In the back of his mind a whisper of suspicion came to life and he fought to hold it back, for it was not a suspicion that he wanted to admit. But gradually, as he stood stark in the blue-lit, flickering place, it forced itself upon him and he felt himself accepting it.
He was, the whisper said, inside the huge black box that had fallen astride the river. The rope or wire or tentacle, or whatever it might have been, had been extruded from it. Seizing him, it had jerked him here, in some manner passing him through the outer wall and depositing him here in its interior.
To one side of him he heard a slight sound that was between a snick and a gulp and when he looked to see what had occasioned it, he realized there was something flopping on the floor. Bending over to peer at the place where the flopping was taking place, he saw that it was a fish, a rainbow from the size and shape of it. It was about sixteen inches long and muscular of body. When he put a hand down to grasp it, it had a hefty feel to it. He got his hand around it, but it slipped away from him and continued flopping on the floor.
Now, he told himself, let’s look at all of this realistically. Let’s step away from it and have a long, hard look at it. Let’s not go jumping to conclusions; let’s try to be objective.
Item: A huge blackness had fallen from the sky, landing on the bridge and, judging from the crunch of metal he had heard, probably crushing his parked car.
Item: He was in a place that could be, more than likely was, the interior of the blackness that had fallen, a place quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.
Item: Not only he, but a fish, had been introduced into this place.
He took the items, one by one, into the computer of his mind, and tried to put them all together. They added up to one thing: He was inside, had somehow been spirited or absorbed inside a visitor from space, a visitor that was picking up and looking over the fauna of the planet upon which it had landed.
First himself and then a fish. And in a little while, perhaps, a rabbit, a squirrel, a coon, a bear, a deer, a bobcat. After a time, he told himself, the place was going to get crowded.
The gleaming circular objects that were watching him could be receptors, watching and recording, extracting data and storing it, making note of him (and the fish as well), picking up every vibration of his brain, every quiver of his psyche, analyzing him, breaking down the kind of organism that he was and classifying him by whatever code that might apply, tucking him away in memory cells, writing him up in chemical equations, seeking an understanding of what he was and what might be his status and his purpose in the ecology of the planet.
Probably it was not only the circular objects that were doing the work. Perhaps the flashing lights and the mechanisms behind the flashing lights were a part of it as well.
He could be wrong, he thought. When he could really come to think of it, he must know that he was wrong. Yet it was the one explanation that squared with what had happened. He had seen the blackness fall; he had been snatched up from the river—he remembered the running water under him as he was hoisted in the air, he remembered the long line of trees that grew along its banks, he remembered seeing the town of Lone Pine, set on its gravel terrace above the river’s bed. He remembered all these things and the next that he had known had been the darkness of this cave-like place. Except for the interior of the object that had fallen on the river, there was no other place into which he might have been tucked.
If all of this had happened, if he were not mistaken, then it meant that the object that had fallen across the river was alive, or that it was operated by something that was alive, and not only alive, but intelligent.
He found himself instinctively fighting against what he was thinking, for in the context of human experience, it was utter madness to believe that an intelligence had landed on the Earth and forthright snapped him up.
He was astonished to find that whatever terror he had felt had drained out of him. In its stead, there was now a coldness, a bleak coldness of the soul that, in a way, was far worse than terror.
Intelligence, he thought—if there were an intelligence here, there must be a way to talk with it, in some manner to work out a system of communication with it.
He tried to speak and the words dried up before his tongue could shape them. He tried again and the words came, but in a whisper. He tried once more and this time the words came louder, booming in the hollowness of the cave in which he stood.
“Hello,” he shouted. “Is there anyone around?”
He waited and there was no answer, so he spoke again, even louder this time, shouting at the intelligence that must be there. The words echoed and reverberated and then died out. The circular eyelike objects still kept on watching him. The flickering continued. But no one, or nothing, answered.
3. MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Kathy Foster sat at her typewriter in the Tribune newsroom and hammered out the story—such a stupid story and such stupid people. Damn Johnny for sending her out on it. There must have been other assignments he could have sent her on, assignments that did not have the phoney mush content that this one did, nor the sloppy mysticism. The Lovers, they called themselves, and she could still see the sleepy innocence of their eyes, the soft, smooth flow of posturing euphemisms—love is all, love conquers all, love encompasses everything. All you have to do is love someone or something hard enough and long enough and the love would be returned. Love is the greatest force in the universe, more than likely the only significant force, the be-all and the is-all of everything there is. And it was not only people, not only life, that would respond. If you loved any kind of matter, any kind of energy, it would return the love and, in consequence of that love, do anything that you wish it to, even to the point of disobeying or disregarding all empirical laws (which, they had told her, may not exist in fact), perform in any manner, do anything, go anywhere, stay anywhere, do anything one wished. But to accomplish this, they had told her solemnly, with the innocence in their eyes gleaming brightly at her, one must strive to understand the life, the matter, the energy, whatever it might be, and to love it so that it became aware of you. That was the trouble now, they said. No one had sufficient understanding, but understanding could be obtained through the force of love. Once the depth of love was great enough to secure the understanding, then man in all truth would be in control of the universe. But this control, they had said, must not be a control for the sake of control alone, but to perfect the understanding and the love of all that went into the makeup of the universe.
That damn university, she told herself, is a hot-bed for the nurturing of such phony misfits groping for significance where there is no significance, employing the search for non-existent meaning as a means to escape reality.
