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.Of such things had their lives been made, the thin grist of excitement.But now they faced a bigger thing, something they could not comprehend, a happening and a situation that was, for the moment, too big for the world to comprehend.And because they could not reduce this situation to the simple formula of aimless wonder that could be accorded a cat that had somehow attained the parsonage roof, they were uneasy and upset and their tempers were on edge, ready to flare into an antagonistic attitude, and very probably into violence—if they could find something or someone against which such a violence could be aimed.And now I knew that Tom Preston and Hiram Martin had provided them with a target for their violence—if and when the violence came.I saw now that I was almost home.I was in front of the house of Daniel Willoughby, a big brick house, upstanding and foursquare, the kind of house you’d know, without even thinking of it, that a man like Daniel Willoughby would own.Across the street, on the corner, was the old Perkins house.New people had moved into the place a week or so ago.It was one of the few houses in the village that was put up for rent, and people moved in and out of it every year or so.No one ever went out of their way to get acquainted with these renters; it wasn’t worth one’s while.And just down the street was Doc Fabian’s place.A few minutes more, I thought, and I would be home, back in the house with the hole punched in the roof, back with the echoing emptiness and the lonely question, with the hatred and suspicion of the town performing sentry-go just outside the gate.Across the street a screen door slammed and feet tramped across the porch boards.A voice yelled: “Wally, they’re going to bomb us! It was on television!”A shadow hunched up out of the darkness of the earth—a man who had been lying on the grass or sitting in a low-slung lawn chair, invisible until the cry had jerked him upright.He gurgled as he tried to form some word, but it came out wrong.“There was a bulletin!” the other one shouted from the porch.“Just now.On television.”The man out in the yard was up and running, heading for the house.And I was running, too.Heading for home, as fast as I could go, my legs moving of their own accord, unprompted by the brain.I’d expected I’d have a little time, but there’d been no time.The rumor had broken sooner than I had anticipated.For the bulletin, of course, had been no more than rumor, I was sure of that—that a bombing might take place; that, as a last resort, a bomb might be dropped on Millville.But I also knew that so far as this village was concerned, it would make no difference.The people in the village would not differentiate between fact and rumor.This was the trigger that would turn this village into a hate-filled madhouse.I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood—and Stiffy, too, if he were here.I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing.It was not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram.Earlier in the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there.I skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground.Quickly I surveyed the area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness, any movement that might betray a watcher.From far away I heard a shout and on the street above someone ran, feet pounding on the pavement.A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away, a car was started and the driver gunned the engine.The excited voice of a news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make out the words.There was no sign of Hiram.I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope.I reached the garden and made my way across it.Ahead of me loomed the shattered greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me.Then I started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voice froze me.Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there’d been no sound.Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.And there was a smell of purpleness—perhaps not a smell, exactly, but a sense of purpleness.It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler’s camp where the Presence had waited on the hillside to walk me back to Earth.“Yes,” I said.“Where are you?”The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway, although there was not breeze enough to sway it.I am here, it said.I have been here all the years.I have been looking forward to this time when I could talk with you.“You know?” I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.“No despair?” I asked, aghast.If we fail this time, it said, we will try again.Another place, perhaps.Or we may have to wait the—what do you call it?“The radiation,” I said.“That is what you call it.”Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.“That will be years,” I said.We have the years, it said.We have all the time there is.There is no end of us.There is no end of time.“But there is an end of time for us,” I said, with a gush of pity for all humanity, but mostly for myself.“There is an end for me.”Yes, we know, said the purpleness.We feel much sorrow for you.And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.But when I tried to say the words, I couldn’t make them come.I couldn’t admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride.But I had not known until I tried to speak the words that I had the stubbornness and pride.We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said.But what kind of sorrow—a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and surety.It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a color; it was something more than that.It was, perhaps, the odor of immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it could not allow itself to care.And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree.Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well—the same life stuff of which I myself was made—that I felt pity for
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