Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER TWELVE

THERE were many little tubes, smashed, and an intricate mass of wiring that was bent and broken and funny crystal discs that were chipped and splintered, and the metallic outer shell that had held the tubes and wiring and the discs and the many other pieces of mechanical mystery that he did not recognize.

Vickers pulled the desk lamp closer to him, so that the light might shine down upon the handful of parts he had gathered from the floor and he put out a finger and stirred it among them, gingerly, listening to the tinkling sounds they made as they clinked together.

No mouse, but something else — something that scuttled in the night, knowing that he would think it was a mouse; a thing that had scared the cat which knew it was no mouse, and a thing that would not be attracted to traps.

An electronic contraption, maybe, from the look of tubes and wiring. Vickers stirred the pieces again with a finger and listened to the tinkling as they clinked together.

An electronic spy, he speculated, a scuttling, scurrying, listening thing that watched his every moment, a thing that stored what it heard and saw for future reference or transmitted directly the knowledge that it gained. But direct to whom? And why? And maybe it wasn't a spying thing, at all. Maybe it was something else, something for which there might be a simpler — or a more weird — explanation. If it were a listening or a seeing device, planted here to spy on him, he would not have caught it. He had never seen one of them before, and for months now he'd heard the scurrying and the scampering that he had thought were mice.

If it were a spying device it would be made so well, so cleverly that it would be able not only to observe him, but to keep out of sight itself. To have any value it must keep its presence undetected. There would have been no careless moment. It would not have been seen unless it wanted itself to be seen.

_Unless it wanted itself to be seen!_

He had been sitting at the desk and had gotten up and pushed the chair flush with the desk and it had been then that he had heard the scampering. If it had not run, he never would have seen it. And it need not have run, for the room was in shadow, with only the desk lamp burning, and his back had been toward the room.

The cold certainty came to him that it had wanted to be seen, that it had wanted to be trapped in a corner and crushed with a paperweight — that it had run deliberately to call his attention to it and that once he'd seen it, it had not tried to get away.

He sat at the desk and cold beads of perspiration came out of his forehead and he felt them there but did not lift a hand to brush them off.

It had wanted to be seen. It had wanted him to know.

Not it, of course, but the thing behind it — whoever or whatever it was that had caused the contraption to be placed inside his house. For months it had scampered and scurried, had listened and watched, and now the time for the scampering and the watching had come to an end and it was time for something else; time to serve notice on him that he was being watched.

But why, and who?

He fought down the cold, screaming panic that rose inside of him, forced himself to stay sitting in the chair.

There was a clue somewhere in this very day, he thought. Somewhere there was a clue, if he could recognize it. Something happened today that made the agency behind the watcher decide it was time to let him know.

He ticked off the day's events, marshalling them in his mind as they might be written in a notebook:

_The little girl who had come to breakfast._

_ The remembrance of a walk that he had taken twenty years before._

_ The story in the paper about more worlds than one._

_The Forever car._

_The women who had talked in the seat behind him on the bus, and Mrs. Leslie and the club she was organizing._

_Crawford and his story of a world with its back against the wall._

_The houses at five hundred dollars a room._

_ Mr. Flanders sitting on the porch and saying that there was a new-found factor which kept the world from war._

_The mouse that was not a mouse._

But that wasn't all, of course; somewhere there was something else that he had forgotten. Without knowing how he knew it, he knew that he had forgotten something, some other tabulated fact that should be inserted somewhere in the list of things that had happened in the day.

There was Flanders saying that he was interested in the setup of the gadget shops and that he was intrigued by the riddle of the carbohydrates and that he was convinced there was something going on.

And later in the day he had sat on the porch and talked of reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and of a factor which kept the world from war and of another factor which had whipped Man out of his rut almost a hundred years ago and had kept him at the gallop ever since. He had speculated about these matters in an idle way, he had said.

But was his speculation idle?

Or did Flanders know more than he was telling?

And if he knew, what then?

Vickers shoved back the chair and got to his feet.

He looked at the time. It was almost two o'clock.

No matter, he thought. It's time that I find out. Even if I have to break into his house and jerk him out of bed, screaming in his nightshirt (for he was sure that Flanders would not wear pajamas), it's time that I find out.