I leaned over to see what she was pointing at. “That would just burn out the tubes.”
“Oh.” She stood there for a moment. Then her hand darted out, and before I could stop her, before I even had any idea what she was up to, she moved the wire she’d been talking about.
“Hey!” I squawked, “Stop that!” I said it too late. There was a crackle and a flash and all the tubes burned out. My station was completely dead.
Mom rubbed her forehead and looked at me. “I don’t know what made me do that, Eddie,” she said apologetically. “It was just like something moved my hand! I’m awfully sorry, son.”
“Oh, that’s O.K.,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. The station wasn’t good for anything.”
“I know, but… My head’s been feeling queer all morning. I think it must be the weather. Doesn’t the air feel heavy and oppressive to you?”
The air did have a thick, discouraging feel, but I hadn’t noticed it before she burned out the radio tubes. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could say it, Donnie yelled, “Look at Fluffie! She’s walking on the air!”
We both jerked around. There Fluffie was, about ten feet up, making motions with her paws as if she were trying to walk. She was mewing a blue streak. Now and then she’d slip down three or four feet and then go up to the former level, just as if a hand had caught at her. Her fur was standing up all over, and her tail was three times its usual size. Finally she went up about twenty feet and then came sailing down in a long curve. She landed on the ground with a thump. And that was the beginning of all the phenomena.
It wasn’t so much that we felt depressed at first, though we certainly did. But we could stand it; the depression wasn’t as bad as it had been when we first came to Hidden Valley. I guess that was because the things in the egg were more spread out now. Whether that was the reason or not, most of the phenomena were physical.
You could hardly get into the living room. It was like pushing your way through big wet bladders to go into it. If you sat on the sofa you had a sense of being crowded and pushed, and pretty soon you’d find yourself down at the far end of it, squeezed into a corner. When Mom struck matches to make a fire for lunch, the matches were twitched out of her hand and went sailing around the room. We had to eat cold things; she was afraid of burning down the place.
At first Mom tried to pretend there was nothing wrong; after all, you couldn’t see anything. But I went out in the kitchen at suppertime and found her crying quietly. She said it was because she’d been trying to cut bread for sandwiches and the knife in her hand kept rising up toward her throat. I knew that if Mom was crying it had been pretty bad. So I told her about the egg in the cave and all that.
“They’re out of the egg now,” she said unhappily when I had finished. “My burning out the tubes this morning let them out. We’ve got to go back to the city, Eddie. It’s the only thing to do.”
“And leave them loose?” I said sharply. “We can’t do that. If it was just a case of deserting the valley and having them stay here, it would be all right. But they won’t stay here. They came to Earth to colonize. That means they’ll increase and spread out.
“Remember how it was when we came here? Remember how we felt? Suppose it was like that over most of the Earth!”
Mom shook her head till her gray curls bobbed. “This can’t be real, Eddie,” she said in a sort of wail. “We must be having hallucinations or something. I keep telling myself, this can’t be real.”
Donnie, outside, gave a sudden horrible shriek. Mom turned as white as a ghost. Then she darted out, with me after her.
Donnie was standing over Fluffie’s body, crying with rage. He was so mad and so miserable he could hardly talk. “They killed her! They killed her!” he said at last. “She was way up in the air, and they pushed her down hard and she squashed when she hit the ground. She’s all mashed flat.”
There wasn’t anything to say. I left Mom to try to comfort Donnie, and went off by myself to try to think.
I didn’t get anywhere with my thinking. How do you fight anything you can’t see or understand? The things from the egg were immaterial but could produce material phenomena; Donnie had said they were like electricity or radio. Even if that were true, how did it help? I thought up a dozen fragmentary schemes, each with some major flaw, for getting rid of them, and in the end I had to give up.
None of us went to bed that night. We stayed up in the kitchen huddled together for comfort and protection, while the house went crazy around us. The things that happened were ridiculous and horrible. They made you feel mentally outraged. It was like being lowered down into a well filled with craziness.
About three o’clock the light in the kitchen went slowly out. The house calmed down and everything got quiet. I guess the things from the egg had revenged themselves on us enough for having tried to get rid of them, and now they were going about their own business, perhaps beginning to increase. Because from then on the feeling of depression got worse. It was worse than it had ever been before.
It seemed like years and years until four o’clock. I sat there in the dark, holding Mom’s and Donnie’s hands and wondering how much longer I could stand it. I had a vision of life, then, that people in asylums must have, an expanse filled with unbearable horror and pain and misery.
By the time it was getting light I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was a way out; I didn’t have to go on seeing Hell opening in front of me. I pulled my hands from Mom’s and Donnie’s and stood up. I knew where Uncle Albert had kept the dynamite. I was going to kill myself.
Donnie’s eyes opened and he looked at me. I’d known he wasn’t asleep. “Don’t do it, Eddie,” he said in a thread of a voice. “It’ll only give them more juice.”
Part of my mind knew dimly what he meant. The things from the egg weren’t driving me to suicide deliberately; they didn’t care enough about me for that. But my death—or any human’s death—would be a nice little event, a tidbit, for them. Life is electrical. My death would release a little juice.
It didn’t matter, it wasn’t important. I knew what I was going to do.
Mom hadn’t moved or looked at me. Her face was drawn and gray and blotched. I knew, somehow, that what she was enduring was worse than what I had endured. Her vision was darker than mine had been. She was too deep in it to be able to think or speak or move.
The dynamite was in a box in the shed. I hunted around until I found the detonator and the fuse. I stuffed the waxy, candlelike sticks inside the waistband of my trousers and picked up the other things. I was going to kill myself, but part of me felt a certain compunction at the thought of blowing up Mom and Donnie. I went outside and began to walk uphill.
The sun was coming up in a blaze of red and gold and there was a soft little breeze. I could smell wood smoke a long way off. It was going to be a fine day. I looked around me critically for a good place to blow myself up.
They say suicides are often very particular; I know I was. This spot was too open and that one was too enclosed; there was too much grass here and not quite enough at the other place. It wasn’t that I had cold feet. I hadn’t. But I wanted everything to go off smoothly and well, without any hitches or fuss. I kept wandering around and looking, and pretty soon, without realizing it, I was near the hillside with the cave.
For a moment I thought of going down in the cave to do what I had to do. I decided against it. The explosion, in that confined space, might blow up the whole valley. I moved on. And suddenly I felt a tug at my mind.