The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Come in, Dave,” said the President. “Pull up a chair. The general has something rather strange to tell us.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Porter.

  The President went around his desk and sat behind it, facing the two of them.

  “I hear you had a rough half-hour with the press this afternoon.”

  “They wanted to know about some weapon test. I told them I had not heard of it.”

  The President nodded. “That’s good. How did that sort of little white lie go down with you?”

  “Sir,” said Porter, “most things can be talked about and should. I assumed the test, if not a security matter, at Least, was highly confidential.”

  “It’s a good thing you assumed that,” Whiteside said sourly.

  “Which I take to mean that it might be a long time before anything at all can be said of it.”

  “That’s why I asked you in,” said the President. “I respect you and your viewpoint sufficiently that I don’t want to leave you operating in a vacuum. When you hear what Henry has to say, I think you’ll agree it should be kept undercover.”

  He nodded at Whiteside. “If you’ll run through it again, Henry.”

  The general settled himself more firmly in his chair. “I think that both of you are familiar with the exercise. We mounted a .30 caliber and took movies of the bullet’s path, thousands of frames a second.”

  The President nodded. “Yes, we know.”

  “It was totally incredible,” said Whiteside.

  “Okay, Henry. Go ahead. Tell us.”

  “When the bullet struck the visitor,” said the general, “the skin of the visitor indented. The bullet did not penetrate. It simply made a dimple in the thing’s hide. Like pushing a fist into a feather pillow. Like pushing a finger into your cheek. Then, almost immediately, the dimple rebounded back to its original position and a flare of energy bounced back, striking the mounted rifle and melting it. The funny thing about it is that the bullet itself, the projectile, was not thrown back, not all the way, that is. It bounced back for a short distance, then fell. Later we found it on the ground, where it had fallen.”

  The general stopped talking for a moment, sucking in his breath.

  “Our people tell us,” he said, “that is, our scientists tell us that what happened is that the visitor converted the kinetic energy of the projectile into potential energy. Doing that, you see, so that the energy could be handled. It’s not absolutely certain, but indications are that the visitor absorbed the potential energy, analyzed it, and tossed back an even bigger flare of raw energy that destroyed the weapon. It struck the weapon square, dead-on, and that, the scientists say, is because the indentation was a parabolic indentation, its axis along the line of the projectile’s trajectory. The indentation bounced back to its original position, but the shape of it was so precise that it threw back the energy, in some new form, exactly to its source. The scientists talked about a wave pulse or a reflected wave, but they lost me on that one. The point is that the visitor flung back the energy of the projectile, or at least that much, straight into the weapon that fired it. Even if the shot had been a lobbing shot, say, from a mortar, the return blast of energy would have followed precisely the trajectory of the projectile.”

  He paused, sucking in his breath again, looking from one to the other.

  “Do you realize what that means?” he asked.

  “A perfect defense system,” said the President. “You toss to the other fellow whatever he throws at you.”

  Whiteside nodded. “And perhaps in different forms of energy. That’s what the people at the lab think, anyhow. It wouldn’t have to be a blast of heat. It might be radiation—say, a storm of gamma rays. The visitor can convert kinetic energy to potential energy and it may have a wide choice of energy conversions.”

  “How many people, besides the three of us, know of this?” asked the President.

  “Quite a number of people, service technicians, troops and so forth, witnessed the exercise. If you mean what I’ve just told you, only three others than ourselves.”

  “They can be trusted?”

  “They can be trusted. There’ll be no talk.”

  “I think, to be on the safe side,” said the President, “we must insist the firing test never happened. Would you go along with that, Dave? I know how you feel. . .”

  “Much as it goes against my grain,” said Porter, “I would agree I’d have to. But it will be difficult to keep the cover on. Some of the servicemen, possibly some of the technicians, will talk. Isn’t there some other way it can be done? Say yes, there was a test, but there were no clear-cut results, that what little data we got was confusing and inconclusive.”

  “My advice,” said Whiteside, “is that we stonewall it. That’s the only safe way.”

  “Dave,” said the President, “I’ve never asked you to cover up before. I’m asking you to cover up now. There was, of course, the matter of the object in orbit beginning to break up. I think I made a mistake on that one. You argued for full disclosure, but I weaseled on you. I made a mistake. I should have turned you loose rather than using the NASA announcement. But this is a different matter.”

  “This,” said Whiteside, “could give us the edge we need. If we only can find out how it’s done.”

  “We could call in Allen.”

  “Mr. President,” said Whiteside, “I wish you wouldn’t. Maybe eventually he can help with an answer, hopefully without actually knowing what he’s doing. But he shouldn’t be told about this. Six men know about it now; six men are too many, but there’s nothing we can do about that. Let’s keep it at the six. Allen is soft and a bit given to talk. He is somewhat bitten with the idea that scientific knowledge should be shared. The force that he has pulled together is working outside security and . . .”

  “You don’t need to belabor the point,” said the President. “You are entirely right. We’ll keep Allen out of it.”

