Clifford Simak - The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

Beasly had been right about the tanklike thing. One edge of it showed out of one side of the hole.

Towser backed out of the hole and sat down heavily, his whiskers dripping clay, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.

“He says that it’s about time that we showed up,” said Beasly.

Taine walked around the hole and knelt down. He reached down a hand to brush the dirt off the projecting edge of Beasly’s tank. The clay was stubborn and hard to wipe away, but from the feel of it the tank was heavy metal.

Taine picked up a shovel and rapped it against the tank. The tank gave out a clang.

They got to work, shoveling away a foot or so of topsoil that lay above the object. It was hard work and the thing was bigger than they had thought and it took some time to get it uncovered, even roughly.

“I’m hungry,” Beasly complained.

Taine glanced at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.

“Run on back to the house,” he said to Beasly. “You’ll find something in the refrigerator and there is milk to drink.”

“How about you, Hiram? Ain’t you ever hungry?”

“You could bring me back a sandwich and see if you can find a trowel.”

“What you want a trowel for?”

“I want to scrape the dirt off this thing and see what it is.”

He squatted down beside the thing they had unearthed and watched Beasly disappear into the woods.

“Towser,” he said, “this is the strangest animal you ever put to ground.”

A man, he told himself, might better joke about it – if to do no more than keep his fear away.

Beasly wasn’t scared, of course. Beasly didn’t have the sense to be scared of a thing like this.

Twelve feet wide by twenty long and oval shaped. About the size, he thought, of a good-size living room. And there never had been a tank of that shape or size in all of Willow Bend.

He fished his jackknife out of his pocket and started to scratch away the dirt at one point on the surface of the thing. He got a square inch free of dirt and it was no metal such as he had ever seen. It looked for all the world like glass.

He kept on scraping at the dirt until he had a clean place as big as an outstretched hand.

It wasn’t any metal. He’d almost swear to that. It looked like cloudy glass – like the milk-glass goblets and bowls he was always on the lookout for. There were a lot of people who were plain nuts about it and they’d pay fancy prices for it.

He closed the knife and put it back into his pocket and squatted, looking at the oval shape that Towser had discovered.

And the conviction grew: Whatever it was that had come to live with him undoubtedly had arrived in this same contraption. From space or time, he thought, and was astonished that he thought it, for he’d never thought such a thing before.

He picked up his shovel and began to dig again, digging down this time, following the curving side of this alien thing that lay within the earth.

And as he dug, he wondered. What should he say about this – or should he say anything? Maybe the smartest course would be to cover it again and never breathe a word about it to a living soul.

Beasly would talk about it, naturally. But no one in the village would pay attention to anything that Beasly said. Everyone in Willow Bend knew Beasly was cracked.

Beasly finally came back. He carried three inexpertly made sandwiches wrapped in an old newspaper and a quart bottle almost full of milk.

“You certainly took your time,” said Taine, slightly irritated.

“I got interested,” Beasly explained.

“Interested in what?”

“Well, there were three big trucks and they were lugging a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. Two or three big cabinets and a lot of other junk. And you know Abbie’s television set? Well, they took the set away. I told them that they shouldn’t, but they took it anyway.”

“I forgot,” said Taine. “Henry said he’d send the computer over and I plumb forgot.”

Taine ate the sandwiches, sharing them with Towser, who was very grateful in a muddy way.

Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.

“Let’s get to work,” he said.

“But you got all that stuff down in the basement.”

“That can wait,” said Taine. “This job we have to finish.”

It was getting dusk by the time they finished.

Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.

Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep – and all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell when you whacked it with a shovel.

They’d have to be small, he thought, if there were many of them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very long. And that fitted in, of course, for if they weren’t small they couldn’t now be living in the space between the basement joists.

If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it wasn’t all just a lot of supposition.

Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the house, they might be there no longer – for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he’d paid them no attention.

Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the pick.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve put in a long, hard day.”

They tramped out through the brush and reached the road.

Fireflies were flickering off and on in the woody darkness and the street lamps were swaying in the summer breeze. The stars were hard and bright.

Maybe they still were in the house, thought Taine. Maybe when they found out that Towser had objected to them, they had fixed it so he’d be aware of them no longer.

They probably were highly adaptive. It stood to good reason they would have to be. It hadn’t taken them too long, he told himself grimly, to adapt to a human house.

He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage.

There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.

They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting unbelieving in the summer dark.

There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all. It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.

He now had a curved-front house. Although it was, actually, not as simple as all that, for the curvature was not in proportion to what actually would have happened in case of such a feat. The curve was long and graceful and somehow not quite apparent. It was as if the front of the house had been eliminated and an illusion of the rest of the house had been summoned to mask the disappearance.

Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there.

And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit.

There was no front to the house.

Then he was running around the house, hardly knowing he was running, and there was a fear inside of him at what had happened to the house.

But the back of the house was all right. It was exactly as it had always been.

He clattered up the stoop with Beasly and Towser running close behind him. He pushed open the door and burst into the entry and scrambled up the stairs into the kitchen and went across the kitchen in three strides to see what had happened to the front of the house.

At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room.