Norma Shepard touched Bill on the arm. "Take her up to the house," she said. "I'll take care of her."

"But my husband," Mrs Fabian insisted. "You'll get some help for him? You'll find some way to help him?"

"Yes, Myra," Higgy said. "Yes, of course we will. We can't let him down. He's done too much for us. We'll find a way to help him." Donovan started up the hill, carrying Mrs Fabian. Norma ran ahead of him.

Butch Ormsby said, "Some of us ought to go, too, "and see what we can do for Doc."

"Well," asked Charley Hutton, "how about it, Higgy? You were the one who shot off his big fat face. How are you going to help him?"

"Somebody's got to help him," declared Pappy Andrews, thumping his cane upon the ground by way of emphasis. "There never was a time we needed Doc more than we need him now. There are sick people in this village and we've got to get him on his feet somehow."

"We can do what we can," said Streeter, "to make him comfortable. We'll take care of him, of course, the best that we know how. But there isn't" anyone who has any medical knowledge…"

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Higgy. "Someone can get in touch with some medical people and tell them what's happened. We can describe the symptoms and maybe they can diagnose the illness and then tell us what to do. Norma is a nurse — well, sort of, she's been helping out in Doc's office for the last four years or so — and she'd be some help to us."

"I suppose it's the best we can do," said Streeter, "but it's not very good."

"I tell you, men," said Pappy, loudly, "we can't stay standing here. The situation calls for action and it behooves us to get started."

What Streeter had said, I told myself, was right. Maybe it was the best that we could do, but it wasn't good enough. There was more to medicine than word-of-mouth advice or telephoned instructions. And there were others in the village in need of medical aid, more specialized aid than a stricken doctor, even if he could be gotten on his feet, was equipped to give them.

Maybe, I thought, there was someone else who could help — and if they could, they'd better, or I'd go back somehow into that other world and start ripping up their roots.

It was time, I told myself, that this other world was getting on the ball. The Flowers had put us in this situation and it was time they dug us out. If they were intent on proving what great tasks they could perform, there were more important ways of proving it than growing fifty-dollar bills on bushes and all their other hocus-pocus.

There were phones down at the village hall, the ones that had been taken from Stiffy's shack, and I could use one of those, of course, but I'd probably have to break Hiram's skull before I could get at one of them. And another round with Hiram, I decided, was something I could get along without.

I looked around for Sherwood, but he wasn't there, and neither was Nancy. One of them might be home and they'd let me use the phone in Sherwood's study.

A lot of the others were heading up toward Doc's house, but I turned and went the other way.

20

No one answered the bell. I rang several times and waited, then finally tried the door and it was unlocked.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. The sound of its closing was muffled by the hushed solemnity of the hail that ran back to the kitchen.

"Anyone home?" I called.

Somewhere a lone fly buzzed desperately, as if trying to escape, trapped against a window perhaps, behind a fold of drape. The sun spilled through the fanlights above the door to make a ragged pattern on the floor.

There was no answer to my hail, so I went down the hall and walked into the study. The phone stood on the heavy desk. The walls of books still seemed rich and wondrous. A half. empty whisky bottle and an unwashed glass stood on the liquor cabinet.

I went across the carpeting to the desk and reached out, pulling the phone toward me.

I lifted the receiver and immediately Tupper said, in his businessman's voice, "Mr Carter, it's good to hear from you at last. Events are going well, we hope. You have made, we would presume, preliminary contact." As if they didn't know!

"That's not what I called about," I snapped.

"But that was the understanding. You were to act for us." The unctuous smugness of the voice burned me up.

"And it was understood, as well," I asked, "that you were to make a fool of me?"

The voice was startled. "We fail to understand. Will you please explain?"

"The time machine," I said.

"Oh, that."

"Yes, oh, that," I said.

"But, Mr Carter, if we had asked you to take it back you would have been convinced that we were using you. You'd probably have refused."

"And you weren't using me?"

"Why, I suppose we were. We'd have used anyone. It was important to get that mechanism to your world. Once you know the pattern…"

"I don't care about the pattern," I said angrily. "You tricked me and you admit you tricked me. That's a poor way to start negotiations with another race."

"We regret it greatly. Not that we did it, but the way we did it. If there is anything we can do…"

"There's a lot that you can do. You can cut out horsing around with fifty-dollar bills…"

"But that's repayment," wailed the voice. "We told you you'd get back your fifteen hundred. We promised you'd get back much more than your fifteen hundred…"

"You've had your readers read economic texts?"

"Oh, certainly we have."

"And you've observed, for a long time and at first hand, our economic practices?"

"As best we can," the voice said. "It's sometimes difficult."

"You know, of course, that money grows on bushes."

"No, we don't know that, at all. We know how money's made. But what is the difference? Money's money, isn't it, no matter what its source?"

"You couldn't be more wrong," I said. "You'd better get wised up."

"You mean the money isn't good?"

"Not worth a damn," I said.

"We hope we've done no wrong," the voice said, crestfallen.

I said, "The money doesn't matter. There are other things that do. You've shut us off from the world and we have sick people here. We had just one poor fumbling doctor to take care of them. And now the doctor's sick himself and no other doctor can get in…"

"You need a steward," said the voice.

"What we need," I told them, "is to get this barrier lifted so we can get out and others can get in. Otherwise there are going to be people dying who don't have to die."

"We'll send a steward," said the voice. "We'll send one right away. A most accomplished one. The best that we can find."

"I don't know," I said, "about this steward. But we need help as fast as we can get it."

"We," the voice pledged, "will do the best we can." The voice clicked off and the phone went dead. And suddenly I realized that I'd not asked the most important thing of all — why had they wanted to get the time machine into our world?

I jiggled the connection. I put the receiver down and lifted it again.

I shouted in the phone and nothing happened.

I pushed the phone away and stood hopeless in the room. For all of it, I knew, was a very hopeless mess.

Even after years of study, they did not understand us or our institutions. They did not know that money was symbolic and not simply scraps of paper. They had not, for a moment, taken into consideration what could happen to a village if it were isolated from the world.

They had tricked me and had used me and they should have known that nothing can arouse resentment quite so easily as simple trickery. They should have known, but they didn't know, or if they knew, had discounted what they knew — and that was as bad or worse than if they had not known.

I opened the study door and went into the hall. And as I started down the hail, the front door opened and Nancy stepped inside.