by Chad Oliver
“Did you hear it?” he asked the others.
They nodded, uncertain and suddenly alone. A new sound. How could that be?
Gordon Collier walked nervously out of the room, followed by Barton. He clenched his fists, feeling the clammy sweat in the palms of his hands, and fought to keep the fear from surging up within him. They walked into a small hall and Gordon pressed a button. A section of the wall slid smoothly back on oiled runners, and the two men walked into the white, brightly-lighted equipment room.
Gordon kept his hand steady and flipped on the outside scanners. He couldn’t see a thing. He tried the tracer screen, and it was blank. Barton tried the radio, on the off chance that someone was trying to contact them. There was silence.
They checked the radar charts for the past hour. They were all quite normal—except the last one. That one had a streak on it, a very sharp and clear and unmistakable streak. It was in the shape of an arc, and it curved down in a grimly familiar way. It started far out in space and it ended. Outside—Outside in the ice and the rocks and the cold.
“Probably a meteor,” Barton suggested.
“Probably,” Gordon agreed dubiously, and made a note to that effect in the permanent record.
“Well, what else could it have been?” Barton challenged.
“Nothing,” Gordon admitted. “It was a meteor.”
They swung the wall shut again, covering the tubes and screen and coils with flowered wallpaper and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. They returned to the living room, where their wives still sat around the card table waiting for them. The room was as comfortable as ever, and the tri-di set was on again.
It was all just as they had left it, Gordon thought—but it was different. The room seemed smaller, constricted, isolated. The temperature had not changed, but it was colder. Millions and millions of miles flowed into the room and crawled around the walls….
“Just a meteor, I guess,” Gordon said.
They went on with their game for another hour, and then Barton and Mary went home to bed. Before they left, they invited Gordon and Helen to visit them the next night.
The house was suddenly empty.
Gordon Collier held his wife in his arms and listened to the frigidaire wheezing in the kitchen and the water dripping from a half-closed faucet. Outside, there were only the crickets and the wind.
“It was only a meteor,” he said.
“I know,” said his wife,
They went to bed then, but sleep was slow in coming. They had a home, of course, a little white cottage in a green yard. They had two nice neighbors and blue skies and a tri-di set. It was all exactly perfect, and there was certainly nothing to be afraid of.
But it was a long way back, and they had no ship.
When Gordon Collier awoke in the morning, he knew instantly that something was wrong. He swung himself out of bed and stood in the middle of the room, half-crouched, not sure what he was looking for.
The room seemed normal enough. The twin beds were in their proper places, the rug was smooth, his watch was still on the dresser where he had left it. He looked at the alarm clock and saw that it hadn’t gone off yet. His wife was still asleep. What had awakened him?
He stood quite still and listened. At once, he heard it. It came from outside, out by the green lawn and the blue skies. He walked to the window to make certain that his senses weren’t playing tricks on him. The sound was still there—another new sound. Another new sound where there could be no new sounds, but only the old ones, repeating themselves over and over again….
He closed the window, trying to shut it out. Perhaps, he told himself, it wasn’t exactly a new sound after all; perhaps it was only the old sound distorted by a faulty speaker or a bad tube. There had been gentle breezes before, summery puffs and wisps of air, and even the gentle patter of light rain once every two weeks. He listened again, straining his ears, but he did not open the window. His heart beat spasmodically in his chest. No, there could be no doubt of it!
The wind was rising.
Helen moaned in her sleep and Gordon decided not to waken her. She might need her sleep and then some before this was over, he knew. He dressed and walked out into the hall, pressed the button that opened the equipment room, and went inside. He checked everything—dials, scanners, tracers, charts. Again, they were all quite normal except one. One of the tracers showed a faint line coming in from the ice and the rocks, in toward the two isolated cottages that huddled under the Bubble.
Presumably, it was still there—whatever it was.
The significant question was easily formulated: what did the line represent, the line that had curved down out of space and had now cut across the ice almost to his very door? What could it represent?
Gordon Collier forced himself to think logically, practically. It wasn’t easy, not after seven months of conditioned living that had been specially designed so that he wouldn’t think in rational terms. He closed the door, shutting off the little white house and all that it represented. He sat down on a hard metal chair with only the gleaming machines for company. He tried.
It was all too plain that he couldn’t contact Earth. His radio wouldn’t reach that far, and, anyhow, who was there to listen at the other end? The ship from Earth wasn’t due for another five months, so he could expect no help from that source. In an emergency, the two women wouldn’t be of much help. As for Bart, what he would do would depend on what kind of an emergency he had to face.
What kind of emergency was it? He didn’t know, had no way of knowing. The situation was unprecedented. It was nothing much on the face of it—a whistle and a thump and a few lines on a tracer. And the wind, his mind whispered, don’t forget the wind. Nothing much, but he was afraid. He looked at his white, trembling hands and doubted himself. What could he do?
What was out there?
The wall slid open behind him and he bit his lip to keep from crying out.
“Breakfast is ready, dear,” his wife said.
“Yes, yes,” Gordon murmured shakily. “Yes, I’m coming.”
