“Then you’ll come?”
“Just tell me when you want me, and I’ll be there.”
“Come with me—now. Maybe I can help to keep you safe. I don’t know. I’d like to try.”
“That’s a fine idea, anyway.” Putney rose from the table. “I can help persuade the others you’ll need to complete the service. The caretaker at Bladen cemetery is a special friend of mine. If he hasn’t been evacuated, I think I can prick his conscience enough to make him prepare the grave.”
Linc took the little man in tow, and together they drove the deserted streets. The town was a ghost town. Many of the houses stood empty as the result of the evacuation. Others might as well have been empty, for the people inside were hiding, tight and fearful behind their locked windows and doors.
The first three mortuaries they visited were closed. The fourth was open, but the mortician refused to help. He wouldn’t even supply a casket.
The fifth mortuary harbored a man with a heart, and that part of the search was ended. The man’s name was Evans, and he was oddly unafraid. He volunteered to take the casket to Linc’s house, prepare the body quickly, and be waiting there when they were ready.
Bladen Cemetery presented no problem. Linc had to stand by, on guard for approaching Eyes, while the big, husky caretaker dug in the not yet frozen earth, but the grave was deep and waiting when he and the minister left.
Kelly was ready, her coat on, and the hearse was in the driveway. A quick call to the lab brought enough men to act as pallbearers, and the funeral began from the house… to the hearse… to the cemetery. There the wind, springing up in the noontime, whipped at them and chilled with its gusts. The leaves fell wildly, the last of them, drifting red and yellow to settle on the brown ones that had withered earlier.
The service over the grave was brief and sharply sad. There was one bouquet of late mums that Kelly had picked from their garden, there were the familiar words that surrounded a death, and then it was over. Linc’s chest was tight with pent-up emotion, but he kept himself hard. Iverson stood beside him, and he couldn’t even feel anger toward the old man in this situation.
Linc whispered “Good-bye” under his breath, and walked for the car. Kelly fell in beside him, but he couldn’t touch her. Even his own journey into the hole couldn’t atone for what he had done to Wes, and this place with its tombstones and quiet made him so heavily guilty that he could barely order his feet to walk away from it. He should be there, in that casket, quiet beneath the dark earth. It was because of Kelly, and his own weakness, that he wasn’t.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Linc was awakened out of a fitful sleep by the persistent ring of the phone. He stumbled out of bed and down the stairs, picked it up, and yawned into it, “Yes?”
“Hosier, is that you?” Iverson’s voice spewed out at him.
“It’s me, but why it’s you I don’t know. I thought we were through with our association.”
“Not quite.” Iverson’s tone raised, now that he was sure he had the right target. “I want you over here inside the hour. There’s a job you didn’t clean up.”
Iverson hung up with a bang. Linc swore under his breath. He wouldn’t go. He had a right to some time, a right to some adjustment after losing Wes. But, even as he shuffled toward the kitchen and coffee, he knew he would go. The day stretched empty before him and he would grasp at anything to fill it. Even Iverson’s shaking anger. But he would also take his time.
He fed Ichabod, fed himself, took a shower, and then led the dog outside for his customary morning romp. He saw Ichabod looming as a duty to consume his future. He wished he could find some feeling for the dog—some of what Wes had known—but it wouldn’t appear just because he wished it. He liked the spotted dog, and that was all. Any stronger feeling was beyond him.
Once the animal was safely settled in the house, he started the drive to the lab. He would be late twenty minutes, and he drove slowly, obstinately trying to stretch it into a half-hour.
He strode the empty corridors into Iverson’s office.
“You’re late.” Iverson glanced up from his desk sourly.
“I had things to do.”
“You have more important things to do here. Come with me. I want to show you the result of your handiwork.” Linc followed Iverson into the little room he and Wes had used to study the Eye. Iverson went to the window and pointed outside. “What do you think of that?”
Linc looked, and looked the second time. Outside, six feet from the window, hovered the watery-blue Eye.
“Well?” Iverson said.
“Well, nothing. What am I supposed to say?”
“You’re supposed to get rid of it. We’ve done everything to chase it off, but the damn thing comes right back again, like it’s searching for its long-lost mother. I can’t figure you, Linc. You really goofed this time. All down the line. That thing hovers out there and endangers every man in the lab. We don’t dare walk near it. It just waits. It has already picked off Bennet.”
“Oh, no,” Linc felt a surge of pity. He liked Bennet.
“I want you to get rid of it. I can’t have it about, ready to capture all of my men. We need those men. And as long as it’s there, the reactor is in danger. You should have known better.”
“Hold on. I tried to chase it off the other night. What can I do that you haven’t done?”
“That’s what I called you to figure out. You made the mess, so you clean it up.”
Iverson was speaking to him in a way that he had no right to do, and Linc felt belligerence rising in himself to match the old man’s. He had absorbed the name-calling, had heard himself called a fool in every way but the outright one, and was angry with himself for enduring it.
“You’re just making a lot of noise,” he said. “Noise and panic and half-baked plans—that’s all that’s left in this lab. You’ve forgotten the questions!”
