“But crystal can’t be alive,” protested Belsen. “Crystal is stuff that things are made of. Vacuum tubes and such. There is no life in it.”
“Don’t try to fight with me,” I told him. “I can’t help it if they are crystal.”
There seemed to be a lot of ruckus going on out in the street and I got to my feet to peer around the corner of the house.
For a moment there was not a thing to see. Everything looked peaceful. One or two policemen were running around excitedly, but I couldn’t see that anything was happening. It looked just as it had before.
Then a door slowly, almost majestically, detached itself from one of the police cars parked along the curb and started floating toward the open kitchen door. It reached the door and made a neat left turn and disappeared inside.
A rear vision mirror sailed flashing through the air. It was followed by a siren. Both disappeared within the house.
Good Lord, I told myself, the bugs are going after cars!
Now I saw that a couple of the cars were already minus hoods and fenders and that some other doors were missing.
The bugs, I thought, had finally really hit the jackpot. They wouldn’t stop until they’d stripped the cars clean down to the tires.
And I was thinking, too, with a strange perverse reaction, that there wasn’t nearly room enough inside the house to pack all those dismantled cars. What, I wondered, would the bugs do when the house was full?
A half dozen policemen dashed across the street and started for the house. They reached the lawn before the bug patrol above the house became aware of them and swooped down in a screaming, golden arc.
The policemen ran back pell-mell. The bug patrol, its duty done, returned to circling the house. Fenders, doors, tail lights, head lights, radio antennae, and other parts of cars continued to pour into the house.
A dog came trotting out of nowhere and went across the lawn, tail wagging in friendly curiosity.
A flight of bugs left the patrol and headed down toward him.
The dog, startled by the whistle of the diving bugs, wheeled about to run.
He was too late.
There was the sickening thud of missiles hitting flesh. The dog leaped high into the air and fell over on his back.
The bugs swooped up into the air again. There were no gaps in their ranks.
The dog lay twitching in the yard and blood ran in the grass.
I ducked back around the corner, sick. I doubled up, retching, trying hard to keep from throwing up.
I fought it off and my stomach quieted down. I peeked around the corner of the house.
All was peaceful once again. The dead dog lay sprawling in the yard. The bugs were busy with their stripping of the cars. No policemen were in sight. There was no one in sight at all. Even Belsen had disappeared somewhere.
It was different now, I told myself. The dog had made it different.
The bugs no longer were a mystery only; now they were a deadly danger. Each of them was a rifle bullet with intelligence.
I remembered something that Dobby had said just an hour or so ago.
Evacuate the area, he had said, then drop an atom bomb.
And would it come to that? I wondered. Was that the measure of the danger?
No one, of course, was thinking that way yet, but in time they might. This was just the start of it. Today the city was alerted and the police were on the scene; tomorrow it might be the governor sending in some troops. And in time it would be the federal government. And after that, Dobby’s solution might be the only answer.
The bugs hadn’t spread too far as yet. But Belsen’s fear was valid; in time they would expand, pushing out their beachhead block by block as there were more and more of them. For Billy had been right when he had said they must multiply real fast.
I tried to imagine how the bugs could multiply, but I had no idea.
First of all, of course, the government probably would try to make contact with them, would attempt to achieve some communication with them—not with the creatures themselves, perhaps, but rather with that mass mind which Dobby had figured them to have.
But was it possible to communicate with creatures such as these? On what intellectual level might one approach them? And what good could possibly come of such communication if it was established? Where was the basis for understanding between these creatures and the human race?
And I realized, even as I thought all this, that I was thinking with pure panic. To approach a problem such as the bugs presented, there was need of pure objectivity—there could be no question of either fear or anger. The time had come for Man to discard the pettiness of one-planet thinking.
It was no problem of mine, of course, but thinking of it, I saw a deadly danger—that the eventual authority, whoever that might be, might delay too long in its objectivity.
There had to be a way to stop the bugs, there must be some measure to control them. Before we tried to establish contact, there must be a way in which we could contain them.
And I thought of something—of Billy telling me that to hold them once you caught them you had to have a plastic trap.
I wondered briefly how the kid had known that. Perhaps it had been no more than simple trial and error. After all, he and Tommy Henderson must have tried several different kinds of traps.
Plastic might be the answer to the problem I had posed. It could be the answer if we acted before they spread too far.
And why plastic, I wondered. What element within plastic would stop them cold and hold them once they were entrapped within it? Some factor, perhaps, that we would learn only after long and careful study. But it was something that did not matter now; it was enough we knew that plastic did the trick.
I stood there for a time, turning the matter in my mind, wondering who to go to.
I could go to the police, of course, but I had a feeling I would get little hearing there. The same would be true of the officials of the city. For while it was possible they might listen, they’d have to talk it over, they’d have to call a conference, they’d feel compelled to consult some expert before they did anything about it. And the government in Washington, at the moment, was unthinkable.