He got to his feet and followed his wife out of the room, back into the comfortable cottage that he knew so well. He kept his eyes straight ahead of him as he walked and tried not to listen to the swelling moan of the wind that couldn’t blow.
Gordon Collier drank his coffee black and dabbled at the poached converter eggs, trying to fake an appetite that he did not feel. His wife ate her breakfast in normal fashion, chattering familiar morning-talk in an inconsequential stream. Gordon didn’t pay much attention until a stray sentence or two struck home:
“Just listen to that wind, Gordey,” she said, with only a trace of strain in her voice. “I declare, I believe we’re in for a storm!”
Collier forced himself to go on drinking his coffee, but he was badly shaken. Her mind won’t even accept the situation for what it is, he thought with a chill. She’s going to play the game out to the bitter end. I’m ALONE.
“That’s right, dear,” he said evenly, fighting to keep his voice steady. “We’re in for a storm.”
Outside, the wind whined around the corners of the little cottage and something that might have been thunder rumbled in from far away.
The afternoon was a nightmare.
Gordon Collier stood at the window and watched. He didn’t want to do it, but something deep within him would not let him turn away. His wife stayed huddled in front of the tri-di, watching a meaningless succession of pointless programs, and doubtless she was better off than he was. But he had to watch, even if it killed him. Dimly, he sensed that it was his responsibility to watch.
There wasn’t much to see, of course. The robin’s-egg-blue sky had turned an impossible, leaden gray, and the fleecy white clouds were tinged with a dismal black. The neat green grass seemed to have lost some of its vitality; it looked dead, like the artificial thing that it was. From far above his head—almost to the inner surface of the Bubble, he judged—little flickerings of light played across the sky.
>
The visual frequencies were being tampered with, that was all. It wouldn’t do to get all excited about it.
The sounds were worse. Thunder muttered and rolled down from above. The faint hum of a copter high in the sky changed to a high-pitched screech, the sound of an aircraft out of control and falling. He waited and waited for the crash, but of course it never came. There was only the screech that went on and on and on, forever.
The auditory frequencies were being tampered with, that was all. It wouldn’t do to get all excited about it.
When the laughing children who were splashing in the old swimming hole began to scream, Gordon Collier shut the window.
He sank down in a chair and buried his face in his hands. He wanted to shout, throw things, cry, anything. But he couldn’t. His mind was numb. He could only sit there in the chair by the window and wait for the unknown.
It was almost evening when the rain came. It came in sheets and torrents and splattered on the window panes. It ran down the windows in gurgling rivulets and made puddles in the yard. It was real rain.
Gordon Collier looked at the water falling from a place where water could not be and began to whimper with fright.
Precisely at nine o’clock, Gordon and Helen dug up two old raincoats out of the hall closet and walked next door through the storm. They rang the doorbell and stood shivering in the icy rain until Mary opened the door and spilled yellow light out into the blackness.
They entered the cottage, which was an exact replica of their own except for the austerely frowning portrait of Grandfather Walters in the front hall. They stood dripping on the rug until Bart came charging in from the living room, grinning with pleasure at seeing them again.
“What a storm!” he said loudly. “Reminds me of the time we played UCLA in a cloudburst—here, let me take your coats.”
Gordon clenched his fists helplessly. Bart and Mary weren’t facing the situation either; they were simply adapting to it frantically and hoping it would go away. Well, his mind demanded, what else can they do?
They went through the ritual of playing cards. This time, it was bridge instead of poker, but otherwise it was the same. It always was, except for holidays.
Outside, the incredible storm ripped furiously at the cottage. The roof began to leak, ever so slightly, and a tiny drip began to patter away ironically in the middle of the bridge table. No one said anything about it.
Gordon played well enough to keep up appearances, but his mind wasn’t on the game. He loaded his pipe with his own ultra-fragrant bourbon-soaked tobacco, and retreated behind a cloud of smoke.
He had himself fairly well under control now. The worst was probably over for him. He could at least think about it—that was a triumph, and he was proud of it.
Here they were, he thought—four human beings on a moon as big as a planet, three hundred and ninety million miles from the Earth that had sent them there. Four human beings, encased in two little white cottages under an air bubble on the rock and ice that was Ganymede. Here they were—waiting. Waiting in an empty universe, sustained by a faith in something that had almost been lost.
They were skeleton crews, waiting for the firm flesh to come and clothe their bones. It would not happen today, and it would not happen tomorrow. It might never happen—now.
It was unthinkable that any ship from Earth could be in the vicinity. It was unthinkable that their equipment could have broken down, changed, by itself.
So they were waiting, he thought—but not for the ship from Earth. No, they were waiting for—what?
At eleven o’clock, the storm stopped abruptly and there was total silence.
At midnight, there was a knock on the door.
It was one of those moments that stand alone, cut off and isolated from the conceptual flow of time. It stood quite still, holding its breath.
The knock was repeated—impatiently.
“Someone is at the door,” Mary said dubiously.
“That’s right,” Bart said. “We must have visitors.”
