by Jack Finney
We ran, and in a minute, perhaps, we were at the back door of the building, pushing against it. Their car was locked, and I grabbed Becky's arm. Three seconds later we were climbing one of the packed-dirt paths that wound up into the Marin County hills. Then we were hidden by the straggling undergrowth and wild, tangled shrubbery.
We had no chance; the string was nearly played out, and I knew it and didn't try to fool myself about it. I knew these paths and hills, every foot of them, but so did others, plenty of others. And between us and Highway 101 — the passing cars and humanity from outside — lay over two miles of hills, paths, open field and farmland. Against any kind of search and pursuit at all, we couldn't get through and there was no place we could go into hiding to wait for outside help — if any was coming. Even as I was thinking so, the town fire signal began blasting the air, sounding very close, building a terrible sense of panicky excitement.
I knew men were already getting into cars, starting after us; I knew there were more and more pursuers with every blast of that ominous, terrible sound. Far ahead, men were leaving home to spread through these hills, hunting or waiting for us. The next few minutes were the last moments left in which we could even hope to stay unobserved.
Farther up the hill to our right, the underbrush dwindled and gave way to an exposed stretch of field, waist high with summer-browned weeds. Walking in that field, we'd be instantly visible to the first man or men to come over the hill's crest or step out from the underbrush below it. Yet to continue walking this path could only mean stepping into the arms of the men who would be prowling it within minutes.
Holding Becky by the arm, I stopped and stood in a panic of confused indecision, trying to make one of two hopeless choices. I turned suddenly, leading Becky, and we climbed the hill to the edge of the exposed, sunlit field of weeds that stretched on up to the crest. Stooping, my arms moving fast, I began yanking great handfuls of weeds loose, snapping their brittle stems, gesturing violently at Becky to do the same. Then we had, each of us, a huge armload of weeds, like sheaves of wheat. Walk ahead, I said to Becky, out into the field, and without question she moved, her body pushing through the weeds, leaving a swath of bent weeds trailing behind her.
I followed, sidling along, and with my free arm moving in a steady, scythe-like sweep, I caught up the weeds we'd bent down, straightening them behind me as I walked. I moved fast, sweeping the bent weeds to an exactly upright position again; and when we'd gone twenty yards, I could see no visible trail behind us. In the center of the field now, I had Becky lie down, and then I lay down beside her. I scattered her armload of yellow weeds over us, covering us completely; then, as well as I could, I straightened the weeds around us, and propped those I carried on top of us, spreading them apart till they stood — leaning, sagging in places — in a more or less vertical position.
Exactly what our hiding place would look like to an observer on the edge of the field, I didn't know; but with no trail leading to it, I could only hope it wouldn't be particularly noticeable. The middle of a wide and exposed field, apparently searchable at a glance, was, I hoped, a hiding place that wouldn't occur to anyone passing it. A hunter expects the fugitive to run.
We lay for a long time, motionless, terribly uncomfortable at first, then painfully uncomfortable, but never moving, never changing position. From time to time we heard voices, on the path near us and from farther away. Once — for a long, long time, it seemed, though it was probably no more than three to four minutes — we heard two men talking quietly, slowly climbing our hill, cutting through the field we lay in. Their voices drew nearer, steadily louder in volume as they approached; then they passed us, no more than thirty yards away. We could have heard clearly, I suppose, what they were saying, but I was too frightened and intent on guessing their progress to pay attention to the sense of their talk. Several times, very distantly, we heard automobile horns, series of short and long blasts in some sort of signal.
After a very long time we were cold, the damp and chill rising from the ground underneath us. The sun was low, time had passed, and I knew that we weren't going to be found, at least not here where we lay.
We lay there until full dark, and for the last long spell of it we were steadily shivering. I had to clench my teeth till my jaws ached to prevent my teeth from chattering. We talked a little, trying to comfort each other.
