fool an awful lot of people. Maybe everyone. Maybe no one could ever tell
that it wasn’t money. But if the source of it should be learned, how much
value do you think it would have then? Not only that, but all the money in
this village would be suspect. If we can grow fifty-dollar bills, what is
there to stop us from growing tens and twenties?’
‘I don’t see what this fuss is all about,’ shouted Charley Hutton.
‘There isn’t any need for anyone to know. We can keep quiet about it. We can
keep the secret. We can pledge ourselves that we’ll never say a word about
it.’
The crowd murmured with approval. Daniel Willoughby looked as if he
were on the verge of strangling. The thought of all that phony money
shrivelled up his prissy soul.
‘That’s something,’ said the mayor, blandly, ‘that my committee can
decide.’
The way the mayor said it one knew there was no doubt at all in his
mind as to how the committee would decide.
‘Higgy,’ said lawyer Nichols, ‘there’s another thing we’ve overlooked.
The money isn’t ours.’
The mayor stared at him, outraged that anyone could say a thing like
that.
‘Whose is it, then?’ he bellowed.
‘Why,’ said Nichols, ‘it belongs to Brad. It’s growing on his land and
it belongs to him. There is no court anywhere that wouldn’t make the
finding.’
All the people froze. All their eyes swivelled in on me. I felt like a
crouching rabbit, with the barrels of a hundred shotguns levelled at him.
The mayor gulped. ‘You’re sure of this?’ he asked.
‘Positive,’ said Nichols.
The silence held and the eyes were still trained upon me.
I looked around and the eyes stared back. No one said a word.
The poor, misguided, blinded fools, I thought. All they saw here was
money in their pockets, wealth such as not a single one of them had ever
dared to dream. They could not see in it the threat (or promise?) of an
alien race pressed dose against the door, demanding entrance. And they could
not know that because of this alien race, blinding death might blossom in a
terrible surge of unleashed energy above the dome that enclosed the town.
‘Mayor,’ I said, ‘I don’t want the stuff…’
‘Well, now,’ the mayor said, ‘that’s a handsome gesture, Brad. I’m sure
the folks appreciate it.’
‘They damn well should,’ said Nichols.
A woman’s scream rang out – and then another scream. It seemed to come
from behind me and I spun around.
A woman was running down the slope that led to Doc Fabian’s house –
although running wasn’t quite the word for it.
She was trying to run when she was able to do little more than hobble.
Her body was twisted with the terrible effort of her running and she had her
arms stretched out so they would catch her if she fell – and when she took
another step, she fell and rolled and finally ended up a huddled shape lying
on the hillside.
‘Myra!’ Nichols yelled. ‘My God, Myra, what’s wrong?’
It was Mrs Fabian, and she lay there on the hillside with the whiteness
of her hair shining in the sunlight, a startling patch of brilliance against
the green sweep of the lawn. She was a little thing and frail and for years
bad been half-crippled by arthritis, and now she seemed so small and
fragile, crumpled on the grass, that it hurt to look at her.
I ran toward her and all the others were running toward her, too.
Bill Donovan was the first to reach her and he went down on his knees
to lift her up and bold her.
‘Everything’s all right,’ he told her. ‘See – everything’s all right.
All your friends are here.’
Her eyes were open and she seemed to be all right, but she lay there in
the cradle of Bill’s arms and she didn’t try to move. Her hair had fallen
down across her face and Bill brushed it back, gently, with a big, grimed,
awkward hand.
‘It’s the doctor,’ she told us. ‘He’s gone into a coma…’
‘But,’ protested Higgy, ‘he was all right an hour ago. I saw him just
an hour ago.’
She waited until he’d finished, then she said, as if he hadn’t spoken,
‘He’s in a coma and I can’t wake him up. He lay down for a nap and now, he
won’t wake up.’
Donovan stood up, lifting her, holding her like a child. She was so
little and he was so big that she had the appearance of a doll, a doll with
a sweet and wrinkled face.
‘He needs help,’ she said. ‘He’s helped you all his life. Now he needs
some help.’
Norma Shepard touched Bill on the arm. ‘Take her up to the house,’ she
said. ‘I’ll take care of her.’
‘But my husband,’ Mrs Fabian insisted. ‘You’ll get some help for him?
You’ll find some way to help him?’
‘Yes, Myra,’ Higgy said. ‘Yes, of course we will. We can’t let him
down. He’s done too much for us. We’ll find a way to help him.’
Donovan started up the hill, carrying Mrs Fabian. Norma ran ahead of
him.
Butch Ormsby said, ‘Some of us ought to go, too, ‘and see what we can
do for Doc.’
‘Well,’ asked Charley Hutton, ‘how about it, Higgy? ‘You were the one
who shot off his big fat face. How are you going to help him?’
‘Somebody’s got to help him,’ declared Pappy Andrews, thumping his cane
upon the ground by way of emphasis. ‘There never was a time we needed Doc
more than we need him now. There are sick people in this village and we’ve
got to get him on his feet somehow.’
‘We can do what we can,’ said Streeter, ‘to make him comfortable. We’ll
take care of him, of course, the best that we know how. But there isn’t’
anyone who has any medical knowledge…’
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Higgy. ‘Someone can get in touch
with some medical people and tell them what’s happened. We can describe the
symptoms and maybe they can diagnose the illness and then tell us what to
do. Norma is a nurse – well, sort of, she’s been helping out in Doc’s office
for the last four years or so – and she’d be some help to us.’
‘I suppose it’s the best we can do,’ said Streeter, ‘but it’s not very
good.’
‘I tell you, men,’ said Pappy, loudly, ‘we can’t stay standing here.
The situation calls for action and it behooves us to get started.’
What Streeter had said, I told myself, was right. Maybe it was the best
that we could do, but it wasn’t good enough. There was more to medicine than
word-of-mouth advice or telephoned instructions. And there were others in
the village in need of medical aid, more specialized aid than a stricken
doctor, even if he could be gotten on his feet, was equipped to give them.
Maybe, I thought, there was someone else who could help – and if they
could, they’d better, or I’d go back somehow into that other world and start
ripping up their roots.
It was time, I told myself, that this other world was getting on the
ball. The Flowers had put us in this situation and it was time they dug us
out. If they were intent on proving what great tasks they could perform,
there were more important ways of proving it than growing fifty-dollar bills
on bushes and all their other hocus-pocus.
There were phones down at the village hall, the ones that had been
taken from Stiffy’s shack, and I could use one of those, of course, but I’d
probably have to break Hiram’s skull before I could get at one of them. And
another round with Hiram, I decided, was something I could get along
without.
I looked around for Sherwood, but he wasn’t there, and neither was
Nancy. One of them might be home and they’d let me use the phone in
Sherwood’s study.
A lot of the others were heading up toward Doc’s house, but I turned
and went the other way.
20
No one answered the bell. I rang several times and waited, then finally
tried the door and it was unlocked.
I went inside and closed the door behind me. The sound of its closing
was muffled by the hushed solemnity of the hail that ran back to the
kitchen.
‘Anyone home?’ I called.
Somewhere a lone fly buzzed desperately, as if trying to escape,
trapped against a window perhaps, behind a fold of drape. The sun spilled
through the fanlights above the door to make a ragged pattern on the floor.
There was no answer to my hail, so I went down the hall and walked into
the study. The phone stood on the heavy desk. The walls of books still