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“Yes, I know,” said Taine.
“Coming, Abbie?” Henry asked, standing at the door.
He lifted a hand in a confidential farewell to Taine. “Ill see you later, Hiram. I’ll get it fixed up.”
I just bet you will, thought Taine.
He went back to the table, after they were gone, and sat down heavily in a chair.
The front door slammed and Beasly came panting in, excited.
“Towser’s back!” he yelled. “He’s coming back and he’s driving in the biggest woodchuck you ever clapped your eyes on.”
Taine leaped to his feet.
“Woodchuck! That’s an alien planet. It hasn’t any woodchucks.”
“You come and see,” yelled Beasly.
He turned and raced back out again, with Taine following close behind.
It certainly looked considerably like a woodchuck—a sort of man-size woodchuck. More like a woodchuck out of a children’s book, perhaps, for it was walking on its hind legs and trying to look dignified even while it kept a weather eye on Towser.
Towser was back a hundred feet or so, keeping a wary distance from the massive chuck. He had the pose of a good sheep-herding dog, walking in a crouch, alert to head off any break that the chuck might make.
The chuck came up close to the house and stopped. Then it did an about-face so that it looked back across the desert and it hunkered down.
It swung its massive head to gaze at Beasly and Taine and in the limpid brown eyes Taine saw more than the eyes of an animal.
Taine walked swiftly out and picked up the dog in his arms and hugged him tight against him. Towser twisted his head around and slapped a sloppy tongue across his master’s face.
Taine stood with the dog in his arms and looked at the man-size chuck and felt a great relief and an utter thankfulness.
Everything was all right now, he thought. Towser had come back.
He headed for the house and out into the kitchen.
He put Towser down and got a dish and filled it at the tap. He placed it on the floor and Towser lapped at it thirstily, slopping water all over the linoleum.
“Take it easy, there,” warned Taine. “You don’t want to overdo it.”
He hunted in the refrigerator and found some scraps and put them in Towser’s dish.
Towser wagged his tail with doggish happiness.
“By rights,” said Taine, “I ought to take a rope to you, ru
Beasly came ambling in.
“That chuck is a friendly cuss,” he a
“That’s nice,” said Taine, paying no attention.
He glanced at the clock.
“It’s seven-thirty,” he said. “We can catch the news. You want to get it, Beasly?”
“Sure. I know right where to get it. That fellow from New York.”
“That’s the one,” said Taine.
He walked into the living room and looked out the window. The man-size chuck had not moved. He was sitting with his back to the house, looking back the way he’d come.
Waiting for someone, Beasly had said, and it looked as if he might be, but probably it was all just in Beasly’s head.
And if he were waiting for someone, Taine wondered, who might that someone be? What might that someone be? Certainly by now the word had spread out there that there was a door into another world. And how many doors, he wondered, had been opened through the ages?
Henry had said that there was a big new world out there waiting for Earthmen to move in. And that wasn’t it at all. It was the other way around.
The voice of the news commentator came blasting from the radio in the middle of a sentence:
“…finally got into the act. Radio Moscow said this evening that the Soviet delegate will make representations in the U.N. tomorrow for the internationalization of this other world and the gateway to it.
“From that gateway itself, the home of a man named Hiram Taine, there is no news. Complete security had been clamped down and a cordon of troops form a solid wall around the house, holding back the crowds. Attempts to telephone the residence are blocked by a curt voice which says that no calls are being accepted for that number. And Taine himself has not stepped from the house.”
Taine walked back into the kitchen and sat down.
“He’s talking about you,” Beasly said importantly.
“Rumor circulated this morning that Taine, a quiet village repairman and dealer in antiques, and until yesterday a relative unknown, had finally returned from a trip which he made out into this new and unknown land. But what he found, if anything, no one yet can say. Nor is there any further information about this other place beyond the fact that it is a desert and, to the moment, lifeless.
“A small flurry of excitement was occasioned late yesterday by the finding of same strange object in the woods across the road from the residence, but this area likewise was swiftly cordoned off and to th moment Colonel Ryan, who commands the troops, will say nothing of what actually was found.
“Mystery man of the entire situation is one Henry Horton, who seems to be the only unofficial person to have entry to the Taine house. Horton, questioned earlier today, had little to say, but managed to suggest an air of great conspiracy. He hinted he and Taine were partners in some mysterious venture and left hanging in midair the half impression that he and Taine had collaborated in opening the new world.
“Horton, it is interesting to note, operates a small computer plant and it is understood on good authority that only recently he delivered a computer to Taine, or at least some sort of machine to which considerable mystery is attached. One story is that this particular machine had been in the process of development for six or seven years.
“Some of the answers to the matter of how all this did happen and what actually did happen must wait upon the findings of a team of scientists who left Washington this evening after an all-day conference at the White House, which was attended by representatives from the military, the state department, the security division and the special weapons section.
“Throughout the world the impact of what happened yesterday at Willow Bend can only be compared to the sensation of the news, almost twenty years ago, of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. There is some tendency among many observers to believe that the implications of Willow Bend, in fact, may be even more earth-shaking than were those of Hiroshima.
“Washington insists, as is only natural, that this matter is of internal concern only and that it intends to handle the situation as it best affects the national welfare.
“But abroad there is a rising storm of insistence that this is not a matter of national policy concerning one nation, but that it necessarily must be a matter of world-wide concern.
“There is an unconfirmed report that a U.N. observer will arrive in Willow Bend almost momentarily. France, Britain, Bolivia, Mexico and India have already requested permission of Washington to send observers to the scene and other nations undoubtedly plan to file similar requests.
“The world sits on edge tonight, waiting for the word from Willow Bend and—”
Taine reached out and clicked the radio to silence.
“From the sound of it,” said Beasly, “we’re going to be overrun by a batch of foreigners.”
Yes, thought Taine, there might be a batch of foreigners, but not exactly in the sense that Beasly meant. The use of the word, he told himself, so far as any human was concerned, must be outdated now. No man of Earth ever again could be called a foreigner with alien life next door—literally next door. What were the people of the stone house?
And perhaps not the alien life of one planet only, but the alien life of many. For he himself had found another door into yet another planet and there might be many more such doors and what would these other worlds be like, and what was the purpose of the doors?