The Time Traveler's Almanac (108 page)

“Go call the Sherrif,” Ma Chetton whispered.

I could hear Bill Chetton pressing the receiver and saying
Hello? Hello?
like his life depended on it. It didn’t come as any surprise when Bill announced to the hushed room that the line seemed like it was dead. Then the jukebox kicked in again with a loud and raucous
A papapapapapa
 … the needle somehow having returned to the start of the Trashmen’s hit record.

The street outside seemed like it was holding its breath in much the same way as the folks looking out of the window were holding their breath … both it and us waiting to see what was going to happen.

What happened was both awesome and kind of an anticlimax.

Just as Jimmy-James reached the sidewalk across the street, the sides of the giant vegetable balloon canister from another world dropped down and became a kind of shiny skirt reaching all the way to the ground. No sooner had that happened than a whole group of smaller vegetable things – smaller but still twice the size of Jimmy-James … and, at almost six-four, JJ is not a small man – came sliding down the platform onto terra firma … and into the heart of Forest Plains.

We could hear their caterwauling from where we were, even over the drone of The Trashmen telling anyone who would listen that
the Bird was the Word …
and, as we watched, we saw the vegetable-shapes come to a halt on the sidewalk right in front of Jimmy-James where they kind of spun around and then gathered around him in a tight circle. Then all but one of them moved back a few feet and then the last one moved back, too.

At this point, Jimmy-James turned around and waved to us. “Come on out,” he yelled.

“You think it’s safe?” Ed Brewster asked.

I shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be they mean any harm,” Ma Chetton said softly, the wonder in her voice as plain as the streaks of grey coloring the hair around her ears and temples.

“They come all the way from wherever it is they come from, seems to me that if they’d had a mind to do us any harm they’d have done it by now,” said Old Fred Wishingham. “That said, mind you,” he added, “I’m not about to go charging out there until we see what it is they
have
come for.”

“Maybe they haven’t come for nothing at all,” Estelle suggested.

Somebody murmured that such an unlikely scenario could be the case but they weren’t having none of it. That was the way folks were in Forest Plains in those days – the way folks were all over this country, in fact. Nobody (with the possible exception of Ed Brewster, and even he only did it for fun) wanted to make anyone look or feel a damned fool and hurt their feelings if they could get away without doing so. With Estelle it could be difficult. Estelle had turned making herself look a damned fool into something approaching an artform.

“You mean, like they’re exploring … something like that?” Abel Bodeen said to help her out a mite.

“Yeah,” Estelle agreed dreamily, “exploring.”

“Well, I’m going out,” Ma said. And without so much as a second glance or a pause to allow someone to talk her out of it, she rested the empty plate on the counter-top and strode over to the door. A minute or so later she was walking across the street. It seemed like the things had sensed she was going to come out because they’d moved across the street like to greet her, swivelling around at the last minute – just as Ma came to a stop – and ringing her just the way they had done with Jimmy-James.

They seemed harmless enough but I felt like we should have the law in on the situation. “Phone still out, Bill?” I shouted. Bill Chetton lifted the receiver and tried again. He nodded and returned it to the cradle.

“Okay Ed,” I said, “let’s me and you scoot out the back and run over to the Sherriff’s office.”

Ed said okay, after thinking about that for a second or two, and then the two of us slipped behind the counter and into Bill’s and Ma’s kitchen, then out of the back door and into the yard, past the trashcans towards the fence … and then I heard someone calling.

“What was that?” I whispered across to Ed.

Ed had stopped dead in his tracks on the other side of the fence. He was staring ahead of him. When I got to the fence I looked in the directioon Ed was looking and there they were. Three of them. Right in front of us, wailing. I’ll never forget that sound … like the wind in the desert, lost and aimless.

The door we’d just come out of opened up again behind us and Fred Wishingham’s voice shouted, “Hold it right where you…” and then trailed off when Fred saw the things. “I was just going to tell you that some of those things had just turned around and headed over to where you’d be appearing … and, well, you already saw that.” Fred had lowered his voice like he’d just been caught shooting craps in Church.

