He suddenly became aware of Kathy with a start.
“I’m sorry, Kathy.”
“Don’t think a thing of it,” said Kathy. “You can’t say a thing I haven’t heard before.”
The line edged into the water.
“Jesus,” sang out a TV man in the lead, “this water is like ice.”
“Easy,” someone said. “Take it easy, men.”
They inched across. In the deepest part of the stream, the water came to a tall man’s waist.
Kathy, as she hit the water, gritted her teeth. But as she inched along with the others, one hand engulfed in the big fist of Douglas, the other held, vise-like, in Norton’s hand, she forgot the cold and concentrated on making her way across.
The head of the line reached the opposite bank, clustered there to help the others.
Teeth chattering, Kathy climbed the river bank, Chet’s camera swinging, bumping against her.
Chet reached back a hand to help her up the last few feet, took the camera from her.
“Run around a bit,” he told her. “Jog around. Keep moving. You’ll be warmer that way. You look like a drowned rat.”
“So do you,” she said. “So do all the rest of us.”
Some of the others were running up the slight incline that sloped down to the river. She ran along with them. To their left, the object from the sky loomed tall above them, like a great black wall reaching up into the sky. The crashes of the falling trees and the deep, rising and falling rumble of the object chewing them up was louder than it had been across the river.
Photographers scattered, their cameras aimed.
Here, close to it, the object was more impressive than seen from farther off. Here the true dimension of it became apparent. Too, the imperturbability of it—the great black box lurching slowly along, paying no attention, or at least giving the impression of paying no attention, to the humans who swarmed about it. As if it might be unaware of them, or being aware of them, ignored them. As if we didn’t exist, thought Kathy, as if we were not worth paying attention to, little scurrying life forms that were beneath its notice.
She gravitated toward the rear end of the object and tried to make out how it moved. There were no treads, no wheels, nothing to propel it. As a matter of fact, it seemed to have no moving parts and, come to think of it, no part of it seemed to touch the ground. She considered crouching down and putting her hand between the ground and the great black mass to see if there actually were some ground clearance, but, at the last minute, her courage failed her. You could lose a hand with a stunt like that, she told herself.
The box, she saw, was not actually a box. The side that she could see went straight up, but the rear end (and maybe the front end, too, she told herself) curved outward slightly, that area of it closest to the ground flaring out slightly. For some reason she could not quite reconcile, the whole thing reminded her of a turtle in its shell.
She walked in back of it and stubbed her toe, pitching forward, but catching herself before she fell. She looked to see what she had stubbed her toe on. Whatever it was, was white and smooth and close to the ground. Squatting down, she brushed away the forest duff that covered it. It was, she saw, a newly cut tree stump, sheared off smoothly, only a couple of inches above the ground.
Stunned, she rubbed the palm of her hand across the smoothness of the stump. Little drops of resin were oozing out of it and smeared her palm. The object, she realized, was not knocking down the trees, as she had thought. It was cutting them close against the ground and pushing them, with its great weight, so they fell in front of it.
And that meant, she told herself, that this harvesting of the trees was not a simple matter of forcibly crashing its way through them. It meant that the object was designed to do this very thing. It was designed to harvest trees.
She rose to her feet and stared at the massive rear end of the thing. And, as she did, the back end of the turtle-like shell twitched and then rolled up—like an automatic garage door responding to a signal.
It slid up five or six feet and three large white objects were expelled from it. Along with the three white objects a sudden gush of chewed-up bark and pine needles, resembling the mulch spewed out by a lawn mower.
Then the back of the object slid down again.
Chutes? Kathy wondered. Had she seen chutes out of which the baled white masses and the mulch had been expelled? She could not be sure.
She walked up cautiously to one of the bales, put out a hand, then pulled it back, suddenly frightened, reluctant to touch the bale. She swore luridly at herself for her timidity and put out her hand again. The white material was tightly packed, compressed, but not bound by wires or by anything at all. She dug her fingers into it and the substance resisted the digging. She managed to pull loose a small fragment of the material.
It was, she saw, almost exactly like cotton. Funny thing, she thought, a bale of cotton emerging from this monster that was eating trees.
From across the river came a metallic squealing and looking to find out what had caused it, she saw that a large truck equipped with a crane had backed up to the other end of the bridge. The crane was lifting an oblong structure of wood off the truck, bed. Beneath the structure the crane had lifted were others, stacked upon the truck. It must be, she told herself, the army engineers with their prefabricated bridge. Maybe, she thought, we will not have to wade again across the river, wondering as she thought it how long it might require to put the bridge together. She hoped that it would not take long, for it would be a comfort not to have to plunge again into the chilling cold of the river.
She heard the pound of feet behind her and, turning, saw that Chet was charging towards her, followed by the other photographers and newsmen.
“What have we got here?” Chet panted. “Where did those bales come from?”
“The thing just spewed them out,” she said.
Chet was squaring off, his camera to his face, the others rushing in behind him. The TV crews frantically went about setting up their equipment, some of them using hand-held mini-cams, while the others manipulated tripods and electronic gear.
