"Maybe you won't be here for long," I said, doing my best to make him feel a little better. "Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your…"
He made an insulting, disgusted noise. "Not that bunch," he said. "Not that gang of chisellers."
"It's too soon to start worrying," I told him. "We don't know what has happened and until we do…"
"I guess you're right," he said. "Of course, I'm not the only one. I been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one. I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while ago and his wife is in the hospital over at — what's the name of that town?"
"Elmore," Nancy said.
"Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town. Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come. Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind.
"And there was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone, and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs, and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't."
"You must have talked to a lot of people," I said.
"Hush," said Nancy.
Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his arms to get the people quiet.
"Fellow citizens," yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that makes you sick at heart. "Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet."
Someone yelled, "You tell "em Higgy!" There was a wave of laughter, but it was a nervous laugh.
"Friends," said Higgy, "we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened."
"I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it seemed the quickest way."
"Ah, hell," yelled someone. "Get on with it, Higgy." No one laughed this time.
"Well, all right," said Higgy. "I'll get on with it. I don't know quite how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows. There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only temporary; it may go away."
"What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things that are not alive."
"Just a minute, mayor," someone shouted.
"Yes," the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt him. "Was that you, Len?" he asked.
"Yes, it was," said the man.
I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science teacher.
"What did you want?" asked Higgy.
"I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours — about only non-living matter getting through the barrier — on the car that was parked on the Coon Valley road."
"Why, yes," said Higgy, condescendingly, "that is exactly what I was basing the statement on. What do you know about it?"
"Nothing," Len Streeter told him. "Nothing about the car itself. But I presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon within well restricted bounds of logic."
"That's right," said Higgy, sanctimoniously. "That's exactly what we intend to do." And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
"In that case," said Streeter. "I might caution you against accepting facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no human in the car, there was nothing living in it."
"Well, there wasn't," Higgy argued. "The man who had been driving it had left and gone away somewhere."
"Humans," said Streeter, patiently, "aren't the only forms of life. We can't be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life, just the same as we are." Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn't know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.
"You know, Higgy," said a voice I recognized as Doc Fabian" s, "our young friend is right. Of course there would be microorganisms. Some of the rest of us should have thought of it at once."
"Well, all right, then," said Higgy. "If you say so, Doc. Let's say that Len is right. It don't make any difference, does it?"
"At the moment, no," said Doc.
"The only point I wanted to make," said Streeter, "is that life can't be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get a right start at it. We shouldn't begin with a lot of misconceptions."
"I got a question, mayor," said someone else. I tried to see who it was, but couldn't.
"Go ahead," said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to break up this Streeter business.
"Well, it's like this," said the man. "I've been working on the highway job south of town. And now I can't get to it and maybe they'll hold the job for me for a day or two, but it isn't reasonable to expect the contractor to hold it very long. He's got a contract he has to meet — a time limit, you know, and he pays a penalty for every day he's late. So he's got to have men to do the job. He can't hold no job open for more than a day or two."
"I know all that," said Higgy.
"I ain't the only one," said the man, "There are a lot of other fellows who work out of town. I don't know about the rest of them, but I got to have my pay. I ain't got any backlog I can fall back on. What's going to happen to us if we can't get to our jobs and there isn't any pay cheque and no money in the bank?"