Over the River and Through the Woods Read online

  This is the reality, thought Taine, this is all the reality there is. Whatever else may happen, this is where I stand—this room with its fireplace blackened by many winter fires, the bookshelves with the old thumbed volumes, the easy chair, the ancient worn carpet—worn by beloved and unforgotten feet through the many years.

  And this also, he knew, was the lull before the storm.

  In just a little while the brass would start arriving—the team of scientists, the governmental functionaries, the military, the observers from the other countries, the officials from the U.N.

  And against all these, he realized, he stood weaponless and shorn of his strength. No matter what a man might say or think, he could not stand off the world.

  This was the last day that this would be the Taine house. After almost a hundred years, it would have another destiny.

  And for the first time in all those years there’d be no Taine asleep beneath its roof.

  He stood looking at the fireplace and the shelves of books and he sensed the old, pale ghosts walking in the room and he lifted a hesitant hand as if to wave farewell, not only to the ghosts but to the room as well. But before he got it up, he dropped it to his side.

  What was the use, he thought.

  He went out to the porch and sat down on the steps.

  Beasly heard him and turned around.

  “He’s nice,” he said to Taine, patting the chuck upon the back. “He’s exactly like a great big teddy bear.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Taine.

  “And best of all, I can talk with him.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Taine, remembering that Beasly could talk with Towser, too.

  He wondered what it would be like to live in the simple world of Beasly. At times, he decided, it would be comfortable.

  The ratlike things had come in the spaceship, but why had they come to Willow Bend, why had they picked this house, the only house in all the village where they would have found the equipment that they needed to build their apparatus so easily and so quickly? For there was no doubt that they had cannibalized the computer to get the equipment they needed. In that, at least, Henry had been right. Thinking back on it, Henry, after all, had played quite a part in it.

  Could have they foreseen that on this particular week in this particular house the probability of quickly and easily doing what they had come to do had stood very high?

  Did they, with all their other talents and technology, have clairvoyance as well?

  “There’s someone coming,” Beasly said.

  “I don’t see a thing.”

  “Neither do I,” said Beasly, “but Chuck told me that he saw them.”

  “Told you!”

  “I told you we been talking. There, I can see them too.”

  They were far off, but they were coming fast—three dots rode rapidly out of the desert.

  He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get the rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.

  They were closer now and it seemed to him that they were sitting in invisible chairs that traveled very fast.

  He saw that they were humanoid, to a degree at least, and there were only three of them.

  They came in with a rush and stopped very suddenly a hundred feet or so from where he sat upon the steps.

  He didn’t move or say a word—there was nothing he could say. It was too ridiculous.

  They were, perhaps, a little smaller than himself, and black as the ace of spades, and they wore skintight shorts and vests that were somewhat oversize and both the shorts and vests were the blue of April skies.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  They sat on saddles, with horns in front and stirrups and a sort of bedroll tied on the back, but they had no horses.

  The saddles floated in the air, with the stirrups about three feet above the ground and the aliens sat easily in the saddles and stared at him and he stared back at them.

  Finally he got up and moved forward a step or two and when he did that the three swung from the saddles and moved forward, too, while the saddles hung there in the air, exactly as they’d left them.

  Taine walked forward and the three walked forward until they were no more than six feet apart.

  “They say hello to you,” said Beasly. “They say welcome to you.”

  “Well, all right, then, tell them—Say, how do you know all this!”

  “Chuck tells me what they say and I tell you. You tell me and I tell him and he tells them. That’s the way it works. That is what he’s here for.”

  “Well, I’ll be—,” said Taine. “So you can really talk to him.”

  “I told you that I could,” stormed Beasly. “I told you that I could talk to Towser, too, but you thought that I was crazy.”

  “Telepathy!” said Taine. And it was worse than ever now. Not only had the ratlike things known all the rest of it, but they’d known of Beasly, too.

  “What was that you said, Hiram?”

  “Never mind,” said Taine. “Tell that friend of yours to tell them I’m glad to meet them and what can I do for them?”

  He stood uncomfortably and stared at the three and he saw that their vests had many pockets and that the pockets were crammed, probably with their equivalent of tobacco and handkerchiefs and pocket knives and such.

  “They say,” said Beasly, “that they want to dicker.”

  “Dicker?”

  “Sure, Hiram. You know, trade.”

  Beasly chuckled thinly. “Imagine them laying themselves open to a Yankee trader. That’s what Henry says you are. He says you can skin a man on the slickest—”

  “Leave Henry out of this,” snapped Taine. “Let’s leave Henry out of something.”

  He sat down on the ground and the three sat down to face him.

  “Ask them what they have in mind to trade.”

  “Ideas,” Beasly said.

  “Ideas! That’s a crazy thing—”

  And then he saw it wasn’t.

  Of all the commodities that might be exchanged by an alien people, ideas would be the most valuable and the easiest to handle. They’d take no cargo room and they’d upset no economies—not immediately, that is—and they’d make a bigger contribution to the welfare of the cultures than trade in actual goods.

