Suddenly they were finished. The boat was painted, and so was the cottage. The puttied, painted storm windows were leaned against the trees. The hose was dragged up the hill and neatly coiled again.
I saw that they were finishing and I tried to call them all together so that I could thank them, but they paid no attention to me. And when they were finished, they were gone. I was left standing, all alone—with the newly-painted cottage shining in the moonlight and the smell of paint heavy in the air.
I suppose I wasn’t exactly sober, despite the night air and all the coffee Jo Ann had poured into me. It I had been cold, stone sober I might have done it better; I might have thought of something. As it was, I’m afraid I bungled it.
I staggered into the house and the outside door seemed a little hard to shut. When I looked for the reason, I saw it had been weather-stripped.
With the lights on, I looked around—and in all the time I’d been there the place had never been so neat. There wasn’t a speck of dust on anything and all the metal shone. All the pots and pans were neatly stacked in place; all the clothing I had left strewn around had been put away; all the books were lined straight within the shelves, and the magazines were where they should be instead of just thrown anywhere.
* * * *
I managed to get into bed, and I tried to think about it; but someone came along with a heavy mallet and hit me on the head and that was the last I knew until I was awakened by a terrible rackets
I got to it as fast as I could.
“What is it now?” I snarled, which is no way to answer a phone but was the way I felt.
It was J. H. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “Why aren’t you at the office? What do you mean by…”
“Just a minute, J. H.; don’t you remember? You canned me yesterday.”
“Now, Mark,” he said, “you wouldn’t hold that against me, would you? We were all excited.”
“I wasn’t excited,” I told him.
“Look,” he said, “I need you. There’s someone here to see you.”
“All right,” I said and hung up.
* * * *
I didn’t hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.
I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.
There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place—exactly the kind of tracks I’d seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn’t be. They were the self-same tracks.
They were brownie tracks!
I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.
The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener had said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.
And if there were good deeds in death, there were as well in life. In an operation such as this, the surgeon had told me, there are so many factors that no one can take the credit. It was a miracle, he’d said, but don’t you quote me on it.
And someone—no cleaning woman, but someone or something else—had messed up the notes of the physicist and in the messing of them had put together two pages out of several hundred—two pages that tied together and made sense.
Coincidence? I asked myself. Coincidence that a woman died and that a boy lived, and that a researcher got a clue he’d otherwise have missed? No, not coincidence when there was a track beneath a window and papers scattered from beneath a paperweight.
And—I’d almost forgotten—Jo Ann’s old lady who sat rocking happily because all her old dead friends had come to visit her. There were even times when senility might become a very kindness.
I straightened up and went down to the car. As I drove into town I kept thinking about the magic touch of kindness from the stars or if, perhaps, there might be upon this earth, co-existent with the human race, another race that had a different outlook and a different way of life. A race, perhaps, that had tried time and time again to ally itself with the humans and each time had been rejected and driven into hiding—sometimes by ignorance and superstition and again by a too-brittle knowledge of what was impossible. A race, perhaps, that might be trying once again.
V
J. H. was waiting for me, looking exactly like a cat sitting serenely inside a bird cage, with feathers on his whiskers. With him was a high brass flyboy, who had a rainbow of decorations spread across his jacket and eagles on his shoulders. They shone so bright and earnestly that they almost sparkled.
“Mark, this is Colonel Duncan,” said J. H. “He’d like to have a word with you.”
The two of us shook hands and the colonel was more affable than one would have expected him to be. Then J. H. left us in his office and shut the door behind him. The two of us sat down and each of us sort of measured up the other. I don’t know how the colonel felt, but I was ready to admit I was uncomfortable. I wondered what I might have done and what the penalty might be.
“I wonder, Lathrop,” said the colonel, “if you’d mind telling me exactly how it happened. How you found out about the brownies.”
“I didn’t find out about them, Colonel; it was just a gag.”
I told him about the Barnacle shooting off his mouth about no one on the staff ever showing any initiative, and how I’d dreamed up the brownie story to get even with him. And how the Barnacle had got even with me by running it.
But that didn’t satisfy the colonel. “There must be more to it than that,” he said.
I could see that he’d keep at me until I’d told it, anyhow; and while he hadn’t said a word about it, I kept seeing images of the Pentagon, and the chiefs of staff, and Project Saucer—or whatever they might call it now—and the FBI, and a lot of other unpleasant things just over his left shoulder.
So I came clean with him. I told him all of it and a lot of it, I granted, sounded downright silly.
But he didn’t seem to think that it was silly. “And what do you think about all this?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “They might come from outer space, or…”
He nodded quietly. “We’ve known for some time now, that there have been landings. This is the first time they’ve ever deliberately called attention to themselves.”
“What do they want, Colonel? What are they aiming at?”
“I wish I knew.”
Then he said very quietly, “Of course, if you should write anything about this, I simply shall deny it. That will leave you in a most peculiar position at the best.”
I don’t know how much more he might have told me—maybe quite a bit. But right then the phone rang. I picked it up and answered; it was for the colonel.
He said “yes,” and listened. He didn’t say another word. He got a little white around the gills, then he hung up the phone.
He sat there, looking sick.
* * * *
“What’s the matter, Colonel?”
“That was the field,” he told me. “It happened just a while ago.