“What questions?”
“Questions like: Why does that Eye stay here? When you drive it off, why does it come back? What does it want? I set it free. If it had wanted freedom, it would have taken it. It hasn’t.”
“I can see that,” Iverson countered.
“Okay, and there are more questions, too. Why did it allow itself to be caged in the first place? That’s a question I missed. I should have asked it right after I came back from the hole, right after I knew what these Eyes really are. That thing could have shrunk itself and teleported out of that cage at any time. It didn’t need to stay a prisoner. So why did it?”
“And you have the answer now?” Iverson perked up a bit.
“The same one I had for the other questions. It didn’t fly the coop because it wanted something. The mentality behind it, the brain in whatever bloated monster it came from, wants something. While Wes and I were studying it, it was studying us.”
Iverson wiped his forehead, shaken by the volume of Linc’s voice, and gathering in the new ideas. “I admit, it sounds interesting. But what good does it do us?”
“A lot, if we’ve got the guts to carry through the next step. To go out there and find out what it wants.”
“How?” The old man was incredulous. “The thing can’t talk. It could only lead you back to the hole. Maybe that’s what it wants anyway. Personal revenge against the man who caged it. I imagine it was tormented aplenty. Now don’t tell me that what this Eye wants is contact. Is that what you’re getting at? Contact?”
“I suppose it is,” Linc admitted, uneasily.
“Then why haven’t the things made a move toward it before? Why only this one, and why only you? Even your reputed egotism can’t make you think that you’re so different it wants to treat with you as an equal!”
“It wouldn’t be egotism, if I did think so. Who else has ever stood up to it but Wes and me? Who else has had the guts to face it out? It finally found two men with courage and sens
e that it could understand, and it wants us back. It didn’t want to leave us.”
“It left Wes!” Iverson said meanly. As he saw Linc’s reaction, he sat down. “I’m sorry for that, Linc. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. This isn’t me, you know that. I’ve just had too much. Constant bickering, constantly changing plans, all so gigantically opposed to each other that I’ve had no real choice between them.”
“I realize that.” Linc accepted the apology. “But if you’d listen to me just once more.”
“And if I should go along with you, what would it entail?”
Linc braced himself to bring the words out. They weren’t going to lead to anything easy, but it was all he could think of to do.
“Let me go there and see what happens. I don’t know what I will do, or what the Eye will do, but I have to try. If I’m wrong, I won’t come back, most likely. But if I’m right, this could be the big and final moment in the whole fight.”
“I don’t like to take the chance with you. Not you.”
“Thanks. But where was this vote of confidence the other night when all I was asking for was time?”
“You think I betrayed you, don’t you? I didn’t. I simply took the course I thought best. I had to go along with Collins’ plan”
“You’ll still have Collins’ plan, if I fail out there. If I succeed, then who knows? Maybe those hundreds of people won’t have to be killed, after all. Time is short.” He tried to jar Iverson out of his indecision. “Every hour that those people are down in that hole, they’re soaking in more radioactivity. They’re dying bit by bit while we stand here arguing.”
Iverson couldn’t make the decision. He was wrung out with deciding. Linc made it for him. “Stay inside,” Linc said. “Don’t endanger yourself.”
He ran for the outside door.
As he came into the air, he wanted to stop. Every sensible nerve in him shouted to stop, to go back, and quit being the fool. This was crazy. Crazy from beginning to end. What was he to do when he came upon the Eye? What would the Eye do? He should have thought those points through before he hit Iverson with the grand questions.
But now it was too late to stop, because hovering and swaying before him was the six-foot, watery-blue Eye that he knew so well.
He approached it at a walk. This was the moment, then—his moment—and he didn’t want it. But he needed it. His mind was a turmoil of confusion, and all he could do to free himself was face the puzzle and let come what may.
He halted four feet from the Eye. It was low, and at this distance the great iris was level with his face. It stretched away on both sides of him, filling his vision, and it blinked, and watched, and was blank.
Trembling hit him in the knees and he was afraid. But he stood there, alone before it, loosening part of his mind to catch the swirls he knew the Eye would be casting, and keeping the other part tight to protect himself. He held one sentence swimming in his brain. “Talk to me,” he said over and over again. “Talk to me.”
It was foolishness, because the Eye couldn’t speak, yet he had to bridge the gulf between them with the sense of what he wanted. The Eyes were hypnotists, teleports—why not telepaths, too?
The shadows rose to buffet his brain and the swirls eddied in his mind’s eye, round and round, softly hitting against the tight part of his thought and being repelled by the force of will, he had developed. He was getting nowhere.
Perhaps… He shuddered, a great rolling tremor that shook his body. He threw back his head and gave himself over to Fate. There was no other way. He had to drop all his defenses if he hoped to make the contact. If this was to be his time to walk away lead-footed, then he would consciously allow it. He hardly cared, anyway.
