The Sun had risen above the horizon now and sent level shafts of light into the thicket and the early morning silence hung over them like a benediction.
«Peter,» said Mary, «I just can’t stay awake any longer. Kiss me before I go to sleep.»
He kissed her and they clung together, shut from the world by the jagged, twisted, low-growing branches of the plum trees.
«I hear the bells,» she breathed. «Do you hear them, too?»
Peter shook his head.
«Like school bells,» she said. «Like bells on the first day of school—the first day you ever went.»
«You’re tired,» he told her.
«I’ve heard them before. This is not the first time.»
He kissed her again. «Go to sleep,» he said and she did, almost as soon as she lay down and closed her eyes.
He sat quietly beside her and his mind retreated to his own hidden depths, searching for the pain within him. But there was no pain. It was gone forever.
The pain was gone and the incidence of polio was down and it was a crazy thing to think, but he thought it, anyhow:
Missionary!
When human missionaries went out to heathen lands, what were the first things that they did?
They preached, of course, but there were other things as well. They fought disease and they worked for sanitation and labored to improve the welfare of the people and tried to educate them to a better way of life. And in this way they not only carried out their religious precepts, but gained the confidence of the heathen folk as well.
And if an alien missionary came to Earth, what would be among the first things that he was sure to do? Would it not be reasonable that he, too, would fight disease and try to improve the welfare of his chosen charges? Thus he would gain their confidence. Although he could not expect to gain too much at first. He could expect hostility and suspicion. Only a pitiful handful would not resent him or be afraid of him.
And if the missionary—
And if THIS missionary—
Peter fell asleep.
The roar awakened him and he sat upright, sleep entirely wiped from his mind.
The roar still was there, somewhere outside the thicket, but it was receding.
«Peter! Peter!»
«Quiet, Mary! There is something out there!»
The roar turned around and came back again, growing until it was the sound of clanking thunder and the Earth shook with the sound. It receded again.
The midday sunlight came down through the branches and made of their hiding place a freckled spot of Sun and shade. Peter could smell the musky odor of warm soil and wilted leaf.
They crept cautiously through the thicket and when they gained its edge, where the leaves thinned out, they saw the racing tank far down the field.
Its roar came to them as it tore along, bouncing and swaying to the ground’s unevenness, the great snout of its cannon pugnaciously thrust out before it, like a stiff-arming football player.
A road ran clear down the field—a road that Peter was sure had not been there the night before. It was a straight road, absolutely straight, running toward the building, and it was of some metallic stuff that shimmered in the Sun.
And far off to the left was another road and to the right another, and in the distance the three roads seemed to draw together, as the rails seem to converge when one looks down a railroad track.
Other roads running at right angles cut across the three roads, intersecting them so that one gained the impression of three far-reaching ladders set tightly side by side.
The tank raced toward one of the intersecting roads, a tank made midget by the distance, and its roar came back to them no louder than the humming of an angry bee.
It reached the road and skidded off, whipping around sidewise and slewing along, as if it had hit something smooth and solid that it could not get through, as if it might have struck a soaped metallic wall. There was a moment when it tipped and almost went over, but it stayed upright and finally backed away, then swung around to come lumbering down the field, returning toward the thicket.
Halfway down the field, it pivoted around and halted, so that the gun pointed back toward the intersecting road.
The gun’s muzzle moved downward and flashed and, at the intersecting road, the shell exploded with a burst of light and a puff of smoke. The concussion of the shot slapped hard against the ear.
Again and again the gun belched out its shells point blank. A haze of smoke hung above the tank and road—and the shells still exploded at the road—this side of the road and not beyond it.
The tank clanked forward once more until it reached the road. It approached carefully this time and nudged itself along, as if it might be looking for a way to cross.
From somewhere a long distance off came the crunching sound of artillery. An entire battery of guns seemed to be firing. They fired for a while, then grudgingly quit.
The tank still nosed along the road like a dog sniffing beneath a fallen tree for a hidden rabbit.
«There’s something there that’s stopping them,» said Peter.
«A wall,» Mary guessed. «An invisible wall of some sort, but one they can’t get through.»
«Or shoot through, either. They tried to break through with gunfire and they didn’t even dent it.»
He crouched there, watching as the tank nosed along the road. It reached the point where the road to the left came down to intersect the cross road.
The tank sheered off to follow the left-hand one, bumping along with its forward armor shoved against the unseen wall.
Boxed in, thought Peter—those roads have broken up and boxed in all the military units. A tank in one pen and a dozen tanks in another, a battery of artillery in another, the motor pool in yet another. Boxed in and trapped; penned up and useless.
And we, he wondered—are we boxed in as well?
A group of soldiers came tramping down the right-hand road. Peter spotted them from far off, black dots moving down the road, heading east, away from the building. When they came closer, he saw that they carried no guns and slogged along with the slightest semblance of formation and he could see from the way they walked that they were dog-tired.
He had not been aware that Mary had left his side until she came creeping back again, ducking her head to keep her hair from being caught in the low-hanging branches.
She sat down beside him and handed him a thick slice of bread and a chunk of bologna. She set the bottle of water down between them.
«It was the building,» she said, «that built the roads.»
Peter nodded, his mouth full of bread and meat.
«They want to make it easy to get to the building,» Mary said. «The building wants to make it easy for people to come and visit it.»
«The bells again?» he asked.
She smiled and said, «The bells.»
The soldiers now had come close enough to see the tank. They stopped and stood in the road, looking at it.
Then four of them turned off the road and walked out into the field, heading for the tank. The others sat down and waited.
«The wall only works one way,» said Mary.
«More likely,» Peter told her, «it works for tanks, but doesn’t work for people.»
«The building doesn’t want to keep the people out.»
The soldiers crossed the field and the tank came out to meet them. It stopped and the crew crawled out of it and climbed down. The soldiers and the crew stood talking and one of the soldiers kept swinging his arms in gestures, pointing here and there.
From far away came the sound of heavy guns again.
«Some of them,» said Peter, «still are trying to blast down the walls.»
Finally the soldiers and the tank crew walked back to the road, leaving the tank deserted in the field.
And that must be the way it was with the entire military force which had hemmed in the building, Peter told himself. The roads and walls had cut it into bits, had screened it off—and now the tanks and the big guns and the planes were just so many ineffective toys of an infant race, lying scattered in a thousand playpens.