Ed nodded and I told Fred to get back inside.

As I heard the lock click on the door, I whispered to Ed. “You think maybe they can read our minds?”

Ed shrugged.

The things were about 10, maybe 12 feet high and seemed to float above the ground on a circular frilled platform. I say ‘floated’ because they didn’t leave any marks as they moved along, not even in the soft dirt of the alleyway that ran behind Bill’s and Ma’s store.

The platform was about a foot deep and, above that, the thing’s body kind of tapered up like a glass stem until it reached another frilly overhang – like a mushroom’s head – at the top. Halfway between the two platforms a collar of tendrils or thin wings – like the gossamer veils of a jellyfish – stuck out from the stem a foot or so and then drooped down limply about three feet. These seemed to twitch and twirl of their own accord, no matter whether a wind was blowing or not, and it didn’t take me too long to figure out these were what passed for arms and hands on the things’ own world.

I looked up at the first creature’s top section, trying to see if there were any kind of air-holes or eyes but there was nothing, although the texture of the skin-covering was kind of opaque or translucent … see-through, for want of a better phrase, and I could see things moving around in there, shifting and re-forming. Where the noise they made came out, I couldn’t tell. And we never did find out.

We watched as the creatures moved closer. Suddenly, the one at the front turned around real fast and the hand-arm things fluttered outwards, like a sheet settling on a bed, and, just for a moment, they touched my shoulder. There was something akin to affection there. At the time, I thought I was maybe imagining it … maybe reading the creature’s thought-waves or something, but I was later to discover that there was, if not an outright affection, then at least a feeling of familiarity on the creature’s part.

This confrontation lasted only a few seconds, a minute at the most, and then the creatures moved back away from us in the direction of the Sherriff’s office, the wing things outstretched towards us as they went.

“What did you make of that?” Ed Brewster said, his voice a little croaky and hoarse.

“I have absolutely no idea at all,” I said.

I kept watching because one of the creatures intrigued me more than the others. This one carried what seemed to be some kind of foam box, thick with piled-up layers of what looked like cotton candy. All the time we’d been ‘meeting’ with the leader – we supposed the thing that had touched me
was
the leader – this other creature was removing small pieces of foam which it seemed to absorb into its tendrils. It was still doing it as the three of them moved down the alleyway. Just as they reached the back of the Sherriff’s office, the leader put down its wings, turned around and, leaving the other two behind, moved up onto the sidewalk and out of sight.

I turned at the sound of hurried footsteps behind me and saw Jimmy-James running along the alleyway, his face beaming a wide smile. Ma Chetton was following him, her head still turned in the direction of the street to see if any of the creatures were following
her.

“What about
that!
” JJ said. Then, “What
about
that!”

I nodded and when I turned to look at Ed, he was nodding too. There didn’t seem much else to do.

“Did they say anything?” Jimmy-James asked. “Did they say where they’ve come from?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not a word. Just that mournful wailing. Gives me the creeps … sounds like a coyote.”

“Or a baby teething,” Ma said breathlessly.

“Same here,” said JJ. “I tried them with everything I know … English, French, German, Spanish, Russian … quite a few more. And I tried out a couple of hybrids, too.”

“Like standing in the United Nations,” Ma Chetton muttered testily, her breath rasping. “Or hanging atop the Tower of Babel come Doomsday.”

“What the hell are hybrids?” Ed Brewster asked.

“Mixtures of two or three languages,” JJ explained. “In the old days, that was the way most folks communicated … I mean before any one single language or dialect had gained enough of a footing to be commonplace. And I tried them with all kinds of signs and stuff but they didn’t seem to know what I was doing. I thought maybe they would have known all about our language by listening to our radio waves out there in outer space. But it was no-go. I can’t figure out how they communicate with each other at all,” he said. “Unless it’s that wailing noise or maybe through that thing that one of them’s carrying around.”

“You mean the box-thing? The thing that looks like a pile of cotton candy?”

