the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked
up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard,
the receptionist at Doc Fabian’s office, was standing on a box out on the
sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the
owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was
standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of
waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on
trying.
Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and
shut off the motor.
A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He
leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.
‘How are things going, pal?’ he asked.
I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then
suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘the guy who smacked your car.’ He straightened and
reached out his hand. ‘Name is Gabriel Thomas,’ he said. ‘You just call me
Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there.’
I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.
‘Mr Thomas,’ Nancy said, ‘I heard about the accident. Brad won’t talk
about it.’
‘Well,’ said Gabe, ‘it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing
there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of
stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it.’
‘Did you phone your company?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I’m
drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn’t dare to drive and I’m holing up
somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up.’
‘Did they say so, Mr Thomas?’
‘No, miss,’ he said, ‘but I know how them jokers think. And the thing
that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain’t a drinking
man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a
row.’
He said to me, ‘I don’t know what to do. I can’t get out of here.
There’s no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five
hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest
one a baby. I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s used to it, of course, with
me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time
it takes for me to make a run. What if I can’t get back for two or three
weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won’t be any
money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six
kids to feed.’
‘Maybe you won’t be here for long,’ I said, doing my best to make him
feel a little better. ‘Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something
about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn’t, I imagine
that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it’s not your…’
He made an insulting, disgusted noise. ‘Not that bunch,’ he said. ‘Not
that gang of chisellers.’
‘It’s too soon to start worrying,’ I told him. ‘We don’t know what has
happened and until we do…’
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘Of course, I’m not the only one. I
been talking to a lot of people and I’m not the only one.
I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while
ago and his wife is in the hospital over at – what’s the name of that town?’
‘Elmore,’ Nancy said.
‘Yes, that was it. She’s in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his
mind, afraid he can’t go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe
it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town.
Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She’ll be
expecting him, he says, and maybe she won’t understand why he doesn’t come.
Talked as if a good part of the time she’s not in her right mind. And there
was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone,
and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they’ll be all tired out
from travelling and now they can’t reach their home after they have
travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home
early in the afternoon. He’s planning to go out on the road and wait for
them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them
out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are
a lot of people who work out of town and now they can’t get to their jobs,
and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to
marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get
married tomorrow and now, of course, they can’t.’
‘You must have talked to a lot of people,’ I said. ‘Hush,’ said Nancy.
Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of
the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his
arms to get the people quiet.
‘Fellow citizens,’ yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that
makes you sick at heart. ‘Fellow citizens, if you’ll just be quiet.’
Someone yelled, ‘You tell ’em Higgy!’ There was a wave of laughter, but
it was a nervous laugh.
‘Friends,’ said Higgy, ‘we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably
have heard about it. I don’t know what you heard, for there are a lot of
stories. I don’t know, myself, everything that’s happened.’
‘I’m sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it
seemed the quickest way.’
‘Ah, hell,’ yelled someone. ‘Get on with it, Higgy.’
No one laughed this time.
‘Well, all right,’ said Higgy. ‘I’ll get on with it. I don’t know quite
how to say this, but we’ve been cut off. There is some sort of fence around
us that won’t let anybody in or anybody out. Don’t ask me what it is or how
it got there. I have no idea. I don’t think, right now, that anybody knows.
There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only
temporary; it may go away.’
‘What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We’re all in this
together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven’t
got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can’t
go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our
telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty
of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run
short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we
need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the
truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn’t stop things
that are not alive.’
‘Just a minute, mayor,’ someone shouted.
‘Yes,’ the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt
him.
‘Was that you, Len?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it was,’ said the man.
I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science
teacher.
‘What did you want?’ asked Higgy.
‘I suppose you’re basing that last statement of yours – about only
non-living matter getting through the barrier – on the car that was parked
on the Coon Valley road.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Higgy, condescendingly, ‘that is exactly what I was
basing the statement on. What do you know about it?’
‘Nothing,’ Len Streeter told him. ‘Nothing about the car itself. But I
presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon
within well restricted bounds of logic.’
‘That’s right,’ said Higgy, sanctimoniously. ‘That’s exactly what we
intend to do.’
And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what
Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
‘In that case,’ said Streeter. ‘I might caution you against accepting
facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no
human in the car, there was nothing living in it.’