Gentle Invaders

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Gentle Invaders Page 5

by Hans Stefan Santesson


  I slid the automatic into my palm and opened my mouth to speak, and then I heard her say:

  “You won’t give him a chance to get out?”

  Her tone said she knew the answer to that one before she asked it. But he said with furious sarcasm:

  “Why certainly, and then you can call the sheriff and explain why you burned the house down. And the hospital. Christ. I told Arnek you weren’t to be trusted.” He gave her a rough shove. “Get with it.”

  Vadi walked five careful paces away from him. Then very swiftly she threw away, in two different directions, whatever it was she carried. I heard the two things fall, rustling among grass and branches where it might take hours to find them even by daylight. She spun around. “Now,” she said in a harsh defiant voice, “what are you going to do?”

  There was a moment of absolute silence, so full of murder that the far-off lightning seemed feeble by comparison. Then he said:

  “All right, let’s get out of here.”

  She moved to join him, and he waited until she was quite close to Mm. Then he hit her. She made a small bleating sound and fell down. He started to kick her, and then I jumped out and hit him over the ear with the flat of the automatic. It was his turn to fall down.

  Vadi got up on her hands and knees. She stared at me, sobbing a little with rage and pain. Blood was running from the corner of her mouth. I took the man’s gun and threw it far off and it splashed in the creek. Then I got down beside the girl.

  “Here,” I said. “Have my handkerchief.”

  She took it and held it to her mouth. “You were outside here all the time,” she said. She sounded almost angry.

  “It just happened that way. I still owe you thanks for my life, and my house. Though you weren’t so tender about the hospital.”

  “There was no one to be killed there. I made sure. A building one can always rebuild, but a life is different.”

  She looked at the unconscious man. Her eyes burned with that catlike brilliance in the lightning flares.

  “I could kill him,” she said, “with pleasure.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My brother’s partner.” She glanced toward Buckhorn and the light went out of her eyes. Her head became bowed. “Your brother sent you to kill me?”

  “He didn’t say—”

  “But you knew.”

  “When Marlin came with me I knew.”

  She had begun to tremble.

  “Do you make a career of arson?”

  “Arson? Oh. The setting of fires. No. I am a chemist And I wish I—”

  She caught herself fiercely and would not finish.

  I said, “Those things are listening devices, then.”

  She had to ask me what I meant. Her mind was busy with some thorny darkness of its own.

  “The little gadgets your brother put in the television sets,” I said. “I figured that’s what they were when I saw how they were placed. A string of sentry posts all around the center of operations, little ears to catch every word of gossip, because if any of the local people get suspicious they’re bound to talk about it and so give warning. He heard my calls this afternoon, didn’t he? That’s why he sent you. And he heard Doc and me at the Tates’. That’s why—”

  Moving with that uncanny swiftness of hers, she rose and ran away from me. It was like before. She ran fast, and I ran after her. She went splashing through the shallow stream and the water flew back against me, wetting my face, spattering my clothes. On the far bank I caught her, as I had before. But this time she fought me.

  “Let me go,” she said, and beat her hands against me. “Do you know what I’ve done for you? I’ve asked for the knife for myself. Let me go, you dumsy fool—”

  I held her tighter. Her soft curls pressed against my cheek. Her body strove against me, and it was not soft but excitingly strong.

  “—before I regret it,” she said, and I kissed her.

  It was strange, what happened then.

  I’ve kissed girls who didn’t want to be kissed, and I’ve kissed girls who didn’t like me particularly. I’ve kissed a couple of the touch-me-not kind who shrink from any sort of physical contact. I’ve had my face slapped. But I never had a girl withdraw from me the way she did. It was like something closing, folding up, shutting every avenue of contact, and yet she never moved. In fact she had stopped moving entirely. She just stood with my arms around her and my lips on hers, and kind of a coldness came out of her, a rejection so total I couldn’t even get mad. I was shocked, and very much puzzled, but you can’t get mad at a thing that isn’t personal. This was too deep for that. And suddenly I thought of the boy.