  “Ask them,” said Taine, “what they’ll take for the idea back of those saddles they are riding.”

  “They say, what have you to offer?”

  And that was the stumper. That was the one that would be hard to answer.

  Automobiles and trucks, the internal gas engine—well, probably not. Because they already had the saddles. Earth was out of date in transportation from the viewpoint of these people.

  Housing architecture—no, that was hardly an idea and, anyhow, there was that other house, so they knew of houses.

  Cloth? No, they had cloth.

  Paint, he thought. Maybe paint was it.

  “See if they are interested in paint,” Taine told Beasly.

  “They say, what is it? Please explain yourself.”

  “O.K., then. Let’s see. It’s a protective device to be spread over almost any surface. Easily packaged and easily applied. Protects against weather and corrosion. It’s decorative, too. Comes in all sorts of colors. And it’s cheap to make.”

  “They shrug in their mind,” said Beasly. “They’re just slightly interested. But they’ll listen more. Go ahead and tell them.”

  And that was more like it, thought Taine.

  That was the kind of language that he could understand.

  He settled himself more firmly on the ground and bent forward slightly, flicking his eyes across the three deadpan, ebony faces, trying to make out what they might be thinking.

  There was no making out. Thos
e were three of the deadest pans he had ever seen.

  It was all familiar. It made him feel at home. He was in his element.

  And in the three across from him, he felt somehow subconsciously, he had the best dickering opposition he had ever met. And that made him feel good too.

  “Tell them,” he said, “that I’m not quite sure. I may have spoken up too hastily. Paint, after all, is a mighty valuable idea.”

  “They say, just as a favor to them, not that they’re really interested, would you tell them a little more.”

  Got them hooked, Taine told himself. If he could only play it right—

  He settled down to dickering in earnest.

  Hours later Henry Horton showed up. He was accompanied by a very urbane gentleman, who was faultlessly turned out and who carried beneath his arm an impressive attache case.

  Henry and the man stopped on the steps in sheer astonishment.

  Taine was squatted on the ground with a length of board and he was daubing paint on it while the aliens watched. From the daubs here and there upon their anatomies, it was plain to see the aliens had been doing some daubing of their own. Spread all over the ground were other lengths of half-painted boards and a couple of dozen old cans of paint.

  Taine looked up and saw Henry and the man.

  “I was hoping,” he said, “that someone would show up.”

  “Hiram,” said Henry, with more importance than usual, “may I present Mr. Lancaster. He is a special representative of the United Nations.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, sir,” said Taine. “I wonder if you would—”

  “Mr. Lancaster,” Henry explained grandly, “was having some slight difficulty getting through the lines outside, so I volunteered my services. I’ve already explained to him our joint interest in this matter.”

  “It was very kind of Mr. Horton,” Lancaster said. “There was this stupid sergeant—”

  “It’s all in knowing,” Henry said, “how to handle people.”

  The remark, Taine noticed, was not appreciated by the man from the U.N.

  “May I inquire, Mr. Taine,” asked Lancaster, “exactly what you’re doing?”

  “I’m dickering,” said Taine.

  “Dickering. What a quaint way of expressing—”

  “An old Yankee word,” said Henry quickly, “with certain connotations of its own. When you trade with someone you are exchanging goods, but if you’re dickering with him you’re out to get his hide.”

  “Interesting,” said Lancaster. “And I suppose you’re out to skin these gentlemen in the sky-blue vests—”

  “Hiram,” said Henry, proudly, “is the sharpest dickerer in these parts. He runs an antique business and he has to dicker hard—”

  “And may I ask,” said Lancaster, ignoring Henry finally, “what you might be doing with these cans of paint? Are these gentlemen potential customers for paint or—”

  Taine threw down the board and rose angrily to his feet.

  “If you’d both shut up!” he shouted. “I’ve been trying to say something ever since you got here and I can’t get in a word. And I tell you, it’s important—”

  “Hiram!” Henry exclaimed in horror.

  “It’s quite all right,” said the U.N. man. “We have been jabbering. And now, Mr. Taine?”

  “I’m backed into a corner,” Taine told him, “and I need some help. I’ve sold these fellows on the idea of paint, but I don’t know a thing about it—the principle back of it or how it’s made or what goes into it or—”

  “But, Mr. Taine, if you’re selling them the paint, what difference does it make—”

  “I’m not selling them the paint,” yelled Taine. “Can’t you understand that? They don’t want the paint. They want the idea of paint, the principle of paint. It’s something that they never thought of and they’re interested. I offered them the paint idea for the idea of their saddles and I’ve almost got it—”

  “Saddles? You mean those things over there, hanging in the air?”

  “That is right. Beasly, would you ask one of our friends to demonstrate a saddle?”

  “You bet I will,” said Beasly.

  “What,” demanded Henry, “has Beasly got to do with this?”

  “Beasly is an interpreter. I guess you’d call him a telepath. You remember how he always claimed he could talk with Towser?”

