waited for him.
He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent and he had good manners. He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.
It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.
'It's no scandal,' Rickard told me, 'if that is what you're thinking. It's just a matter of statistics.'
There are a lot of times when I don't catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.
'I did a series of farm articles a few months back,' said Rickard, 'and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life.'
'And?' I asked, not feeling too well myself.
'I found some interesting things about this valley,' he went on. 'I remember that I didn't catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn't in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts.'
I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn't let me.
'Your weather, for one thing,' he said. 'Do you realize you've had perfect weather for the past ten years?'
'The weather's been pretty good,' I admitted.
'It wasn't always good. I went back to see.'
'That's right,' I said. 'It's been better lately.'
'Your crops have been the best they've ever been in the last ten years.'
'Better seed,' I said. 'Better ways of farming.'
He grinned at me. 'You guys haven't changed your way of farming in the last quarter century.' And he had me there, of course.
'There was an army worm invasion two years ago,' he said. 'It hit all around you, but you got by scot- free.'
'We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time.'
'I checked health records,' he said. 'Same thing once again. For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia. No nothing. One death in ten full years?complications attendant on old age.'
'Old Man Parks,' I said. 'He was going on to ninety. Fine old gentleman.'
'You see,' said Rickard. I did see. The fellow had the figures. He had tracked it down, this thing we hadn't even realized, and he had us cold.
'What do you want me to do about it?' I asked.
'I want to talk to you about a neighbour.'
'I won't talk about any of my neighbours. Why don't you talk to him yourself?'
'I tried to, but he wasn't home. Fellow down the road said he'd gone into town. Whole family had gone into town.'
'Reginald Heath,' I said. There wasn't much sense in playing dumb with Rickard, for he knew all the angles.
'That's the man. I talked to folks in town. Found out he'd never had to have any repair work done on any of his machinery or his car. Has the same machinery he had when he started farming. And it was worn out then.'
'He takes good care of it,' I told him. 'He keeps it tinkered up.'
'Another thing,' said Rickard. 'Since he's been here he hasn't bought a drop of gasoline.'
I'd know the rest of it, of course, although I'd never stopped to think about it. But I didn't know about the gasoline. I must have shown my surprise, for Rickard grinned at me.
'What do you want?' I asked.
'A story.'
'Heath's the man to talk to. I don't know a thing to help you.'
And even when I said it I felt easy in my mind. I seemed to have an instinctive faith that Heath could handle the situation, that he'd know just what to do.
But after breakfast I couldn't settle down to work. I was pruning the orchard, a job I'd been putting off for a year or two and that badly needed doing. I kept thinking of that business of Heath not buying gasoline and that night I'd found the tractor ploughing by itself and how smooth both the car and tractor ran despite all the noise they made.
So I laid down my pruning hook and shears and struck out across the fields. I knew the Heath family was in town, but I don't think it would have made any difference to me if they'd been at home. I think I would have gone just the same. For more than ten years now, I realized, I'd been wondering about that tractor and it was time that I found out.
I found the tractor in the machine shed and I thought maybe I'd have some trouble getting into it. But I didn't have a bit. I slipped the catches and the hood lifted up and I found exactly what I had thought I'd find, except that I hadn't actually worked out in my mind the picture of what I'd find underneath that hood.
It was just a block of some sort of shining metal that looked almost like a cube of heavy glass. It wasn't very big, but it had a massive look about it, as if it might have been a heavy thing to lift. You could see the old bolt holes where the original internal combustion engine had been mounted and a heavy piece of some sort of metal had been fused across the frame to seat that little power plant. And up above the shiny cube was an apparatus of some sort. I didn't take the time to find out how it worked, but I could see that it was connected to the exhaust and I knew it was a dingus that disguised the power plant. You know how in electric trains they have it fixed up so that the locomotive goes chuff-chuff and throws out a stream of smoke. Well, that was what that contraption was. It threw out little puffs of smoke and made a tractor noise.
I stood there looking at it and I wondered why it was, if Heath had an engine that worked better than an internal combustion engine, he should have gone to so much trouble to hide the fact he had it. If I'd had a thing like that, I knew, I'd make the most of it. I'd get someone to back me and go into production and in no time at all I'd be stinking rich. And there'd been nothing in the world to prevent Heath from doing that. But instead he'd fixed the tractor so it looked and sounded like an ordinary tractor and he'd fixed his car to make so much noise that it hid the fact it had a new type motor. Only he had overdone it. He'd made both the car and tractor make more noise than they should. And he'd missed an important bet in not buying gasoline. In his place I'd bought the stuff, just the way you should, and thrown it away or burned it to get rid of it.
It almost seemed to me that Heath might have had something he was hiding all these years, that he'd tried deliberately to keep himself unnoticed. As if he might really have been a refugee from the Iron Curtain?or from somewhere else.
I put the hood back in place again and snapped the catches shut and when I went out I was very careful to shut the machine shed door securely.
I went back to my pruning and I did quite a bit of thinking and while I was doing it I realized that I'd been doing this same thinking, piecemeal, ever since that night I'd found the tractor running by itself. Thinking of it in snatches and not trying to correlate all my thinking and that way it hadn't added up to much, but now it did and I suppose I should have been a little scared.
But I wasn't scared. Reginald Heath was a neighbour, and a good one, and we'd gone hunting and fishing together and we'd helped one another with haying and threshing and one thing and another and I liked the man as well as anyone I had ever known. Sure, he was a little different and he had a funny kind of tractor and a funny kind of car and he might even have a way of stretching time and since he'd come into the valley we'd been fortunate in weather and in health. All true, of course, but nothing to be scared of. Nothing to be scared of, once you knew the man.
For some reason or other I remembered the time several years before when I'd dropped by of a summer evening. It was hot and the Heath family had brought chairs out on the lawn because it was cooler there. Heath got me a chair and we sat and talked, not about anything in particular, but whatever came into our heads.
There was no moon, but there were a lot of stars and they were the prettiest I have ever seen them. I called Heath's attention to them and, just shooting off my mouth, I told him what little I'd picked up about