  “A different breed,” I said. “Worlds apart. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Worlds apart.”

  And the coldness spread through me. I stood on the bank of the stream in the warm night, the bank where I had stood ten thousand times before, boy and man, and saw the strange shining of her eyes, and I was more than cold, I was afraid. I stepped back away from her, still holding her but In a different way.

  “It wasn’t like this,” I said, “between your brother and Sally Tate.”

  The girl-thing said, “My brother Amek is a corrupt man.”

  “Vadi,” I said. “Where is Hrylliannu?”

  The girl-thing looked past my shoulder and said, “Marlin is running away.”

  I looked too, and it was so. The big man’s head was harder than I had thought. He had got up, and I saw him blundering rapidly away along the side of my house, heading for the street.

  “Well,” I said, “he’s gone now. You must have come in a car, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “It won’t be challenged as soon as mine. We’ll take it.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, catching her breath sharply.

  “Where I was going when you stopped me. Up Buckhorn.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No, you can’t, you mustn’t.” She was human again, and afraid. “I saved your life, isn’t that enough for you? You’ll never live to climb Buckhorn and neither will I if—”

  “Did Sally and the boy live to climb it?” I asked her, and, she hung her head and nodded. “Then you’ll see to it that we do.”

  “But tonight!” she said in a panic. “Not tonight!”

  “What’s so special about tonight?” She didn’t answer, and I shook her. “What’s going on up there?”

  She didn’t answer that, either. She said with sudden fierceness, “All right, then, come on. Climb Buckhorn and see. And when you’re dying, remember that I tried to stop you.”

  She didn’t speak again. She led me without protest to the car parked on the dirt road. It was a panel truck. By day it would have been a dirty blue.

  “He’s going to kill them, isn’t he?” I said. “He killed Doc. You admit he wants to kill me. What’s going to save Sally and the child?”

  “You torture me,” she said. “This is a world of torture. Go on. Go on, and get it done.”

  I started the panel truck. Like the television set, it worked better than it had any business to. It fled with uncanny strength and swiftness over the dirt roads toward Buckhorn, soft-sprung as a cloud, silent as a dream.

  “It’s a pity,” I said. “Your brother has considerable genius.” She laughed. A bitter laugh. “He couldn’t pass his second year of technical training. That’s why he’s here.”

  She looked at Buckhorn as though she hated the mountain, and Buckhorn, invisible behind a curtain of storm, answered her look with a sullen curse, spoke in thunder.

  I stopped at the last gas station on the road and honked the owner out of bed and told him to call Sheriff Betts and tell him where I’d gone. I didn’t dare do it myself for fear Vadi would get away from me. The man was very resentful about being waked up. I hoped he would not take out his resentment by forgetting to call.

  “You’re pretty dose to Buckhorn,” I told him. “The neck you save may be your own
.”

  I left him to ponder that, racing on toward the dark mountain in that damned queer car that made me feel like a character in one of my own bad dreams, with the girl beside me—the damned queer girl who was not quite human.

  The road dropped behind us. We began to climb the knees of the mountain. Vadi told me where to turn, and the road became a track, and the track ended in the thick woods beside a rickety little lodge the size of a piano-box, with a garage behind it. The garage only looked rickety. The headlights showed up new and sturdy timbers on the inside.

  I cut the motor and the lights and reached for the handbrake. Vadi must have been set on a hair-trigger waiting for that moment. I heard her move and there was a snap as though she had pulled something from a clip underneath the dashboard. The door on her side banged open.

  I shouted to her to stop and sprang out of the truck to catch her. But she was already out of the garage, and she was waiting for me. Just as I came through the door there was a bolt of lightning, bright green, small and close at hand. I saw it coining. I saw her dimly in the backflash and knew that in some way she had made the lightning with a thing she held in her hand. Then it hit me and that was all.

