Bears Discover Fire

When we locked back in, the chimes for incoming were ringing. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had timed it all perfectly. Hvarlgen rolled off on two wheels to meet them; I was in no hurry. By the time I got to Grand Central, it was empty—everyone was greeting the Diana at South. I walked back down the tube to East. The bowl was gone; it had been returned to Other for Sidrath’s arrival. But the Shadow didn’t seem to notice. He was standing at the foot of the bed, no longer faded. For the first time he seemed to be looking directly at me. I didn’t know whether to say hello or good-bye. The Shadow seemed to be receding faster and faster, and me with him. I lost my balance and fell to one knee just as I “felt” what came to be known, much later, around the world, as the Brush.

III

Four days short of eleven months later, there was a knock at the door of my Road Lord.

“Major Bewley?”

“Call me Colonel,” I said.

It was Here’s Johnny. He was wearing a faux leather suit that somehow told me he had gone ahead and taken retirement. I wasn’t surprised. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live with his sister. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Better than that,” I said. “You’re spending the night.”

It was almost as if we were friends, and at my age almost is as good as the real thing, almost. I cleared a place on the couch (my picture—the same one—was in an eighteen-inch stack of magazines) and he sat down. Here’s Johnny had gained twenty pounds, which often happens to lunies when they lock in for good. I put on a fresh pot of coffee. It must have been the smell of the coffee that made us both think of Hvarlgen.

“She’s in Reykjavik,” Here’s Johnny said. “When the film didn’t show anything, that was it for her. The last straw.

She left the rest of it up to Sidrath and the Commission.”

“The rest of what?” There was no more Shadow; both the image and the substance in the bowl had disappeared with the Brush. As promised. “What did they have left to do?”

“All the surveys, interviews, population samples. All the stuff you’ve read about the Brush; it all came from Sidrath and the Commission. But without Hvarlgen’s help. Or yours, I happened to notice.”

“I’d had enough, myself,” I said. “I felt like we were all getting a little crazy. That whole week was like a dream.

Plus, there seemed, at the time, to be nothing to say. What I had experienced was, literally, as you know—as we all know now—indescribable. Since my contract was up, I sort of cut and ran because I didn’t want to be roped into some elaborate effort to figure it all out.”

“And you thought you were the only one.”

“Well, didn’t we all? At first, anyway.”

It had taken several months of research to determine, positively, that every man, woman, and child on and off the planet (plus, it was now thought, a high percentage of dogs) had experienced the Brush at the same instant. We were no more able to describe it than the dogs were. It was intensely sensual but in no way physical, brilliantly colorful but not visible, musical but not quite a sound—an entirely new sensation, indescribable and unforgettable at the same time. The best description I heard was from an Indian filmmaker, who said it was as if someone had painted his soul with light. That’s poetic license, of course. It had happened in less than an instant, but it was days before anyone spoke of it, and weeks before the SETI Commission realized it was the communication we had been promised.

By then it was only a memory. And lucky it was that we all had felt it: otherwise some of us would be spending the next few centuries trying to describe it to those who hadn’t. A new religion, maybe. As it was, most people on the planet were going about their business as if it had never happened, while a few were still trying to figure out what the Brush meant to the children. And the dogs.

“It was a bitter disappointment to Hvarlgen,” said Here’s Johnny. It was late; we were sitting outside, having a whisky, waiting to catch the sunset.

“I know,” I said. “To her, it was an insult. She called it the Brush-off. I can understand her point of view. We are finally contacted by another, maybe the only other life-form in the Universe, but it has nothing to say. No more than a hello, how are you. A wave from a passing ship, she called it.”

“Maybe because it happened to everybody,” Here’s Johnny said.

“I can understand that too,” I said. “We all thought it was going to be just for us.”

One of my unofficial grandsons rode up on a bicycle carrying a turtle. I gave him a dollar for it, and put it into a polyboard box under the trailer with two other turtles. “I pay the kids for the ones they pick up off the road,” I said.

“Then after sundown I let them go, away from the highway.”

“Me, I’m more optimistic,” Here’s Johnny said. “Maybe the children who experienced the Brush will grow up different. Maybe smarter or less violent.”

“Or maybe the dogs,” I said.

“What do you think?” he asked. “You were, after all, the first contact.”