  “My people think,” said the general, “that with the visitors it is not a matter of defense at all. Not defense against an enemy, that is. They think the visitors absorb energy from any source that is available. Out in space, they’d absorb energy from all sorts of radiations or from small particles of matter, perhaps on occasion rather large particles of matter that might collide with them. In such an instance, they can convert the kinetic energy of such particles into potential energy, absorb what they can of it and reject that part they can’t absorb. The ability is a sort of built-in safety valve against excess energy.”

  “You used a .30 caliber projectile,” said the President. “Do you have any estimate of how much larger projectiles the visitors could withstand?”

  “I suppose a nuke might destroy them,” said the general, “but the probability seems to be they could withstand anything short of that. The dimple made by the rifle bullet was small and shallow. The dimple would increase in size with anything heavier, but there is plenty of leeway. The visitor we used for the test didn’t seem to notice. When the bullet struck, it never even flinched. It was standing, doing nothing, before the test. At least, nothing we could notice. It was still standing there, doing nothing, after the firing. What I’d like to do is try something a little heavier, progressively heavier firing tests.”

  “You can’t do that,” warned Porter. “You would blow your cover. Maybe we can get by, just barely get by, denying this one test. If you tried others, there wouldn’t be a chance.”

  “That’s right,” said the President. “For the moment, we must be satisfied with what we have. What we must do now is find what the visitors are. How they are made. How they operate, if that’s the word. Allen may be pulling something together soon that will help us.”

  “He hasn’t much to work on,” said Porter. “About all his people can do is stand to one side and observe.”

  The box on the President’s desk beeped. Frowning, he reached out and punched a button.

  “Grace, I thought I told you . . .”

  �
�I’m terribly sorry, sir, I thought you’d want to know. Dr. Allen is here. He says he must see you immediately. It seems that someone out in Minnesota has found a dead visitor.”

  33. MINNEAPOLIS

  The room was closing in on him and that was strange, for it had not closed in before. For the first time since he had lived there—a long two years—he became aware of the room’s smallness, its cluttered bareness, its squalidness. He saw the grime upon the windows, the water streaks upon the wall.

  He shoved the papers on the desk to one side and stood up, looking out the window to where kids where playing one of those nonsensical, running-and-yelling games that had no significance to anyone but themselves. An old woman, struggling with a grocery bag, was limping down the broken sidewalk. A dog sat lopsided before the stoop of a ramshackle house. The old wreck of a car, its battered fenders drooping disconsolately, stood in its accustomed place beside the curb.

  What the hell is the matter with me? Jerry Conklin asked himself. And asking, knew.

  It was this visitor business. It had preyed upon him ever since it had happened. He had not, since then, been himself. The worry of it had robbed him of his dedication as a student, had nagged at him almost every waking hour. It would not let him be. It had interfered with his work on his thesis and the thesis was important. He simply had to get the thesis written.

  Would it have been better, he wondered, if he had come forward to tell the story of what had happened to the proper authorities? And having gotten rid of it by the telling of it, he might now be shut of it and able to get down to work. Yet, for some reason, he had not been able to do that. He had told himself that he balked against the ridicule and the hidden laughter the story would have brought, although that might not be the only reason. Although he could not imagine what other reason there might be. He had thought that telling it to Barr might be some help, but it hadn’t been. The exobiologist, despite the fact that he had listened without laughter, had been no help at all. Nor had the telling of it, even under the circumstances, had the cleansing therapy of a confessional.

  And, now, he simply could not tell it. Telling it now, so long after the fact, would lump it with the stories all the kooks were telling about being taken up by the visitors. Telling it now would do no more than link him with the lunatic fringe that had sprung up with the advent of the visitors. Difficult to tell his story before, it was now impossible.

  Although, more than likely, he was not through with it yet. At some time, the investigators who had hauled his car away would find a license plate or a motor number and the car would be linked to him. Perhaps, he told himself, they already had found the evidence that would link him to the car. He had done nothing about the car and perhaps he should have, but had not been able to decide what to do. He should have reported its destruction to his insurance company, but what could he have told them? For a time, he had considered reporting it stolen, but had not acted on that impulse. If he had, he probably would find himself in more trouble that he was right now.

  He moved away from the window and back to the desk. Sitting down, he pulled the papers in front of him. No matter what, he told himself, he had to get some work done that afternoon. Kathy would be picking him up at six or so and they’d go out to eat.

  Kathy, he thought. What the hell would he have done without her? It had been her strength and steadiness, her loving solicitude that had carried him through the last few days.

  The phone rang and he picked it up.

  Kathy said, “Jerry, I’m so sorry. I can’t see you tonight. I’m going out of town. Up to Lone Pine again.”

  “Oh, hell,” Jerry said. “I had been sitting here, counting on seeing you. What is it this time?”

  “They’ve found a dead visitor up there. Washington probably will be sending in investigators. We have to have someone up there and Johnny picked on me.”

  “A dead visitor? What happened?”

  “No one knows. It was just found dead. Stiffy Grant found it. You remember Stiffy. I introduced you to him.”

  “Yeah, I remember him. Tell me, how would Stiffy know if it was dead or not?”

