by Jack Finney
THE door of my office opened instantly, and the four men came in, hurrying, their faces utterly calm and composed, completely devoid of emotion. I looked past them, through the partly blocked door. There on the brown rug, yellow-white and reproduced in absolute perfection down to the last useless detail, lay two skeletons, red-daubed on the shoulders. Beside and under them, nearly unnoticeable on the rug, lay the brittle fragments of the two great pods.
Budlong said, “So that’s what happened—you used substitutes. Very interesting.”
“All right, Miles,” Mannie said. “You’ve managed to waste these pods; but now we’ll simply hold you in a cell till we can get others.”
I just nodded, and we all went out then, into the building hallway. Mannie said, “We’ll go down the fire stairs. The car’s in back.” And we walked along the hall to the fire door, then began filing down the staircase.
They had Chet Meeker and the little stout man first, Becky and me in the middle, Mannie and Budlong directly behind. There was no reason I could think of for waiting, and as we approached the first landing, I placed my palms together loosely before me, the thumb and forefinger of each hand sliding into the opposite sleeve. The fingers of each hand touched and pulled loose the strips of adhesive just above my cuffs. Then—and this was Becky’s plan—each hand held a loaded hypodermic syringe.
Stepping onto the landing, beginning the turn to the next flight of stairs, the little stout man was on the inside, gripping the stair rail; and Chet Meeker swung out to walk beside him. I stepped suddenly forward, directly behind him, shoving Becky to one side with an elbow, flinging her into a corner of the landing. Both my hands shot instantly forward, hard and fast, the needles tight between my fingers, thumbs on the depressors, and I gave each man 2 c.c. of morphine in the great muscles of the buttocks.
They yelped and swung toward me as Mannie and Budlong leaped onto my back. I was smashed to the steel floor, gouging, kicking, using the needles as weapons. But four against one, they had me overpowered in seconds; both needles were kicked out of my hands, one ground to powder and glass fragments under a heel. They had one of my arms and both legs pinned tight, and I was wrenching and jerking my free arm, trying to keep them from pinning it. Becky—I saw it, and so did they—stood huddled in a corner against the brick walls, trying to keep clear of the struggling mass of men, the flying feet and arms. She cowered helplessly, eyes wide and frightened, both hands raised in horror to her open mouth.
Then, as I struggled, the sound of our panting and grunts loud and echoing, Becky’s fingers—her hands still upraised, eyes still wide and astonished—flickered at the sleeves of her dress. She yanked both strips of adhesive loose, stepped forward suddenly—as Budlong and Mannie leaned over me, grabbing at my flailing arm—and plunged home both of the needles she held in her hands. Mannie straightened; I lay there motionless, and for a moment we all stood, knelt, or lay in a frozen tableau. They stared at Becky, then looked down at me.
“What are you doing?” Budlong said puzzledly. “I don’t understand.” Then I rolled to my knees, starting to rise, and they were on me again.
It’s hard to say, it isn’t easy to judge, how long we struggled there. But then Chet Meeker, kneeling on my arm, sighed gently, and toppled limply sideways onto the next flight of stairs, and rolled, slowly bumping each step, till his feet caught in the stair rails. They stared after him, and Mannie said, “Hey!” Then the little stout man, kneeling at my head, hands on my throat, let go, and dropped back, slumping against the wall in a sitting position, and sat there blinking at us.
BUDLONG looked down at me, his mouth opening to speak; then his knees bent, and he fell heavily onto the steel floor, muttering something I couldn’t make out. Mannie had grabbed the railing with both hands, and now he bent over to lay his forehead on the backs of his clenched hands. After a few moments, he slowly knelt to the floor, then he fell face forward on the metal floor.
We ran, and in a minute, perhaps, we were at the back door of the building, pushing against it. Their car was locked, and I grabbed Becky’s arm. Three seconds later we were climbing one of the packed-dirt paths that wound up into the Marin County hills. Then we were hidden by the straggling undergrowth and wild, tangled shrubbery.
We had no chance; the string was nearly played out, and I knew it and didn’t try to fool myself about it. I knew these paths and hills, every foot of them, but so did others, plenty of others. And between us and Highway 101—the passing cars and humanity from outside—lay over two miles of hills, paths, open field and farmland. Against any kind of search and pursuit at all, we couldn’t get through and there was no place we could go into hiding to wait for outside help—if any was coming. Even as I was thinking so, the town fire signal began blasting the air, sounding very close, building a terrible sense of panicky excitement.
I knew men were already getting into cars, starting after us; I knew there were more and more pursuers with every blast of that ominous, terrible sound. Far ahead, men were leaving home to spread through these hills, hunting or waiting for us. The next few minutes were the last moments left in which we could even hope to stay unobserved.
Farther up the hill to our right, the underbrush dwindled and gave way to an exposed stretch of field, waist high with summer-browned weeds. Walking in that field, we’d be instantly visible to the first man or men to come over the hill’s crest or step out from the underbrush below it. Yet to continue walking this path could only mean stepping into the arms of the men who would be prowling it within minutes.
