Bentley scrambled to his feet and saw the gun crew dead, ripped and flung and trampled. The gun had tipped over. Smoke still trailed from its muzzle. From down the street came shrill, high screams and he caught—for an instant only—the flickering motion of something large and dark whipping across a corner of a yard. A picket fence exploded in a shower of white slivers as the dark thing vanished through it.
He sprinted around the corner of the house and burst through the kitchen door, clawing for the phone, dialing almost by instinct, praying the line was open.
“Global News,” said a raspy voice. “Manning.”
“Tom, this is Bentley.”
“Yes, Bentley. What is it now? Where are you?”
“I am home. Out at Joe’s place. And I got some news.”
“Are you sober?”
“Well, I stopped by a place I know and had a drink or two. Sunday, you know. None of the regular places open. And when I come home I found a gun crew right in Edna’s flower bed—”
“Hell,” said Manning, “that’s no news. We had that a couple of hours ago. They set up guns at all the tunnels for some reason.”
“I know the reason.”
“Well, now, that’s nice,” said Manning.
“Yeah, there was a monster come through the tunnel and—”
“A monster? What kind of monster?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Bentley. “I never got a real good look at it. And there wasn’t only one monster. There was two of them. One of them the gun killed, but the other got away. It killed the gun crew and tipped over the gun and all the people ran screaming and it got away. I saw it bust right through a picket fence—”
“Now, Bentley,” said Manning, “stop talking so fast. Take it a little slow and tell me. You say one got away. There is a monster loose—”
“There sure is. He killed the gun crew and maybe other people, too. The tunnel is shut down and there’s a dead beast out there.”
“Now tell me about the monster. What kind of monster was it?”
“I can’t tell you that,” said Bentley, “but I got pictures of it.”
“Of the dead one, I suppose.”
“No, the live one,” said Bentley, his voice bright with scorn. “I wouldn’t never bother with no dead monster when there’s a live one.
“Now, listen, Bentley. Listen closely. Are you in shape to drive?”
“Sure, I’m in shape to drive. I drove out here, didn’t I?”
“All right. I’ll send someone else out there. And you—I want you to get in here as quickly as you can with the pictures you have. And Bentley—”
“Yes?”
“You’re sure you’re right? There really was a monster?”
“I’m sure I’m right,” said Bentley piously. “I only had a drink or two.”
20. Steve Wilson strode into the press lounge in search of coffee and sandwiches. A dozen or so newsmen were still there.
“Anything new, Steve?” asked Carl Anders of AP.
Wilson shook his head. “Everything seems to be quiet. If anything of consequence were going on I think I would know it.”
“And tell us?”
“And tell you,” Wilson said sharply. “You know damn well we’ve played fair with you.”
“Yeah? How about the guns?”
“Simply routine emergency precaution. How about some sandwiches or did you guys eat them all?”
“Over there in the corner, Steve,” said John Gates of the Washington Post.
Wilson piled two sandwiches on a plate and got a cup of coffee. As he came back across the room Gates slid over on the davenport where he had been lounging and patted a place beside him. Wilson sat down, putting his plate and cup on the coffee table.
Anders came over to take a nearby chair. Henry Hunt, the New York Times man, sat down on the davenport on the other side of Wilson.
“It’s been a long day, Steve,” he said.
Wilson bit into a sandwich. “Rough,” he said.
“What’s going on right now?” asked Anders.
“Perhaps quite a bit. Nothing that I know of. There’s nothing I can tell, nothing that I know.”
Gates chuckled, “You can talk, can’t you?”
“Sure I can talk. But I can’t give you anything. You guys know procedure. If I should happen to say something that makes sense it’s off the record.”
“Well, hell—yes, of course,” said Anders. “You newspapered yourself. You know how it is.”
“I know how it is,” said Wilson. “What bothers me,” said Hunt, “is how anyone, even the President, knows where to take hold of a thing like this. There’s no precedent. Nothing like this has ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. As a rule a crisis will build up—you can see it coming and be halfway ready for it. But not this one. This one exploded without warning.”
“That’s bothering me, too,” said Anders. “How do you find a handle?”
“You’re stuck with it,” said Wilson. “You can’t just ignore it. You do the best you can. You try to find out what it’s all about. In a case like this you have to be somewhat skeptical and that doesn’t allow you to move as fast as you’d like to move. You have to talk with a lot of people—you have to check around and develop some sort of judgment. I suspect you might pray a lot.”
“Is that what the President did?” asked Anders.
“That’s not what I said. I was just trying to think through a hypothetical question.”
