” said Quinn. “The whole thing makes no sense. I’ve laid awake at night to get it figured out and there’s no way to figure it. But that’s notthe reason I came out. We would like to have you and the wife eat dinner with us. It won’t be too much, but we have a roast and I could fix a drink or two. We could sit and talk.”

“Mr. Quinn,” I said, “Joy is not my wife. We are just two people who got sort of thrown together.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry. I had just presumed she was. It really makes no difference. I hope you’re not embarrassed.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“And you will eat with us?”

“Some other time,” I said. “But thank you very much. I may have a lot to do.”

He stood there and looked at me. “Graves,” he said, “there’s something that you haven’t told me. Something about this business you said the other night. You said it was the same all over, that there was no place to run. How did you know that?”

“I’m a newspaperman,” I told him. “I’m working on a story.”

“And you do know something.”

“Not very much,” I said.

He waited and I didn’t tell him. He flushed and turned around. “Be seeing you,” he said, and went back to his unit.

I didn’t blame him any. I felt like a heel myself.

I went into the unit and there was no one there. Joy was still at the office. Gavin, more than likely, had found things for her to do.

I took the greater part of the money out of my pockets and hid it underneath the mattress on my bed. Not too imaginative or too good a place, but no one knew I had it and I wasn’t worried. I had to put it somewhere. I couldn’t leave it lying out where anyone could see it.

I picked up the rifle and took it out and put it in the car.

Then I did something I’d been intending to do ever since I’d left the Belmont place.

I went over the car. I went over all of it. I lifted the hood and checked the motor. I crawled beneath it and checked it entirely out. There wasn’t a part of it I failed to examine.

And when I had finished, there could be no doubt.

It was what it was supposed to be. It was an expensive but entirely ordinary car. There was nothing different. There wasn’t a thing left out or a thing put on. There was no bomb, no malfunctioning that I could find. It wasn’t, I could swear, some-

thing fashioned by the artistry of a bunch of bowling balls that had clubbed together to simulate a car. It was honest steel and glass and chrome.

I stood beside it and patted the fender and wondered what I should do next.

And maybe the thing to do, I thought, was to put in another call for Senator Roger Hill. When you get sobered up, he’d said, call me back again. If you still have something to tell me, call me back tomorrow.

And I was sober and I still had something to tell him.

I was pretty sure what he would say, but still I had to call him.

I headed for the little restaurant to call the senator.

“Parker,” said the senator, “I am glad you called.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you will listen to me now.”

“Certainly,” said the senator in that oily way of his, “if you don’t insist on that cock and bull about invading aliens.”

“But, Senator. . .”

“I don’t mind telling you,” said the senator, “that there’ll be hell to pay look, you know, of course, I’m talking off the record.”

“I guessed that,” I told him. “When you come up with something interesting, it’s always off the record.”

“Well, there’ll be hell to pay come Monday morning when the market opens. We don’t know what’s happened, but the banks are short of money. Not one bank, mind you, but damn near every bank. There’s not a one of them that can get its cash to balance. Every bank right now has its people in on overtime to find out where all that cash went to. But that is not the worst of it.”

“What is the worst of it?”

“That money,” said the senator. “There was too much of it to start with. A way too much of it. You take the cash on hand as of Friday morning and add it up and there is more of it, a good deal more of it, than there had any right to be. There isn’t that much money, I tell you, Parker, in the whole United States.”

“But it’s not there any more.”

“No,” said the senator, “it’s not there anymore. The money, so far as we can figure out, is back to somewhere near the figure one would expect to see.”

I waited for him to go on, and in the little silence I heard him take a deep breath, as if he were strangling for air.

“Something else,” he said. “There are rumors. Just all sorts of rumors. A new one every hour. And you can’t check them out.,,

“What kind of rumors?”

He hesitated; then he said: “Remember, off the record.”

“Sure, it’s off the record.”

“There’s one rumor that someone, no one knows quite who, has grabbed control of U. S. Steel and a slew of other corporations.”

“Same people?”

“God, Parker, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of it or not. You hear one rumor one minute and there’s another one the next.”

He paused a moment; then he asked:

“Parker, what do you know about this?”

I could have told him what I knew, but I knew it wasn’t smart to do it. He’d just get sore and chew me out and that would be the end of it.

“I can tell you what to do,” I said. “What you have to do.”

“I hope it’s a good idea.”

“Pass a law,” I said.

“If we passed every law—”

“A law,” I said, “outlawing private ownership. Every sort of private ownership. Make it so that no one can own a foot of ground, an industrial plant, an ounce of ore, a house—”

“Are you crazy!” yelled the senator. “You can’t pass that kind of law. You can’t even think about it.”

“And while you’re at it, dream up a substitute for money.”

The senator sputtered without making any words.

“Because,” I said, “the way it is, the aliens are buying up the Earth. If you leave it as it is, they will own the Earth.”

The senator got his voice back.

“Parker,” he yelled, “you are off your rocker. I have never heard such damn foolishness as this in all my life and I’ve heard a lot of it.”

“If you don’t believe me, go and ask the Dog.”

“What the hell has a dog got to do with this? What dog?”

“The one down at the White House. Waiting to get in and see the President.”

“Parker,” he snapped, “don’t call me again. I have enough on my mind without listening to you I don’t know what you’re trying to do. But don’t call me again. If this is a joke—”

“It’s not a joke,” I said.

“Good-bye, Parker,” said the senator.

“Good-bye, Senator,” I said.

I hung up the receiver and stood in the little cubicle, trying to think.

It all was utterly hopeless, I knew. The senator had been, from the start, the only hope I had. He was the only man I knew in public office who had imagination, but I guess not enough imagination to listen to what I had to tell him.

I had done my best, I thought, and it had been no good. Perhaps if I’d done it differently, if I’d gone about it differently, it might have worked out better. But a man could say that about anything he did. And there was no way of knowing. It was done now and there was no way of knowing.

There was nothing now that could stop what the aliens had begun. And it apparently was coming sooner than I thought. Monday morning would bring a panic in Wall Street and the economy would start to fall apart. The first crack in our financial structure would begin on the trading floor and would go fast from there. In the space of one week’s time, the world would be in chaos.

And more than likely, I thought, with a cold chill down my spine, the aliens knew what I had done. It was inconceivable that they’d not be somehow tied in with the communications systems. They would know I’d called the senator even as I was supposed to be considering their offer.

It was something I’d not thought of. There were too many things to think of. But even if I’d thought of t, I still probably would have put in the call.

Perhaps it would make no great difference to them. Maybe they had expected that I’d flounder around a bit before I agreed to take the job they’d offered. And thus the call, by once again demonstrating to me the impossibility of what I was trying to accomplish, might, to their way of thinking, bind me closer to them, convinced finally that there was no way in which one might resist them.

