I tried to get some words out, but they gurgled in my throat and died. It was just as well. I was not even sure what I had meant to say.
“There’s nothing wrong,” said Atwood, “with our money or our securities.”
“Just one thing,” I said. “You have too much money, far too much of it.”
But it was not the idea of too much money that was bothering me. It was something else. Something far more important than having too much money.
It was the words he used and the way he used them. The way he said “our” to include himself and whoever was leagued with him; the way he used “your” to include all the world exclusive of his group. And the stress he’d put upon the fact that he had operated within the human structure.
It was as if my brain had split in two. As if one side of it shouted horror and the other pleaded reason. For the idea was too monstrous to even think about.
He was grinning at me now and I was filled with sudden rage. The shouting of the one side of my brain drowned out the reason and I came out of the chair, with my hand snaking the gun out of my pocket.
I would have shot him in that instant. Without mercy, without thinking, I would have shot to kill. Like stamping on a snake, like swatting at a fly—it was no more than that.
But I didn’t get the chance to shoot.
For Atwood came unstuck.
I don’t know how to tell it. There is no way to tell it. It was something that no human had ever seen before. There are no words in any human language for the thing that Atwood did.
He didn’t fade or flicker. He didn’t suddenly melt down. Whatever it was he did, he did it all at once.
One second he was sitting there. And the next second he was gone. I didn’t see him go.
There was a tiny click, as if someone had dropped a light metallic object, and there was a flock of jet-black bowling balls that had not been there before bouncing on the floor.
My mind must have gone through certain acrobatics, but I was not aware of them. What I did, I seemed to do instinctively, without even thinking of it—unaware of the interplay of cause and effect, of fact, surmise, and hunch that must have gone flashing through my brain to spur me into action.
I dropped the gun and stooped, grabbing up the sheet of plastic off the floor. And even as I grabbed it and began to shake it out, I moved toward the outer wall, heading for the hole from which blew the chilly breeze.
The bowling balls were coming at me, heading for the hole, and I was ready for them, with the plastic centered on the hole, a trap that waited for them.
The first one hit the hole and drove theplastic in and the second followed close behind—and the third and fourth and fifth.
I made a grab to bring the ends of the plastic sheet together and pulled it from the hole, and inside of it the jet-black bowling balls clicked excitedly as they knocked together.
There were others of them rolling in that basement room—the ones that had been scared off and had escaped the net and now were rolling frantically, seeking for a place to hide.
I lifted up the bag of plastic and gave it a shake to settle the balls I’d caught well into its bottom. I twisted the neck of plastic tightly to hold them in and swung the bag thus formed across my shoulders. And all around me ran the whispering and the slithering as the other balls sought for shadowed corners.
“All right,” I yelled at them, “back into your hole! Back to where you came from!”
But there was no answer. They all were hidden now. Hidden in the shadow and among the junk and watching me from there. Not seeing me, perhaps. More like sensing, likely. But, no matter how they did it, watching.
I took a forward step and my foot came down on something. I jumped in sudden fright.
It was nothing but my gun, lying on the floor, dropped when I had grabbed the plastic.
I stood and looked at it and felt the shaking and the trembling that was inside of me, held inside of me and struggling to begin, but unable to begin because my body was too tight and tense to tremble. My teeth were trying to chatter and they couldn’t chatter, for my jaws were clamped together with such fanatic desperation that the muscles ached.
There were watchers everywhere and the cold wind blowing from the hole and the excited, not quite angry clicking of the balls in the sack across my shoulder. And the emptiness the emptiness of a basement where there’d been two men and now was only one. And, worse than that, the howling emptiness of a universe insane and an Earth that had lost its meaning and a culture that now was lost and groping, although it did not know it yet.
Over and above it all was the smell—the scent I’d smelled that morning—the odor of these creatures, whoever they might be, wherever they might come from, whatever was their purpose. But certainly nothing of the Earth, not of our old, familiar planet—nothing that man had ever known before.
I fought against admitting what I knew—that here I faced a life form from outside, from somewhere other than this planet where I at this moment stood. But there was no other answer.
I let the bag down from my shoulder and stooped to scoop up the gun, and as I reached out my fingers for it I saw that something else lay on the floor a little distance from it.
My fingers let the gun go and darted out and picked up this other object, and as they closed upon it I saw it was a doll. Even before I had a chance to look at it, I knew what kind of doll it was, remembering the tiny metallic click I’d heard as Atwood disappeared.
I was right. The doll was Atwood. Every line upon his face, every feature of him, the very feeling of him. As if someone had taken the living Atwood and compressed him to, perhaps, a hundredth of his size, being careful in the process not to change him, not to distort a single atom of the creature that was Atwood.
I dropped the doll into a pocket and grabbed up the gun. Then I straightened to my feet and slung the bag across shoulder and went across the basement to the stairs.
I wanted to run. It took every Ounce of will power that I had to keep my feet from running. But I forced myself to walk. As if I didn’t care, as if I weren’t scared, as if there were nothing in all God’s world or in the universe that could scare a man, that could make him run.
For I had to show them!
Unaccountably, on the spur of the moment, almost as if by instinct, I knew that I had to show them, that I had to act in this instant for all the rest of mankind, that I had to demonstrate the courage and determination and the basic stubbornness that was in the human race.
I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I walked across the floor and climbed the stairs, without hurrying, feeling the daggers of their watching pointed at my back. I reached the top of the stairs and closed the door behind me, being careful not to bang it.
Then, free of the watching eyes, free of the need of acting, I stumbled down the hallway and somehow got the front door open and felt the clean sweep of night air from across the lake, cleaning my nostrils and my brain of the stench in the basement room.
I found a tree and leaned against it, weak and winded, as if I’d run a race, and retching, sick to the core and soul of me. I shook and gagged and vomited, and the taste of bile, biting in my throat and mouth, was almost a welcome taste—the taste, somehow, of a basic and a bare humanity.
I stayed there, with my forehead leaning on the roughness of the trunk, and the roughness was a comfort, a contact once again with the world I knew. I heard the booming of the waves upon the lakeshore and the death dance of the leaves, already dead but hanging still upon the parent tree, and from somewhere far off the distance- muffled barking of a dog.
Finally I straightened from the tree and used my sleeve to wipe my mouth and chin. For now it was time to get to doing. Now I had something to support my story, a sack full of things that would support my Story, and somehow or other I had to get the Story told.