_The Face at the Window_
With heavy, sluggish engines I panted down and came to rest in the dull
yellow glow of the field lights. A new world here. The field was flat,
caked ooze, cracked and hardened. It sloped upward from the shore toward
where, a quarter of a mile away, I could see the dull lights of the
settlement, blurred by the gathered night vapors.
The field operator shut off his permission signal and came forward. He
was a squat, heavy-set fellow in wide trousers and soiled white shirt
flung open at his thick throat. The sweat streamed from his forehead.
This oppressive heat! I had discarded my flying garb in the descent. I
wore a shirt, knee-length pants, with hose and wide-soled shoes of the
newly fashioned Lowland design. What few weapons I dared carry were
carefully concealed. No alien could enter Nareda bearing anything
resembling a lethal weapon.
My wide, thick-soled shoes did not look suspicious for one who planned
much walking on the caked Lowland ooze. But those fat soles were
cleverly fashioned to hide a long, keen knife-blade, like a dirk. I
could lift a foot and get the knife out of its hidden compartment with
fair speed. This I had in one shoe.
In the other, was the small mechanism of a radio safety recorder and
image finder, with its attendant individual audiophone transmitter and
receiver. A miracle of smallness, these tiny contrivances. With
batteries, wires and grids, the whole device could lay in the palm of
one's hand. Once past this field inspection I would rig it for use under
my shirt, strapped around my chest. And I had some colored magnesium
flares.
* * * * *
The field operator came panting.
"Who are you?"
"Philip Grant. From Great New York." I showed him my name etched on my
forearm. He and his fellows searched me, but I got by.
"You have no documents?"
"No."
My letter to the President of Nareda was written with invisible ink upon
the fabric of my shirt. If he had heated it to a temperature of 180 deg.F.
or so, and blown the fumes of hydrochloric acid upon it, the writing
would have come out plain enough.
I said, "You'll house and care for my machine?"
They would care for it. They told me the price--swindlingly exorbitant
for the unwary traveller who might wander down here.
"All correct," I said cheerfully. "And half that much more for you and
your men if you give me good service. Where can I have a room and
meals?"
"Spawn," said the operator. "He is the best. Fat-bellied from his own
good cooking. Take him there, Hugo."
I had a gold coin instantly ready; and with a few additional directions
regarding my flyer, I started off.
It had been hot and oppressive standing in the field; it was infinitely
worse climbing the mud-slope into the village; but my carrier, trudging
in advance of me along the dark, winding path up the slope, shouldered
my bag and seemed not to notice the effort. We passed occasional
tube-lights strung on poles. They illumined the heavy rounded crags. A
tumbled region, this slope which once was the ocean floor twenty
thousand feet below the surface. Rifts were here like gulleys; little
buttes reared their rounded, dome heads. And there were caves and
crevices in which deep sea fish once had lurked.
* * * * *
For ten minutes or so we climbed. It was past the midnight hour; the
village was asleep. We entered its outposts. The houses were small
structures of clay. In the gloom they looked like drab little beehives
set in unplanned groups, with paths for streets wandering between them.
Then we came to a more prosperous neighborhood. The street widened and
straightened. The clay houses, still with rounded dome like tops, stood
back from the road, with wooden front fences, and gardens and shrubbery.
The windows and doors were like round finger-holes plugged in the clay
by a giant hand. Occasionally the windows, dimly lighted, stared like
sleeping giant eyes.
There were flowers in all the more pretentious private gardens. Their
perfume, hanging in the heavy night air, lay on the village, making one
forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the
Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in
the village now, I felt it less ominous. The scent of the flowers, the
street lined in one place by arching giant fronds drowsing and nodding
overhead--there seemed a strange exotic romance to it. The sultry air
might almost have been sensuous.
"Much further, Hugo?"
"No. We are here."
He turned abruptly into a gateway, led me through a garden and to the
doorway of a large, rambling, one-story building. The news of my coming
had preceded me. A front room was lighted; my host was waiting.
Hugo set down my bag, accepted another gold coin; and with a queer
sidelong smile, the incentive for which I had not the slightest idea,
he vanished. I fronted my host, this Jacob Spawn. Strange fate that
should have led me to Spawn! And to little Jetta!