JJ nodded. “He’s messing with that thing all the time, changing it even as I’m trying to talk to them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but did you notice he’s taking things
out
instead of adding to what’s already in there.”

“I’d noticed that,” JJ said. “I was wondering if that stuff is absorbed into him and enables him to communicate to the others. Like a translator.”

I shrugged. It was all too much for me.

Ed glanced around to make sure none of those creatures had sneaked up on him and said, “We figure they can read our minds.”

“Really?” said JJ. “How’s that?”

“Well,” Ed said, matter-of-factly, “they knew we were coming out here into the alleyway.”

JJ frowned and glanced at me before returning his full attention to Ed.

Ed gave a characteristic shrug. “Why else would they come on down here from the street if they didn’t know we were coming out?”

While JJ mulled that over, I said, “What do you figure they want, JJ?”

The back door to the poolroom opened and Abel Bodeen peered out. “Is there any of those things out there?”

“Nope, they’ve gone down to see the Sherriff,” I said.

Abel pulled a face and gave a wry smile. “That should please Benjamin no end,” he said with a chuckle.

The fact was that the creatures
did
please Sherriff Ben Travers, as it turned out. Or they didn’t
dis
please him anyway. The truth of the matter was that the aliens didn’t do anything to upset or irritate anyone. In fact, they didn’t do anything at all.

“Why the hell did they come, Derby?” Abel Bodeen asked me a couple of days after they’d … after we’d first seen them.

“Beats me,” I said.

We were sitting out on the old straight-backed chairs Molly Waldon had left out in front of her and Vince’s General Store, watching the creatures wander around the town, just as they had been doing all the time. But I was watching a little more intently than I had done at first. The folks around town had become used to the aliens after two full days and nobody seemed to care much
what
they were there for. So it’s probably fair to say that people hadn’t picked up that the attitude of the creatures was changing. It wasn’t changing by much, but it
was
changing.

“You’ve noticed, haven’t you?”

I shielded my eyes from the glare of the late afternoon November sunshine and looked across at Jimmy-James. “Noticed what?”

He looked across at two of the creatures gliding along the other side of the street. “They’re slowing down.”

I followed his gaze and, sure enough, the creatures did seem to be slower than they had been at first. But it was more than that. They seemed to be more cautious. I mentioned this to JJ and Abel, and to Ed and Estelle who were leaning on what remained of an old hitching rail at the edge of the sidewalk.

Ed snorted. “That don’t make no sense at all,” he said. “Why would they be cautious now, when they’ve been here two goddam days.”

“Ed, watch your mouth,” Estelle whined in her high-pitched voice.

“He’s right,” agreed Jimmy-James.

“Who?” Ed asked. “Me or him?”

“Both of you.” JJ got to his feet and strode across to the post behind Ed and leaned. “They
are
getting slower and they do seem to be more … more careful,” he said, choosing his words. “And, no, it doesn’t make any sense for them to be more careful the longer they’re here.”

“Nothing for them to be nervous about, that’s for sure,” Abel said. “They’ve got us wrapped up neat as a Christmas gift.”

The aliens had effectively cut off the town. There were no phone lines and the roads were … well, they were impassible. It was Doc Maynard had seen it first, trying to get his old Ford Fairlane out to check on Sally Iaccoca’s father, over towards Bellingham. Frank Iaccoca had taken a bad fall – cracked a couple of ribs, Doc said – and Doc had him trussed up like Boris Karloff in the old
Mummy
movie.

The car had cut out three miles out of Forest Plains and there was nothing Doc could do to get it going again. So he’d come back into town for help, without even taking a look under the hood, and Abel, Johnny Deveraux and me had gone out there to give him some help. Johnny, who works at Phil Masham’s garage, had taken some tools and a spare battery in case it was something simple he could fix out on the road. Doc Maynard was not renowned for looking after his automobile.

When we got out there, Johnny tried the ignition and it was dead. But when he made to move around to the front of the car to open the hood he suddenly started floundering and dropped the battery. That’s when we found the barrier.

A ‘force field’ is what Jimmy-James called it.