“But now he knows. Now he’s sure?”
“Now he knows. He has the cars.
He has pictures of them.”
“Have you seen the pictures?”
“It was less than half an hour ago the Tribune went to press. The story caught everyone, the news services included, by surprise. It would take a while to get the photos from the Tribune, a while longer to transmit them. They should be coming in soon.”
“But cars,” said the President. “Why, for Christ’s sake, cars? Why not something really fanciful? Why not diamond necklaces? Cases of champagne? Fur coats?”
“The visitors are good observers, sir. They have been watching us for days . . .”
“And they saw a lot of cars. Almost everyone has one. Those who don’t have one want one. Those who have an old car want a new one. Old cars. Beaten-up cars. Worn-out cars. Accidents on the road. People killed and cars demolished. The visitors saw all this. So they gave us cars that never would wear out, that need no gasoline, that need no roads, that can never crash because they veer off when there is the danger of a crash, no maintenance, no repairs, no paint job . . .”
“We can’t be sure of that, sir. That’s a speculation.”
“A car for everyone?”
“We can’t be sure of that, either. That’s what Garrison thinks. That’s what his reporter thinks. As I understand, however, the Tribune story is very careful not to say that, although the implication’s there.”
“It can wreck us, Dave. Whether there is a car for everyone or not, it can blow the economy to hell. Because the implication, as you say, is there. I’m thinking of calling a moratorium, a financial holiday. Shutting down the stock market, the banks, all financial institutions, no financial transactions of any kind at all. What do you think?”
“It would give us time. That might be all it would give us. And a few days only. You couldn’t make it stick for more than just a few days.”
“If the market opens tomorrow morning.
“You’re right. Something has to be done. You’d better talk to the attorney general, the federal reserve. Probably some other people.”
“Time might be all that it would give us,” said the President. “I agree with that. But we need some time. We need some elbow room. Give people a chance to think things over. A chance for us to talk with people. I told you the other day I felt there was no reason for panic. Goddammit, Dave, I’m close to panic now.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Panic is something we can’t afford. Not visible panic. Politics gives you a long training in the control of personal panic. Right now my gut is jumping, but I can’t let it show. They’ll be coming out of the woodwork to crucify us. Congress, the press, business interests, labor leaders, everyone. All of them claiming we should have foreseen this situation, should have been doing something to head it off.”
“The country will live through it, sir.”
“The country, but not me. It does beat hell how things turn out. Up until now, I figured I had it made for another term.”
“You still may have.”
“It would call for a miracle.”
“All right. We’ll carpenter up a miracle.”
“I don’t think so, Dave. Not that we won’t try. We’ll have to see what happens. Allen and Whiteside will be joining us. Grace is trying to locate Hammond. I want his input. A sound man, Hammond. He can handle the mechanics of the financial holiday. We’ll have to have Marcus over later. There’ll be others coming in. God knows, I need all the advice that I can get. I want you to hang in close.”
“After a while, I’ll have to have a briefing. The boys are already pounding on the door.”
“Hold up for a while,” said the President. “Maybe in a couple of hours, we’ll have something to give them. Go out now, empty, and they’ll maul you to death.”
“They’ll maul me, anyhow. But it’s a good idea to wait a while. I’m not looking forward to it.”
The box on the President’s desk beeped. When he answered, Grace said, “General Whiteside and Dr. Allen are here.”
“Show them in.”
The two came into the room and were waved to chairs. “You’ve heard?” asked the President. “It was too involved to try to tell you when I spoke to you.”
They nodded.
“Car radio,” said Allen.
“TV,” said the general. “I turned it on after you phoned.”
“Steve, what do you think of it?” asked the President. “There seems to be no question the visitors are making cars. What kind of cars would they be?”
“As I understand it,” said the science advisor, “they are budding them. They bud their young, forming them in the images of themselves. I suppose there’s nothing to stop them from budding in the image of cars.”
“Some of them ate some cars,” said Whiteside. “In St. Louis, I believe.”
“I’m not too sure that has anything to do with it,” said Allen. “Certainly, they probably could analyze the cars once they ingested them, but the cars they are budding apparently are similar only in external features to our manufactured cars.”
“Then why did they snap up the cars in St. Louis?” asked the general.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Allen. “All I know is that the cars the visitors are budding are visitors. Not actually cars at all, but visitors in the shape of cars, apparently capable of being used as cars. They are biological, not mechanical vehicles.”
“The reporter who found the cars,” said the President, “seems to think, at least she suggests, the cars are being budded out of gratitude. A free will offering to the people of the planet that supplies their cellulose.”
“About that I wouldn’t know,” said Allen. “You are talking about how these damn things think. On that I couldn’t even hazard a guess. We’ve been studying the one that died for days and we have not even the slightest idea of its anatomy, of how it manages to live and function on the physical level, let along the mental. The situation is analogous to a medieval man trying to understand how and why a sophisticated computer works. Not one single organ that can be compared to a human organ. We are completely baffled. I had hoped we might be able to determine what caused the creature’s death. In this we have failed. Until we find how the organism functions, there’s no chance of pinning down the cause of death, or of anything else, for that matter.”
