Stuffy Grant came to an abrupt halt as he came around the edge of the uncut forest and saw what had happened. He reached up a hand and tipped his hat back on his head, ran a hand across his brow to wipe it dry.
“Now what the hell?” he asked aloud. There seemed to be no answer. Studiously, he focused his eyes, but only with an effort. He reached for his back pocket and took out the bottle, uncapped it and put it to his lips, throwing back his head to drink. Finished with the drink, he eyed the level of the liquor in the bottle with some dismay. There weren’t more than another two drinks left in it. It wasn’t the best of liquor; in fact, it was the cheapest to be bought, but it was liquor and he mourned its disappearance. He recapped the bottle carefully and eased it into the back pocket, patting the pocket to make certain the bottle was secure.
Walking carefully so he would not fall (for if he fell, he might break the bottle), he set out to find what might be wrong. Maybe it got tired, he told himself, and had stopped to rest, although over all the time that he had kept tab on the visitors, not a one of them had ever stopped to rest or had given any sign of tiredness.
Norton had bought his breakfast for him and that meant that he had enough money left to buy another bottle of the booze. It was good to feel, he told himself, that he had at least another bottle in his future. That Norton, say what you might of him, was a decent man.
The visitor that was standing still turned out to be a greater distance off than he had estimated, but he kept plodding doggedly up the swath that it had cut, warily avoiding the bales that it had dropped, and finally reached it.
“What’s the matter, fellow?” he asked, walking up and putting out a hand to rest against its hide. Once he put it there, he leaned against it for a moment to get himself a little steadied.
And as he held his arm straight out against it to gain some steadiness, he knew there was something wrong, something not quite the way it bad been before, although it took a little time for him to pinpoint the wrongness.
Then he knew. The visitor was cold. Gone was the pleasant, friendly warmth that he had always felt before when he had laid a hand upon one of them. He shook his head in amazement and took away his hand. He stumbled along beside it for a dozen feet or so and then hid his hand on it again. The hide was still cold, all the warmth was gone.
Fumbling his way along it, he laid his hand upon its hide time and time again. Always the side was cold, stone cold. He turned and leaned his back against the visitor and slid down, collapsing to a sitting position.
Cold and motionless. No longer floating a few inches off the ground, but resting on the ground.
Could this be death? he asked himself. Could the visitor be dead? Cold and still and that was the way of death. And if it had died, why had it died? What had happened to it? And another thing—if it now were dead, it once had been living, but that was no news to him. For a long time, it had seemed to him, without question, that the visitors were alive. Not only alive, but friends. He wondered about that as he thought it, for it had been a long time since he had had a friend. It was strange, he thought, that he should have found a friend among people other than his own.
Huddled against the cold visitor, without even bothering to cover his face, letting the tears run unhindered down his stubbled cheeks, Stuffy Grant wept bitterly for a friend that he had lost
31. MINNEAPOLIS
Al Lathrop, the managing editor, sat at the head of the conference table. He was idly tapping his pencil on the desk. Whatever are we here for? Kathy wondered. There were just the three of them, she and Jay and Johnny. Johnny could be expected to be here, of course, but not the others. Never before, in her time at the Tribune, had she ever been called into the conference room. Here it was that the various editors huddled, well before the first deadline, to discuss the stories they had, deciding what to do with them. Such news huddles, however, were held late in the day and this was only a little after lunch.
“I thought,” said Lathrop, “that we should get together to talk about what long range plans we should be making in covering the story of the visitors. Since it started, it seems to me that we have done somewhat better than an adequate job. We have done it well—conscientiously and objectively. I think we will continue doing exactly that. But now it may be time to begin to think about possible new dimensions to the story. Johnny, you have been on top of it since the first of the visitors landed at Lone Pine. Would you have some thought about what we should be doing next?”
“Al, it’s just possible that it’s too early to try to do any more than continue to report the facts as we can determine them,” said Garrison. “At first, we were dealing with a piece of news that had high shock value in itself. Our concern then, of course, was not to go beyond the most factual and objective reporting. The news itself, the bare recital of it, had sufficient impact. For my part, and I think in everyone else’s opinion, it seemed important that we not engage in any kind of writing to increase the impact. In fact, there was no need to. Jay wrote a few general background articles, but he did not engage in any speculation beyond much that had previously been written before the visitors showed up. His articles were intended to do no more than inform our readers, as gently as possible, what concepts could be involved. Other than that, we stuck to straight news reporting.”
“But, now,” Lathrop said, “the public, in general, has accepted the situation. Many of them may not like it, may find it difficult to accept. But, by now, most everyone does realize that the visitors are here and may be staying for a while. My point is that now may be the time to embark on some background work, digging a bit more deeply into possible consequences
“Giving our readers something to think about,” said Garrison.
“That’s exactly it. Throw out a few questions they should be mulling over.
“Al, what you are saying is perfectly logical,” said Garrison. “The time will come for that, but I still think it’s too early. This kind of writing can only be done if a great deal of careful thought is put into it. We can’t go off half-cocked. We have to have some information or at least some indication of some sort of information before we can begin writing that kind of articles. The information, I agree, need not be as solid as we’d want in writing factual news, but it would have to have some substance. Otherwise, we could be caught a long way off base. We could turn out awfully wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that we should immediately go into back-grounding. I didn’t expect that we’d walk out the door and start writing think pieces. But it does seem we should be considering it, getting sorted out in our mind the kind of writing we’d like to see done. We have a lot of people out in the newsroom who have been spending a lot of time observing the visitors and writing about them. Some sort of consensus should be taking shape in the minds of some of these people. Kathy, you and Jay probably have been the most involved of all our staff. Have you any thoughts about the situation? For starters, Kathy, how do you feel about the visitors?”
“I like them,” Kathy told him.
“Well, now,” said Lathrop, “I hadn’t quite expected that. But go ahead and tell us what you like about them.”
“For one thing,” she said, “they haven’t jostled us. They have been nuisances now and then, but done us no actual harm.”
“A man was killed at Lone Pine.”
“The man was the aggressor. He fired at the visitor. Since then, there has been no one hurt. The visitors have been decent people.”
“People, Kathy?”
“Sure, they’re people. Different from us, but they still are people. They are intelligent. I’d suspect they have an ethical sense.”
“That may all be true,” said Jay, “but my impression is that they are arrogant. They pay no attention to us. They ignore us, not studiously, as if they were working at it, but as if they honestly feel that we are not worthy of attention. At times as if they didn’t even see us.