by Allen Wold
But from all he'd heard so far, Dave and his friends had accomplished no more than to cause the Visitors a minor inconvenience. Surely they didn't deserve to be turned into slaves just for that. Or worse. Besides, they were so young.
At last he couldn't stand it anymore. He left his office and the Smythe Building, and walked down the quad to the Visitor liaison offices in Courtland. There he asked to see Jozef, the Visitor campus liaison, and after a moment's wait, was shown into the office.
If this was where the students had done their vandalism, there was no sign of it now. Jozef, a spare man who assumed the appearance of one in his late forties in part, Morton was sure, to enhance his aura of authority, stood up to greet him.
"What can I do for you, Professor Barnes?" he asked, not uncordially.
"I know it's none of my business," Morton started hesitantly, "but one of the boys who was responsible for the vandalism to your offices here has been a student of mine for over three years."
"I see. That certainly explains your interest, but as you said, his fate is not your business."
"I know that, but you do understand that it pains me to think about what will happen to him. And to the others too, of course. That their action was criminal cannot be denied, nor the fact that they should be punished. But I couldn't in good conscience fail to take the opportunity to ask you to remember that they are, after all, little more than children."
"College seniors are not children, Professor Barnes, as I'm sure they will remind you themselves."
"But doesn't the very stupidity of what they did prove that they are nonetheless not yet adults?"
"Perhaps, but I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"It means that you might treat them with more clemency than you would a hardened rebel."
"It is such amateurs as these," Jozef said, "that eventually turn into 'hardened rebels,' as you call them. It is far better to stop them early, before they can do real damage, and before they pervert others to their distorted way of thinking."
"But surely, they did you no real harm. Is it necessary to send them away to a prison camp somewhere? Couldn't you let us try them in our own courts?"
"Their crime was serious by intent, if not by accomplishment. And it was against us, not against you. If other students vandalize your office, Professor Barnes, we shall not interfere and let you deal with them in your own way."
"How long will you keep them?" Barnes asked, beginning to feel it had been a mistake to come here.
"I cannot tell you that, and if I could, I wouldn't. I'm sorry, Professor Barnes, I wish I could reassure you, but it would be false of me to try to do so. As you said at the very beginning, this is no business of yours."
"All right." He turned heavily toward the door. "Thank you for listening to me anyway."
"It's my job," Jozef said, and watched the man leave, his shoulders sagging.
Jozef sat there for a long moment, thinking about what Barnes had said. He was not the first to have come and ask about those five students, and he would not be the last. That these people showed concern for and interest in the vandals was only natural. He would have done the same had the positions been reversed.
But he dared not tell any of them what was in store for the vandals, though he disapproved of part of it himself. The situation was uncomfortable enough as it was, without these people—a subject people, though they didn't fully realize it yet—knowing that those prisoners who could not be made use of would wind up as a gourmet feast for those who had acquired the taste for human flesh. No, that knowledge would make the whole situation altogether untenable.
Something was still bothering him. He had been so concerned about being noncommittal that he had missed the import of some of Barnes's words. What was it—ah, yes, prison camp. Now how had Barnes known about a prison camp? No other human who had talked to him so far had mentioned such a thing—prison, yes, or execution once, but not camp.
Such a little thing, and yet not a part of this people's general conception of what was done to prisoners. A tiny slip, but it could indicate that Barnes in fact knew a little more than he should. He reached out, touched the communicator, and spoke into it.
"Chang," he said, "Jozef here. We may be in for some more trouble on campus. At least one person had mentioned 'prison camp' to me in a way that indicates he has some idea of what he's talking about."
"Let's not be hasty," Chang said, the speaker emphasizing rather than diminishing the resonant quality of her alien voice. "But perhaps you'd better keep an eye on this person, just in case. Camp T-3 is not yet that secure, and though we have no known rebel activity in the area, knowledge of its existence could be just enough to produce it."
"Very good," Jozef said. "I'll hold back, but I'll start a quiet investigation right away."
Under normal circumstances, Durk found cultivating his bean fields an undemanding, quietly satisfying, and relaxing chore. Of course, when the tractor broke down or the cultivator hung up on a rock, it became less pleasant. But today it was different. Today, as never before, he was aware of the sandy quality of the soil. And "sandy" had taken on a whole new meaning for him lately, aside from its implications of low fertility and production.
The bean fields were quite a way south from the place on the Thurston farm—he'd better start thinking of it as the Visitors' farm, he thought—where the crivits were kept. And the soil here was nowhere as loose as in the sand fields, but it was not as firm as he'd like it. It made him nervous, just thinking about those monsters, whatever they were, being able to burrow away from their captivity onto his own farm.
His nervousness changed to complete alarm when, working his way eastward, he noticed what looked like mole-runs in the soil. Two things marked them as distinct, however. They avoided the plants, instead of running from one to another, and they were fully two feet wide. He stopped his tractor before the front wheels could cross over the nearest track.