“You’d say, then,” said the President, “there is no chance to communicate with them. If we could somehow talk with them, even in sign language or something, or . . .”
“Not a chance,” said Allen. “No chance at all.”
“What you are saying,” said Whiteside, “is that we have to sit and take it. This car business. Detroit down the drain. Detroit and a lot of other places. The military has contracts . . .”
“If the visitors had only come to us,” said the President. “If they only would have come and tried to let us know what they intended . . .”
“By us, you mean the government,” said Allen.
The President nodded.
“What everyone fails to realize,” said Allen, “is the true, utter alienness of these creatures. They are more alien than can possibly be conceived. I figure them for a hive organism, what one knows or sees or feels all the rest of them know as well. Such a society would have no need of a government. They would never have thought of it. They wouldn’t know what a government was, because there never was a need of them to develop the governmental concept.”
“We have to do something,” said the general. “We have to protect ourselves. We need to Jake some action.”
“Forget what you are thinking,” said the President. “You told me, in this office, a few days ago, the visitors could withstand anything short of a nuclear blast. That was your calculation, you said. We can’t use nukes . . .”
Allen straightened in his chair. “Then there was a weapons test,” he said. “I kept hearing about it, rumors about it. But, surely, I thought, if ther
e had been one, I would have been informed. Tell me, why wasn’t I informed? Your findings might have thrown some light . . .”
“Because it was none of your damned business,” said the general. “Because it’s classified.”
“Even so,” said Allen, “it might have been important and you should have . . .”
“Gentlemen, please,” said the President. “I apologize for the slip of the tongue. It’s all my fault.” He looked at Allen. “You never heard it, of course,” he said.
“No, Mr. President,” said Allen, “I never heard a word that was said.”
“The fact remains,” said the President, “that we can’t use nukes . . .”
“If we could get all the visitors herded together,” said the general, “then, maybe . . .”
“But we can’t do that,” said the President. “We don’t even know where they are—or, at least, not the most of them. Probably scattered all over the country. Hiding, making cars . . .”
“Sir, you can’t be sure of that.”
“Well, it’s a logical assumption,” said the President. “It’s understandable. They couldn’t sit out in plain sight, making cars. The people avid to get cars, would rush in and swamp them.” No one spoke for a moment.
“Maybe,” said Whiteside, grasping for hope, “they may run out of trees. They must have to eat a lot of trees to make cars.”
“That would be unlikely,” said Allen. “There are a lot of trees in North America. And should they begin running short of them, there still would be the rest of the world, including the equatorial jungles. And don’t forget they’ll be growing trees to replace those they eat. Number 101 planted the field in Iowa.”
“That’s another thing that worries me,” said the President. “If they start using too much farmland to grow trees we might run into a food shortage. I know we have large amounts of wheat in storage, but that would be soon used up.”
“The danger there would be,” said Allen, “that if there were a food shortage, the visitors might start making food. Our people, in effect, would be placed on a dole system.”
“While all this is interesting,” said the President, “and perhaps even pertinent, it is getting us nowhere. What we should be talking about is what we should be doing now.”
“I just now thought of something,” said Porter. “When I talked with Garrison, he mentioned a name. Jerry Conklin, I believe. Said Conklin was the one who really was the first to learn about the cars, but that he objected to being identified, so his name was not mentioned in the story. It seems to me I’ve heard that name before. It seems to ring a bell.”
Allen came to rigid attention. “Of course, it does,” he said. “That’s the man whose car was crushed when the first visitor landed at Lone Pine. The one that disappeared when we tried to find him. And here he pops up again. This strikes me as rather strange.”
“Perhaps we should bring him in and have a talk with him,” said Whiteside. “It’s just possible this young fellow knows some things he should be telling . . .”
“Wait a minute,” said Allen. “We found out something else. Conklin is a friend, apparently a close friend, of a reporter for the Tribune. Kathy, I think was the first name.”
“Kathy Foster,” said Porter. “She was the one who found the cars, who wrote the story.”
“Maybe we ought to have them both in,” said Whiteside. “Ask the FBI to pick them up.”
The President shook his head. “Not the FBI,” he said. “We’ll act civilized about it. We’ll invite them as White House guests. We’ll send a plane to pick them up.”
“But, sir,” the general protested, “this man has disappeared before, he could disappear again.”
“We’ll take our chances on that,” said the President. “Dave, will you make the call?”
“Gladly,” Porter said.
47. MINNEAPOLIS
A copy aide, bent sidewise under a heavy load of papers clutched beneath one arm, tossed a copy on Garrison’s desk, then hurried on.
