happened even before I stooped to have a look.
Squatting there, I squinted along the ground and in the first grey
light of the coming day, I saw there were no flowers. Instead of a patch of
flowers there was a patch of little bushes, perhaps a little larger, but not
much larger than the flowers.
I hunkered there, with a coldness growing in me – for there was no
explanation other than the fact that the bushes were the flowers, that
somehow the Flowers had changed the flowers that once had grown there into
little bushes. And, I wondered wildly, what could their purpose be?
Even here, I thought – even here they reach out for us. Even here they
play their tricks on us and lay their traps for us. And they could do
anything they wanted, I supposed, for if they did not own, at least they
manipulated this corner of the Earth entrapped beneath the dome.
I put out a hand and felt along a branch and the branch had
soft-swelling buds all along its length. Springtime buds, that in a day or
so would be breaking into leaf. Springtime buds in the depth of summer!
I had believed in them, I thought. In that little space of time toward
the very end, when Tupper had ceased his talking and had dozed before the
fire and there had been something on the hillside that had spoken to me and
had walked me home, I had believed in them.
Had there been something on that hillside? Had something walked with
me? I sweated, thinking of it.
I felt the bulk of the wrapped time contraption underneath my arm, and
that, I realized, was a talisman of the actuality of that other world. With
that, I must believe.
They had told me, I remembered, that I’d get my money back – they had
guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.
I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I
turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian’s house. It might be a
good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The
people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.
I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the
east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights
of many cars running back and forth.
A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly
sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a
greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around
it.
Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth
piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging
of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole
to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.
A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the
house behind me. Doc, I thought – Doc coming home after being routed out of
bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house.
The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting
out.
‘Doc,’ I said, ‘it’s Brad.’ He turned and peered at me.
‘Oh,’ he said, and his voice sounded tired, ‘so you are back again.
There are people waiting at the house, you know.’
Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to
care.
He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of
course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed
old. Now I could see that he was – the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet
barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man
hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.
‘Floyd Caidwell,’ he said. ‘I was out to Floyd’s. He had a heart attack
– a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack.’
‘How is he?’
‘As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete
rest. But I can’t get him there. With that thing out there, I can’t get him
where he should be.
‘I don’t know, Brad. I just don’t know what will happen to us. Mrs
Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She’ll die,
anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And
there’s no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going
regularly to a specialist and he’s been helping her a lot. Decker – perhaps
you’ve heard of him. He’s a top-notch man. We interned together.’
He stopped in front of me. ‘Can’t you see,’ he said. ‘I can’t help
these people. I can do a little, but I can’t do enough. I can’t handle
things like this – I can’t do it all alone. Other times I could send them
somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can’t do that. For
the first time in my life, I can’t help my people.’
‘You’re taking it too hard,’ I said.
He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.
‘I can’t take it any other way,’ he said. ‘All these years, they’ve
depended on me.’
‘How’s Stuffy?’ I asked. ‘You have heard, of course.’
Doc snorted angrily. ‘The damn fool ran away.’
‘From the hospital?’
‘Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned
and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense.
They’re looking for him, but no one’s found him yet.’
‘He’d head back here,’ I said.
‘I suppose he would,’ said Doc. ‘What about this story I heard about;
some telephone he had?’
I shook my head. ‘Hiram said he found one.’
Doc peered sharply at me. ‘You don’t know anything about it?’
‘Not very much,’ I said.
‘Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of
talk is that?’
‘Did Nancy tell you that?’
He shook his head. ‘No, Gerald told me. He asked me what to do. He was
afraid that if he mentioned it, he would stir up the village.’
‘And?’
‘I told him not to. The folks are stirred up enough. He told them what
you said about the flowers. He had to tell them something.’
‘Doc,’ I said, ‘it’s a funny business. I don’t rightly know myself.
Let’s not talk about it. Tell me what’s going on. What are those fires out
there?’
‘Those are soldier fires,’ he told me. ‘There are state troops out
there. They’ve got the town ringed in. Brad, it’s crazier than hell. We
can’t get out and no one can get in, but they got troops out there. I don’t
know what they think they’re doing. They evacuated everybody for ten miles
outside the barrier and there are planes patrolling and they have some
tanks. They tried to dynamite the barrier this morning and they didn’t do a
thing except blow a hole in Jake Fisher’s pasture. They could have saved
that dynamite.’
‘They’re trying to dig under the barrier,’ I said.
‘They’ve done a lot of things,’ said Doe. ‘They had some helicopters
that flew above the town, then tried to come straight down. Figuring, I
guess, that there are only walls out there, without any top to them. But
they found there was a top. They fooled around all afternoon and they
wrecked two ‘copters, but they found out, I guess, that it’s a sort of dome.
It curves all the way above us. A kind of bubble, you might say.’
‘And there are all those fool newspapermen out there. I tell you, Brad,
there’s an army of them. There isn’t anything but Millville on the TV and
radio, or in the papers either.’
‘It’s big news,’ I said.
‘Yes, I suppose so. But I’m worried, Brad. This village is getting
ready to blow up. The people are on edge. They’re scared and touchy. The
whole damn place could go hysterical if you snapped your fingers.’
He came a little closer.
‘What are you planning, Brad?’
‘I’m going down to my place. There are people down there. You want to
come along?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I was down there for a while and then I got
this call from Floyd. I’m all beat out. I’m going in to bed.’
He turned, and started to shuffle away and then he turned back.
‘You be careful, boy,’ he warned. ‘There’s a lot of talk about the
flowers. They say if your father hadn’t raised those flowers it never would