Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

"So you knew all about it all along."

Sherwood shook his head. "I didn't know anything at all. I just made the phones."

Higgy sat back weakly. He clasped and unclasped his hands, staring down at them.

"I don't know," he said. "I just don't understand." But I am sure he did. Now he understood, for the first time, that this was no mere unusual natural happening which would, in time, quietly pass away and leave Millville a tourist attraction that each year would bring the curious into town by the thousands. For the first time, I am sure, Mayor Higgy Morris realized that Millville and the entire world was facing a problem that it would take more than good luck and the Chamber of Commerce to resolve.

"There is one thing," I sad.

"What's that?" asked Higgy.

"I want my phone. The one that was in my office. The phone, you remember, that hasn't any dial." The mayor looked at Hiram.

"No, I won't," said Hiram. "I won't give it back to him. He's done harm enough already."

"Hiram," said the mayor.

"Oh, all right," said Hiram. "I hope he chokes on it."

"It appears to me," said Father Flanagan, "that we are all acting quite unreasonably. I would suggest we might take this entire matter up and discuss it point by point, and in that way…" A ticking interrupted him, a loud and ominous ticking that beat a measure, as of doom, through the entire house. And as I heard it, I knew that the ticking had been going on for quite some time, but very softly, and that I'd been hearing it and vaguely wondering what it was.

But now, from one tick to another, it had grown loud and hard, and even as we listened to it, half hypnotized by the terror of it, the tick became a hum and the hum a roar of power.

We all leaped to out feet, startled now, and I saw that the kitchen walls were flashing, as if someone were turning on and off a light of intensive brilliance, a pulsing glow that filled the room with a flood of light, then shut off, then filled it once again.

"I knew it!" Hiram roared, charging for the kitchen. "I knew it when I saw it. I knew it was dangerous!" I ran after him.

"Look out!" I yelled. "Keep away from it!" It was the time contraption. It had floated off the table and was hovering in mid-air, with a pulse of tremendous power running through it in a regular beat, while from it came the roar of cascading energy. Below it, lying on the table, was my crumpled jacket.

I grabbed hold of Hiram's arm and tried to haul him back, but he jerked away and was hauling his pistol from its holster.

With a flash of light, the time contraption moved, rising swiftly toward the ceiling.

"No!" I cried, for I was afraid that if it ever hit the ceiling, the fragile lenses would be smashed.

Then it hit the ceiling and it did not break. Without slackening its pace, it bored straight through the ceiling. I stood gaping at the neat round hole it made.

I heard the stamp of feet behind me and the banging of a door and when I turned around the room was empty, except for Nancy standing by the fireplace.

"Come on," I yelled at her running for the door that led onto the porch.

The rest of them were grouped outside, between the porch and hedge, staring up into the sky, where a light winked off and on, going very rapidly.

I glanced at the roof and saw the hole the thing had made, edged by the ragged, broken shingles that had been displaced when the machine broke through.

"There it goes," said Gerald Sherwood, standing at my side. "I wonder what it is."

"I don't know," I said. "They slipped one over on me. They played me for a fool." I was shaken up and angry, and considerably ashamed. They had used me back there in that other world. They had fooled me into carrying back to my own world something they couldn't get there by themselves.

There was no way of knowing what it was meant to do, although in a little while, I feared, we would all find out.

Hiram turned to me in disgust and anger. "You've done it now," he blurted. "Don't tell us you didn't mean to do it, don't pretend you don't know what it is. Whatever may be out there, you're hand in glove with them." I didn't try to answer him. There was no way I could.

Hiram took a step toward me.

"Cut it out!" cried Higgy. "Don't lay a hand on him."

"We ought to shake it out of him," yelled Hiram. "If we found out what it was, then we might be able…"

"I said cut it out," said Higgy.

"I've had about enough of you," I said to Hiram. "I've had enough of you all your whole damn life. All I want from you is that phone of mine. And I want it fast."

"Why, you little squirt?" Hiram bellowed, and he took another step toward me.

Higgy hauled off and kicked him in the shin. "God damn it," Higgy said, "I said for you to stop it." Hiram jigged on one leg, lifting up the other so he could rub his shin.

"Mayor," he complained, "you shouldn't have done that."

"Go and get him his phone," Tom Preston said. "Let him have it back.

"Then he can call them up and report how good a job he did." I wanted to clobber all three of them, especially Hiram and Tom Preston. But, of course, I knew I couldn't. Hiram had beaten me often enough when we were kids for me to know I couldn't.

Higgy grabbed hold of Hiram and tugged him toward the gate. Hiram limped a little as the mayor led him off. Tom Preston held the gate for them and then the three of them went stalking up the street, never looking back.

And now I noticed that the rest had left as well — all of them except Father Flanagan and Gerald Sherwood, and Nancy, standing on the porch. The priest was standing to one side and when I looked at him, he made an apologetic gesture.

"Don't blame them," he said, "for leaving. They were embarrassed and uneasy. They took their chance to get away."

"And you?" I asked. "You're not embarrassed?"

"Why, not at all," he told me. "Although I am a bit uneasy. The whole thing, I don't mind telling you, has a whiff of heresy about it."

"Next," I said, bitterly, "you'll be telling me you think I told the truth."

"I had my doubts," he said, "and I'm not entirely rid of them. But that hole in your roof is a powerful argument against wholesale scepticism. And I do not hold with the modern cynicism that seems so fashionable. There is still, I think, much room in the world today for a dash of mysticism." I could have told him it wasn't mysticism, that the other world had been a solid, factual world, that the stars and sun and moon had shown there, that I had walked its soil and drunk its water, that I had breathed its air and that even now I had its dirt beneath my fingernails from having dug a human skull from the slope above the stream.

"The others will be back," said Father Flanagan. "They had to get away for a little time to think, to get a chance to digest some of this evidence. It was too much to handle in one gulp. They will be back, and so will I, but at the moment I have a mass to think of." A gang of boys came running down the street. They stopped a half a block away and pointed at the roof. They milled around and pushed one another playfully and hollered.

The first edge of the sun had come above the horizon and the trees were the burnished green of summer.

I gestured at the boys. "The word has gotten out," I said.

"In another thirty minutes we'll have everyone in town out in the street, gawking at the roof."

The crowd outside had grown.

No one was doing anything. They just stood there and looked gaping at the hole in the roof, and talking quietly among themselves — not screaming, not shouting, but talking, as if they knew something else was about to happen and were passing away the time, waiting for it to happen. Sherwood kept pacing up and down the floor.

"Gibbs should be phoning soon," he said. "I don't know what has happened to him. He should have called by now."