now they are agreed I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” she said, “and that is not a sinkhole, either. Tell me what it is.”
I took a deep breath and told her. “I think it’s a crater where a spaceship crashed God knows how long ago. I’ve been finding bits of metal. Nothing big, nothing that really tells me anything. The vehicle, if that was what it was, didn’t crash at any great speed. Not like a meteorite. Otherwise, even the kind of metal I am finding would have not survived except as molten chunks. It came in hard enough to dig a hell of a big hole, but there is no sign of plasma reaction. Down deeper, I am confident, lies the greater part of the mass of whatever it was that hit here.”
“You knew of this hole before, when you lived here as a boy?”
“That is right,” I said. “This country is laced with so-called mineral holes. There is a lot of lead in this country. At one time, there were mines — nothing big, of course, but small, operating mines. In the old days, more than a hundred years ago, prospectors swarmed all over this county and the next. They dug exploratory holes all over the landscape, hoping to uncover strikes. In later years, every hole came to be, regarded as a mineral hole. A lot of them, of course, weren’t.
My pals and I, when I was a boy, were sure this was a mineral hole and off and on, of summers, we did some digging here. The old codger who farmed the place didn’t seem to mind. He used to joke with us about it, calling us miners. We found some strange metallic fragments, but they weren’t ore and were in no way spectacular. So, after a while, we lost interest. But, through the years, I kept thinking back on it and the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that what we’d found had been the debris of a spaceship. So I came back, pretending just to be coming back to the scenes of my childhood. When I found the farm had been put up for sale, I bought it, sort of on the spur of the moment. If I had taken time to think about it, I don’t suppose I would have. In retrospect, at times, it has seemed a sort of silly thing to have done. Although I have enjoyed the months I’ve spent here.”
“I think it’s wonderful,” said Rila.
I looked at her in surprise. “You do?”
“Think of it,” she said. “A spaceship from the stars.”
“I can’t be sure of that.”
She moved closer, reached up and kissed me on the cheek.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” she said. “The point is that you can still dream, that you could convince yourself it could be here.”
“And you, a hard-headed business woman.”
“Being a business woman was a matter of survival.
At heart, I’m still an archaeologist. And all people in that line of work are pure romantics.”
“You know,” I said, “I was torn between two emotions about showing this to you. I wanted to share it with you, but I was afraid as well — afraid you’d think me irresponsible and silly.”
“How sure are you? What evidence do you have?”
“Chunks of metal. Strange alloys of some sort. I sent some chunks to the university for testing and the report shows that there are no known alloys of that sort.
The university people got uptight. Asked me where I’d found the stuff. I told them I’d picked it up in a field and had got curious about it. That’s the way the matter stands now. It’s still my show for a while. I don’t want the university horning in on it. Some of the pieces are just chunks of metal. A few show some machining.
No sign of rust, just a faint blurring of the surface, as if the metal is showing some slight reaction to long exposure. Hard and tough. Metal almost as hard as a diamond and still not brittle. Terrific tensile strength.
There may be other explanations, but an alien spaceship is the best, the most sensible, that I can come up with. I tell myself that I must be scientific and objective, that I can’t go riding off on a hobbyhorse …”
“Asa, forget it. You’re not riding a hobbyhorse. It’s all hard to accept, the hypothesis that you have and the evidence you have found, but the evidence is there.
You can’t simply overlook it.”
“In that case,” I said, “there is something further.
On this one, there is no evidence at all. Just the evidence of my eyes and the feeling that I have. A strange neighbor — I guess that’s the best way to describe him.
I’ve never really seen him, never got a good look at him. But I’ve felt him looking at me, and I’ve caught glimpses of him, not really seeing him, but a certain outrageous configuration that makes me imagine he is there. I say imagine because I’m still trying to be scientific and objective. On a purely observational level, I’m sure that he exists. He hangs out in the orchard, but he’s not there all the time. He wanders quite a bit, it seems.”
“Is there anyone else who has seen him?”
“Others, I would guess, have seen him. Periodically, there is a panther scare — although why people should be afraid of panthers, I don’t know. But in rural communities, bear and panther scares seem to be a favorite pastime. An atavistic fear, I suppose, that still hangs on.”
“Maybe there are panthers.”
“I doubt it. There has been no authentic mountain lion sighting for forty years or more. The thing about it is that this creature I am talking of does leave a cat impression. There is one man who knows more about it than anybody else. He’s sort of a cross between Daniel Boone and David Thoreau, and he’s spent his life out in the woods.”
“What does he think about it?”
“Like me, he doesn’t know. I’ve talked to him a few times and we’ve agreed we don’t know what it is.”
“You think there is some connection between this creature and your spaceship?”
“At times, I’m tempted. But it seems a bit far-fetched. The implication would be that it’s an alien creature that escaped the crash. That would mean it is impossibly long-lived. Also, it would seem unlikely anything could have survived the crash, if there was a crash.”
“I’d like to see some of the metal you dug up,” she said.
“No problem,” I told her. “It is in the barn. We’ll have a look when we go back.”
FOUR
Hiram was perched on one of the lawn chairs in front of the house with Bowser laid out on the grass beside him. The front-yard robin stood impertinently a few paces off, eyeing their intrusion of its territory with perky belligerence.
Hiram explained, “Bowser said he didn’t want to stay in the house, so I carried him out.”
“He used you,” I told him. “He could have walked himself.”
Bowser beat an apologetic tail.
“The robin feels sorry for him,” said Hiram.
The robin had no look of sorrow.
“I ain’t got nothing to do,” said Hiram. “You go about your business. I’ll watch over Bowser till he’s well. Day and night, if you want me to. If he wants anything, he can tell me.”
“All right, then, you watch over him,” I said. “We have things to do.”
At the barn, I had a hell of a time getting the sagging door open again. Someday, I promised myself, I would get it fixed. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours work, but somehow I had never quite gotten around to it.
The interior of the barn, redolent of ancient horse manure, had a pile of junk stacked haphazardly in one corner, but was mostly filled by two long tables I had set up with boards laid across sawhorses. Ranged on the tables were all the pieces of metal I had found or dug out of the pit. At the far end of one of the tables lay two hollow hemispherical pieces of bright metal I had found when I had cleaned out the barn.
Rila walked over to one of the tables and picked up a jagged piece of metal. She turned it over and over in her hands. She said, in some amazement, “Just as you said, there isn’t any rust. Just some slight discoloration here and there. There’s some iron in it, isn’t there?”
“Quite a lot,” I told her. “At least, that’s what the university people said.”
“Any ferric metal rusts,” she said. “Some alloys will stand up for a long time, but they finally show some rust. When oxygen gets to them.”
