you.'
'Huh?' Homer asked blankly.
'A car. This is a road, you know.'
Homer turned around and brushed past the gateman. He hustled down the concourse, aiming for Steen's office.
But the office was locked. Homer shook the door. He rapped wildly on the glass. He pounded on the frame. Absolutely nothing happened.
Turning from the door, he stared out across the development with incredulous eyes?the vacant concourse, the empty houses among the trees, the faint patches of shining lake peeking through the clearings.
He jammed his hands into his pockets and his fingers touched the little radiator ornament. He took it out and looked at it. He'd seen it before?not the little replica, but the ornament itself.
He had seen it, he remembered, on the new cars parked outside his office by the people seeking leases. He had seen it on the car that had crashed the gate and disappeared.
He walked slowly to the parking lot and drove home.
'I don't think I'll go back to the office today,' he told Elaine. 'I don't feel so good.'
'You've been working too hard,' she told him accusingly. 'You look all worn out.'
'That's a fact,' he admitted.
'After lunch, you lie down. And see that you get some sleep.'
'Yes, dear,' he said.
So it began to fall into a pattern, he thought, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. Finally it was clear enough so a man could begin to make some head and tail of it.
It was unbelievable, but there was no choice?one could not disbelieve in it. It was there to see. And if one looked at it any other way, it made no sense at all.
Someone?Steen, perhaps, or maybe someone else for whom Steen was serving as a front?had found out how to build one house, yet have many houses, houses stretching back street after street from the first house, all shadows of the first house, but substantial just the same?substantial enough for families to live in.
Dimensional extensions of that first house. Or houses stretching into time. Or something else as weird.
But however they might do it, it was a swell idea. For you could build one house and sell it, or lease it, time and time again. Except that one was crazy to get hold of an idea that was as good as that and then let someone else make all the money from the leasing of the houses.
And there was no question that Steen was crazy. That idea he had about the shopping centre was completely batty?although, stop to think of it, if one had five thousand houses and leased each of them ten times and had a monopoly on all the shops and stores?why, it would pay off tremendously.
And the bank president's slant on sovereignty had certain angles, too, that should not be overlooked.
A new idea in housing, Steen had told him. It was all of that.
It was a new idea that would apply to many things?to industry and farming and mining and a lot of other ventures. A man could make one car and there would be many others. A man could build a manufacturing plant and he would have many plants.
It was like a carbon copy, Homer thought?an economic carbon copy. And a man apparently could make as many carbons as he wished. Possibly, he speculated, once you knew the principle, there was no limit to the carbons. Possibly the ghostly parade of Happy Acres houses stretched limitless, forever and forever. There might be no end to them.
He fell asleep and dreamed of going down a line of ghostly houses, counting them frantically as he ran along, hoping that he'd soon get to the end of them, for he couldn't quit until he did get to the end. But they always stretched ahead of him, as far as he could see, and he could find no end to them.
He woke, damp with perspiration, his tongue a dry and bitter wad inside a flannel mouth. He crept out of bed and went to the bathroom. He held his head under a cold faucet. It helped, but not much.
Downstairs, he found a note that Elaine had propped against the radio on the breakfast table:
Gone to play bridge at Mabel's.
Sandwiches in refrigerator.
It was dark outside. He'd slept the daylight hours away. A wasted day, he berated himself?a completely wasted day. He hadn't done a dollar's worth of work.
He found some milk and drank it, but left the sandwiches where they were.
He might as well go to the office and get a little work done, compensate in part for the wasted day. Elaine wouldn't return until almost midnight and there was no sense in staying home alone.
He got his hat and went out to where he'd parked the car in the driveway. He got into it and sat down on something angular and hard. He hoisted himself wrathfully and searched the seat with a groping hand to find the thing he'd sat on. His fingers closed about it and then he remembered. He'd sat on it on that day Morgan had showed up in answer to the ad. It had been rolling around ever since, unnoticed in the seat.
It was smooth to the touch and warm?warmer than it should be?as if there were a busy little motor humming away inside it.
And suddenly it winked.
He caught his breath and it flashed again.
Exactly like a signal.
Instinct told him to get rid of it, to heave it out the window but a voice suddenly spoke out of it?a thick, harsh voice that mouthed a sort of chant he could not recognize.
'What the hell?' chattered Homer, fearful now. 'What's going on?'
The chanting voice ceased and a heavy silence fell, so thick and frightening that Homer imagined he could feel it closing in on him.
The voice spoke again. This time, it was one word, slow and laboured, as if the thick, harsh tongue drove itself to create a new and alien sound.
The silence fell again and there was a sense of waiting. Homer huddled in the seat, cold with fear.
For now he could guess where the cube had come from.
Steen had ridden in the car with him and it had fallen from his pocket.
The voice took up again: 'Urrr?urr?urrth?mum!'
Homer almost screamed.
Rustling, panting sounds whispered from the cube.
Earthman? Homer wondered wildly. Was that what it had tried to say?
And if that was right, if the cube in fact had been lost by Stcen, then it meant that Steen was not a man at all.
He thought of Steen and the way he wore his shoes and suddenly it became understandable why he might wear his shoes that way. Perhaps, where Steen came from, there was no left or right, maybe not even shoes. No man could expect an alien, a being from some distant star, to get the hang of all Earth's customs?not right away, at least. He recalled the first day Steen had come into the office and the precise way he had talked and how stiffly he'd sat down in the chair. And that other day, six weeks later, when Steen had talked slangily and had sat slouched in his chair, with his feet planted on the desk.
Learning, Homer thought. Learning all the time. Getting to know his way around, getting the feel of things, like a gawky country youth learning city ways.
But it sure was a funny thing that he'd never learned about the shoes.
The cube went on gurgling and panting and the thick voice muttered and spat out alien words. One could sense the tenseness and confusion at the other end.
Homer sat cold and rigid, with horror seeping into him drop by splashing drop, while the cube blurted over and over a single phrase that meant not a thing to him.
Then, abruptly, the cube went dead. It lay within his hand, cooling, silent, just a thing that looked and felt like a cliptogether plastic block for children.
From far off, he heard the roar of a car as it left the curb and sped off in the night. From someone's backyard, a cat meowed for attention. Nearby, a bird cheeped sleepily.
