“Not sure at all. It’s what our man at the UN was told this afternoon.”
“You’re talking about Max Hale. He’s your man up there.”
“One of the best,” said Manning. “He’s fairly good at sorting out the truth.”
“Yes, he is. I remember him from Chicago days.”
“Hale’s informant told him that tomorrow the UN will be told of our refusal and a demand made that we be forced to accept troops from other nations. It’ll be said that we are negligent in not accepting them.”
“The old squeeze play,” said Wilson.
“And that’s not all of it. If other troops are not accepted and the monsters can’t be controlled, then, the UN will be told, the entire area must be nuclearly destroyed. The world can’t take a chance.…”
“Wait a minute,” said Wilson quickly. “You’re not putting this on the wires, you say?”
“Not yet. Probably never. I hope that it is never. That’s the reason I phoned. If Hale heard it, there’s a likelihood someone else will hear it and, sure as God, it will get on a wire or be published somewhere.”
“There’s no truth in it,” said Wilson. “I am sure of it. Christ, we’re all in this together. For the moment, political power plays should be set aside. Or it seems to me they should. Tom, I simply can’t believe it.”
“You know nothing of this? Of any of it? There hasn’t been a breath?”
“Not a breath,” said Wilson.
“You know,” said Manning, “I wouldn’t have your job, Steve. Not for a million dollars.”
“You’ll hold off, Tom. You’ll give us a little time to check.”
“Of course. Only if the pressure gets too great. Only if someone else—I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, Tom. Someday.…”
“Someday, when this is all over,” said Manning, “we’ll go off in some dark corner in an obscure bar, where no one possibly can find us, and we’ll hang one on.”
“I’ll stand the drinks,” said Wilson. “All the drinks.”
After hanging up, he sat slumped. Just when another day was about to end, he thought. But hell, some days never ended. They just kept on and on. Yesterday and today had not been two days, but a nightmare-haunted eternity that seemed, when one thought of it, to have no reality at all. Judy gone, kids marching in the street, the business community bitching loudly because it was prevented from using the economic disruption to go out and make a killing, pulpit-thumping preachers hellbent to make another kind of killing, monsters running in the hills and the future still emptying its humanity upon this moment in the time track.
His eyelids slid down and stuck and he forced himself erect. He had to get some sleep tonight—he had to find the time to get some sleep.
Maybe Judy had the right idea. Just up and walk away from it. Although, he told himself, quite honestly, there still remained the question of what she’d walked away from. He missed her—gone no more than an hour or two and he was missing her. Quite suddenly, he realized he’d been missing her all day. Even while she still had been here, he had been missing her. Knowing she would be leaving, he had started missing her. Maybe, he. thought, he should have asked her once again to stay, but there hadn’t been the time and he’d not known how to do it—at least he had not know how to do it gracefully and you did things gracefully or you did them not at all. More than likely, had he known, she’d not have listened to him.
He picked up the phone. “Kim, you still there? I’ll need to see the President. It is rather urgent. The first chance you have to squeeze me in.”
“It may be some time, Steve,” she said. “There is a cabinet meeting.”
41
Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark said to Colonel Eugene Dawson, “I had it in my sights and then it wasn’t there. It disappeared. It went away. I’m sure it didn’t move. I saw it move before it stopped. It blurred when it moved. Like a cartoonist drawing something moving fast, lettering in a SWISH, but this was without a swish. When it disappeared there wasn’t any swish. The first time I could see that it was moving. But not when I had it in my sights. It didn’t move then. It didn’t blur. It didn’t swish.”
“It saw you, Sergeant,” said the colonel.
“I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I didn’t move. I moved the launcher barrel a couple of inches. That was all.”
“One of your men, then.”
“Sir, all those men I trained myself. No one sees them, no one hears them.”
“It saw something. Or heard something. It sensed some danger and then it disappeared. You’re sure about this disappearance, Sergeant?”
“Colonel, I am sure.”
Dawson was sitting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it, reducing the twig to bits of wood. Clark stayed squatting to one side, using the launcher, its butt resting on the ground, as a partial support to his squatting pose.
“Sergeant,” Dawson said. “I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do about all this. I don’t know what the army’s going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We’ve got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they’d line up and we’d line up and they came at us, we could clobber them. We have more and better armaments than the people of future had and we can do the job. But not when they’re trying to keep clear of us, not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get, maybe, one of them. God knows how much else we’d kill, including people. We haven’t the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We got to hunt these monsters down, one by one.…”
“But even when we hunt them down, sir.…”
“Yes, I know. But say that you are lucky. Say you bag one now and then. There still will be hundreds of them hatching and in a week or so, a month or so, thousands of them hatching. And the first ones growing bigger and meaner all the time. And while we hunt for them, they wipe out a town or two, an army camp or two.…”
“Sir,” said Sergeant Clark, “it is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy.”