Were there other things to do? Other approaches that a man might take? Was there anything a man could do at all?

I could call the President, or I could try to call him. I didn’t kid myself. I knew how little chance there’d be for me to talk with him. Especially at a time like this, when the President had the greatest burden any man in office had faced since the beginning of the nation.

See the Dog, I’d tell him, when and if I got him on the line. See the Dog that’s waiting out there for you.

It wouldn’t work. There was no way to make it work.

I was beat, hands down. I’d never had a . chance. There’d be no one who had a chance.

I found a dime and fed it into the slot.

I dialed the office and asked for Joy.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Everything’s just fine. When are you coming home?”

“I don’t know,” she said angrily. “This damn Gavin, he finds more things to do.”

“Just walk out on him.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Well, all right, then. Where do you want to eat tonight? Think of an expensive place. I’m loaded.”

“How come you are loaded? I have your check right here. I picked it up for you.”

“Joy, believe me, I have wads of cash. Where do you want to eat?”

“Let’s not go out,” she said. “Let us cook a meal. The restaurants are so crowded.”

“Steaks? What else? I’ll go out and get it.,’

She told me what else.

I went out to get it.

I came back to the car, packing one of those oversize grocery bags filled with all the stuff Joy had ticked off for me.

The car was far down the line in the supermarket parking lot and the bag was heavy and packed rather sloppily and there were a couple of cans, one of corn and another one of peaches, that had started to tear a hole in the bottom of the bag and were trying to get out.

I padded across the lot, walking carefully so as not to joggle the bag more than necessary, clutching it desperately with both hands in an earnest attempt to keep it from breaking up entirely.

I reached the car without disaster but on the very verge of it. By a process of contortionist acrobatics I got the front door open and dumped the bag onto the seat. It came apart then, spilling all the groceries into a jumbled heap. I used both hands to shove the mess to the other side so I could get underneath the wheel.

I suppose that if I’d not been having so much trouble with the bag of groceries, I’d have noticed it at once, but I didn’t see it until I had gotten in and was reaching out to insert the key in the ignition lock.

And there it was, a sheet of paper, folded to make a tent and propped above the instrument panel and against the windshield. Across the sheet had been printed in large block letters the single word “STINKER!”

I had leaned forward to put the key into the lock and I stayed leaning forward, staring at the paper and its one-word message.

I didn’t even have to guess who might have put it there. There was no doubt in my mind. It was almost as if I knew, as if I’d seen them put it there—some pseudo- human, some agglomeration of the bowling balls that had made themselves into a human form, telling me they knew I had called the senator, telling me they knew I would double-cross them if I had the chance. Not angry with me, perhaps, not particularly disturbed at what I’d done, but disgusted with me, perhaps—perhaps disappointed in me. Something just to let me know they were on to me and that I was not getting away with anything.

I shoved the key into the lock and started the engine. I reached out and got the paper and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it out the window. If they were watching me, and I figured that they were, that would let them know what I thought of them.

Childish? Sure, it was. I just didn’t give a damn. There was nothing left to give a damn about.

Three blocks down the street, I noticed the car. It was just an ordinary car, black and medium-priced. I don’t know why I noticed it. There was nothing unusual about it. It was the kind of car, the age, the make, the color you saw a hundred times a day.

Perhaps the answer is that I would have noticed any car that pulled in behind me.

I went two more blocks and it still trailed f along behind. I made a couple of turns and it still was there.

There was little question that it was tailing me, and a clumsy job of tailing. I headed out of town and it followed still, half a block behind. Not caring, I thought, not even trying to hide the fact that it was following. Wanting me to know perhaps, that I was being followed, just keeping on the pressure.

I wondered, as I drove, whether I should even bother to shake this follower. There didn’t seem to be any particular reason that I should. Even if I shook him, it might make little difference. There wasn’t much, I told myself, to be gained by it. They had monitored my call to the senator. More than likely they knew my base of operations, if you could so dignify it. Without much question, they knew exactly where to find me if they ever wanted me.

But there might be some small advantage, I told myself, if I could make them think that I didn’t know all this. It was a good, cheap way of playing dumb, for whatever that was worth.

I reached the city limits and hit one of the west highways and let out the car a bit. I gained on my pursuer, but not by very much.

Ahead the road curved up a hill, with a sharper curve starting at the top. Leading off the curve, I remembered, was a country road. There was little traffic, and maybe, if I were lucky, I could duck into the side road and be out of sight before the black car cleared the curve.

I gained a little on him on the hill and put on a burst of speed when he was hidden by the curve. The road ahead was clear, and as I reached the side road I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel hard over. The car hugged the ground like a crouching animal. The rear wheels started to skid a bit, squealing on the pavement; then I was into the country road and straightened out and pouring on the gas.

The road was hilly, one steep incline and then another, with sharp dips between them. And at the top of the third of them glancing up at the rear-vision mirror, I saw the black car topping the second hill behind.

It was a shock. Not that it meant so awfully much, but I had been so sure I had shaken him that it was a solid blow at my confidence.

It angered me as well. If that little pip- squeak back there .

Then I saw the trail. It was, I suppose an old wagon road of some years ago choked with weeds and with the branches of a grove of trees hanging down to shield it, as if the very branches were trying to hide the faint trace that was left.

I turned the car’s wheel sharply and went bumping over the shallow ditch. The overhanging branches blotted out the windshield and screeched against the metal of the body.

I drove blind, with the tires bouncing in the old, almost obliterated ruts. Finally I stopped and got out. The branches hung low on the track behind, and it was unlikely that the car could be seen by anyone passing on the road.

I grinned in minor triumph.

This time, I was sure, I had put one over.

I waited, and the black car topped the hill and came roaring down the road. In the silence of the afternoon, it made a lot of noise. It didn’t have too far more to run before it would need a major overhaul.

It went on down the hill; then there was a screech of brakes. They kept on screeching for some time before the car came to a halt.

Licked again, I thought. Somehow or other, they knew that I was here.

So they wanted to play rough. So if that was the way they wanted it, that was the way they’d have it.

I opened the front door and reached into the back to pick up the rifle. I swung it in my hand, and the weight and heft of it had an assuring feel. For a moment I wondered just how much good the rifle might be against a thing like this; then I remembered how Atwood had come apart when I’d reached for the pistol in my pocket and how the car on the road up north had gone rolling down the hillside when I’d opened fire on it.

Rifle in hand, I cat-footed down the trail. If the follower should come hunting me—and certainly he would—it would never do to let him find me where he thought I was.

I moved through a hushed and silent world, redolent with the scent of autumn. Crimson-leafed vines looped above the trail, and there was a constant rain of frost- tinted leaves, falling gently and slowly, running a slow-paced maze through the branches of the grove. Except for a slight rustling as my feet scuffed against a dry leaf here and there, walking was quiet. Years of fallen leaves and growing moss made a carpet that deadened every noise.

