care for one another, but we have to work together. And there is a way. We
do have a shelter.’
I stared at him for a moment, then I saw what he was getting at.
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘No, we can’t do that. Not yet. Don’t you see? That
would be throwing away any chance we have for negotiation. We can’t let them
know.’
‘Ten to one,’ said Joe, ‘they already know.’
‘I don’t get it at all,’ Higgy pleaded. ‘What shelter have we got?
‘The other world,’ said Joe. ‘The parallel world, the one that Brad was
in. We could go back there if we had to. They would take care of us, they
would let us stay. They’d grow food for us and there’d be stewards to keep
us healthy and…’
‘You forget one thing,’ I said. ‘We don’t know how to go. There’s just
that one place in the garden and now it’s all changed. The flowers are gone
and there’s nothing there but the money bushes.’
‘The steward and Smith could show us,’ said Joe. ‘They would know the
way.’
‘They aren’t here,’ said Higgy. ‘They went home. There was no one at
the clinic and they said they had to go, but they’d be back again if we
needed them. I drove them down to Brad’s place and they didn’t have no
trouble finding the door or whatever you call it. They just walked a ways
across the garden and then they disappeared.’
‘You could find it, then?’ asked Joe.
‘I could come pretty close.’
‘We can find it if we have to, then,’ said Joe. ‘We can form lines, arm
in arm, and march across the garden.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It may not be always open.’
‘Open?’
‘If it stayed open all the time,’ I said, ‘we’d have lost a lot of
people in the last ten years. Kids played down there and other people used
it for a short cut. I went across it to go over to Doc Fabian’s, and there
were a lot of people who walked back and forth across it. Some of them would
have hit that door if it had been open.’
‘Well, anyhow,’ said Higgy, ‘we can call them up. We can pick up one of
those phones…’
‘Not,’ I said, ‘until we absolutely have to. We’d probably be cutting
ourselves off forever from the human race.’
‘It would be better,’ Higgy said, ‘than dying.’
‘Let’s not rush into anything,’ I pleaded with them. ‘Let’s give our
own people time to try to work it out. It’s possible that nothing will
happen. We can’t go begging for sanctuary until we know we need it. There’s
still a chance that the two races may be able to negotiate. I know it
doesn’t look too good now, but if it’s possible, humanity has to have a
chance to negotiate.’
‘Brad,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t think there’ll be any negotiations. I don’t
think the aliens ever meant there should be any.’
‘And,’ said Higgy, ‘this never would have happened if it hadn’t been
for your father.’
I choked down my anger and I said, ‘It would have happened somewhere.
If not in Millville, then it would have happened some place else. If not
right now, then a little later.’
‘But that’s the point,’ said Higgy, nastily. ‘It wouldn’t have happened
here; it would have happened somewhere else.’
I had no answer for him. There was an answer, certainly, but not the
kind of answer that Higgy would accept.
‘And let me tell you something else,’ said Higgy. ‘Just a friendly
warning. You better watch your step. Hiram’s out to get you. The beating you
gave him didn’t help the situation any. And there are a lot of hotheads who
feel as Hiram does about it. They blame you and your family for what has
happened here.’
‘Higgy,’ protested Joe, ‘no one has any right…’
‘I know they don’t,’ said Higgy, ‘but that’s the way it is. I’ll try to
uphold law and order, but I can’t guarantee it now.’
He turned and spoke directly to me. ‘You better hope,’ he said, ‘that
this thing gets straightened out and soon. And if it doesn’t, you better
find a big, deep hole to hide in.’
‘Why, you …’ I said. I jumped to my feet and I would have slugged
him, but Joe came fast around the desk and grabbed hold of me and pushed me
back.
‘Cut it out!’ he said, exasperated. ‘We got trouble enough without you
two tangling.’
‘If the bombing rumour does get out,’ said Higgy, viciously, ‘I
wouldn’t give a nickel for your life. You’re too mixed up in it. Folks will
begin to wonder…’
Joe grabbed hold of Higgy and shoved him against the wall. ‘Shut your
mouth,’ he said, ‘or I’ll shut it for you.’ He balled up a fist and showed
it to Higgy and Higgy shut his mouth.
‘And now,’ I said to Joe, ‘since you’ve restored law and order and
everything is peaceable and smooth, you won’t be needing me. I’ll run
along.’
‘Brad,’ said Joe, between his teeth, ‘just a minute, there…’
But I went out and slammed the door behind me.
Outside, the dusk had deepened and the street was empty. Light still
burned in the village hall, but the few loungers at the door were gone.
Maybe, I told myself, I should have stayed. If for no other reason than
to help Joe keep Higgy from making some fool move.
But there had, it seemed to me, been no point in staying. Even if I had
something to offer (which I didn’t), it would have been suspect. For by now,
apparently, I was fairly well discredited. More than likely Hiram and Tom
Preston had been busy all afternoon lining people up in the Hate Bradshaw
Carter movement.
I turned off Main Street and headed back toward home. All along the
Street lay a sense of peacefulness. Shadows flickered on the lawns
quartering the intersections as a light summer breeze set the street lamps,
hung on their arms, to swaying. Windows were open against the heat and to
catch the breeze and soft lights shone within the houses, while from the
open windows came snatches of muttering from the TV or radio. Peaceful, and
yet I knew that beneath that quiet exterior lay the fear and hate and terror
that could turn the village into a howling bedlam at a single word or an
unexpected action.
There was resentment here, a smouldering resentment that one little
group of people should be penned like cattle while all the others in the
world were free. And a feeling of rebellion against the cosmic unfairness
that we, of all the people in the world, should have been picked for
penning. Perhaps, as well, a strange unquiet at being stared at by the world
and talked of by the world, as if we were something monstrous and unkempt.
And perhaps the shameful fear that the world might think we had brought all
this on ourselves through some moral or mental relapse.
Thrown into this sort of situation, it was only natural that the people
of the village should be avid to grasp at any sort of interpretation that
might clear their names and set them right, not only with themselves, but
with the aliens and the world; that they should be willing to believe
anything at all (the worst or best), to embrace all rumours, to wallow in
outlandish speculation, to attempt to paint the entire picture in
contrasting black and white (even when they knew that all of it was grey),
because in this direction of blackness and of whiteness lay the desired
simplicity that served an easier understanding and a comfortable acceptance.
They could not be blamed, I told myself. They were not equipped to take
a thing like this in stride. For years they had lived unspectacularly in a
tiny backwash off the mainstream of the world. The small events of village
life were their great events, the landmarks of their living that time the
crazy Johnson kid had rammed his beat-up jalopy into the tree on Elm Street,
the day the fire department had been called to rescue Grandma Jones’ cat,
marooned on the roof of the Presbyterian parsonage (and to this day no one
could figure out how the cat had got there), the afternoon Pappy Andrews had
fallen asleep while fishing on the river bank, and had tumbled down into the
stream, to be hauled out, now thoroughly awakened, but with water in his
lungs, spewing and gasping, by Len Streeter (and the speculation as to why
Len Streeter should have been walking along the river bank). Of such things
had their lives been made, the thin grist of excitement.
But now they faced a bigger thing, something they could not comprehend,
a happening and a situation that was, for the moment, too big for the world