“Confidentially, I may tell you that Washington is frantic, and requires that something be done to stop it immediately. Something is being done right now. Our National Guard is at this moment engaging the Eyes, and this afternoon will see the end of them.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Linc asked.
Stanley clearly didn’t like the remark. “I see no reason to doubt that it will, and no reason to jump ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time, please. One tactic at a time.”
“Has Dr. Iverson explained my idea to you?” Linc asked.
“Yes,” Stanley said, “and it has merit. But it won’t be necessary.”
“Merit?” Collins cut in. “It’s preposterous. The Eyes can’t be captured and contained. Such an idea assumes that the Eyes are complete, live beings that can be pounced upon and taken captive. And that is ridiculous.”
“Then what are they?” Linc demanded.
Collins shrugged. “Two possibilities enter my mind. One, they are some kind of machines—remotely controlled machines. Two, they are merely manifestations, created by a power operating somewhere else entirely. If they have the mental power to hypnotize masses of people, then why couldn’t they also cause hallucinations?”
“Well?” Colonel Stanley turned quickly on Linc, jarring him out of his intended retort. “What do you have to say to that?”
“Nothing much. Collins may be right. I’ve had the same thoughts myself. However, I do know that the Eyes are solid matter. I saw them shot, I saw them break open, I saw them bleed. I’m not prepared to go any further than that. But I’d like to attempt to capture one, and then we’d know, wouldn’t we?”
“Quite so. I like the way your mind works, Hosier,” Stanley said. “You go after concrete proof of your contentions—none of this scientific jabberwocky. However, I still stay that you’re premature and too pessimistic. This afternoon is going to tell the story. Our fighting men will be the answer, mark my words.”
A hesitant rap on the door swung him round. He always seemed to be pivoting. “Come in,” he called.
A young lieutenant entered, a National Guardsman, and he was dirty, disheveled and haunted-looking. He didn’t salute the rank of the man before him, and even Stanley didn’t object.
Linc gave the soldier his chair and waited for the words he knew were coming. The Lieutenant’s voice was low as though he were afraid to speak above a whisper.
“We went out as ordered, sir. Out into the country, into an open field. We had high-powered rifles and two field pieces. We waited. And they came.” A shiver passed through him with the remembering. “It was a rout, sir. We tried. We shot them to pieces; we shot holes right through them—the big guns blew them into jagged bits—but the bits came back together again! They came back together and they healed up and they—”
“Take it easy.” Linc placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Somebody get him a drink.”
The soldier swallowed the water convulsively.
“How many did you lose?” Colonel Stanley asked. “Over half,” the boy answered. “Over half.”
“There’s your answer,” Linc said to the colonel. “There’s your end to the phenomenon. Now do I get my chance?” Stanley was too stunned to answer. But Iverson said, “It may be all we have. At least it would be something to do while we’re looking for a new idea.”
Slowly Stanley nodded his head. “All right, we’ll try it. But no one from this lab must be in on it. It’s too dangerous, after what happened with that man Hendricks.”
“That’s impossible,” Iverson protested. “Any such study of an Eye is scientific work. And aside from our men here there is no one else. Any possible civilian scientists in the area are hiding. People won’t come out of their houses any more. They caught on quickly that the Eyes only attack groups of people and leave individuals alone, so they refuse to come out where there are others to make a group. No one will volunteer, and this has to be a voluntary effort.”
“It’s my idea,” Linc said, “and if it’s tried at all, I intend to try it I Collins can come along with me.”
“No,” Collins was fast with his refusal. “I’m not going out in the open and dare one of those things to climb into a cage. That’s suicide, zombie-style. Count me out.”
Linc suddenly felt alone. He couldn’t manage it alone—not this. He needed someone, and he had to admit it.
“You’ve forgotten me, all of a sudden,” Wes stood up. “That’s no way to keep a friend—by overlooking him.”
Wes was offering to help and to mend their quarrel all in one. Linc was almost too ashamed to answer, but he had to answer, and to express his deep-felt thanks in that answer. He glanced at the floor. “There’s no one I’d rather have with me.”
“Then it’s settled.” Stanley ignored the emotions in the room. “You two have a try at this while Iverson and Collins put their heads together with me and try to come up with something else.”
Even as the colonel was talking, Linc was aware that he had made an important discovery. He needed Wes and Wes’ friendship. But he wouldn’t have had it if Wes hadn’t been a big enough man to make the first move—time and again to make the first move. He had a lot to learn from the quiet, bookish man. He hoped he was given the time and the chance to learn it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The room Linc appropriated for their workshop was in the administration building. It was just adequate to hold the workbench, desk and three chairs that crammed it. They opened the window to clear out the musty odor, and Wes swept the floor.
“What’s first?” Wes asked between swishes of the broom.
Linc sat down in one of the chairs. “Something to contain the Eye, once we have it. A box, a cage? If a cage, then out of what materials?”
Wes paused in the sweeping. “The obvious answer is wire or chain link, but in order to have a good view of it, one side should be glass.”
“Good. I’ll order the stuff.”
