He looked at his watch and saw that he could afford no more than thirty minutes at the pool. Kathy had a pair of tickets for the symphony—some guest conductor, whose name he had quite forgotten, would be directing the orchestra and Kathy had been wild, for weeks, to attend the concert. He didn't care too much
for that kind of music, but Kathy did and she would be sore as hell if he didn't get back to Minneapolis on time.
In the barber shop, George said to Norton, "You put the papers in the mail this afternoon. It must feel good not to have much to do for another week."
"You are dead wrong there," said Norton. "You don't just snap your fingers and get out a paper, even a weekly paper. There are ads to be made up and sold, job printing to be done, copy to be written and a lot of other things to do to get together next week's paper.
"I've always wondered why you stay here," said George. "A young newspaperman like you, there are a lot of places you could go. You wouldn't have to stay here. The papers down at Minneapolis would find a place for you,,snap you up, more than likely, if you just said the word to them.
"I don't know about that," said Norton. "Anyhow, I like it here. My own boss, my own business. Not much money, but enough to get along on. I'd be lost in a city. I have a friend down in Minneapolis. He's city editor of the Tribune. Young to be a city editor, but a good one. His name is Johnny Garrison.
"I bet he'd hire you," said George.
"Maybe. I don't know. It would be tough going for a time. You'd have to learn the ropes of big-city newspapering. But, as I was saying, Johnny is city editor there and makes a lot more money than I do. But he's got his worries, too. He can't knock off early in the afternoon and go fishing if he wants to. He can't take it easy one day and make up lost time the next. He has a house with a big mortgage on it. He has an expensive family. He fights miles of city traffic to get to work every day and other miles of it to get home again. He's got a hell of a lot of responsibility. He does a lot more drinking than I do. He probably has to do a lot of things that he doesn't want to do, meet a lot of people he'd just as soon not meet. He works long hours; he carries his responsibilities home with him.
"I suppose there are drawbacks," said the barber, "to every job there is."
A confused fly irritatingly, and with stupid persistence, buzzed against the plate-glass window of the shop front. The bar back of the chair was lined with ornate bottles, very seldom used, window dressing from an earlier time. Above the wall, a.30-.3o rifle hung on pegs against the wall.
At the corner gas station the attendant, inserting the nozzle into the tank of the banker's car, looked upward across his shoulder.
"Christ, Kermit, look at that, will you!"
The banker looked up.
The thing in the sky was big and black and very low. It made no noise. It floated there, sinking slowly toward the ground. It filled half the sky.
"One of them UFOs," the attendant said. "First one I ever saw. God, it's big. I never thought they were that big."
The banker did not answer. He was too frozen to answer. He couldn't move a muscle.
Down the street, Sally, the waitress, screamed. She dropped the broom and ran, blindly, aimlessly, screaming all the while.
Stuffy Grant, startled at the screaming, lurched up from the nail keg and waddled out into the street before he saw the black bigness hanging in the sky. He tilted back so far in looking that he lost his balance, which wasn't as good as it might have been, a result of having finished off what was left in a bottle of rot-gut moonshine made by Abe Parker out somewhere in the bush. Stuffy went over backwards and came to a solid sitting position in the middle of the street. He scrambled frantically to regain his feet and ran. The cigar had fallen from his mouth and he did not retrace his steps to retrieve it. He had forgotten that he had it.
In the barber shop, George quit his haircutting and ran to the window. He saw Sally and Stuffy fleeing in panic. He dropped his scissors and lunged for the wall back of the bar, clawing for the rifle. He worked the lever mechanism to jack a cartridge into the(chamber and leaped for the door.
Norton came out of the chair. "What's the matter, George? What's going on?"
The barber did not answer. The door slammed behind him.
Norton wrenched the door open, stepped out on the sidewalk. The barber was running down the street. The attendant from the gas station came running toward him.
"Over there, George," the attendant yelled, pointing to a vacant lot. "It came down near the river."
George plunged across the vacant lot. Norton and the attendant followed him. Kermit Jones, the banker, pelted along behind them, puffing and panting.
Norton came out of the vacant lot onto a low gravel ridge that lay above the river. Lying across the river at the bridge, covering the bridge, was a great black box—a huge contraption, its length great enough to span the river, one end of it resting on the opposite bank, its rear end on the near bank. It was not quite as broad as it was long and it stood high into the air above the river. At first appearance, it was simply an oblong construction, with no distinguishing features one could see—a box painted the blackest black he had ever seen.
Ahead of him the barber had stopped, was raising the rifle to his shoulder.
"No, George, no!" Norton shouted. "Don't do it!"
The rifle cracked and almost at the instant of its cracking a bolt of brilliant light flashed back from the box that lay across the river. The barber flared for an instant as the bolt of brilliance struck him, then the light was gone and the man, for the moment, stood stark upright, blackened into a grotesque stump of a man, the blackness smoking. The gun in his hands turned cherry red and bent, the barrel dropping like a length of wet spaghetti. Then George, the barber, crumpled to the ground and lay there in a run-together mass that had no resemblance to a man, the black, huddled mass still smoking, little tendrils of foul-smelling smoke streaming out above it.
2. LONE PINE
The water boiled beneath Jerry Conklin's fly. Conklin twitched the rod, but there was nothing there. The trout—and from the size of the boil, it must have been a big one—had sheered off at the last instant of its strike.
Conklin sucked in his breath. The big ones were there, he told himself. The attendant at the station had been right; there were big rainbow lurking in the pool.
The sun was shining brightly through the trees that grew along the river. The dappled water danced with little glints of sunlight shining off the tiny waves on the surface of the pool, set in motion by the rapids that came down the ledges of broken rock just upstream.
Carefully, Conklin retrieved his fly, lifted the rod to cast again, aiming at a spot just beyond where he had missed the strike.
In mid-cast, the sun went out. A sudden shadow engulfed the pool, as if some object had interposed itself between the sun and pool.
Instinctively, Conklin ducked. Something struck the upraised fly rod and he felt the tremor of it transmitted to his hand, heard the sickening splinter of bamboo. My God, he thought, an eighty-dollar rod, the first and only extravagance he had allowed himself.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the square of blackness coming down upon him. The blackness struck the bank behind him and he heard, as if from far off, the crunch of tortured metal as it came down upon his ear.