  “It was cold,” she said. “No longer warm, but cold. And it wasn’t floating. It was resting on the ground.”

  “And now they’re going to rush in and dissect it to find out how it works.”

  “I suppose that’s the idea,” Kathy said.

  “It has a gruesome sound to me.”

  “To me, too, but it’s logical.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. A day or two, I think. I will see you then.”

  “I was counting on seeing you tonight.”

  “So was I. Jerry, I’m awfully sorry. And so disappointed.”

  “Oh, well, you have a job to do. So have I—the thesis. I’ll get some work done on it.”

  “And, Jerry, something else. Old 101 has been found.”

  “101?”

  “Yes, don’t you remember? I told you. How one of the men from Washington painted a green 101 on that first visitor to land.”

  “Yes, you did tell me. So it has been found. Where is it?”

  “On a farm near a little place in Iowa. Davis Corners. The farmer thinks it planted something in the field and now is guarding it. When he approaches the field, it runs him off.”

  “What could it have planted?”

  “Maybe nothing. That’s only what the farmer thinks. Johnny was going to send me down there, then this Lone Pine business came up.”

  “Why should he have sent you down there? What could you have done?”

  “It was just one of Johnny’s hunches. He operates by hunch, runs the city desk by hunch. Some of the hunches are good, some of them pay off. Some people might call it a newspaperman’s intuition. Actually, it’s hunch. Now I have to go. The plane is waiting and Chet is standing here, first on one foot and then the other.”

  “I’ll miss you, Kathy.”

  “So will I miss you. Get lots of work done while I’m gone.”

  “I’ll try. Thanks for calling, Kathy.”

  He hung up the phone and sat idly at the desk. The room closed in on him again. He saw the grimy windows and the streaks upon the wall.

  Old 101, he thought. Somewhere down in Iowa, guarding a field. And why should it be in Iowa? There were no trees in Iowa, or at the best, few trees. Nothing like the trees in Minnesota. The farmer thought it had planted or sowed his field. And what could it have planted? He shook his head, puzzled. The farmer, he told himself, must be mistaken.

  He got up from the desk and walked up and down the room, remembering again, with a sharpness that terrified him, those few hours (or few minutes?) he had spent inside the thing that was 101. He saw the luminous disks again, the pale blueness of the light, the strange flickerings. There had been something there, he thought, that he should have understood, some fact or facts that, had he stayed a little longer, he might have been able to perceive.

  If he could have stayed a little longer, if he could talk with it again—and stopped himself, damning himself for a fool. For he had never talked with it, never really talked with it. From it he had done no more than gain impressions, the sense of home and the sense of trees. And those impressions, he told himself, bitterly, might not have come from 101 at all. They might have come from some unexpected abberations in his mind.

  He went back to his desk and sat down again, pulling the papers in front of him, picking up his pen. But he could not work. The writing that he’d done no longer was writing, but strange, alien squiggles. He stared at the squiggles, trying to make them out, startled by his not being able to make them out, angry and confused, his mind churning.

  Maybe, he told himself, the answer might be there, down on that farm in Iowa. And that, he thought, was sheer insanity. He could go to Iowa, out to the farm, and 101 would chase him off, even as it had chased the farmer. He was dealing in a fantasy and knew it, but knowing it did no good. The fantasy still hung on. The impulse bec
ame a certainty—he had to go to Iowa. Although what he’d do once he got there, he had no idea.

  He rose from the desk and paced up and down the room, fighting it out with himself. One idea hammered at him, zeroing in on him. He needed an answer and this was the only way that he could think of that might provide an answer. It might turn out to be nothing, but he couldn’t pass it up. He had to take a chance. He had to play his hunch. Johnny Garrison was a hunch player, Kathy had said, and at times, his hunches did pay off.

  He fought it out half the afternoon and it would not go away. He had to go to Iowa. He had to go to Iowa and he didn’t even have a car. But Charlie would let him use his car. If he asked, Charlie would loan the car to him.

  Limp and sweating, he lifted the phone and dialed Charlie’s number.

  34. LONE PINE

  Looking through binoculars, Kathy could see, across the river, the knot of men who were at work on the dead visitor. There was no way she could make out what they were doing. The only thing she could determine was that in some manner (using saws, she wondered?), they had cut sections out of the dead body, probably securing samples to be taken back to Washington, or perhaps elsewhere, for closer examination. They were busy with a number of pieces of equipment, but the distance was too great to make certain what they were doing. There had been no chance to talk with anyone who might answer her questions. Security was tight. The bridge the Army Engineers had thrown across the river was closed by national guardsmen and other guardsmen patrolled the riverbank to stop anyone who might try to cross.

  The other visitors paid no attention to what was going on around the dead body of their fellow. They continued cutting timber and spewing out the bales of cellulose. Some of them were budding and a dozen or so of their young were scurrying about, chomping at the bales of cellulose.

  Kathy lowered the glasses, laid them in her lap.

  “Anything to see over there?” asked Norton.

  “Nothing I can make out,” said Kathy. She handed the glasses to him. “You want to have a try?”