  When I came to I was alone and the rain was falling on me just the way it had on Doc . . ..

  But I wasn’t dead.

  I crawled around and finally managed to get up, feeling heavy and disjointed. My legs and arms flopped around as though the coordinating controls had been burned out. I stood inside the garage out of the rain, rubbing my numb joints and thinking.

  All the steam had gone out of me. I didn’t want to climb Buckhorn Mountain any more. It looked awfully black up there, and awfully lonesome, and God alone knew what was going on under the veil of cloud and storm that hid it. The lightning flashes—real sky-made lightning—showed me the dripping trees going right up into nothing, and the wind thrashing them, and then the following thunder cracked my eardrums. The rain hissed, and I thought, it’s crazy for one man to go up there alone.

  Then I thought about Sally Tate and the little red-headed kid, and I thought how Ed Betts might already be up there somewhere, plowing his way through the woods looking for me. I didn’t know how long I’d been out.

  I made sure I still had my gun, and I did have. I wished I had a drink, but that was hope,-less. So I started out. I didn’t go straight up the mountain. I figured the girl would have had time to find her brother and give him warning, and that he might be looking for me to come that way. I angled off to the east, where I remembered a ravine that might give me some cover. I’d been up Buckhorn before, but only by daylight, with snow on the ground and a couple of friends with me, and not looking for anything more sinister than a bear.

  I climbed the steep flank of the mountain, leaning almost into it, worming and floundering and pulling my way between the trees. The rain fell and soaked me. The thunder was a monstrous presence, and the lightning was a great torch that somebody kept tossing back and forth so that sometimes you could see every vein of every leaf on the tree you were fighting with, and sometimes it was so dark that you knew the sun and stars hadn’t been invented yet. I lost the ravine. I only knew I was still going up. There wasn’t any doubt about that. After a while the rain slacked off and almost stopped.

  In an interval between crashes of thunder I heard voices.

  They were thin and far away. I tried to place them, and when I thought I had them pegged I started toward them. The steep pitch of the ground fell away into a dizzying downslope and I was almost running into a sort of long shallow trough, thickly wooded, its bottom hidden from any view at all except one directly overhead. And there were lights in it, or at least a light.

  I slowed down and went more carefully, hoping the storm would cover any noise I made.

  The voices went on, and now I could hear another sound, and scrinch and screek of metal rubbing on metal.

  I was on the clearing before I knew it. And it wasn’t a clearing at all really, just one of those natural open places where the soil is too thin to support trees and runs to brush instead. It wasn’t much more than ten feet across. Almost beside me were a couple of tents so cleverly hidden among the trees that you practically had to fall on them, as I did, to find them at all.

  From one of them came the sleepy sobbing of a child.

  In the small clearing Vadi and Amek were watching a jointed metal mast build itself up out of a pit in the ground. The top of it was already out of sight in the cloud but it was obviously taller than the trees. The lamp was on the ground beside the pit.

  The faces of Vadi and Her brother were both angry, both set and obstinate. Perhaps it was their mutual fury that made them seem less human, or more unhuman, than ever, the odd bone-structure of cheek and jaw accentuated, the whole head elongated, the silver-red hair fairly bristling, the copper-colored eyes glinting with that unpleasantly catlike brilliance in the light They had been quarreling, and they still were, but not in English. Amek had a look like a rattlesnake.

  Vadi, I thought, was frightened. She kept glancing at the tents, and in a minute the big man, Marlin, came out of one of them. He was pressing a small bandage on the side of his head, over his ear. He looked tired and wet and foul-tempered, as though he had not had an easy time getting back to base.

  He started right in on Vadi, cursing her because of what she had done.

  Amek said in English, “I didn’t ask her to come here, and I’m sending her home tonight.”

  “That’s great,” Marlin said. “That’s a big help. We’ll have to move our base anyway now.”

