Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE town was large and there were eating places and people on the street, the six o'clock factory workers on the move to their seven o'clock jobs.

He picked out a place that didn't look too bad, that had less of the cockroach look about it than some of the other places, and slowed to a crawl, looking for a parking place. He found one, a block beyond the restaurant.

He parked and got out, locked the door. Standing on the sidewalk, he sniffed the morning. It still was fresh and cool, with the deceptive coolness of a summer morning.

He'd have breakfast, he told himself. Take his time eating it, give himself a little time in which to relax, let some of the road fatigue drop from his bones.

Maybe he should try to call Ann again. Maybe this morning, he could catch her in. He'd feel safer if she knew, if she were in hiding. Perhaps instead of just meeting him at the place where they sold the houses, she should go there and explain to them what the situation was and maybe they would help her. But to do that, to explain that to Ann, would take too long. He had to tell her fast and sure and she had to go on faith.

He went back down the street and turned in at the restaurant door. There were tables but no one seemed to be using them. All the eaters were bellied up to the counter. There were a few stools still left and Vickers took one.

On one side of him a hulking workman in faded shirt and bulging overalls was noisily slupping up a bowl of oatmeal, head bent close above the bowl, shoveling the cereal into his mouth with a rapidly moving spoon that dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, almost as if the man were attempting to establish a siphoning flow of the food into his mouth. On the other side sat a man in blue slacks and white shirt with a neat black bow. He wore glasses and he read a paper and he was, from the look of him, a bookkeeper or something of the sort, a man handy with a column of figures and very smug about it.

A waitress came and mopped the space in front of Vickers with a dirty cloth.

"What'll you have?" she asked, impersonally, running the words together until they were one word.

"Stack of cakes," said Vickers, "with a side of ham."

"Coffee?"

"Coffee," said Vickers.

The breakfast came and he ate it, hurriedly at first, stuffing his mouth with great forkfuls of syrup-dripping cakes, with generous cuts of ham, then more slowly as the first hunger was appeased.

The overalled man got up and left. A wispy girl with drooping eyelids took his place. Some weary secretary, Vickers thought, with only an hour or two of sleep after a night of dancing.

He was almost through when he heard the shouting in the street outside, then the sound of running feet.

The girl beside him swung around on her stool and looked out the window.

"Everybody's running," she said. "I wonder what's the trouble."

A man stopped outside the door and yelled, "They found one of them Forever cars!"

The eaters leaped from their stools and surged toward the door. Vickers followed slowly.

They'd found a Forever car, the shouting man had said. The only one they could have found was the one he'd parked just up the street.

They had tipped the car over and rolled it out into the middle of the street. They were ringed around it, shouting and shaking their fists at it. Someone threw a brick or stone at it and the sound of the object striking its metal boomed through the early morning street like a cannon shot.

Someone picked up whatever had been thrown and heaved it through the door of a hardware store. Reaching in through the broken glass, someone else unlocked the door. Men streamed in and came out again, carrying mauls and axes.

The crowd drew back to give them elbow room. The mauls and axes flashed in the slanted sunlight. They struck and struck again. The street rang with the sound of metallic hammering. Glass shattered with a crunching sound, then came a metallic clanging.

Vickers stood beside the restaurant door, sick in the pit of his stomach, his brain frozen with what later might be fear, but which now was no more than astonishment and blind befuddlement.

Crawford had written: _Don't try to use that car of yours_. And this was what he'd meant.

Crawford had known what would happen to any Forever car found on the streets.

Crawford had known and had tried to warn him. Friend or foe?

Vickers reached out a hand and put it, palm flat, against the rough brick of the building.

The touch of the brick, the roughness of it, told him that this was happening, that it was no dream, that he actually stood here in front of a restaurant in which he had just eaten breakfast, and saw a mob, mad with fury and with hate, smashing up his car.

They know, he thought.

The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants.

And they hated the mutants.

Of course, they hated them.

They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.

He turned and went back into the restaurant, walking softly, ready to leap and run if someone should suddenly shout behind him, if a finger tapped his shoulder.

The bespectacled man with the black bow tie had left the paper beside his plate. Vickers picked it up, walked steadily on, down the length of counter. He pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. There was no one there. He walked through the kitchen rapidly, let himself out the rear door into an alley.

He went down that alley, found another narrow one between two buildings, leading to an opposite street. He took it, crossed the street when he came to it, followed another alleyway between two buildings that led to still another alley.

"They'll fight," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room the night before, his big body filling the chair to overflowing, "they'll fight with what they have."

So finally they were fighting, striking back with what they had. They had picked up their club and were fighting back.

He found a park and walking through it, came across a bench shielded from the Street by a clump of bushes. He sat down and unfolded the paper he had taken from the restaurant, turned its pages back until he found the front page.

And there the story was.