"You have some damn strange ideas," Garrison told him.

"For myself," said Gold, "I want a robin's-egg-blue ear. My wife never let me have one. We've always had red cars. She likes red."

"Maybe there'll be enough of them," said Russell, "that you both can get one—you a blue one and your wife a red."

"In that case," said Gold, "we'll have two reds. She'd never let me have a blue. She thinks blue is sissy."

"Have either of you figured out the mathematics on this?" Garrison asked. "Could the visitors really make that many ears? Have we ever had a solid figure on how many of them there are?"

"I don't think a solid figure," Russell said. "Several thousand, I would guess. According to Kathy, three of them made more than a hundred ears in less than a week. Say it was a week. That's more than thirty cars a visitor. Put five thousand of them at it and that's a hundred and fifty thousand cars a week. The figure could be higher, but, even so, that's more than a quarter million cars a month."

"Our population is two hundred fifty million," said Gold.

"You wouldn't be making cars for everyone. A lot of those two hundred fifty million are babies and kids underage. You wouldn't

give them cars. And remember all those baby visitors who are growing up. In another year, maybe in another six months, they could be making ears. As I remember it, the babies were pupped in fairly large litters. Say an average of ten babies to every visitor. In a year's time, say, several million cars a month."

"All right," said Garrison. "All right. I guess it could be done."

"And then," said Gold, "they'll start making beer. They could make beer a lot faster than ears. Say a case a week for every male adult. A case a week would be about right, I'd judge."

"Hot dogs," said Russell. "And pretzels. They'd have to make hot dogs and pretzels to go along with beer."

The phone rang. Annie answered it. "It's for you," she said to Garrison. "On two."

Garrison stabbed a button and picked up his phone.

"Garrison. City desk."

"This is Porter at the ‘White House," said the voice on the other end. "I called you earlier."

"Yes, I remember. What can I do for you?"

"Does Miss Foster happen to be around?"

"I'll look and see."

He rose, with the phone in hand, located Kathy at her desk. He waved the phone above his head. "Kathy," he bawled. "A call for you on two."

48. WILDERNESS AREA

Norton steadied the canoe with choppy paddle strokes, staring at what the bend in the river had revealed. There, straight ahead of him, five masses of square blackness loomed above the deep green of the pines.

Visitors, he told himself. What would visitors be doing here, deep in the wilderness? Although, once he thought of it, he realized it might not be strange at all. More than likely many of the big black boxes had landed in areas where they would not readily be found.

He chuckled to himself and dipped the paddle deep, driving the canoe toward shore. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon and he'd been looking for a place to camp. This place, he told himself, would do as well as any. He'd beach the canoe and look over the visitors. After that, he'd build a fire and settle for the night. He was surprised to find that he was pleased at finding the visitors. There was, he thought, something companionable about them—as if unexpectedly he had come upon some neighbors whose existence he had not suspected.

He hauled the canoe up the shelving, pebbly beach and strode into the forest, heading for the visitors. There was, he thought, one strange thing about it—not the strangeness of finding the visitors here, but the fact that there was no racket. They were not sawing down or ingesting trees. More than likely they had processed all the cellulose they needed, had budded young and now were simply taking it easy, a time for resting once their chores were done.

He burst into the clearing they had made and skidded to a surprised halt. In front of him stood a house. It was a somewhat lopsided house, leaning drunkenly to one side, as if the builder had done a poor job of it and it had come unstuck. Just beyond it stood a second house. This one stood foursquare, but there was still a certain wrongness to it. It was a moment before he could make out what the wrongness was, and then he knew—it hadn't any windows.

Beyond the houses stood the visitors, so closely ranged together that they gave the impression of a group of great buildings clustered in a city's downtown district.

Norton stood undecided and confused. No one in their right mind, he told himself, would have come into this wilderness, built two houses, then gone away and left them. Nor would any builder construct a lopsided house and another without windows. And even if the hypothetical builder had wanted, for some unfathomable reason, to do so, he would have had no reasonable way in which to transport his materials to the building site.

The pines moaned softly as the wind blew through them. On the other side of the clearing in which the houses and the visitors stood, a small, bright bird flickered for a moment against the green wall of the encircling conifers. Other than the sound of the wind in the pines and the bright flash of the bird, the place stood unmoving and silent. The stillness and the brooding somberness of the primeval forest overshadowed all, serving to blot out and soak up even the wonder of the houses and the visitors.

With an effort, Norton uprooted himself and moved toward the first of the houses, the lopsided one. The front door was open, but it took him a moment to decide to enter. It was entirely possible, he thought, that the structure might collapse once he stepped inside of it. But he finally took the chance and went into the hall, which opened into a kitchen and what appeared to be a living room. He went into the kitchen, walking softly because he was afraid of jarring the house and hastening its collapse. Despite the house's structural oddity, the kitchen seemed quite normal. An electric stove and refrigerator stood against one wall. Starting at the stove and running around another wall were cabinets, with counter top, drawers, dish cupboards and a sink.

Norton turned a dial on the stove and held a palm above the burner. The burner heated quickly and he turned it off. At the sink, he turned a faucet and a small trickle of water ran out of the tap, then stopped. He turned the faucet further and the tap sputtered. Water finally gushed out, but again it stopped. He turned off the faucet.

He went into the living room and everything seemed all right except that the windows were set into the wall at an unusual angle. Down the hail he found three bedrooms and they seemed to be all right, although there were certain small peculiarities in the dimensions of the rooms that puzzled him. Thinking about it, he found himself unable to say exactly what was wrong.

It was with a sense of relief that he stepped out the front door and headed for the second house—the one that had no windows. There was something—something rather startling—that puzzled him about the lopsided house and he wondered what it was. Not the canted windows in the living room or the odd dimensional qualities of the bedrooms, or even the faulty faucet in the kitchen. It had been something else and it was important. Walking toward the other house and thinking about it, he suddenly knew what it was that had bothered him so deeply—the lopsided house didn't have a bathroom. He stopped short and pondered it. Could he be wrong? It was incomprehensible that someone should build a house and not put in a bathroom. Carefully he ran through an inventory of the rooms and was sure that he was right. He could not have overlooked a bathroom; if one had been there, he'd have seen it.