“If you just poke around in the storeroom, you’ll probably find what we need without waiting for deliveries. I doubt if there’s anyone to deliver, anyway.”
They went down the hall to the large room at the end. It was crammed with materials, ordered and unused, thrust into storage and forgotten. They searched through it, sneezing in the dust, and it was nightfall by the time they had found everything they required.
Linc was driven by the need for speed, yet knew that when the cage was completed he would have to face the larger problem of the capture. How could they capture an Eye? The answer depended upon being able to incapacitate it long enough to get it into the cage. Nothing from his experience seemed to meet the requirements.
As the cage took shape, a tall rectangular frame—top, bottom, and three sides covered with fencing, the other waiting for Wes’ glass—he made a conscious effort to think the problem through. What he needed was a simple idea—something that would work because it was simple, and had few parts to go haywire.
The Eyes appeared to be like normal human eyes; they wept when stung and bled when wounded. Therefore, they could be blinded. And whether it sounded too simple or not, tear gas might be the instrument for that blinding. Tear gas bombs, smothering it in fumes, should incapacitate an Eye long enough for them to get their hands on it.
He told Wes, and Wes agreed that it sounded logical. “But what do we do with it once it’s blinded?” Wes asked. There was a crawly look on his face. “I don’t think I could muster the courage to touch one of those things. To touch it and carry it—what would an eye feel like to touch?”
Linc shivered. “Ughhh. I hadn’t considered that.”
“So what do we do?”
“Find some other way to maneuver it into the cage. Something to pull or push it.”
“Pulling sounds best to me. They float, so if we could get something around it and pull, it ought to float along behind us.”
Even as Wes talked, the picture he created took form in Linc’s mind, and the tool they needed was there in the picture. “A net,” Linc said. “We’ll get a big net, and while the thing is blinded by the gas, we’ll throw the net over it and pull it in.”
Wes sighed a loud sigh of relief. “Here’s the glass.” He fitted it into the slots. “It sounds crazy—going after an Eye with tear gas and a net—but at least it’s a plan. When I volunteered, I doubted if you’d ever figure it out.”
“You volunteered for more than either of us expected. Frankly, I thought Iverson would grab my idea, then give it to some poor fools to carry out, and I’d have to bear the guilt of their failure.”
“He gave it to two poor fools, all right. Linc Hosier and Wesley Rowe—two fools in the traditional pattern.”
* * * *
Morning came brightly and they left the house three-strong, because Ichabod refused to be locked behind. He had been alone too much since the departure of the housekeeper and demanded companionship.
“I haven’t heard of the Eyes attacking animals,” Wes said, as he put the dog between them on the front seat.
“He’ll be safe.”
The dog was nervous and eager, bumping Linc’s arm with his busy nose. It was the last thing Linc needed, but he made no comment.
They had driven home in the lab’s pick-up truck, and now it clattered down Colt Street, disturbing the morning silence. Linc thought they must make a strange sight: two men and a dog, a rattly truck, and on that truck, covered with a tarpaulin, an eight-foot cage, empty and waiting. They were going out to do battle like men armed with sticks against cannons. The tear gas bombs were in a box that Wes held, two gas masks on top of them. The net lay folded beside the cage.
Linc took the deserted roads into the country. The farms they saw were devoid of activity; they might as well have been dead farms. Linc was headed in the direction of the game preserve and the “hole,” but minutes passed and they were still alone. There was no Eye in sight.
The sun had climbed to ten o’clock and still they moved alone down the road, making a clear target, but unchallenged. Linc’s hands were sweaty as the minutes ticked by without release from tension.
“Why don’t they come?” he hissed at Wes. “Do we have to go right up to their den?”
“Let’s not try that.” Wes’ hand was on Ichabod’s head, taking his own nerves out in the comfort of his dog. “Maybe we’re not juicy enough prey. One truck—two men—they go for bigger numbers.”
“They’ve got to go for us!”
“Take it easy. You’ll get yourself so worked up you’ll panic when we do find one.”
The fields at their side were high with weeds, and looming ahead was a small woods, bright-colored against the sky. He tried to see its beauty, the red torches of maples, and the higher yellow of elms. He tried to relax in it. Too much tension could lose a battle, and this would be a bale so dangerous that he must have all his wits about him. If there was a battle.
As they neared the woods, Ichabod stiffened. His busy nose ceased its probing and pointed, quivering, straight ahead. There was an almost imperceptible growl in his throat, and Linc’s foot stamped on the brake in reaction to the sense of danger.
Up and over the trees, a shadow came, and resolved into the distended form of a giant Eye. It was blue—a watery blue—and it slithered its iris from side to side, sweeping the ground.
Wes’ hand closed over Linc’s arm, and Wes was a shaft of stiffness to match his dog. The Eye zoomed higher and sailed on. Its blank gaze touched the truck and swept past. It wasn’t going to bother with them. It was going to leave them behind.
Frantically, Linc leaped from the truck. This was his chance, and he was missing it. He hit the ground and started yelling and waving his hands in the air. “You devil!” he shouted. “You dirty, slimy devil. Come down and fight! Come down!”
