Clifford Simak - Ring Around the Sun

HE told himself he would not stop at the Preston house. He would drive by, not too fast, of course, and would have a look at it, but he would not stop. For he was fleeing now, as he had known that he would flee. He had looked upon the empty shell of childhood and had found an artifact of childhood and he would not look once again upon the bare bones of his youth.

He wouldn't stop at the Preston house. He'd just slow up and look, then speed up the car and put the miles behind him.

He wouldn't stop, he said.

But, of course, he did.

He sat in the car and looked at the house and remembered how it once had been a proud house and had sheltered a family that had been proud as well — too proud to let a member of its family marry a country lad from a farm of sickly corn and yellow clay.

But the house was proud no longer. The shutters were closed and someone had nailed long planks across them, taping shut the eyes of the once-proud house, and the paint was scaling and peeling from the stately columns that ran across its front and someone had thrown a rock to break one of the fanlights above the carved front door. The fence sagged and the yard had grown to weeds and the brick walk that ran from gate to porch had disappeared beneath the running grass.

He got out of the car and walked through the drooping front gate up to the porch. Climbing the stairs, he walked along the porch and saw how the floor boards had rotted.

He stood where they had stood, the two of them, and first had known their love would last forever and he tried to catch that moment of the past and it was not there. There had been too much time, too much sun and wind, and it was there no longer, although the ache of it was there. He tried to remember how the meadows and the fields and yard had looked from the porch, with the white moonlight shattering on the whiteness of the columns, and how the roses had filled the air with the distilled sunshine of their scent. He knew these things, but he could not feel or see them.

On the slope behind the house were the barns, still painted white, although not so white as they once had been. Beyond the barns the ground sloped down and there stretched out before him the valley they had walked that last time he had seen her.

It had been an enchanted valley, he remembered, with apple blossoms and the song of lark.

It had been enchanted once. It had not been the second time. But what about the third?

He told himself that he was crazy, that he was chasing rainbow ends, but even as he told himself, he was walking down the slope, down past the barns and on into the valley.

At the head of it he stopped and looked at it and it was not enchanted, but he remembered it, as he had remembered the moonlight on the columns — the columns had still been there, and the valley still was there and the trees were where he had known they'd be and the creek still trickled down the meadows that flanked it on each side.

He tried to go back, and could not, but went on walking down the valley. He saw the crab apple thickets, with the blossoms fallen now, and once a lark soared out of the grass and flew into the sky.

Finally he turned back: it was the same as it had been that second time. The third visit, after all, had been the same as the second. It had been she who had turned this prosaic valley into an enchanted place. It had been, after all, an enchantment of the spirit.

Twice he had walked in enchanted places, twice in his life he had stepped out of old familiar earth.

Twice. Once by the virtue of a girl and the love between them. Once again because of a spinning top.

No, the top had been the first.

Yes, the top — Now, wait a minute! Now, not so fast!

You're wrong, Vickers. It wouldn't be that way.

You crazy fool, what are you running for?

THE manager of the dime store, when Vickers sought him out, seemed to understand.

"You know," he said, "I understand just how you feel. I had a top like that myself when I was a kid, but they don't make them any more. I don't know why — they just don't, I guess. Got too many other high powered, new fangled kinds of toys. But there's nothing like a top."

"Especially those big ones," said Vickers. "The ones with the handle on them and you pumped them on the floor and they whistled."

"I remember them," the manager said. "Had one myself when I was a kid. Sat and played with it for hours, just watching it."

"Watching where the stripes went?"

"I don't recall I worried much about where the stripes might go. I just sat and watched it spin and listened to it whistle."

"I used to worry about where they went. You know how it is. They travel round and then they disappear, somewhere near the top."

"Tell me," asked the manager. "Where _do_ they go?"

"I don't know," Vickers admitted.

"There's another dime store down the street a block or two," the manager said. "Carries a lot of junky stuff, but they might have a top like that left over."

"Thanks," said Vickers.

"You might ask at the hardware store across the street, too. They carry quite a stock of toys, but I suppose they got them put away down in the basement. They only get them out at

Christmas time."

The man at the hardware store said he knew what Vickers wanted, but he hadn't seen one for years. The other dime store didn't have one, either. No, said the girl, chewing gum and nervously thrusting a pencil back and forth into the wad of hair above her ear, no, she didn't know where he might get one. She'd never heard of one. There were a lot of other things here if he wanted to get something for a little boy. Like those toy rockets or these — He went out on the sidewalk, watching the late afternoon crowd of shoppers in the little Midwestern town. There were women in print dresses and other women in sleek business suits and there were high school kids just out of class and businessmen out for a cup of coffee before they settled down to clean up the odds and ends of the day before they left for home. Up the street he saw a crowd of loafers gathered around his own car, parked in front of the first dime store. It was time, he thought, to feed that parking meter.

He reached into his pocket, looking for another dime, and he had one — a dime, a quarter and a nickel. The sight of the coins in his hand made him wonder about the money in his billfold, so he took it out and flipped it open and saw that all that he had left were two dollar bills.

Since he couldn't go back to Cliffwood, not right away at least, he had no place to call his home. He'd need money for lodging for the night and for meals and for gasoline to put into the car — but more than that, more than anything, he was in need of a singing top that had colored stripes painted on its belly.

He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about the top, arguing with himself, with all of his logical being telling him that he must be wrong about it. It is _not_ wrong, said the illogic within him. It _will_ work. It had worked once before, when he was a child, before Pa had taken the top away from him.

What would have happened to him if the top had not been taken and hidden away from him? He wondered if he would have gone again and again, once he had found the way, back into that fairyland and what might have happened there, who and what he might have met and what he would have found in the house hidden in the grove. For he would have gone to the house, he knew, after a time. Having watched it long enough and grown accustomed to it, he would have followed the path across the grove and gone up to the door and knocked.

He wondered if anyone else had ever watched a spinning top and walked into fairyland. And he wondered, if they had, what had happened to them.