I came to the edge of the grove and crept along it to reach the top of the hill. I found a flaming sumac bush and squatted down behind it. The bush still held its full quota of glossy red leaves and I was in splendid ambush.

Below me the hill swept down toward a tiny stream, no more than a trickle of water that ran down the fold between the hills. The grove curved in toward the road, and below it was a brown expanse of hillside covered by high, dry weeds, with here and there the flaming fire of another sumac cluster.

The man came down the creek, then started up the long slope of hill, heading straight toward me, almost as if he knew I was hiding there behind the bush. He was an undistinguished-looking customer, a man walking with a slight stoop to his shoulders, with an old felt hat pulled down around his ears, and dressed in some sort of a black suit that even from that distance I could see was shabby.

He came straight toward me, not looking up. As if he were pretending he didn’t see me, had no idea I was anywhere around. He moved at a shambling gait, and not very fast, plodding up the hill, with his eyes bent on the ground.

I brought up the gun and poked the barrel through the scarlet leaves. I held it steady on my shoulder and put the sights on the bent-down head of the man who climbed the hill.

He stopped. As if he knew the rifle had been pointed at him, he stopped and his head came up and swiveled on his neck. He straightened and he stiffened, and then he changed his course, angling across the hillside toward a little swale that was grown high with weeds.

I lowered the rifle, and as I did I caught the first edge of the tainted air.

I sniffed to be certain what I smelled, and there was no mistaking it. There was an irate skunk somewhere, down there on the hillside.

I grinned. It served him right, I thought. It served the damn fool right.

He was plunging, moving rapidly now, through the patch of waist-high weeds, down toward the swale, and then he disappeared.

I rubbed my eyes and had another look and still he wasn’t there.

He might have stumbled and fallen in the weeds, I told myself, but there was the haunting feeling I’d seen it all before. I had seen it in the basement of the Belmont house. Atwood had been there, sitting in the chair, and in an instant the chair had been empty and the bowling balls had been rolling on the floor.

I had not seen it happen. I had not looked away. I could not have missed its happening and yet I had. Atwood had been there one moment and the next there’d been the bowling balls.

And this was what had happened here, in the bright sunshine of an autumn afternoon. One moment a man had been walking through the weeds and then he’d not been walking. He was nowhere to be seen.

I stood up cautiously, with the rifle held at ready, and peered down the hillside.

There was nothing to be seen except the waving weeds, and it was only in that one spot, in that spot where the man had disappeared, that the weeds were waving. All else on the entire hillside was standing deathly still.

The scent of skunk came stronger to my nostrils, drifting up the hill.

And there was something damned funny going on.

The weeds were waving wildly, as if there were something thrashing in them, but there was no sound. There was no sound at all.

I moved down the hill, with the rifle still at ready.

And suddenly there was something in my pocket, fighting to get out. As if a mouse or rat had sneaked into my pocket and now was trying to get free.

I made a wild grab at the pocket, but even as I did the thing came out of it. It was a tiny ball of black, like one of those small, soft rubber balls they give tiny kids to play with.

It popped out of my pocket and dodged my grasping fingers and fell into the grass, squirming madly through the grass,

heading for that place where the weeds were waving.

I stood and watched it go and wondered what it was. And all at once I knew. It was the money. It was that part of the money I still had in my pocket—the money I had been given at the Belmont house.

Now it had changed back into what it had been before and was hurrying toward the place where that other thing, the one shaped like a man, had suddenly disappeared.

I gave a yell and ran toward the weeds, throwing aside all caution.

For there was something going on and I must find out what it was.

The scent of skunk was almost overpowering and, despite myself, I started veering off, and then I saw out of the corner of my eye what was going on.

I stopped and stared, not quite understanding.

There were bowling balls down there in the weeds, gamboling wildly and ecstatically and with complete abandon. They spun and rolled and leaped into the air.

And up out of that patch of weeds rose the nauseating eye-watering, spine-tingling smell left by a passing skunk that something had disturbed.

It was more than I could stand. I retreated, gagging.

Running for the car, I knew, in something less than triumph, that at last I’d found a chink in the bowling balls’ almost perfect armor.

They liked perfume, the Dog had said. Once they had seized the Earth, they would barter it for a consignment of perfumes. It was the thing they lived for; it was their one and only source of pleasure. It was the thing they valued beyond all else.

And here on Earth, on a weedy swale running down an autumn hillside, they’d found one that they liked. For there was no other way in which one could interpret their ecstatic gamboling. And one, apparently, that had a strong enough appeal to force them to give up whatever purpose they might have held in mind.

I got into the car and backed it out onto the road and drove back toward the main highway.

Apparently the bowling balls, I thought, had not found the other perfumes of Earth worth particular attention, but they’d gone crazy on the skunk. And while it made no sense to me, I suppose that, naturally, it must make some sort of sense to a bowling ball.

There must be a way, I told myself, that the human race could use the newfound knowledge to advantage, some way in which we could cash in on this matter of the bowling balls’ love affair with skunks.

I remembered back to the day before when Gavin had put Joy’s story about the skunk farm on page one. But the skunks in that particular instance had been different kinds of skunks.

I thought around in circles, and all the thinking came to nothing. And, I thought at last, how infuriating it would be if this one sign of the alien’s weakness could not serve some human purpose.

For it was, so far as I could see, the only chance we had. In every other department, they had us licked without a chance of recourse.

But if there were a way to use this thing we had, I couldn’t think of one. If there had been other people, if there had been more than myself alone, I might have thought of something. But, except for Joy, there wasn’t anyone.

I reached the outskirts of the city, and I’m afraid I wasn’t paying the attention that I should have to my driving. I hit a stoplight and sat there thinking and didn’t see the light change.

The first I knew of it was when a cab shot past me, with the irate driver leaning out.

“Knothead!” he yelled at me. There were some other things he said, probably worse than knothead, that I didn’t catch, and the other cars behind me began an angry honking.

I got out of there.

But now I knew, I thought. Now there was a way. Well, maybe not a way, but at least an idea.

I searched my memory all the way back to the motel and the memory finally came—the name of that other cabdriver, the one who had talked so enthusiastically about hunting coons.

I drove into the courtyard and parked before the unit and sat there for a while trying to get it figured out.

Then I got out of the car and walked to the restaurant. In the phone booth, I hunted up the name of Larry Higgins and dialed the number.

A woman’s voice answered and I asked for Larry. I waited while she went to call him.

“This is Higgins speaking.”

“Maybe you remember me,” I said, “and again you mightn’t. I’m the man you took to the Wellington Arms last night. You were telling me about hunting coons.”