The colonel got up from the log. “There hasn’t nothing beat us yet,” he said. “Nothing has ever beat us all the way. It won’t this time. But we have to find out how to do it. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use to you until you can find something to aim the firepower and the sophistication at and it stays put until you pull the trigger.”
The sergeant got to his feet, tucked the launcher underneath his arm. “Well, back to work,” he said.
“Have you seen a photographer around here?”
“A photographer?” said the sergeant. “What photographer? I ain’t seen no photographer.”
“He said his name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him.”
“If I happen onto him,” said the sergeant, “I’ll tie a knot into his tail.”
42
The Reverend Jake Billings was in conference with Ray MacDonald, formerly his assistant public relations manager, who had been appointed, within the last twelve hours, to the post of crusade operations chief.
“I really do not think, Ray,” said the Reverend Billings, “that this business of crucifixion will advance our cause. It strikes me as being rather crude and it could backlash against us. As witness what one paper had to say of the attempt at Washington.…”
“You mean someone has already gotten around to editorializing on it? I had not expected such prompt reaction.”
“The reaction is not good,” said the Reverend Billings, with some unaccustomed heat. “The editorial called it a cheap trick and a pantywaisted effort. The young man’s arms, it turns out, were fastened to the crossbar with thongs—not nails, but thongs. The entire editorial, of course, is
in a somewhat facetious vein, but nevertheless.…”
“But they are wrong,” MacDonald said.
“You mean that you used nails!”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that thongs were the way that it was done. The Romans ordinarily did not use nails.…”
“You are trying to tell me that the Gospels erred?”
“No, I’m not trying to tell you that. What I am saying is that ordinarily—ordinarily, mind you, perhaps not always—the arms were tied, not nailed. We did some research on it and.…”
“Your research is no concern of mine,” said Billings icily. “What I do care about is that you gave some smart-assed editorial writer the chance to poke fun at us. And even if that had not happened, I think the whole idea stinks. You didn’t check with me. How come you didn’t check with me?”
“You were busy, Jake. You told me to do my best. You told me I was the man who could come up with ideas and I did come up with ideas.”
“I had this call from Steve Wilson,” Billings said. “He chewed me out. There is no doubt that official Washington—the White House, at least—is solidly against us. When he gets around to it, Wilson will brand us as sensationalists. He brushed us off contemputuously in his press briefing this afternoon. That was before this silly crucifixion business. Next time around, he’ll blast us out of the water.”
“But we have a lot of people with us. You go out to the countryside, to the little towns.…”
“Yes, I know. The rednecks. They’ll be for us, sure, but how long do you think it is before redneck opinion can have any significant impact? What about the influential pastors in the big city churches? Can you imagine what the Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor will tell his congregation and the newspapers and the world? He’s the one who started all of this, but he’ll not go along with solemn young men packing crosses through the street and getting crucified on a public square. For years I have tried to conduct my ministry with dignity and now it’s been pulled down to the level of street brawling. I have you to thank for this and.…”
“It’s not too different,” protested MacDonald, “from the stunts we’ve used before. Good old circus stuff. Good old show biz. It’s what you built the business on.”
“But with restraint.”
“Not too much restraint. Skywriting and parades and miles of billboards.…”
“Legitimate advertising,” said Billings. “Honest advertising. A great American tradition. The mistake you made was to go out in the streets. You don’t know about the streets. You ran up against the experts there. These Miocene kids know about the streets. They have been there they have lived there. You had two strikes on you before you started out. What made you think you could compete with them?”
“All right, then, what shall we do? The streets are out, you say. So we pull off the streets. Then what do we do? How do we get attention?”
The Reverend Jake Billings stared at the wall with glassy eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I purely do not know. I don’t think it makes much difference what we do. I think that gurgling noise you hear is our crusade going down the drain.”
43
It was the dog that did it. Bentley Price hadn’t had a drink all day. The road was a narrow, winding mountain road, and Bentley, exasperated beyond endurance at what had happened to him, was driving faster than he should. After hours of hunting for it, he had finally found the camp—a very temporary camp by the looks of it, with none of the meticulous neatness of the usual army camp, simply a stopping place in a dense patch of woods beside a stream that came brawling down the valley. Filled with a deep sense of duty done and perseverance paying off, he had slung cameras around his neck and gone plodding toward the largest of the tents and had almost reached it when the colonel had come out to stop his further progress. Who the hell are you, the colonel had asked and where do you think you’re going? I am the Global News, Bentley had told him, and I am out here to take some pictures of this monster hunt. I tell the city editor it isn’t worth the time, but he disagrees with me and it’s no skin off my nose no matter where I’m sent, so leave us get the lead out and do some monster hunting so I can get some pictures.
You’re off limits, mister, the colonel had told him. You are way off limits, in more ways than one. I don’t know how you got this far. Didn’t someone try to stop you? Sure, said Bentley, up the road a ways. A couple of soldier boys. But I pay no attention to them. I never pay attention to someone who tries to stop me. I got work to do and I can’t fool around.