No one moved. The four human beings sat paralyzed around the table, their cards still in their hands, precisely as though they were waiting for some imaginary servant to open the door and see who was outside. Gordon Collier found himself relatively calm, but he knew that it was not a natural calmness. He was conditioned too, like the rest of them. He studied them with intense interest. Could they even swallow this insane knock on the door, digest it, fit it somehow into their habitual thought patterns?
Apparently, they could.
“See to the door, dear,” Mary told her husband. “I wonder who it could be this time of night?”
The knock was repeated a third time. Whoever—or whatever—was outside, Gordon thought, sounded irritated.
Reluctantly, Bart started to get up. Gordon beat him to it, however, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “Let me go,” he said. “I’m closer.”
He walked across the room to the door. It seemed a longer way than he had ever noticed before. The stout wood door seemed very thin. He put his hand on the doorknob, and was dimly conscious of the fact that Bart had gotten up and followed him across the room. He looked at the door, a scant foot before his eyes. The knock came again—sharply, impatiently, a no-nonsense knock. Gordon visualized the heavy brass door knocker on the other side of the door. To whom, or what, did the hand that worked that knocker belong? Or was it a hand?
Almost wildly, Gordon remembered a string of jokes that had made the rounds when he was a boy. Jokes about the little man who turned off the light in the refrigerator when you closed the door. Jokes about a little man—what had they called him?
The little man who wasn’t there.
Gordon shook his head. That kind of reaction wouldn’t do, he told himself. He had to be calm. He asked himself a question: What are you waiting for?
He gritted his teeth and opened the door, fast.
The little man was there, and he was tapping his foot. But he was not exactly a little man, either. He was somewhat vague, amorphous—he was, you might say, almost a little man.
“It’s about time,” the almost-man said in a blurred voice. “But first, a word from our sponsor. May I come in?”
Stunned, Gordon Collier felt himself moving aside and the little man hustled past him into the cottage.
The almost-man stood apart from the others, hesitating. He wasn’t really a little man, Gordon saw with some relief; that is, he wasn’t a gnome or an elf or anything like that. Gordon recognized with a start the state of his own mental processes that had even allowed him to imagine that it could be some supernatural creature out there on the green lawn, knocking at the door. He fought to clear his mind, and knew that he failed.
Gordon caught one thought and held on, desperately: If this is an alien, all that I have worked for is finished. The dream is ended.
The almost-man—changed. He solidified, became real. He was a man—elderly, a bit pompous, neatly dressed in an old-fashioned business suit with a conservative blue tie. He had white hair and a neat, precise moustache. His blue eyes twinkled.
“I am overwhelmed,” he said clearly, waving a thin hand in the air. “My name is John. You are too kind to a poor old country boy.”
Gordon stared. The man was a dead ringer for the portrait of Grandfather Walters on the wall.
Bart and Mary and Helen just looked blankly at the man, trying to adjust to the enormity of what had happened. Bart had resumed his seat at the bridge table, and had even picked up his hand. Helen was watching Gordon, who still stood by the door. Mary sat uncertainly, dimly realizing that she was the hostess here, and waiting for the proper stimulus that would prod her into a patterned routine of welcome. The house waited—a stage set for a play, with the actors all in place and the curtain half-way up.
Gordon Collier slammed the door, fighting to clear his mind from the gentle fog that lapped at it, that made everything all right. “What in the hell is the big idea?” he asked the man who looked lik
e Grandfather Walters and whose name was John.
“Gordey!” exclaimed Helen.
“That’s no way to talk to company,” Mary said.
John faced Gordon, ignoring the others. His moustache bristled. He spread his hands helplessly, “I am a simple wayfaring stranger,” he said. “I happened to pass by your door, and since you live in a house by the side of the road, I assumed that you would wish to be a friend to man.”
Gordon Collier started to laugh hysterically, but smothered it before the laughter exploded nakedly into the room. “Are you a man?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” John said indignantly.
Gordon Collier clenched his fists until his fingernails drew blood from the palms of his hands. He tried to use his mind, to free it, to fight. He could not, and he felt the tears of rage in his eyes. I must, he thought, I must, I must, I MUST.
He closed his eyes. The ritual had been broken, the lulling pattern was no more. He told himself: Somewhere in this madness there is a pattern that will reduce it to sanity. It is up to me to find it; that is why I am here. I must fight this thing, whatever it is. I must clear my mind and I must fight. I must get behind the greasepaint and the special effects and deal with whatever is underneath. This is the one test I must not fail.
“Would you care for a drink?” he asked the man who looked like Grandfather Walters.
“Not particularly,” John told him. “In fact, the thought appalls me.”
Gordon Collier turned and walked out into the kitchen, took a bottle of Bart’s best Scotch out of the cupboard, and drank two shots straight. Then he methodically mixed a Scotch and soda, and stood quite still, trying to think.
He had to think.
This wasn’t insane, he had to remember that. It seemed to be, and that was important. Things didn’t just happen, he knew; there was always an explanation, if you could just find it. Certainly, these two little cottages out here on Ganymede were fantastic enough unless you knew the story behind them. You would never guess, looking at them, that they were the tail end of a dream, a dream that man was trying to stuff back into the box …