The Eye swerved in the air to peer at him, and he waved harder and cursed it. If it could be angered, he would anger it.
The Eye moved closer, and he continued with his dares, his flaring insults. The Eye leveled off, picked up speed, and came at him. He jumped back into the truck and stepped on the accelerator.
Wes yelled, “We didn’t come to run away from it.”
“I’ve got to find some cover,” Linc explained quickly. “I’ve got to force it down to our level.”
He maneuvered the truck off the road, and into the trees.
The Eye couldn’t approach from the sky now, but would be forced to come down into the small clearing ahead. It had to come down—so they could get the net around it.
He climbed out of the truck and Wes came to stand beside him, proffering a gas mask and two bombs. Linc took them, readying himself for the moment. Everything was quiet. There wasn’t even the sound of a bird in this woods. Overhead, he knew there was a shadow sailing, and the monstrous thing that cast it, but here they were in a world alone. The moment had come, and he was afraid.
A movement through the leaves dragged his attention forward and up. Into the clearing before them, beneath the leaves, edged a pinkish lower lid, then a white iris, and then the watery blue of the Eye he had cursed. It sank down, more and more of it visible until it was all there, hovering two feet above the ground, staring at them with the blankness of its alien sense.
Linc hated it violently in that moment. Its ugliness, its monstrosity, were a blight upon the earth. He hated it, but he couldn’t move. It fascinated him, it awed him, and it paralyzed him. Wes was silent beside him, and together they stared at the thing that had come down into their trees.
Ichabod barked wildly from the truck and the sharp yaps pierced through Linc’s consciousness, shocking him back to reality. He felt the tear gas bombs hard in his hand. He raised them slowly, ready to throw, his left hand fumbling with the mask for his own protection. As the Eye settled, making no move except great, hypnotic blinks, he tightened the muscles of his arm.
“Now!” he screamed to Wes, and heaved his bombs straight at the thing in the path. They hit and burst, and two spurts from Wes’ hand rose beside them. Linc pulled on his mask, started forward, and stopped. The whole clearing was obscured by the fog of the gas. The Eye was invisible behind it. Wes pushed one end of the net into his waiting grasp, but still he stood.
“Come on,” Wes called. “We’ll lose our chance.”
Linc stumbled forward into the smog, trying to hurry, yet trying to keep his feet in the blur. Then he couldn’t stand the suspense another moment. He ran headlong into the mist, the tug on the other end of the net telling him that Wes was keeping pace.
The mist cleared briefly and something brushed his face, something soft and hairy, and he cried out and jumped backward. In the momentary clearness, he saw the thing that had touched him—the Eye, its great lashes twitching, water running from it to wet the ground. He had almost run straight into it.
“Go to the left,” he yelled at Wes.
Linc ran to the right, past the place where he knew the Eye to be, although he could no longer see it through the mist. He seemed to run for miles before he felt the pull of the net as it hit the Eye and circled it. He cut in then, to meet Wes, and they came together in the fog, joining their hands and the ends of the net, only sure of the capture by the tugging of the mesh and the pulling bulge it made behind them.
“Hurry,” Wes’ whisper was shaky. “Go back through the trees.”
“Be careful!” Linc called. “Don’t get away from me.”
They moved quickly but carefully, pulling the net and the floating weight of the Eye in a circle, back through the woods and out of the tear gas. When they reached the open air, they turned to look at what they were dragging.
Behind them, wrapped in the mesh, the Eye floated, bulging, unable to blink because of the restraining material, dripping great drops of water on the leaves in a so
dden trail. It was still blinded, and it looked for once completely helpless, with no hands to wipe away its tears.
At the truck they separated, each proceeding down a different side, aiming the Eye and the net at the cage. The door was open for the thing, and they maneuvered it up. The net shoved it partway inside, but the back of it stuck out.
“Give it a jerk,” Wes said.
They tried jerking the net, but it didn’t work. The Eye still protruded. Linc fastened his end of the net around the side mirror at the front of the truck, then ran back to the Eye. He took a deep breath to hold his stomach from retching, and said, “I’m going to shove it in. When you see it go, come around and free the net from the cage so I can close the door. Got that?”
“Got it,” Wes answered. “Be careful.”
Linc braced himself, put his hands out, and closing his eyes against the horror, and steeling himself against the touch, he shoved.
The thing was warm under his hands, warm and wet, and a shudder raced up his wrists and down his back. He jumped backward, letting Wes run between him and the truck with the free net, then he slammed the cage shut and fastened the lock.
He stood there panting. It was done. The Eye was in the cage, still weeping, still blinded, its back to them as it faced the glass wall. Wes trembled as he reached for the tarp to throw over it.
“Let’s get it to the lab,” he said to Linc, “before I’m sick.”
Linc climbed into the truck. Wes immediately gave Ichabod a great hug. “You saved us, old fellow,” Wes said to the dog. “Your barking saved us, and we’ve got our Eye.”
But could they keep it? Linc wondered as he sped away from the trees. Now that they had it, would Collins prove to be right? Would it seep away from them somehow? Or would it stay in the cage?
* * * *
The Flying Eyes Page 6