“Mister, I tell everyone who’ll listen about hunting coons. It’s a passion with me, see.”

“But you didn’t just tell me. We talked about it. I told you I hunted ducks and pheasant and you asked me to go coon hunting sometime. You told me—”

“Hey, there,” he said, “I remember now. Sure, I remember you. I picked you up outside a bar. But I can’t go hunting tonight. I got to work tonight. You were lucky just to catch me in, I was about to leave.”

“But I don’t—”

“Some other night, though. Tomorrow will be Sunday. How’s Sunday night? Or Tuesday. I’ll be off on Tuesday night. It’s more fun, I tell you, mister—”

“But I didn’t call you about hunting.”

“You mean you don’t want to go? I tell you, once you’ve done it—”

“Sure, some night,” I told him. “Some night real soon. I’ll call you and we’ll fix a time.”

“OK, then. Call me any time.”

He was ready to hang up and I had to hurry. “But there was this other thing. You were telling me about this old man who had a way with skunks.”

“Yeah, that old geezer is a caution. Honest, I tell you—”

“Could you tell me how to find him?”

“Find him?”

“Yes. How can I get to his place?”

“You want to see him, huh?”

“Sure, I’d like to see him. I’d like to talk with him.”

“What you want to talk about?”

“Well . .

“Look, it’s this way. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. He’s a nice old guy. I wouldn’t want no one bothering him. He’s the kind of fellow other folks could poke a lot of fun at.”

“You told me,” I said, “that he was trying to write a book.”

“Yeah, I told you that.”

“And he’s getting no place with it. You told me that yourself. You said it was a shame, that he had a book to write but he’d never get it done. Well, I’m a writer and I got to thinking that maybe with a little help . . .”

“You mean that you would help him?”

“Not for free,” I said.

“He hasn’t nothing he could pay you.”

“He wouldn’t have to pay me anything. I could write the book for him, if he’s got a book. Then we could split the money we got out of the book.”

Higgins considered for a moment. “Well, that should be all right. He won’t never get a cent the way he’s going at that book. He sure could use some help.”

“OK, then, how do I find the place?”

“I could take you out some night.”

“I want to see him now if I can. I’ll be leaving town tomorrow.”

“All right, then. I guess it is all right. You got a pencil and some paper?”

I told him that I had.

“His name is Charley Munz, but people call him Windy. You go out Highway 12 and...”

I wrote down the directions as he gave them to me.

I thanked him when he had finished.

“Call me some other time,” he said, “and we’ll fix up some hunting.”

I told him that I would.

I found another dime and called the office. Joy still was there.

“Did you get the groceries, Parker?”

I told her that I had but that I had to leave again. “I’ll put the groceries inside,” I said. “Did you notice—was the refrigerator working?”

“I think so,” she said. Then she asked, “Where are you going, Parker? You sound worried. What is going on?”

“I’m going to see a man about some skunks.”

She thought I was kidding her about the story she had written and she got sore about it.

“Nothing of the sort,” I told her. “I mean it. There’s an old man by the name of Munz up the river valley. He’s probably the only man in the world who makes pets of unadulterated skunks.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “A gabby cabdriver ‘ by the name of Larry Higgins told me all about it.”

“Parker,” she said, “you’re up to some thing. You went out to the Belmont house. Did something happen there?”

“Not much. They made me an offer and I said I’d think it over.”

“Doing what?”

“Their press agent. I guess you’d call it that.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m scared,” she told me. “More scared than I was last night. I tried to talk to Gavin about it and I tried to talk with Dow. But I couldn’t force myself to. What’s the sense of talking? No one would believe us.”

“Not a soul,” I said.

“I’m coming home. In just a little while. I don’t care what Gavin finds for me to do; I’m going to leave here. You won’t be gone for long, will you?”

“Not for long,” I promised. “I’ll put the groceries in the unit and you get dinner started.”

We said good-bye and I walked back to the car.

I lugged the groceries into the unit and put the milk and butter and some other stuff in the refrigerator. The rest I left sitting on the table. Then I dug out the rest of the money I had hidden and crammed my pockets with it.

And having done all that, I went to see the old man about his skunks.

I parked down at the end of the farmer’s yard, the way Higgins had told me to do, off to one side of the gate that led down to the barns, so I wouldn’t block the way if someone wanted to come through. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, but a smiling, tail-waving, nondescript farm dog came out to bounce around in an unofficial welcome.

I patted him and talked to him a little and he went along with me when I went through the gate and walked through the barnyard. But at the wire gap which led into a field of clover, I told him to go back. I didn’t want to take him down to the old man’s shack and have him upset a bunch of friendly skunks.

He wanted to argue with me. He indicated that it would be nice the two of us going out into the field, adventuring together. But I insisted that he go back and I paddled his rump to emphasize my words and he finally went, looking back over his shoulder to see if I might possibly relent.

When he was gone, I went across the field, following the rutted wagon road which showed faintly through the stand of Clover. Late-fall grasshoppers went scuttering out of the hay as I strode along, making angry whirring noises as they scudded up the field.

I reached the end of the field and went through another wire gap, still following the wagon traces through heavily timbered pasture. The sun was westering and the place was filled with shadows and down in the hollow some squirrels were holding carnival, scampering in the fallen leaves and shinnying up the trees.

The road plunged down the hillside and went across the hollow and up the other slope, perched below a great rock ledge that punched out of the hillside, I came upon the cabin and the man I sought.

The old man sat in a rocking chair, an old, rickety chair, that creaked and groaned as if it were about to fall apart. The chair rested on a little area that had been leveled off and paved with native limestone slabs that the old man probably had quarried and hauled up the hill from the dry stream bed that twisted down the valley. A dirty sheepskin pelt had been thrown over the back of the chair and the skinned-out forelegs swayed like tassels as he rocked.

“Good evening, stranger,” said the old man, unperturbed and calm, as if a stranger dropping in on him were an occurrence of every afternoon. I realized that I probably was no surprise to him, that he had watched me angle down the hillside along the wagon track and come across the valley. He could have watched me all the way and I had been unaware of him, since I did not know where to look to find him.

For now I realized for the first time how the shack blended into the hillside and the rock outcropping as if it were as much a part of this wooded pasture landscape as the trees and rocks. It was low and not too large and the logs of which it had been built had weathered until they were a neutral tone that had no color in them. A washstand stood beside the door. A tin washbasin and a bucket of water, with the handle of a dipper protruding from it, stood upon the bench. Beyond the bench was a pile of firewood, and the blade of a double-bitted ax was stuck in a chopping block.

“You are Charley Munz?” I asked.

The old man said: “That is who I am. How’d you make out to find me?”

“Larry Higgins told me.”

He bobbed his head, “Higgins is a good man. If Larry Higgins told you, I guess you are all right.”