After a time — despairing, uncomfortable and afraid, needing to blame someone, anyone — I remembered the way Jack Belicec had seemed to stumble and stutter incoherently when he was making our appeal for help to the San Francisco FBI office. I was convinced now that he'd been stalling until the operator had time to realize what was happening and sabotage the call completely. He too was lost, caught and changed into something that was no longer Jack Belicec; perhaps it had happened while he was napping alone in his room the day before. At other moments, remembering how Jack and Theodora had led their pursuers away from us, I wasn't sure, and let myself hope that maybe he and Theodora had got through, that at any moment they'd arrive with help. But I didn't believe it; I couldn't.
We stood up, finally — stiffly, hardly able to get our feet — and I saw that with darkness there had come advantages and disadvantages. We couldn't be seen from even ten yards away — there was no moon at all — and now low broken stretches of fog, a real help, drifted low in the sky, and across the ground. But the moon would be rising very soon, and I knew that long before we could walk two miles, it would be well above the horizon. And long since, in the time we'd lain silent and motionless in this field, the search had undoubtedly been organized, the hunting party completed — every able-bodied man and woman in Santa Mira, for all I knew. And there was only one way we could get out: the way we now began walking, toward Highway 101. And they knew that, all of them, as well as we. We weren't going to get out; that was certain, and I understood it. We walked on through the dark as quietly as we could, Becky holding my arm, while I guided us by means of an occasional small landmark.
An hour passed; we'd come over a mile, encountering no one, hearing no one. An illusion of hope began to grow in me, and I began visualizing Becky and me reaching the highway and running onto it, stopping traffic suddenly, bunching it up, brakes squealing — twenty or a hundred cars deep, bumper to bumper, and filled with real and living people.
We kept on, covering another half mile in another half hour. Then we were moving down the gentle slope of the final hill, toward the wide strip of farmland between us and the highway; and in the little valley at our feet, we could see the fences and fields. Just below and a little to the left lay Art Gessner's farmhouse, dark and unlighted, and his fields, neatly ruled off by the thin lines of his irrigation ditches. In the nearest field I could see something I'd never seen grow there before. Paralleling the ditches lay row after row of what looked like cabbages or pumpkins, though neither were grown here, not in this area. There were fairly round spheres, dark circular blobs in the faint moonlight, lying in long evenly spaced rows — and then I knew what they were, and Becky, beside me, drew in a sudden sharp breath. There lay the new pods, already as large as bushel baskets and still growing — hundreds of them in the dim even light of the moon.
The sight terrified me, and I hated to go on, to walk down there and through them — but we had to. Now we sat down, waiting till once more the fog drifted over the face of the moon; I wanted to cross this field in as near to pitch darkness as possible.
We were both tired, exhausted in spite of all the Benzedrine we'd been taking. We sat slumped, staring dully at the ground, waiting till the fog should darken the moon completely. I realized, suddenly, what would happen; now I understood why we'd got as far as we had, encountering no one. There had been no point in scattering their strength through the miles of territory we had crossed, trying to find us in the darkness. Instead, they were simply waiting for us, hundreds of silent figures bunched together in a solid line, hidden in the fields between us and the highway we had to approach. Presently we would have to walk into t
heir waiting arms and hands.
But I told myself this: there is always a chance. Men have escaped from the most tightly guarded prisons other men could contrive. War prisoners have walked hundreds of miles through a population of millions, every one of them his enemy. We had to count on sheer luck; a momentary gap in the line at just the right instant, a mistake in identity made in the darkness. Until the very moment we were caught, there was always a chance.
And then I saw that we didn't dare take even what little chance we might have had to cross that field. A low swirl of fog edged off the face of the moon, and again I saw the pods, row after row of them, lying evil and motionless at our feet. If we were caught, what about these pods? We had no right to walk on and be caught, no right to waste ourselves! We were here — with the pods — and even though it was hopeless, even though it made capture an absolute certainty, we had to use ourselves against these pods. If there was any luck to be had, this was how it had to be used.
