There was no Willow Bend. There was more of the desert, a great deal more of it.
He walked around the house and there was no back to the house. The back of the house now was just the same as the front had been before—the same smooth curve pulling the sides of the house together.
He walked on around the house to the front again and there was desert all the way. And the front was still all right. It hadn’t changed at all. The truck was there on the chopped-off driveway and the garage was open and the car inside.
Taine walked out a way into the desert and hunkered down and scooped up a handful of the pebbles and the pebbles were just pebbles.
He squatted there and let the pebbles trickle through his fingers.
In Willow Bend there was a back door and there wasn’t any front. Here, wherever here might be, there was a front door, but there wasn’t any back.
He stood up and tossed the rest of the pebbles away and wiped his dusty hands upon his breeches.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a sense of movement on the porch and there they were.
A line of tiny animals, if animals they were, came marching down the steps, one behind another. They were four inches high or so and they went on all four feet, although it was plain to see that their front feet were really hands, not feet. They had ratlike faces that were vaguely human, with noses long and pointed. They looked as if they might have scales instead of hide, for their bodies glistened with a rippling motion as they walked. And all of them had tails that looked very much like the coiled-wire tails one finds on certain toys and the tails stuck straight up above them, quivering as they walked.
They came down the steps in single file, in perfect military order, with half a foot or so of spacing between each one of them.
They came down the steps and walked out into the desert in a straight, undeviating line as if they knew exactly where they might be bound. There was something deadly purposeful about them and yet they didn’t hurry.
Taine counted sixteen of them and he watched them go out into the desert until they were almost lost to sight.
There go the ones, he thought, who came to live with me. They are the ones who fixed up the ceiling and who repaired Abbie’s television set and jiggered up the stove and radio. And more than likely, too, they were the ones who had come to Earth in the strange milk-glass contraption out there in the woods.
And if they had come to Earth in that deal out in the woods, then what sort of place was this?
He climbed the porch and opened the screen door and saw the neat, six-inch circle his departing guests had achieved in the screen to get out of the house. He made a mental note that some day, when he had the time, he would have to fix it.
He went in and slammed the door behind him.
“Beasly,” he shouted.
There was no answer.
Towser crawled from beneath the love seat and apologized.
“It’s all right, pal,” said Taine. “That outfit scared me, too.”
He went into the kitchen. The dim ceiling light shone on the overturned coffee pot, the broken cup in the center of the floor, the upset bowl of eggs. One broken egg was a white and yellow gob on the linoleum.
He stepped down on the landing and saw that the screen door in the back was wrecked beyond repair. Its rusty mesh was broken-exploded might have been a better word—and a part of the frame was smashed.
Taine looked at it in wondering admiration.
“The poor fool,” he said. “He went straight through it without opening it at all.”
He snapped on the light and went down the basement stairs. Halfway down he stopped in utter wonderment.
To his left was a wall—a wall of the same sort of material as had been used to put in the ceiling.
He stooped and saw that the wall ran clear across the basement, floor to ceiling, shutting off the workshop area.
And inside the workshop, what?
For one thing, he remembered, the computer that Henry had sent over just this morning. Three trucks, Beasly had said—three truck-loads of equipment delivered straight into their paws!
Taine sat down weakly on the steps.
They must have thought, he told himself, that he was co-operating! Maybe they had figured that he knew what they were about and so went along with them. Or perhaps they thought he was paying them for fixing up the TV set and the stove and radio.
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.