Holding Becky by the arm, I stopped and stood in a panic of confused indecision, trying to make one of two hopeless choices. I turned suddenly, leading Becky, and we climbed the hill to the edge of the exposed, sunlit field of weeds that stretched on up to the crest. Stooping, my arms moving fast, I began yanking great handfuls of weeds loose, snapping their brittle stems, gesturing violently at Becky to do the same. Then we had, each of us, a huge armload of weeds, like sheaves of wheat. “Walk ahead,” I said to Becky, “out into the field,” and without question she moved, her body pushing through the weeds, leaving a swath of bent weeds trailing behind her.
I followed, sidling along, and with my free arm moving in a steady, scythelike sweep, I caught up the weeds we’d bent down, straightening them behind me as I walked. I moved fast, sweeping the bent weeds to an exactly upright position again; and when we’d gone twenty yards, I could see no visible trail behind us. In the center of the field now, I had Becky lie down, and then I lay down beside her. I scattered her armload of yellow weeds over us, covering us completely; then, as well as I could, I straightened the weeds around us, and propped those I carried on top of us, spreading them apart till they stood—leaning, sagging in places—in a more or less vertical position.
EXACTLY what our hiding place would look like to an observer on the edge of the field, I didn’t know; but with no trail leading to it, I could only hope it wouldn’t be particularly noticeable. The middle of a wide and exposed field, apparently searchable at a glance, was, I hoped, a hiding place that wouldn’t occur to anyone passing it. A hunter expects the fugitive to run.
We lay for a long time, motionless, terribly uncomfortable at first, then painfully uncomfortable, but never moving, never changing position. From time to time we heard voices, on the path near us and from farther away. Once—for a long, long time, it seemed, though it was probably no more than three to four minutes—we heard two men talking quietly, slowly climbing our hill, cutting through the field we lay in. Their voices drew nearer, steadily louder in volume as they approached; then they passed us, no more than thirty yards away. We could have heard clearly, I suppose, what they were saying, but I was too frightened and intent on guessing their progress to pay attention to the sense of their talk. Several times, very distantly, we heard automobile horns, series of short and long blasts in some sort of signal.
After a very long time we were cold, the damp and chill rising from the ground underneath us. The
sun was low, time had passed, and I knew that we weren’t going to be found, at least not here where we lay.
WE LAY there until full dark, and for the last long spell of it we were steadily shivering. I had to clench my teeth till my jaws ached to prevent my teeth from chattering. We talked a little, trying to comfort each other.
After a time—despairing, uncomfortable and afraid, needing to blame someone, anyone—I remembered the way Jack Belicec had seemed to stumble and stutter incoherently when he was making our appeal for help to the San Francisco FBI office. I was convinced now that he’d been stalling until the operator had time to realize what was happening and sabotage the call completely. He too was lost, caught and changed into something that was no longer Jack Belicec; perhaps it had happened while he was napping alone in his room the day before. At other moments, remembering how Jack and Theodora had led their pursuers away from us, I wasn’t sure, and let myself hope that maybe he and Theodora had got through, that at any moment they’d arrive with help. But I didn’t believe it; I couldn’t.
We stood up, finally—stiffly, hardly able to get our feet—and I saw that with darkness there had come advantages and disadvantages. We couldn’t be seen from even ten yards away—there was no moon at all—and now low broken stretches of fog, a real help, drifted low in the sky, and across the ground. But the moon would be rising very soon, and I knew that long before we could walk two miles, it would be well above the horizon. And long since, in the time we’d lain silent and motionless in this field, the search had undoubtedly been organized, the hunting party completed—every able-bodied man and woman in Santa Mira, for all I knew. And there was only one way we could get out: the way we now began walking, toward Highway 101. And they knew that, all of them, as well as we. We weren’t going to get out; that was certain, and I understood it. We walked on through the dark as quietly as we could, Becky holding my arm, while I guided us by means of an occasional small landmark.
An hour passed; we’d come over a mile, encountering no one, hearing no one. An illusion of hope began to grow in me, and I began visualizing Becky and me reaching the highway and running onto it, stopping traffic suddenly, bunching it up, brakes squealing—twenty or a hundred cars deep, bumper to bumper, and filled with real and living people.
We kept on, covering another half mile in another half hour. Then we were moving down the gentle slope of the final hill, toward the wide strip of farmland between us and the highway; and in the little valley at our feet, we could see the fences and fields. Just below and a little to the left lay Art Gessner’s farmhouse, dark and unlighted, and his fields, neatly ruled off by the thin lines of his irrigation ditches. In the nearest field I could see something I’d never seen grow there before. Paralleling the ditches lay row after row of what looked like cabbages or pumpkins, though neither were grown here, not in this area. There were fairly round spheres, dark circular blobs in the faint moonlight, lying in long evenly spaced rows—and then I knew what they were, and Becky, beside me, drew in a sudden sharp breath. There lay the new pods, already as large as bushel baskets and still growing—hundreds of them in the dim even light of the moon.
The sight terrified me, and I hated to go on, to walk down there and through them—but we had to. Now we sat down, waiting till once more the fog drifted over the face of the moon; I wanted to cross this field in as near to pitch darkness as possible.
