All Flesh Is Grass (33 page)

“Sure, senator,” I said, disgusted.

“Thanks for calling,” said the senator. “I'll keep in touch.”

“Goodbye, senator,” I said.

I put the receiver back into the cradle. Joe looked at me inquiringly.

I shook my head. “He doesn't know and he isn't talking. And I gather he is helpless. He can't do anything for us.”

Footsteps sounded on the sidewalk and a second later the door came open. I swung around and there stood Higgy Morris.

Of all the people who would come walking in at this particular moment, it would be Higgy Morris.

He looked from one to the other of us.

“What's the matter with you guys?” he asked.

I kept on looking at him, wishing that he'd go away, but knowing that he wouldn't.

“Brad,” said Joe, “we've got to tell him.”

Higgy didn't move. He stood beside the door while Joe told him how it was. Higgy got wall-eyed and seemed to turn into a statue. He never moved a muscle; he didn't interrupt.

For a long moment there was silence, then Higgy said to me, “What do you think? Could they do a thing like that to us?”

I nodded. “They could. They might. If the barrier moves again. If something else should happen.”

“Well, then,” said Higgy, springing into action, “what are we standing here for? We must start to dig.”

“Dig?”

“Sure. A bomb shelter. We've got all sorts of manpower. There's no one in the village who's doing anything. We could put everyone to work. There's road equipment in the shed down by the railroad station and there must be a dozen or more trucks scattered here and there. I'll appoint a committee and we'll … Say, what's the matter with you fellows?”

“Higgy,” said Joe, almost gently, “you just don't understand. This isn't fallout—this would be a hit with the village as ground zero. You can't build a shelter that would do any good. Not in a hundred years, you couldn't.”

“We could try,” said Higgy, stubbornly.

“You can't dig deep enough,” I said, “or build strong enough to withstand the blast. And even if you could, there'd be the oxygen …”

“But we got to do something,” Higgy shouted. “We can't simply sit and take it. Why, we'd all be killed!”

“Chum,” I told him, “that's too damned bad.”

“Now, see here …” said Higgy.

“Cut it out!” yelled Joe. “Cut it out, both of you. Maybe you don't care for one another, but we have to work together. And there is a way. We do have a shelter.”

I stared at him for a moment, then I saw what he was getting at.

“No!” I shouted. “No, we can't do that. Not yet. Don't you see? That would be throwing away any chance we have for negotiation. We can't let them know.”

“Ten to one,” said Joe, “they already know.”

“I don't get it at all,” Higgy pleaded. “What shelter have we got?”

“The other world,” said Joe. “The parallel world, the one that Brad was in. We could go back there if we had to. They would take care of us, they would let us stay. They'd grow food for us and there'd be stewards to keep us healthy and …”

“You forget one thing,” I said. “We don't know how to go. There's just that one place in the garden and now it's all changed. The flowers are gone and there's nothing there but the money bushes.”

“The steward and Smith could show us,” said Joe. “They would know the way.”

“They aren't here,” said Higgy. “They went home. There was no one at the clinic and they said they had to go, but they'd be back again if we needed them. I drove them down to Brad's place and they didn't have no trouble finding the door or whatever you call it. They just walked a ways across the garden and then they disappeared.”

“You could find it, then?” asked Joe.

“I could come pretty close.”

“We can find it if we have to, then,” said Joe. “We can form lines, arm in arm, and march across the garden.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It may not be always open.”

“Open?”

“If it stayed open all the time,” I said, “we'd have lost a lot of people in the last ten years. Kids played down there and other people used it for a short cut. I went across it to go over to Doc Fabian's, and there were a lot of people who walked back and forth across it. Some of them would have hit that door if it had been open.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Higgy, “we can call them up. We can pick up one of those phones …”

“Not,” I said, “until we absolutely have to. We'd probably be cutting ourselves off forever from the human race.”

“It would be better,” Higgy said, “than dying.”

“Let's not rush into anything,” I pleaded with them. “Let's give our own people time to try to work it out. It's possible that nothing will happen. We can't go begging for sanctuary until we know we need it. There's still a chance that the two races may be able to negotiate. I know it doesn't look too good now, but if it's possible, humanity has to have a chance to negotiate.”

“Brad,” said Joe, “I don't think there'll be any negotiations. I don't think the aliens ever meant there should be any.”

“And,” said Higgy, “this never would have happened if it hadn't been for your father.”

I choked down my anger and I said, “It would have happened somewhere. If not in Millville, then it would have happened some place else. If not right now, then a little later.”

“But that's the point,” said Higgy, nastily. “It wouldn't have happened here; it would have happened somewhere else.”

I had no answer for him. There was an answer, certainly, but not the kind of answer that Higgy would accept.

“And let me tell you something else,” said Higgy. “Just a friendly warning. You better watch your step. Hiram's out to get you. The beating you gave him didn't help the situation any. And there are a lot of hotheads who feel as Hiram does about it. They blame you and your family for what has happened here.”

“Higgy,” protested Joe, “no one has any right …”

“I know they don't,” said Higgy, “but that's the way it is. I'll try to uphold law and order, but I can't guarantee it now.”

He turned and spoke directly to me. “You better hope,” he said, “that this thing gets straightened out and soon. And if it doesn't, you better find a big, deep hole to hide in.”

“Why, you …” I said. I jumped to my feet and I would have slugged him, but Joe came fast around the desk and grabbed hold of me and pushed me back.

“Cut it out!” he said, exasperated. “We got trouble enough without you two tangling.”

