The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  He hung up, fished in his pocket for another dime, inserted it in the slot and dialed.

  Jane answered. “Johnny, I’m sitting up, waiting for you. When will you be home?”

  “I started out,” he said, “then something happened.”

  “And you aren’t coming?”

  “Not for awhile. One of the visitors landed on the road just ahead of me. I have to get back to the office. Jim tells me another one landed at the airport.”

  “You mean one landed on Highway 12?”

  “That’s right. Just east of Ridgedale.”

  “Johnny, that’s only four or five miles from here.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “But there’s nothing . . .”

  “Johnny,” she said, “that’s too close. I’m getting scared.”

  21. THE UNITED STATES

  They came down through the night, like homing birds, although they were not homing birds, but were settling on a terrain that was alien to them. They came seeking through the dark, although it was not dark to them, and picked out their landing places with a certain care. There was little interference, for there was nothing, at this time of night, to interfere with them. They kept in touch with one another, talking back and forth and there was nothing that one sensed the others did not know.

  They landed in the watery delta lands where the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf, on the broad plains of Texas, the deserts of the American Southwest, the sandy beaches of Florida, the wheatlands of the West, the rustling cornfields of the Central States, the commons of New England villages, in southern cotton fields and sweet potato patches, on the concrete of large airports, astride the great highways that spanned the continent, along the western seaboard, in the forests of Oregon, Washington and Maine, in the woodlots of Ohio and Indiana.

  They came down and landed silently with no more noise than the whisper of the air disturbed by their passage. They landed softly, then rose an inch or two from where they had landed and floated just above the surface. They disturbed few of the sleeping millions they passed over and landed among. Only on occasion were they sighted and, except when they landed on airports or highways, that by accident.

  They made a flurry of soft, fluttering, mothlike tracks across the screen in the war room of the Strategic Air Command, but there the watchers of the screens, maintaining an intent, militarily professional surveillance, had been warned and were prepared for them, their only real concern being that the coming of the visitors cluttered up the board and might mask other kinds of incoming objects.

  In those instances where they landed in forested areas, they almost immediately set to work harvesting cellulose. In a suburban Virginia housing tract, not far from Washington, one of them, in lieu of trees, began the harvesting of houses. Another, in Oregon, landed adjacent to a huge lumber yard and began the chomping of stacked lumber. But the most of them, coming to rest in less productive areas, simply squatted down and waited.

  22. MINNEAPOLIS

  Gold was on the phone when Garrison came into the newsroom. The only other people in the room were three copyreaders and two sleepy dog-trick copy aides.

  Gold hung up the phone and said to Garrison, “That was some screwball, calling to tell me that a group that calls themselves the Lovers are going to go out to the airport, sit down in front of the visitor there and love it all to hell. Isn’t that the silly bunch that Kathy wrote about?”

  “That’s right. Did Kathy’s story ever make the paper?”

  “I never saw it. Just knew you sent her out on if.”

  “It’s probably still in her typewriter. She was working on it when I interrupted her to ship her off to Lone Pine. Now that I am here, why don’t you take off?”

  “Not on your life,” said Gold. “I wouldn’t miss this for a million dollars.”

  “All right, then, if that’s the way you feel, why don’t we settle down and figure what we should be doing. Probably, in the next few hours, we should start calling in some of our people early. You have any ideas?”

  “Jay’s out at the airport now,” said Gold. “I caught Sloane before he left and sent him out to Highway 12. Jones just got back from South Dakota and he’ll have to write his Black Hills-Indian story for the Sunday paper.”

  “Let’s forget the Black Hills piece,” said Garrison. “We’ll have plenty else and it can wait. Jones is a good man and we’ll need him. He’s had a good night’s sleep. Call him in another hour or two.”

  “Freeman is another man we could use early,” said Gold, “he knows his way around the statehouse. The governor, most likely, will be calling out the guard. We need someone who can sit here at a desk and keep tabs on what the state is doing. I phoned the highway patrol and it is on the job. They’ll probably have troopers three deep around the visitor on Highway 12. Some at the airport, too, but the airport has its own security force and may not need much help.”

  “They’ll have real problems out there when the traffic picks up later in the morning.”

  “They have problems now. It puts a crimp in handling air traffic when you have a runway out.”

  “Why the hell do you think that thing landed at the airport?”

  Gold shook his head. “For that matter, why should one land on a highway? Why do they land in any one particular place?” He reached out his hand and picked up a sheaf of paper ripped off the teletypes. “All over the country,” he said. “Mostly reports of sightings, but some of them now are being verified. One reported here, another there. Reports from truck drivers, late people driving home from work, night watchmen, from all kinds of night owls.”

  “Like us,” said Garrison.

  “That’s right. Like us.”

  “We’ll need coverage of state and federal agencies,” said Garrison. “Anyone or any agency that can be possibly involved. Williams is our man to contact the local FBI. No one is going to get much out of the FBI, but Williams will come closer than any other man. He seems to get along with them.”