Slowly, Kathy backed away. There was nothing more that she could do—and it was a damn shame, she told herself. This was a break for the afternoon papers. It would be in the evening papers and on the evening TV news shows before the Tribune went to press. That was the way it sometimes went, she told herself philosophically. You won a few, you lost a few. There was not much that could be done about it.
What did it all mean, she wondered—this box-like monster eating trees and then, from the other end of it, expelling bales of stuff that looked like cotton, along with bushels of junk that probably was the by-product of its eating of the trees. It made sense, she told herself, that bales had been processed from the trees that had been ingested, but what could that white stuff be? She should know, she thought, searching frantically for a knowledge that she knew must be tucked somewhere in her memory, tucked away in those college days when she had struggled valiantly with biology, but not too successfully. Science, she recalled, science and math had been her two worst subjects and she never had done too well in either of them.
A word came floating up. Cellulose. Could that be it? Trees, she remembered vaguely, were made up, in a large part, of cellulose. Perhaps all plants had some cellulose in them. But how much? Enough to make it worth the effort to chew up trees and extract the cellulose? Did cellulose look like cotton? And if this stuff really should be cellulose, what the hell did that big black box want of cellulose?
All the time that she had been thinking this, she had been backing up, step by slow step, head tilted back to stare up at the bigness of the thing, trying to get a better perspective of it, the better to measure its size and massiveness.
A tree stopped her. She had backed into it. Lowering her head to look around, she saw that she had backed into the fringe of the forest through which the big blackness was cutting a swath.
A low voice came from b
ehind her. “Kathy,” it said. “Kathy, is that you?”
The moment she heard the voice she recognized it, knowing who it was who spoke. She turned quickly, heart pounding.
“Jerry,” she said. “Jerry, what are you doing here?”
And there the damn fool stood, grinning at her, enjoying the fact that he had sneaked up on her and frightened her. He was wearing waders and there were scratches on his face and jagged tears in the woolen shirt that he wore.
“Jerry,” she said again, not crediting what she saw.
He put a finger to his lips, cautioning her. “Not too loud,” he said.
She flew at him and his arms came tight around her.
“Careful,” he said. “Careful. Let’s move back a ways.” Propelling her deeper into the tangled cover even as he said it.
She lifted her eyes to him and could feel the tears running down her cheeks. “But, Jerry, why careful? I’m so glad to see you. I was sent up here by the city desk and I left word there for you . . .”
“Careful,” he said, “because I can’t be seen.”
“I don’t understand,” she protested. “Why can’t you be seen? Why are you here at all?”
“I parked the car and went fishing in the pool. Then this thing came down and smashed the car . . .”
“So that was your car?”
“You saw the car? I suppose it was smashed.”
“It was flattened. They hauled it away.”
“Who hauled it away?”
“I don’t know. It was hauled away, is all. Maybe the FBI.”
“Damn!” he said.
“Why damn?”
“That was one of the things I was afraid of. They’ll find the license plates. It can be traced to me.”
“Jerry, why are you hiding? What have you got to hide?”
“I was in that thing out there. Inside of it. Something reached down and jerked me inside of it.”
“Inside of it? But you got away.”
“It threw me out,” he said. “Handed in a tree. That saved me.”
“Jerry, I don’t understand any of this. Why should you be jerked inside of it?”
“To find out what I was, I think. I’m not sure. Not sure of anything at all. I spent all night, lost, huddled in the woods. I damn near froze to death. I did a lot of thinking.”
“You thought and got something figured out. Tell me what it was.”
“I figured out I can’t be one of those kooks who have been inside a flying saucer.”
“This is no saucer, Jerry.”
“It’s the next thing to it. It’s from outer space. It’s alive. I know.”
“You know . . .”
“Yes, I know. No time to tell you now.”
“Why don’t you come with me. I don’t want you running around in the woods alone. Come with me.”
“Those are newspaper people out there, aren’t they?”
“Yes, of course, they are.”
“They’d take me apart. They would ask me questions.”
“No, they wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let them.”
“And there are state troopers at the bridge.”
“Yes. Two of them.”
“More than likely they are watching for me. They probably figured out someone had parked his car to go fishing in the pool. These waders—they’d know me from the waders.”
“All right,” she said. “All right. What do you want to do?”
“I scouted down the stream,” he said, “when I saw the troopers and knew I couldn’t get across. There’s a shallow stretch of water I can wade across. A quarter mile downstream. Just opposite the far edge of the town. Later on, you can meet me there.”
“If that’s the way you want it, Jerry. I still think you could walk right out with me.”
He shook his head. “I have it figured out. I know what will happen if anyone ever finds out I was inside that thing. I’ll see you later. Now get back before someone comes looking for you.”
“Kiss me first,” said Kathy. “You big lug, you never even kissed me.”
