‘Don’t let him take you in,’ the Diner cautioned Blake. ‘Buy him this breakfast, if you must, but then shake free of him. Don’t let him fasten on to you, or he will suck you dry.’
‘Machines,’ the Brownie said, ‘have no sensibilities. They are ignorant of the finer instincts. They are callous to the suffering of the very ones they are meant to serve. And they have no souls’
‘Neither have you, you heathen alien,’ raged the Diner. ‘You are a chiseller and a moocher and you are a parasite. You use humankind most unmercifully and you have no gratitude and you don’t know when to stop.’
The Brownie slanted his rodent eyes at Blake and lifted both of his hands, palms upward, in a hopeless gesture.
‘Well, you don’t,’ the Diner said, aggrieved. ‘There is solemn truth in every word I said.’
The arm scooped up the first three cakes, put them on a plate, ranged the bacon alongside them, punched a button and caught, with great dexterity, the three pats of butter ejected from a chute. The arm set the plate in front of Blake, darted down underneath the counter and came up with a jug of syrup.
The Brownie’s nose twitched with pleasure. ‘They smell delicious,’ he said.
‘No snitching!’ screamed the Diner. ‘You wait till yours are done.’
From far off came a faint moaning bleat.
The Brownie stiffened, its ears stretched up and flaring.
The moaning came again.
‘It’s another one of them!’ the Diner yelled. ‘They are supposed to warn us well ahead of time, not come sneaking up on us like this. And you, you no-good chiseller, are supposed to be out there, listening for the first sign of them. That’s what I feed you for.’
‘It’s way too soon for another one,’ the Brownie said. ‘There shouldn’t be another one through until late this evening. They are supposed to spread themselves out, to use different roads so one road doesn’t have to put up with them all the time.’
The moaning came again, louder and closer – a lonesome, wailing sound trailing off the hills.
‘What is it?’ asked Blake.
‘It’s a cruiser,’ the Brownie told him. ‘One of those big sea-going freighters. It has a load of something that it’s carried all the way from Europe, maybe from Africa, and it came ashore an hour or so ago and is coming up the road.’
‘You mean it doesn’t stop when it reaches shore?’
‘Why should it?’ asked the Brownie. ‘It travels on the same principle as the ground cars, on a cushioned jet stream. It can travel on either land or water. It comes up to shore and never hesitates – just goes booming down a road.’
Metal screeched and thudded on metal. Blake saw that great steel shutters were creeping across the outside of the windows. Clamps swivelled out of the wall and moved against the door, snugging it tight.
The moaning filled the room now and far off there was a terrible howling, as if a gigantic storm moved across the land.
‘All battened down!’ the Diner screamed to be heard above the noise. ‘You guys better hit the floor. This sounds like a big one.’
The building was shaking and the noise was a numbing cataract that poured from all directions to fill the room to bursting.
The Brownie had nipped beneath the stool and was hanging tightly, both arms wrapped about the metal standard on which the stool was mounted. His mouth was open and it was evident that he was yelling at Blake, but his voice was engulfed and drowned out by the howling that was coming up the road.
Blake threw himself off the stool and hugged the floor. He tried to hook his fingers into the floor, but the floor covering was a hard, smooth plastic and he could get no grip on it.
The Diner seemed to buck and the howling of the cruiser was almost unendurable. Blake found himself sliding on the floor.
Then the howling tapered off and died away, became a faint, long-drawn and distorted moaning.
Blake picked himself off the floor.
A lake of coffee lay upon the counter where his cup had been and there was no sign of the cup. The plate on which the cakes and bacon had rested was on the floor, smashed and scattered. The cakes lay limply on the stool. The cakes meant for the Brownie still were on the griddle, but were smoking and had turned black around the edges.
‘I’ll start over,’ said the Diner.
The arm reached out and snatched up a spatula, scraped the burned cakes off the griddle, flipped them into a garbage can underneath the burner.
Blake looked over the counter and saw that the space behind it was littered with broken crockery.
‘Yeah, look at it!’ the Diner screeched. ‘There ought to be a law. I’ll notify the boss and he’ll slap a claim against that outfit and he’ll see they pay – he always has so far. You guys might want to file claims as well. Allege mental agony or something. I got claim forms if you want to do it.’
Blake shook his head. ‘What about motorists. What if you met that thing on the road?”
‘You saw those bunkers along the road, ten feet high or so, with exit lanes leading up to them?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Blake.
‘The cruiser has to sound its horn as soon as it leaves water and starts travelling on land. It has to keep on sounding it all the time it’s travelling. You hear that siren and you head for the nearest bunker and you duck behind it.’
The spigot travelled deliberately along its track, pouring out the batter.
‘How come, mister,’ asked the Diner, ‘you didn’t know about the cruisers and the bunkers? You come from the backwoods, maybe?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ said the Brownie, speaking for Blake. ‘Just get on with our breakfast.’
23
‘I’ll walk you a piece down the road,’ said the Brownie when they left the diner.
The morning sun was topping the horizon behind them and their elongated shadows bobbed along the road in front of them. The paving, Blake noted, was broken and eroded.
‘They don’t keep up the roads,’ he said, ‘the way I remember them.’
‘No need to,’ said the Brownie. ‘No wheels. No need of a smooth surface since there isn’t any contact. The cars all ride on cushions of air. They only need roads as designation strips and to keep the traffic out of people’s hair. Now, when they lay out a new road, they just set out a double row of stakes, to show the drivers the location of the highway.’
They jogged along, not hurrying. A flock of blackbirds rose in a blue of flashing wings out of a marshy swale off to the left.
‘Flocking up,’ the Brownie said. ‘They’ll be leaving soon. Cheeky things, the blackbirds. Not like larks or robins.’
‘You know about these wild things?’
‘We live with them,’ the Brownie said. ‘We get to understand them. Some we get so we can almost talk with them. Not birds, though. Birds and fish are stupid. But raccoons and foxes, musk rats and mink – they are all real people.’
‘You live out in the woods, I understand.’
‘In the woods and fields. We conform to ecology. We take things as we find them. We adapt to circumstances. We are blood brothers to all life. No quarrel with anyone.’
Blake tried to remember what Daniels had told him. A strange sort of little people who had taken a liking to the Earth, not because of the dominant life form that inhabited it, but because of the planet itself. Perhaps, Blake thought, because they found in the non-dominant residents, in the few remaining wild denizens of the woods and fields, the sort of simple associations that they liked. Insisting on living their own way of life to go their independent way, and yet beggars and moochers, attaching themselves in a slipshod alliance with anyone who would provide whatever simple needs they had.
‘I met another of your people a few days ago,’ said Blake. ‘You’ll pardon me, but I can’t be sure. Could you…’
‘Oh no,’ the Brownie said. ‘That was another one of us. He was the one who spotted you.’
‘Spotted me?’
‘Oh yes, indeed. As one who would bear watching. He said that there was more than one of you and that you were in trouble. He sent out word we should, any one of us who could, keep an eye on you.’
‘Apparently you’ve been doing a good job of it. It didn’t take you long to pick me up.’
‘When we set out to accomplish something,’ the Brownie said, with pride, ‘we can be most efficient.’
‘And I? Where do I fit in?’
‘I am not sure exactly,’ said the Brownie. ‘We are to keep an eye on you. You only need to know we’re watching. You can count on us.’