WE WERE both tired, exhausted in spite of all the Benzedrine we’d been taking. We sat slumped, staring dully at the ground, waiting till the fog should darken the moon completely. I realized, suddenly, what would happen; now I understood why we’d got as far as we had, encountering no one. There had been no point in scattering their strength through the miles of territory we had crossed, trying to find us in the darkness. Instead, they were simply waiting for us, hundreds of silent figures bunched together in a solid line, hidden in the fields between us and the highway we had to approach. Presently we would have to walk into their waiting arms and hands.
But I told myself this: there is always a chance. Men have escaped from the most tightly guarded prisons other men could contrive. War prisoners have walked hundreds of miles through a population of millions, every one of them his enemy. We had to count on sheer luck; a momentary gap in the line at just the right instant, a mistake in identity made in the darkness. Until the very moment we were caught, there was always a chance.
And then I saw that we didn’t dare take even what little chance we might have had to cross that field. A low swirl of fog edged off the face of the moon, and again I saw the pods, row after row of them, lying evil and motionless at our feet. If we were caught, what about these pods? We had no right to walk on and be caught, no right to waste ourselves! We were here—with the pods—and even though it was hopeless, even though it made capture an absolute certainty, we had to use ourselves against these pods. If there was any luck to be had, this was how it had to be used.
A minute passed before the bank of fog moved across the face of the moon. Then, once again, it was dark, and we stood and walked silently down the hill, into the monstrous field. The nearest building was the barn, and I hurried Becky toward it, occasionally brushing the dry brittle surfaces of the great pods, stepping over the irrigation ditches between the rows.
I FOUND great metal drums of tractor gas just inside the open door of the barn, lined up along the wall on the dirt-packed floor. Suddenly excitement and hope flared up in me; new strength came to me. This was futile, of course—there were hundreds of pods—but the chance to make a stand is always the one to take. I shook two Benzedrine tablets into Becky’s hand, took a couple myself, and we choked them down. Then Becky helped me tip the first drum onto its side. It took me ten minutes, prowling that barn, lighting one match after another, but at last I found a rusted wrench up on one of the low rafters. Then we rocked the big metal drum, got it rolling, and trundled it out through the doorway and down to the nearest of the irrigation ditches. I wedged the drum in place—the hexagonal metal plug over the edge of the ditch—with a clod of dirt, and left it.
Presently six drums of low-test farm gasoline lay side by side at the head of the irrigation ditches, and the first one was already empty, its contents flowing down through the field. Ten minutes passed; we simply sat there, silently. Then the flow from the last of the drums ceased, except for a slow dripping sound, and I knelt beside the open ditch, the sharp fumes of gasoline stinging at my eyes. I lighted a match, dropped it into the slow-flowing gas, and it promptly went out. I lighted another, and this time brought it slowly down, till the bottom edge of flame touched the shiny surface; I could see my face reflected in the pool. The flame caught, a little flicker of blue that grew into a circle, tiny for a moment, then swelling. And then it flared, and the flame—red spikes mixing with the blue now—moved down the ditch, widening to its edges. In another instant it began to race, and I ran back to the far comer of the barn where Becky was, shielded and in the shadows.
The heat grew, the flames began to make a liquid crackle, and then reddened and shot suddenly high, and the black smoke began to roll. From our hiding place, we watched the line of flame, climbing in height, running down the field in parallel lines, shooting down connecting ditches with a subdued roaring sound, and the black silhouettes of the pods were suddenly sharp against the smoky red flame. A first pod burst into a torch of pale, almost incandescent flame, the smoke white; then a second burst, a third, a fourth and fifth together, then more and more. And now the soft explosive puffs of pods bursting into flame came steadily as a clock tick, one after another down the rows, flaring into mushrooming incandescence. And then, over the roar of the fire, we heard the sound of hundreds of voices moving toward us through the night.
For perhaps a minute I had thought we had won, but then the gasoline—only six drums of it flowing into that great field—burned out. One after another the racing red lines of flame slowed and stopped, dwindling wherever the last trickles of gasoline were flowing into the ground.
The rows of burning torches still glowed, but the flames were redder, the white smoke increasing, and no new pods were catching. The flames—twelve and fourteen feet high at their peak—were suddenly only waist-high, sinking rapidly, and the red lines of fire—once solid and bright—were broken. At almost the same moment, the flames, which had covered perhaps half an acre, subsided to flickering inch-high tongues; and it was then, the moon brightly lighting the countryside, that we saw the hundreds of figures advancing upon us.
They hardly touched us; there was no anger, no emotion in them. Stan Morley, the jeweler, simply laid a hand lightly on my arm, and Ben Ketchel stood beside Becky, in case she should try to run. The others, gathering around us, looked at us without curiosity.
I started to move over toward Becky, but they closed in around us both, keeping us apart. I tried to reassure her with a look, but it was no use. She was too exhausted even to care. Then I noticed that the ones who had captured us seemed to have no plan, and I looked around for Mannie Kaufman or Budlong, who were, I guessed, their leaders. Neither of them was in this group. But I suspected that they would arrive soon, and that then Becky and I would probably be given drugs and left bound in a room with two of the pods.