"In which case," said White, "there would be no harm in letting them in. It would improve relationships greatly and if we found nothing, it would cost us nothing."
"Marcus," said the President, "you are talking about playing the odds and that could be dangerous."
"Let's forget it," said Mallory. "I'm sorry I mentioned it. It just came off the top of my head."
"The embarrassing thing about all this," said ‘White, "is that we are receiving offers of assistance from good allies and friends to help us in any way they can. They seem to be sincere.
"I just bet they are," said Hammond.
"The only thing I can tell them," said White, ignoring Hammond, "is that later on we may call on them, but that, at the moment, we don't know what we face."
"I think, for the moment," said the President, "we had best leave it at that. Let's forget other countries for the moment and look to our own. There have been a few minor flare-ups. Small riots, some looting and burning in such places as Chicago, New York, St. Louis. Is there anything new on all of this, Dave?"
"Nothing big," said Porter. "And in this we have been lucky. We should have prepared the country. We should have called in the press when we first found the swarm was beginning to break up. We could have forewarned the country."
"You're still smarting over that?"
"You're damned right I am, Mr. President. We botched it. To let NASA issue that skimpy little announcement was a sneaky thing to do."
"Dave, we talked it over.
"Yes, I know. And you were wrong.
"You went along with it."
"I didn't go along. I protested and there were a few who sided with me.
"But only a few."
"Sir, you can't run a news operation on a majority vote. The rest of you know your business, but I know mine. Right now we've been lucky. I hope we can say the same thing at this time tomorrow. The thing I'm afraid of is the cult outbreak. Every crackpot in the country is up on the stump and shouting. All the evangelists are calling big prayer meetings. Every little backwoods church is filled with clapping, stomping, singing people. Out in Minneapolis, a group of second generation flower people tried to rush police lines. They wanted to squat down on an airport runway and give the visitor that landed there a demonstration of their love."
"I don't think we need to worry too much about things like
that," said Hammond.
‘‘There's a lot of emotion boiling around, ' Porter told him, a lot of it still beneath the surface. I hope it can be kept from boiling over. Mixed emotions of all sorts. Latent fears that can easily boil up to the surface. Hallelujah emotions that can get out of hand. We're on the edge of something that could produce violent street encounters. Let a bunch of beer drinking hardhats get fed up with the antics of the millennium-has-come dancers in the streets
"You're exaggerating," said Hammond.
"I hope I am," said Porter.
"I don't like this watchful waiting," said Sullivan. "I think we
should act in some positive manner. Something to let the people
know we are involved, that we, at least, are taking some action."
"We've called out the National Guard," said the President.
"We have investigators in the field."
"That's passive action," said Sullivan.
"The trouble is," said the President, "that anything we did
probably would be wrong."
25. THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Dr. Albert Barr said to Jerry Conklin, "Miss Foster phoned to say that you wanted to talk with me, but she wasn't too specific. She indicated it had something to do with the visitors." He said to Kathy, "You assured me this is not an interview for an article in your paper.
"It's not an interview," said Kathy, "and I was not specific because I think that Jerry should tell you what happened."
"I've been worried about it," said Jerry, "ever since it happened.
"Please tell me what happened," said Barr. "Start at the beginning."
He lounged behind his desk, regarding his two callers with a quizzical expression. He was a sandy-haired man, much younger than Kathy had expected him to be, with the build of a football player. Through the open window of his office came the sounds of a late afternoon on campus, the shrill laughter of a girl, students shouting back and forth, the deep humming of a started car and the scream of tires on pavement as it was gunned to a sudden take-off. Golden spangles of light flecked the windows as the westering sun shone through a birch tree decked in bright autumnal color.
"You may have read about the car that was smashed when the first visitor landed at Lone Pine," said Jerry.
"Could it have been your car?" asked Barr.
"It could have been. It was. I had parked at the end of the bridge to get in some fishing. I had been told there were some big rainbow in the pool below the bridge."
Barr did not interrupt as Jerry told his story. A couple of times he seemed to be on the verge of asking questions, but he did not ask them.
When Jerry had finished, the exobiologist said, "There are a number of points I would like to raise and discuss with you, but tell me first, why have you come to me? What do you want of me?"
"There are two things," said Jerry. "This business of home. The visitor thought of home, or made me think of home. I've mulled it over and over and there seems to be no sense to it. I am convinced that it induced the thought I had of home. In a situation such as that, I would not have thought of home. And the thought was real enough—not just a brief impression, but something that continued. As if the visitor or whatever was inside the visitor wanted me to think of home, kept on pressuring me to think of home."
"Are you trying to say that telepathy was involved?"
"I don't know what was involved. If by telepathy you mean that it was talking with me, or trying to talk with me, no, that was not the case. I tried to talk with it, which might have been a foolish thing to do, but something, that under the circumstances, I imagine might have come quite naturally. There I was, trapped in a place that I did not understand and I was reaching out for information, for any kind of information that would help to explain what was going on. So I tried to talk with it, to establish any kind of contact, to seek some answers. Probably I was fairly well aware that it would be impossible to establish contact, but..
"Do you consider yourself in any way telepathic?"
"No, I do not. I have no telepathic ability that I am aware of. The simple fact is that it is something I had never thought about. I would say I'm not a telepath."
"And yet it talked to you. Or you think it talked to you."
"Dr. Barr, that's not what I said," said Jerry. "At no time did I think the visitor was talking to me. No conscious communication, no words forming in my mind, no pictures, nothing like that at all. There was just this feeling of home, this overpowering sense of home.~~
"You are convinced the feeling came from the creature?"
"Where else could it have come from? I am convinced the thought of home would not have occurred independently to me. There was no reason for it to. There were a lot of other things that were more important for me to think about."
"You said two things. What was the other thing?"
"It seemed to me," said Jerry, "that the visitor was a tree or very like a tree.~~