And then the colonel had thrown him out of there. He had spoken in a clipped, military voice and had been very icy-eyed. We’ve got trouble enough, he said, without some damn fool photographer mucking around and screwing up the detail. If you don’t leave under your own power, I’ll have you escorted out. While he was saying this, Bentley snapped a camera up and took a picture of him. That made the situation even worse, and Bentley, with his usual quick perception, could see his cause had worsened, so had beat a dignified retreat to avoid escort. When he had passed the soldier boys who had tried to stop him they had yelled at him and thumbed their noses. Bentley had slowed down momentarily, debating whether to go back and reason with them, then had thought better of it. They ain’t worth the time, he told himself.
Now the dog.
The dog came bursting out of high weeds and brush that grew along the road. His ears were laid back, his tail tucked in and he was kiyodeling in pure, blind panic. The dog was close and the car traveling much too fast. Bentley jerked the wheel. The car veered off the road, smashed through a clump of brush. The tires screamed as Bentley hit the brakes. The nose of the car slammed hard into a huge walnut tree and stopped with a shuddering impact. The left-hand door flew open and Bentley, who held a lofty disdain for such copouts as seat belts, was thrown free. The camera which he wore on a strap around his neck, described a short arc and brought up against his ear, dealing him a blow that made his head ring as if there were a bell inside it. He landed on his back and rolled, wound up on hands and knees. He surged erect and found that he had ended up on the edge of the road.
Standing in the middle of the road was a monster. Bentley knew it was a monster; he had seen two of them only yesterday. But this one was small, no bigger than a Shetland pony. Which did not mean the horror of it was any less.
But Bentley was of different fiber from other men. He did not gulp; his gut did not turn over. His hands came up with swift precision, grabbed the camera firmly, brought it to his eye. The monster was framed in the finder and his finger pressed the button. The camera clicked and as it clicked the monster disappeared.
Bentley lowered the camera and let loose of it. His head still rang from the blow upon the ear. His clothes were torn; a gaping rent in a trouser leg revealed one knobby knee. His right hand was bloody from where his palm had scraped across some gravel. Behind him the car creaked slightly as twisted metal settled slowly into place. The motor pinged and sizzled as water from the broken radiator ran across hot metal.
Off in the distance the still-running dog was yipping frantically. In a tree up the hillside an excited squirrel chattered with machine-gun intensity. The road was empty. A monster had been there. From where he stood, Bentley could see its tracks printed in the dust. But it was no longer there.
Bentley limped out into the road, stared both up and down it. There was nothing on the road.
It was there, said Bentley stubbornly to himself. I had it in the finder. It was there when I shot the picture. It wasn’t until the shutter clicked that it disappeared. Doubt assailed him. Had it been there or not when he’d shot the picture? Was it on the film? Had he been robbed of a photo by its disappearance?
Thinking about it, it seemed that it had been there, but he could not be sure.
He turned about and started limping down the road as rapidly as he could. There was one way to find out. He had to get to a phone, he had to somehow get a car. He must get back to Washington.
44
“We have made three contacts with the monsters,” Sandburg said. “There are yet to be results. No one has had a chance to fire at them. They disappear and that’s the end of it.”
“You mean,” said Thorton Williams, “that they duck away.…”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said the Secretary of Defense. “They just aren’t there, is all. The men who saw them swore they didn’t move at all. They were there and then they weren’t. The observers, all reporting independently, not knowing of the other reports, have been very sure of that. One man could be wrong in his observation; it’s possible that two could be. It seems impossible that three observers could err on exactly the same point.”
“Have you, has the military, any theory, any idea of what is going on?”
“None,” said Sandburg. “It must be a new defensive adaptation that they have developed. These creatures, as you all by now must understand, are very much on the defensive. They know they have to survive. For the good of the species, they can’t take any chances. Cornered, I suppose that they would fight, but only if they were cornered and there was no way out. Apparently they have come up with something new under this sort of situation. We have talked with Dr. Isaac Wolfe, the refugee biologist who probably knows more about the monsters than any other man, and this business of disappearing is something he has never heard of. He suggests, simply as a guess, that it may be an ability that only the juvenile monsters have. A sort of juvenile defense mechanism. It may have gone on unobserved up in the future because the people up there had little opportunity to observe the juveniles; they had their hands full fighting off the adult monsters.”
“How are you doing with getting men into the area?” asked the President.
“I haven’t any figures,” said Sandburg, “but we’re piling them in as fast as we can get them there. The refugee camps have formed their own caretaking committees and that takes off some of the pressure, frees some troops. Agriculture and Welfare are taking over a lot of the transport that is needed to get food and other necessities into the camps and that, as well, has freed military personnel. We expect the first overseas transport planes to begin landing sometime tonight and that will give us more men.”
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