Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

"Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you."

"No, he wasn't. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to get even with him."

"But that's crazy," I protested. "Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?"

"I know," said Hiram.

"You mean you believe all this?"

"You bet I believe it. There's something wrong, something awfully wrong." But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn't worked that way and now he was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while he'd start getting sore.

He was that kind of jerk.

"When did Tom tell you all of this?"

"This morning."

"Why not last night? If he thought it was so important…"

"But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work…"

"Yes, I see," I said. "But now he thinks that it was really Tupper calling and that the call actually was for me."

"Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see."

"And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me."

Hiram's face hardened. "I know you're up to something," he said. "I know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken Stiffy in to Elmore."

"Yes, I did," I said. "I found his keys where they had fallen out of his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and everything was all right."

"You sneaked in," Hiram said. "You turned off your lights to go up Stiffy's lane."

"I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them fixed before I left the shack." It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram didn't press the point.

"This morning," he said, "me and Tom went out to the shack."

"So it was Tom who was spying on me."

Hiram grunted. "He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of you."

"And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left."

"Yeah," said Hiram, "we broke in. And we found more of them telephones. A whole box full of them."

"You can quit looking at me like that," I said. "I saw no telephones. I didn't snoop around." I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were neck-deep in it.

And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused.

And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.

Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used the phones for communication.

Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few hours' time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.

Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.

Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the phones — and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.

For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.

"Well?" asked the constable.

"You want to know what I know about it?"

"Yes, I do," said Hiram, "and if you know what's good for you…"

"Hiram," I told him, "don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do…" Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.

"It's moving!" he yelled at us. "The barrier is moving!" Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.

I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the curb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed.

There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy cut around them with a burst of speed.

"Do you know what happened?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Just that the barrier is moving." We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.

She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a mass of jam-packed cars.

And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had moved.

The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was evidence of it.

Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, masses of uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the masses of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.

The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.

Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.

I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road, working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running — well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.