V 14 - The Oregon Invasion

by Jayne Tannehill (UC) (epub)

  “What are you talking about, your ranch! Mike, all you have in this world is your skin! If you don’t protect that, there isn’t going to be any argument about any ranch.”

  “All right, all right, men. You both have a point. We need to take time to look at all the alternatives. But we also need to organize what forces we have. The mill is closed for the day. I sent some of the men up to Barr’s, on the pretext of lunch, to see if they can get some of the people up there organized as well. The rest of the guys have gone home to get their families and what weapons they’ve got. Bob, I know you don’t have any ammo on the shelves, but you know where to get it. The rest of you get your business taken care of and get your guns. We’ll put a man in every store in town. If one of them comes in, shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “You do that and you’ll all get killed. There won’t be any town left to take over.”

  “Look, we don’t even know why they are here.” “They’ve invaded every city in the world, do they need to explain any more than that?”

  “Maybe they do. We’re not a major city of the

  world. Why are they here in the middle of Central Oregon? Maybe they just want to find an open space to live in and settle and raise families. Why are we assuming they have to be killed just because they are aliens? There is a lot of room in Central Oregon for people to live in and settle and be constructive.” “Oh, my God. Listen to the man. You’d think we hadn’t already learned all about them. You’ve seen the papers, man. You’ve seen the television programs. They have taken captives; they have stolen water; they have killed anyone who stood in their way. They have no interest in peace. ‘Maybe they want to move into Central Oregon and live and settle and be constructive.’ Sure, they do. But they’re gonna eliminate all the competition first. And we are the competition, man. We are the competition, and they will drive us out or kill us in the process.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  The girl in the leather jacket spoke again.

  “We don’t have to put ourselves in a paper bag and shoot our way out to prove we are the smarter inhabitants of this town. Mr. Ripley suggested we get what weapons we have. Even if we don’t use them, that makes more sense than being unarmed.”

  “I don’t go nowhere without my gun, lady.” “That’s fine for you, but it’s not true for all of us. Personally, I don’t ever want to kill anything. I don’t even eat meat.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “No, it’s not my problem. It’s the point of all this. We don’t want to kill anyone, or we wouldn’t be standing here arguing about it.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’d love to get a little target practice.”

  “Harv, you get plenty of target practice. And I’m not gonna let you shut me up with your macho line. Whatever we do to get organized, we can’t move

  against a force that doesn’t do anything. And we can’t fight them unless they come down here and fight. So all this talk about guns is only part of it. We can’t stay holed up in stores waiting forever. We have to go on living our lives. You can’t keep your kids home every day. They’ll go crazy. We have to go on living our lives. And we have to know where to go, what to do, how to organize if and when something happens.”

  “I vote for the fairgrounds. Everybody can get in there.”

  “And you’re a sitting target for anyone up on the hill, let alone up in a hover craft.”

  “Better the hospital; we might need the supplies there.”

  “That’s a point.”

  “So can we at least agree on that? If something happens, we all meet at the hospital?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’m still for getting men in all the stores.”

  “Mr. Ripley, where do you draw the line? Which Visitors do you kill on sight? Which ones do you watch to be sure they don’t do something wrong? And how do you define ‘something wrong’? There have been resistance fighters on all the ships all over the world. I can’t remember what they call them. How do you know you won’t be killing one of them? They could help us if we knew who they were.”

  “I say we kill ’em. They’re Visitors. They ain’t one of us. There ain’t no reason good enough to suit me for them to even be here.”

  That sort of ended the organized discussion. The last man to speak was the first to leave. The others stayed, seeking small audiences for the points they had not yet made. Mr. Ripley managed a few recruits for his plan to arm the stores of town, and sent a few men up to the cafe on Main Street to tell his other followers about the plan to meet at the hospital. A few people had actually come in to shop and they now turned their attention to the shelves, hunting for items necessary to whatever ordinariness they expected of the day.

  The girl in the leather jacket had come to speak to the store owners, and now that the group was clearing, it was evident that she had a satchel between her feet. She lifted the bundle onto the counter and opened it,

  “I think I picked a bad time, all around. I didn’t know about. . . Oh, what the hell... we talked about you selling some of my pieces on consignment. We might as well forget it. . . but I brought some things in to show you. Do you want to look at them now?”

  The man behind the counter nodded and spoke very quietly. Hadad couldn’t hear his voice over the argument beside him, but he figured it was okay because the girl started taking out pieces of leather-work and holding them up. It seemed strange that the girl was bringing them here. This was a market, not a clothing store. There were a few things—gloves, caps, socks, underwear, utility items—on the rack against the far wall, but no garments like these. The man took a jacket and tried it on. Perhaps he was buying for himself. Hadad wasn’t sure.

  He wanted to see the leather goods. He had never seen shirts like that. He had seen jackets. A lot of the men at the mill wore them. But he had never seen a shirt that looked like skin. And there were pants, men’s pants that looked like the legs of a deer.