At one time he’d been a big man, but he’d been whittled down by age. His shirt hung loose upon a heavy pair of shoulders and his trousers were rumpled with the unfilled look characteristic of old men. He was bare-headed, but his iron-gray hair made it look as if he wore a cap, and he had a short and somewhat untidy beard. I could not make up my mind whether he meant it to be a beard or if he simply hadn’t shaved for weeks.

I told him who I was and said I was interested in skunks and knew about his book.

“It sounds,” he said, “as if you’d like to squat and talk awhile.”

“If it’s all right with you.”

He got out of the chair and headed for the shack.

“Sit down,” he said. “If you’re going to stay awhile, sit down.”

I looked around, too obviously, I fear, for a place to sit.

“In the chair,” he said. “I got it warm for you. I’ll pull up a block of wood. Do me a world of good. I been sitting comfortable all the afternoon.”

He ducked into the shack and I sat downin the chair. I felt a heel at doing it, but he’d have been offended, I suppose, if I hadn’t done it.

The chair was comfortable and I could look across the valley and it was beautiful. The ground was paved with fallen leaves that still had not lost their colors and there were a few trees that still stood in tattered dress. A squirrel ran along a fallen log and stopped at the end of it, to sit there, looking at me. He jerked his tail a few times, but he wasn’t scared.

It was beautiful and calm and peaceful with a quietness that I had not known for years. I could understand how the old man could have sat there comfortable through the golden afternoon. There was a lot to rest one’s eyes on. I felt the peace descend upon me and the calmness running through me and I wasn’t even startled when the skunk came waddling around the corner of the shack.

The skunk stopped and stared at me, with one dainty forepaw lifted, but a moment later proceeded up the yard, walking very slowly and sedately. It wasn’t, I suppose, a particularly big one, but it looked big to me, and I was careful to keep on sitting quietly; I didn’t move a muscle.

The old man came out of the shack. He had a bottle in his hand.

He saw the skunk and cackled into delighted laughter.

“Gave you a scare, I bet!”

“Just for a moment,” I told him. “But I sat still and it didn’t seem to mind.”

“This here is Phoebe,” he said. “A confounded nuisance. No matter where you go, she’s always underfoot.”

He kicked a block over from the woodpile and upended it. He sat down on it ponderously and uncorked the bottle, then handed it to me.

“Talking gets one thirsty,” he declared, “and I ain’t had no one to drink with in a month of Sundays. I take it, Mr. Graves, that you’re a drinking man.”

I’m afraid I almost lapped my chops. I hadn’t had a drink all day and I had been so busy I hadn’t even thought of it, but now I knew I needed one.

“I’ve been known to drink, Mr. Munz,” I said. “I will not turn it down.”

I tilted up the bottle and took a modest slug. It wasn’t topnotch whiskey, but it tasted good. I wiped the bottle’s neck on my sleeve and passed it over to him. He had a moderate drink and passed it back to me.

Phoebe, the skunk, came over to him and stood up and put her forepaws on his knees. He reached down a hand and boosted her up into his lap. She settled down in it.

I watched, fascinated, and so far forgot myself as to take a couple of drinks, one atop the other, getting one up on my host.

I handed back the bottle and he sat there with it in one hand, while with the other he scratched the skunk underneath its chin.

“I’m glad to have you come,” he said, “for any reason or for none at all. I’m not the lonesome sort and I get along all right, but even so the face of a fellowman is a welcome sight. But you got something in your craw. You came here for a reason. You want to get it off your chest.”

I looked at him for a moment and I made the big decision. It went against all reason and everything that I had planned to do. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe the peacefulness that rested on that hillside, maybe the calmness of the old man and the comfort of the chair, maybe a lot of different things had a hand in it. If I’d taken time to think it over, I doubt I would have done it. But something inside of me, something in the afternoon, told me I should do it.

“I lied to Higgins to get him to tell me the way out here,” I said. “I told him that I wanted to help you write your book. But I’m through with lying now. One lie is enough. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ll tell you the story just exactly as it stands.”

The old man looked a little puzzled. “Help me with my book? You mean about the skunks?”

“I’ll still help you, after all of this is over, if you want me to.”

“I guess it’s only fair to say that I could use some help. But that’s not the reason you are here?”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

He took a deep drink and handed me the bottle. I took another drink myself.

“All right, friend,” he said, “I’m settled and all ears. Get about your telling.”

“When I get started,” I pleaded, “don’t break in and stop me. Let me tell it to the end. Then you can ask your questions.”

“I’m a good listener,” said the old man, cuddling the bottle, which I had handed back to him, and petting the skunk.

“You may find it hard to believe.”

“Leave that up to me,” he said. “Just go ahead and tell me.” So I went ahead and told him. I did the best job that I could, but I was honest about it. I told it just the way it happened and I told him what I knew and what I had conjectured and how no one would listen to me, for which I didn’t blame them. I told him about Joy and Stirling, about the Old Man and the senator and about the insurance executive who couldn’t find a place to live. I didn’t leave out a single thing. I told him all of it.

I quit talking and there was a silence. While I had talked the sun had disappeared and the woods had filled with the haze of dusk. A little wind had come up and it was a chilly wind and there was the heavy smell of fallen leaves hanging in the air.

I sat there in the chair and thought what a fool I’d been. I had thrown away my chance by telling him the truth. There were other ways I could have gone about getting him to do what I wanted done. But, no, I’d had to do it the hard way, the honest way and truthful.

I sat and waited. I’d listen to what he had to say and then get up and leave. I’d thank him for his whiskey and his time and then would walk, through the deepening dusk, up the wagon track through the woods and field to where I’d parked my car. I’d drive back to the motel and Joy would have dinner waiting and be sore at me for being late. And the world would go crashing down, just as if no one had ever tried to do a thing to stop it.

“You came to me for help,” the old man said out of the dusk. “Tell me what I can do to help.”

I gasped. “You believe me!”

“Stranger,” said the old man, “I don’t amount to nothing. Unless what you told me happened to be true, you’d never bothered with me. And, besides, I think that I can figure when a man is lying.”

I tried to speak and couldn’t. The words bubbled in my throat and would not come out. I think I was as close to tears as I had been in a long, long time. And within me I felt a surging sense of thankfulness and hope.

For someone had believed me. Another human had listened and believed and I no longer was a fool or crackpot. I had regained, in this mystery of belief, all of the human dignity that had been slipping from me.

“How many skunks,” I asked, “could you get together?”

“A dozen,” said the old man. “Perhaps a dozen and a half. These rocks are full of them, all along the ridge. They’ll be coming in all night to visit me and to get their handouts.”

“And you could box them up and have some way to carry them?”

“Carry them?”

“In to town,” I said. “Into the city.”

