"This morning."

"Why not last night? If he thought it was so important..."

"But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was important until all h.e.l.l broke loose this morning. After he answered and heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work..."

"Yes, I see," I said. "But now he thinks that it was really Tupper calling and that the call actually was for me."

"Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see."

"And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me."

Hiram's face hardened. "I know you're up to something," he said. "I know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken Stiffy in to Elmore."

"Yes, I did," I said. "I found his keys where they had fallen out of his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and everything was all right."

"You sneaked in," Hiram said. "You turned off your lights to go up Stiffy's lane."

"I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them fixed before I left the shack."

It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram didn't press the point.

"This morning," he said, "me and Tom went out to the shack."

"So it was Tom who was spying on me."

Hiram grunted. "He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of you."

"And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left."

"Yeah," said Hiram, "we broke in. And we found more of them telephones. A whole box full of them."

"You can quit looking at me like that," I said. "I saw no telephones. I didn't snoop around."

I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were neck-deep in it.

And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused. And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.

Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used the phones for communication.

Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few hours" time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone. Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.

Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the phones-and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.

For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village b.u.m.

"Well?" asked the constable.

"You want to know what I know about it?"

"Yes, I do," said Hiram, "and if you know what's good for you..."

"Hiram," I told him, "don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do..."

Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.

"It's moving!" he yelled at us. "The barrier is moving!"

Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.

I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the kerb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed. There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy cut around them with a burst of speed.

"Do you know what happened?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Just that the barrier is moving."

We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.

She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a ma.s.s of jam-packed cars. And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had moved.

The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was evidence of it.

Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, ma.s.ses of uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the ma.s.ses of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.

The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped. Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.

I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road, working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running-well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.

It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds, retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the surface of the land.

The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except two leafless trees. And they, I thought-they would be left behind. For they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a certain condition of life.

But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.

There was no gra.s.s upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All that was green was gone.

I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before the barrier.

Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing through the upper emptiness.

"Nancy," I said, but she did not answer.

I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of her.

I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out on the pavement-and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.

The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the door behind me.

"... called out the national guard and had officially informed Washington. The first units will move out in another-no, here is word just now that they have already moved out..."

"That," said Nancy, "is us he's talking about."

I reached out and twisted the dial. "... just came in. The barrier is moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing wildly from it. And here is more-the barrier is moving no faster than a man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile..."

And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile from its starting point.

"... question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end to it?"

"Brad," Nancy said, "do you think it will push everyone off the earth? Everyone but the people here in Millville?"

"I don't know," I said, rather stupidly.

"And if it does, where will it push them'? Where is there to go?"

"... London and Berlin," blared the radio speaker. "Apparently the Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy."

The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the people still retreated.

I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally arrived to watch the moving barrier.

"... sweeping everything before it," screamed the radio.

I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.

"Careful there," I warned. "Don't run into it."

"I'll be careful," said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.

"... like a wind," the announcer said, "blowing a long line of gra.s.s and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind..."

And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal and gla.s.s.

It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.

The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the direction of the wind.

"Brad!" she shouted.

But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering sound of raindrops splashing on the car.

The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over, that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the wind and that it was being held there.

With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.

They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.

"Hail," Nancy shouted at me.

But it wasn't hail.

Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.

"Seeds!" I shouted back. "Those things out there are seeds!" It was no regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather; There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and prepared it for the seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.

The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain and a wind blew out of nowhere.

"Brad," said Nancy, "I think I'm beginning to get scared."

She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened, hanging onto me.

"It makes me mad," she said, "I've never been scared, never my life. Never scared like this."

"It's all over now," I said. "The storm is ended and the barrier has stopped moving. Everything's all right."

"It's not like that at all," she told me. "It's only just beginning."

A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.

The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at us as he run.

We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there, waiting for him.

He came up to us, panting with his running.

"Brad," he gasped, "maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something."

"Why, that's crazy!" Nancy cried.

"Sure it is," said Ed, "but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything. They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think if it's right or wrong."

I asked him: "What do you have in mind?"

"You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or two .. ."

I shook my head. "I have too many things to do."

"But, Brad..."

"I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a thing to do with it."

"That don't make no difference."

"Yes, it does," I said.

"Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones..."

Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it."

"I know about those phones," I said. "Hiram told me all about them. Ed, take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else entirely."