The Beyonders (6 page)

He set his elbows on the edge of the table and clamped his chin in his hands to study what had been given him. Finally he rose, went to a shelf, and opened a cigar box there. Out of it he took an ancient gold watch that had once belonged to his mother's father. Bringing it back to the table, he held it close to the lump of metal. The colors, the textures, were practically the same in both.

At last he took the mystery into his hand. It still had a warmth to it, like a frying pan taken out of hot dishwater. It must have been piping hot when it was thrown at his feet, up there on the road to the Kimber settlement. He hefted it experimentally, trying to judge its weight. The thing was heavy, all right. It must weigh several pounds. Heavier than lead.

If it was what Gander Eye thought it was, it could sell for more than a thousand dollars.

So whatever had met him out yonder on that road had given him a mighty expensive gift. It must have wanted to please him, must have wanted to make friends with him.

Or possibly it had been trying to buy him. Buy Gander Eye Gentry, who had spent his life not being for sale.

He put it back down on the table and sat gazing at it.

VI

Next morning Gander Eye walked to Bo Fletcher's little barber shed. Bo sat in the single chair, looking at a catalogue of woodworking tools. "Hey," he greeted Gander Eye. "You had you a haircut last Saturday, so I reckon you're after some blockade."

"I still got some of what Duffy gave me," said Gander Eye. "I want to show you something, a kind of metal stuff. See can you figure out what it is."

"Let's go in my shop and have a look."

Bo led the way across his yard and in at the basement door. Inside he switched on bright lights. The basement was cemented in and furnished with a lathe, a workbench, racks of tools, shelves, and boxes of various things. Gander Eye fished a wad of paper from his shirt pocket, carefully unfolded it, and spread it out on the bench. Upon it lay a shining yellow scrap the size of a nail paring. Bo stooped above it and studied it critically.

"Looks like a hunk of gold, right off," he pronounced. "What is it for sure?"

"Can't rightly tell you that. I brought it over here for you to see if you could decide on it."

"Where did it come from?" asked Bo.

"It's just a something I've had down at my place. Something I come up on." Gander Eye tried his best not to sound mysterious. "How do you test it to see is it gold or not?"

Bo considered the problem gravely. "There's several ways you can do that, I reckon. The assay office is where you'd ought to take it for official tests, but let's try something."

He selected an old chisel blade from a box. Laying this flat on the workbench, he transferred the scrap to it. From his rack of tools he selected a light hammer. Very carefully he pounded the scrap flat and studied again, his gaunt face alert.

"Look yonder," he said. "It flattened right out. Gold does that."

"So does lead," reminded Gander Eye.

"Sure enough, but this has a shiny, yellowy color, like gold."

"It weighs pretty heavy, I thought," Gander Eye said. "Heavier than lead, I'd judge."

"Let's try it with some acid. I've got two kinds here, right strong stuff. I use it for etching things out."

Bo rummaged out an old china saucer, into which he carefully slid the flattened fragment. Then he sought a shelf of bottles and chose two, with glass stoppers.

"Look out the way," he warned Gander Eye. "This here stuff could eat the soles right off your shoes."

With the utmost knowledgeable caution he drew the stopper from one bottle and leaned above the saucer to pour acid, drop by drop. He reclosed the bottle and squinted for a moment. He took a nail and probed the fragment. Then he opened the other bottle and dripped liquid from it in turn. A biting odor rose in the room. Again Bo used the nail to poke, and held it up.

"Looky there at the point," he invited. "That there acid sure enough works on iron, but it ain t grabbing onto your little piece of stuff any."

Gander Eye extended a cautious hand.

"I done told you, don't let that acid touch you," reminded Bo sharply. "Here, let me put in some water to sort of thin it out."

He did so, then poked the bit of metal back upon the flattened paper.

"I'd be apt to call it gold, Gander Eye," he said soberly. "How much of it you got around?"

"I told you, not much," replied Gander Eye, folding the paper and tucking it back in his shirt pocket.

"You don't need any great much. An ounce of gold is worth near about two hundred dollars these times." Bo thinned a smile at Gander Eye. "You don't act like a fellow about to tell his choice friends anything. But if you've found a gold mine somewheres, I want to partner with you to work it."

Gander Eye flashed a smile in return as he shook his head. "No, son, I ain't found no gold mine. Just a piece of it, is all."

Bo was back at the shelf of bottles. He brought down a fruit jar.

"I don't expect it's too early in the day for me and you to take a drink for old time's sake."

