The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (76 page)

He walked out from the door and looked up at the sky, and
the rain drops pounded at his face with a stinging fury. There was a chill and
a dampness in the air and the place was eldritch—a world jerked straight from
some ancient Gothic tale of goblin and of sprite.

He glanced around and there was nothing he could see, for
the rain blotted out the world beyond this stretch of coast, but behind the
rain he could sense or seemed to sense a presence that sent shivers down his
spine. Gulping in fright, Taine turned around and stumbled back again through
the door into the house.

One world away, he thought, was far enough; two worlds away
was more than one could take. He trembled at the sense of utter loneliness that
tumbled in his skull and suddenly this long-forsaken house became unbearable
and he dashed out of it.

Outside the sun was bright and there was welcome warmth. His
clothes were damp from rain and little beads of moisture lay on the rifle
barrel.

He looked around for Towser and there was no sign of the
dog. He was not underneath the pickup; he was nowhere in sight.

Taine called and there was no answer. His voice sounded lone
and hollow in the emptiness and silence.

He walked around the house, looking for the dog, and there
was no back door to the house. The rough rock walls of the sides of the house
pulled in with that funny curvature and there was no back to the house at all.

But Taine was not interested, he had known how it would be.
Right now he was looking for his dog and he felt the panic rising in him.
Somehow it felt a long way from home.

He spent three hours at it. He went back into the house and
Towser was not there. He went into the other world again and searched among the
tumbled rocks and Towser was not there. He went back to the desert and walked
around the hillock and then he climbed to the crest of it and used the
binoculars and saw nothing but the lifeless desert, stretching far in all
directions.

Dead-beat with weariness, stumbling, half asleep even as he
walked, he went back to the pickup.

He leaned against it and tried to pull his wits together.

Continuing as he was would be a useless effort. He had to
get some sleep. He had to go back to Willow Bend and fill the tank and get some
extra gasoline so that he could range farther afield in his search for Towser.

He couldn't leave the dog out here—that was unthinkable. But
he had to plan, he had to act inteUigently. He would be doing Towser no good by
stumbling around in his present shape.

He pulled himself into the truck and headed back for Willow
Bend, following the occasional faint impressions that his tires had made in the
sandy places, fighting a half-dead drowsiness that tried to seal his eyes shut.

Passing the higher hill on which the milk-glass things had
stood, he stopped to walk around a bit so he wouldn't fall asleep behind the
wheel. And now, he saw, there were only seven of the things resting in their
cradles.

But that meant nothing to him now. All that meant anything
was to hold off the fatigue that was closing down upon him, to cling to the
wheel and wear off the miles, to get back to Willow Bend and get some sleep and
then come back to look for Towser.

Slightly more than halfway home he saw the other car and
watched it in numb befuddlement, for this truck that he was driving and the car
at home in his garage were the only two vehicles this side of his house.

He pulled the pickup to a halt and tumbled out of it.

The car drew up and Henry Horton and Beasly and a man who
wore a star leaped quickly out of it.

"Thank God we found you, man!" cried Henry,
striding over to him.

"I wasn't lost," protested Taine. "I was
coming back."

"He's all beat out," said the man who wore the
star.

"This is Sheriff Hanson," Henry said. "We
were following your tracks."

"I lost Towser," Taine mumbled. "I had to go
and leave him. Just leave me be and go and hunt for Towser. I can make it
home."

He reached out and grabbed the edge of the pickup's door to
hold himself erect.

"You broke down the door," he said to Henry.
"You broke into my house and you took my car-"

"We had to do it, Hiram. We were afraid that something
might have happened to you. The way that Beasly told it, it stood your hair on
end."

"You better get him in the car," the sheriff said.
"I'll drive the pickup back."

"But I have to hunt for Towser!"

"You can't do anything until you've had some
rest."

Henry grabbed him by the arm and led him to the car and
Beasly held the rear door open.

