I waited a little longer, getting up my nerve. Then I boosted myself through the open window.
I stepped quickly to one side, with my back against the wall, so that I wouldn’t be outlined against the window opening. I stood there for a while, straight against the wall, trying to hold in my breathing so I’d catch the slightest sound.
Nothing happened. Nothing moved. And there was no sound.
I lifted the flashlight out of my pocket and switched it on and swept the room with its shaft of light. There was dust- sheeted furniture, there were paintings on the wall, there was a trophy of some sort standing on the fireplace mantel.
I switched off the light and slid swiftly along the wall, just on the chance that someone or something had been hiding among the sheeted furniture and might decide to have a go at me.
Nothing did.
I waited some more.
The room went on being nothing but a room.
I soft-footed across it and went out into the entrance hail. I found the kitchen and the dining room and a study, where empty bookshelves gaped back at me like an old man with a toothless grin.
I didn’t find a thing.
The dust was heavy on the floor and I left tracks across it. The furniture all was sheeted. The place held a slightly musty smell. It had the feel of a house that had been left behind, a house that people had unaccountably walked away from and then never had come back to.
I had been a fool to come, I told myself. There was nothing here. I had simply allowed my imagination to run away with me.
But so long as I was here, I figured, I should make a job of it. Foolish as it all had been, it would be senseless to leave until I had seen the rest of the house, the upstairs and the basement.
I trailed back to the entry hail and started up the staircase, a spiral affair with gleaming rail and posts.
I had gotten three treads up when the voice stopped me.
“Mr. Graves,” it said.
It was a smooth and cultivated voice and it spoke in normal tones. And while it had some question in it, it was conversational. It brought my hair up straight, stiff upon my head, prickling at my scalp.
I spun around, scrabbling for the gun weighing down my pocket.
I had it halfway out when the voice spoke again.
“I’m Atwood,” said the voice. “I’m sorry that the bell is broken.”
“I also knocked,” I said.
“I didn’t hear your knock. I was downstairs working.”
I could see him now, a dark figure in the hail. I let the gun slide back into the pocket.
“We could go downstairs,” said Atwood, “and have a pleasant talk. This hardly is the place for an extended conversation.”
“If you wish,” I told him.
I came down the stairs and he led the way, down the hail and to the basement door. Light flooded up the stairway and I saw him now. He was a most ordinary- looking man, the quiet, pleasant, business type.
“I like it down here,” said Atwood, going easily and unconcernedly down the stairs. “The former owner fixed up this amusement room, which to my mind is far more livable than any other part of the house. I suppose that may be because the rest of the house is old and the room down here is a fairly new addition.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner and were in the amusement room.
It was a large place, running the entire length of the basement, with a fireplace at each end and some furniture scattered here and there on the red tile floor. A table stood against one wall, its top littered with papers; opposite the table, in the outer wall, was a hole—a round hole bored into the wall, about the size to accommodate a bowling ball—and from it a cold wind swept and blew across my ankles. And there was in the air, as well, the faintest suggestion of the shaving lotion smell.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Atwood watching me, and I tried to freeze my face—not into a frozen mask, but into the kind of mask that I imagined was my everyday appearance. And I must have done it, for there was no smile on Atwood’s face, as there might have been if he’d trapped me into some expression of bewilderment or fear.
“You are right,” I told him. “It is very livable.”
I said it simply to be saying something.
For the place was not livable, not by human standards. Dust lay almost as deep in this room as it had upstairs, and there was small junk of all descriptions scattered all about and stacked into the corners.
“Won’t you have a chair?” said Atwood. lie waved toward a deeply cushioned one that stood slantwise of the table.
I walked across the floor to reach it and the floor rustled underneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that I had walked across a large sheet of almost transparent plastic that lay crumpled on the floor.
“Something that the former owner left,” said Atwood carelessly. “Someday I’ll have to get around to cleaning up the place.”
I sat down in the chair.
“Your coat,” said Atwood.
“I believe that I will keep it. There seems to be a draft in here.”
I watched his face and there was no expression in it.
“You catch on quick,” said Atwood, but there was no menace in this tone. “Perhaps a bit too quick.”
I said nothing and he said, “Although I’m glad you came. It is not often that one meets a man of your fine perception.”
I kidded him: “Meaning that you’re about to offer me a job in your organization?”
“The thought,” said Atwood quietly, “has passed across my mind.”
I shook my head. “I doubt you have any need of me. You’ve already done a fair job of buying up the city.”
“City!” Atwood cried, outraged.
I nodded at him.
He spun a chair out from the desk and sat down carefully.
“I see that you do not comprehend,” he told me. “I must put you right.”
“Please do,” I told him. “That is what I’m here for.”
Atwood leaned forward earnestly.
“Not the city,” he said quietly, tensely. “You must not sell me short. Far more than a city, Mr. Graves. Much more than a city. I think it’s safe to say it, for now no one can stop me. I am buying up the Earth!”
There are some ideas so monstrous, so perverted, so outrageous that one’s mind must take a little time to become accustomed to them.
And one of these ideas is that anyone should even think of trying to buy up the Earth. Conquer it—most certainly, for that is an old and fine and traditional idea that has been held by many men. Destroy it—that also is understandable, for there have been madmen who have used the threat of such destruction as an adjunct, if not the backbone, of their policy.
But buying it was unthinkable.
First of all, it was impossible, for no one had the money. And even if one had, it still was crazy—for what would one do with it once one got it bought? And, thirdly, it was unethical and a perversion of tradition, for one does not kill off utterly all his competitors if he’s a businessman. He may absorb them, or control them, but he does not kill them off.
Atwood sat there, poised on the edge of his chair, like an anxious hawk, and he must have read some censure into my very silence.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he told me. “It is entirely legal.”
“I suppose there’s not,” I said. Although I knew there was. If only I could have pulled the words together, I could have told him what was wrong with it.
“We are operating,” Atwood said, “within the human structure. We are operating within and abiding by your rules and regulations. Not only the rules and regulations, but even by your customs. We have violated not a single one of them. And I tell you, my friend, that is not an easy thing. It is rare that one can operate without violating custom.”