Protesting sullenly, the two boys disappeared, and the door closed. Gradually, the living room broke into motion. The tape-recorder man began rewinding his reel. The legal stenographer shakily collected her notes and put away her pencils. Hurley lit up a cigar and stood puffing moodily, his face dark and somber.

“I suppose,” Courtland said finally, “that we’ve all accepted it; we assume it’s not a fake.”

“Well,” Pesbroke pointed out, “he vanished. That ought to be proof enough. And all the junk he took out of his kit—”

“It’s only nine years,” Parkinson, the electrician, said thoughtfully. “Wright must be alive already. Let’s look him up and stick a shiv into him.”

“Army engineer,” MacDowell agreed. “R.J. Wright. It ought to be possible to locate him. Maybe we can keep it from happening.”

“How long would you guess people like him can keep the swibbles under control?” Anderson asked.

Courtland shrugged wearily. “No telling. Maybe years … maybe a century. But sooner or later something’s going to come up, something they didn’t expect. And then it’ll be predatory machinery preying on all of us.”

Fay shuddered violently. “It sounds awful; I’m certainly glad it won’t be for a while.”

“You and the repairman,” Courtland said bitterly. “As long as it doesn’t affect you—”

Fay’s overwrought nerves flared up. “We’ll discuss it later on.” She smiled jerkily at Pesbroke. “More coffee? I’ll put some on.” Turning on her heel, she rushed from the living room into the kitchen.

While she was filling the Silex with water, the doorbell quietly rang.

The roomful of people froze. They looked at each other, mute and horrified.

“He’s back,” Hurley said thickly.

“Maybe it’s not him,” Anderson suggested weakly. “Maybe it’s the camera people, finally.”

But none of them moved toward the door. After a time the bell rang again, longer, and more insistently.

“We have to answer it,” Pesbroke said woodenly.

“Not me,” the legal stenographer quavered.

“This isn’t my apartment,” MacDowell pointed out.

Courtland moved rigidly toward the door. Even before he took hold of the knob he knew what it was. Dispatch, using its new-fangled instantaneous transmission. Something to get work crews and repairmen directly to their stations. So control of the swibbles would be absolute and perfect; so nothing would go wrong.

But something had gone wrong. The control had fouled itself up. It was working upside down, completely backward. Self-defeating, futile: it was too perfect. Gripping the knob, he tore the door open.

Standing in the hall were four men. They wore plain gray uniforms and caps. The first of them whipped off his cap, glanced at a written sheet of paper, and then nodded politely at Courtland.

“Evening, sir,” he said cheerfully. He was a husky man, wide-shouldered, with a shock of thick brown hair hanging over his sweat-shiny forehead. “We—uh—got a little lost, I guess. Took a while to get here.”

Peering into the apartment, he hitched up his heavy leather belt, stuffed his route sheet into his pocket, and rubbed his large, competent hands together.

“It’s downstairs in the trunk,” he announced, addressing Courtland and the whole living room of people. “Tell me where you want it, and we’ll bring it right up. We should have a good-sized space—that side over there by the window should do.” Turning away, he and his crew moved energetically toward the service elevator. “These late-model swibbles take up a lot of room.”

Saturday morning, about eleven o’clock, Mrs. Edna Berthelson was ready to make her little trip. Although it was a weekly affair, consuming four hours of her valuable business time, she made the profitable trip alone, preserving for herself the integrity of her find.

Because that was what it was. A find, a stroke of incredible luck. There was nothing else like it, and she had been in business fifty-three years. More, if the years in her father’s store were counted—but they didn’t really count. That had been for the experience (her father made that clear); no pay was involved. But it gave her the understanding of business, the feel of operating a small country store, dusting pencils and unwrapping flypaper and serving up dried beans and chasing the cat out of the cracker barrel where he liked to sleep.

Now the store was old, and so was she. The big, heavyset, black browed man who was her father had died long ago; her own children and grandchildren had been spawned, had crept out over the world, were everywhere. One by one they had appeared, lived in Walnut Creek, sweated through the dry, sun-baked summers, and then gone on, leaving one by one as they had come. She and the store sagged and settled a little more each year, became a little more frail and stern and grim. A little more themselves.

That morning very early Jackie said: “Grandmaw, where are you going?” Although he knew, of course, where she was going. She was going out in her truck as she always did; this was the Saturday trip. But he liked to ask; he was pleased by the stability of the answer. He liked having it always the same.

To another question there was another unvarying answer, but this one didn’t please him so much. It came in answer to the question.”Can I come along?”

The answer to that was always no.

Edna Berthelson laboriously carried packages and boxes from the back of the store to the rusty, upright pickup truck. Dust lay over the truck; its red-metal sides were bent and corroded. The motor was already on; it was wheezing and heating up in the midday sun. A few drab chickens pecked in the dust around its wheels. Under the porch of the store a plump white shaggy sheep squatted, its face vapid, indolent, indifferently watching the activity of the day. Cars and trucks rolled along Mount Diablo Boulevard. Along Lafayette Avenue a few shoppers strolled, farmers and their wives, petty businessmen, farmhands, some city women in their gaudy slacks and print shirts, sandals, bandannas. In the front of the store the radio tinnily played popular songs.

“I asked you a question,” Jackie said righteously. “I asked you where you’re going.”

Mrs. Berthelson bent stiffly over to lift the last armload of boxes. Most of the loading had been done the night before by Arnie the Swede, the hulking, white-haired hired man who did the heavy work around the store. “What?” she murmured vaguely, her gray, wrinkled face twisting with concentration. “You know perfectly well where I’m going. “

Jackie trailed plaintively after her, as she reentered the store to look for her order book. “Can I come? Please, can I come along? You never let me come—you never let anybody come. “

“Of course not,” Mrs. Berthelson said sharply. “It’s nobody’s business. “

“But I want to come along,” Jackie explained.

Slyly, the little old woman turned her gray head and peered back at him, a worn, colorless bird taking in a world perfectly understood. “So does everybody else.” Thin lips twitching in a secret smile, Mrs. Berthelson said softly: “But nobody can.”

Jackie didn’t like the sound of that. Sullenly, he retired to a comer, hands stuck deep in the pockets of his jeans, not taking part in something that was denied him, not approving of something in which he could not share. Mrs. Berthelson ignored him. She pulled her frayed blue sweater around her thin shoulders, located her sunglasses, pulled the screen door shut after her, and strode briskly to the truck.

Getting the truck into gear was an intricate process. For a time she sat tugging crossly at the shift, pumping the clutch up and down, waiting impatiently for the teeth to fall into place. At last, screeching and chattering, the gears meshed; the truck leaped a little, and Mrs. Berthelson gunned the motor and released the hand brake.