The situation, he thought, was quickly getting out of hand. He didn't like the Visitors, didn't want them as his neighbors, but he could live with that if they kept to themselves. He had decided, after his "squirrel hunt" encounter with them, to stay clear of the Visitors altogether and to not go up to the Research Triangle Park after all. Whatever those scientists wanted to do, it could only get him into trouble.
But now, here was evidence that made it difficult to ignore what was going on in the next farm. Even if he never trespassed on their property again, even if he averted his eyes whenever he had to drive by, he was not going to be left alone.
He got down off his tractor and walked slowly and carefully to the slightly mounded track just five feet in front of the front wheels. Just exactly like a mole burrow, he thought. He couldn't tell when it had been made; it could have been this morning or more than a week ago. He knelt at the track and picked at the upthrust soil.
Surface cracks were dry all the way down, but there had been no rain recently, so that meant only that it had been made since the last rain, and he'd been over this field once since then. He stood up and kicked at the disturbed soil with his boot. A small section of the mound collapsed, sinking several inches below the level of the field.
He didn't want to do this, a part of his mind yammered as he kicked away more of the soil to reveal a half-filled hollow underneath the mound. He reached down, on his knees, and cleared away the fallen earth with his hands. The hole revealed was a lot bigger than the track on the surface indicated, maybe eighteen inches across, its roof a foot under the top of the mound. It was almost big enough for a man to crawl into.
That thought got him up on his feet in a hurry. He tried to imagine a creature eighteen inches in diameter and strong enough to make a tunnel like that in this ground, and he couldn't. Where did it keep its tentacles? How did it know where it was going? He had no answers.
More importantly, why was it here at all? From what he had seen before, the monsters preferred to burrow deeply, except when they were hunting. This track
was just below the surface, for as much of it as he could see. The subsoil, he knew, was far harder than that on the surface, and even that was made dense by clay, moisture, and organic matter.
He didn't know in which direction the creature had been moving, but guessed that it had come from the north. He followed the track in that direction, all too painfully aware of the sandy nature of the ground on which he walked. Had the thing been hungry? Had it just been curious about a break in its natural perimeter, come out for a look around, and gotten lost? Had some animal, such as a deer or a possum or even a dog come by its preserve and run away, drawing it out into less congenial territory?
The track, when it had to pass under a row of beans, did so with a sharp S-curve. Otherwise, it stayed between the rows, giving it an artificially linear formation. Had the rows not been there, he realized after crossing over the same one three times, the creature probably would have just gone around in circles. He had no doubt that it had come up from the area near where he had showed those scientists how it could take a pig right down into the sand. It was more important, he realized, to figure out where it had wound up.
He turned around and started back toward his tractor, surprised that he had come so far from it. He didn't bother following the crivit track, but took the most direct route. One thing was sure: he was not going to continue cultivating this field. Even if the monster had found its way home, the tunnels it had left would collapse under the weight of the tractor's front wheels, causing it to pitch forward and certainly bogging it down. Then he'd have to bring his truck out to haul the tractor out, and that would destroy a portion of his crop. No, further cultivation could wait until later, after he'd gone through with a shovel and knocked all the burrows flat, maybe even filled in some of them to make the ground level again.
His concern with the immediate and practical consequences of this invasion so occupied him that he was halfway back to his tractor before he became aware of the sound that had begun when he'd turned away from the source of the burrows. Something like cement sliding down a cement truck's chute, something like the movement of rocks underwater, it had grown steadily louder until at last it penetrated his consciousness. He froze for a moment, listening.
And even as he did so he knew he should be running instead. Though he'd never heard a sound exactly like that before, he knew without doubt what it was—a crivit coming through the soil.
It was coming from ahead of him, from beyond the tractor, but not in the row in which he was now standing. It grew louder, but he had no idea how near it was, had no way to gauge its speed of approach. The tractor, idling just two hundred feet away, made less noise than the thing did.
He took a step, then saw, two rows over, the tops of bean plants just fifty feet away rise up a few inches. A few seconds later and the next row did a similar lift.
And then he saw it—a mound in the soil moving toward him at a rate that seemed phenomenal. He made a small sound in his throat, remembered once seeing a cotton rat standing frozen as a blacksnake approached, and then he broke, turned, and ran across the field, trampling rows of beans as he crossed them. He couldn't help himself; he had to look over his shoulder, and the moving mound, with loose dirt flying into the air, was right behind him, not ten feet back. He put his head down and ran as hard as he could.
When the soil firmed unexpectedly under his feet he staggered, managed a few paces more, then fell headlong across a row of beans. With a cry he forced himself to his feet, looking once again over his shoulder, but there was no sign of pursuit behind him. Of course, coming across the rows, he wouldn't see it until it was right on him. He scanned the bean field, looking for the telltale rise of the tops of the plants. There was nothing.
His tractor was back there, idling away until its fuel would run out. He didn't care. He walked, quickly, still farther from the sandy area, trying to catch his breath, trying to listen for the telltale sound of the crivit approaching. He eventually succeeded in the former and was equally if not more pleased in failing in the latter endeavor. Staying on ground that he knew was too dense with clay to permit even a mole, let alone a crivit, he worked his way back to his house.
