“And what’s wrong with that?” asked the senator. “Money is the basis of our economic order. And while you may not think so, the basis of our social order as well. The country is starting a long slide to collapse. And those ninnies down at the White House don’t even recognize it.”
“I think we do,” said Porter, “although we’re not as pessimistic in our assessment as you seem to be. There are other things that call for priority consideration.”
“What other things?”
“Well, a wide variety of . . .”
“Stop there!” shouted the senator, triumphantly. “I knew it! I knew there was something that you weren’t telling me. Something you were hiding.”
“Senator, I assure you . . .”
“You are onto something, aren’t you? You’ve found out something about the visitors that won’t bear talking on.”
“Not that I know of,” said Porter. The senator sat down in a chair, gulped the remainder of his drink.
“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to know, not until it’s time for me to know, for a lot of us to know. And you are sitting on it. That’s good. Not broadcasting it. Protecting it. I know that fuzzy-minded secretary of state wants to share what we find with everyone, including Ivan. We can’t afford to share . . .”
“Senator, you are absolutely wrong. We don’t know one single goddamned thing.”
“Spoken like a gentleman,” said the senator. “I knew you had it in you. I knew you could be counted on to keep your mouth shut.”
He looked at the watch on his wrist. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I kept you longer than I should, ranting at you. You and Alice will be late for your dinner reservation.”
30. LONE PINE
One of the visitors had fallen behind the others. It was standing still and was not cutting trees. On either side of it, the other visitors were continuing with their cutting, regularly spewing out the bales of cellulose behind them.
Stiffy Grant came to an abrupt halt as he came around the edge of the uncut forest and saw what had happened. He reached up a hand and tipped his hat back on his head, ran a hand across his brow to wipe it dry.
“Now what the hell?” he asked aloud. There seemed to be no answer. Studiously, he focused his eyes, but only with an effort. He reached for his back pocket and took out the bottle, uncapped it and put it to his lips, throwing back his head to drink. Finished with the drink, he eyed the level of the liquor in the bottle with some dismay. There weren’t more than another two drinks left in it. It wasn’t the best of liquor; in fact, it was the cheapest to be bought, but it was liquor and he mourned its disappearance. He recapped the bottle carefully and eased it into the back pocket, patting the pocket to make certain the bottle was secure.
Walking carefully so he would not fall (for if he fell, he might break the bottle), he set out to find what might be wrong. Maybe it got tired, he told himself, and had stopped to rest, although over all the time that he had kept tab on the visitors, not a one of them had ever stopped to rest or had given any sign of tiredness.
Norton had bought his breakfast for him and that meant that he had enough money left to buy another bottle of the booze. It was good to feel, he told himself, that he had at least another bottle in his future. That Norton, say what you might of him, was a decent man.
The visitor that was standing still turned out to be a greater distance off than he had estimated, but he kept plodding doggedly up the swath that it had cut, warily avoiding the bales that it had dropped, and finally reached it.
“What’s the matter, fellow?” he asked, walking up and putting out a hand to rest against its hide. Once he put it there, he leaned against it for a moment to get himself a little steadied.
As he held his arm straight out against it to gain some steadiness, he knew there was something wrong, something not quite the way it had been before, although it took a little time for him to pinpoint the wrongness.
Then he knew. The visitor was cold. Gone was the pleasant, friendly warmth that he had always felt before when he had laid a hand upon one of them. He shook his head in amazement and took away his hand. He stumbled along it for a dozen feet or so and then laid his hand on it again. The hide was still cold, all the warmth was gone.
Fumbling his way along it, he laid his hand upon its hide time and time again. Always the hide was cold, stone cold. He turned and leaned his back against the visitor and slid down, collapsing to a sitting position.
Cold and motionless. No longer floating a few inches off the ground, but resting on the ground.
Could this be death? he asked himself. Could the visitor be dead? Cold and still and that was the way of death. And if it had died, why had it died? What had happened to it? And another thing—if it now were dead, it once had been living, but that was no news to him. For a long time, it had seemed to him, without question, that the visitors were alive. Not only alive, but friends. He wondered about that as he thought it, for it had been a long time since he had had a friend. It was strange, he thought, that he should have found a friend among people other than his own.
Huddled against the cold visitor, without even bothering to cover his face, letting the tears run unhindered down his stubbled cheeks, Stiffy Grant wept bitterly for a friend that he had lost.
31. MINNEAPOLIS
Al Lathrop, the managing editor, sat at the head of the conference table. He was idly tapping his pencil on the desk. Whatever are we here for? Kathy wondered. There were just the three of them, she and Jay and Johnny. Johnny could be expected to be here, of course, but not the others. Never before, in her time at the Tribune, had she ever been called into the conference room. Here it was that the various editors huddled, well before the first deadline, to discuss the stories they had, deciding what to do with them. Such news huddles, however, were held late in the day and this was only a little after lunch.
