“By rights,” said Taine, “I ought to take a rope to you, running off like that.”
Beasly came ambling in.
“That chuck is a friendly cuss,” he announced. “He is waiting for someone.”
“That’s nice,” said Taine, paying no attention.
He glanced at the clock.
“It’s seven thirty,” he said. “We can catch the news. You want to get it, Beasly?”
“Sure. I know right where to get it. That fellow from New York.”
“That’s the one,” said Taine.
He walked into the living room and looked out the window. The man-size chuck had not moved. He was sitting with his back to the house, looking back the way he’d come.
Waiting for someone, Beasly had said, and it looked as if he might be, but probably it was all just in Beasly’s head.
And if he were waiting for someone, Taine wondered, who might that someone be? What might that someone be? Certainly by now the word had spread out there that there was a door into another world. And how many doors, he wondered, had been opened through the ages?
Henry had said that there was a big new world out there waiting for Earthmen to move in. And that wasn’t it at all. It was the other way around.
The voice of the news commentator came blasting from the radio in the middle of a sentence:
“… Finally got into the act. Radio Moscow said this evening that the Soviet delegate will make representations in the U.N. tomorrow for the internationalization of this other world and the gateway to it.
“From that gateway itself, the home of a man named Hiram Taine, there is no news. Complete security had been clamped down and a cordon of troops form a solid wall around the house, holding back the crowds. Attempts to telephone the residence are blocked by a curt voice which says that no calls are being accepted for that number. And Taine himself has not stepped from the house.”
Taine walked back into the kitchen and sat down.
“He’s talking about you,” Beasly said importantly.
“Rumor circulated this morning that Taine, a quiet village repair man and dealer in antiques, and until yesterday a relative unknown, had finally returned from a trip which he made out into this new and unknown land. But what he found, if anything, no one yet can say. Nor is there any further information about this other place beyond the fact that it is a desert and, to the moment, lifeless.
“A small flurry of excitement was occasioned late yesterday by the finding of some strange object in the woods across the road from the residence, but this area likewise was swiftly cordoned off and to the moment Colonel Ryan, who commands the troops, will say nothing of what actually was found.
“Mystery man of the entire situation is one Henry Horton, who seems to be the only unofficial person to have entry to the Taine house. Horton, questioned earlier today, had little to say, but managed to suggest an air of great conspiracy. He hinted he and Taine were partners in some mysterious venture and left hanging in midair the half impression that he and Taine had collaborated in opening the new world.
“Horton, it is interesting to note, operates a small computer plant and it is understood on good authority that only recently he delivered a computer to Taine, or at least some sort of machine to which considerable mystery is attached. One story is that this particular machine had been in the process of development for six or seven years.
“Some of the answers to the matter of how all this did happen and what actually did happen must wait upon the findings of a team of scientists who left Washington this evening after an all-day conference at the White House, which was attended by representatives from the military, the state department, the security division and the special weapons section.
“Throughout the world the impact of what happened yesterday at Willow Bend can only be compared to the sensation of the news, almost twenty years ago, of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. There is some tendency among many observers to believe that the implications of Willow Bend, in fact, may be even more Earth-shaking than were those of Hiroshima.
“Washington insists, as is only natural, that this matter is of internal concern only and that it intends to handle the situation as it best affects the national welfare.
“But abroad there is a rising storm of insistence that this is not a matter of national policy concerning one nation, but that it necessarily must be a matter of worldwide concern.
“There is an unconfirmed report that a U.N. observer will arrive in Willow Bend almost momentarily. France, Britain, Bolivia, Mexico and India have already requested permission of Washington to send observers to the scene and other nations undoubtedly plan to file similar requests.
“The world sits on edge tonight, waiting for the word from Willow Bend and –”
Taine reached out and clicked the radio to silence.
“From the sound of it,” said Beasly, “we are going to be overrun by a batch of foreigners.”
Yes, thought Taine, there might be a batch of foreigners, but not exactly in the sense that Beasly meant. The use of the word, he told himself, so far as any human was concerned, must be outdated now. No man of Earth ever again could be called a foreigner with alien life next door – literally next door. What were the people of the stone house?
And perhaps not the alien life of one planet only, but the alien life of many. For he himself had found another door into yet another planet and there might be many more such doors and what would these other worlds be like, and what was the purpose of the doors?
Someone, something, had found a way of going to another planet short of spanning light-years of lonely space – a simpler and a shorter way than flying through the gulfs of space. And once the way was open, then the way stayed open and it was as easy as walking from one room to another.
But one thing – one ridiculous thing – kept puzzling him and that was the spinning and the movement of the connected planets, of all the planets that must be linked together. You could not, he argued, establish solid, factual links between two objects that move independently of one another.
And yet, a couple of days ago, he would have contended just as stolidly that the whole idea on the face of it was fantastic and impossible. Still it had been done. And once one impossibility was accomplished, what logical man could say with sincerity that the second could not be?
The doorbell rang and he got up to answer it.
It was Ernie, the oil man.
“Henry said you wanted some gas and I came to tell you I can’t get it until morning.”
“That’s all right,” said Taine. “I don’t need it now.”
And swiftly slammed the door.
He leaned against it, thinking: I’ll have to face them sometime. I can’t keep the door locked against the world. Sometime, soon or late, the Earth and I will have to have this out.
And it was foolish, he thought, for him to think like this, but that was the way it was.
He had something here that the Earth demanded; something that Earth wanted or thought it wanted. And yet, in the last analysis, it was his responsibility. It had happened on his land, it had happened in his house; unwittingly, perhaps, he’d even aided and abetted it.
And the land and house are mine, he fiercely told himself, and that world out there was an extension of his yard. No matter how far or where it went, an extension of his yard.
Beasly had left the kitchen and Taine walked into the living room. Towser was curled up and snoring gently in the gold-upholstered chair.
Taine decided he would let him stay there. After all, he thought, Towser had won the right to sleep anywhere he wished.
He walked past the chair to the window and the desert stretched to its far horizon and there before the window sat the man-size woodchuck and Beasly side by side, with their backs turned to the window and staring out across the desert.