It was J.H. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “Why aren’t you at the office? What do you mean by…”
“Just a minute, J. H.; don’t you remember? You canned me yesterday.”
“Now, Mark,” he said, “you wouldn’t hold that against me, would you? We were all excited…”
“_I_ wasn’t excited,” I told him.
“Look,” he said, “I need you, There’s someone here to see you.”
“All right,” I said and hung up.
I didn’t hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.
I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car, when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.
There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place-exactly the kind of tracks I’d seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn’t be. They were the self-same tracks.
They were brownie tracks!
I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.
The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.
And if there were good deeds in death, there were as well in life. In an operation such as this, the surgeon had told me, there are so many factors that no one can take the credit. It was a miracle, he’d said, but don’t you quote me on it.
And someone – no cleaning woman, but someone or something else – had messed up the notes of the physicist and in the messing of them had put together two pages out of several hundred – two pages that tied together and made sense.
Coincidence? I asked myself. Coincidence that a woman died and that a boy lived, and that a researcher got a clue he’d otherwise have missed? No, not coincidence when there was a track beneath a window and papers scattered from beneath a paperweight.
And – I’d almost forgotten – Jo Ann’s old lady who sat rocking happily because all her old dead friends had come to visit her. There were even times when senility might become a very kindness.
I straightened up and went down to the car. As I drove into town I kept thinking about the magic touch of kindness from the stars or if, perhaps, there might be upon this earth, coexistent with the human race, another race that had a different outlook and a different way of life. A race, perhaps, that had tried time and time again to ally itself with the humans and each time had been rejected and driven into hiding – sometimes by ignorance and superstition and again by a too-brittle knowledge of what was impossible. A race, perhaps, that might be trying once again.
J. H. was waiting for me, looking exactly like a cat sitting serenely inside a bird cage, with feathers on his whiskers. With him was a high brass flyboy, who had a rainbow of decorations spread across his jacket and eagles on his shoulders. They shone so bright and earnestly that they almost sparkled.
“Mark, this is Colonel Duncan,” said J. H. “He’d like to have a word with you.”
The two of us shook hands and the colonel was more affable than one would have expected him to be. Then J. H. left us in his office and shut the door behind him. The two of us sat down and each of us sort of measured up the other. I don’t know how the colonel felt, but I was ready to admit I was uncomfortable. I wondered what I might have done and what the penalty might be.
“I wonder, Lathrop,” said the colonel, “if you’d mind telling me exactly how it happened.
“How you found out about the brownies?”
“I didn’t find out about them, Colonel; it was just a gag.”
I told him about the Barnacle shooting off his mouth about no one on the staff ever showing any initiative, and how I’d dreamed up the brownie story to get even with him. And how the Barnacle had got even with me by running it.
But that didn’t satisfy the colonel. “There must be more to it than that,” he said.
I could see that he’d keep at me until I’d told it, anyhow; and while he hadn’t said a word about it, I kept seeing images of the Pentagon, and the chiefs of staff, and Project Saucer – or whatever they might call it now – and the FBI, and a lot of other unpleasant things just over his left shoulder.
So I came clean with him. I told him all of it and a lot of it, I granted, sounded downright silly.
But he didn’t seem to think that it was silly. “And what do you think about all this?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “They might come from outer space, or …”
He nodded quietly. “We’ve known for some time now that there have been landings. This is the first time they’ve ever deliberately called attention to themselves.”
‘What do they want, Colonel? What are they aiming at?”
“I wish I knew.”
Then he said very quietly, “Of course, if you should write anything about this, I shall simply deny it. That will leave you in a most peculiar position at best.”
I don’t know how much more he might have told me – maybe quite a bit. But right then the phone rang. I picked it up and answered; it was for the colonel.
He said “Yes,” and listened. He didn’t say another word. He got a little white around the gills; then he hung up the phone.
He sat there, looking sick.
“What’s the matter, Colonel?”
“That was the field,” he told me. “It happened just a while ago. They came out of nowhere and swarmed all over the plane – polished it and cleaned it and made it spic and span, both inside and out. The men couldn’t do a thing about it. They just had to stand and watch.”
I grinned. “There’s nothing bad about that, Colonel. They were just being good to you.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “When they got it all prettied up, they painted a brownie on the nose.”
That’s just about all there’s to it as far as the brownies are concerned. The job they did on the colonel’s plane was, actually, the sole public appearance that they made. But it was enough to serve their purpose if publicity was what they wanted – a sort of visual clincher, as it were. One of our photographers – a loopy character by the name of Charles, who never was where you wanted him when you wanted him, but nevertheless seemed to be exactly on the spot when the unusual or disaster struck – was out at the airport that morning. He wasn’t supposed to be there; he was supposed to be covering a fire, which turned out luckily to be no more than a minor blaze. How he managed to wind up at the airport even he, himself, never was able to explain. But he was there and he got the pictures of the brownies polishing up the plane – not only one or two pictures, but a couple dozen of them, all the plates he had. Another thing – he got the pictures with a telescopic lens. He’d put it in his bag that morning by mistake; he’d never carried it before. After that one time he never was without it again and, to my knowledge, never had another occasion where he had to use it.
Those pictures were a bunch of lulus. We used the best of them on page one – a solid page of them – and ran two more pages of the rest inside. The AP got hold of them, transmitted them, and a number of other member papers used them before someone at the Pentagon heard about it and promptly blew his stack. But no matter what the Pentagon might say, the pictures had been run and whatever harm – or good – they might have done could not be recalled.
I suppose that if the colonel had known about them, he’d have warned us not to use them and might have confiscated them. But no one knew the pictures had been taken until the colonel was out of town, and probably back in Washington. Charlie got waylaid somehow – at a beer joint most likely – and didn’t get back to the office until the middle of the afternoon.