“Tom—he’s the farmer where you parked—he has a pickup truck. He would loan it to me.”

“And he wouldn’t ask you questions?”

“Oh, sure he would. But I could think up answers. He could bring the truck partway through the woods.”

“All right, then,” I said, “this is what I want you to do. This is the way that youcan help . .

I told him swiftly what I wanted him to do.

“But my skunks!” he cried, dismayed. “The human race,” I answered. “You remember what I told you. .

“But the cops. They’ll grab me. I couldn’t—”

“Don’t worry about the cops,” I said. “We can take care of them. Here . . .”

I reached into my pocket and brought out the wad of bills.

“This will pay any fines they’ll want to throw at you, and there’ll still be a lot of it left over.”

He stared at the money.

“That’s the stuff you got at the Belmont house!”

“Part of it,” I said. “You better leave it in the cabin. If you took it with you, it might disappear. It might turn back into what it was before.”

He dumped the skunk out of his lap and stuffed the money in his pocket. He stood up and handed me the bottle.

“When should I get started?”

“Can I phone this Tom?”

“Sure, any time. I’ll go up after a while and tell him I’m expecting a call. When he gets it, he can bring down the truck. I’ll explain it to him. Not the truth, of course. But you can count on him.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks an awful lot.”

“Go ahead and have a drink,” he said. “Then give it back to me. I could stand a drink myself.”

I had the drink and gave him back the bottle and he had a snort.

“I’ll start right in,” he said. “In another hour or two, I’ll have a batch of skunks.”

“I’ll call Tom,” I said. “I’ll go back and check to see that everything’s all right. Then I’ll call Tom what is his last name?”

“Anderson,” said the old man. “I’ll have talked to him by then.”

“Thanks again, old-timer. I’ll be seeing you.”

“You want another drink?”

I shook my head. “I have work to do.”

I turned and left, tramping down the hillside through the dusk and up the slanting trace that led to the clover field.

There were lights in the farmhouse when I got to where I’d parked my car, but the barnyard itself was quiet.

As I walked over to the car, a growl came from the darkness. It was a vicious sound that brought the hair bristling on my head. It hit me like a hammer and left me cold and limp. It was filled with fear and hatred and it had the sound of teeth.

I reached out and found the handle of the door and the growl went on—a sobbing, choking growl, an almost incessant rumbling torn from the throat.

I jerked the car door open and tumbled on the seat and slammed the door behind me. Outside the growling still went on, slobbering in and out.

I started the motor and switched on the lights. The cone of brightness caught the thing that had been growling. It was the friendly farm dog that had greeted my arrival and had begged to go along with me. But the friendliness had vanished. His hackles stood erect and his bared teeth were a white slash across his muzzle. His eyes were glowing green in the flare of light. He retreated, moving sidewise slowly, with his back humped high and his tail between his legs.

Terror rose within me and I hit the accelerator. The wheels spun, whining, as the car leaped forward, brushing past the dog.

He had been a friendly dog and a laughing dog when I first had seen him. He had liked me then. It had taken quite a lot of trouble to get him to stay home.

What had happened to him in a few short hours?

Or, perhaps, more to the point, what had happened to me?

I puzzled on it, while something with wet and hairy feet crawled up and down my back.

Perhaps it was the dark, I thought. Probably in the daylight he was a friendly pooch, but with the fall of night he became the vicious watchdog, setting up a guard for the family acres.

But the explanation had a false ring to it. There was, I was certain, more involved than that.

I glanced at the clock on the instrument panel and the time was six-fifteen. I’d go back to the motel and phone Dow and Gavin to find out what they knew. Not that I expected to find that anything had changed, but to make sure it hadn’t. Then I’d phone Tom Anderson and the wheels would begin to turn; for good or bad, the fat was in the fire.

A rabbit ran across the road in front of the car and popped into the weeds in the roadside ditch. In the west, where the dying glow of the departed sun painted the edge of the sky a cloudy shade of green, a small flock of birds was flying, outlined like blown fragments of soot against the colored sky.

I came to the main highway and stopped, then proceeded out into the right- hand lane and headed back for town.

The things with wet, cold feet had stopped running on my spine and I began to forget about the dog. I started to feel good again about someone believing in me—even if it were no more than an old, eccentric hermit buried in the woods. Although that old, eccentric hermit probably was the one man in all the world who could help me most. More convincingly, perhaps, than the senator or the Old Man or any other person. That is, if the plan came off, if it didn’t backfire.

The wet, cold feet had stopped, but now I got an itchy ear. Jumpy, I thought—all tied up and jumpy.

I tried to take a hand off the wheel to scratch my ear and I couldn’t take it off. It was glued there, stuck there, and I couldn’t get it loose.

At first I thought I had imagined it or that I was mistaken—that somehow I’d meant to lift the hand and then had failed to do it because of some peculiar lapse of my brain or body. Which, if I’d stopped to think of it, would have been fearsome in itself.

So I tried again. The muscles in the arm strained at the hand and the hand stayed where it was, and panic came charging out of the darkened world to wash over me.

I tried the other hand and I couldn’t move it either. And now I saw that the wheel had grown extensions of itself and had enclosed my hands, so that the hands were manacled to the wheel.

I stamped my foot hard upon the brake—too hard, I knew, even as I hit it. But it did no good. It was as if there had been no brake. The car didn’t even falter. It kept on going as if I had not touched the brake.

I tried again and there was no braking power.

But even so, with my foot off the accelerator, even if I had not used the brake, the car should have been slowing down. But it wasn’t slowing down. It still kept on, at a steady sixty miles an hour.

I knew what was the matter. I knew what had happened. And I knew as well why the dog had growled.

For this was not a car; it was an alien simulation of a car!

An alien contraption that held me prisoner, that could hold me there forever, that could take me where it wanted, that could do anything it wished.

I wrenched savagely at the wheel to free my hands, and in doing so I turned the wheel halfway round and then swiftly swung it back again, sweat breaking out on me at the thought of what a twist on that wheel could do at sixty miles an hour.

But, I realized, I had turned the wheel and the car had not responded and I knew there was now no need to worry about what I did with the wheel. For the car was out of my control entirely. It did not respond to brake or wheel or accelerator.

And that, of course, was the way it would be. For it was not a car at all. It was something else, a fearsome something else.

But, I was convinced, it once had been a car. It had been a car that afternoon when the thing that followed me had gone to pieces on the hillside at the whiff of skunk. It had gone to pieces, but the car had stayed there; it had not changed into a hundred bowling balls charging for the swale to gambol in the scent.

Somehow, in the last few hours, there had been a switch—probably in that time I had been sitting at the shack, telling Charley Munz my story. For the dog had not objected to the car when I’d driven in the yard; he had been growling out of the darkness at it when I had returned.

