That, I thought, should hold them for a while. I remembered Benson's
'note desk' and put through a long distance call to Fort Hicks, person to person. The Omaha operator asked for Fort Hicks information, but there wasn't any. The Fort Hicks operator asked whom she wanted.
Omaha finally admitted that we wanted to talk to Mr. Edwin C. Benson.
Fort Hicks figured out loud and then decided that Ed was probably at the police station if he hadn't gone home for sup-per yet. She connected us with the police station, and I got Benson. He had a pleasant voice, not particularly backwoods Arkansas. I gave him some of the old oil about a fine dispatch, and a good, con-scientious job, and so on. He took it with plenty of dry reserve, which was odd. Our rural stringers always ate that kind of stuff up. Where, I asked him, was he from?
'Fort Hicks,' he told me, 'but I've moved around. I did the court-house beat in Little Rock—' I nearly laughed out loud at that, but the laugh died out as he went on—'rewrite for the A.P. in New Orleans, not to be bureau chief there but I didn't like wire service work. Got an opening on the Chicago Trib desk. That didn't last— they sent me to head up their Washington bureau. There I switched to the New York Tunes. They made me a war correspondent and I got hurt—back to Fort Hicks. I do some magazine writing now. Did you want a follow-up on the Rush City story?'
'Sure,' I told him weakly. 'Give it a real ride—use your own judg-ment.
Do you think it's a fake?'
'I saw Pink's body a little while ago at the undertaker's parlor, and I had a talk with Allenby, from Rush City. Pink got burned all right, and Allenby didn't make his story up. Maybe somebody else did—he's pretty dumb—but as far as I can tell, this is the real thing. I'll keep the copy coming. Don't forget about that dollar eighty-five phone call, will you?'
I told him I wouldn't, and hung up. Mr. Edwin C. Benson had handed me quite a jolt. I wondered how badly he had been hurt, that he had been forced to abandon a brilliant news career and bury him-self in the Ozarks.
Then there came a call from God, the board chairman of World Wireless. He was fishing in Canada, as all good board chairmen do during the silly season, but he had caught a news broadcast which used my Rush City story. He had a mobile phone in his trailer, and it was but the work of a moment to ring Omaha and louse up my care-fully planned vacation schedules and rotation of night shifts. He wanted me to go down to Rush City and cover the story personally. I said yes and began trying to round up the rest of the staff. My night editor was sobered up by his wife and delivered to the bureau in fair shape. A telegrapher on vacation was reached at his summer resort and talked into checking out. I got a taxi company on the phone and told them to have a cross-country cab on the roof in an hour. I specified their best driver, and told them to give him maps of Ar-kansas.
Meanwhile, two 'with domes' dispatches arrived from Benson and got moved on the wire. I monitored a couple of newscasts; the second one carried a story by another wire service on the domes—a pickup of our stuff, but they'd have their own men on the scene fast enough. I filled in the night editor, and went up to the roof for the cab.
The driver took off in the teeth of a gathering thunderstorm. We had to rise above it, and by the time we could get down to sight-pilot-age altitude, we were lost. We circled most of the night until the driver picked up a beacon he had on his charts at about 3:30 a.m. We landed at Fort Hicks as day was breaking, not on speaking terms.
Fort Hicks' field clerk told me where Benson lived, and I walked there.
It was a white, frame house. A quiet, middle-aged woman let me in. She was his widowed sister, Mrs. McHenry. She got me some coffee and told me she had been up all night waiting for Edwin to come back from Rush City. He had started out about 8:00 p.m., and it was only a two-hour trip by car. She was worried. I tried to pump her about her brother, but she'd only say that he was the bright one of the family. She didn't want to talk about his work as war corre-spondent. She did show me some of his magazine stuff—boy-and-girl stories in national weeklies. He seemed to sell one every couple of months.
We had arrived at a conversational stalemate when her brother walked in, and I discovered why his news career had been inter-rupted. He was blind. Aside from a long, puckered brown scar that ran from his left temple back over his ear and onto the nape of his neck, he was a pleasant-looking fellow in his mid-forties.
'Who is it, Vera?' he asked.
'It's Mr. Williams, the gentleman who called you from Omaha today—I mean yesterday.'
'How do you do, Williams. Don't get up,' he added—hearing, I suppose, the chair squeak as I leaned forward to rise.
'You were so long, Edwin,' his sister said with relief and re-proach.
'That young jackass Howie—my chauffeur for the night—' he added an aside to me—'got lost going there and coming back. But I did spend more time than I'd planned at Rush City.' He sat down, facing me.
'Williams, there is some difference of opinion about the shining domes.
The Rush City people say that they exist, and I say they don't.'
His sister brought him a cup of coffee.
'What happened, exactly?' I asked.
'That Allenby took me and a few other hardy citizens to see them. They told me just what they looked like. Seven hemispheres in a big clearing, glassy, looming up like houses, reflecting the gleam of the headlights.
But they weren't there. Not to me, and not to any blind man. I know when I'm standing in front of a house or anything else that big. I can feel a little tension on the skin of my face. It works un-consciously, but the mechanism is thoroughly understood.
'The blind get—because they have to—an aural picture of the world.
We hear a little hiss of air that means we're at the corner of a building, we hear and feel big, turbulent air currents that mean we're coming to a busy street. Some of the boys can thread their way through an obstacle course and never touch a single obstruction. I'm not that good, maybe because I haven't been blind as long as they have, but by hell, I know when there are seven objects the size of houses in front of me, and there just were no such things in the clear-ing at Rush City.'
'Well,' I shrugged, 'there goes a fine piece of silly-season journal-ism.
What kind of a gag are the Rush City people trying to pull, and why?'
'No kind of gag. My driver saw the domes, too—and don't forget the late marshal. Pink not only saw them but touched them. All I know is that people see them and I don't. If they exist, they have a kind of existence like nothing else I've ever met.'
'I'll go up there myself,' I decided.
'Best thing,' said Benson. 'I don't know what to make of it. You can take our car.' He gave me directions and I gave him a schedule of deadlines.
We wanted the coroner's verdict, due today, an eyewit-ness story—his driver would do for that—some background stuff on the area and a few statements from local officials.
I took his car and got to Rush City in two hours. It was an un-painted collection of dog-trot homes, set down in the big pine forest that covers all that rolling Ozark country. There was a general store that had the place's only phone. I suspected it had been kept busy by the wire services and a few enterprising newspapers. A state trooper in a flashy uniform was lounging against a fly-specked tobacco counter when I got there.
'I'm Sam Williams, from World Wireless,' I said. 'You come to have a look at the domes?'
'World Wireless broke that story, didn't they?' he asked me, with a look I couldn't figure out.
'We did. Our Fort Hicks stringer wired it to us.'
The phone rang, and the trooper answered it. It seemed to have been a call to the Governor's office he had placed.
'No, sir,' he said over the phone. 'No, sir. They're all sticking to the story, but I didn't see anything. I mean, they don't see them any more, but they say they were there, and now they aren't any more.' A couple more 'No, sirs' and he hung up.
'When did that happen?' I asked.
'About a half-hour ago. I just came from there on my bike to re-port.'
The phone rang again, and I grabbed it. It was Benson, asking for me. I told him to phone a flash and bulletin to Omaha on the disap-pearance and then took off to find Constable Allenby. He was a stage reuben with a nickel- plated badge and a six-shooter. He cheerfully climbed into the car and guided me to the clearing.
There was a definite little path worn between Rush City and the clearing by now, but there was a disappointment at the end of it. The clearing was empty. A few small boys sticking carefully to its fringes told wildly