“I thought,” said Lathrop, “that we should get together to talk about what long range plans we should be making in covering the story of the visitors. Since it started, it seems to me that we have done somewhat better than an adequate job. We have done it well—conscientiously and objectively. I think we will continue doing exactly that.
“But now it may be time to begin to think about possible new dimensions to the story. Johnny, you have been on top of it since the first of the visitors landed at Lone Pine. Would you have some thought about what we should be doing next?”
“Al, it’s just possible that it’s too early to try to do any more than continue to report the facts as we can determine them,” said Garrison. “At first, we were dealing with a piece of news that had high shock value in itself. Our concern then, of course, was not to go beyond the most factual and objective reporting. The news itself, the bare recital of it, had sufficient impact. For my part, and I think in everyone else’s opinion, it seemed important that we not engage in any kind of writing to increase the impact. In fact, there was no need to. Jay wrote a few general background articles, but he did not engage in any speculation beyond much that had previously been written before the visitors showed up. His articles were intended to do no more than inform our readers, as gently as possible, what concepts could be involved. Other than that, we stuck to straight news reporting.”
“But, now,” Lathrop said, “the public, in general, has accepted the situation. Many of them may not like it, may find it difficult to accept. But, by now, most everyone does realize that the visitors are here and may be staying for a while. My point is that now may be the time to embark on some background work, digging a bit more deeply into possible consequences . . .”
“Giving our readers something to think about,” said Garrison.
“That’s exactly it. Throw out a few questions they should be mulling over.”
“Al, what you are saying is perfectly logical,” said Garrison. “The time will come for that, but I still think it’s too early. This kind of writing can only be done if a great deal of careful thou
ght is put into it. We can’t go off half-cocked. We have to have some information or at least some indication of some sort of information before we can begin writing that kind of article. The information, I agree, need not be as solid as we’d want in writing factual news, but it would have to have some substance. Otherwise, we could be caught a long way off base. We could turn out awfully wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that we should immediately go into backgrounding. I didn’t expect that we’d walk out the door and start writing think pieces. But it does seem we should be considering it, getting sorted out in our mind the kind of writing we’d like to see done. We have a lot of people out in the newsroom who have been spending a lot of time observing the visitors and writing about them. Some sort of concensus should be taking shape in the minds of some of these people. Kathy, you and Jay probably have been most involved of all our staff. Have you any thoughts about the situation? For starters, Kathy, how do you feel about the visitors?”
“I like them,” Kathy told him.
“Well, now,” said Lathrop, “I hadn’t quite expected that. But go ahead and tell us what you like about them.”
“For one thing,” she said, “they haven’t jostled us. They have been nuisances now and then, but done us no actual harm.”
“A man was killed at Lone Pine.”
“The man was the aggressor. He fired at the visitor. Since then, there has been no one hurt. The visitors have been decent people.”
“People, Kathy?”
“Sure, they’re people. Different from us, but they still are people. They are intelligent. I’d suspect they have an ethical sense.”
“That may all be true,” said Jay, “but my impression is that they are arrogant. They pay no attention to us. They ignore us, not studiously, as if they were working at it, but as if they honestly feel that we are not worthy of attention. At times as if they didn’t even see us.”
Kathy started to speak, but caught herself in time. If she could only tell them, she thought, but she couldn’t. Not about Jerry, not even about the handshake she had experienced, although thinking of it as a handshake fell short of what it really had been. It had been something more than a handshake; it had been more personal and understanding than a simple handshake.
“Were you about to say something?” Lathrop asked her.
She shook her head. “Only to say that I do think of them as people. I wish I could say why, but I can’t. I can’t manage to define what I really feel.”
“One thing I’ve wondered about,” said Jay. “These things must have come from somewhere deep in space. It seems fairly apparent that they eat trees to provide cellulose as food for their young. They may even use some of the cellulose to feed themselves. That we cannot be sure about. But the point I want to make is that they probably are not from this solar system.
On no other planet in the system would they find trees or anything else that would provide cellulose. Which would mean that they must come from some other solar system, probably from a planet that could produce cellulose. If this is so, then they must have crossed several light-years, perhaps a great many light-years, for it stands to reason that every solar system would not have a planet that could provide them with the cellulose they seek. Such a planet, with many differences, of course, would have to roughly approximate the Earth and . . .”
“Jay,” asked Garrison, “just what the hell are you getting at?”
“There might be a number of considerations,” Jay said, “but the one I’m most concerned about is that their trip must have taken a great deal of time. Physicists tell us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, probably not even close to the speed of light. This might mean that our visitors could have traveled for many thousands of years before they came to Earth.”
“They must have been desperate,” said Kathy, “to embark on such a journey. Something must have happened to drive them out into space to search for another planet, having no idea where they’d find such a planet, perhaps not even knowing they’d find one at all. But they needed cellulose to feed their babies. Until they found cellulose, they could have no young. They would have been facing racial extinction.”