  “Campbell, maybe, could tackle some of the people at the university,” said Gold. “Physicists, psychologists, engineers, aeronautic people. They might be able to give some insight on what is going on. Maybe some of the sociologists and psychologists may be able to make some sort of an assessment on what the public impact will be. And we can’t forget the churches. Will this business have any impact on religious thinking?”

  “We’ll have to pick our sources carefully,” said Garrison. “Some of these churchmen are inclined to shoot off their mouths in all directions and endlessly and without thought on any given subject.”

  “Roberts might be the man for that,” said Gold.

  The phone rang and Garrison picked it up.

  Kathy’s voice asked, “Is that you, Johnny? What are you doing there this time of night?”

  “We have some of your visitors down here. How about yourself? We talked about phoning you, but figured you were asleep.”

  “I was, but Stiffy came pounding at the door and woke me up.”

  “Stiffy?”

  “That old man who took the call and held the phone for me.”

  “Now I remember. Why should he be pounding at your door?”

  “He was sleeping off a drunk and woke up and saw them.”

  “Them?”

  “More of the visitors. A dozen or so of them, all coming in a bunch. They landed across the river, in the wilderness area. They’re lined up abreast, mowing down the trees and turning out cellulose.”

  “But Stiffy . . .”

  “I gave him five dollars for holding the phone. Chet gave him a quart of booze. We’ve bought the man for life.”

  “We need you and Chet down here, Kathy. I think there’s an early morning plane out of Bemidji. Can you manage it?”

  “It doesn’t leave until six or so. Plenty of time. Even time to go out and have a closer look at these new visitors. Stiffy’s pounding Chet awake right now.”

  “Okay. Whatever you can manage. But don’t miss that plane. All
hell is set to let loose down here.”

  “I should give Stiffy another five.”

  “Give him ten,” said Garrison. “Norton can keep an eye on things up there for us and Stiffy maybe can do some legwork for him.”

  23. THE UNITED STATES

  People woke and turned on their radios to learn what kind of weather they might expect that day. There was no weather news; instead a running commentary, half news, half wonder and speculation spewed out of the sets.

  The people listened, prickled by the first faint touch of fear. The Minnesota visitor had been a novelty, an event that brought twinges of excitement and well-hidden apprehension, but there had been only one of them. It had stayed for a time and then had flown off and, except for the young that it had spawned, that had been the end of it. But now, suddenly, a horde of the things had descended on the Earth. Well-behaved, of course, not really causing trouble, but posing an uneasy wonder as to what kind of things they were, what they might expect of Earth.

  The people went about their work, but all day long they met other people who were prone to stop and talk about the wonder of the visitors. Throughout the day, the uneasiness kept growing as rumor piled on rumor, as speculation grew, adding to the sense of uneasiness and, at times, the sense of fear. Little work was done.

  An Iowa farmer, not bothering to turn on his radio, went out in the early dawn to do the morning chores and was stopped in his tracks by the sight of the huge black box that was sitting in his cornfield. He hurried back into the house and came out again armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun, his jacket pocket sagging with a handful of shells. Riding a small farm tractor, he went to the cornfield and parked outside the fence that enclosed the field. Climbing from the tractor, he crawled through the fence and walked toward the visitor. It made no sign that it noticed his approach. Cautiously, he made his way around it. Apparently, it was doing nothing; it was only sitting there. Twice he raised the gun, his finger on the trigger; each time he decided not to shoot. There was no way of telling, he reminded himself, what it might do if he shot at it. Finally, having circled it, he climbed through the fence, clambered on the tractor and went back to the morning chores.

  Looking to his left, the airliner pilot spotted the visitor several miles away. He reached out a hand and nudged the man sitting next to him. “Look over there,” he said. The other looked. “It’s paralleling us,” he said. “I thought all of them were down,” the pilot said. “Sitting on the ground.” They continued to watch it. It continued on course with them, matching their speed, moving no nearer or no farther off.

  A man stood on a street corner in a ghetto area and raised his arms above his head. He bellowed to the others in the street. “Our brothers out of space,” he howled, “have come to rescue us. They’re dropping down to confront those who hold us in our bondage. Let us rejoice, brothers, for help has finally come.” The people gathered to listen to his mad ranting, grinning or scowling as the words might strike them, but not believing him, for these people of the street believed no one at all, but sensing in him a primitive excitement that stirred in them a savage anger at their hopelessness. And hour later, there was looting and burning in the area.

  In one New England village, someone (never identified) went into a church and began ringing the bell. Curious people came to learn why the bell was ringing. And to many of them, it seemed good to be there, proper to be there when visitors had come upon the Earth. So they went into the church and the minister, hurrying from the parsonage, found them there. To him, as well, it seemed proper that they should be there, so he led them in prayer. In other villages, other church bells rang and other people came to be led in prayer. Across the land suddenly god-stricken people flocked to church.

  National guardsmen cordoned off the visitors that were sitting on the ground. Highway patrolmen worked to keep traffic moving as thousands of sightseers converged upon the sites where the visitors were sitting. And in some scattered places visitors, floating easily along, only a few hundred feet above the ground, patrolled the highways. Motorists stopped their cars to get out and gape and tangled traffic jams resulted. There were many accidents.

