The Taking

time, she had the solitude and the peace to brood about what difference might exist between the wonders she had seen and her interpretation of them. Some elusive truth still teased at the limits of her reason, but she could not quite seize it.
        Tutelary. A guardian, a protector, especially one with special powers. Although it wasn't an archaic word, it wasn't one that she remembered having used before in either her writing or conversation; yet it had come into her mind as precisely the right word to ward off the ET in the bank vault. Tutelary.
        A few minutes before three o'clock in the morning, the rain stopped.
        She went to a window to pull aside a blind, but returned to her chair without doing so. She was afraid that clinging to the window would be some fungoid form, human faces screaming silently in the rounded surfaces of its strange flesh.

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    64
        
        WITH DAWN, THE TRAMMELED SUN WAS FREED FROM chains of rain and nets of mist. As if rising in celebration, it painted the eastern heavens with the glow of roses, blued the remainder of the sky, and gilded the windows of Black Lake.
        Molly, Neil, the children, and the dogs left the cold marble lobby of the bank for the warm morning in the street. They stood at first in quiet rapture, faces to the sky, mouths open as if to drink the sun's golden wine.
        Only thirty-six hours had elapsed since they had seen sunshine, but Molly felt as if half her life had passed since she had last enjoyed this delicious warmth on her face.
        One of the children was the first to notice the restoration of all things. "Hey, all the crap and creepazoids are gone!"
        The strangulation of blackish moss had rinsed out of the trees and off the buildings, dissolved, and washed along gutters into storm drains.
        The phantasmagoria of fungi, both those that walked and those that rooted, had vanished. What remained was right: sodden grass, dripping shrubbery, washed-out flower beds of gluey mud.
        No monkeylike forms capered on the roofs, and nothing red and ravenous crawled through the trees.
        Molly felt almost as though she had dreamed it all-or were dreaming now.
        The earth had been taken by an extraterrestrial species as ruthless as might have been a race of intelligent crocodiles. The future had promised an end, and soon, to the human experience and the eradication of every human achievement. Yet the future that had been inevitable was not. Here in the still point, the dance of life went on, moment by moment.
        She could not comprehend what had happened, what those princes from another star had intended to accomplish, whether they had in fact accomplished it, or why they had gone.
        A flicker of alarm trembled her heart when she glimpsed movement in the sky, but she saw that this, too, was good and right. Overhead a hawk turned in a widening gyre.
        The bark of a dog, not one of theirs, drew her attention to the north end of Main Street. The Irish setter, first seen the previous day, led three adults and a group of children toward the bank. The number of kids in that procession had increased since she had waved at them on Marine Avenue.
        Another bark, this time from a curly-coated mutt of many breeds, announced the approach of another group from the south end of Main Street. One adult, seven children, and a golden cat that guarded their western flank.
        Molly felt Neil's gaze, met his eyes, moved to him, and took his hand.
        A third group-four adults, more than twenty children, and a host of dogs-called out as they approached through the small park across the street.
        Of all the shocks and astonishments of the past thirty-six hours, none had affected Molly more profoundly than this, and certainly none had lifted her heart as this lifted it.
        In a quarter of an hour, the last of nine groups arrived, and Molly was able to tally the surviving population of Black River, where once more than two thousand people had lived. Twenty-two adults, most of them parents. One hundred seventy-six children, more than half of whom were orphans now. Forty dogs, seven cats.

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    65
        
        THAT GATHERING ON MAIN STREET OCCURRED ON Thursday morning, and by the end of breakfast, all twenty-two adults agreed that they must move the children out of Black Lake, to a more comfortable location in the lowlands to the west.
        This was