I tried a step or two and found that I could walk. Perhaps, instead of waiting for a car, I should start walking on the road, out toward the main highway. There I would be sure of picking up some help. The rest of the night might pass upon this road without another car.
I went limping down the road and it wasn’t bad except that my chest was sore and pains went shooting through it at every step I took.
As I walked, the night seemed to grow a little brighter, as if a heavy bank of clouds had broken and was moving out.
I had to stop every now and then to rest, and now, as I did, I glanced back the wayI’d come and saw the reason for the light. A fire was burning in the woods behind me, and, as I watched, the flames shot up with a sudden gush, to leap into the sky, and through the redness of the glare I saw the shape of rafters.
It was the Belmont house, I knew; the Belmont house was burning!
I stood and stared at it and hoped to God that some of them would burn. But I knew they wouldn’t, that they would be safe within those burrows that led to some other world. I saw them, in my imagination, scurrying for those holes, with the fire behind them—the simulated humans and the simulated furniture and all the rest of it changing into bowling balls and rolling for the holes.
And it was good, of course, but it didn’t mean a thing, for the Belmont house was a single camp of them. There were many other camps, in all parts of the world—other places where the tunnels stretched out to an unknown place, the home ground of the aliens. And that home ground, perhaps, was so close, through the science and the mystery of the tunnels, that it was but a second’s distance for them to be home.
Two spaced lights raced around the curve behind me and bore straight down upon me. I waved my arms and yelled, then jumped awkwardly to one side as the car rushed past. Then the brake lights burned red holes in the night and the tires were screeching on the paving. The car began to back, reversing rapidly, until it came even with me.
A head stuck out of the driver’s window and a voice said: “What the hell? We thought that you were dead!”
Joy was running around the car, sobbing as she ran, and Higgins spoke again. “Talk to her,” he said. “For God’s sake, talk to her. She is off her rocker. She set fire to a house.”
Joy reached me with a rush. She put out her hands and grabbed me by the arms, with her fingers tight, as if she wanted to be sure that I was flesh and bone.
“One of them phoned,” she said, and she was choking as she said it, “and said that you were dead. They said nobody could fool around with them and get away with it. They said that you had tried and they had bumped you off. They said if I had any ideas, I better just forget them. They said—”
“What is she talking about, mister?” asked Higgins desperately. “I swear to God she’s nuts. She don’t make no sense to me. She phoned and asked about Old Windy and she was bawling at the time but mad even when she was bawling. . .”
“Are you hurt?” asked Joy.
“Just staved up a little. Maybe a rib or two is busted. But we haven’t got the time—”
“She talked me into driving out to Windy’s,” Larry Higgins said, “and she told him you were dead but to go ahead and do whatever you had wanted. So he loaded up a batch of skunks—”
“He did what?” I yelled, unable to believe it.
“He loaded up them skunks and then lit out for town.”
“Did I do wrong?” asked Joy. “You told me about the old man with the skunks and you said you’d talked to a cabdriver by the name of Larry Higgins and I—”
“No,” I told her, “you did right. You couldn’t have done righter.”
I put an arm around her and drew her close to me. It hurt my chest a little, but I didn’t give a damn.
“Turn on the radio,” I said to Higgins.
“But, Mister, we better be getting out of here. She set fire to that house. I tell you, I had no idea—”
“Turn on the radio!” I yelled.
Grumbling he pulled his head back into the car and fumbled at the radio.
We waited, and when it came the voice was excited: “. . . Thousands of them, millions of them! No one knows what they are or where they’re coming from . . .”
From everywhere, I thought. Not just from this city or this nation, but probably from everywhere on Earth, and they had no more than started, for the news would spread as the night went on.
Out on the hillside that afternoon there had been no way in which quick communication could be established, there was no way in which the good news could be spread. For the thing in the shape of a man that had been following me, and the little fractional thing that had been in my pocket in the guise of money, had been far from any tunnel, far from any line of communication.
But now the good news was going out, to all the aliens on the Earth, and perhaps to those other aliens out beyond the Earth, and it had only started now. Before it ended there would be a mountain of them, seeking to share in the ecstasy of this new perfume.
“First there were the skunks,” said the excited radio. “Someone dropped a large number of skunks at the intersection of Seventh and State, in the heart of town. No one need tell you what that would be like, with the show and the nightclub crowd.
“Police were told that the skunks were dumped by an old eccentric with a beard, driving a pickup truck. But no sooner had the police begun their hunt for him than these other things began arriving. Whether there is some connection between the skunks and these other things, no one yet can say. There were just a few of them at first, but they have been pouring in steadily ever since they started, appearing in the intersection in steady streams, coming in from all directions. They look like bowling balls—black and about the size of bowling balls—and the intersection and the four streets leading to it now are jammed with them.
“The skunks, when they were dumped out of the truck, were exhausted and confused, and they reacted rather violently against anything which might be close to them. This served to clear the area rather rapidly. Everyone who was there got out as fast as they were able. Cars were piled up for blocks and there were running people everywhere you looked. And then the first of these bowling balls arrived. Eyewitnesses tell us they bounced and skipped and gamboled in the street and that they chased the skunks. The skunks, quite naturally, did some more reacting. By this time the atmosphere in the vicinity of the intersection was becoming somewhat thick. People occupying the cars in the forefront of the traffic jam abandoned their machines and beat a fast retreat. And still the bowling balls poured in.
“They aren’t gamboling or skipping any more; there isn’t room for that. There is just a great, shivering, seething mass of them piled up at the intersection and overflowing down the streets, piling up in front of the jam-packed cars.
“From our position here, on top of the McCandless Building, it is an awful and fear-inspiring sight. No one, I repeat, knows what these things are or where they might have come from or what they might be here for . . .”
“That was Old Windy,” said Higgins breathlessly. “He was the one who dumped those skunks. And, I guess, from the sound of it, he must have got away.”
Joy looked up at me. “That was what you wanted? The thing that’s happening now?”
I nodded. “Now they know,” I said. “Now everyone will know. Now they will listen to us.”
“But what is going on?” howled Higgins. “Won’t someone explain it all to me? It is another Orson Welles—”
“Get into the car,” Joy said to me. “We’ll F have to find a doctor for you.”
“Look, mister,” Higgins pleaded, “I didn’t know what I was getting into. She begged me to go with her. So I parked my hack and went. She said she had to find Old Windy fast. She said it was life or death.”