to comprehend. And because they could not reduce this situation to the
simple formula of aimless wonder that could be accorded a cat that had
somehow attained the parsonage roof, they were uneasy and upset and their
tempers were on edge, ready to flare into an antagonistic attitude, and very
probably into violence – if they could find something or someone against
which such a violence could be aimed. And now I knew that Tom Preston and
Hiram Martin had provided them with a target for their violence – if and
when the violence came.
I saw now that I was almost home. I was in front of the house of Daniel
Willoughby, a big brick house, upstanding and foursquare, the kind of house
you’d know, without even thinking of it, that a man like Daniel Willoughby
would own. Across the street, on the corner, was the old Perkins house.
New people had moved into the place a week or so ago. It was one of the
few houses in the village that was put up for rent, and people moved in and
out of it every year or so. No one ever went out of their way to get
acquainted with these renters; it wasn’t worth one’s while. And just down
the street was Doc Fabian’s place.
A few minutes more, I thought, and I would be home, back in the house
with the hole punched in the roof, back with the echoing emptiness and the
lonely question, with the hatred and suspicion of the town performing
sentry-go just outside the gate.
Across the street a screen door slammed and feet tramped across the
porch boards.
A voice yelled: ‘Wally, they’re going to bomb us! It was on
television!’
A shadow hunched up out of the darkness of the earth – a man who had
been lying on the grass or sitting in a low-slung lawn chair, invisible
until the cry had jerked hint upright.
He gurgled as he tried to form some word, but it came out wrong.
‘There was a bulletin!’ the other one shouted from the porch. ‘Just
now. On television.’
The man out in the yard was up and running, heading for the house.
And I was running, too. Heading for home, as fast as I could go, my
legs moving of their own accord, unprompted by the brain.
I’d expected I’d have a little time, but there’d been no time. The
rumour had broken sooner than I had anticipated.
For the bulletin, of course, had been no more than rumour, I was sure
of that – that a bombing might take place; that, as a last resort, a bomb
might be dropped on Millville. But I also knew that so far as this village
was concerned, it would make no difference. The people in the village would
not differentiate between fact and rumour.
This was the trigger that would turn this village into a hate-filled
madhouse. I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood – and Stiffy,
too, if he were here.
I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian
house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was
not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in
the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I
skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the
area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness,
any movement that might betray a watcher.
From far away I heard a shout and on the Street above someone ran, feet
pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away,
a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a
news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make
out the words.
There was no sign of Hiram.
I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope. I reached the
garden and made my way across it. Ahead of me loomed the shattered
greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.
I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking
one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me. Then I
started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voice froze
me.
Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there’d been no sound.
Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.
And there was a smell of purpleness – perhaps not a smell, exactly, but
a sense of purpleness. It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp
and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler’s camp where the Presence had waited on
the hillside to walk me back to Earth.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’
The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway,
although there was not breeze enough to sway it.
I am here, it said. I have been here all the years. I have been looking
forward to this time when I could talk with you.
‘You know?’ I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was
sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.
We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.
‘No despair?’ I asked, aghast.
If we fail this time, it said, we will try again. Another place,
perhaps. Or we may have to wait the – what do you call it?
‘The radiation,’ I said. ‘That is what you call it.’
Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.
‘That will be years,’ I said.
We have the years, it said. We have all the time there is. There is no
end of us. There is no end of time.
‘But there is an end of time for us,’ I said, with a gush of pity for
all humanity, but mostly for myself. ‘There is an end for me.’
Yes, we know, said the purpleness. We feel much sorrow for you.
And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we
were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that
those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.
But when I tried to say the words, I couldn’t make them come. I
couldn’t admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.
It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride. But I had not known until I
tried to speak the words that I had the stubborness and pride.
We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of
sorrow – a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow
of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?
I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but
forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.
And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and
dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and
surety. It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.
A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a
colour; it was something more than that. It was, perhaps, the odour of
immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to
care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on
into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it
could not allow itself to care.
And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless
loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.
Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt
pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree.
Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the
Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well – the same life
stuff of which I myself was made – that I felt pity for.
‘I am sorry for you, too,’ I said, but even as I spoke I knew it would
not understand the pity any more than it would have understood the pride if
it had known about the pride.
A car came screeching around the curve on the street above the swale
and the illumination of its headlights slashed across the greenhouse. I
flinched away, but the lights were gone before the flinch had finished.
Somewhere out in the darkness someone was calling me, speaking softly,
almost fearfully.
Another car came around the curve, turning fast, its tires howling on