‘Chances?’ asked the senator.
‘This is our first chance to make contact with another race. It won’t
be the last. When man goes into space…’
‘But we aren’t out in space,’ said Newcombe.
I knew then that there was no use. I’d expected too much of the men in
my living-room and I’d expected too much of these men out here on the road.
They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything
but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn’t change them. We
had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a
self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we
travelled.
Although, I thought, perhaps the human race was not alone in this.
Perhaps this alien race we faced, perhaps any alien race, travelled a rut
that was as deep and narrow as the human rut. Perhaps the aliens would be as
arbitrary and as unbending and as blind as was the human race.
I made a gesture of resignation, but I doubt that they ever saw it. All
of them were looking beyond me, staring down the road.
I twisted around and there, halfway up the road, halfway between the
barrier and the traffic snarl, marched all those people who had been out
there waiting. They came on silently and with great deliberation and
determination. They looked like the march of doom, bearing down upon us.
‘What do they want, do you suppose?’ the senator asked, rather
nervously.
George Walker, who ran the Red Owl butcher department, was in the
forefront of the crowd, and walking just behind him was Butch Ormsby, the
service station operator, and Charley Hutton of the Happy Hollow. Daniel
Willoughby was there, too, looking somewhat uncomfortable, for Daniel wasn’t
the kind of man who enjoyed being with a mob. Higgy wasn’t there and neither
was Hiram, but Tom Preston was. I looked for Sherwood, thinking it unlikely
that he would be there.
And I was right; he wasn’t. But there were a lot of others, people I
knew. Their faces all wore a hard and determined look.
I stepped off to one side, clear of the road, and the crowd tramped
past me, paying no attention.
‘Senator,’ said George Walker in a voice that was louder than seemed
necessary. ‘You are the senator, ain’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘That,’ said Walker, ‘is what we’re here to find out. We are a
delegation, sort of.’
‘I see,’ said the senator.
‘We got trouble,’ said George Walker, ‘and all of us are taxpayers and
we got a right to get some help. I run the meat department at the Red Owl
store and without no customers coming into town, I don’t know what will
happen. If we can’t get any out-of-town trade, we’ll have to close our
doors. We can sell to the people here in town, of course, but there ain’t
enough trade in town to make it worth our while and in a little while the
people here in town won’t have any money to pay for the things they buy, and
our business isn’t set up so we can operate on credit. We can get meat, of
course. We’ve got that all worked out, but we can’t go on selling it and…’
‘Now, just a minute,’ said the senator. ‘Let’s take this a little slow.
Let’s not go so fast. You have problems and I know you have them and I aim
to do all I can…’
‘Senator,’ interrupted a man with a big, bull voice, ‘there are others
of us have problems that are worse than George’s. Take myself, for example.
I work out of town and I depend on my pay cheque, every week, to buy food
for the kids, to keep them in shoes and to pay the other bills. And now I
can’t get to work and there won’t be any cheque. I’m not the only one. There
are a lot of others like me. It isn’t like we had some money laid by to take
care of emergencies. I tell you, Senator, there isn’t hardly anyone in town
got anything laid by. We all are…’
‘Hold on,’ pleaded the senator. ‘Let me get a word in edgewise. Give me
a little time. The people in Washington know what is going on. They know
what you folks are facing out here. They’ll do what they can to help.
There’ll be a relief bill in the Congress to help out you folks and I, for
one, will work unceasingly to see that it is passed without undue delay. And
that isn’t all. There are two or three papers in the east and some
television stations that have started a drive for funds to be turned over to
this village. And that’s just a start. There will be a lot of. . .’
‘Hell, Senator,’ yelled a man with a scratchy voice, ‘that isn’t what
we want. We don’t want relief. We don’t ask for charity. We just want to be
able to get back to our jobs.’
The senator was flabbergasted, ‘You mean you want us to get rid of the
barrier?’
‘Look, Senator,’ said the man with the bull-like voice, ‘for years the
government has been spending billions to send a man up to the moon. With all
them scientists you got, you can spend some time and money to get us out of
here. We been paying taxes for a long time now, without getting anything…’
‘But that,’ said the senator, ‘will take a little time. We’ll have to
find out what this barrier is and then we’ll have to figure out what can be
done with it. And I tell you, frankly, we aren’t going to be able to do that
overnight.’
Norma Shepard, who worked as receptionist for Doc Fabian, wriggled
through the press of people until she faced the Senator.
‘But something has to be done,’ she said. ‘Has to be done, do you
understand? Someone has to find a way. There are people in this town who
should be in a hospital and we can’t get them there. Some of them will die
if we can’t get them there. We have one doctor in this town and he’s no
longer young. He’s been a good doctor for a long, long time, but he hasn’t
got the skill or the equipment to take care of the people who are terribly
sick. He never has had, he never pretended that he had . . .’
‘My dear,’ said the senator, consolingly. ‘I recognize your concern and
I sympathize with it, and you may rest assured…’
It was apparent that my interview with the men from Washington had come
to an end. I walked slowly down the road, not actually down the road, but
along the edge of it, walking in the harrowed ground out of which, already,
thin points of green were beginning to protrude. The seeds which had been
sown in that alien whirlwind had in that short time germinated and were
pushing toward the light.
I wondered bitterly, as I walked along, what kind of crops they’d bear.
And A wondered, too, how angry Nancy might be at me for my fight with
Hiram Martin. I had caught that one look on her face and then she’d turned
her back and gone up the walk.
And she had not been with Sherwood when he had come charging down the
walk to announce that Gibbs had phoned.
For that short moment in the kitchen, when I had felt her body pressing
close to mine, she had been once again the sweetheart out of time – the girl
who had walked hand in hand with me, who had laughed her throaty laugh and
been an unquestioned part of me, as I had been of her.
Nancy, I almost cried aloud, Nancy, please let it be the same. But
maybe it could never be the same, I told myself. Maybe it was Millville – a
village that had come between us for she had grown away from Millville in
the years she’d been away, and I, remaining here, had grown more deeply into
it.
You could not dig back, I thought, through the dust of years, through
the memories and the happenings and the changes in yourself- in both
yourselves – to rescue out of time another day and hour. And even if you
found it, you could not dust it clean, you could never make it shine as you
remembered it. For perhaps it never had been quite the shining thing that
you remembered, perhaps you had burnished it in your longing and your
loneliness.
And perhaps it was only once in every lifetime (and perhaps not in
every lifetime) that a shining moment came. Perhaps there was a rule that it
could never come again.
‘Brad,’ a voice said.
I had been walking, not looking where I went, staring at the ground.