‘I thank you,’ Blake told him. ‘I thank you very much.’ And that was all he needed, he told himself – to have these crazy little creatures keeping tabs on him.
They walked along in silence for a time and then Blake asked: ‘He told you, this one that I met, to keep an eye on me…’
‘Not just me alone…’
‘I know that,’ said Blake. ‘He told all of you. Would you mind explaining how he told the rest of you? Or maybe it’s a stupid question. There are mail and telephones.’
The Brownie made a clucking sound of immense disgust. ‘We wouldn’t be caught dead,’ he said, ‘using such contrivances. It would be against our principles and there really is no need to use them. We just pass the word along.’
‘You mean you are telepathic.’
‘Well, to tell you the honest truth, I don’t know if we are or not. We can’t transmit words, if that is what you mean. But we have a oneness. It gets a bit hard to explain.’
‘I would imagine so,’ said Blake. ‘A sort of tribal psychic grapevine.’
‘You don’t make any sense to me,’ the Brownie said, ‘but if you want to think of it that way, I guess it does no harm.’
‘I suppose,’ said Blake, ‘there are a lot of people that you keep an eye on.’
It would be just like them, he told himself, a bunch of little busybodies very much concerned with other people’s lives.
‘There are no others,’ said the Brownie. ‘Not at the moment, anyhow. He told us there were more than one of you and…’
‘What has that got to do with it?’
‘Why, bless you,’ said the Brownie, ‘that’s the whole of it. How often does one find a creature there is more than one of? Would you mind telling me, I wonder, just how many…’
‘There are three of me,’ said Blake.
The Brownie jigged in triumph. ‘I knew there were!’ he crowed. ‘I made a bet with myself that there were three of you. One of you is warm and shaggy, but with a terrible temper. Can you tell me this is so?’
‘Yes,’ said Blake, ‘I would suppose it is.’
‘But the other one of you,’ the Brownie said, ‘baffles me entirely.’
‘Welcome to the club,’ said Blake. ‘He baffles me as well.’
24
When he topped the long, steep hill, Blake saw it in the valley, where the land dipped down and ran level for a mile or so, then climbed another hill. It rested on the level of the valley floor and it seemed to fill half the level space – a great, black bulging structure that looked amazingly like a monstrous bug, humped in its middle and blunted at both ends.
Blake stopped at the sight of it. He had never seen a cruiser, but there could be no doubt that the thing squatting at the bottom of the hill was the cruiser which had shaken up the Diner.
Cars went whipping past Blake, the gush of wind from their humming jets beating at him.
The Brownie had left him an hour before and since that time he had trudged along, looking for some place where he might hide away and sleep. But stretching on either side of the road was nothing but fields, stripped by the harvest, now lying in their autumn garb of brown and gold. No habitations were located near the road, all of them sitting back from it half a mile or so. Blake wondered if the use of this highway by the cruisers and probably other large conveyances as well might have dictated the position of the homesteads, or if there were some other reason for their off-the-road location.
Far off to the south-west loomed a small group of shimmering towers – perhaps a complex of high-rise apartments, still within easy distance of Washington, but giving their occupants the advantages of a rural life.
Blake, staying well out on the shoulder of the road, went down the hill and finally reached the cruiser. It had pulled off to one side of the highway and had settled down, roosting on stubby, peg-like legs that held it six feet or so above the ground. Close up, it was even larger than it had appeared at a distance, rearing twenty feet or more above Blake’s head.
At its forward end a man sat, leaning against the flight of steps that led up to the cab. He sat flat, with his legs stuck out in front of him, and he wore a greasy engineer’s cap pulled down almost to his eyes. His tunic was pulled up and bunched about his middle.
Blake stopped and stood looking down at him.
‘Good morning, friend,’ said Blake. ‘It looks to me that you are in trouble.’
‘Greetings to you, Brother,’ said the man, taking in Blake’s black robe and knapsack. ‘You are seeing right. Burned out a jet and she began to whipsaw me. Lucky that I didn’t pile it up.’
He spat derisively in the dust. ‘Now we have to sit and wait. I radioed in for a new jet component and a repair crew and they take their time, of course.’
‘You said we.’
‘There are three of us,’ said the engineer. ‘Two others are up there, sacking out.’
He jerked his thumb upwards towards the small living quarters installed behind the cab.
‘We were on schedule, too,’ he said. ‘that’s the tough part of it. Made a good crossing – calm seas and we hit no coastal fog. But now we’ll be hours late when we hit Chicago. There’s overtime, of course, but who the hell wants any overtime.’
‘You’re headed for Chicago?’
‘Yeah. This time. Always different places. Never the same place twice.’
He reached up and pulled at the beak of his cap.
‘I keep thinking of Mary and the kids,’ he said.
‘Your family? Surely you can get in touch with them, let them know what happened.’
‘Tried to. But they aren’t home. Finally asked the operator to go out and tell them I wouldn’t be along. Not right away, at least. You see, whenever I take this road, they know when I’ll be coming and they go down to the road and stand there and wait and wave at me as I go through. The kids get an awful kick out of it, seeing their old man driving this monster.’
‘You must live near here,’ said Blake.
‘Little town,’ said the engineer. ‘Little backwater place a hundred miles or so from here. Old town, stuck out of the way. Just the way it was two hundred years ago. Oh, they put a new front on one of the buildings down on Main Street every now and then, or someone remodels a house, but mostly the town just sits there, the way it always was. None of these big apartment complexes they are building everywhere. Nothing new at all. Good place to live. Easy-going place. No one doing any pushing. No Chamber of Commerce. No one lathering to get rich, Anyone who wants to get rich or get ahead or anything like that simply doesn’t stay there. Lots of fishing, some hunting. Some horseshoe pitching.’
‘He glanced up at Blake. ‘I guess you get the picture.’
Blake nodded.
‘Good place to raise kids,’ said the engineer.
He picked up a dried weed stalk off the ground, poked gently at the earth with it.
‘Town by the name of Willow Grove,’ he said. ‘You ever hear of it?’
‘No.’ said Blake, ‘I don’t think I ever…’
But that was not correct, he realized suddenly. He had heard of it! That message on the PG that had been waiting for him when the guard had brought him home from the senator’s house had mentioned Willow Grove.
‘You have heard of it, then,’ said the engineer.
‘I guess I have,’ said Blake. ‘Someone mentioned it to me.’
‘A good place to live,’ said the man.
What had that message said? Contact someone in the town of Willow Grove and he’d learn something to his interest. And there had been the name of the man he should contact. What was that name again? Blake sought for it frantically, winnowing through his mind, but it wasn’t there.
‘I must be getting on,’ he said. ‘I hope the service crew shows up.’
The man spat in disgust. ‘Oh, they’ll be along all right. When they are good and ready.’
Blake trudged on, facing the long hill which rose above the valley. At the top of the hill, he saw, were trees, a humped line of autumn colour ranging above the high horizon line, a break at last in the brown and yellow fields. Perhaps somewhere among those trees he could find a place where he could get some sleep.
Thinking back, Blake tried to call up the fantasy of the night, but there was still about it all an air of unreality, it was almost as if it were a series of incidents which had happened, not to him, but to someone else.