I hoisted the sack back on my shoulder, and as I did 50 I caught the faint edge of the alien odor once again.
My legs were weak and my gut was sore and I felt cold all over. What I needed more than anything, I told myself, was a slug of booze.
The car was a dark blur in the driveway and I headed for it, none too steady. Be- hind me the house loomed up, with the moonlight still breaking into sharded silver from the one window, high up in a gable.
A funny thought hit me: I’d left the window open, and maybe I should go back and close it, for the wind could blow leaves into the rooms with their white-shrouded furniture and the rain would drive in on the carpeting and when the snows came there would be little drifts of white running in the room.
I laughed harshly at myself for thinking such a thing when every minute was a minute to be used in getting out and as far away as possible from this house in Timber Lane.
I reached the car and swung open the door next to the wheel. Something stirred in the opposite side of the seat, and it said to me: “I am glad to see you back. I was worrying about how you were getting on.” I froze in unbelieving terror.
For the thing sitting in the seat, the thing that had spoken to me, was the happy’ shaggy dog I’d met for the second time that very evening on the sidewalk in front of my apartment house!
“I see,” said the Dog, “that you have one of them. Hang onto it tight. I can testify they’re slippery characters.”
And he told me that when I had all that I could do to hang on to the edges of my sanity.
I just stood there, I guess. There was nothing else to do. Get belted over the head often enough and you turn sort of dopey.
“Well,” said the Dog reprovingly, “it would seem that now’s the time for you to ask me who the hell I am.”
“All right,” I croaked. “Just who the hell are you?”
“Now,” said the Dog, delighted, “I am glad you asked me that. For I can tell you frankly that I’m a competitor—I’m sure competitor is the proper term—of the thing you have there in the sack.”
“That tells me a lot,” I said. “Mister, Whoever you may be, you had better start explaining.”
“Why,” said the Dog, amazed at my Stupidity, “I think it must be perfectly clear exactly what I am. As a competitor of these bowling balls, I must automatically be classified as a friend of yours.”
By this time the numbness had worn off enough for me to climb into the car. Somehow I didn’t seem to care too much what happened any more. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the Dog was another gang of bowling balls, made up like a dog instead of like a man, but if he was, I was set to take him on at any given moment. I had got over being scared, at least to some extent, and I was getting sore. It was a hell of a world, I told myself, when a man would come unstuck and turn into a bunch of jet-black balls and when a dog waited in a car and struck up a sprightly conversation as soon as one showed up.
I suppose, at that particular time, I didn’t quite believe it. But the Dog was there and he was talking to me and there wasn’t much that I could do except to go along with it—with the gag, I mean.
“Why don’t you,” asked the Dog, “give the sack to me? I will hang onto it, I assure you, with the utmost concentration and with the grip of death. I will make it very much my business they do not get away.”
So I handed over the sack to him and be reached out a paw and, so help me God, that paw grabbed hold of the sack as neatly if it had sprouted fingers.
I took the gun out of my pocket and laid it in my lap.
“What kind of instrument is that?” asked the Dog, not missing anything.
“This is a weapon called a gun,” I told him, “and with it I can blow a hole clear through you. One wrong move out of you, buster, and I will let you have it.”
“I will try my very best,” said the Dog quite matter-of-factly, “to make no wrong move at all. I can assure you that I am very much on the side of you in this which is transpiring.”
“That is just fine,” I said. “See you keep it that way.”
I started the car and turned around, heading down the lane.
“I am glad that you were agreeable,” said the Dog, “to hand this sack to me. I have had some experience in the handling of these things.”
“Perhaps, then,” I told him, “you might Suggest where we go from here.”
“Oh, there are many ways,” said the Dog, “of disposing of them. I would venture to suggest, sir, that we should choose a method that is sufficiently restrictive and, Perhaps, a little painful.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, “of disposing of them. I went to a lot of trouble to get them in that sack.”
“That is too bad,” said the Dog regret fully. “Believe me, it is poor policy to let these things survive.”
“You keep calling them these things,” I pointed out, “and yet you say you know them. Haven’t they a name?”
“Name?”
“Yes. Designation. Descriptive term. You have to call them something.”
“I get you,” said the Dog. “There are times I do not catch so quick. I require a little time.”
“And before I forget to ask you, how come you can talk to me? There is no such thing as a talking dog.”
“Dog?”
“Yes, the thing you are. You look just like a dog.”
“How marvelous!” cried the Dog, enraptured. “So that is what I am. I had met creatures of my general appearance, but they were so different from me and of so many different types. At first I tried communicating with them, but—”
“You mean you’re really as you are. You aren’t something built out of something else, like our friends there in the sack?”
“I am myself,” the Dog said proudly. “I would be nothing else even if I could.”
“But you haven’t answered how you can talk to me.”
“My friend, if you please, let’s not go into that. It would require so much explanation and we have so little time. I am, you see, not really talking with you. I am communicating, but—”
“Telepathy?” I asked.
“Come again—and slowly.”
I told him what telepathy was, or was supposed to be. I made a bad job of it, principally, I suppose, because I knew very little of it.
“Roughly,” said the Dog. “Not exact, however.”
I let it go at that. There were other things that were more important.
“You’ve been hanging around my place,” I said. “I saw you yesterday.”
“Why, certainly,” said the Dog. “You were let me try to put this right—you Were the focal point.”
“The focal point,” I said, amazed. All this time I had been thinking I’d just fallen into it. Some guys are like that. If lightning hits a tree in a thousand-acre forest, they’ll be standing underneath it.
“They knew,” said the Dog, “and, of course, I knew. You mean that you were ignorant?”
“You said a mouthful, buster.”
We had reached the end of Timber Lane and were out on the highway now, heading back for town.
“You didn’t answer me,” I said, “when I asked what these things are. The name you have for them. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things you haven’t answered.”
“You gave me no chance,” said the Dog. “You ask me things too fast. And you have a funny thinker. It keeps churning round and round.”
The window on his side of the car was open several inches and a sharp breeze was blowing in. It was blowing back his whiskers, smooth against his jaws. They were heavy, ugly jaws, and he kept them closed. They didn’t move as if he had been talking—with his mouth, I mean.
“You know about my thinker?” I asked him feebly.
“How else,” rejoined the Dog, “could I converse with you? And it’s most disorderly and moving very fast. It will not settle down.”
I thought that over and decided maybe he was right. Although I didn’t like the connotations of what he’d said. I had aSeakmg feeling that he might know everything I knew or thought, although, God he didn’t act that way.