  24. WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Winston Mallory, the secretary of defense, said to the President, “Whiteside thinks we should run a test of how these things react to firepower. Under the circumstances, I recommend that we should turn him loose. It didn’t make much sense when there was only one of them, but now that they’ve invaded . . .”

  “I object to your use of the term invasion for what is happening,” said the secretary of state. “A fair number of them have landed, but there has been no violence. They’re not killing our citizens, they’re not burning our cities.”

  William Sullivan, secretary of interior, said, “They chewed up a housing development across the Potomac. One of them gobbled up a lumberyard out on the west coast. They’re eating our forests in Michigan, in Maine, in Minnesota, in Washington and Oregon.”

  “But they haven’t killed anyone,” said State. “The only thing they’ve done is steal a little cellulose. They haven’t . . .”

  “Just a minute, Marcus,” said the President. “I want to hear more about this weapons test. What does Whiteside propose to do? Open up on them with tanks?”

  “Nothing like that,” said Mallory. “Just a simple test, that is all. We’ve got to know how these things respond. You remember, out in Minnesota, a man fired at the one that landed there and it fired back, killing him. He used a deer rifle, probably a .30 caliber. The thing about it is that we don’t know what happened, how the visitor did it. It carried no apparent weaponry. It was bare of any external features. Yet when that man fired at it . . .”

  “What you want to do is fire another .30 caliber, probably by remote control, then try to determine how the visitor fires back?”

  “Precisely. We’ll use cameras. High speed cameras. Some of them can take up to thousands of frames a second. That way we can track the bullet, record the moment of impact, see what happens on impact. A study of the film . . .”

  “Yes, I see,” said the President. “If you can be sure the general will stop with a .30 caliber.”

  “He will stop at the .30 caliber. All we want, all he wants, is some idea of how the visitor shoots back. Once we know that, we can go on from there.”

  “If it seems necessary.”

  “That’s right. If it seems necessary.”

  “And, for Christ’s sake, tell Henry to go easy. Take all possible precautions. Exercise all restraint. Only the one shot to get the data.”

  “He’ll go easy. I have talked with him about it.”

  “I’m impressed by what Marcus was saying,” said the President. “Except for this cellulose business, nothing actually has happened. The closest to anything disastrous was the Virginia housing development . . .”

  “People could have been killed,” said Sullivan. “It was just plain dumb luck that everyone got out of the houses in time. There were people sleeping in those houses. A lot of them could have lost their lives. And they’re sitting down at airports, closing runways. Let one plane crash because of that and we’d have casualties. Also, I understand they are flying along with planes, as if they might be studying them. So far nothing’s happened, but it could.”

  “What would you have us do?” asked State. “Wheel out our artillery?”

  “No, of course not. But we should be doing something. We shouldn’t just be sitting here.”

  “We’ve called out the National Guard,” said the President. “Troops are keeping each of our visitors isolated, keeping the public away from them. That way we probably will avoid incidents.”

  “What if our visitors start in on other housing developments?” asked Sullivan. “What if they move into the residential areas of our cities, leveling houses to get cellulose? What will we do then? How will we take care of the people who will be homeless?”

  “They haven’t done that yet,” said Marcus White. “Virginia apparently was an
isolated example. And the visitor stopped after chewing up a few houses, as if it realized it had made a mistake.”

  “We have to take care of emergencies as they arise,” said the President. “Meanwhile, we’ll have to do everything we possibly can to find out more about our visitors.”

  “The thing that puzzles me,” said White, “is that so far they’ve landed only in the United States, with some small slop-over into Canada. None in Europe. None in Africa. None anywhere else. Why us? Why just us?”

  “I think I may have a suggestion,” said Dr. Steven Allen, the science advisor. “Let’s put ourselves in the place of the visitors. Let’s say we have sent out an expedition to some other planet. A half a dozen ships, a hundred—the number’s not important. We are looking for one specific thing, like these things apparently are looking for cellulose. We don’t know too much about this planet we have reached. A few things by instrument study from some distance off, but that is all. So we send one ship down to study the situation. There are several land masses and we pick one as a starter. The ship goes down and finds what we are looking for. It finds, as well, that the indigenous life in that area seems friendly. At first glance, there’s nothing on that particular land mass that is about to cause too much trouble and we, of course, want as little trouble as possible. We know this one land mass is safe; we don’t know about the others . . .”

  “You make a good point there,” said the President. “Don’t you agree, Marcus?”

  “Yes, I do agree. I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. I had assumed the visitors might want a rather broad look at the entire planet.”

  “Have you anything else for us?” the President asked the science advisor.

  “A big puzzle,” said Allen. “Much as we hate to even think it, there seems to be a fair possibility that the visitors operate by means of some sort of gravitational control. They float an inch or two above ground level. The one that left Minnesota yesterday rose into the air with no sign of using any propulsive units. They come down to land slowly, almost as if they were gliding to a landing, but to glide you have to make use of wing surfaces and they haven’t any wings.”