The trouble was that no one was scared enough as yet. To act as quickly as they should they’d have to be scared silly—and I had had a longer time to get scared silly than any of the rest.
Then I thought of another man who was as scared as I was.
Belsen.
Belsen was the man to help me. Belsen was scared stiff.
He was an engineer and possibly he could tell me if what I had been thinking was any good or not. He could sit down and figure how it might be done. He’d know where to get the plastic that we needed and the best type of it to use and more than likely he’d know how to go about arranging for its fabrication. And he might, as well, know someone it would do some good to talk to.
I went back to the corner of the house and had a look around.
There were a few policemen in sight, but not too many of them. They weren’t doing anything, just standing there and watching while the bugs kept on working at the cars. They had the bodies pretty well stripped down by now and were working on the engines. As I watched I saw one motor rise and sail toward the house. It was dripping oil and chunks of caked grease and dust were falling off of it. I shivered at the thought of what a mess like that would do to Helen’s carpeting and the decorating.
There were a few knots of spectators here and there, but all of them were standing at quite a distance off.
It looked to me as if I’d have no trouble reaching Belsen’s house if I circled round the block, so I started out.
I wondered if Belsen would be at home and was afraid he might not be. Most of the houses in the neighborhood seemed to be deserted. But it was a chance, I knew, that I had to take. If he wasn’t at his house, I’d have to hunt him down.
I reached his place and went up the steps and rang the bell. There wasn’t any answer, so I walked st
raight in.
The house seemed to be deserted.
“Belsen,” I called.
He didn’t answer me and I called again.
Then I heard footsteps clattering up a stairs.
The basement door came open and Belsen stuck his head out.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I’m glad you came. I will need some help. I sent the family off.”
“Belsen,” I said, “I know what we can do. We can get a monstrous sheet of plastic and drop it on the house. That way they can’t get out. Maybe we can get some helicopters, maybe four of them, one for each corner of the sheet …”
“Come downstairs,” said Belsen. “There’s work for both of us.”
I followed him downstairs into his workroom.
The place was orderly, as one might expect from a fussbudget such as Belsen.
The music machines stood in straight and shining lines, the work bench was immaculate and the tools were all in place. The tape machine stood in one corner and it was all lit up like a Christmas tree.
A table stood in front of the tape machine, but it was far from tidy. It was strewn with books, some of them lying flat and open and others piled haphazardly. There were scribbled sheets of paper scattered everywhere and balled-up bunches of it lay about the floor.
“I cannot be mistaken,” Belsen told me, jittery as ever. “I must be sure the first time. There’ll be no second chance. I had a devil of a time getting it all figured out, but I think I have it now.”
“Look, Belsen,” I said, with some irritation, “I don’t know what hare-brained scheme you may be working on, but whatever it may be, this deal of mine is immediate and important.”
“Later,” Belsen told me, almost hopping up and down in his anxiety. “Later you can tell me. I have a tape I have to finish. I have the mathematics all worked out …”
“But this is about the bugs!”
Belsen shouted at me: “And so is this, you fool! What else did you expect to find me working on? You know I can’t take a chance of their getting in here. I won’t let them take all this stuff I’ve built.”
“But, Belsen …”
“See that machine,” he said, pointing to one of the smaller ones. “That’s the one we’ll have to use. It is battery powered. See if you can get it moved over to the door.”
He swung around and scurried over to the tape machine and sat down in front of it. He began punching slowly and carefully on the keyboard and the machine began to mutter and to chuckle at him and its lights winked on and off.
I saw there was no sense in trying to talk to him until he had this business done. And there was a chance, of course, that he knew what he was doing—that he had figured out some way either to protect these machines of his or to stop the bugs.
I walked over to the machine and it was heavier than it looked. I started tugging at it and I could move it only a few inches at a time, but I kept on tugging it.
And suddenly, as I tugged away, I knew without a question what Belsen must be planning.
And I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself; why Dobby, with all his talk of A-bombs, hadn’t thought of it. But, of course, it would take a man like Belsen, with his particular hobby, to have thought of it.
The idea was so old, so ancient, so much a part of the magic past that it was almost laughable—and yet it ought to work.
Belsen got up from the machine and lifted a reel of tape from a cylinder in its side. He hurried over to me and knelt down beside the machine I’d tugged almost to the door.
“I can’t be sure of exactly what they are,” he told me. “Crystal. Sure, I know they’re crystalline in form, but what kind of crystals—just what type of crystals? So I had to work out a sort of sliding shotgun pattern of supersonic frequencies. Somewhere in there, I hope, is the one that will synchronize with whatever structure they may have.”
He opened a section of the small machine and started threading in the tape.
“Like the violin that broke the goblet,” I said.
He grinned at me nervously. “The classical example. I see you’ve heard of it.”
“Everyone has,” I said.