Garrison picked up the paper, unfolded it, glanced swiftly across the front page. It was not greatly changed over the first edition, except for the new article that had not been written when the first edition had gone to press. He laid the paper down on his desk and admired the new story. It had a two-column head and an artist’s sketch of the control panel of the visitor-car. He read the first paragraph:
If you should become one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a visitor-car early, there need be no concern about its operation. Handling it is a simple matter, easily understood. To start it, you depress the first button on the panel to your right. (The button marked A on the artist’s sketch.) To cause it to move forward, depress button B. Speed is controlled by rotating the dial above the control panel, to the right for higher speeds, to the left for slower. All the way to the left to stop. Elevation is controlled by the lever to right of the panel. To rise, push it up; to descend, push it down. The buttons, the dial and the elevator lever are unmarked, nor are they graduated. You must get clear in mind what each control will do. Since there are few of them, the operation is not difficult . . .
Garrison let his eyes go down to the final paragraph:
It might be a good idea to clip this story and the diagram, putting the clipping in your billfold or purse. So that if, some morning, you find one of the cars parked in your driveway . . .
Garrison said to Gold, “This was a good idea. It relates the reader directly to the cars. It’s something everyone will read. I’m glad you thought of it.”
“Well, hell,” said Gold, “it’s time I began to earn my salary.”
Hal Russell came loping down the aisle. He stopped before the city desk and said to Garrison, “More of the visitors have been spotted. One bunch in Idaho. Another of them in Maine.”
“All making cars,” said Gold.
“All making cars,” said Russell. “They’re beginning to surface,” said Garrison. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll have spotted a fair number of them.”
“Thing is,” said Russell, “people are out there looking for them.”
“They have reason now to look,” said Gold. “A new car in everyone’s garage.”
“The next big story,” said Garrison, “will be the delivery of the cars. People waking up and finding them parked in their driveways.”
Gold shook his head. “It might not happen that way. Maybe drawings will be held to see who gets the cars. A sort of nationwide lottery. Or maybe they’ll just be dumped out in a field or in vacant city lots and let the people fight for them. A car to the fastest and the meanest.”
“You have some damn strange ideas,” Garrison told him.
“For myself,” said Gold, “I want a robin’s egg blue car. My wife never let me have one. We’ve always had red cars. She likes red.”
“Maybe there’ll be enough of them,” said Russell, “that you both can get one—you a blue one and your wife a red.”
“In that case,” said Gold, “we’ll have two reds. She’d never let me have a blue. She thinks blue is sissy.”
“Have either of you figured out the mathematics on this?” Garrison asked. “Could the visitors really make that many cars? Have we ever had a solid figure on how many of them there are?”
“I don’t think a solid figure,” Russell said. “Several thousand, I would guess. According to Kathy, three of them made more than a hundred cars in less than a week. Say it was a week. That’s more than thirty cars a visitor. Put five thousand of them at it and that’s a hundred and fifty thousand cars a week. The figure could be higher, but, even so, that’s more than a quarter million cars a month.”
“Our population is two hundred fifty million,” said Gold.
“You wouldn’t be making cars for everyone. A lot of those two hundred fifty million are babies and kids underage. You wouldn’t give them cars. And remember all those baby visitors who are growing up. In another year, maybe in another six months, they could be making cars. As I remember it,
the babies were pupped in fairly large litters. Say an average of ten babies to every visitor. In a year’s time, say, several million cars a month.”
“All right,” said Garrison. “All right. I guess it could be done.”
“And then,” said Gold, “they’ll start making beer. They could make beer a lot faster than cars. Say a case a week for every male adult. A case a week would be about right, I’d judge.”
“Hot dogs,” said Russell. “And pretzels. They’d have to make hot dogs and pretzels to go along with beer.”
The phone rang. Annie answered it. “It’s for you,” she said to Garrison. “On two.”
Garrison stabbed a button and picked up his phone.
“Garrison. City desk.”
“This is Porter at the White House,” said the voice on the other end. “I called you earlier.”
“Yes, I remember. What can I do for you?”
“Does Miss Foster happen to be around?”
“I’ll look and see.”
He rose, with the phone in hand, located Kathy at her desk. He waved the phone above his head. “Kathy,” he bawled. “A call for you on two.”
48. WILDERNESS AREA
Norton steadied the canoe with choppy paddle strokes, staring at what the bend in the river had revealed. There, straight ahead of him, five masses of square blackness loomed above the deep green of the pines.
Visitors, he told himself. What would visitors be doing here, deep in the wilderness? Although, once he thought of it, he realized it might not be strange at all. More than likely many of the big black boxes had landed in areas where they would not readily be found.
He chuckled to himself and dipped the paddle deep, driving the canoe toward shore. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon and he’d been looking for a place to camp. This place, he told himself, would do as well as any. He’d beach the canoe and look over the visitors. After that, he’d build a fire and settle for the night. He was surprised to find that he was pleased at finding the visitors. There was, he thought, something companionable about them—as if unexpectedly he had come upon some neighbors whose existence he had not suspected.
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