Matt was crowded off the road by a people wave, and by the time he was allowed back on it, most of the watchers had gone, to search for the small boats. When he reached his house, and went straight to the infirmary to check on Florence, he saw that one of the small boats had brought him a visitor, a pregnant woman, as near delivery as Florence judging from her appearance.
He slammed the door and locked it, then bedded her down and examined her, and almost forgot that she was an alien, and that hundreds of frightened people were then scouring the woods and fields for her.
She was sick and weak and skim-milk white with gray lips, and Matt knew that she was dying. He put her tunic on a chair and something fell from it. She motioned that he was to keep it, and he dropped it into his pocket. It was a black disk, shiny and smooth on one side, dull on the other, half an inch thick, about two and a half inches in diameter. He thought it was a touchstone, and from time to time, he rubbed it and found that it was satisfying to touch. The woman was in second stage labor, almost ready, when the searchers burst into the house. Florence cried out then, and she too was suddenly ready. She woke up at the sound of the voices in the hall arguing with Mrs. Murray, who was trying to keep them from entering the infirmary.
Matt left his patients and confronted the men in the hall, led by Obie, closely followed by Billy Warren Smith, Matt’s next door neighbor.
They insisted that aliens had entered, and they demanded access to the infirmary, and while they argued about it, things happened inside the infirmary, and there was the first tentative wail of a newborn babe, and a silence during which none of the men moved. Obie pushed Matt aside then and went inside. And Florence sat up, holding a child against her breast, and smiled angelically at him and said, “I knew you’d come.” She lay back down and fell asleep again, and Obie swayed like a man caught in a hurricane.
Obie never would have seen the other woman in the room, but one of the other men, one not touched by the turbulence of sudden fatherhood, did see her and he pushed into the room and stood over her. She was dead, and in the crook of her arm lay a second baby, and it too appeared to be dead. Everyone believed that Matt had delivered her, and he never told them otherwise.
The alien baby didn’t die, of course. Matt labored over it, was relieved by specialists who took the child and did open heart surgery on it, and other things that saved its life. And the alien child became the ward of the United Nations.
Because Florence was sixteen and because Obie denied the child, it was decided, had been decided long ago when pregnancy had been determined, that she would give it up for adoption at birth. Matt took it from her flaccid arms and gave it to Mrs. Murray to care for, and in the end, didn’t offer it to anyone, but talked his wife, whom he loved, and who loved him, into keeping it. Both babies had pale, almost white, hair, and both had the blue eyes of birth, and neither was any more or less human than the other. Staring at the child that had become his, Matt fingered the black touchstone and wondered.
And that is the last element, the prince and the pauper bit.
Chapter Two
BILL Y WARREN SMITH was a fat lawyer. His wife was fat, and both of them detested other fat people. Neither considered himself to be in that category. Billy was thirty-five, pink, and afraid, because having lived half a lifetime, he was in debt, still had to work very hard simply to keep his cars running and his office rent paid, and lived in perpetual terror that the Internal Revenue Service would pull his file for an audit.
Had he been crooked in big ways, involving millions of dollars, and important people much could have been forgiven of him, but he wasn’t. His thefts were of pennies, and his deals involved the manipulation of petty accident reports, and fixing an occasional ticket. If he had been taken into the law firm of a brilliant, imaginative attorney, he would have been successful, because he delighted in the detailed labor of searching for precedent, and locating little used loopholes and quirks. His talents had rested through the years, uncalled for, unsuspected, only because he didn’t have the large vision by himself.
Billy poured gin and tonic for Obie and said, “You have quite a flair for speaking. Going to school?”
Obie shook his head. “I was about to, but I don’t think I will.”
“Oh,” Billy said, and the one dream he had entertained that year faded. “You’ll get drafted then.”
“Don’t think so, Mr. Smith. You see, I. got the Call. And I aim to answer it. Yes siree, I aim to answer the Lord’s Call” He held out his glass and Billy automatically took it and refilled it.
“A preacher? You going to be a preacher? That takes school, doesn’t it?”
“An evangelist, Mr. Smith. Takes nothing but the Lord’s Call, which I got. I’m going up the mountain to fast and meditate for a week and next Sunday I’ll preach again, and the next and the next.”
“What mountain? There aren’t any mountains here.”
“Robb’s Hill will do fine.” Obie slugged down the rest of his drink, and they both were silent for several minutes, and the interlude was filled with June night sounds; crickets, tree frogs, cicadas, a low-voiced bird.
“You could probably get some personal appearances, being the first man to see the aliens, and all,” Billy’s voice was subdued, as if he were deep in thought. As he was. He was trying to capture a dream that hadn’t happened yet, and it was fuzzy and almost without features, without details, but very important.
Obie looked across the yard, across Matt Daniels’ yard at the lighted windows and nodded. “He’s been too busy to deny that I was there first, and by now it wouldn’t matter what he said. They all know I was the first man on earth to lay eyes on the strangers.”
“Billy’s voice rose then and he leaned forward. “You could use a manager, Obie. A business manager to handle receipts and engagements and records. How about it?”
And so, although his purpose in inviting Obie Cox to his house that night had been in order to nudge Obie into law school with the premise of a job afterward, Billy found himself being hired instead, and thought it an equitable arrangement.
“You’ll need a cache of food up there, and a blanket, and clean clothes. You should come down looking hollow-eyed and hungry, but clean. We’ll keep it quiet that I’m your manager for the time being, and I’ll pass the word around that you’re up there fasting and praying.”
Obie grinned and poured straight gin into his glass.
Dr. Winifred Harvey was staring down at the child still hovering between giving up and making it, and she wondered if they should even try to keep it alive. Heart failure within the hour of birth, a complete transfusion during the surgery, possible brain damage…
“Sure doesn’t look human, does it?” said the nurse checking the incubator temperature.
“It looks human and sick,” Winifred snapped. But it was a lie. The child didn’t look human, but what newborn sick baby does? She left the helicopter outfitted as a hospital for the alien infant and stared at the spaceship. The doors were still closed. The ship stood dark and still, a dimly reflecting silver blob against the sky. She returned to Busby’s house where Busby and his wife were treated like lepers, always in the way, faintly unclean, to be endured simply because in the beginning no one had thought to tell them to leave, and by the time the thought had occurred, it seemed a trifle pointless and would have made for bad publicity. Cal Busby and his wife whispered, and pointed at the U.N. people and the army personnel, and shrank back from the white-coated medics, but mostly it was their whispering that rasped. Heads together, a sibilant bss, bss forever issuing from the double-headed entity, they were an unknown quantum. To be trusted, or not to be trusted? That was the problem. Unanswerable, it was decided that they should be ignored. Voices would stop when either of them entered a room, and where conversation had been low-pitched, it became a whisper, and where it had been in normal tones, it became low-pitched, so that the house was filled with murmuring voices and whispers and watchful eyes.