“Now listen to me carefully,” said Belsen. “All we have to do is flip this switch and the tape starts moving. The dial controls the volume and it’s set at maximum. We’ll open up the door and we’ll grab the machine, one on each side of it, and we’ll carry it as far as we can before we set it down. I want to get it close.”
“Not too close,” I cautioned. “The bugs just killed a dog. Couple of them hit him and went through him without stopping. They’re animated bullets.”
Belsen licked his lips. “I figured something like that.”
He reached out for the door.
“Just a minute, Belsen. Have we got a right to?”
“A right to what?” he asked.
“A right to kill these things. They’re the first aliens to come to visit us. There’s a lot we might learn from them if we could only talk to them …”
“Talk to them?”
‘Well, communicate. Get to understand them.”
And I wondered what was wrong with me, that I should be talking that way.
“After what they did to the dog? After what they did to you?”
“Yes, I think,” I said, “even after what they did to me.”
“You’re crazy,” Belsen screamed.
He pulled the door wide open.
“Now!” he shouted at me.
I hesitated for a second, then grabbed hold.
The machine was heavy, but we lifted it and rushed out into the yard. We went staggering with it almost to the alley and there the momentum of our rush played out and we set it down.
I looked up toward my house and the bug patrol was there, circling at rooftop height, a flashing golden circle in the light of the setting sun.
“Maybe,” Belsen panted, “maybe we can get it closer.”
I bent to pick it up again and even as I did I saw the patrolling circle break.
“Look out!” I screamed.
The bugs were diving at us.
“The switch!” I yelled. “The switch!”
But Belsen stood there, staring at them, frozen, speechless, stiff.
I flung myself at the machine and found the switch and flipped it and then I was groveling in the dirt, rooting into it, trying to make myself extremely thin and small.
There was no sound and, of course, I had known there would be none, but that didn’t stop me from wondering why I didn’t hear it. Maybe, I thought, the tape had broken; maybe the machine had failed to work.
Out of the tail of my eye I saw the patrol arrowing down on us and they seemed to hang there in the air, as if something might have stopped them, but I knew that was wrong, that it was simply fright playing tricks with time.
And I was scared, all right, but not as scared as Belsen. He still stood there, upright, unable to move a muscle, staring at oncoming death in an attitude of stricken disbelief.
They were almost on top of us. They were so close that I could see each one of them as a dancing golden mote and then suddenly each little mote became a puff of shining dust and the swarm was gone.
I climbed slowly to my feet and brushed off my front.
“Snap out of it,” I said to Belsen. I shook him.
He slowly turned toward me and I could see the tension going from his face.
“It worked,” he said, in a flat sort of voice. “I was pretty sure it would.”
“I noticed that,” I said. “You’re the hero of the hour.”
And I said it bitterly, without even knowing why.
I left him standing there and walked slowly across the alley.
We had done it, I told myself. Right or wrong, we’d done it. The first things from space had come and we had smashed them flat.
And was this, I wondered, what would happen to us, too, when we ventured to the stars? Would we find as little patience and as little understanding? Would we
act as arrogantly as these golden bugs had acted?
Would there always be the Belsens to outshout the Marsdens? Would the Marsdens always be unable or unwilling to stand up before the panic-shouting—always fearful that their attitude, slowly forming, might be antisocial? Would the driving sense of fear and the unwillingness to understand bar all things from the stars?
And that, I told myself, was a funny thing for me, of all people, to be thinking. For mine was the house the bugs had ruined.
Although, come to think of it, they might have cost me not a dime. They might have made me money. I still had the agate boulder and that was worth a fortune.
I looked quickly towards the garden and the boulder wasn’t there!
I broke into a run, breath sobbing in my throat.
I stopped at the garden’s edge and stared in consternation at the neat pile of shining sand.
There was one thing I’d forgotten: that an agate, as well as bugs and goblet, was also crystalline!
I turned around and stared back across the yard and I was sore clean through.
That Belsen, I thought—him and his sliding shotgun pattern!
I would take one of those machines of his and cram it down his throat!
Then I stopped dead still. There was, I realized, nothing I could do or say.
Belsen was the hero, exactly as I had said he was.
He was the man, alone, who’d quashed the menace from the stars.
That was what the headlines would be saying, that was what the entire world would think. Except, perhaps, a few scientists and others of their kind who didn’t really count.
Belsen was the hero and if I laid a finger to him I’d probably be lynched.
And I was right.
Belsen is the hero.
He turns on his orchestra at six o’clock each morning and there’s no one in the neighborhood who’ll say a word to him.
Is there anyone who knows how much it costs to soundproof an entire house?
Special Feature
Charles V. De Vet
* * *
Using only the strength in her sinewy forearms Pentizel pulled herself up quietly through the hole in the ice. The small droplets of water that clung to her hairy body turned quickly to patches of shining glaze as she lay low and motionless against the hardened surface of the river.
Seven Come Infinity Page 5