“What do you think of it, Steve?” asked Gates. “You, not the President.”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Wilson. “It’s all too new. I found myself just a while ago wondering if it was all delusion, if it might not be gone by morning. Of course, I know it won’t be. But it boggles the mind to think of it. I have brought myself to believe these people are really from the future. But even if they’re not—they’re here and we have to deal with them. I suppose it doesn’t really matter where they came from.”
“You, personally, still have doubts?”
“You mean are they from the future? Their explanation holds up. Why should they lie? What would they gain by lying?”
“But, still you—”
“Now, wait a minute. I don’t want you to start speculating that the answer we have is wrong. That would be unrealistic. This is among friends, remember? Just sitting down and talking.”
The pressroom door came open. Wilson looked up. Brad Reynolds stood in the doorway. His face wore a pitiful, stricken look.
“Steve,” he said. “Steve, I have to see you.”
“What’s going on?” asked Hunt.
Through the open door came a frantic clanging as a bell on one of the teletypes signaled a bulletin.
Wilson rose to his feet so swiftly that he joggled the coffee table, tipping his cup. Coffee ran across the table and dripped onto the carpet.
He strode across the room and gripped Reynolds by the arm.
“A monster got through!” Reynolds blurted out. “Global has it. It’s on radio.”
“For the love of God,” said Wilson. He glanced back over his shoulder at the newsmen and saw that they had heard.
“What’s this about monsters?” shouted Anders. “You never told us about any monsters.”
“Later,” said Wilson savagely. He pushed Reynolds back into the pressroom and slammed the door behind him.
“I thought you and Frank were working on the TV speech,” he said. “How did you—”
“The radio,” said Reynolds. “We heard it on the radio. What will we do about the TV talk? He can’t go on TV without mentioning this and it’s only an hour away.”
“We’ll take care of that,” said Wilson. “Does Henderson know?”
“Frank went to tell him. I came to you.”
“Do you know what happened? Where it happened?”
“Down in Virginia. Two of them came through the tunnel. The gun got one of them. The other one got through. It killed the gun crew—”
“You mean one of them is running loose?”
Reynolds nodded miserably.
21. Tom Manning turned from his desk, and ran fresh paper into the typewriter. He wrote:
Third Lead: Monster
Washington, D.C. (Global)—An alien beast is loose on Earth tonight. No one knows where it is. It came out of a time tunnel in Virginia and disappeared after killing the crew of an artillery piece posted in front of the tunnel, placed to prevent the very thing that happened. A second beast came, through with it, but this one was killed by the gun.
There are unconfirmed reports that several other people, in addition to the gun crew, were killed by the tunnel monster.
Eyewitnesses said that the beast was large and unbelievably quick in its movements. No one got a good look at it. “It moved too fast for anyone really to see it,” said one eyewitness. Within seconds after emerging from the tunnel it disappeared. There is no clue as to where it may be now.
“Mr. Manning,” said someone at his elbow.
Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there.
“Mr. Price’s pictures,” said the copy boy, handing them to him.
Manning looked at the one on top and drew in his breath sharply. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said aloud to himself, “will you look at that!”
It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was in motion even in the still photo, and probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley’s super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity—the fangs, the talons, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. The very shape of it was evil. It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up Manning’s spine—not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning fear.
Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand he fanned them out. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed the fleeing crowd—dark shadows in a hurry. Another showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead creature crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies.
“That goddamned Price,” said Manning soulfully. “He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew.”
22. “We can’t cancel your TV appearance,” Wilson told the President. “The situation is bad enough right now. It will be worse if we cancel. We can fix it with a paragraph or two. Say that the Virginia incident is too recent to comment on. Give assurance that it will be run down, that the beast will be found and killed. That we’re already closing in on it—”
“But we aren’t,” said the President. “We don’t know where the hell it is. There’s been no report of it. You remember what Gale said—how fast they could move. Traveling in the dark, this thing could be deep into the mountains of West Virginia and well hidden before daylight.”
“There’s more reason right now than there ever was,” said Frank Howard, who had been working on the speech text with Reynolds, “for you to talk to the people. The entire country will be in an uproar and we’ll have to tame them down.”
“You know, Frank,” said the President, “I don’t seem to care right now to tame the country down. Can’t you get it through your head that this is not a political matter? It’s far more than that. I can’t be sure just how much danger the country may be facing, but I know that there is danger. I’ve asked Gale to step down here and tell us what he thinks. He knows more than we do.”
“What you refuse to understand, sir,” said Wilson, “is that the country’s waiting to hear from .you. The people would like some sort of assurance, but if you can’t give them that you can let them know that we are on the job. Seeing and hearing you will be visible proof that everything has not entirely gone to pot. They need some physical evidence that the government is aware of what is going on—”
The box on the President’s desk purred. “Yes?” Henderson said.
