The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (77 page)

"I was thinking," Henry interrupted, "as I
was sitting here, that your attitude is most commendable and deserving of
support. It has occurred to me that it would be most unneighborly of me to go
on sitting here and leave you in the fight alone. We could hire ourselves a
fine array of legal talent and we could fight the case and in the meantime we
could form a land and development company and that way we could make sure that
this new world of yours is used the way it should be used.

"It stands to reason, Hiram, that I am the one to stand
beside you, shoulder to shoulder, in this business since we're already partners
in this TV deal."

"What's that about TV?" shrilled Abbie, slapping a
plate of cakes down in front of Taine.

"Now, Abbie," Henry said patiently, "I have
explained to you already that your TV set is back of that partition down in the
basement and there isn't any telling when we can get it out."

"Yes, I know," said Abbie, bringing a platter of
sausages and pouring a cup of coffee.

Beasly came in from the living room and went bumbling out
the back.

"After all," said Henry, pressing his advantage,
"I would suppose I had some hand in it. I doubt you could have done much
without the computer I sent over."

And there it was again, thought Taine. Even Henry thought
he'd been the one who did it.

"But didn't Beasly tell you?"

"Beasly said a lot, but you know how Beasly is."

And that was it, of course. To the villagers it would be no
more than another Beasly story—another whopper that Beasly had dreamed up.
There was no one who believed a word that Beasly said.

Taine picked up the cup and drank his coffee, gaining time
to shape an answer and there wasn't any answer. If he told the truth, it would
sound far less believable than any lie he'd tell.

"You can tell me, Hiram. After all, we're
partners."

He's playing me for a fool, thought Taine. Henry thinks he
can play anyone he wants for a fool and sucker.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, Henry."

"Well," Henry said, resignedly, getting to his
feet, "I guess that part of it can wait."

Beasly came tramping and banging through the kitchen with
another load of cans.

"I'll have to have some gasoline," said Taine,
"if I'm going out for Towser."

"I'll take care of that right away," Henry
promised smoothly. "I'll send Ernie over with his tank wagon and we can
run a hose through here and fill up those cans. And I'll see if I can find
someone who'll go along with you."

"That's not necessary. I can go alone."

"If we had a radio transmitter, then you could keep in
touch."

"But we haven't any. And, Henry, I can't wait. Towser's
out there somewhere—"

"Sure, I know how much you thought of him. You go out
and look for him if you think you have to and I'll get started on this other
business. I'll get some lawyers lined up and we'll draw up some sort of
corporate papers for our land development—"

"And, Hiram," Abbie said, "will you do
something for me, please?"

"Why, certainly," said Taine.

"Would you speak to Beasly. It's senseless the way he's
acting. There wasn't any call for him to up and leave us. I might have been a
little sharp with him, but he's so simple-minded he's infuriating. He ran off
and spent half a day helping Towser at digging out that wood-chuck and—"

"I'll speak to him," said Taine.

"Thanks, Hiram. He'll listen to you. You're the only
one he'll listen to. And I wish you could have fixed my TV set before all this
came about. I'm just lost without it. It leaves a hole in the living room. It
matched my other furniture, you know."

"Yes, I know," said Taine.

"Coming, Abbie?" Henry asked, standing at the
door.

He lifted a hand in a confidential farewell to Taine.
"Ill see you later, Hiram. I'll get it fixed up."

I just bet you will, thought Taine.

He went back to the table, after they were gone, and sat
down heavily in a chair.

The front door slammed and Beasly came panting in, excited.

"Towser's back!" he yelled. "He's coming back
and he's driving in the biggest woodchuck you ever clapped your eyes on."

Taine leaped to his feet.

"Woodchuck! That's an alien planet. It hasn't any
woodchucks."

"You come and see," yelled Beasly.

He turned and raced back out again, with Taine following
close behind.

It certainly looked considerably like a woodchuck—a sort of
man-size woodchuck. More like a woodchuck out of a children's book, perhaps,
for it was walking on its hind legs and trying to look dignified even while it
kept a weather eye on Towser.

Towser was back a hundred feet or so, keeping a wary
distance from the massive chuck. He had the pose of a good sheep-herding dog,
walking in a crouch, alert to head off any break that the chuck might make.

The chuck came up close to the house and stopped. Then it
did an about-face so that it looked back across the desert and it hunkered
down.

It swung its massive head to gaze at Beasly and Taine and in
the limpid brown eyes Taine saw more than the eyes of an animal.

Taine walked swiftly out and picked up the dog in his arms
and hugged him tight against him. Towser twisted his head around and slapped a
sloppy tongue across his master's face.

Taine stood with the dog in his arms and looked at the
man-size chuck and felt a great relief and an utter thankfulness.

Everything was all right now, he thought. Towser had come
back.

He headed for the house and out into the kitchen.

He put Towser down and got a dish and filled it at the tap.
He placed it on the floor and Towser lapped at it thirstily, slopping water all
over the linoleum.

"Take it easy, there," warned Taine. "You
don't want to overdo it."

He hunted in the refrigerator and found some scraps and put
them in Towser's dish.

Towser wagged his tail with doggish happiness.

"By rights," said Taine, "I ought to take a
rope to you, running off like that."

Beasly came ambling in.

"That chuck is a friendly cuss," he announced.
"He's waiting for someone."

"That's nice," said Taine, paying no attention.

He glanced at the clock.

"It's seven-thirty," he said. "We can catch
the news. You want to get it, Beasly?"

"Sure. I know right where to get it. That fellow from
New York."

"That's the one," said Taine.

He walked into the living room and looked out the window.
The man-size chuck had not moved. He was sitting with his back to the house,
looking back the way he'd come.

