A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation.
Trent took one cautious step farther into the little room; an especially bright red light, or series of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as he stepped forward - the machines and consoles pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust. The lights which had snagged his attention were numbers. They were under a glass strip on a metal construct which was spinning its way out of a console. This new thing looked like some sort of chair, although no one sitting in it would have been very comfortable. At least, no one with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver.
The glass strip was in one of the arms of this twisted chair - if it was a chair. And the numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.
72:34:18
became
72:34:17
and then
72:34:16
Chapter Six
Trent looked at his watch, which had a sweep second hand, and used it to confirm what his eyes had already told him. The chair might or might not really be a chair, but the numbers under the glass strip were a digital clock. It was running backward. Counting down, to be perfectly accurate. And what would happen when that read-out finally went from
00:00:01
to
00:00:00
some three days from this very afternoon?
He was pretty sure he knew. Every American boy knows one of two things happen when a backward-running clock finally reads zeros across the board: an explosion or a lift-off. Trent thought there was too much equipment, too many gadgets, for it to be an explosion. He thought something had gotten into the house while they were in England. Some sort of spore, perhaps, that had drifted through space for a billion years before being caught in the gravitational pull of the earth, spiraling down through the atmosphere like a bit of milkweed fluff caught in a mild breeze, and finally falling into the chimney of a house in Titusville, Indiana. Into the Bradburys' house in Titusville, Indiana.
It might have been something else entirely, of course, but the spore idea felt right to Trent, and although he was the oldest of the Bradbury kids, he was still young enough to sleep well after eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:00 P.M., and to believe completely in his own perceptions and intuitions. And in the end, it didn't really matter, did it? What mattered was what had happened. And, of course, what was going to happen. When Trent left the wine-cellar this time, he not only snapped the padlock's arm closed, he took the key as well.
Something terrible happened at Lew's faculty party. It happened at quarter of nine, only forty-five minutes or so after the first guests arrived, and Trent and Laurie later heard Lew shouting at their mother that the only goddam consideration she had shown him was getting up to her foolishness early - if she'd waited until ten o'clock or so, there would have been fifty or more people circulating through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and back parlor. 'What the hell's the matter with you?' Trent and Laurie heard him yelling at her, and when Trent felt Laurie's hand creep into his like a small cold mouse, he held it tightly. 'Don't you know what people are going to say about this? Don't you know how people in the department talk? I mean, really, Catherine - it was like something out of the Three Stooges!' Their mother's only reply was soft, helpless sobbing, and for just one moment Trent felt a horrible, unwilling burst of hate for her. Why had she married him in the first place? Didn't she deserve this for being such a fool?
Ashamed of himself, he pushed the thought away, made it gone, and turned to Laurie. He was appalled to see tears pouring down her cheeks, and the mute sorrow in her eyes went to his heart like a knife-blade.
'Great party, huh?' she whispered, scrubbing at her cheeks with the heels of her palms. 'Right, Sprat,' he said, and hugged her so she could cry against his shoulder without being heard. 'It'll make my top-ten list at the end of the year, no sweat.'