A minute passed before the bank of fog moved across the face of the moon. Then, once again, it was dark, and we stood and walked silently down the hill, into the monstrous field. The nearest building was the barn, and I hurried Becky toward it, occasionally brushing the dry brittle surfaces of the great pods, stepping over the irrigation ditches between the rows.
I found great metal drums of tractor gas just inside the open door of the barn, lined up along the wall on the dirt-packed floor. Suddenly excitement and hope flared up in me; new strength came to me. This was futile, of course — there were hundreds of pods — but the chance to make a stand is always the one to take. I shook two Benzedrine tablets into Becky's hand, took a couple myself, and we choked them down. Then Becky helped me tip the first drum onto its side. It took me ten minutes, prowling that barn, lighting one match after another, but at last I found a rusted wrench up on one of the low rafters. Then we rocked the big metal drum, got it rolling, and trundled it out through the doorway and down to the nearest of the irrigation ditches. I wedged the drum in place — the hexagonal metal plug over the edge of the ditch — with a clod of dirt, and left it.
Presently six drums of low-test farm gasoline lay side by side at the head of the irrigation ditches, and the first one was already empty, its contents flowing down through the field. Ten minutes passed; we simply sat there, silently. Then the flow from the last of the drums ceased, except for a slow dripping sound, and I knelt beside the open ditch, the sharp fumes of gasoline stinging at my eyes. I lighted a match, dropped it into the slow-flowing gas, and it promptly went out. I lighted another, and this time brought it slowly down, till the bottom edge of flame touched the shiny surface; I could see my face reflected in the pool. The flame caught, a little flicker of blue that grew into a circle, tiny for a moment, then swelling. And then it flared, and the flame-red spikes mixing with the blue now — moved down the ditch, widening to its edges. In another instant it began to race, and I ran back to the far corner of the barn where Becky was, shielded and in the shadows.
The heat grew, the flames began to make a liquid crackle, and then reddened and shot suddenly high, and the black smoke began to roll. From our hiding place, we watched the line of flame, climbing in height, running down the field in parallel lines, shooting down connecting ditches with a subdued roaring sound, and the black silhouettes of the pods were suddenly sharp against the smoky red flame. A first pod burst into a torch of pale, almost incandescent flame, the smoke white; then a second burst, a third, a fourth and fifth together, then more and more. And now the soft explosive puffs of pods bursting into flame came steadily as a clock tick, one after another down the rows, flaring into mushrooming incandescence. And then, over the roar of the fire, we heard the sound of hundreds of voices moving toward us through the night.
For perhaps a minute I had thought we had won, but then the gasoline — only six drums of it flowing into that great field — burned out. One after another the racing red lines of flame slowed and stopped, dwindling wherever the last trickles of gasoline were flowing into the ground. The rows of burning torches still glowed, but the flames were redder, the white smoke increasing, and no new pods were catching. The flames — twelve and fourteen feet high at their peak — were suddenly only waist-high, sinking rapidly, and the red lines of fire — once solid and bright — were broken. At almost the same moment, the flames, which had covered perhaps half an acre, subsided to flickering inch-high tongues; and it was then, the moon brightly lighting the countryside, that we saw the hundreds of figures advancing upon us.
They hardly touched us; there was no anger, no emotion in them. Stan Morley, the jeweler, simply laid a hand lightly on my arm, and Ben Ketchel stood beside Becky, in case she should try to run. The others, gathering around us, looked at us without curiosity.
I started to move over toward Becky, but they closed in around us both, keeping us apart. I tried to reassure her with a look, but it was no use. She was too exhausted even to care. Then I noticed that the ones who had captured us seemed to have no plan, and I looked around for Mannie Kaufman or Budlong, who were, I guessed, their leaders. Neither of them was in this group. But I suspected that they would arrive soon, and that then Becky and I would probably be given drugs and left bound in a room with two of the pods.
There was a nightmare quality to the scene — these passive, inexorable beings holding us captive, yet not seeming to menace us. And then we heard the roar of several cars coming down the highway, and the squeal of tires as they turned off the highway and came up the lane toward the barnyard. Our captors turned expectantly, shoving Becky and me toward whoever had arrived.