Waiting for someone, Beasly had said, and it looked as if he
might be, but probably it was all just in Beasly's head.

And if he were waiting for someone, Taine wondered, who
might that someone be?
What
might that someone be? Certainly by now the
word had spread out there that there was a door into another world. And how
many doors, he wondered, had been opened through the ages?

Henry had said that there was a big new world out there
waiting for Earthmen to move in. And that wasn't it at all. It was the other
way around.

The voice of the news commentator came blasting from the
radio in the middle of a sentence:

". . . finally got into the act. Radio Moscow said this
evening that the Soviet delegate will make representations in the U.N. tomorrow
for the internationalization of this other world and the gateway to it.

"From that gateway itself, the home of a man named
Hiram Taine, there is no news. Complete security had been clamped down and a
cordon of troops form a solid wall around the house, holding back the crowds.
Attempts to telephone the residence are blocked by a curt voice which says that
no calls are being accepted for that number. And Taine himself has not stepped
from the house."

Taine walked back into the kitchen and sat down.

"He's talking about you," Beasly said importantly.

"Rumor circulated this morning that Taine, a quiet
village repairman and dealer in antiques, and until yesterday a relative
unknown, had finally returned from a trip which he made out into this new and
unknown land. But what he found, if anything, no one yet can say. Nor is there
any further information about this other place beyond the fact that it is a
desert and, to the moment, lifeless.

"A small flurry of excitement was occasioned late
yesterday by the finding of same strange object in the woods across the road
from the residence, but this area likewise was swiftly cordoned off and to
th&
moment Colonel Ryan, who commands the troops, will say nothing of what
actually was found.

"Mystery man of the entire situation is one Henry
Horton, who seems to be the only unofficial person to have entry to the Taine
house. Horton, questioned earlier today, had little to say, but managed to
suggest an air of great conspiracy. He hinted he and Taine were partners in
some mysterious venture and left hanging in midair the half impression that he
and Taine had collaborated in opening the new world.

"Horton, it is interesting to note, operates a small
computer plant and it is understood on good authority that only recently he
delivered a computer to Taine, or at least some sort of machine to which
considerable mystery is attached. One story is that this particular machine had
been in the process of development for six or seven years.

"Some of the answers to the matter of how all this did
happen and what actually did happen must wait upon the findings of a team of
scientists who left Washington this evening after an all-day conference at the
White House, which was attended by representatives from the military, the state
department, the security division and the special weapons section.

"Throughout the world the impact of what happened
yesterday at Willow Bend can only be compared to the sensation of the news,
almost twenty years ago, of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. There is
some tendency among many observers to believe that the implications of Willow
Bend, in fact, may be even more earth-shaking than were those of Hiroshima.

"Washington insists, as is only natural, that this
matter is of internal concern only and that it intends to handle the situation
as it best affects the national welfare.

"But abroad there is a rising storm of insistence that
this is not a matter of national policy concerning one nation, but that it
necessarily must be a matter of world-wide concern.

"There is an unconfirmed report that a U.N. observer
will arrive in Willow Bend almost momentarily. France, Britain, Bolivia, Mexico
and India have already requested permission of Washington to send observers to
the scene and other nations undoubtedly plan to file similar requests.

"The world sits on edge tonight, waiting for the word
from Willow Bend and-"

Taine reached out and clicked the radio to silence.

"From the sound of it," said Beasly, "we're
going to be overrun by a batch of foreigners."

Yes, thought Taine, there might be a batch of foreigners,
but not exactly in the sense that Beasly meant. The use of the word, he told
himself, so far as any human was concerned, must be outdated now. No man of
Earth ever again could be called a foreigner with alien life next
door—literally next door. What were the people of the stone house?

And perhaps not the alien life of one planet only, but the
alien life of many. For he himself had found another door into yet another
planet and there might be many more such doors and what would these other
worlds be like, and what was the purpose of the doors?

Someone,
something,
had found a way of going to
another planet short of spanning light-years of lonely space—a simpler and a
shorter way than flying through the gulfs of space. And once the way was open,
then the way stayed open and it was as easy as walking from one room to
another.

But one thing—one ridiculous thing—kept puzzling him and
that was the spinning and the movement of the connected planets, of all the
planets that must be linked together. You could not, he argued, establish
solid, factual links between two objects that move independently of one another.

And yet, a couple of days ago, he would have contended just
as stolidly that the whole idea on the face of it was fantastic and impossible.
Still it had been done. And once one impossibility was accomplished, what
logical man could say with sincerity that the second could not be?

The doorbell rang and he got up to answer it.

It was Ernie, the oil man.

"Henry said you wanted some gas and I came to tell you
I can't get it until morning."

"That's all right," said Taine. "I don't need
it now."

And swiftly slammed the door.

He leaned against it, thinking: I'll have to face them
sometime. I can't keep the door locked against the world. Sometime, soon or
late, the Earth and I will have to have this out.

And it was foolish, he thought, for him to think like this,
but that was the way it was.

He had something here that the Earth demanded; something
that Earth wanted or thought it wanted. And yet, in the last analysis, it was
his responsibility. It had happened on his land, it had happened in his house;
unwittingly, perhaps, he'd even aided and abetted it.

And the land and house are mine, he fiercely told himself,
and that world out there was an extension of his yard. No matter how far or
where it went, an extension of his yard.

Beasly had left the kitchen and Taine walked into the living
room. Towser was curled up and snoring gently in the gold-upholstered chair.

Taine decided he would let him stay there. After all, he
thought, Towser had won the right to sleep anywhere he wished.

He walked past the chair to the window and the desert
stretched to its far horizon and there before the window sat the man-size
wood-chuck and Beasly side by side, with their backs turned to the window and
staring out across the desert.