"Hi. Did you see it?"
"The buggie? No."
"My Dad saw it, coming home from work."
"Bull!"
"No, he really did. He said they were getting it down with a pole."
Ralf Drake rode up on his bike. "Where is it? Is it gone?"
"They already tore it up," Mike said. "Barnes says his old man saw it, coming home last night."
"He said they were poking it down with a pole. It was trying to hang onto the roof."
"They're all dried-up and withered," Mike said, "like something that's been hanging out in the garage."
"How do you know?" Ralf said.
"I saw one once."
"Yeah. I'll bet."
They walked along the sidewalk, Ralf wheeling his bike, discussing the matter loudly. They turned down Vermont Street and crossed the big vacant lot.
"The TV announcer said most of them are already rounded up," Ralf said. "There weren't very many this time."
Jimmy kicked a rock. "I'd sure like to see one before they get them all."
"I'd sure like to get one," Mike said.
Ralf sneered. "If you ever saw one you'd run so fast you wouldn't stop until the sun set."
"Oh, yeah?"
"You'd run like a fool."
"The heck I would. I'd knock the ol' buggie down with a rock."
"And carry him home in a tin can?"
Mike chased Ralf around, out into the street and up to the corner. The argument continued endlessly all the way across town and over to the other side of the railroad tracks. They walked past the ink works and the Western Lumber Company loading platforms. The sun sank low in the sky. It was getting to be evening. A cold wind came up, blowing through the palm trees at the end of the Hartly Construction Company lot.
"See you," Ralf said. He hopped on his bike, riding off. Mike and Jimmy walked back toward town together. At Cedar Street they separated.
"If you see a buggie give me a call," Mike said.
"Sure thing." Jimmy walked on up Cedar Street, his hands in his pockets. The sun had set. The evening air was chill. Darkness was descending.
He walked slowly, his eyes on the ground. The streetlights came on. A few cars moved along the street. Behind curtained windows he saw bright flashes of yellow, warm kitchens and livingrooms. A television set brayed out, rumbling into the gloom. He passed along the brick wall of the Pomeroy Estate. The wall turned into an iron fence. Above the fence great silent evergreens rose dark and unmoving in the evening twilight.
For a moment Jimmy stopped, kneeling down to tie his shoe. A cold wind blew around him, making the evergreens sway slightly. Far off a train sounded, a dismal wail echoing through the gloom. He thought about dinner, Dad with his shoes off, reading the newspapers. His mother in the kitchen -- the
TV set murmuring to itself in the corner -- the warm, bright living-room.
TV set murmuring to itself in the corner -- the warm, bright living-room.
A buggie. Waiting and watching, crouched silently up in the tree.
It was old. He knew that at once. There was a dryness about it, an odor of age and dust. An ancient gray shape, silent and unmoving, wrapped around the trunk and branches of the evergreen. A mass of cobwebs, dusty strands and webs of gray wrapped and trailing across the tree. A nebulous wispy presence that made the hackles of his neck rise.
The shape began to move but so slowly he might not have noticed. It was sliding around the trunk, feeling its way carefully, a little at a time. As if it were sightless. Feeling its way inch by inch, an unseeing gray ball of cobwebs and dust.
Jimmy moved back from the fence. It was completely dark. The sky was black above him. A few stars glittered distantly, bits of remote fire. Far down the street a bus rumbled, turning a corner.
A buggie -- clinging to the tree above him. Jimmy struggled, pulling himself away. His heart was thumping painfully, choking him. He could hardly breathe. His vision blurred, fading and receding. The buggie was only a little way from him, only a few yards above his head.
Help -- he had to get help. Men with poles to push the buggie down -- people -- right away. He closed his eyes and pushed away from the fence. He seemed to be in a vast tide, a rushing ocean dragging at him, surging over his body, holding him where he was. He could not break away. He was caught. He strained, pushing against it. One step... another step... a third -
And then he heard it.
Or rather felt it. There was no sound. It was like drumming, a kind of murmuring like the sea, inside his head. The drumming lapped against his mind, beating gently around him. He halted. The murmuring was soft, rhythmic. But insistent -- urgent. It began to separate, gaining form -- form and substance. It flowed, breaking up into distinct sensations, images, scenes.
Scenes -- of another world, its world. The buggie was talking to him, telling him about its world, spinning out scene after scene with anxious haste.
"Get away," Jimmy muttered thickly.
But the scenes still came, urgently, insistently, lapping at his mind.
Plains -- a vast desert without limit or end. Dark red, cracked and scored with ravines. A far line of blunted hills, dust-covered, corroded. A great basin off to the right, an endless empty piepan with white-crusted salt riming it, a bitter ash where water had once lapped.
"Get away!" Jimmy muttered again, moving a step back.
The scenes grew. Dead sky, particles of sand, whipped along, carried endlessly. Sheets of sand, vast billowing clouds of sand and dust, blowing endlessly across the cracked surface of the planet. A few scrawny plants growing by rocks. In the shadows of the mountains great spiders with old webs, dust-covered, spun centuries ago. Dead spiders, lodged in cracks.
A scene expanded. Some sort of artificial pipe, jutting up from the red-baked ground. A vent -underground quarters. The view changed. He was seeing below, down into the core of the planet -- layer after layer of crumpled rock. A withered wrinkled planet without fire or life or moisture of any kind. Its skin cracking, its pulp drying out and blowing up in clouds of dust. Far down in the core a tank of some sort -- a chamber sunk in the heart of the planet.
He was inside the tank. Buggies were everywhere, sliding and moving around. Machines, construction of different kinds, buildings, plants in rows, generators, homes, rooms of complex equipment.
Sections of the tank were closed off -- bolted shut. Rusty, metal doors -- machinery sinking into decay -- valves closed, pipes rusting away -- dials cracked and broken. Lines clogged -- teeth missing from gears -- more and more sections closed. Fewer buggies -- fewer and fewer...
The scene changed. Earth, seen from a long way off -- a distant green sphere, turning slowly, cloud-covered. Broad oceans, blue water miles deep -- moist atmosphere. The buggies drifting through empty reaches of space, drifting slowly toward Earth, year after year. Drifting endlessly in the dark wastes with agonizing slowness.
wastes with agonizing slowness.
On the surface of the water flat spheres drifted, huge metal discs. Floating units, artificially built, several hundred feet around. Buggies rested silently on the discs, absorbing water and minerals from the ocean under them.
The buggie was trying to tell him something, something about itself. Discs on the water -- the buggies wanted to use the water, to live on the water, on the surface of the ocean. Big surface discs, covered with buggies -- it wanted him to know that, to see the discs, the water discs.
The buggies would live on the water, not on the land. Only the water -- they wanted his permission. They wanted to use the water. That was what it was trying to tell him -- that they wanted to use the surface of the water between the continents. Now the buggie was asking, imploring. It wanted to know. It wanted him to say, to answer, to give his permission. It was waiting to hear, waiting and hoping -- imploring...