Someone, then, had driven into the farmyard in this car in which I now was trapped, this car which was not a car, and had left it there and driven the actual car away. It would not have been hard to do, for when I had arrived there’d been no one around the place. And even later, if there had been, perhaps such a substitution might have gone unnoticed or, at the very most, occasioned only some mild wonderment for someone who was watching.

The car had been real to start with; of course, it had been real. For they probably had guessed that I would go over it and perhaps they had been afraid that I might have been able to spot some wrongness in it. And they couldn’t take the chance, for they had to have a trap for me. But once I had examined it, once I’d convinced myself that it was an actual car, then, they must have reasoned, it would be safe to switch it, for having once satisfied myself, I’d have no further doubt.

Perhaps they had limitations and were well aware of them. Perhaps the best that they could do was to ape externals. And perhaps, even then, they had certain blind spots. For the car I had wrecked with gunfire on the road had its headlight in the middle of the windshield. But that had been, of course, a quick and sloppy job. They could have done much better, and perhaps they knew they could, but there still might have been a doubt about their competence, or perhaps a fear that there were ways they did not know about in which a bogus car might be identified.

So they had played it safe. And playing safe had paid off. For they had me now.

I sat there, helpless, frightened at my helplessness, but not fighting any longer, for I was convinced that no physical effort could free me from the car. There might be other ways, short of physical, and I tried to think of how I might go about it. I might, for example, try talking with the car—which sounded silly on the face of it, of course, but still made a kind of sense, for this was not a car but an enemy which undoubtedly was very much aware of me. ButI shrank from doing it, for I doubted that the car, which probably could have heard me, was equipped to answer. And carrying on a one-sided conversation with it would have been akin to pleading, in which the words I said would seem to be disregarded with a disdain that would spell out humiliation. And I, despite the situation in which I found myself, was not reduced to pleading or to humiliation.

I felt regret, of course, but not regret that touched upon myself. Regret, rather, that my plan would not go through, that now nothing would be done, that the one slim chance I’d had to beat the aliens at their game must now be lost by default.

We met other cars and I shouted at them, hoping to attract attention, but the windows of my car were closed, and I suppose the windows of the other cars were closed as well, so I was not heard.

We went for several miles and then the car slowed down and turned off on another road. I tried to figure where we were, but I’d lost track of landmarks and I had no idea. The road was narrow and crooked and it wound through heavy woods and here and there it skirted great humps of rock that shouldered out of the contour of the land.

Watching the roadside, I guessed, rather than recognized, where we might be headed. I watched more closely after that and became convinced that the guess was right. We were going to the Belmont house, back to where all of this had started, where they would be waiting for me, grim-lipped, perhaps, and angry—if things like these could be grim-lipped and angry.

And this was the end of all of it, quite naturally. This closed out the chapter. Unless, of course, there might be someone else, perhaps in some other place, who was working on the problem—and working alone because no one would believe him. It was, I told myself, entirely possible. And where I had finally failed, he might somehow succeed.

I knew, in the back of my mind, just how slim the chance of such a thing might be, but it was the only hope I had, and in a moment of fantasy I grabbed it close and held it and tried to make it true.

The car swung round a curve and did not quite make the curve, and ahead of us was a picket fence of trees. We were hurtling toward them, and the wheels came off the road. The car began to tilt, nose downward, as it took the dive.

Then, suddenly, there was no car and I was in the air alone, in the darkness without a car around me, flying toward the trees.

I had time for a single scream of terror before I hit the tree that seemed to come rushing at me through the dark.

I was cold. There was a cold wind blowing down my back and it was dark—so dark I couldn’t see a thing. There was a chill dampness underneath me and I was sore all over and there was a dismal sound, a strange keening coming from somewhere in the dark.

I tried to move, and when I moved I hurt, so I quit moving and just lay there, in the chill and dampness. I didn’t wonder who I was or where I was, for it didn’t make much difference. I was too tired and I hurt too much to care.

I lay there for a while and the sound and dampness went away and the darkness closed in on me, and then, after a long time, I was me again and it still was dark and even colder than it was before.

So I moved again, and again it hurt me, but when I moved I reached out my hand, with the fingers open reaching, seeking, grasping. And when the fingers closed, they closed on something that I recognized, something soft and pulpy that I squeezed inside my hand.

Moss and fallen leaves, I thought. I’d reached out into the darkness and my hand had grabbed moss and fallen leaves.

I lay quiet for a moment, letting where I was soak into me—for now I knew I was somewhere in the woods. The keening noise was the sound of wind blowing in the treetops, and the dampness underneath me was the dampness of woodland moss, and the smell was the smell of woods in autumn.

If it had not been for the cold and hurt, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad. For it was a pleasant place. And I hurt only when I moved. Maybe if I could suck the blackness inside of me again, it would be all right.

I tried, but the darkness wouldn’t come, and now I was beginning to remember about the car that had gone hurtling off the narrow curve and how the car had gone away and left me all alone, flying through the dark.

I am alive, I thought, aghast that I should be alive—remembering the tree that I had seen or sensed and that had seemed to come rushing out of the dark at me.

I opened up the fingers that had grabbed the moss and leaves and shook my hand to get rid of them. I put out both my hands to raise me up. I moved both my legs, pulling them beneath me. Both my arms and legs worked, so there was nothing broken, but my belly was a mass of soreness and there was a pain that went skittering through my chest.

So they had failed, after all, I thought—the Atwoods, the bowling balls, whatever one might call them. I was still alive, and I was free of them, and if I could reach a phone, there still was time to carry out my plan.

I tried to stand, but I couldn’t make it. I pushed myself to my feet and stood there for an instant while waves of pain washed over me. My nerve gave out and my knees folded and I slid to the ground and sat there, with my arms wrapped around me to hold in the pain that threatened to burst out.

I sat there for a long time and the edge of the hurt was dulled. It remained as a leaden lump of misery that settled somewhere in my middle.

Apparently I was on some sort of steep hillside and the road must lay above me. I had to reach the road, I knew, for if I could reach it, there would be a chance that someone would come along and find me. I had no idea how far it might be up to the road—how far I had been thrown before I hit the tree or how far I might have rolled or slid once I hit the ground.

I had to reach the road, and if I couldn’t walk there, I’d have to creep or crawl. I couldn’t see the road; I couldn’t see a thing. I existed in a world of utter darkness. There were no stars. There was no light at all.

I got to my hands and knees and started creeping up the hill. I couldn’t go far at a time. I seemed to have no strength. I didn’t seem to hurt as much as I had before, but I petered out.

It was slow going and hard going. I ran into a tree and had to creep around it. I got entangled in a clump of what I took to be blackberry bushes and had to crawl some distance along the hill before I could bypass them. I came to the moldering trunk of a fallen tree and managed to claw my way over it and keep going.

