«We’ll be seeing you,» said Peter.
«I hope so.»
«I know we will,» Mary stated positively.
They watched him trudge away, then walked on in the other direction.
Mary said to Peter, «The symbol is the mark of them. The ones who get the symbol are the ones who will go back. It’s a passport, a seal of approval.»
«Or,» Peter amended, «the brand of ownership.»
«They’d be looking for certain kinds of people. They wouldn’t want anybody who was afraid of them. They’d want people who had some faith in them.»
«What do they want us for?» Peter fretted. «That’s what bothers me. What use can we be to them? The soldier wants to help them, but they don’t need help from us. They don’t need help from anyone.»
«We’ve never seen one of them,» said Mary. «Unless the box was one of them.»
And the cigarette machines, thought Peter. The cigarette machines and God knows what else.
«And yet,» said Mary, «they know about us. They’ve watched us and studied us. They know us inside out. They can reach deep within us and know what each of us might want and then give it to us. A rod and reel for Johnny and a piece of jade for you. And the rod and reel were a human rod and reel and the jade was Earth jade. They even know about the soldier’s girl. They knew she would like a shiny necklace and they knew she was the kind of person that they wanted to come back again and …»
«The Saucers,» Peter said. «I wonder if it was the Saucers, after all, watching us for years, learning all about us.»
How many years would it take, he wondered, from a standing start, to learn all there was to know about the human race? For it would be from a standing start; to them, all of humanity would have been a complex alien race and they would have had to feel their way along, learning one fact here and another there. And they would make mistakes; at times their deductions would be wrong, and that would set them back.
«I don’t know,» said Peter. «I can’t figure it out at all.»
They walked down the shiny metal road that glimmered in the starlight, with the building growing from a misty phantom to a gigantic wall that rose against the sky to blot out the stars. A thousand stories high and covering more than a hundred acres, it was a structure that craned your head and set your neck to aching and made your brain spin with its glory and its majesty.
And even when you drew near it, you could not see the dropped and cradled bomb, resting in the emptiness above it, for the bomb was too far away for seeing.
But you could see the little cubicles sliced off by the roads and, within the cubicles, the destructive toys of a violent race, deserted now, just idle hunks of fashioned metal.
They came at last, just before dawn, to the great stairs that ran up to the central door. As they moved across the flat stone approach to the stairs, they felt the hush and the deepness of the peace that lay in the building’s shadow.
Hand in hand, they went up the stairs and came to the great bronze door and there they stopped. Turning around, they looked back in silence.
The roads spun out like wheel spokes from the building’s hub as far as they could see, and the crossing roads ran in concentric circles so that it seemed they stood in the center of a spider’s web.
Deserted farm houses, with their groups of buildings—barns, granaries, garages, silos, hog pens, machine sheds—stood in the sectors marked off by the roads, and in other sectors lay the machines of war, fit now for little more than birds’ nests or a hiding place for rabbits. Bird songs came trilling up from the pastures and the fields and you could smell the freshness and the coolness of the countryside.
«It’s good,» said Mary. «It’s our country, Peter.»
«It was our country,» Peter corrected her. «Nothing will ever be quite the same again.»
«You aren’t afraid, Peter?»
«Not a bit. Just baffled.»
«But you seemed so sure before.»
«I still am sure,» he said. «Emotionally, I am as sure as ever that everything’s all right.»
«Of course everything’s all right. There was a polio epidemic and now it has died out. An army has been routed without a single death. An atomic bomb was caught and halted before it could go off. Can’t you see, Peter, they’re already making this a better world. Cancer and polio gone—two things that Man had fought for years and was far from conquering. War stopped, disease stopped, atomic bombs stopped—things we couldn’t solve for ourselves that were solved for us.»
«I know all that,» said Peter. «They’ll undoubtedly also put an end to crime and graft and violence and everything else that has been tormenting and degrading mankind since it climbed down out of the trees.»
«What more do you want?»
«Nothing more, I guess—it’s just that it’s circumstantial. It’s not real evidence. All that we know, or think we know, we’ve learned from inference. We have no proof—no actual, solid proof.»
«We have faith. We must have faith. If you can’t believe in someone or something that wipes out disease and war, what can you believe in?»
«That’s what bothers me.»
«The world is built on faith,» said Mary. «Faith in God and in ourselves and in the decency of mankind.»
«You’re wonderful,» exclaimed Peter.
He caught her tight and kissed her and she clung against him and when finally they let each other go, the great bronze door was opening.
Silently, they walked across the threshold with arms around each other, into a foyer that arched high overhead. There were murals on the high arched ceiling, and others paneled in the walls, and four great flights of stairs led upward.
But the stairways were roped off by heavy velvet cords. Another cord, hooked into gleaming standards, and signs with pointing arrows showed them which way to go.
Obediently, walking in the hush that came close to reverence, they went across the foyer to the single open door.
They stepped into a large room, with great, tall, slender windows that let in the morning sunlight, and it fell across the satiny newness of the blackboards, the big-armed class chairs, the heavy reading tables, case after case of books, and the lectern on the lecture platform.
They stood and looked at it and Mary said to Peter: «I was right. They were school bells, after all. We’ve come to school, Peter. The first day we ever went to school.»
«Kindergarten,» Peter said, and his voice choked as he pronounced the word.
It was just right, he thought, so humanly right: the sunlight and the shadow, the rich bindings of the books, the dark patina of the wood, the heavy silence over everything. It was an Earthly classroom in the most scholarly tradition. It was Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne and an Eastern ivy college all rolled into one.
The aliens hadn’t missed a bet—not a single bet.
«I have to go,» said Mary. «You wait right here for me.»
«I’ll wait right here,» he promised.
He watched her cross the room and open a door. Through it, he saw a corridor that went on for what seemed miles and miles. Then she shut the door and he was alone.
He stood there for a moment, then swung swiftly around. Almost running across the foyer, he reached the great bronze door. But there was no door, or none that he could see. There was not even a crack where a door should be.
He went over the wall inch by inch and he found no door.
He turned away from the wall and stood in the foyer, naked of soul, and felt the vast emptiness of the building thunder in his brain.
Up there, he thought, up there for a thousand stories, the building stretched into the sky. And down here was kindergarten and up on the second floor, no doubt, first grade, and you’d go up and up and what would be the end—and the purpose of that end?