I bent a little closer to one of the smooth, waxy surfaces and it seemed to me that I could see the hint of wavy lines running in the stone.
"Billy," I asked, "would you know an agate if you saw one?"
"Gosh, Dad, I don't know. But Tommy would. He is a sort of rockhound. He's hunting all the time for different kinds of rocks."
He came up close and looked at one of the polished surfaces. He wet his thumb against his tongue and rubbed it across the waxy surface to bring out the satin of the stone.
"I don't know," he said, "but I think it is."
He backed off a ways and stared at the boulder with a new respect.
"Say, Dad, if it really is an agate—if it is one big agate, I mean, it would be worth a lot of money, wouldn't it?"
"
"I don't know. I suppose it might be."
"A million dollars, maybe."
I shook my head. "Not a million dollars."
"I'll go get Tommy, right away," he said.
He went around the garage like a flash and I could hear him running down the driveway, hitting out for Tommy's place.
I walked around the boulder several times and tried to estimate its weight, but I had no knowledge I could go on.
I went back to the house and read the directions on the can of insecticide. I uncapped and tested it and the sprayer worked.
So I got down on my knees in front of the threshold of the kitchen door and tried to find the path the ants were using to come in. I couldn't see any of them right away, but I knew from past experience that they are little more than specks and almost transparent in the bargain and mighty hard to see.
A glittery motion in one corner of the kitchen caught my eye and I wheeled around. A glob of golden shimmer was running on the floor, keeping close to the baseboard and heading for the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink.
It was another of the outsize ladybugs.
I aimed the squirt can at it and let it have a burst, but it kept right on and vanished underneath the cabinet.
With the bug gone, I resumed looking for the ants and found no sign of them. There were none coming in the door. Or going out, for that matter. There were none on the sink or the work table space.
So I went around the corner of the house to size up Operation Wasp. It would be a sticky one, I knew. The nest was located in the attic louver and would be hard to get at. Standing off and looking at it, I decided the only thing to do was wait until night, when I could be sure all the wasps were in the nest. Then I'd put up a ladder and climb up and let them have it, then get out as fast as I could manage without breaking my fool neck.
It was a piece of work that I frankly had no stomach for, but I knew from the tone of Helen's voice at the breakfast table there was no ducking it.
There were a few wasps flying around the nest, and as I watched a couple of them dropped out of the nest and tumbled to the ground.
Wondering what was going on, I stepped a little closer and then I saw the ground was littered with dead or dying wasps. Even as I watched, another wasp fell down and lay there, twisting and squirming.
I circled around a bit to try to get a better look at whatever might be happening. But I could make out nothing except that every now and then another wasp fell down.
I told myself it was all right with me. If something was killing off the wasps it would save me the job of getting rid of them.
I was turning around to take the insecticide back to the kitchen when Billy and Tommy Henderson came panting in excitement from the backyard.
"Mr. Marsden," Tommy said, "that rock out there is an agate. It's a banded agate."
"Well, now, that's fine," I said.
"But you don't understand," cried Tommy. "No agate gets that big. Especially not a banded agate. They call them Lake Superior agates and they don't ever get much bigger than your fist."
That did it. I jerked swiftly to attention and went pelting around the house to have another look at the boulder in the garden. The boys came pounding on behind me.
That boulder was a lovely thing. I put out my hand and stroked it. I thought how lucky I was that someone had plopped it in my garden. I had forgotten all about the dahlias.
"I bet you," Tommy told me, his eyes half as big as saucers, "that you could get a lot of money for it."
I won't deny that approximately the same thought had been going through my mind.
I put out my hand and pushed against it, just to get the solid and substantial feel of it.
And as I pushed, it rocked slightly underneath the pressure!
Astonished, I pushed a little harder, and it rocked again.
Tommy stood bug-eyed. "That's funny, Mr. Marsden. By rights, it hadn't ought to move. It must weigh several tons. You must be awfully strong."
"I'm not strong," I told him. "Not as strong as that." I tottered back to the house and put away the insecticide, then went out and sat down on the steps to do some worrying.
There was no sign of the boys. They probably had run swiftly off to spread the news through the neighborhood.
If that thing was an agate, as Tommy said it was—if it really was one tremendous agate, then it would be a fantastic museum piece and might command some money. But if it was an agate, why was it so light? No ten men, pushing on it, should have made it budge.
I wondered, too, just what my rights would be if it should actually turn out to be an agate. It was on my property and it should be mine. But what if someone came along and claimed it?
And there was this other thing: How had it gotten there to start with?
I was all tied up in knots with my worrying when Dobby came trundling around the corner of the house and sat down on the steps beside me.
"Lots of extraordinary things going on," he said. "I hear you have an agate boulder in the garden."
"That's what Tommy Henderson tells me. I suppose that he should know. Billy tells me he's a rockhound."
Dobby scratched at his whiskers. "Great things, hobbies," he said. "Especially for kids. They learn a lot from them,"
"Yeah," I said without enthusiasm.
"Your son brought me an insect for identification after breakfast this morning."
