I turned a little to my left and then went straight ahead.
A few more feet, it said.
I stopped and turned my head to face it and there was nothing there. If there had been anything, it was gone from there.
The moon was a golden gargoyle in the west. The world was lone and empty; the silvered slope had a hungry look. The blue-black sky was filled with many little eyes with a hard sharp glitter to them, a predatory glitter and the remoteness of uncaring.
Beyond the ridge a man of my own race drowsed beside a dying campfire, and it was all right for him, for he had a talent that I did not have, that I knew now I did not have — the talent for reaching out to grasp an alien hand (or paw or claw or pad) and being able in his twisted mind to translate that alien touch into a commonplace.
I shuddered at the gargoyle moon and took two steps forward and walked out of that hungry world straight into my garden.
15
Ragged clouds still raced across the sky, blotting out the moon. A faint lighting in the east gave notice of the dawn. The windows of my house were filled with lamplight and I knew that Gerald Sherwood and the rest of them were waiting there for me. And just to my left the greenhouse with the tree growing at its corner loomed ghostly against the rise of ground behind it.
I started to walk forward and fingers were scratching at my trouser leg. Startled, I looked down and saw that I had walked into a bush.
There had been no bush in the garden the last time I had seen it; there had been only the purple flowers. But I think I guessed what might have happened even before I stooped to have a look.
Squatting there, I squinted along the ground and in the first grey light of the coming day, I saw there were no flowers. Instead of a patch of flowers there was a patch of little bushes, perhaps a little larger, but not much larger than the flowers.
I hunkered there, with a coldness growing in me — for there was no explanation other than the fact that the bushes were the flowers, that somehow the Flowers had changed the flowers that once had grown there into little bushes. And, I wondered wildly, what could their purpose be?
Even here, I thought — even here they reach out for us. Even here they play their tricks on us and lay their traps for us. And they could do anything they wanted, I supposed, for if they did not own, at least they manipulated this corner of the Earth entrapped beneath the dome.
I put out a hand and felt along a branch and the branch had soft-swelling buds all along its length. Springtime buds, that in a day or so would be breaking into leaf. Springtime buds in the depth of summer!
I had believed in them, I thought. In that little space of time toward the very end, when Tupper had ceased his talking and had dozed before the fire and there had been something on the hillside that had spoken to me and had walked me home, I had believed in them.
Had there been something on that hillside? Had something walked with me? I sweated, thinking of it.
I felt the bulk of the wrapped time contraption underneath my arm, and that, I realized, was a talisman of the actuality of that other world. With that, I must believe.
They had told me, I remembered, that I'd get my money back — they had guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.
I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian's house. It might be a good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.
I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights of many cars running back and forth.
A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around it.
Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.
A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the house behind me. Doc, I thought — Doc coming home after being routed out of bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house.
The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting out.
"Doc," I said, "it's Brad." He turned and peered at me.
"Oh," he said, and his voice sounded tired, "so you are back again. There are people waiting at the house, you know." Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to care.
He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed old. Now I could see that he was — the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.
"Floyd Caidwell," he said. "I was out to Floyd" s. He had a heart attack — a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack."
"How is he?"
"As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete rest. But I can't get him there. With that thing out there, I can't get him where he should be.
"I don't know, Brad. I just don't know what will happen to us. Mrs Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She'll die, anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And there's no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going regularly to a specialist and he's been helping her a lot. Decker — perhaps you've heard of him. He's a top-notch man. We interned together." He stopped in front of me. "Can't you see," he said. "I can't help these people. I can do a little, but I can't do enough. I can't handle things like this — I can't do it all alone. Other times I could send them somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can't do that. For the first time in my life, I can't help my people."
"You're taking it too hard," I said.
He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.
"I can't take it any other way," he said. "All these years, they've depended on me."
"How's Stuffy?" I asked.
"You have heard, of course." Doc snorted angrily. "The damn fool ran away."
"From the hospital?"
"Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense. They're looking for him, but no one's found him yet."
"He'd head back here," I said.
"I suppose he would," said Doc. "What about this story I heard about; some telephone he had?"
I shook my head. "Hiram said he found one."
Doc peered sharply at me. "You don't know anything about it?"
"Not very much," I said.
"Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of talk is that?"
"Did Nancy tell you that?"
He shook his head. "No, Gerald told me. He asked me what to do. He was afraid that if he mentioned it, he would stir up the village."
"And?"
"I told him not to. The folks are stirred up enough. He told them what you said about the flowers. He had to tell them something."
"Doc," I said, "it's a funny business. I don't rightly know myself. Let's not talk about it. Tell me what's going on. What are those fires out there?"
"Those are soldier fires," he told me. "There are state troops out there. They've got the town ringed in. Brad, it's crazier than hell. We can't get out and no one can get in, but they got troops out there. I don't know what they think they're doing. They evacuated everybody for ten miles outside the barrier and there are planes patrolling and they have some tanks. They tried to dynamite the barrier this morning and they didn't do a thing except blow a hole in Jake Fisher's pasture. They could have saved that dynamite."