What had happened to him in a few short hours?
Or, perhaps, more to the point, what had happened to me?
I puzzled on it, while something with wet and hairy feet crawled up and down my back.
Perhaps it was the dark, I thought. Probably in the daylight he was a friendly pooch, but with the fall of night he became the vicious watchdog, setting up a guard for the family acres.
But the explanation had a false ring to it. There was, I was certain, more involved than that.
I glanced at the clock on the instrument panel and the time was six-fifteen. I’d go back to the motel and phone Dow and Gavin to find out what they knew. Not that I expected to find that anything had changed, but to make sure it hadn’t. Then I’d phone Tom Anderson and the wheels would begin to turn; for good or bad, the fat was in the fire.
A rabbit ran across the road in front of the car and popped into the weeds in the roadside ditch. In the west, where the dying glow of the departed sun painted the edge of the sky a cloudy shade of green, a small flock of birds was flying, outlined like blown fragments of soot against the colored sky.
I came to the main highway and stopped, then proceeded out into the right- hand lane and headed back for town.
The things with wet, cold feet had stopped running on my spine and I began to forget about the dog. I started to feel good again about someone believing in me—even if it were no more than an old, eccentric hermit buried in the woods. Although that old, eccentric hermit probably was the one man in all the world who could help me most. More convincingly, perhaps, than the senator or the Old Man or any other person. That is, if the plan came off, if it didn’t backfire.
The wet, cold feet had stopped, but now I got an itchy ear. Jumpy, I thought—all tied up and jumpy.
I tried to take a hand off the wheel to scratch my ear and I couldn’t take it off. It was glued there, stuck there, and I couldn’t get it loose.
At first I thought I had imagined it or that I was mistaken—that somehow I’d meant to lift the hand and then had failed to do it because of some peculiar lapse of my brain or body. Which, if I’d stopped to think of it, would have been fearsome in itself.
So I tried again. The muscles in the arm strained at the hand and the hand stayed where it was, and panic came charging out of the darkened world to wash over me.
I tried the other hand and I couldn’t move it either. And now I saw that the wheel had grown extensions of itself and had enclosed my hands, so that the hands were manacled to the wheel.
I stamped my foot hard upon the brake—too hard, I knew, even as I hit it. But it did no good. It was as if there had been no brake. The car didn’t even falter. It kept on going as if I had not touched the brake.
I tried again and there was no braking power.
But even so, with my foot off the accelerator, even if I had not used the brake, the car should have been slowing down. But it wasn’t slowing down. It still kept on, at a steady sixty miles an hour.
I knew what was the matter. I knew what had happened. And I knew as well why the dog had growled.
For this was not a car; it was an alien simulation of a car!
An alien contraption that held me prisoner, that could hold me there forever, that could take me where it wanted, that could do anything it wished.
I wrenched savagely at the wheel to free my hands, and in doing so I turned the wheel halfway round and then swiftly swung it back again, sweat breaking out on me at the thought of what a twist on that wheel could do at sixty miles an hour.
But, I realized, I had turned the wheel and the car had not responded and I knew there was now no need to worry about what I did with the wheel. For the car was out of my control entirely. It did not respond to brake or wheel or accelerator.
And that, of course, was the way it would be. For it was not a car at all. It was something else, a fearsome something else.
But, I was convinced, it once had been a car. It had been a car that afternoon when the thing that followed me had gone to pieces on the hillside at the whiff of skunk. It had gone to pieces, but the car had stayed there; it had not changed into a hundred bowling balls charging for the swale to gambol in the scent.
Somehow, in the last few hours, there had been a switch—probably in that time I had been sitting at the shack, telling Charley Munz my story. For the dog had not objected to the car when I’d driven in the yard; he had been growling out of the darkness at it when I had returned.
Someone, then, had driven into the farmyard in this car in which I now was trapped, this car which was not a car, and had left it there and driven the actual car away. It would not have been hard to do, for when I had arrived there’d been no one around the place. And even later, if there had been, perhaps such a substitution might have gone unnoticed or, at the very most, occasioned only some mild wonderment for someone who was watching.
The car had been real to start with; of course, it had been real. For they probably had guessed that I would go over it and perhaps they had been afraid that I might have been able to spot some wrongness in it. And they couldn’t take the chance, for they had to have a trap for me. But once I had examined it, once I’d convinced myself that it was an actual car, then, they must have reasoned, it would be safe to switch it, for having once satisfied myself, I’d have no further doubt.
Perhaps they had limitations and were well aware of them. Perhaps the best that they could do was to ape externals. And perhaps, even then, they had certain blind spots. For the car I had wrecked with gunfire on the road had its headlight in the middle of the windshield. But that had been, of course, a quick and sloppy job. They could have done much better, and perhaps they knew they could, but there still might have been a doubt about their competence, or perhaps a fear that there were ways they did not know about in which a bogus car might be identified.
So they had played it safe. And playing safe had paid off. For they had me now.
I sat there, helpless, frightened at my helplessness, but not fighting any longer, for I was convinced that no physical effort could free me from the car. There might be other ways, short of physical, and I tried to think of how I might go about it. I might, for example, try talking with the car—which sounded silly on the face of it, of course, but still made a kind of sense, for this was not a car but an enemy which undoubtedly was very much aware of me. ButI shrank from doing it, for I doubted that the car, which probably could have heard me, was equipped to answer. And carrying on a one-sided conversation with it would have been akin to pleading, in which the words I said would seem to be disregarded with a disdain that would spell out humiliation. And I, despite the situation in which I found myself, was not reduced to pleading or to humiliation.
I felt regret, of course, but not regret that touched upon myself. Regret, rather, that my plan would not go through, that now nothing would be done, that the one slim chance I’d had to beat the aliens at their game must now be lost by default.
We met other cars and I shouted at them, hoping to attract attention, but the windows of my car were closed, and I suppose the windows of the other cars were closed as well, so I was not heard.
We went for several miles and then the car slowed down and turned off on another road. I tried to figure where we were, but I’d lost track of landmarks and I had no idea. The road was narrow and crooked and it wound through heavy woods and here and there it skirted great humps of rock that shouldered out of the contour of the land.
Watching the roadside, I guessed, rather than recognized, where we might be headed. I watched more closely after that and became convinced that the guess was right. We were going to the Belmont house, back to where all of this had started, where they would be waiting for me, grim-lipped, perhaps, and angry—if things like these could be grim-lipped and angry.