* * * * *
Spawn was a fat-bellied Dutchman, as the field attendant had said. A
fellow of perhaps fifty-five, with sparse gray hair and a heavy-jowled,
smooth-shaved face from which his small eyes peered stolidly at me. He
laid aside a huge, old-fashioned calabash pipe and offered a pudgy hand.
"Welcome, young man, to Nareda. Seldom do we see strangers."
The meal which he presently cooked and served me himself was lavishly
done. He spoke good English, but slowly, heavily, with the guttural
intonation of his race. He sat across the table from me, puffing his
pipe while I ate.
"What brings you here, young lad? A week, you say?"
"Or more. I don't know. I'm looking for oil. There should be petroleum
beneath these rocks."
For an hour I avoided his prying questions. His little eyes roved me,
and I knew he was no fool, this Dutchman, for all his heavy, stolid
look.
We remained in his kitchen. Save for its mud walls, its concave,
dome-roof, it might have been a cookery of the Highlands. There was a
table with its tube-light; the chairs; his electron stove; his orderly
rows of pots and pans and dishes on a broad shelf.
I recall that it seemed to me a woman's hand must be here. But I saw no
woman. No one, indeed, beside Spawn himself seemed to live here. He was
reticent of his own business, however much he wanted to pry into mine.
I had felt convinced that we were alone. But suddenly I realized it was
not so. The kitchen adjoined an interior back-garden. I could see it
through the opened door oval--a dim space of flowers; a little path to a
pergola; an adobe fountain. It was a sort of Spanish patio out there,
partially enclosed by the wings of the house. Moonlight was struggling
into it. And, as I gazed idly, I thought I saw a figure lurking. Someone
watching us.
* * * * *
Was it a boy, observing us from the shadowed moonlit garden? I thought
so. A slight, half grown boy. I saw his figure--in short ragged trousers
and a shirt-blouse--made visible in a patch of moonlight as he moved
away and entered the dark opposite wing of the house.
I did not see the boy's figure again; and presently I suggested that I
retire. Spawn had already shown me my bedroom. It was in another wing of
the house. It had a window facing the front; and a window and door back
to this same patio. And a door to the house corridor.
"Sleep well, Meester Grant." My bag was here on the table under an
electrolier. "Shall I call you?"
"Yes," I said. "Early."
He lingered a moment. I was opening my bag. I flung it wide under his
gaze.
"Well, good night. I shall be very comfortable, thanks."
"Good night," he said.
He went out the patio door. I watched his figure cross the moonlit path
and enter the kitchen. The noise of his puttering there sounded for a
time. Then the light went out and the house and garden fell into
silence.
I closed my doors. They sealed on the inside, and I fastened them
securely. Then I fastened the transparent window panes. I did not
undress, but lay on the bed in the dark. I was tired; I realized it now.
But sleep would not come.
I am no believer in occultism, but there are premonitions which one
cannot deny. It seemed now as I lay there in the dark that I had every
reason to be perturbed, yet I could not think why. Perhaps it was
because I had been lying to this innkeeper stoutly for an hour past, and
whether he believed me or not for the life of me I could not now
determine.
* * * * *
I sat up on the bed, presently, and adjusted the wires and diaphragms of
the ether-wave mechanism. When in place it was all concealed under my
shirt. As I switched it on, the electrodes against my flesh tingled a
little. But it was absolutely soundless, and one gets used to the
tingle. I decided to call Hanley.
The New York wave-sorter handled me promptly, but Hanley's office was
dead.
As I sat there in the darkness, annoyed at this, a slight noise forced
itself on me. A scratching--a tap--something outside my window.
Spawn, come back to peer in at me?
I slipped noiselessly from the bed. The sound had come from the window
which faced the patio. The room, over by the bed, was wholly dark. The
moonlight outside showed the patio window as a dimly illumined oval.
For a moment I crouched on the floor by the bed. No sound. The silence
of the Lowlands is as heavy and oppressive as its air. I felt as though
my heart were audible.
I lifted my foot; extracted my dirk. It opened into a very businesslike
steel blade of a good twelve-inch length. I bared the blade. The click
of it leaving the flat, hollow handle sounded loud in the stillness of
the room.
A moment. Then it seemed that outside my window a shadow had moved. I
crept along the floor. Rose up suddenly at the window.
And stared at a face peering in at me. A small face, framed by short,
clustering, dark curls.
A girl!