“You make quite a case for them,” Lathrop said to Kathy.
“She may be right,” said Jay. “The scenario she outlines could be close to truth. They may have had to look at a number of solar systems before they found one with a planet that fitted their needs. As I say, the search may have taken-thousands of years. If that is the case, our visitors must be an extremely long-lived race.”
“You’re talking about some background articles,” Garrison said to Lathrop. “Kathy and Jay have given you a hypothetical estimate that would make a dilly of a backgrounder. How would you feel about them going ahead and writing it?” Lathrop shrugged. “I don’t think so. It’s just too theoretical. It has no solid basis. It would come out with a sensational sound to it.”
“I agree,” said Garrison. “The same objection could be made to almost anything else that might be written. It would all be based on supposition. We have nothing solid on which to base any background writing. The best we can do is stick to what can be seen. If we get into theorizing, we’ll find that we have nothing on which to tie the theories. We can’t pretend to understand what is going on because we are dealing with a life form so unlike us that there’s no basis for understanding. Kathy’s belief that these things had to find a place where they could raise their young makes sense so far as we are concerned, but does it make sense so far as the visitors are concerned? They may have few concepts that would match our concepts. Their intelligence and outlook, their life style, if you want to call it that, may be, probably is, in large part not understandable to us.”
“Maybe you are right,” said Lathrop. “One thing—I don’t want any of us going off the deep end. In this matter, we simply can’t afford to be sensational. By the way, Matthews, in our news bureau, told me this morning there was a rumor in Washington that some sort of weapon test was tried out on one of the visitors. Is there any news of that, any hint of it on the wires?”
Garrison shook his head. “Matthews filed just thirty minutes ago. The question was raised at the White House press briefing today and Porter, the press secretary, denied he knew anything about it.”
“How much can you depend on what Porter says?”
“It’s hard to tell. So far he seems to have been aboveboard. The scuttlebutt is that there is a hell of a row going on inside the White House, Porter insisting on full disclosure of everything about the visitors and some of the White House people wanting to clam up. If there were a weapon test, I would suppose it might be military. The chances are the results would be classified. Porter might have to cave in on something like that.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, not much. Nothing but the regular flow of visitor news. A few days ago, a visitor showed up at an eastern Iowa farm, took over a freshly plowed field, went sailing up and down it until it had covered the entire field, then squatted down in a pasture to watch. It runs off everyone who tries to approach the field. The visitor, it seems, is an old friend of ours.”
“What the hell do you mean? An old friend?”
“It has the number 101 painted on it in green.”
Kathy jerked upright. “That’s the one that was the first to land at Lone Pine,” she said. “One of the federal observers painted the number on it. She was the one who had the babies.”
“She?”
“Well, it had babies, didn’t it? That makes it a she in my book. How come I missed that story?”
“It never got in the paper,” said Garrison. “Got crowded out. Showed up in the slop. We’ll get it in tonight. I don’t know how it happened.”
“We have to watch things like that,” said Lathrop. “That’s a good story. We should have run it.”
“Al, it happens now and then. Not often. But it does happen. It’s just one of those things. I’ve been wondering if Kathy should go down
to Iowa and look into the situation. The visitor might remember her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Lathrop. “Not a single one of them has paid any attention to a human.”
“How do we know?” asked Garrison. “Sure, none of them has wandered over and said hello, but that doesn’t mean they don’t notice people. Kathy was at Lone Pine for several days and . . .”
“What good would it do if old 101 did remember her? There’s no way to interview one of them. No way at all to get any information out of them.”
“I know all that,” said the city editor. “I just have a hunch. I don’t think it would be a bad idea.”
“All right. Go ahead. You run the city room. If you have a hunch . . .”
The door burst open and Jim Gold thrust through it.
“Johnny,” he said, “Frank Norton’s on the phone from Lone Pine. Stiffy Grant has just found a dead one.”
“A dead what?”
“A dead visitor,” said Gold.
32. WASHINGTON, D.C.
Porter picked up the phone. “Dave,” said the President, “can you come in? There’s something I want you to hear.”
“Immediately, Mr. President,” said Porter.
He put the phone back in the cradle and got out of his chair. From her desk in the corner, his assistant, Marcia Langley, looked inquiringly at him.
“I don’t know,” said Porter. “More than likely trouble of one sort or another.”
As he came into the outer office he made a thumb at the door to the President’s office and asked, “Who is in there with him?”
“General Whiteside,” said Grace.
“Only Whiteside?”
“Only Whiteside. He arrived a couple of minutes ago.”
Porter knocked on the door and opened it. The President was perched on one corner of his desk and Whiteside was sitting in a chair against the wall.
The Complete Serials Page 170