The Busbys were finally escorted from their property, installed in a motel that was within the limited area, and there left to their own devices. They confirmed the story that there was sickness back on the farm, and Cal Busby said outright that the Lord had caused it. Else why didn’t he and his wife get sick? They ate the same food as the soldiers, drank the same water. Why didn’t they get sick too? Because the Lord knew they were good people, not helping the strangers who had come to their cornfield unasked, unwanted. The Lord spared them, which was more than the aliens did for his corn. As the day got on, Cal Busby was expanding, and by sundown, he had three of the soldiers dead and in secret graves, with many more, hundreds maybe, near death. But when the reporters got near them, and when the army men came to question them, the Busbys drew together again, and nothing but bss, bss came from them.
Most of the personnel at the farm didn’t get sick, but some did, and the source was traced to contaminated water. “Thank God,” Winifred said, “I just drank the bitch’s coffee. And it boiled and boiled and boiled.”
As the days dragged by with no new excitement, some of the people wished out loud that Obie would come down off the mountain and give them the word about what to expect next. Some laughed to exhaustion at the thought of Obie Cox praying up on Robb’s Hill. And still others trekked up the hill to see if Obie really was there fasting and praying like he said, and they brought back the word that he really was, and there was slightly more than a touch of awe in their voices when they said it, for none of them ever had seen a holy man fasting and praying only having heard of it in far-off places like India and Tibet. Obie looked real spiritual they said.
Billy’s wife Wanda returned and demanded to know why he was Hill scratched up and sore, and he wouldn’t tell her that it was from hauling a week’s supply of food and clothing up Robb’s Hill in the dead of night, sliding most of the way up and down in the middle of blackberry bushes. Also he had got chiggers, and he was one continuous itching hive.
Winifred left, promising to keep in touch with Matt, assuring him that she would get herself appointed to the special group assigned to the alien child. Lisa and Derek returned soon after her departure. Lisa wrinkled her nose and could have put markers on all the spots where Winifred had stood or sat or lain, but she didn’t, because she loved her husband and trusted him. She commiserated with him instead over the influx of patients and the probability that none of them would pay him anything unless they had been his regular patients before the landing, figuring that their own doctors came first and this had been a special case. They hadn’t wanted to go to him, but the government forced them. Let him bill the government. They discussed the landing for hours, and then got in the car, with Derek, who was four, and drove up Slater Hill to a point where they could look down on the ship and the heavy cordon of guards surrounding the field, and construction workers who were fencing it all in. Derek was properly impressed and argued bitterly when he was denied permission to go down and enter the ship. He swore that he would run away and do it by himself when everyone else was sleeping.
Still later Lisa held Lorna and listened intently while Lorna babbled and pried at her nose and tried to take off her ears. Lorna had learned a new word, baby, and she said it again and again, adding it to her permanent, stable vocabulary that endured along with the babbling that changed from day to day. Lorna could say dadda, momma, Dek, bye-bye, and baby. Lisa didn’t need a lot of talking into it after that. She seemed to assume, as Lorna did, that they had a new baby.
And the new baby stared at her and smiled slowly and, Matt thought with a touch of wonder, deliberately. They named him Blake.
INTERLUDE ONE
So says Conan Woosley—
Overhead planes with metal detection devices make a latticework pattern in the sky; in the dark woods men are stumbling and lurching and falling over each other as the search for the missing capsule continues. They are tired men, they have been searching for four days now…. And vituperation also continues…
Excerpts from U.N. speeches, week of June 20….
U.S.S.R.: …furthermore, this government must ponder the possibilities that the U.S., or one of the many branches of intelligence operating within the U.S. might have located the missing capsule, as suggested by the distinguished representative of the republic of France…
France: …so in answer to the charge made against our great nation by the United States, our only possible reply can be to abstain from future meetings of this august body until such time as the missing capsule has been found and restored to the joint scientific body as advocated.
Great Britain: To suggest that our esteemed friend and ally in this magnificent effort to achieve communication with the first aliens to reach the soil of this planet is to cost the success of this body into gloom so deep and impenetrable that it becomes difficult to see any end in sight…
B.B.C. speech mode by Prime Minister Lloyd, June 29, 1972
…we must therefore assume that those charges are being leveled by those whose gaol it is to breach the solid wall of friendship…. If the United States government has somehow located the missing capsule, it is undeniably on act of reasonableness in the face of the current mistrust that surrounds the entire issue. To doubt the motives of that great country is to place in jeopardy the alliance that has united us in common cause, and would serve only to risk material gains from trade and tourism that would continue to undermine our economy for a century…
Reuters, June 29
Reliable sources today mode public a speech by Mao Tse Tung before a crowd estimated to number three hundred thousand in Red Square in Peking. In it he accused the imperialistic revisionist government of the Soviet Union of conspiring with the imperialistic oppressive forces of the United States to conceal the capsule from the rest of the peace-loving free world in order to obtain for themselves the extraterrestrial weapons and knowledge they have acquired. The plot to culminate in a full-scale war against the People’s Republic of China, Mao promised, would be resisted to the lost hundred million…
Letter from Roald Lit (Chairman, U.N. Science Advisory Board) to his daughter
My dear Marguerita,
All the aliens have died! Such a waste; but then we do have all those cadavers to study, so perhaps we still shall be able to salvage something. And there is the ship. No matter what happens to people, you know, math is math, and science is science, and universal laws are universal laws. So I continue optimistic.
We shall remain here for the next three to five days, to be certain there is no danger of contamination. I would like to be able to leave immediately, but I must be careful and not antagonize any of the local people more than has already been done. You know that they are accusing us of poisoning the well that contained the strep bacilli” that infected many of our personnel. The local peasants were immune following long exposure, but they won’t believe that, and so they say we must have put germs in the well.
Anyway, I shall be home next week, and am looking forward to seeing you and the children…