But to tackle first things first, why had they repaired the TV set and the stove and radio? As a sort of rental payment? As a friendly gesture? Or as a sort of practice run to find out what they could about this world’s technology? To find, perhaps, how their technology could be adapted to the materials and conditions on this planet they had found?
Taine raised a hand and rapped with his knuckles on the wall beside the stairs and the smooth white surface gave out a pinging sound.
He laid his ear against the wall and listened closely and it seemed to him he could hear a low-key humming, but if so it was so faint he could not be absolutely sure.
Banker Stevens’ lawn mower was in there, behind the wall, and a lot of other stuff waiting for repair. They’d take the hide right off him, he thought, especially Banker Stevens. Stevens was a tight man.
Beasly must have been half-crazed with fear, he thought. When he had seen those things coming up out of the basement, he’d gone clean off his rocker. He’d gone straight through the door without even bothering to try to open it and now he was down in the village yapping to anyone who’d stop to listen to him.
No one ordinarily would pay Beasly much attention, but if he yapped long enough and wild enough, they’d probably do some checking. They’d come storming up here and they’d give the place a going over and they’d stand goggle-eyed at what they found in front and pretty soon some of them would have worked their way around to sort of running things.
And it was none of their business, Taine stubbornly told himself, his ever-present business sense rising to the fore. There was a lot of real estate lying around out there in his front yard and the only way anyone could get to it was by going through his house. That being the case, it stood to reason that all that land out there was his. Maybe it wasn’t any good at all. There might be nothing there. But before he had other people overrunning it, he’d better check and see.
He went up the stairs and out into the garage.
The sun was still just above the northern horizon and there was nothing moving.
He found a hammer and some nails and a few short lengths of plank in the garage and took them in the house.
Towser, he saw, had taken advantage of the situation and was sleeping in the gold-upholstered chair. Taine didn’t bother him.
Taine locked the back door and nailed some planks across it. He locked the kitchen and the bedroom windows and nailed planks across them, too.
That would hold the villagers for a while, he told himself, when they came tearing up here to see what was going on.
He got his deer rifle, a box of cartridges, a pair of binoculars and an old canteen out of a closet. He filled the canteen at the kitchen tap and stuffed a sack with food for him and Towser to eat along the way, for there was no time to wait and eat.
Then he went into the living room and dumped Towser out of the gold-upholstered chair.
“Come on, Tows,” he said. “We’ll go and look things over.”
He checked the gasoline in the pickup and the tank was almost full.
He and the dog got in and he put the rifle within easy reach. Then he backed the truck and swung it around and headed out, north, across the desert.
It was easy traveling. The desert was as level as a floor. At times it got a little rough, but no worse than a lot of the back roads he traveled hunting down antiques.
The scenery didn’t change. Here and there were low hills, but the desert itself kept on mostly level, unraveling itself into that far-off horizon. Taine kept on driving north, straight into the sun. He hit some sandy stretches, but the sand was firm and hard and he had no trouble.
Half an hour out he caught up with the band of things – all sixteen of them – that had left the house. They were still traveling in line at their steady pace.
Slowing down the truck, Taine traveled parallel with them for a time, but there was no profit in it; they kept on traveling their course, looking neither right or left.
Speeding up, Taine left them behind.
The sun stayed in the north, unmoving, and that certainly was queer. Perhaps, Taine told himself, this world spun on its axis far more slowly than the Earth and the day was longer. From the way the sun appeared to be standing still, perhaps a good deal longer.
Hunched above the wheel, staring out into the endless stretch of desert, the strangeness of it struck him for the first time with its full impact.
This was another world – there could be no doubt of that – another planet circling another star, and where it was in actual space no one on Earth could have the least idea. And yet, through some machination of those sixteen things walking straight in line, it also was lying just outside the front door of his house.
Ahead of him a somewhat larger hill loomed out of the flatness of the desert. As he drew nearer to it, he made out a row of shining objects lined upon its crest. After a time he stopped the truck and got out with the binoculars.
Through the glasses, he saw that the shining things were the same sort of milk-glass contraptions as had been in the woods. He counted eight of them, shining in the sun, perched upon some sort of rock-gray cradles. And there were other cradles empty.
He took the binoculars from his eyes and stood there for a moment, considering the advisability of climbing the hill and investigating closely. But he shook his head. There’d be time for that later on. He’d better keep on moving. This was not a real exploring foray, but a quick reconnaissance.
He climbed into the truck and drove on, keeping watch upon the gas gauge. When it came close to half full he’d have to turn around and go back home again.
Ahead of him he saw a faint whiteness above the dim horizon line and he watched it narrowly. At times it faded away and then came in again, but whatever it might be was so far off he could make nothing of it.
He glanced down at the gas gauge and it was close to the halfway mark. He stopped the pickup and got out with the binoculars.
As he moved around to the front of the machine he was puzzled at how slow and tired his legs were and then remembered – he should have been in bed many hours ago. He looked at his watch and it was two o’clock and that meant, back on Earth, two o’clock in the morning. He had been awake for more than twenty hours and much of that time he had been engaged in the back-breaking work of digging out the strange thing in the woods.
He put up the binoculars and the elusive white line that he had been seeing turned out to be a range of mountains. The great, blue, craggy mass towered up above the desert with the gleam of snow on its peaks and ridges. They were a long way off, for even the powerful glasses brought them in as little more than a misty blueness.
He swept the glasses slowly back and forth and the mountains extended for a long distance above the horizon line.
He brought the glasses down off the mountains and examined the desert that stretched ahead of him. There was more of the same that he had been seeing – the same floorlike levelness, the same occasional mounds, the self-same scraggy vegetation.
And a house!
His hands trembled and he lowered the glasses, then put them up to his face again and had another look. It was a house, all right. A funny-looking house standing at the foot of one of the hillocks, still shadowed by the hillock so that one could not pick it out with the naked eye.
It seemed to be a small house. Its roof was like a blunted cone and it lay tight against the ground, as if it hugged or crouched against the ground. There was an oval opening that probably was a door, but there was no sign of windows.
He took the binoculars down again and stared at the hillock. Four or five miles away, he thought. The gas would stretch that far and even if it didn’t he could walk the last few miles into Willow Bend.