[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
Mooney looked out of his window, and the sky was white.
It was a sudden, bright, cold flare and it was gone again. It had no
more features than a fog, at least not through the window that was
showered with snow and patterned with spray from the windy sea.
Mooney blew on his hands and frowned at the window.
"Son of a gun," he said, and thought for a moment about phoning the
Coast Guard station. Of course, that meant going a quarter of a mile in
the storm to reach the only other house nearby that was occupied; the
Hansons had a phone that worked, but a quarter of a mile was a long way
in the face of a December gale. And it was all dark out there now. Less
than twenty miles across the bay was New York, but this Jersey shore
coast was harsh as the face of the Moon.
Mooney decided it was none of his business.
He shook the kettle, holding it with an old dish towel because it was
sizzling hot. It was nearly empty, so he filled it again and put it
back on the stove. He had all four top burners and the oven going,
which made the kitchen tolerably warm--as long as he wore the scarf and
the heavy quilted jacket and kept his hands in his pockets. And there
was plenty of tea.
Uncle Lester had left that much behind him--plenty of tea, nearly a
dozen boxes of assorted cookies and a few odds and ends of canned
goods. And God's own quantity of sugar.
It wasn't exactly a balanced diet, but Mooney had lived on it for three
weeks now--smoked turkey sausages for breakfast, and oatmeal cookies
for lunch, and canned black olives for dinner. And always plenty of tea.
* * * * *
The wind screamed at him as he poured the dregs of his last cup of tea
into the sink and spooned sugar into the cup for the next one. It was,
he calculated, close to midnight. If the damn wind hadn't blown down
the TV antenna, he could be watching the late movies now. It helped to
pass the time; the last movie was off the air at two or three o'clock,
and then he could go to bed and, with any luck, sleep till past noon.
And Uncle Lester had left a couple of decks of sticky, child-handled
cards behind him, too, when the family went back to the city at the end
of the summer. So what with four kinds of solitaire, and solo bridge,
and television, and a few more naps, Mooney could get through to the
next two or three A.M. again. If only the wind hadn't blown down the
antenna!
But as it was, all he could get on the cheap little set his uncle had
left behind was a faint gray herringbone pattern--
He straightened up with the kettle in his hand, listening.
It was almost as though somebody was knocking at the door.
"That's crazy," Mooney said out loud after a moment. He poured the
water over the tea bag, tearing a little corner off the paper tag on
the end of the string to mark the fact that this was the second cup he
had made with the bag. He had found he could get three cups out of a
single bag, but even loaded with sugar, the fourth cup was no longer
very good. Still, he had carefully saved all the used, dried-out bags
against the difficult future day when even the tea would be gone.
That was going to be one bad day for Howard Mooney.
Rap, tap. It really was someone at the door! Not knocking, exactly, but
either kicking at it or striking it with a stick.
Mooney pulled his jacket tight around him and walked out into the
frigid living room, not quite so frigid as his heart.
"Damn!" he said. "Damn, damn!"
What Mooney knew for sure was that nothing good could be coming in that
door for him. It might be a policeman from Sea Bright, wondering about
the light in the house; it might be a member of his uncle's family.
It was even possible that one of the stockholders who had put up the
money for that unfortunate venture into frozen-food club management
had tracked him down as far as the Jersey shore. It could be almost
anything or anybody, but it couldn't be good.
All the same, Mooney hadn't expected it to turn out to be a tall, lean
man with angry pale eyes, wearing a silvery sort of leotard.
* * * * *
"I come in," said the angry man, and did.
Mooney slammed the door behind him. Too bad, but he couldn't keep it
open, even if it was conceding a sort of moral right to enter to the
stranger; he couldn't have all that cold air coming in to dilute his
little bubble of warmth.
"What the devil do you want?" Mooney demanded.
The angry man looked about him with an expression of revulsion. He
pointed to the kitchen. "It is warmer. In there?"
"I suppose so. What do--" But the stranger was already walking into the
kitchen. Mooney scowled and started to follow, and stopped, and scowled
even more. The stranger was leaving footprints behind him, or anyway
some kind of marks that showed black on the faded summer rug. True, he
was speckled with snow, but--that much snow? The man was drenched. It
looked as though he had just come out of the ocean.
The stranger stood by the stove and glanced at Mooney warily. Mooney
stood six feet, but this man was bigger. The silvery sort of thing he
had on covered his legs as far as the feet, and he wore no shoes. It
covered his body and his arms, and he had silvery gloves on his hands.
It stopped at the neck, in a collar of what looked like pure silver,
but could not have been because it gave with every breath the man took
and every tensed muscle or tendon in his neck. His head was bare and
his hair was black, cut very short.
He was carrying something flat and shiny by a molded handle. If it
had been made of pigskin, it would have resembled a junior executive's
briefcase.