Still mulling over this morning's interview with Jozef, Morton Barnes walked back from lunch at the Porthole Restaurant, halfway planning to contact Dave Androvich's parents.
As he walked past the cars filling the Smythe Building parking lot, he noticed a red-uniformed Visitor standing beside the Evergreen House. The woman pretended to be looking the other way, but Barnes was not fooled.
As he mounted the steps at the north entrance to Smythe, he pretended to drop the book he was carrying, and when he bent to pick it up took the opportunity to pause and look back the way he had come. The Visitor was still there, rapidly turning away so as not to be seen watching him. Barnes felt the lunch in his stomach grow hard and indigestible. It had, indeed, been a mistake to go talk to Jozef.
He entered the foyer and walked down the hall to the central lobby with the stairs going up. The door on the other side of the lobby closed, but not before he caught the merest glimpse of red. Of course, red was a popular color, and many students, and even faculty, wore red on occasion.
But not of that particular shade. Only Visitors now wore that red. He went up the stairs to the third floor, and instead of thinking about calling Androvich's parents, started thinking about calling his own family—to say good-bye.
He paused at the top of the stairs and looked down both ends of the corridor. He saw no Visitors, but that didn't mean anything. He stopped in at the secretary's office and asked if there were any messages. There were none. More importantly, her behavior indicated that nothing untoward had happened since he'd left—such as Visitors come calling.
But that didn't mean that nobody had been there. He let himself into his office, thinking that with classes and lunch, it had been three hours since he'd been here. He sat down at his desk and forced himself to relax, letting his eyes go around the room, looking for signs that it wasn't as it had been three hours ago.
He saw nothing out of place, but was not reassured. He reached for his phone and picked it up. But even as he brought the handset up to his face, he smelled something, like slightly charred electrical insulation. Sniffing, he identified the source as coming from the phone's mouthpiece. There were no wires extending from it, but he put it down nonetheless. It had not smelled that way earlier this morning. Maybe it was just a short—but he didn't believe that.
He spent a few moments idly flipping through the papers on his desk, more to pass the time than to take note of what he was looking at. Then he pushed his chair back, went to his filing cabinet, pawed aimlessly through a drawer for a moment, and came back to the window behind his desk to look out.
And to look up and down the frame, behind the blinds, out at the bricks of the outside wall. Nothing seemed out of place. He turned and looked at his desk.
He went to his knees and, without making a sound, moved so that he could see into the kneehole. There, at the back, was a tiny black disk which he knew had not been there before.
Now that he knew, much of his anxiety left him. His office was bugged, and he knew very well that it was the Visitors, probably at Jozef's instructions, who had done it. He sat back in his chair and started going over the stack of papers. It was amazing, he thought, how he could return to his work with such concentration while at the same time he was screaming inside.
By the time he reached his house, Durk's panic had subsided and had been replaced by a grim determination. He couldn't work without his tractor, and he could hear the crivits coming, and the soil around the tractor was dense enough that he could outrun the monsters, so he had decided that he would go back and get his tractor.
But not without his shotgun. He went in the back door and pulled open the cabinet in the back hall where he kept his spare ammunition. There were still ten buckshot shells, heavy enough to stop anything except a bear, and even a bear would slow down a minute when hit. He gra
bbed three—more would be superfluous, and went into his living room.
As he did so he heard a car drive up. He ignored it, took down his shotgun, and, taking out the squirrel shot, loaded it with the heavier ammunition. His front door reverberated with a heavy knocking.
He went to the door, gun in hand as if he might be expecting trouble—which he was. When he opened the door, he found Wendel Fenister, Arnold Rutgers, and another man standing on his front porch.
"How you doin', Durk?" Wendel asked, eyeing the shotgun.
"Not bad," Durk said, looking from the hunter to the scientist to the other man. "Afternoon, Me Rutgers. I guess this isn't just a social call."
"I'm afraid not," Rutgers said. "Can we come in?"
"Sure, this gun's not for you." Durk stood aside and let the three men into his living room. "Thought about calling you up this morning," he said to Arnold, "then changed my mind. Maybe it's just as well you stopped by." He then told them of his spying trip of the night before, and of the crivit tracks out by his abandoned tractor.
"If it's still out there," Arnold said, "we'd like to go take a look. You know Wendel Fenister, of course. This is Jack Corey. He's got a plan to catch one of those monsters, and I don't suppose you'd mind it being gone from your field." He looked significantly at the shotgun Durk was still carrying.
"How are you going to catch something like that?" Durk asked.
"Like fishing for catfish," Corey said. "We've got a pig for bait, a harness full of hooks, and a steel cable on a winch in the back of the truck."
"You got this thing all figured out, don't you?" Durk said with a hint of admiration in his voice. "But what's your cover if the lizards come by?"
"You've provided us with one," Arnold said. "You're tractor's broken down, and we've come to help you tow it back to the barn."
"That'll do," Durk said. "I don't think those lizards over there are smart enough to figure out I could do it myself. They bought my squirrel-hunting story last night. All right, let's go give it a try."