  “Maybe not,” said Amek defiantly. He watched the slim mast stretching up and up with a soft screeking of its joints.

  “You’re a fool,” said Marlin, in a tone of cold and bitter contempt. “You started this mess, Amek. You had to play around with that girl and make a kid to give the show away. Then you pull that half-cocked trick with those guys in the station wagon and you can’t even do that right. You kill the one but not the other. And then she louses up the only chance we got left. You know how much money we’re going to lose? You know how long it’ll take us to find a location half as good as this? You know what I ought to do?”

  Amek’s voice was sharp, but a shade uncertain. “Oh, stop bitching and get onto those scanners. All we need is another hour and then they can whistle. And there are plenty of mountains.”

  “Are there?” said Marlin, and looked again at Vadi. “And how long do you think she’ll keep her mouth shut at your end?”

  He turned and walked back into the tent. Amek looked uncertainly at Vadi and then fixed his attention on the mast again. Vadi’s face was the color of chalk. She started once toward the tent and Amek caught her roughly and spoke to her in whatever language they used, and she stopped.

  I slid around the back of the tents to the one Marlin was in. There was a humming and whining inside. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled carefully over the wet grass between the tents, toward the front. The mast apparently made its last joint because it stopped and Amek said something to Vadi and they bent over what seemed to be a sunken control box in the ground. I took my chance and whipped in through the tent flap.

  I didn’t have long to look around. The space inside was crammed with what seemed to be electronic equipment. Marlin was sitting hunched up on a stool in front of a big panel with a dozen or so little screens on it like miniature television monitors. The screens, I just had time to see, showed an assortment of views of Buckhorn and the surrounding areas, and Marlin was apparently, by remote control, rotating one by one the distant receivers that sent the images to the screens. They must have been remarkably tight-beamed, because they were not much disturbed by static. I knew now how the eye of God had watched Doc and me on Tunkhannock Ridge.

  I didn’t know yet how the lightning-bolts were hurled, but I was pretty sure Ed Betts would get one if his car showed up on a scanner screen, and who would be the wiser? Poor Ed hit by lightning just like old Doc, and weren’t t
he storms something fierce this summer?

  Marlin turned around and saw it wasn’t Amek. He moved faster than I would have thought possible. He scooped up the light stool he was sitting on and threw it at me, leaping sideways himself in a continuation of the same movement. In the second in which I was getting my head out of the way of the stool he pulled a gun. He had had a spare, just as he must have had a car stashed somewhere in or near the town.

  He did not quite have time to fire. I shot him twice through the body. He dropped but I didn’t know if he was dead. I kicked the gun out of his hand and jumped to stand flat against the canvas wall beside the front flap, not pressing against it. The canvas was light-proof, and the small lamps over the control panels did not throw shadows.

  Amek did not come in.

  After a second or two I got nervous. I could hear him shouting “Marlin! Marlin!” I ran into the narrow space behind the banks of equipment, being extremely careful how I touched anything. I id not see any power leads. It dawned on me that all this stuff had come up out of a pit in the ground like the mast and that the generator must be down there below. The floor wasn’t canvas at all, but some dark gray material to which the equipment was bolted.

  I got my knife out and started to slit the canvas at the back. And suddenly the inside of the tent was full of green fire. It sparked off every metal thing and jarred the gun out of my hand. It nearly knocked me out again. But I was shielded by the equipment from the full force of the shock. It flicked off again almost at once. I got the canvas cut and squirmed through it and then I put three or four shots at random into the back of the equipment just for luck.

  Then I raced around the front and caught Amek just as he was deciding not to enter the tent after all.

  He had a weapon in his hand like the one Vadi had used on me. I said, “Drop it,” and he hesitated, looking evil and upset. “Drop it!” I told him again, and he dropped it. “Now stand away,” I said. “Walk out toward your sister, real slow, one step at a time.”

  He walked, and I picked up the weapon.

 

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