  The garments were laid aside and from the satchel the girl pulled belts, pouches, watchbands, a woven strap, a lady’s cap, a pair of gloves.

  Hadad edged closer to the counter and reached out with his unbandaged hand to touch the gloves. The man and the girl stopped their conversation to acknowledge him, but he was not aware of their response. He was aware only of the softness of the glove and the tight, even stitching on each finger. The belt was not so soft, but the braiding baffled him. He could not see where the pieces could have, must have, couldn’t have twisted, braided, woven over and under and back where they had started, not where they had started. He tried to trace one strand and lost it, tried again.

  The girl laughed.

  “That’s a mystery braid. It’s easy. I’ll show you.”

  Hadad shook his head and turned away from the counter. It was enough that it was braided. He did not need the mystery part too. The girl and the man went back to their trading.

  Mr. Ripley had said the mill was closed for the day. Hadad did not need to go and sweep or carry. He did not have to explain why he was not at work this morning. He did not have to show his hand. He did not have to go anywhere, and so he stayed in the store listening to the people, hearing their concerns. At times he had the urge to tell them the limit of the arsenals aboard the mother ship. Except for weapons that had been invented while they were on Earth, the ships were only limitedly armed for terran battles. That did not make them less dangerous. But the imaginations of the scattered Earth ones were far more elaborate than the munitions departments on the ships.

  Hadad watched the patterns of fear. Each man who joined a cluster would assert first his authority (“They have no right to be here”) and then his strength (“I’d kill every damn one of them before I’d let them near my home”) and then his deepest concern. (Here there was more variety: For some it was a homestead, for others a child, for others an ailing wife, for a few their own lives.) Finally would come the confusion, the wavering between action and inaction. In time each would settle into a point
of view: For some the only solution was to kill the aliens; for others the only solution was to run away; for a few there was resignation, a willingness to endure anything just to be allowed to believe nothing had changed; a few showed cunning—the watchfulness that does not move before the right moment, the planning that mentally calculates the alternatives and what is needed, gained, lost in each, silent impatience with the noise of confusion, guarded waiting that does not concede.

  The cunning sifted through the crowds, waited while the unsure drifted out of the store, on to carry out or abandon their schemes for survival. The cunning waited, and when the last person who carried the smell of panic had left the building, the organized conversation began again. This time it was quiet, reasoned, purposeful.

  Hadad began to measure the group. The girl was still there. He could not pin down her energy. Her words were those of a pacifist. She had already said in a dozen different ways she did not kill, as though there had been someone there trying to convince her to do so. And yet she carried a throwing knife. Hadad had seen the outline of the sheath between her shoulder blades as she stretched forward showing the shop owner the leather garments. She talked about passive resistance, but when an aggressive strategy was proposed by someone else, she had a suggestion that would improve it. She had the eyes of a deer, and the mettle of a fox.

  The man called Larry stayed. Hadad judged his body as he would an opponent for a fight. His power was in his shoulders and arms. He could outswing Hadad in a moment. And his body was trim, no indulgences turning into complacency. He was alert but not strung tight like a man eager for battle. Hadad’s reflexes would keep him out of the man’s way in a scrap. The man was careful. Hadad concluded he would rather have him as an ally than as an opponent.

  Three men had come in together. Hadad knew them from the mill. They didn’t talk much. But Hadad had seen them at work. They did the job. They collected their pay. They didn’t look for ways around the boss, or take extra coffee breaks. That much Hadad knew. He looked now at each of them. The graying man had a scar just below his right eye. The impulse was to look away if he looked at you, to stare at the intricacy of the stitched-together face if he looked away. Beside him stood a man who could have been his son. His body was armored with the same taut fibers. His face was empty of expression, but his eyes blazed with intensity. The third was shorter than the others. A wiry man who looked more like a dancer than a lumberman. His body was limber, his movements liquid. His power was in his legs and in something undefinable called presence.

  One other woman had come into the store and stayed. She had come over from the courthouse. Her graying hair was taking the last signs of youth. Wrinkles and plumpness, arthritis and a bad back had taken their toll earlier. But there was determination in her stride and purpose in her words. And no one discounted her contributions.

  A cockroach walked daringly across the front of the counter. Hadad watched him test the air and venture from behind the cash register toward the edge, over the electric cord, and down the front of the display case. Hadad became aware that he was hungry. He had not had breakfast. The few mice captured in the middle of the night no longer sustained him. Four men stood between him and the counter. As the cockroach descended the case, he watched, moving his head slowly from side to side to keep his prey in sight as the legs intervened. The roach stopped, moved back, turned, stopped again, turned back in the original direction, and moved forward. It stopped again and did not move.

  Another pair of legs pushed into the space. Hadad felt the shoulder nudging him to the right and yielded. The cockroach did not move.

  “Either way, we can use the additional numbers.” The girl in the leather jacket spoke and Hadad looked up, then back to the cockroach. He hadn’t moved.

  “. . . I’d say they’re power hungry.”

