«Hey,» I yelled, «take those back. Hey, what is going on!»
I didn’t need to ask, of course. Of all the people in Willow Grove, she would have been the one most certain to be on hand to listen to the passenger and the most avid to believe. She could smell out an evangelist twenty miles away and the high moments of her life were those spent with her scrawny little bottom planted on the hardness of a bench in the suffocating air of a tent meeting and listening to some jackleg preacher spout about his hellfire and brimstone. She’d believe anything at all and subscribe to it whole-heartedly so long as it was evangelistic.
I started down the lawn toward her but was distracted.
From the other side of the square came a snarling, yipping sound; out of the dusk came a running figure, with a pack of dogs snapping at his heels.
The man had shucked up his robe to give him extra leg room, and he was making exceptionally good time. Every once in a while one of the dogs would get a mouthful of the robe that flowed out behind him, snapping in the wind of his rapid movement, but it didn’t slow him down.
It was the passenger, of course, and while he’d done right well with humans, it was quite evident he was doing not so well with dogs. They had just been let loose with the dusk, after being tied up for the day, and they were spoiling for a bit of fun. They didn’t understand the talk of the passenger perhaps, or there was something so different about him that they immediately had pegged him as some sort of outlander to be hunted down.
He went across the lawn below me in a rush with the dogs very close behind, and out into the street, and it wasn’t until then that I realized where he would be heading.
I let out a whoop and set out after him. He was heading for that car to make his getaway and I couldn’t let him do it. That car belonged to George.
I knew I could never catch him, but I pinned my hopes on Chet. Chet would have a man or two guarding the car; and while the passenger would probably talk them out of it, they might slow him a bit, enough for me to catch up with him before he had taken off. He might try, of course, to talk me out of it as well with his chittering gibberish, but I told myself I’d have to do my best to resist whatever he might tell me.
We went whipping down the street, the passenger with the dogs close to his heels, and me close to the dogs; and there, up ahead, stood the car out in front of the station. There still was a fair-sized crowd around it, but the passenger yelled some outlandish sounds at them and they began to scatter.
He didn’t even break his stride, and I’ll say this much for him—he was quite an athlete. Ten feet or so from the car, he jumped and sailed up through the air and landed in the driver’s seat. He was plenty scared of those mutts, of course, and that may have helped him some; under certain crisis circumstances a man can accomplish feats that ordinarily would be impossible. But even so, he had to be fairly athletic to manage what he did.
He landed in the driver’s seat and immediately the car took off upward at a slant, and in a couple of seconds had soared up above the buildings and was out of sight. The two cops that Chet had detailed to guard the car just stood there with their jaws hanging down, looking up at where the car had gone. The crowd that had been there and scattered when the passenger yelled his gibberish at them now turned about and stared as vacantly, while the dogs circled around, puzzled, sniffing at the ground and every now and then pointing up a nose to bay.
I was standing there like the rest of them when someone came running up behind me and grabbed my arm. It was Colonel Sheldon Reynolds.
«What happened?»
I told him, somewhat bitterly and profanely, exactly what had happened.
«He’s gone futureward,» the colonel said. «We’ll never see him or the car again.»
«Futureward?» I asked stupidly.
«That must be it,» the colonel said. «There’s no other way to explain it. George wasn’t in contact with any UFO, as I had thought to be the case. He must have travelled futureward. You probably were right about the way the passenger talked. That was a new semantics. A sort of speech shorthand, made up of basic sounds. I suppose it would be possible, but it would take a long time to develop. Maybe it developed, or was borrowed, when the race went to the stars—a sort of universal language, a vocal version of the sign language used by the Great Plains Indians …»
«But that would be time travel,» I protested. «Hell, George doesn’t know enough …»
«Look,» said the colonel, «you maybe don’t need to know anything to travel in time. You maybe have to feel something; you may have to be in tune. There might be only one man in the entire world today who can feel that way …»
«But, colonel,» I said, «it makes no sense at all. Let’s say George did go into the future—just for the sake of argument, let us say he did. Why should people up in the future be throwing away their things, why should there be the big pile of junk?»
«I don’t know,» the colonel said. «That is, I couldn’t say for sure, but I have a theory.»
He waited for me to ask about his theory, but when I didn’t ask, he went ahead and told me.
«We’ve talked a lot,» he said, «about contact with other intelligences that live on other stars and we’ve done some listening in the hope of picking up some signals sent out by peoples many light years distant. We haven’t heard any signals yet and we may never hear any because the time span during which any race is technologically oriented may be very short.»
I shook my head. «I don’t see what you’re driving at,» I told him. «What has all that has happened here got to do with signals from the stars?»
«Perhaps not very much,» he admitted, «except that if contact is ever made it must be made with a technological race very much like ours. And there are sociologists who tell us that the technological phase of any society finds ways and means of destroying itself or it creates stresses and pressures against which the people rebel or it becomes interested in something other than technology and …»
«Now hold up a minute,» I said. «You are trying to tell me that this junk heap of George’s is the result of the human race, in some future day, rejecting a technological society—throwing away technological items? It wouldn’t work that way. It would be a gradual rejection, a gradual dying out of technology. People wouldn’t just decide they wanted no more of it and go out and throw all their beautiful, comfortable gadgets …»
«That could happen,» the colonel argued. «It could happen if the rejection was the result of a religious or evangelistic movement. The passenger may have been one of their evangelists. Look at what he did right here in a few minutes time. Typewriters, radios, television sets, vacuum cleaners in that pile on the courthouse lawn—all technological items.»
«But a painting isn’t technological,» I protested. «A pail of diamonds isn’t.»
Both of us stopped talking and looked at one another in the deepening dusk. Both of us realized, I guess, that there wasn’t too much sense of us standing there and arguing over a speculation.
The colonel shrugged. «I don’t know,» he said. «It was only an idea. The car is lost for good, of course, and all the stuff George had thrown into the back seat. But we have the other stuff …»
One of the cops who had been set to guard the car had been standing close and listening to us and now he broke in on us.
«I am sorry, sir,» he said, gulping a little, «but we ain’t got none of it. All of it is gone.»
«All of it!» I yelled. «The painting and the diamonds. I told Chet …»
«Chet, he couldn’t do nothing else,» said the man. «He had two of us here and he had two inside guarding that other stuff and when the ruckus started up at the courthouse, he needed men and he didn’t have them …»