«I don’t believe,» said Charley, «a single word of this.»
«Go on,» urged the colonel. «Tell us the rest of it.»
«Well,» said George, «I guess I must have walked almost all the way around that pile, picking one thing up and throwing another away and I was loaded, I can tell you. I had my arms full and my pockets full and stuff hung around my neck. And suddenly, driving out from those tall buildings came this car, floating about three feet off the ground …»
«You mean the vehicle that you have out there?»
«The very one,» said George. «There was a sad-looking old geezer driving it, and he ran it up alongside the pile and set it down, then got out of it and started walking back, sort of hobbling. So I went up to it and I dumped all the stuff I had been carrying into the back seat and it occurred to me that with it I could carry away more than I could in my arms. But I thought that first, perhaps, I had ought to see if I could operate it, so I climbed in the driver’s seat and there was no trick to it at all. I started it up and began to drive it, slow, around the pile, trying to remember where I had discarded some of the stuff I had picked up earlier—intending to go back and get it and put it in the back seat. I heard the sound of running feet behind me and when I looked around there was this gent all dressed in black. He reached the car and put one hand upon it and vaulted into the seat beside me. The next instant we were in Willow Grove.»
«You mean to tell us,» cried the colonel, leaping to his feet, «that you have the back seat of that car loaded with some of these things you have been telling us about?»
«Colonel, please sit down,» said Charley. «You can’t possibly believe any of the things he has been telling us. On the face of them, they are all impossible and …»
«Charley,» I said, «let me cite a few more impossibilities, like a painting being in the National Gallery of Art and also in Willow Grove, like that car out there without any wheels, like a gadget that is hot at one end and cold at the other.»
«God, I don’t know,» said Charley, desperately. «And I am the guy that has it in his lap.»
«Charley,» I said, «I don’t believe you have anything in your lap, at all. I don’t think there is a single legal question involved in this whole mess. Taking a car, you might say, being of the particular turn of legal mind you are, without the permission of the owner, only it is not a car …»
«It’s a vehicle!» Charley yelled.
«But the owner had junked it. He’d junked it and walked away and …»
«What I want to know,» the colonel said, «is where this place is and why the people were discarding their possessions.»
«And you’d also,» I said, «love to get your hands on some of those possessions.»
«You’re damned right I would,» said the colonel, grimly. «And I’m going to. Do you realize what some of them might mean to this nation of ours? Why, they might spell the margin of difference between us and the other side, and I don’t intend …»
«Colonel,» I said, «haul down the flag. There is no use of screaming. I am sure that George would be willing to discuss terms with you.»
Feet came pounding up the stairs and down the hall. The door flew open and a deputy sheriff came skidding to a halt.
«Charley,» he panted, «I don’t know what to do. There’s been a crazy-looking coot preaching to a crowd out by the Soldier’s Monument. The sheriff, I am told, went out to stop it, him not having any license to be preaching anywhere, let alone the courthouse square, and then came charging back. I came in the back way, without knowing anything about what was going on, and I found the sheriff collecting up the guns and ammunition and when I asked him what was going on, he wouldn’t talk to me, but went walking out the front door and he threw all of them guns and all that ammunition down at the base of the monument. And there are a lot of other people bringing other things and throwing them there, too …»
I didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. I dodged past the deputy and through the door and down the stairs, heading for the building’s front.
The pile had grown to a size that was big enough to cover the base of the monument; and there were, I saw, such things as bicycles, radios, typewriters and sewing machines, electric razors and lawn mowers; and there was a car or two, jammed up against the monument. Dusk had fallen and the farmers were coming into town to trade and people were coming across the square, dark, muffled figures, lugging stuff to throw upon the pile.
There was no sign of the passenger. He had done his dirty work and gone.
Standing there in the courthouse square, with the street lamps swinging in the tiny breeze and all those dark-enshrouded figures toiling up the lawn toward the monument, I had the vision of many other towns throughout the country with growing piles of discarded objects bearing testimony to the gullibility of the human race.
My God, I thought, they never understood a word of what he said, not a single syllable of that clacking tongue of his. But the message, as had been the case which we’d pushed back to clear the path for him, had been plain and clear. Thinking about it, I knew I’d been right up there in Charley’s office when I’d said it was a matter of semantics.
We had words, of course, lots of words, perhaps more than an ordinary man would ever need, but intellectual words, tailored for their precise statement of one peculiar piece of understanding; and we’d become so accustomed to them, to their endless ebb and flow, that many of them—perhaps the most of them—had lost the depth and the precision of their meaning. There had been a time when great orators could catch and hold the public ear with the pure poetry of their speech and men such as these had at times turned the tide of national opinion. Now, however, in large part, spoken words had lost their power to move. But the laugh, I thought, would never lose its meaning. The merry laugh that, even if one were not included in it, could lift the human spirits; the belly laugh that spelled out unthinking fellowship; the quiet laugh of superior, supercilious intellect that could cut the ground beneath one.
Sounds, I thought—sounds, not words—sounds that could trigger basic human reaction. Was it something such as this that the passenger had used?
Sounds so laboriously put together, probing so deeply into the human psyche, that they said almost as much as the most carefully constructed sentence of intellectual speech, but with the one advantage that they were convincing as words could never be. Far back in man’s prehistory there had been the grunt of warning, the cry of rage, the food-call, the little clucking recognition signals.
Was this strange language of the passenger’s no more than a sophisticated extension of these primal sounds?
Old Con Weatherby came tramping stolidly across the lawn to fling his portable television set upon the pile, and behind him came a young housewife I didn’t recognize who threw a toaster and a blender and a vacuum cleaner beside Con’s television set.
My heart cried out to them in my pity of what was happening, and I suppose I should have hurried forth and spoken to them—Old Con at least—trying to stop them, to show them this was all damn foolishness. I knew Old Con had saved dollars here and there, going without the drinks he wanted, smoking only three cigars a day instead of his usual five, so that he and his old lady could have that television set. But, somehow, I knew how useless it would be to stop them, to do anything about it.
I went down across the lawn, feeling beat and all played out. Coming up the lawn toward me, staggering under a heavy load, came a familiar figure.
«Dorothy!» I yelled.
Dorothy stopped and some of the books that she was carrying up toward the monument came unstuck from the load and went thumping to the ground. In a flash I knew exactly what they were—my law books.