  “There are two ways to know you have power. One is by using it. The other is by not using it, and watching the resistance mobilize to defeat you. You can figure you have just a little less power than the opposition figures you have. So if you ever have to use it, you’d lose. The only way to win is to get the opposition to use its own power against itself.”

  The cockroach started moving again, this time across the case out of Hadad’s range.

  “They’d be smart then if they just stayed up there, didn’t come out at all.”

  “How do you figure it?”

  “They know we know they’re there. If they come down right away, we’ve got two advantages: First, it’s our territory. We have the knowledge of it, and we have the passion for it. Second, we’re afraid. If they come down now, you saw what I saw. Ripley’s gang isn’t organized, but the fear’s pumping so hard in those people that, given someone to focus on, they could tear a man limb from limb with their bare hands. But if the Visitors wait, even an hour or so, that initial shock is gonna wear off. And then every one of those cowboys is gonna be eatin’ his own liver wondering what he’s gonna have to do. I’ll bet not a one of those guys will even think to stop for lunch, and come about four o’clock, their gullets are gonna betray ’em.”

  The cockroach reversed his course and the movement caught Hadad’s attention. He watched as it came back across the case and started down toward the floor.

  “Then you’re saying what I said before. We ought to go on doing what we normally do. But we’re still going to need more people.”

  “I’m not disagreeing. We can use all the help we can get. But we don’t need another thousand people running around crying, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling.’ ”

  “I’m not suggesting that. But surely we each know some people we trust, some people we could call.” Hadad watched as the cockroach reached the floor. He wasn’t certain in which direction it would head.

  “Okay, that’s one strategy. But what are we trying to accomplish here? We get lots of people, so what? What are we trying to do?”

  “Kill off the Visitors.”

  “Why, Pete?”

  “Why?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Carl, what do you mean, why?”

  “That’s the hard way. What do you want to kill them off for?”

  “So they don’t kill us off.”

  “That’s my point. We don’t have any reason to kill them off. They might have a reason to kill us off —we’re in their way, we taste good—who knows? But we don’t have any reason to kill them off. We don’t gain a thing collecting dead lizards except a disposal problem. It’s enough work to bury a cow when it dies. We don’t need them dead. What we need is them gone.”

  “What are you gettin’ at?”

  “Look, if our purpose is to kill them off, we can do that. Ripley is right, we arm the town, station the troops on the second story of every store on Main and Third, and draw the suckers down the path and shoot ’em dead. You can watch any ‘B’ western on the tube and learn how to do that. That’s simple. But what do we end up with? A spaceship hanging over our heads with enough big guns to end the game. It’s not the O. K. Corral, folks. I mean, in a situation like that, what do you get if you win? It seems to me we better know what it means to win in this game.”

  “I guess what it comes down to is who do we want to wake up with when the shooting’s over.”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, I don’t want to wake up with no perverts running Prineville.”

  “Pete, we’re all a bunch of perverts. You’ve got your definition. I’ve got mine. Right now the only perverts I’m worried about are green lizards pretending they’re humans and hanging up in that spaceship. When the shooting’s over, I wanna know they’re gone.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We have to make them uncomfortable here. Make it too hard to do the simplest things.”

  “That’s passive resistance.”

  “There’s nothing passive about it. Have you ever tried to physically hold a child who’s trying to run away? Not punish him. Not force him to do something. Just hold him in one place. Thi
s is gonna be just like that. That’s not passive. That takes every ounce of strength you have and every ounce of willpower too. Not to mention imagination. You have to second-guess ’em. Figure out what they want to do, and then figure out how to make it difficult. The only easy part about fighting that way is you don’t have to do anything special to get ready for the fight. You just have to know what the fight is about and what it means to win.”

  “We still need to organize. We need to set up a headquarters or something.”

  “Look, what’s wrong with right here? We’re across the street from the courthouse. They’re big for taking over the system. If they move in there, we’ll be right under their noses. We can watch the whole thing right in front of us. We all got here this morning somehow. Why make it fancy? You okay with that, Bob?”

  Hadad watched the manager consider the possibilities and the alternatives. He didn’t say anything; then after a moment he closed his eyes and nodded.

  The cockroach sensed the completion in the crowd and anticipated movement. His leisurely pace across the shoetops and traversing the open planes of floor now stopped. He froze, then turned from side to side. He would run in a moment, Hadad tried to calculate which way.

  His best bet was to scoop him up with his left hand. If he ran to the right, he’d have to let him go. The foot beside the roach moved and the beastie shot to the left. In one movement Hadad scooped him from the floor.

  No one had particularly noticed him before the movement. Now the attention was again on him as he straightened up, the cockroach palmed in his hand, trapped by a finger, still wiggling. Hadad looked up into the questioning eyes of a burly man with a heavy brown beard and hair as long as the growth on his chin. If he had known the mountains, he would have thought “bear,” but Hadad had never been in the mountains. The man’s eyes questioned what he was doing.