"You got any idea what this place is?" Henry
whispered conspira-torially.

"I don't positively know," Taine mumbled.
"Might be some other-"

Henry chuckled. "Well, I guess it doesn't really
matter. Whatever it may be, it's put us on the map. We're on all the newscasts
and the papers are plastering us in headlines and the town is swarming with
reporters and cameramen and there are big officials coming. Yes, sir, I tell
you, Hiram, this will be the making of us—"

Taine heard no more. He was fast asleep before he hit the
seat.

He came awake and lay quietly in the bed and he saw the
shades were drawn and the room was cool and peaceful.

It was good, he thought, to wake in a room you knew—in a
room that one had known for his entire life, in a house that had been the Taine
house for almost a hundred years.

Then memory clouted him and he sat bolt upright.

And now he heard it—the insistent murmur from outside the
window.

He vaulted from the bed and pulled one shade aside. Peering
out, he saw the cordon of troops that held back the crowd that overflowed his
back yard and the back yards back of that.

He let the shade drop back and started hunting for his
shoes, for he was fully dressed. Probably Henry and Beasly, he told himself,
had dumped him into bed and pulled off his shoes and let it go at that. But he
couldn't remember a single thing of it. He must have gone dead to the world the
minute Henry had bundled him into the back seat of the car.

He found the shoes on the floor at the end of the bed and
sat down upon the bed to pull them on.

And his mind was racing on what he had to do.

He'd have to get some gasoline somehow and fill up the truck
and stash an extra can or two into the back and he'd have to take some food and
water and perhaps his sleeping bag. For he wasn't coming back until he'd found
his dog.

He got on his shoes and tied them, then went out into the
living room. There was no one there, but there were voices in the kitchen.

He looked out the window and the desert lay outside,
unchanged. The sun, he noticed, had climbed higher in the sky, but out in his
front yard it was still forenoon.

He looked at his watch and it was six o'clock and from the
way the shadows had been falling when he'd peered out of the bedroom window, he
knew that it was 6:00
p.m.
He
realized with a guilty start that he must have slept almost around the clock.
He had not meant to sleep that long. He hadn't meant to leave Towser out there
that long.

He headed for the kitchen and there were three persons
there— Abbie and Henry Horton and a man in military garb.

"There you are," cried Abbie merrily. "We
were wondering when you would wake up."

"You have some coffee cooking, Abbie?"

"Yes, a whole pot full of it. And I'll cook up
something else for you."

"Just some toast," said Taine. "I haven't got
much time. I have to hunt for Towser."

"Hiram," said Henry, "this is Colonel Ryan.
National guard. He has his boys outside."

"Yes, I saw them through the window."

"Necessary," said Henry. "Absolutely
necessary. The sheriff couldn't handle it. The people came rushing in and
they'd have torn the place apart. So I called the governor."

"Taine," the colonel said, "sit down. I want
to talk with you."

"Certainly," said Taine, taking a chair.
"Sorry to be in such a rush, but I lost my dog out there."

"This business," said the colonel, smugly,
"is vastly more important than any dog could be."

"Well, colonel, that just goes to show that you don't
know Towser. He's the best dog I ever had and I've had a lot of them. Raised
him from a pup and he's been a good friend all these years—"

"All right," the colonel said, "so he is a
friend. But still I have to talk with you."

"You just sit and talk," Abbie said to Taine.
"I'll fix up some cakes and Henry brought over some of that sausage that
we get out on the farm."

The back door opened and Beasly staggered in to the
accompaniment of a terrific metallic banging. He was carrying three empty
five-gallon gas cans in one hand and two in the other hand and they were
bumping and banging together as he moved.

"Say," yelled Taine, "what's going on
here?"

"Now, just take it easy," Henry said. "You
have no idea the problems that we have. We wanted to get a big gas tank moved
through here, but we couldn't do it. We tried to rip out the back of the
kitchen to get it through, but we couldn't—"

"You did what!"