"I told him not to bother you."
"I am glad he brought it," Dobby said. "It was one I'd never seen before."
"It looked like a ladybug."
"Yes," Dobby agreed, "there is — some- resemblance. But I'm not entirely certain—well, fact of the matter is, I'm not even sure that it is an insect. To tell the truth, it resembles a turtle in many ways more than it does an insect. There is an utter lack of bodily segmentation, such as you'd find in any insect. The exoskeleton is extremely hard and the head and legs are retractible and it has no antennae."
He shook his head in some perplexity. "I can't be sure, of course. Much more extensive examination would be necessary before an attempt could be made at classifying it You didn't happen to find any more of them, did your"
"I saw one running on the floor not so long ago."
"Would you mind, next time you see one, grabbing it for me?"
"Not at all," I said. "I'll try to get you one."
I kept my word. After he left I went down into the basement to look up a bug for him. I saw several of them, but couldn't catch a one. I gave up in disgust.
After supper, Arthur Belsen came popping from across the alley. He was in a dither, but that was not unusual. He is a birdlike, nervous man and it doesn't take too much to get him all upset.
"I hear that boulder in your garden is an agate," he said to me. "What do you intend to do with it?"
"Why, I don't know. Sell it, I suppose, if anyone wants to buy it."
"It might be valuable," said Belsen. "You can't just leave it out there. Someone might come along and pinch it."
"Guess there's nothing else to do," I told him. "I certainly can't move it and I'm not going to sit up all night to guard it."
"You don't need to sit up all night," said Belsen. "I can fix
it for you. We can rig up a nest of trip wires and hook up an alarm."
I wasn't too impressed and tried to discourage him, but he was like a beagle on a rabbit trail. He went back to his basement and came out with a batch of wire and a kit of tools and we fell to work.
We worked until almost bedtime getting the wires rigged up and an alarm bell installed just inside the kitchen door. Helen took a sour view of it. She didn't like the idea of messing up her kitchen, agate or no agate.
In the middle of the night the clamor of the bell jerked me out of bed, wondering what all the racket was. Then I remembered and went rushing for the stairs. On the third step from the bottom I stepped on something that rolled beneath my foot and sent me pitching down the stairs into the living room. I fell sprawling and skidded into a lamp, which landed on top and me and hit me on the head. I brought up against a chair, tangled with the lamp.
A marble, I thought. That damn kid has been strewing marbles all over the house again! He's too big for that. He knows better than to leave marbles on the stairs.
In the bright moonlight pouring through the picture window I saw the marble and it was moving rapidly- — not rolling, moving! — And there were a lot of other marbles, racing across the floor. Sparkling golden marbles running in the moonlight.
And that wasn't all—in the center of the living room stood the refrigerator!
The alarm bell was still clanging loudly and I picked myself up and got loose from the lamp and rushed for the kitchen door. Behind me I heard Helen yelling at me from the landing.
I got the door open and went racing in bare feet through the dew-soaked grass around the corner of the house.
A puzzled dog was standing by the boulder. He had managed to get one foot caught in one of Belsen's silly wires and he was standing there, three-legged, trying to get loose.
I yelled at him and bent over, scrabbling in the grass, trying to find something I could throw at him. He made a sudden lurch and freed himself. He took off up the alley, ears flapping in the breeze.
Behind me the clanging bell fell silent.
I turned around and trailed back to the house, feeling like a fool.
I suddenly remembered that I had seen the refrigerator standing in the living room. But, I told myself, that must be wrong. The refrigerator was in the kitchen and no one would have moved it. There was, first of all, no reason for a refrigerator to be in the living room; its place was in the kitchen. No one would have wanted to move it, and even if they did, they'd have made noise enough to wake the house if they'd tried to do it.
I was imagining things, I told myself. The boulder and the bugs had got me all upset and I was seeing things.
But I wasn't.
The refrigerator still stood in the center of the living room. The plug had been pulled out of the outlet and the cord trailed across the floor. A puddle of water from the slowly-thawing box had soaked into the carpet.
"It's ruining the carpet!" Helen shrieked at me, standing in a corner and staring at the errant refrigerator. "And the food will all be spoiled and…"
Billy came stumbling down the stairs, still half asleep.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
I almost told him about the bugs I'd seen running in the house, but caught myself in time. There was no use upsetting Helen any more than she was right then.
"Let's get that box back where it belongs," I suggested, as matter-of-factly as I could. "The three of us can do it."
We tugged and shoved and hauled and lifted and got it back in its proper place and plugged it in again. Helen found some rags and started to mop up the sopping carpet.
"Was there something at the boulder, Dad?" asked Billy.
"A dog," I told him. "Nothing but a dog."
"I was against it—from the start," declared Helen, on her knees, angrily mopping the carpet. "It was a lot of foolishness. No one would have stolen the boulder. It isn't something you can just pick up and carry off. That Arthur Belsen's crazy."