  “Beasly was always claiming things.”

  “But this time he was right. He tells Chuck, that funny-looking monster, what I want to say and Chuck tells these aliens. And these aliens tell Chuck and Chuck tells Beasly and Beasly tells me.”

  “Ridiculous!” snorted Henry. “Beasly hasn’t got the sense to be…what did you say he was?”

  “A telepath,” said Taine.

  One of the aliens had gotten up and climbed into a saddle. He rode it forth and back. Then he swung out of it and sat down again.

  “Remarkable,” said the U.N. man. “Some sort of antigravity unit, with complete control. We could make use of that, indeed.”

  He scraped his hand across his chin.

  “And you’re going to exchange the idea of paint for the idea of that saddle?”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Taine, “but I need some help. I need a chemist or a paint manufacturer or someone to explain how paint is made. And I need some professor or other who’ll understand what they’re talking about when they tell me the idea of the saddle.”

  “I see,” said Lancaster. “Yes, indeed, you have a problem. Mr. Taine, you seem to me a man of some discernment—”

  “Oh, he’s all of that,” interrupted Henry. “Hiram’s quite astute.”

  “So I suppose you’ll understand,” said the U.N. man, “that this whole procedure is quite irregular—”

  “But it’s not,” exploded Taine. “That’s the way they operate. They open up a planet and then they exchange ideas. They’ve been doing that with other planets for a long, long time. And ideas are all they want, just the new ideas, because that is the way to keep on building a technology and culture. And they have a lot of ideas, sir, that the human race can use.”

  “That is just the point,” said Lancaster. “This is perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to us humans. In just a short year’s time we can obtain data and ideas that will put us ahead—theoretically, at least—by a thousand years. And in a thing that is so important, we should have experts on the job—”

  “But,” protested Henry, “you can’t find a man who’ll do a better dickering job than Hiram. When you dicker with him your back teeth aren’t safe. Why don’t you leave him be? He’ll do a job for you. You can get your experts and your planning groups together and let Hiram front for you. These folks have accepted him and have proved they’ll do business with him and what more do you want? All he needs is a little help.”

  Beasly came over and faced the U.N. man.

  “I won’t work with no one else,” he said. “If you kick Hiram out of here, then I go with him. Hiram’s the only person who ever treated me like a human—”

  “There, you see!” Henry said, triumphantly.

  “Now, wait a second, Beasly,” said the U.N. man. “We could make it worth your while. I should imagine that an interpreter in a situation such as this could command a handsome salary.”

  “Money don’t mean a thing to me,” said Beasly. “It won’t buy me friends. People still will laugh at me.”

  “He means it, mister,” Henry warned. “There isn’t anyone who can be as stubborn as Beasly. I know; he used to work for us.”

  The U.N. man looked flabbergasted and not a little desperate.

  “It will take you quite some time,” Henry pointed out, “to find another telepath—leastwise one who can talk to these people here.”

  The U.N. man looked as if he were strangling. “I doubt,” he said, “there’s another one on Earth.”

  “Well, all right,” said Beasly, brutally, “let’s make up our minds. I ain’t standing here all day.
”

  “All right,” cried the U.N. man. “You two go ahead. Please, will you go ahead? This is a chance we can’t let slip through our fingers. Is there anything you want? Anything I can do for you?”

  “Yes, there is,” said Taine. “There’ll be the boys from Washington and bigwigs from other countries. Just keep them off my back.”

  “I’ll explain most carefully to everyone. There’ll be no interference.”

  “And I need that chemist and someone who’ll know about the saddles. And I need them quick. I can stall these boys a little longer, but not for too much longer.”

  “Anyone you need,” said the U.N. man. “Anyone at all. I’ll have them here in hours. And in a day or two there’ll be a pool of experts waiting for whenever you may need them—on a moment’s notice.”

  “Sir,” said Henry unctuously, “that’s most cooperative. Both Hiram and I appreciate it greatly. And now, since this is settled, I understand that there are reporters waiting. They’ll be interested in your statement.”

  The U.N. man, it seemed, didn’t have it in him to protest. He and Henry went tramping up the stairs.

  Taine turned around and looked out across the desert.

  “It’s a big front yard,” he said.

  Good Night, Mr. James

  He came alive from nothing. He became aware from unawareness.

  He smelled the air of the night and heard the trees whispering on the embankment above him and the breeze that had set the trees to whispering came down to him and felt him over with soft and tender fingers, for all the world as if it were examining him for broken bones or contusions and abrasions.

  He sat up and put both his palms down upon the ground beside him to help him sit erect and stared into the darkness. Memory came slowly and when it came it was incomplete and answered nothing.

  His name was Henderson James and he was a human being and he was sitting somewhere on a planet that was called the Earth. He was thirty-six years old and he was, in his own way, famous, and comfortably well-off. He lived in an old ancestral home on Summit Avenue, which was a respectable address even if it had lost some of its smartness in the last twenty years or so.