"We tried to rip out the back of the kitchen,"
Henry told him calmly. "You can't get one of those big storage tanks
through an ordinary door. But when we tried, we found that the entire house is
boarded up inside with the same kind of material that you used down in the
basement. You hit it with an ax and it blunts the steel—"

"But, Henry, this is my house and there isn't anyone
who has the right to start tearing it apart." «      "Fat
chance," the colonel said. "What I would like to know, Taine, what is
that stuff that we couldn't break through?"

"Now you take it easy, Hiram," cautioned Henry.
"We have a big new world waiting for us out there—"

"It isn't waiting for you or anyone," yelled
Taine.

"And we have to explore it and to explore it we need a
stockpile of gasoline. So since we can't have a storage tank, we're getting
together as many gas cans as possible and then we'll run a hose through
here-"

"But, Henry-"

"I wish," said Henry sternly, "that you'd
quit interrupting me and let me have my say. You can't even imagine the
logistics that we face. We're bottlenecked by the size of a regulation door. We
have to get supplies out there and we have to get transport. Cars and trucks
won't be so bad. We can disassemble them and lug them through piecemeal, but a
plane will be a problem."

"You listen to me, Henry. There isn't anyone going to
haul a plane through here. This house has been in my family for almost a
hundred years and I own it and I have a right to it and you can't come in
high-handed and start hauling stuff through it."

"But," said Henry plaintively, "we need a
plane real bad. You can cover so much more ground when you have a plane."

Beasly went banging through the kitchen with his cans and
out into the living room.

The colonel sighed. "I had hoped, Mr. Taine, that you
would understand how the matter stood. To me it seems very plain that it's your
patriotic duty to co-operate with us in this. The government, of course, could
exercise the right of eminent domain and start condemnation action, but it would
rather not do that. I'm speaking unofficially, of course, but I think it's safe
to say the government would much prefer to arrive at an amicable
agreement."

"I doubt," Taine said, bluffing, not knowing
anything about it, "that the right of eminent domain would be applicable.
As I understand it, it applies to roads—"

"This is a road," the colonel told him flatly.
"A road right through your house to another world."

"First," Taine declared, "the government
would have to show it was in the public interest and that refusal of the owner
to relinquish title amounted to an interference in government procedure
and—"

"I think," the colonel said, "that the
government can prove it is in the public interest."

"I think," Taine said angrily, "I better get
a lawyer."

"If you really mean that," Henry offered, ever
helpful, "and you want to get a good one—and I presume you do—I would be
pleased to recommend a firm that I am sure would represent your interests most
ably and be, at the same time, fairly reasonable in cost."

The colonel stood up, seething. "You'll have a lot to
answer, Taine. There'll be a lot of things the government will want to know.
First of all, they'll want to know just how you engineered this. Are you ready
to tell that?"

"No," said Taine, "I don't believe I
am."

And he thought with some alarm: They think that I'm the one
who did it and they'll be down on me like a pack of wolves to find just how I
did it. He had visions of the FBI and the state department and the Pentagon
and, even sitting down, he felt shaky in the knees.

The colonel turned around and marched stiffly from the
kitchen. He went out the back and slammed the door behind him.

Henry looked at Taine speculatively.

"Do you really mean it?" he demanded. "Do you
intend to stand up to them?"

"I'm getting sore," said Taine. "They can't
come in here and take over without even asking me. I don't care what anyone may
think, this is my house. I was born here and I've lived here all my life and I
like the place and—"

"Sure," said Henry. "I know just how you
feel."

"I suppose it's childish of me, but I wouldn't mind so
much if they showed a willingness to sit down and talk about what they meant to
do once they'd taken over. But there seems no disposition to even ask me what I
think about it. And I tell you, Henry, this is different than it seems. This
isn't a place where we can walk in and take over, no matter what Washington may
think. There's something out there and we better watch our step—"