"I agree with you," I told her, ruefully. "But he is a conscientious sort of fellow and a determined cuss and he thinks in terms of gadgets…"
"We won't get a wink of sleep," she said. "We'll be up a dozen times a night, chasing off stray dogs and cats. And I don't believe the boulder is an agate. All we have to go on is Tommy Henderson."
"Tommy is a rockhound," Billy told her, staunchly defending his pal. "He knows an agate when he sees one. He's got a big shoe box full of ones he's found."
And here we were, I thought, arguing about the boulder, when the thing that should most concern us—the happening with the most brain-twisting implications—was the refrigerator.
And a thought came to me—a floating, random thought that came bumbling out of nowhere and glanced against my mind.
I shivered at the thought and it came back again and burrowed into me and I was stuck with it:
• What if there was some connection between the refrigerator and the bugs?-
Helen got up from the floor. "There," she said accusingly, "that is the best I can do. I hope the carpet isn't ruined."
But a bug, I told myself—no bug could move a refrigerator. No bug, nor a thousand bugs. And what was more and final, no bug would want to move one. No bug would care whether a refrigerator was in the living room or kitchen.
Helen was very businesslike. She spread the wet cloth out on the sink to dry. She went into the living room and turned out the lights.
"We might as well get back to bed," she said. "If we are lucky, we can get some sleep."
I went over to the alarm beside the kitchen door and jerked the connections loose.
"Now," I told her, "we can get some sleep."
I didn't really expect to get any. I expected to stay awake the rest of the night, worrying about the refrigerator. But I did drop off, although not for very long.
At six-thirty Belsen turned on his orchestra and brought me out of bed.
Helen sat up, with her hands against her ears.
"Oh, not again!" she said.
I went around and closed the windows. It cut down the noise a little.
"Put the pillow over your head," I told her.
I dressed and went downstairs. The refrigerator was in the kitchen and everything seemed to be all right. There were a few of the bugs running around, but they weren't bothering anything.
I made myself some breakfast; then I went to work. And this was the second day running I'd gone early to the office. If this kept up, I told myself, the neighborhood would have to get together and do something about Belsen and his symphony.
Everything went all right. I sold a couple of policies during the morning and lined up a third.
When I came back to the office early in the afternoon a wild-eyed individual was awaiting me.
"You Marsden?" he demanded. "You the guy that's got an agate boulder?" -
"That's what I'm told it is," I said.
The man was a little runt. He wore sloppy khaki pants and engineer boots. Stuck in his belt was a rock hammer, one of those things with a hammer on one end of the head and a pick on the other.
"I heard about it," said the man, excitedly and a bit belligerently, "and I can't believe it. There isn't any agate that ever ran that big."
I didn't like his attitude. "If you came here to argue…"
"It isn't that," said the man. "My name is Christian Barr. I'm a rockhound, you understand. Been at it all my life. Have a big collection. President of our rock club. Win prizes at almost every show. And I thought if you had a rock like this…"
"Yes?"
"Well, if you had a rock like this, I might make an offer for it. I'd have to see it first."
I jammed my hat back on my head.
"Let us go," I said.
In the garden, Barr walked entranced around the boulder, He wet his thumb and rubbed the smooth places on its hide. He leaned close and inspected it. He ran a speculative hand across its surface. He muttered to himself.<
br />
"Well?" I asked.
"It's an agate," Barr told me, breathlessly. "Apparently a single, complete agate. Look here, this sort of pebbled, freckled surface—well, that's the inverse imprint of the volcanic bubble inside of which it formed. There's the characteristic mottling on the surface one would expect to find. And the fractures where the surface has been nicked show subconchoidal cleavage. And, of course, there is the indication of some banding."
He pulled the rock hammer from his belt and idly banged the boulder. It rang like a monstrous bell.
Barr froze and his mouth dropped open.
"It hadn't ought to do that," he explained as soon as he regained some of his composure. "It sounds as if it's hollow."
He rapped it once again and the boulder pealed.
"Agate is strange stuff," he said. "It's tougher than the best of steel. I suppose you could make a bell out of it if you could only fabricate it."
He stuck the hammer back into his belt and prowled around the boulder.
"It could be a thunderegg," he said, talking to himself, "But no, it can't be that. A thunderegg has agate in its center and not on the surface. And this is banded agate and you don't find banded agate associated with a thunderegg."
"What is a thunderegg?" I asked, but he didn't answer. He had hunkered down and was examining the bottom portion.
"Marsden," he asked, "how much will you take for it?"
"You'd have to name a figure," I told him. "I have no idea what it's worth."
"I'll give you a thousand as it stands."
"I don't think so," I said. Not that I didn't think it was enough, but on the principle that it's never wise to take a man's first figure.
"If it weren't hollow," Barr told me, "It would be worth a whole lot more."
"You can't be sure it's hollow."
"You heard it when I rapped it."
"Maybe that's just the way it sounds."
Barr shook his head. "It's all wrong," he complained. "No banded agate ever ran this big. No agate's ever hollow. And you don't know where this one came from."
I didn't answer him. There was no reason for me to.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 86