"I'll drink with you," said Gander Eye, "but I ain't telling you no more than what I've done told you already." He took the jar and tipped it up. "Poor old Duffy," he changed the subject. "I'll banter you he'd enjoy to have a good whet of this."

"Peggy wouldn't even let him dream about it," said Bo, drinking in turn.

They walked out into the yard again. James Crispin was walking down from Longcohr's store, a paper sack of groceries under his arm. Gander Eye hailed him and trotted to fall into step with him.

"How did you fare at the Kimber baptizing last night?" Gander Eye inquired.

"It was tremendously impressive, I thought," said Crispin. "It was like something before history, when mankind was working harder to respond to the mystic. They baptized a beautiful young girl."

"Shoo, is that a fact?" Gander Eye pursed his lips. "I'd have enjoyed to have been there and seen that."

"Probably you would have, but I'm an artist," smiled Crispin. "An artist thinks of the human bodv as something worth painting, interpreting. That's all."

"Shoo," said Gander Eye again. "I ain't going to buy that, Jim, about artists or either doctors looking at a pretty naked girl as no more than a business proposition."

"You'll have to ask Doc Hannum about how doctors feel. I'm just an artist, I can't speak for any other profession." Crispin gazed far away, as though toward the distant settlement of the Kimbers. "I'm going to paint that baptism scene. Captain Kimber told me I couldn't bring my paints there, but he also said he could hardly stop me from doing whatever work I wanted to do at home. That sounds more or less like permission, wouldn't you say?"

Crispin had a natural gift for getting whatever he wanted, Gander Eye reflected. They reached the road to the bridge and Crispin's cabin beyond. There they paused.

"Tell me just one true thing, Jim," said Gander Eye, "Did them Kimbers or anybody give you some sort of present?"

"They gave Slowly and me one of the best dinners I ever ate. They had deer meat, roasted in a pot buried underground like baked beans—"

"Sure enough, I know. The Kimbers will feed you good if they like you. But I meant a present of some kind."

"Why, no," said Crispin, "and I certainly didn't expect anything of that kind."

Gander Eye started again along the street toward home. Crispin turned to cross the bridge and go to his own cabin. He opened the door, and . . . "Where did you come from?" he stammered.

Struve sat in the front room, grinning harshly. He had turned on the television and was watching a morning newscast of weather throughout the nation. "Out of the nowhere into the here," he replied easily. "That's what it said about a cute little baby, in a poem back in about the third reader. But you shouldn't yell out like that. Your neighbors might come poking around to see what there was to yell about."

Crispin came in, closed the door behind him, and set down his bag of groceries. "All right," he said. "I've been up to the Kimber settlement. I was there last night. I watched them baptizing. No stranger has ever seen that before."

"But you're not a complete stranger, are you?" mocked Struve. "I've always understood that you were of the authentic Kimber blood. Anyway, it was bound to be managed out all right. You were given the words to say to them that would let them know you're here for a specific purpose."

"Yes," said Crispin. "When I talked to Captain Kimber, I put the code words into what I said."

He sat down, too. Struve looked him over wryly, as though choosing a place to stab him with a needle.

"The time's beginning to get short, and we've got lots of work to do here," said Struve. "That Kimber place isn't enough of a base for the day it happens. Here in this little town, Sky Notch, things have got to be made ready for action. People here have got to be in a mood of acceptance, even welcome. What have you been doing to bring that about?"

He squinted and crinkled the grained, swarthy skin of his heavy jaws. "How about what's-his-name, His Honor the Mayor of this little narrow place off the main road?"

"Derwood Ballinger," said Crispin. "He's the sort that could be persuaded to anything that he thought was profitable, but it would take some telling to make him believe it."

"Then it will be up to us to show him. But what real friends have you made?"

"Gander Eye Gentry and Doc Hannum and several others," replied Crispin. "They're an independent set of people."

"Independent," said Struve after him. "Then they'll have to be persuaded of the error of independent ways. See here, my friend, those others are going to need considerable help to come in. If they get that help, they'll be grateful. Maybe they've already been grateful to that one you call Gander Eye, if he's the black-haired man who plays the banjo."

"That's who he is," said Crispin. "What do you mean about being grateful to him?"

"Just generosity," Struve drawled out slowly. He extended a hand and shut off the television. "Just putting him on the payroll, so to speak. Gold doesn't look bad to any man, and they've got a lot of that on hand. If they've taken him over, they'll take over the others, too. This Sky Notch place will be good base of operations for them and for people like you and me, running things for them."