“A call for Mr. Wilson, sir, an urgent call. Can he answer it in there?”
The President lifted the receiver and handed it to Wilson.
“This is Henry,” said Hunt’s voice. “Sorry for breaking in, but I thought you should know. One of the other tunnels failed out in Wisconsin. It just came in on AP.”
“Failed, you say? Not like Virginia. Nothing came through?”
“Apparently. The message said it failed. Blinked out. Wasn’t there any more.”
“Thank you, Henry. Thanks for telling me.”
He said to the President, “Another tunnel is out. Cut off. Disappeared. I suppose the people did it at the other end. Gale told us, if you remember, that they had men on guard who were prepared to collapse the tunnels if anything went wrong.”
“I do recall,” said the President. “The invaders must be getting at them. I don’t like to think about it. It must take a lot of courage to do a thing like that. The ones at the other end of the Virginia tunnel apparently didn’t have the chance.”
“About the speech, sir,” said Reynolds. “The time rs getting short.”
“All right. I suppose I have to. Do the best you can. But don’t say anything about our having it tracked down and cornered.”
“You’ll have to tell them what it is,” said Wilson. “There has to be an explanation of what the animal is. We’ll have to tell the people it’s beasts such as this that the tunnel folks are fleeing.”
“There’ll be a scream to shut down the tunnels,” Reynolds said.
“Let them scream,” said the President. “We don’t know of any way of shutting them except firing into them. And we can’t fire into crowds of refugees without reason—our own refugees.”
“In a short while,” said Howard, “there may be no need. One tunnel has shut down of itself. There will be others. In a few hours maybe all of them will close.”
“I hope not,” said the President. “No matter what else happens, no matter what problems they may bring us, I can’t help but hope all the people do get through.”
Kim stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Gale is here, sir.”
“Send him in.”
Gale came into the room. He stumbled a little as he started across the room, then stiffened and marched to within a few feet of the desk. His face was haggard.
“I am so sorry, sir,” he said. “I can’t properly express the regrets of myself or of my people. We thought we had taken safeguards.”
“Please sit down, Mr. Gale,” said the President. “You can help us now. We need your help.”
Gale sat carefully in the chair. “You mean about the alien. You want to know more about it. I could have told you more this afternoon, but there was so much to tell and I never thought—”
“I’ll accept your word for that. You did make provisions to guard against what happened. Perhaps you did the best you could. Now we need your help to find this creature. We need to know something about its habits, what we can expect. We have to hunt it down.”
“Luckily,” said Reynolds, “there’s only one of them. When we get it—”
“It is, unfortunately,” said Gale, “not as lucky as you think. The aliens are bisexual creatures.”
“You mean—”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Gale. “The young are hatched from eggs. Any of the adults can lay fertilized eggs. And lay them in great numbers. Once hatched, the young need no care—or at least are given no care.”
“Then,” said the President, “we must find it before it starts laying eggs.”
“That is right,” said Gale, “although I fear you may already be too late. From what we know of them I would suspect that the alien would start laying eggs within a few hours after its emergence from the tunnel. It would recognize the crisis. The aliens are highly intelligent. This one knows that it is the sole representative of its species in this particular time and that the future of the species here may depend on it
alone. This will not be an intellectual realization only—its body will also respond to the situation. All its physical resources will be aimed now at reproduction. Furthermore, realizing that eventually it will be hunted down and slain, it will scatter its clutches of eggs over as much territory as it can. It will locate them in the least accessible spots. It is fighting, you understand, not only for itself, but for the species. Perhaps not at all for itself, but only for the species.”
“I would suspect,” said the President, “that it might be heading for the mountains. But that supposition is based only on my knowledge there are mountains to the west.”
Gale said, “It has as good a geographical knowledge of this area as any of us here. The geography is the same five hundred years from now as it is today.”
“Then,” said the President, “assuming that it would have headed for the mountains, we must not only head it off, but we will have to give some thought to evacuating the people from that area.”
“You’re thinking nuclear,” said Wilson. “Blanketing the area with bombs. You can’t do that, sir. Only as a last resort—and perhaps not even then. The tonnage would have to be massive and the fallout—”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Steve.” Henderson turned to Gale. “You told us your people could supply us with specifications for the building of the tunnels.”
“That is true,” said Gale.
“The point is this—if we are to do anything at all we should do it quickly. If we delay, a dangerous social and economic, not to say political, situation may build up. And this matter of the alien has given us even less time than I thought we had. For that reason it seems to me important that we have the specifications and talk with your people who can explain them to us as soon as possible.”
The Complete Serials Page 144