There were three cars, and they had barely come to a stop when the doors were flung open and men piled out of them. In the lead was Jack Belicec, carrying a pistol; others had riot guns, and two of the men carried small, light, almost dainty-looking machine guns.
You can't arrest a town, and no one tried. Almost silently, with only occasional words of direction, or brief gestures, the quiet, dead-eyed townspeople were bunched and then moved on up the hill we had come from, back toward their town. No one argued, no one resisted, no one even seemed to care. Emotionless, empty, they did as they were told, as unmoved in defeat as they had been moments before in apparent victory.
Jack stood beside us, telling us excitedly how the flaming gasoline had guided him and the FBI to us, and how the FBI had intercepted the people trying to take pods to other towns. I held Becky tight, an arm around her shoulder, and I bent toward her now, to speak. Then the vast low murmur of hundreds of voices sounded again, and I glanced up to see the straggling mob, halfway up the hillside, stop, all of them, and turn to stare. The murmur stopped abruptly then, and the ragged line of motionless figures stood silent, their faces raised in the moonlight to the sky.
Now I followed their gaze, and in the clear, even light of the moon I saw what they'd seen. The white, foggy sky above us was peppered with dots. A great awesome swarm of dark, circular blobs was ascending slowly and steadily into the vast moonlit sky. A last trail of fog left the face of the moon, and the sky lighted up with a luminous, even light. I watched the great pods — the field they had come from almost empty now — steadily rising. Then the last few of the pods still on the ground actually moved, leaning to one side to snap the brittle stems that held them. Then they rose with the others, and we watched the great swarm, slowly diminishing in size, never touching or bumping, climb higher and higher into the sky and the space beyond it.
Quite simply — I knew this instantly, with the undeniable force of revelation — the great pods were leaving a fierce and inhospitable planet. And a wave of terrible exultation, so violent it left me trembling, swept through my body; for now I knew what we had done in simply refusing to give up. Others too, I felt sure, had stumbled and blundered onto what had been happening in Santa Mira; we couldn't possibly have been the only ones. And I knew that they, too, had fought. Some had lost, some had won, but I knew all had fought as we had, whether with fire and gasoline-cont
aminated ground, or simply with spirit, and a phrase from a wartime speech of Churchill's suddenly came to my mind: We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills: we shall never surrender. True then for one people, it was true always, and for the whole human race, and I understood now that nothing in the whole vast universe could ever defeat us. And I knew that Becky and I had provided the final demonstration of that unchangeable fact.
I watched the pods climb into the night sky and wondered: Did this incredible alien life “think” or “know”? Probably not, but it had finally sensed, and with certainty, that this planet and race would never receive them. Santa Mira, then the county? California, the West, and then the continent, and the world? It wasn't possible, and it never had been.
Survival was the pods' driving force, Budlong had said — and now, to survive, they lifted and rose, climbing through the faint mist, drifting across the white face of the moon, on and out toward the space they had come from. Then, with Jack and the silent men who had joined us, Becky and I turned toward the highway, away from that barren field.
It never got into the newspapers, this particular story. Drive across Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County today, make your way to Santa Mira, California, and you'll simply see a town, shabbier and more run-down than most others — but not startlingly so. The people, some of them, may seem to you listless and uncommunicative, and the town may impress you as unfriendly. You'll see more houses empty and for sale than can quite be accounted for; the death rate here is higher than the county average, and sometimes it's hard to know just what to write down on a death certificate. Around certain farms west of town, clumps of trees, patches of vegetation, and occasional farm animals sometimes die from no apparent cause.
But, all in all, there's nothing much to see in — or say about — Santa Mira. The empty houses are filling quickly — it's a crowded county and state — and there are new people, most of them young and with children, in town. There's a young couple from Nevada living next door to Becky and me, and another, from Arizona, just across the street in the old Greeson place. In a few years Santa Mira will seem no different from any other small town. In five years, perhaps less, it will be no different. And what once happened here will have faded into final unbelievability.