Crispin looked at the floor. Struve yawned and stretched.

"It isn't a bad little backwater, at that," he went on. "I'm beginning to see its rustic charm. Why don't I just move in here with you and get to know some of these folks better?"

"No you don't, Struve."

"I don't?" Struve's eyes glittered. "I happen to be the one who says yes and no."

"I mean you'd spoil things. And don't glare at me, you know you'd spoil things."

Struve got to his feet. He laughed silently, a quaking laugh.

"Granted," he said. "I might do just that. But I'll keep looking in on you all the time. I told you we're getting close to D-Day for the Others. We'd better not keep them waiting."

He strolled off through the back of the house and out among the trees behind, where nobody could see him.

Crispin thought, silently and soberly and to some purpose. At last he went out the front door and crossed the bridge and headed for Gander Eye's little green house.

He knocked at the door and waited. No sound within. After several moments he walked around the house. There was Gander Eye, down at the creek. As Crispin watched, Gander Eye threw something that struck the water with a bright splash, then turned and came back through the yard. He saw Crispin and lifted a hand in greeting.

"How you, Jim?" he called. "Glad to see you. Come in the house and stay a week."

Crispin sat down on the back stoop, and Gander Eye came to sit with him.

"What were you throwing away, Gander Eye?" Crispin asked.

"Oh, just something I didn't reckon I wanted."

Crispin looked at him expectantly, waiting to hear more. But Gander Eye only fished out a cigarette.

"Nothing of value?" prompted Crispin at last.

"Not to me, leastways."

"Nothing of value to anybody?"

Gander Eye grinned, showing his teeth around the cigarette. "I ain't much studying what other folks might could think was valuable. I just didn't want it. You can say, I don't want it from where it come from."

"I see," said Crispin, who did see.

"Well, what you got on your mind?" Gander Eye asked a question in turn. "I'm always glad to see you anyhow, but you must have come over here about something or other."

"You might say that I was just wondering about what you want out of life," said Crispin, choosing his words carefully. "If you wouldn't be glad to have a lot of money, for instance, and be able to buy good things with it."

Gander Eye looked at him sidelong. "You come here to offer me such things as that?"

"Not me, exactly," said Crispin. "It's just that as I get to know you, I sometimes wonder if you don't have a wish for something you haven't got."

"Sure enough," nodded Gander Eye. "A man's always got that kind of wish. But money wouldn't fetch it for me. I got enough to buy my needs, and I'll tell you I don't need nothing very bad. If I got just three taters in the house I'll tell anybody on this earth to go to hell."

"I see," said Crispin, seeing again.

Gander Eye blew a puff of smoke. "All right, Jim. If you ain't here to talk about a lot of money for me that I don't hanker after, what is it? If I can help you, I'll do it."

He looked levelly at Crispin, who drew a long breath, like somebody making up his mind.

"I'll tell you about a picture I'm going to make," said Crispin. "As a matter of fact, I've already told you something about it."

"You're all the time making pretty pictures. Right pretty ones."

"I mean my ideas of a picture of the Kimber baptism. I can't paint it at their place, I told you, but I can paint it at mine. And I need models—people to pose for me. I was wondering if you wouldn't pose for the figure of the Captain."

Gander Eye cocked a black brow. "Him and me don't favor one another in looks, no way."

"It won't be the Captain I'm painting, and I don't particularly want you to look like him," said Crispin. "This will be my own impression of the baptism. Stripped down, you'll have good muscles—"

"You ain't never seen me with my clothes off."

"I'm an artist. I can tell that sort of thing."

Gander Eye pursed his lips. "If you get me for the Captain in the picture, who'll you have for that pretty naked girl?"

"I'm going to ask Slowly," said Crispin.

There was a silence, in which even the soft noise of insects and birds seemed stilled.

"I reckon you mean, you already know how she'd look with her clothes off," said Gander Eye tonelessly.

"And I reckon you mean you object," said Crispin, daring to smile.

"Seems to me like as if the only person's got a right to object is Slowly," Gander Eye pronounced. "But look here, I ain't a-going to pose there with her, not both of us together without no clothes on."

Crispin's smile came out all the way. "That means you've decided to pose. All right, Gander Eye, I'll paint only one of you at a time. All right?"

"I reckon so."

"Listen, Gander Eye," Crispin decided to say, "this was once a rich timber-producing part of the country, but has there ever been any mining?"