10. WASHINGTON, D.C.
When Dave Porter entered the conference room, the others were there. The President sat at the head of the table. General Henry Whiteside, Army Chief of Staff, sat at his right hand, John Hammond, White House Chief of Staff, at his left.
John Clark, the President’s military aide, was sitting near the end of the table opposite the President. He pulled out one of-the few remaining chairs as an invitation to the press secretary to sit down.
“Thanks, Jack,” said Porter, sitting in the chair and pulling it up close to the table.
“Dave,” asked the President, “is there anything new on the wires?”
“Nothing, sir. I imagine everyone knows that our visitor is chewing up trees and turning them into bales of cellulose.”
“Yes, I think everyone does. That news came early this morning. There is nothing else?”
“A lot of copy is moving,” said Porter. “Nothing significant. The new object in orbit is getting a fair amount of attention.”
“All right, then,” said the President, “let’s try to figure out what we know of the situation. General, would you care to go first.”
“Everything still seems to be quiet,” said Whiteside. “The public has a lot of interest, but there’s been no panic. Not so far. It might not take much to set it off, for everyone is keyed up. Tension, I would suspect, is running fairly high, but so far is under control. A few kooks are doing a few outrageous things. There have been demonstrations at some colleges, but good-natured demonstrations. Kids letting off steam. Exuberance, mostly. Out in Minnesota, the state highway patrol has the situation well in hand. Lone Pine has been cordoned off. The public seems to be taking it well enough. No big demand to be allowed to go in. The governor has put the National Guard on alert, but there’s been no need as yet to use it. The patrol is allowing the press into Lone Pine. Some photographers and newsmen waded the river early this morning and circulated all around the visitor. Nothing happened. It kept on attending to business, whatever its business may be. I don’t mind telling you that we’ve been concerned about the killing of the barber yesterday, but so far this thing has shown no further hostility. I understand a team of FBI agents from Minneapolis is now at the scene. Perhaps the director has heard from them.”
Timothy Jackson, FBI director, said, “Only a preliminary report, Henry. So far as the agents can ascertain, the visitor seems to carry no armament of any sort. Or, at least, nothing that can be recognized as armament. In fact, it has no exterior features at all, nothing mounted on it, nothing sticking out of it.”
“Then how did it kill the barber?” asked the President.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” said Whiteside. “We haven’t a clue.”
“Steve, you’re sending some men, aren’t you?” asked the President.
“They should be there by now,” said Dr. Steven Allen, the science advisor. “I expect any minute to hear from them. I must warn you, however, not to expect any quick findings or any startling disclosures. We seem to be dealing with something far outside our normal experience.”
“Are you saying,” asked Marcus White, the secretary of state, “that we are dealing with something from space, an extra-terrestrial intelligence, perhaps?”
“The tendency at first is always to overstate,” said Allen. “There is, I must admit, a temptation to say this is an intelligence from space, but we have no proof yet that it is. It did, undeniably, fall from space, and, as I say, it appears to lie outside all present experience, but, as a scientist, I’m reluctant to make any judgment until at least some results are in.”
“You’re straddling the fence,” said the secretary of state.
“No, Marcus, just withholding judgment. It would seem unlikely, on the face of it, that it originated on Earth, but as yet we simply do not know. I am encouraged, whatever it may be, by the fact that it does not, so far, seem intent on doing any harm. So far, it�
�s been friendly.”
“Cutting down trees is not exactly friendly,” said William Sullivan, secretary of interior. “Do you realize, Mr. President, that the land where it is engaged in, its depredation is a primitive wilderness area. One of the most significant such tracts we have, the most representative of what the primitive wilderness really was like. Some thousands of acres of trees, mostly white pine, still stand there today as they stood before white men came to America. Truly, it is a tragic business.”
“It seems to me,” said Hammond, “that cutting down trees and separating out the cellulose should be considered a mark of intelligence.”
“A well-programmed machine could perform such a task quite easily,” said the science advisor.
“But someone or something would have had to program the machine.”
“That is true,” said Allen.
“I would think,” said the secretary of state, “that the loss of a few trees is a small thing to bemoan in the face of what is taking place.”
“From your point of view,” said Interior, “that may be true, although from my point of view, I can’t agree with you. It’s the arrogance of the visitor that bothers me. It’s like someone entering a man’s backyard and chopping down an apple tree that the owner has cherished for years, or stealing the produce from his garden. Not a simple act of vandalism, but acting as if he had a legal right to chop down the apple tree or to rob the garden.”
“We’re wasting time,” said State, “harping on such small matters. We should be considering our national stance, arriving at some sort of policy. If this visitor of ours out in Minnesota should turn out to be an alien intelligence, we, necessarily, must have a policy to guide our handling of it. We can’t be sure it is the only one there is. There may be others waiting to hear from it before coming in. And if others did show up, a policy would be paramount. We must have some idea of how we should act toward them. How are we to treat and view them? I don’t mean we have to immediately get down to specifics, for so far we don’t know what may be involved, but certainly we should determine some broad guidelines on how we should act under certain possibilities.
The Complete Serials Page 161