by Jack Finney
There was a nightmare quality to the scene—these passive, inexorable beings holding us captive, yet not seeming to menace us. And then we heard the roar of several cars coming down the highway, and the squeal of tires as they turned off the highway and came up the lane toward the barnyard. Our captors turned expectantly, shoving Becky and me toward whoever had arrived.
There were three cars, and they had barely come to a stop when the doors were flung open and men piled out of them. In the lead was Jack Belicec, carrying a pistol; others had riot guns, and two of the men carried small, light, almost dainty-looking machine guns.
You can’t arrest a town, and no one tried. Almost silently, with only occasional words of direction, or brief gestures, the quiet, dead-eyed townspeople were bunched and then moved on up the hill we had come from, back toward their town. No one argued, no one resisted, no one even seemed to care. Emotionless, empty, they did as they were told, as unmoved in defeat as they had been moments before in apparent victory.
Jack stood beside us, telling us excitedly how the flaming gasoline had guided him and the FBI to us, and how the FBI had intercepted the people trying to take pods to other towns. I held Becky tight, an arm around her shoulder, and I bent toward her now, to speak. Then the vast low murmur of hundreds of voices sounded again, and I glanced up to see the straggling mob, halfway up the hillside, stop, all of them, and turn to stare. The murmur stopped abruptly then, and the ragged line of motionless figures stood silent, their faces raised in the moonlight to the sky.
NOW I followed their gaze, and in the clear, even light of the moon I saw what they’d seen. The white, foggy sky above us was peppered with dots. A great awesome swarm of dark, circular blobs was ascending slowly and steadily into the vast moonlit sky. A last trail of fog left the face of the moon, and the sky lighted up with a luminous, even light. I watched the great pods—the field they had come from almost empty now—steadily rising. Then the last few of the pods still on the ground actually moved, leaning to one side to snap the brittle stems that held them. Then they rose with the others, and we watched the great swarm, slowly diminishing in size, never touching or bumping, climb higher and higher into the sky and the space beyond it.
Quite simply—I knew this instantly, with the undeniable force of revelation—the great pods were leaving a fierce and inhospitable planet. And a wave of terrible exultation, so violent it left me trembling, swept through my body; for now I knew what we had done in simply refusing to give up. Others too, I felt sure, had stumbled and blundered onto what had been happening in Santa Mira; we couldn’t possibly have been the only ones. And I knew that they, too, had fought. Some had lost, some had won, but I knew all had fought as we had, whether with fire and gasoline-contaminated ground, or simply with spirit, and a phrase from a wartime speech of Churchill’s suddenly came to my mind: We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. True then for one people, it was true always, and for the whole human race, and I understood now that nothing in the whole vast universe could ever defeat us. And I knew that Becky and I had provided the final demonstration of that unchangeable fact.
I watched the pods climb into the night sky and wondered: Did this incredible alien life “think” or “know” ? Probably not, but it had finally sensed, and with certainty, that this planet and race would never receive them. Santa Mira, then the county? California, the West, and then the continent, and the world? It wasn’t possible, and it never had been.
Survival was the pods’ driving force, Budlong had said—and now, to survive, they lifted and rose, climbing through the faint mist, drifting across the white face of the moon, on and out toward the space they had come from. Then, with Jack and the silent men who had joined us, Becky and I turned toward the highway, away from that barren field.
IT NEVER got into the newspapers, this particular story. Drive across Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County today, make your way to Santa Mira, California, and you’ll simply see a town, shabbier and more run-down than most others—but not startlingly so. The people, some of them, may seem to you listless and uncommunicative, and the town may impress you as unfriendly. You’ll see more houses empty and for sale than can quite be accounted for; the death rate here a higher than the county average, and sometimes it’s hard to know just to write down on a death certificate Around certain farms west of town, clumps of trees, patches of vegetation, and occasional farm animals sometimes die from no apparent cause.
But, all in all, there’s nothing much to see in—or say about—Santa Mira. The empty houses are filling quickly—it’s a crowded county and state—and there are new people, most of them young and with children, in town. There’s a young couple from Nevada living next door to Becky and me, and another, from Arizona, just across the street in the old Greeson place. In a few years Santa Mira will seem no different from any other small town. In five years, perhaps less, it will be no different. And what once happened here will have faded into final unbelievability.
Even now—so soon—there are times, and they come more frequently, when I’m no longer certain in my mind of just what we did see, or of what really happened here. I think it’s perfectly possible that we didn’t correctly interpret everything that happened, or that we thought had happened. I don’t know, I can’t say; the human mind exaggerates and deceives itself. And I don’t much care. We’re together, Becky and I, for better or worse.
But this much I know: once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of life are inexplicably shifted and altered. You may read occasional queer little stories about them, or you may hear vague distorted rumors of them, and you probably dismiss them. But—some of them—some of them—are quite true. —JACK FINNEY