acquired an air of dreamy, philosophical calm which Abram found infuriating.
“And what about you, Dr. Rasch?” he said. “Aren’t you worried too?”
“Worried, General, worried?” Rasch stared out through the window to where the desert was shimmering in the day’s still-growing heat. “If you have time to listen, I’ll explain how these scientific trivialities — as you term them — are going to affect the future of humanity.”
He began to speak in a thin, strangely wistful monotone. And, as he listened, General Abram discovered the real meaning of fear…
On almost any clear night on Ridgeway Street, especially if there was a moon, an open window could be seen at the top of the highest house.
People out late sometimes saw a pale blur moving in the oblong of darkness and knew they had caught Willy Lucas watching them. And Willy, his pimply fuzz-covered face twisted with panic, would lunge back from the window, afraid of being seen.
The women who lived opposite often thought Willy was trying to spy into their bedrooms, and had had him punished by complaining to his brother. But Willy was not interested in the tight-lipped, bleak-eyed housewives of Ridgeway Street, nor even in the strange and alluring females who sometimes walked near him in dreams.
The truth was that Willy enjoyed looking out across the silent town when all others had gone to sleep. It was, for those treasured hours, as though they had died and left him alone, and there was nobody to shout or look at him with exasperation…
When the first of the meteors began to fall Willy was at his post high in the tall, narrow building. Quivering with excitement, he snatched up his old mother-of-pearl opera glasses, stolen from Cooney’s junk store on the corner, and focused them into the dark bowl of the sky. Each time he saw a meteor, its transient brilliance limned with prismatic color by the damaged optical system of his glasses, formless and disturbing thoughts stirred in his mind. With the alert instincts of one not altogether at home in the normal pattern of existence, he realized that the fugitive motes of light carried a special message just for him — but what could it be?
Willy watched until near dawn, crouched in the freezing darkness of the little attic, then he closed the window and went to bed.
When he woke up and came down for lunch the grocery store at the front of the house was crowded. His two older sisters, Ada and Emily, were too busy to come back and prepare a meal for him so Willy made sandwiches with mashed banana thickly spread with marmalade.
As he munched in silent abstraction he hardly saw the pages of the book he was leafing through, or heard the sliding rumble of potatoes being weighed in the store. For, just as in the Bible, it had come to him in his sleep — the awful, heart-stilling significance of the falling stars.
He felt uplifted at having been chosen as the instrument whereby the message would be spread throughout the world, but there was also a vast responsibility. Willy had never in his life carried even the smallest shred of responsibility, and he was uncertain about his own capabilities — especially in a matter of such importance. He drifted around the dark, shabby house all day, trying to think of a way to discharge his God-given obligations, but was unable to decide on any worthwhile plan.
At dusk, his brother Joe came home from his job in the town’s gas plant, and was angry because Willy had not whitewashed the yard. Willy paid little attention to him, accepting the furious words meekly, while his mind sought dimly for a way in which to honor God’s trust.
That night the meteor display was even more brilliant than before, and Willy began to feel an unaccustomed sense of urgency, almost a feeling of guilt that he had done nothing about spreading the Word. He began to worry, and when Willy was absentminded it effectively reduced him to a state of imbecility. Once while mooning around the store he knocked over a basket of tomatoes, and another time dropped a crate of empty Coca-Cola bottles on the tiled floor.
Another night of teeming brilliance had passed before the idea came to him. It was a miserable little idea, he realized — achieving some degree of objectivity — but no doubt God understood the limitations of His chosen instrument better than did Willy himself.
Once he understood what he had to do, Willy became impatient to get on with his work. Instead of drifting off to sleep after his nightly vigil, be hurried downstairs and out to the back yard in search of woodworking tools. Joe was standing at the stove, already dressed in stained brown overalls, gulping tea. He looked up at Willy with his usual expression of dismayed hatred.
“Willy,” he said tersely. “If you don’t get the whitewashing done today, I’ll do the job myself, and you’ll be the brush.”
“Yes, Joe.”
“I’m warning you for the last time, Willy. We’re all sick of you not even lifting a finger to pay for your keep.”
“Yes, Joe.”
“You lie in bed all night and half the day too.”
“Yes, Joe.”
Willy stared down into his brother’s square, competent face and was tempted to reveal just how fortunate it had been for Joe, Ada, Emily and everyone else in the world that he had
The work proved more difficult than Willy had anticipated, one of the first snags being the scarcity of suitable materials. He wasted some time pawing through the heap of rain-blackened lumber at the end of the yard, hurting his fingers on its slippery solidity, covering his clothes with mossy green smears and flecks of orange-red fungus. Finally he realized there was nothing for him in the pile, and went into the outhouse which Ada and Emily used as a storeroom.
Near the door was a large plywood packing case filled with paper bags and squares of brown paper for wrapping vegetables. He began lifting the contents out carefully but the blocks of paper were unexpectedly weighty and hard to control with his numb fingers. They kept falling to the ground and bursting apart. Willy endured the inanimate perversity for as long as he could, then he upended the packing case, releasing a pulpy avalanche which slithered out to the muddy concrete of the yard.
It doesn’t matter much now, he thought.
Even when he had the packing case torn apart, the job refused to go well. The thin plywood kept splintering or reverting to separate laminations when he tried to cut it, and nail-heads continually passed right through it. He worked on determinedly, not pausing to eat or even to dash the sweat from his fuzz-covered face, until by late afternoon he had completed a shaky structure which roughly matched his requirements.
Pangs of hunger were twisting his stomach, but he had been lucky that neither Ada nor Emily had poked her bespectacled face through the back door all day, and he decided to press on with his task. He found a can of red paint and a brush, and went to work with them, occasionally moaning softly as he gave the job all the concentration of which his mind was capable.
It was past five by the time he had finished and — since he had to let the paint dry, anyway — he decided to clean himself up and get something to eat. He loped up the dark stairs, washed his face and feverishly changed into his Sunday suit, which seemed appropriate for the occasion. Satisfying himself that there was still some daylight left, Willy ran back down to the ground floor, panting with eagerness.
In the narrow passage behind the store he collided with the blocky figure of Joe, who had just come in from work.
“Well?” Joe’s voice was taut with suppressed anger. “Have you done it?”
Willy stared down at him, aghast. He had completely forgotten the whitewashing. “Ah… There wasn’t time. I been busy.”
“I thought so.” Joe caught hold of Willy’s lapels and pushed him towards the rear of the house, using all his adult strength. “Get that job done right now, or I’ll kill you, Willy. I’ll
Joe opened the back door, threw Willy out into the yard and slammed the door behind him. Willy looked around helplessly for a moment, eyes brimming with tears, then he ran to the shed and got the covered bucket of whitewash and a broad brush. He attacked the job ferociously, splashing the bubbling liquid onto the old uneven bricks in long curving strokes, heedless of his clothes. An hour later the walls were all coated and Willy, aching and blistered, set the bucket aside. At that precise moment, the door opened and Joe came out.
