He swung around and scurried over to the tape machine and sat down in front of it. He began punching slowly and carefully on the keyboard and the machine began to mutter and to chuckle at him and its lights winked on and off.
I saw there was no sense in trying to talk to him until he had this business done. And there was a chance, of course, that he knew what he was doing–that he had figured out some way either to protect these machines of his or to stop the bugs.
I walked over to the machine and it was heavier than it looked. I started tugging at it and I could move it only a few inches at a time, but I kept on tugging it.
And suddenly, as I tugged away, I knew without a question what Belsen must be planning.
And I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself, why Dobby, with all his talk of A-bombs, hadn’t thought of it. But, of course, it would take a man like Belsen, with his particular hobby, to have thought of it.
The idea was so old, so ancient, so much a part of the magic past that it was almost laughable–and yet it ought to work.
Belsen got up from the machine and lifted a reel of tape from a cylinder in its side. He hurried over to me and knelt down beside the machine I’d tugged almost to the door.
“I can’t be sure of exactly what they are,” he told me. “Crystal. Sure, I know they’re crystalline in form, but what kind of crystals–just what type of crystals? So I had to work out a sort of sliding shotgun pattern of supersonic frequencies. Somewhere in there, I hope, is the one that will synchronize with whatever structure they may have.”
He opened a section of the small machine and started threading in the tape.
“Like the violin that broke the goblet,” I said.
He grinned at me nervously. “The classical example, I see you’ve heard of it.”
“Everyone has,” I said.
“Now listen to me carefully,” said Belsen. “All we have to do is flip this switch and the tape starts moving. The dial controls the volume and it’s set at maximum. We’ open up the door and we’ll grab the machine, one on each side of it, and we’ll carry it as far as we can before we set it down. I want to get it close.”
“Not too close,” I cautioned. “The bugs just killed a dog. Couple of them hit him and went through him without stopping. They’re animated bullets.”
Belsen licked his lips. “I figured something like that.” He reached out for the door.
“Just a minute, Belsen. Have we got a right to?”
“A right to what?” he asked.
“A right to kill these things. They’re the first aliens I come to visit us. There’s a lot we might learn from them if we could only talk to them…”
“Talk to them?”
‘Well, communicate. Get to understand them.”
And I wondered what was wrong with me, that should be talking that way.
“After what they did to the dog? After what they did to you?”
“Yes, I think,” I said, “even after what they did to me.”
“You’re crazy,” Belsen screamed.
He pulled the door wide open.
“Now!” he shouted at me.
I hesitated for a second, then grabbed hold.
The machine was heavy, but we lifted it and rushed out into the yard. We went staggering with it almost to the alley and there the momentum of our rush played out and we set it down.
I looked up toward my house and the bug patrol was there, circling at rooftop height, a flashing golden circle in the light of the setting sun.
“Maybe,” Belsen panted, “maybe we can get it closer.”
I bent to pick it up again and even as I did I saw the patrolling circle break.
“Look out!” I screamed. The bugs were diving at us.
“The switch!” I yelled. “The switch!”
But Belsen stood there, staring at them, frozen, speechless, stiff.
I flung myself at the machine and found the switch and flipped it and then I was groveling in the dirt, rooting into it, trying to make myself extremely thin and small.
There was no sound and, of course, I had known there would be none, but that didn’t stop me from wondering why I didn’t hear it. Maybe, I thought, the tape had broken; maybe the machine had failed to work.
Out of the tail of my eye I saw the patrol arrowing down on us and they seemed to hang there in the air, as if something might have stopped them, but I knew that was wrong, that it was simply fright playing tricks with time.
And I was scared, all right, but not as seared as Belsen. He still stood there, upright, unable to move a muscle, staring at oncoming death in an attitude of stricken disbelief.
They were almost on top of us. They were so close that I could see each of them as a dancing golden mote and then suddenly each little mote became a puff of shining dust and the swarm was gone.
I climbed slowly to my feet and brushed off my front. “Snap out of it,” I said to Belsen. I shook him.
He slowly turned toward me and I could see the tension going from his face.
“It worked,” he said, in a flat sort of voice. “I was pretty sure it would.”
“I noticed that,” I said. “You’re the hero of the hour.” And I said it bitterly, without even knowing why.
I left him standing there and walked slowly across the alley.
We had done it, I told myself. Right or wrong, we’d done it. The first things from space had come and we had smashed them flat.
And was this, I wondered, what would happen to us, too, when we ventured to the stars? Would we find as little patience and as little understanding? Would we act as arrogantly as these golden bugs had acted?
Would there always be the Belsens to outshout the Marsdens? Would the Marsdens always be unable or unwilling to stand up before the panic-shouting–always fearful that their attitude, slowly forming, might be antisocial? Would the driving sense of fear and the unwillingness to understand mar all things from the stars?
And that, I told myself, was a funny thing for me, of all people, to be thinking. For mine was the house the bugs had ruined.
Although, come to think of it, they might have cost me not a dime. They might have made me money. I still had the agate boulder and that was worth a fortune.
I looked quickly towards the garden and the boulder wasn’t there!
I broke into a run, breath sobbing in my throat. I stopped at the garden’s edge and stared in consternation at the neat pile of shining sand.
There was one thing I’d forgotten: that an agate, as well as bugs and goblet, was also crystalline!
I turned around and stared back across the yard and I was sore clean through.
That Belsen, I thought–him and his sliding shotgun pattern!
I would take one of those machines of his and cram it down his throat!
Then I stopped dead still. There was, I realized, nothing I could do or say. Belsen was the hero, exactly as I said he was.
He was the man, alone, who’d quashed the menace from the stars.
That was what the headlines would be saying, that was what the entire world would think. Except, perhaps, a few scientists and others of their kind who didn’t really count.
Belsen was the hero and if I laid a finger to him I’d probably be lynched.
And I was right. Belsen is the hero.
He turns on his orchestra at six o’clock each morning and there’s no one in the neighborhood who’ll say a word to him.
Is there anyone who knows how much it costs to soundproof an entire house?