Now, he told himself, let's look at all of this realistically. Let's step away from it and have a long, hard look at it. Let's not go jumping to conclusions; let's try to be objective.
Item: A huge blackness had fallen from the sky, landing on the bridge and, from the crunch of metal he had heard, probably crushing his parked ear.
Item: He was in a place that could be, more than likely was, the interior of the blackness that had fallen, a place quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.
Item: Not only he, but a fish, had been introduced into this place.
He took the items, one by one, into the computer of his mind, and tried to put them all together. They added up to one thing:
He was inside, had somehow been spirited or absorbed inside a visitor from space, a visitor that was picking up and looking over the fauna of the planet upon which it had landed.
First himself and then a fish. And in a little while, perhaps, a rabbit, a squirrel, a coon, a bear, a deer, a bobcat. After a time, he told himself, the place was going to get crowded.
The gleaming circular objects that were watching him could be receptors, watching and recording, extracting data and storing it, making note of him (and the fish as well), picking up every vibration of his brain, every quiver of his psyche, analyzing him, breaking down the kind of organism that he was and classifying him by whatever code that might apply, tucking him away in memory cells, writing him up in chemical equations, seeking an understanding of what he was and what might be his status and his purpose in the ecology of the planet.
Probably it was not only the circular objects that were doing the work. Perhaps the flashing lights and the mechanisms behind the flashing lights were a part of it as well.
He could be wrong, he thought. When he could really come to think of it, he must know that he was wrong. Yet it was the one explanation that squared with what had happened. He had seen the blackness fall; he had been snatched up from the river—he remembered the running water under him as he was hoisted in the air, he remembered the long lines of trees that grew along its banks, he remembered seeing the town of Lone Pine, set on its gravel terrace above the river's bed. He remembered all these things and the next that he had known had been the darkness of this cave-like place. Except for the interior of the object that had fallen on the river, there was no other place into which he might
have been tucked. (If all of this had happened, if he were not mistaken, then it
meant that the object that had fallen across the river was alive, or that it was operated by something that was alive, and not only alive, but intelligent.
He found himself instinctively fighting against what he was thinking, for in the context of human experience, it was utter madness to believe that an intelligence had landed on the Earth and forthwith snapped him up.
He was astonished to find that whatever terror he had felt had drained out of him. In its stead, there was now a coldness, a bleak coldness of the soul that, in a way, was far worse than terror.
Intelligence, he thought—if there was an intelligence here, there must be a way to talk with it, in some manner to work out a system of communication with it.
He tried to speak and the words dried up before his tongue could shape them. He tried again and the words came, but only in a whisper. He tried once more and this time the words came louder, booming in the hollowness of the cave in which he stood.
"Hello," he shouted. "Is there anyone around? Is there someone here?"
He waited and there was no answer, so he spoke again, even louder this time, shouting at the intelligence that must be there. The words echoed and reverberated and then died out. The circular, eye-like objects still kept on watching him. The flickering still continued. But no one, or nothing, answered.
3. MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Kathy Foster sat at her typewriter in the Tribune newsroom and hammered out the story—such a stupid story and such stupid people. Damn Johnny for sending her out on it. There must have been other assignments he could have sent her on, assignments that did not have the phoney mush content that this one did, nor the sloppy mysticism. The Lovers, they called themselves, and she could still see the sleepy innocence of their eyes, the soft, smooth flow of posturing euphuisms—love is all, love conquers all, love encompasses everything. All you have to do is love someone or something hard enough and long enough and the love would be returned. Love is the greatest force in the universe, more than likely the only significant force, the be-all and the is-all and the end-all of everything there is. And it was not only people, not only life, that would respond. If you loved any kind of matter, any kind of energy, it would return the love and, in consequence of that love, do anything that you wished it to, even to the point of disobeying or disregarding all empirical laws (which, they had told her, may not exist in fact), perform in any manner, do anything, go anywhere, stay anywhere, do anything one wished. But to accomplish this, they had told her solemnly, with the innocence in their eyes gleaming brightly at her, one must strive to understand the life, the matter, the energy, whatever it might ~ be, and to love it so that it became aware of you. That was the
trouble now, they said. No one had sufficient understanding, but understanding could be obtained through the force of love. Once the depth of love was great enough to secure the understanding, then man in all truth would be in control of the universe. But this control, they had said, must not be a control for the sake of control alone, but to perfect the understanding and the love of all that went into the makeup of the universe.
That damn university, she told herself, is a hot-bed for the nurturing of such phoney misfits groping for significance where there is no significance, employing the search for nonexistent meaning as a means to escape reality.
She looked at the clock on the wall. Almost four o'clock and Jerry hadn't phoned. He had said that he would phone to tell her he was on his way. If he made her late for the concert, she would have his hide. He knew how she had counted on the concert. For weeks she had dreamed of it. Sure, Jerry didn't like symphonic music but for once he could do what she wanted, even if he squirmed the entire evening. She had done a lot of things, gone to a lot of places that she hadn't wanted to, but had gone because he wanted to. The wrestling matches—for sweet Christ's sake, the wrestling matches!
A strange man, Kathy told herself, strange and at times infuriating, but a sweet guy just the same. He and his everlasting trees! Jerry lived for trees. How in the world, she wondered, could a grown man get so wrapped up in trees? Other people could develop an empathy for flowers, for animals, for birds, but with Jerry it was trees. The guy was silly about his trees. He ~loved them and seemed to understand them and there were times, she thought, when it seemed he even talked with them.
She jerked out the finished page, threaded in another. She hammered at the keys. The anger boiled within her, the disgust smothered her. When she turned in the story, she'd tell Johnny that she thought it should be spiked—or better yet, thrown into the waste basket, for then no one could rescue it from the spike if the day's copy should run thin and a news hole needed filling.
Across the newsroom, John H. Garrison, city editor, sat at his desk, staring out across the room. Most of the desks were empty and he ran down the list—Freeman was covering the meeting of the airport commission and it would likely come to nothing, although with all the flurry about the need of extra runways, it was a meeting that the newsroom had to cover; Jay was at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, getting the story on the new cancer procedures that were being developed there; Campbell was still at city hall, piddling his time away at a park board meeting that, like the airport meeting, probably would fizzle out; Jones was out in South Dakota working on the Black Hills-Indian controversy, getting together material for a Sunday feature; Knight was at the Johnson murder trial; Williams was in the suburban town of Wayzata interviewing that old gal who claimed to be 102 years old (although she probably wasn't). Sloane was tied up with the oil spill at Winona. Christ, Garrison wondered, what would he do if a big story suddenly should break? Although that, he knew, was unlikely. It had been a bad day and was not improving.