“We’ll have to take it easy on the handouts,” I warned Rila. “If we don’t, we’ll have him up here all the time.”
“You know, Asa,” she said, paying no attention to what I had said, “I’ve decided where we’ll build the house. Down there by that patch of crab apples. We can pipe water from the spring and the ridge will protect us from the northwest wind.”
It was the first time I had heard about the house, but I didn’t make a point of that. It was a good idea, actually. We couldn’t go on living in a mobile home.
“I suppose you’ve decided what kind of house you want,” I said.
“Well, not entirely. Not the floor plan. No detailed plan. Just in general. One story, low against the ground.
Fieldstone, I suppose. That’s a little old-fashioned, but it seems the kind of house that would fit in here. Expensive, too, but we should be able to afford it.”
“Water from the spring,” I said, “but what about the heating? After the telephone line that didn’t work, I’m fairly sure we can’t pipe in gas.”
“I’ve thought about that. Build it tight and solid, well insulated, then use wood. A lot of fireplaces. We could get in men to cut and haul the wood. There’s a lot of it in these hills. Off somewhere where we couldn’t see the cutting. We wouldn’t cut it nearby It would be a shame to spoil the woods we can see.”
We talked about the house through supper. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it. I was glad Rila had thought of it.
“I believe I’ll go over to Lancaster tomorrow and talk to a contractor,” she said. “Ben should know a good one.”
“The newsmen outside the gate will gobble you up,” I said. “Herb still wants you to remain a mystery woman.”
“Look, Asa, if need be, I can handle them. I handled them at the hospital that night we took Hiram in. At worst, I could hunker down in the back of the car, cover myself with a blanket or something. Ben would drive me out. Why don’t you come along? We could go to the hospital and see Hiram.”
“No,” I said. “One of us should stay here. I promised Catface I’d see him today and didn’t get around to it. I’ll hunt him up tomorrow.”
“What’s this with you and Catface?” she demanded.
“He gets lonesome,” I said.
The next morning, Catface was in the crab-apple patch, not in the old home orchard.
I squatted down and said to him, half joking, “Well, let’s get on with it.”
He took me at my word. Immediately, the minnows began bumping at my mind, lipping it, sucking away at it, but this time there seemed to be more of them and smaller — small, tiny slivers of minnows that could drive and wriggle themselves deeper and deeper into my mind. I could feel them wriggling deeply into the crevices of it.
A strange, dreamy lassitude was creeping over me and I fought against it. I was being plunged into a soft grayness that entangled me as the gossamer of a finely knit spiderweb might entrap an insect that had blundered into it.
I tried to break the web, to stagger to my feet, but found, with a queer not-caring, that I had no idea where I was. Found, as well, that I really had no concern as to where I might be. I knew, vaguely, that this was Mastodonia and that Catface was with me and that Rila had gone to Lancaster to see a contractor about building a fieldstone house and that we’d have to get men to bring in a winter’s supply of wood for us, but this was all background material, all of it segregated from what was happening. I knew that, for a moment, I need not be concerned with it.
Then I saw it — the city, if it was a city. It seemed that I was sitting atop a high hill, beneath a lordly tree. The weather was fair and warm and the sky was the softest blue that I had ever seen.
Spread out in front of me was the city, and when I looked to either side, I saw that it was everywhere, that it went all around me and spread to the far-off horizon in all directions. The hill stood alone in the midst of the city, a fair hill, its slopes covered by a dark green grass and lovely flowers, blowing in a gentle breeze, and atop it, this one lordly tree beneath which I sat.
I had no idea of how I’d gotten there; I did not even wonder how I’d gotten there. It seemed quite natural that I should be there and it seemed as well that I should recognize the place, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t. I had wondered on first seeing it if it was a city and now I knew it was, but I knew as well that it was something else as well, that it had a significance and that a knowledge of this significance was simply something I had forgotten, but would recall any minute now.
It was like no city I had ever seen before. There were parks and esplanades and wide, gracious streets and these all seemed familiar, although they were very splendid. But the buildings were not the kind of buildings one would have expected anywhere. They had no mass and even little form; rather, they were spiderwebby, lacy, filmy, foamy, insubstantial. Yet, when I looked more carefully at them, I could see that they were not as insubstantial as I had thought, that once I’d looked at them for a time, I began seeing them better, that when I first had looked at them, I had not seen them in their entirety, had been seeing only a part of them and that behind this facade of first seeing, the structures took on a more substantial form. But there was still something about it all that bothered me, and in time I realized it was the pattern of the city. The buildings did not stand in the massive rectangles dictated by street patterns, as was the case with cities on the Earth. That was it, I thought: This was not an Earth city, although why this surprised me I don’t know, for I must have known from the very beginning that it was no city of the Earth — that it was Catface’s city.
“It is headquarters,” said Catface. “Galactic headquarters. I thought that to understand it, you should see it.”
“Thank you for showing it to me,” I said. “It does help me understand.”
I was not surprised at all that Catface had spoken to me. I was in that state where I’d have been surprised at nothing.
About this time, too, I realized that the little lipping minnows were no longer bumping against my mind. Apparently, they had finished their job, gotten all there was to be gotten, all the flaky skin, all the little bloody scabs, and had gone away.
“This is where you were born?” I asked.
“No,” said Catface. “Not where I began. I began on another planet, very far from here. I will show it to you some day if you have the time to look.”
“But you were here,” I said.
“I came as a volunteer,” he said. “Or rather, I was summoned as a volunteer.”
“Summoned? How summoned? Who would summon you? If you’re summoned, you’re not a volunteer.”
I tried to figure out if Catface and I were actually speaking words, and it seemed to me we weren’t, although it made no difference, for we were understanding one another just as well as if we had been speaking words.
“You have the concept of a god,” said Catface.
“Through the history of your race, men have worshipped many gods.”
“I understand the concept,” I said. “I’m not sure I worship any god. Not the way most men would mean if they said they worshipped a god.”
“Nor I,” said Catface. “But if you saw who summoned me, and not only me, but many other creatures; you’d be convinced that they are gods. Which they are not, of course, although there are those who think they are. They are simply a life form, biological or otherwise — of that I can’t be certain — that got an early start at intelligence and over millions of years were wise enough or lucky enough to avoid those catastrophic events that so often cause the downfall and decay of intelligence. They may have been biological at one time; certainly, they must have been. I’m not certain what they are now; over the long millennia, they may have changed themselves….”