“If the bombing rumor does get out,” said Higgy, viciously, “I wouldn't give a nickel for your life. You're too mixed up in it. Folks will begin to wonder …”

Joe grabbed hold of Higgy and shoved him against the wall. “Shut your mouth,” he said, “or I'll shut it for you.” He balled up a fist and showed it to Higgy and Higgy shut his mouth.

“And now,” I said to Joe, “since you've restored law and order and everything is peaceable and smooth, you won't be needing me. I'll run along.”

“Brad,” said Joe, between his teeth, “just a minute, there …”

But I went out and slammed the door behind me.

Outside, the dusk had deepened and the street was empty. Light still burned in the village hall, but the few loungers at the door were gone.

Maybe, I told myself, I should have stayed. If for no other reason than to help Joe keep Higgy from making some fool move.

But there had, it seemed to me, been no point in staying. Even if I had something to offer (which I didn't), it would have been suspect. For by now, apparently, I was fairly well discredited. More than likely Hiram and Tom Preston had been busy all afternoon lining people up in the Hate Bradshaw Carter movement.

I turned off Main Street and headed back toward home. All along the street lay a sense of peacefulness. Shadows flickered on the lawns quartering the intersections as a light summer breeze set the street lamps, hung on their arms, to swaying. Windows were open against the heat and to catch the breeze and soft lights shone within the houses, while from the open windows came snatches of muttering from the TV or radio.

Peaceful, and yet I knew that beneath that quiet exterior lay the fear and hate and terror that could turn the village into a howling bedlam at a single word or an unexpected action.

There was resentment here, a smouldering resentment that one little group of people should be penned like cattle while all the others in the world were free. And a feeling of rebellion against the cosmic unfairness that we, of all the people in the world, should have been picked for penning. Perhaps, as well, a strange unquiet at being stared at by the world and talked of by the world, as if we were something monstrous and unkempt. And perhaps the shameful fear that the world might think we had brought all this on ourselves through some moral or mental relapse.

Thrown into this sort of situation, it was only natural that the people of the village should be avid to grasp at any sort of interpretation that might clear their names and set them right, not only with themselves, but with the aliens and the world; that they should be willing to believe anything at all (the worst or best), to embrace all rumors, to wallow in outlandish speculation, to attempt to paint the entire picture in contrasting black and white (even when they knew that all of it was gray), because in this direction of blackness and of whiteness lay the desired simplicity that served an easier understanding and a comfortable acceptance.

They could not be blamed, I told myself. They were not equipped to take a thing like this in stride. For years they had lived unspectacularly in a tiny backwash off the mainstream of the world. The small events of village life were their great events, the landmarks of their living—that time the crazy Johnson kid had rammed his beat-up jalopy into the tree on Elm Street, the day the fire department had been called to rescue Gradma Jones' cat, marooned on the roof of the Presbyterian parsonage (and to this day no one could figure out how the cat had got there), the afternoon Pappy Andrews had fallen asleep while fishing on the river bank, and had tumbled down into the stream, to be hauled out, now thoroughly awakened, but with water in his lungs, spewing and gasping, by Len Streeter (and the speculation as to why Len Streeter should have been walking along the river bank). Of such things had their lives been made, the thin grist of excitement.

But now they faced a bigger thing, something they could not comprehend, a happening and a situation that was, for the moment, too big for the world to comprehend. And because they could not reduce this situation to the simple formula of aimless wonder that could be accorded a cat that had somehow attained the parsonage roof, they were uneasy and upset and their tempers were on edge, ready to flare into an antagonistic attitude, and very probably into violence—if they could find something or someone against which such a violence could be aimed. And now I knew that Tom Preston and Hiram Martin had provided them with a target for their violence—if and when the violence came.

I saw now that I was almost home. I was in front of the house of Daniel Willoughby, a big brick house, upstanding and foursquare, the kind of house you'd know, without even thinking of it, that a man like Daniel Willoughby would own. Across the street, on the corner, was the old Perkins house. New people had moved into the place a week or so ago. It was one of the few houses in the village that was put up for rent, and people moved in and out of it every year or so. No one ever went out of their way to get acquainted with these renters; it wasn't worth one's while. And just down the street was Doc Fabian's place.

A few minutes more, I thought, and I would be home, back in the house with the hole punched in the roof, back with the echoing emptiness and the lonely question, with the hatred and suspicion of the town performing sentry-go just outside the gate.

Across the street a screen door slammed and feet tramped across the porch boards.

A voice yelled: “Wally, they're going to bomb us! It was on television!”

A shadow hunched up out of the darkness of the earth—a man who had been lying on the grass or sitting in a low-slung lawn chair, invisible until the cry had jerked him upright.

He gurgled as he tried to form some word, but it came out wrong.

“There was a bulletin!” the other one shouted from the porch. “Just now. On television.”

The man out in the yard was up and running, heading for the house.

And I was running, too. Heading for home, as fast as I could go, my legs moving of their own accord, unprompted by the brain.

I'd expected I'd have a little time, but there'd been no time. The rumor had broken sooner than I had anticipated.

For the bulletin, of course, had been no more than rumor, I was sure of that—that a bombing might take place; that, as a last resort, a bomb might be dropped on Millville. But I also knew that so far as this village was concerned, it would make no difference. The people in the village would not differentiate between fact and rumor.

This was the trigger that would turn this village into a hate-filled madhouse. I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood—and Stiffy, too, if he were here.

I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness, any movement that might betray a watcher.

From far away I heard a shout and on the street above someone ran, feet pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away, a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make out the words.