Another gang was dusting an end table and a squad of others was working on the baseboard in the corner and a small army of them was polishing up the television set.
“They’ve got the carpeting all done!” squealed Helen. “And this end of the room is dusted and there are some of them starting on the fireplace. I never could get Nora to even touch the fireplace. And now I won’t need Nora. Randall, do you realize that these bugs will save us the twenty dollars a week that we’ve been paying Nora? I wonder if you’ll let me have that twenty dollars for my very own. There are so many things I need, I haven’t had a new dress for ages and I should have another hat and I saw the cutest pair of shoes the other day…”
“But bugs!” I yelled. “You are afraid of bugs. You detest the things. And bugs don’t clean carpeting. All they do is eat it.”
“These bugs are cute,” protested Helen, happily, “and I’m not afraid of them. They’re not like ants and spiders. They don’t give you a crawly feeling. They are so clean themselves and they are so friendly and so cheerful. They are even pretty. And I just love to watch them work. Isn’t it cunning, the way they get together in a bunch to work? They’re just like a vacuum cleaner. They just move over something and the dust and dirt are gone.”
I stood there, looking at them hard at work, and I felt an icy finger moving up my spine, for no matter how it might violate common sense, now I knew that the things I had been thinking, about the refrigerator and the boulder, had not been half as crazy as they might have seemed.
“I’m going to phone Amy,” said Helen, starting for the kitchen. “This is just too wonderful to keep. Maybe we could give her some of the bugs. What do you think, Randall? Just enough of them to give her house a start.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I hollered at her. “These things aren’t bugs.”
“I don’t care what they are,” said Helen, airily, already dialing Amy’s number, “just so they clean the house.”
“But, Helen, if you’d only listen to me…”
“Shush,” she said playfully. “How can I talk to Amy if you keep–Oh, hello, Amy, is that you…”
I saw that it was hopeless. I retreated in complete defeat.
I went around the house to the garage, intending to move some stuff to make room for the boulder at the back.
The door was open. Inside was Billy, busy at the work bench.
“Hello, son,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “What’s going on?”
“I’m making some bug traps, Dad. To catch some of the bugs that are cleaning up the house. Tommy’s partners with me. He went home to get some bait.”
“Bait?”
“Sure. We found out that they like agates.”
I reached out and grabbed a studding to hold myself erect. Things were going just a bit too fast to take.
“We tried out the traps down in the basement,” Billy told me. “There are a lot of the bugs down there. We tried everything for bait. We tried cheese and apples and dead flies and a lot of other things, but the bugs weren’t having any. Tommy had an agate in his pocket, just a little gravel agate that he picked up. So we tried that.”
“But why an agate, son? I can’t think of anything less likely…”
“Well, you see, it was this way, Dad. We tried everything…”
“Yes,” I said, “I can see the logic of it.”
“Trouble is,” Billy went on, “we have to use plastic for the traps. It’s the only thing that will hold the bugs. They burst right out of a trap made of anything but plastic.”
“Now, just a minute there,” I warned him. “Once you catch these bugs, what do you intend to do with them?”
“Sell them, naturally,” said Billy. “Tommy and me figured everyone would want them. Once the people around here find out how they’ll clean a house, everyone will want them. We’ll charge five dollars for half a dozen of them. That’s a whole lot cheaper than a vacuum cleaner.”
“But just six bugs…”
“They multiply,” said Billy. “They must multiply real fast. A day or two ago we had just a few of them and now the house is swarming.”
Billy went on working on the trap.
Finally he said, “Maybe, Dad, you’d like to come in with us on the deal? We need some capital. We have to buy some plastic to make more and better traps. We might be able to make a big thing out of it.”
“Look, son. Have you sold any of the bugs?”
“Well, we tried to, but no one would believe us. So we thought we’d wait until Mom noised it around a bit.”
“What did you do with the bugs you caught?”
“We took them over to Dr. Wells. I remembered that he wanted some. We gave them to him free.”
“Billy, I wish you’d do something for me.”
“Sure, Dad. What is it?”
“Don’t sell any of the bugs. Not right away at least. Not until I say that it’s okay.”
“But, gee, Dad…”
“Son, I have a hunch. I think the bugs are alien.”
“Me and Tommy figured that they might be.”
“You what!”
“It was this way, Dad. At first we figured we’d sell them just as curiosities. That was before we knew how they would clean a house. We thought some folks might want them because they looked so different, and we tried to figure out a sales pitch. And Tommy said why don’t we call them alien bugs, like the bugs from Mars or something. And that started us to thinking and the more we thought about it the more we thought they might really be bugs from Mars. They aren’t insects, nor anything else so far as we could find. They’re not like anything on Earth…”
“All right,” I said, “All right!”
That’s the way kids are these days. You can’t keep up with them. You think you have something all nailed down and neat and here they’ve beat you to it. It happens all the time.
I tell you, honestly, it does nothing for a man.
“I suppose,” I said, “that while you were figuring all this out, you also got it doped how they might have got here.”
“We can’t be really sure,” said Billy, “but we have a theory. That boulder out in back–we found a hole in it just the right size for these bugs. So we sort of thought they used that.”
“You won’t believe me, son,” I told him, “but I was thinking the same thing. But the part that’s got me stumped is what they used for power. What made the boulder move through space?”
“Well, gee, Dad, we don’t know that. But there is something else. They could have used the boulder for their food all the time they traveled. There’d be just a few of them, most likely, and they’d get inside the boulder and there’d be all that food, maybe enough of it to last them years and years. So they’d eat the agate, hollowing out the boulder and making it lighter so it could travel faster–well, if not faster, at least a little easier. But they’d be very careful not to chew any holes in it until they’d landed and it was time to leave.”
“But agate is just rock…”
“You weren’t listening, Dad,” said Billy, patiently. “I told you that agate was the only bait they’d go for.”
“Randall,” said Helen, coming down the driveway, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to use the car to go over and see Amy. She wants me to tell her all about the bugs.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Any way you look at it, my day is shot. I may as well stay home.”
She went tripping back down the driveway and I said to Billy: “You just lay off everything until I get back.”
“Where are you going, Dad?”
“Over to see Dobby.”
I found Dobby roosting on a bench beneath an apple tree, his face all screwed up with worry. But it didn’t stop him from talking.
“Randall,” he said, beginning to talk as soon as I hove in sight, “this is a sad day for me. All my life I’ve been vastly proud of my professional exactitude in my chosen calling. But this day I violated, willingly and knowingly and in a fit of temper, every precept of experimental observation and laboratory technique.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, wondering what he was talking about. Which was not unusual. One often had to wonder what he was getting at.
“It’s those damn bugs of yours,” Dobby accused me explosively.
“But you said you wanted some more bugs. Billy remembered that and he brought some over.”