And what could you do in a case like this? You could go to the police and say, ‘I have evidence that machines from outer space have arrived on Earth and are freeing our machines.’
And the police — what would they do? Give you the drunkometer test, yell for a medic to see if you were sane, wire the FBI to see if you were wanted anywhere, and more than likely grill you about the latest murder. Then sock you in the jug until they thought up something else.
You could go to the governor — and the governor, being a politician and a very slick one at that, would give you a polite brush-off.
You could go to Washington and it would take you weeks to see someone. And after you had seen him, the FBI would get your name as a suspicious character to be given periodic checks. And if Congress heard about it and they were not too busy at the moment they would more than likely investigate you.
You could go to the state university and talk to the scientists — or try to talk to them. They could be guaranteed to make you feel an interloper, and an uncurried one at that.
You could go to a newspaper — especially if you were a newspaperman and you could write a story … Crane shuddered at the thought of it. He could imagine what would happen.
People rationalized. They rationalized to reduce the complex to the simple, the unknown to the understandable, the alien to the commonplace. They rationalized to save their sanity — to make the mentally unacceptable concept into something they could live with.
The thing in the cabinet had been a practical joke. McKay had said about the sewing machine, ‘Have some fun with it.’ Out at Harvard there’ll be a dozen theories to explain the disappearance of the electronic brain, and learned men will wonder why they never thought of the theories before. And the man who saw the sewing machine? Probably by now, Crane thought, he will have convinced himself that he was stinking drunk.
It was dark when he returned home. The evening paper was a white blob on the porch where the newsboy had thrown it. He picked it up and for a moment before he let himself into the house he stood in the dark shadow of the porch and stared up the street.
Old and familiar, it was exactly as it had always been, ever since his boyhood days, a friendly place with a receding line of street lamps and the tall, massive protectiveness of ancient elm trees. On this night there was the smell of smoke from burning leaves drifting down the street, and it, like the street, was old and familiar, a recognizable symbol stretching back to first remembrances.