I opened the door of the car for Joy, then slammed it shut again before she could get in.
“I forgot,” I said. “There could be a bomb in there.”
She looked at me and raised a hand to push away a lock of hair that had blown across her eyes.
“No,” she said. “He wants to talk with You. Tomorrow.”
“That was just talk,” I said. “His way of being funny.”
“And even if there is a bomb in there, I’m not walking back to town. Not at this hour and in this rain. And there wasn’t One before.”
“Let me get in and start it. You stand off—”
“No,” she said emphatically. She reached out and jerked the door open.
I walked around the car and got in. j turned the key and the engine started.
“See,” she said.
“There could have been,” I told her.
“Even if there were, we can’t live in continual fear of it,” she said. “There are a million ways that they can kill us if that is what they want.”
“They killed Stirling. There probably are others they have killed. They made two tries at me.”
“And failed each time,” she said. “I have a feeling they’ll not try again.”
“Intuition?”
“Parker, they may have intuition, too.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“Maybe nothing,” she said. “It’s not really what I meant to say. What I meant was that no matter how much they learn about us, how much they try to be like us to carry out their project, they can never learn to think like us.”
“So you believe they’ll give up if they don’t kill someone in two tries.”
“Well, not that exactly, although maybe so. But they won’t try the same thing twice.”
“So I am safe from traps and bombs and 50mething in the closet.”
“It may be a superstition with them,” she said. “It may be a way of thinking. It may be a logic we don’t even know.”
She had been thinking about it all the time, I knew. Trying to get it figured out. That pretty little head had been filled with speculation, and the few facts, or quasi facts, that we had in our possession had gone round and round. But there was no way, I thought, to get it figured out. Because you didn’t know enough. You were thinking as a human thought and trying to think as an alien thought without knowing how he thought. And even if you did know there was no guarantee that you could twist the human thought processes into an alien channel.
Joy had put it the other way around. The aliens, she had said, no matter how much they wanted, could never think like us. But they had a better chance to think like u than we to think like them. They had Studied us, how long no one could know.
And there had been many of them; no one knew how many. Or was that the correct way to say it? Might there not be no more than a single one of them, with that One fractionated into units the size of bowling balls, so that a single one of them could be in many places and be many things at once?
Even if they were individuals, if each bowling ball were a complete and single thing, they still were closer to one another than it was possible for human beings to be close to one another. For it took many of them to make a thing like Atwood or like the girl who’d sat beside me at the bar: it took a lot of them to shape themselves into the simulation of a human being. And in doing that, in taking human form, or any other form, they then must work as one; then must, in very fact, the many become as one.
We rolled down the last of the campus streets and came out on a deserted University Avenue and I headed back for town.
“Now what?” I asked.
“I can’t go home,” said Joy. “Not back to the house. They might still be there.”
I nodded, knowing how it was. And I wondered what the things that had prowled the yard might be. Perhaps some ferocious beast, or, rather, the simulation of some ferocious beast from some other planet. Perhaps many kinds of ferocious beasts from many other planets. Perhaps a great menagerie of terrible life-forms, meant, perhaps, to terrify rather than to harm. No more than bait, perhaps, to pull the three of us together—Joy, the Dog, and I—to get us in one spot. But if they bad meant to kill the three of us, then it bad been another plan that had failed.
The Dog had said something about the bowling balls’ never going far enough, never pushing hard enough, dealing in half measures. I tried to remember what he actually had said, but my memory was hazy. Too much had happened.
And I wondered, too, where the Dog had gone.
“Parker,” Joy said, “we have to get some rest. We have to get in out of the rain and get a few hours sleep.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. My place—”
“I didn’t mean your place. It’s as bad as mine. We could find a motel, maybe.”
“Joy, I have only a dollar or two in my pocket. I forgot to pick up my check.”
“I cashed mine,” she said. “I have some money, Parker.”
“Joy…”
“Yes, I know. Don’t worry. It’s all right.” We drove on down the street.
“What time is it?” I asked.
She held her wrist down so that the light from the dash shone on her watch.
“It’s almost four,” she told me.
“Quite a night,” I said.
She leaned back wearily against the seat, turned her head to look at me.
“Wasn’t it,” she said. “One car blown up and some poor kid with it, but thank the Lord, not you; one friend killed without a mark upon him by something from another world; one gal’s reputation gone to hell because she is so sleepy she’s willing to shack up—”
“Just keep quiet,” I said. I turned off the avenue.
“Where you going, Parker?”
“Back to the office. I have to make a call. Long distance. Might as well let the paper pay for it.”
“Washington?” she asked.
I nodded. “Senator Roger Hill. It’s time to talk to Rog.”
“At this hour of the morning?”
“At any time of day. He’s a public servant, isn’t he? That’s what he tells the people. Around election time. And the country—the whole damn country—needs a public servant now.”
“He won’t love you for it.”
“I don’t expect him to.”
I pulled the car up to the curb across from the darkened building. There was a faint light from the third floor and a dim glow from the first-floor pressroom.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No,” she said, “I’ll stay. I’ll lock the doors and wait. I’ll watch that no one bombs the car.”
The office was deserted and had that cold, expectant air that newspaper offices take on when there’s no one there. There were janitors, of course, but I saw none of them, and Lightning, the dog-trick office boy, should have been on duty, too, but he, more than likely, was off on some mysterious unofficial errand of his own or had found some corner where he could snatch an hour or two of sleep.
A few lights were burning, but they did no more than add to the ghostly shadow of the place, like distant streetlamps shining on a foggy boulevard.
I went to my desk and sat down in my chair and put out my hand to pick up the phone, but I didn’t lift it right away. I sat there, quiet and listening, but for the life of me I didn’t know what I was listening to, although it may have been the silence. The room was quiet. There wasn’t a whisper of a sound. And it seemed to me that, at this moment, the world was quiet as well that the silence of this place stretched out beyond these walls to envelop the entire planet and that all the Earth was hushed.
Slowly I lifted the receiver and dialed the operator. She came on in a sleepy voice. There was a bit of polite surprise when I told her who I wanted, as if she, too, was of a mind to rebuke me for calling so great a man as a senator at this time of night. But her training kept her from doing it and she told me she would call me back.