I wondered what the time might be and felt along my wrist to see if I still had my watch. I did. I cut my fingers on the broken crystal. I held it to my ear and it wasn’t ticking. Not that it would have done me any good if it had been, for I couldn’t see it.

From far off I heard a murmur, different than the moaning of the wind blowing through the treetops. I lay still and strained my ears to identify it. Then suddenly it was louder and unmistakably a car.

The noise served like a goad and I scrambled madly up the hillside, but the mad scrambling was only motion mostly. It did little to speed up my progress.

The noise increased, and to my left I saw the blur of light thrown by the oncoming machine. The light dipped and disappeared, then appeared again closer.

I began to yell—not words, just yelling to attract attention—but the car swept around the curve above me, and no one seemed to hear me, for it kept going on. For an instant the light and the rushing body of it filled the horizon above the hill, and then it was gone, and I was left alone, crawling up the slope.

I closed my mind to everything except getting up the slope. There would be, sometime, another car coming along the road, or the one that had passed would be coming back.

After a time it seemed to me a long time—I finally made it.

I sat on the shoulder of the road and rested, then carefully got on my feet. The hurt still was there, but it didn’t seem as bad as it had been before. I was able to stand up, not too solid on my feet, but still able to stay standing.

It was a long way I had come, I thought. A long way since that night when I had found a trap set before my door. And yet, thinking back on it, the time had not been long, perhaps no more than forty hours or so.

And in that time I had played a futile game of chess with the thing that had been the trap. This night the game was meant to end, for I should be dead. The aliens, undoubtedly, had intended that I should be killed and at this moment, more than likely, believed that I was dead.

But I wasn’t dead. I probably had a cracked rib or two, and my midriff had taken a beating as it had slammed into the tree, but I was up and standing and I wasn’t beaten yet.

In not too long there’d be another car. If I was lucky, there would be another car.

I was hit by a terrifying thought: What if the next car to come along this road should be another fashioned out of bowling balls?

I thought about it and it seemed unlikely. They only turned themselves into things for a certain purpose and it would not be reasonable to suppose they’d need a car again.

For they did not need a car to travel. They had their burrows for that. Through them they could travel from whatever place they were to anywhere on Earth and, more than possibly, from one place to another on the Earth. It was not too imaginative, I told myself, to envision the space occupied by Earth as laced and interlaced with a vast system of their burrows. Although I realized that “burrows” was, perhaps, not quite an accurate word.

I tried a step or two and found that I could walk. Perhaps, instead of waiting for a car, I should start walking on the road, out toward the main highway. There I would be sure of picking up some help. The rest of the night might pass upon this road without another car.

I went limping down the road and it wasn’t bad except that my chest was sore and pains went shooting through it at every step I took.

As I walked, the night seemed to grow a little brighter, as if a heavy bank of clouds had broken and was moving out.

I had to stop every now and then to rest, and now, as I did, I glanced back the wayI’d come and saw the reason for the light. A fire was burning in the woods behind me, and, as I watched, the flames shot up with a sudden gush, to leap into the sky, and through the redness of the glare I saw the shape of rafters.

It was the Belmont house, I knew; the Belmont house was burning!

I stood and stared at it and hoped to God that some of them would burn. But I knew they wouldn’t, that they would be safe within those burrows that led to some other world. I saw them, in my imagination, scurrying for those holes, with the fire behind them—the simulated humans and the simulated furniture and all the rest of it changing into bowling balls and rolling for the holes.

And it was good, of course, but it didn’t mean a thing, for the Belmont house was a single camp of them. There were many other camps, in all parts of the world—other places where the tunnels stretched out to an unknown place, the home ground of the aliens. And that home ground, perhaps, was so close, through the science and the mystery of the tunnels, that it was but a second’s distance for them to be home.

Two spaced lights raced around the curve behind me and bore straight down upon me. I waved my arms and yelled, then jumped awkwardly to one side as the car rushed past. Then the brake lights burned red holes in the night and the tires were screeching on the paving. The car began to back, reversing rapidly, until it came even with me.

A head stuck out of the driver’s window and a voice said: “What the hell? We thought that you were dead!”

Joy was running around the car, sobbing as she ran, and Higgins spoke again. “Talk to her,” he said. “For God’s sake, talk to her. She is off her rocker. She set fire to a house.”

Joy reached me with a rush. She put out her hands and grabbed me by the arms, with her fingers tight, as if she wanted to be sure that I was flesh and bone.

“One of them phoned,” she said, and she was choking as she said it, “and said that you were dead. They said nobody could fool around with them and get away with it. They said that you had tried and they had bumped you off. They said if I had any ideas, I better just forget them. They said—”

“What is she talking about, mister?” asked Higgins desperately. “I swear to God she’s nuts. She don’t make no sense to me. She phoned and asked about Old Windy and she was bawling at the time but mad even when she was bawling. . .”

“Are you hurt?” asked Joy.

“Just staved up a little. Maybe a rib or two is busted. But we haven’t got the time—”

“She talked me into driving out to Windy’s,” Larry Higgins said, “and she told him you were dead but to go ahead and do whatever you had wanted. So he loaded up a batch of skunks—”

“He did what?” I yelled, unable to believe it.

“He loaded up them skunks and then lit out for town.”

“Did I do wrong?” asked Joy. “You told me about the old man with the skunks and you said you’d talked to a cabdriver by the name of Larry Higgins and I—”

“No,” I told her, “you did right. You couldn’t have done righter.”

I put an arm around her and drew her close to me. It hurt my chest a little, but I didn’t give a damn.

“Turn on the radio,” I said to Higgins.

“But, Mister, we better be getting out of here. She set fire to that house. I tell you, I had no idea—”

“Turn on the radio!” I yelled.

Grumbling he pulled his head back into the car and fumbled at the radio.

We waited, and when it came the voice was excited: “. . . Thousands of them, millions of them! No one knows what they are or where they’re coming from . . .”

From everywhere, I thought. Not just from this city or this nation, but probably from everywhere on Earth, and they had no more than started, for the news would spread as the night went on.

Out on the hillside that afternoon there had been no way in which quick communication could be established, there was no way in which the good news could be spread. For the thing in the shape of a man that had been following me, and the little fractional thing that had been in my pocket in the guise of money, had been far from any tunnel, far from any line of communication.

But now the good news was going out, to all the aliens on the Earth, and perhaps to those other aliens out beyond the Earth, and it had only started now. Before it ended there would be a mountain of them, seeking to share in the ecstasy of this new perfume.

“First there were the skunks,” said the excited radio. “Someone dropped a large number of skunks at the intersection of Seventh and State, in the heart of town. No one need tell you what that would be like, with the show and the nightclub crowd.