As he relaxed and threw away his guard, the shadows grew to towering giants and the swirls hit him like a tornado, twisting his mind to dizzy heights and dashing it down again. The Eye blinked. And then he couldn’t see it. He was blind with the clouds it was forming on the screen of his brain, and there was only blackness.
He struggled to recapture some of his will to fight the shadows back, but it was too late. The shadows had him, possessed him fully, and he was alone before the Eye, he belonged to the Eye.
The blackness lightened and a moving shape crept in. Visions followed the shape—visions that were unknowable because of their alienness. He couldn’t understand.
The visions cleared, and a voice without substance whispered into his mind; it ignored his ears and whispered directly into the grayness of his brain; a voice that wasn’t a voice, that didn’t really speak, but that put intelligible thoughts into his head. These he could understand. They were stilted, but he could understand them.
“You cannot comprehend my pictures,” the whisper painted on his brain. “So I will employ language.”
Linc trembled. Was this victory? His vision was clear now, but he no longer wanted to look. He was riveted to the blue of the Eye and it filled him up completely.
“Can you not answer?” the whisper came again.
How? Linc thought. How could he return the whisper?
“That is how,” the whisper said. “Just let it form in your mind and I will know.”
“Then you are telepaths, too!” Linc was exultant.
“There are few mental powers lost to us. We are all-powerful.”
The boast brought Linc back out of awe. The situation was weird, and should have been wondrous—this meeting of two alien forms of life, two alien worlds. But he felt only hatred and revulsion, and the strong, strong need to destroy. This was no historic meeting, but a foray. He was here for information.
“You shall have it,” the Eye whispered. “I wanted you for the same reason. The time of groping has come to an end. Now we must make contact, and you must hear my demands and comply. Do you wish to question for your information? Or would you rather that I relate?”
“Both,” thought Linc. “I have no prepared questions at the moment. Tell me what you need to tell me, then I’ll ask.”
The Eye swayed, adjusting its position. “I see in your mind that you already know a great deal of the truth. We are from space, yes. We are telepaths, yes. We can teleport, yet what you have seen is not true teleportation. It is extension; more wonderful than the other. It is a matter of removing an organ completely from the body, severing and healing the connections, yet still keeping mental contact; then returning, reconnecting and healing to become whole again.” It paused, returning to enumerate its powers. “And we are radioactive, as you suspected. You have done remarkably well in your guessing.”
Linc laughed inside himself, a rueful grunt of a laugh. The first praise he had received in all this fight had to come from an Eye itself. From a hated, abominable, killing Eye.
“You are too harsh in your judgment of us.” The Eye answered his laughter. “We have only done what we needed to survive. Our history is desperate. Now I will start the relating, giving you facts to digest.
“My people came originally from a planet which was spawned radioactive. We evolved there, on Zine, adjusting and using the radiation as the basis for our life. Zine was barren compared with earth; yours is heavily crowded with growth, green and animal. All that existed for us was the radioactivity. It is a great commentary on my race that we learned to develop and adapt ourselves to the use of it.
“But then, even as you will do one day, we used up our foodstuff, our radiation source. Only, contrary to your resources, ours was not replaceable. We had accommodated ourselves to accepting the great amounts of radiation our planet cloaked us with, and we couldn’t accommodate backward, so we eventually used it up, exhausted it. Thus in the end we had to leave. We migrated in our machines, taking what we could, searching for another radioactive planet. We were separated during those years—one ship from another—until, to my knowledge, there are only nine of us remaining. The nine from my ship. There may be others, o
f course, but far from here, and it is a sadness to think that they will never find this place and perhaps never save themselves.”
“But Earth isn’t radioactive!” Linc argued.
“Not of itself. But there are belts about it in space that drew us here, and enough radiation in your atmosphere to keep us here, searching for its source. We were gravely disappointed when we found that this source was artificial, that it had to be produced, and that you and your kind were the only ones who could produce it.”
“You mean the bombs we tested?”
“The bombs—yes. But they were not enough for us. We have used up most of their remains. Thus we searched further and found this place. Here you constantly create radioactivity. Enough to draw us. You can, as you put it, test more bombs here, for you know the way. This is what we want.”
Radioactivity? Linc tried to absorb the vast array of information the Eye was feeding him, and to bring up questions that were to the point, but it was difficult. He wasn’t quite himself, quite his own.
“Then you didn’t crash here by accident?” he finally asked.
“Of course not. Why should we have an accident? We chose this place and sank our ship into the coolness of the earth, always to be near this place. We wanted the dark of the ground to protect us. Your gravity is too intense. We can barely move on your earth. We are too large, and accustomed to far less gravity. It is difficult. Thus to save our energy, we hit on the method of sending our sensory-visual organs about. This requires little energy, whereas if we tried to move ourselves, we would exhaust your meager, artificial supply within hours.
“The horrors you have perpetrated on our defenseless eyes shall not soon be forgotten. But we had to persist in spite of them. We need another—bomb, I think you called it. We need radioactivity. The natural radiation of your planet is enough to keep us alive, but we need freedom to move, freedom to live comfortably.”
The Flying Eyes Page 13