She looked at the clock on the wall. Almost four o’clock and Jerry hadn’t phoned. He had said that he would phone to tell her he was on his way. If he made her late for the concert, she would have his hide. He knew how she had counted on the concert. For weeks she had dreamed of it. Sure, Jerry didn’t like symphonic music but for once he could do what she wanted, even if he squirmed the entire evening. She had done a lot of things, gone to a lot of places that she hadn’t wanted to, but had gone because he wanted to. The wrestling matches—for sweet Christ’s sake, the wrestling matches!
A strange man, Kathy told herself, strange and at times infuriating, but a sweet guy just the same. He and his everlasting trees! Jerry lived for trees. How in the world, she wondered, could a grown man get so wrapped up in trees? Other people could develop an empathy for flowers, for animals, for birds, but with Jerry it was trees. The guy was silly about his trees. He loved them and seemed to understand them and there were times, she thought, when it seemed he even talked with them.
She jerked out the finished page, threaded in another. She hammered at the keys. The anger boiled within her, the disgust smothered her. When she turned in the story, she’d tell Johnny that she thought it should be spiked—or better yet, thrown into the wastebasket, for then no
one could rescue it from the spike if the day’s copy should run thin and a news hole need filling.
Across the newsroom, John H. Garrison, city editor, sat at his desk, staring out across the room. Most of the desks were empty and he ran down the list—Freeman was covering the meeting of the airport commission and it would likely come to nothing, although with all the flurry about the need of extra runways, it was a meeting that the newsroom had to cover; Jay was at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, getting the story on the new cancer procedures that were being developed there; Campbell was still at city hall, piddling his time away at a park board meeting that, like the airport meeting, probably would fizzle out; Jones was out in South Dakota working on the Black Hills-Indian controversy, getting together material for a Sunday feature; Knight was at the Johnson murder trial; Williams was in the suburban town of Wayzata interviewing that old gal who claimed to be 102 years old (although she probably wasn’t). Sloane was tied up with the oil spill at Winona. Christ, Garrison wondered, what would he do if a big story suddenly should break. Although that, he knew, was unlikely. It had been a bad day and was not improving.
He said to Jim Gold, the assistant city editor, “What does the budget look like, Jim?”
Gold looked at the sheet of paper in his typewriter. “Thin,” he said. “Not much here, Johnny. Not much at all.”
A phone rang. Gold reached out, spoke into the mouthpiece softly.
“It’s for you, Johnny,” he said. “Line two.”
Garrison picked up the phone at his desk, punched a button.
“Garrison,” he said.
“Johnny, this Frank Norton,” said the voice at the other end. “Up at Lone Pine, remember?”
“Why, Frank,” said Garrison, genuinely pleased, “how great to hear from you. Just the other day I was talking with some of the fellows here about you. Telling them about the great setup you had. Your own boss, the trout fishing at the edge of town. One of these days I’ll come up primed for some of those fish. How about it, Frank?”
“Johnny,” said Norton, “I think I may have something for you.”
“Frank, you sound excited. What is going on?”
“Just maybe,” said Norton, “we may have a visitor from space. I can’t be sure . . .”
“You have what?” roared Garrison, jerked upright in his chair.
“I can’t be sure,” said Norton. “Something big came down out of the sky. Landed straddle of the river. Smashed the bridge to hell.”
“Is it still there?”
“Still there,” said Norton. “Just sitting where it landed, only ten minutes or so ago. It’s huge. Big and black. The town is wild. The place is in an uproar. One man was killed.”
“Killed. How was he killed?”
“He shot at the thing. It shot back. Burned him to a cinder. I saw it happen. I saw him standing here and smoking.”
“Oh, my god,” said Harrison. “What a story, right on top of you.”
“Johnny,” said Norton, “I can’t be certain of what is going on. It happened too short a time ago to know what’s going on. I thought you might want to send someone up to get some pictures.”
“Hold on, Frank,” said Garrison.
“I tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll get right on it. But first, I want to turn you over to someone here on the desk. You tell him what happened. Tell him everything. When you get through, don’t hang up. I’ll be with you whenever you are finished. In the meanwhile, I’ll get hold of a photographer and do some other things.”
“Fine, I’ll hang on.”
Garrison cupped the receiver with his hand, held it out to Gold.
“Frank Norton is on the other end,” he said. “He’s owner and editor of a weekly paper at Lone Pine. An old friend of mine. We went to school together. He says something fell out of the sky up there. One man’s been killed. Fell just Fifteen minutes or so ago. You get down what he has to tell you and then ask him to hold for me. I want to talk with him again.”
“I’ll get it here,” said Gold. He picked up his phone. “Mr. Norton,” he said, “I’m Jim Gold. I’m assistant city editor . . .”
Garrison swung around in his chair, spoke to Annie Dutton, city desk secretary.
“Annie,” he said, “get hold of the plane charter people. See if they can have a plane standing by for us. To fly to—what the hell town with an airstrip is closest to Lone Pine?”
“Bemidji,” said Annie. “That would be the closest.”
“All right. Then get hold of a car rental outfit in Bemidji and arrange for a car to be waiting for us. We’ll phone them later and tell them when we’ll be getting in.”
Annie picked up her phone and started dialing.
Garrison stood and looked over the newsroom, flinching at what he saw.
Finley over in a corner, pecking away at a story—but Finley was the rankest cub, still wet behind the ears. Sanderson, but she was not much better and had the unfailing habit of writing a bit too cutely. Some day, by god, he thought, she would have to mend her ways or be out the door. Jamison, but Jamison took forever. All right on an in-depth story, but too slow and deliberate for a story that was breaking fast.
“Kathy!” he bawled.
Startled, Kathy Foster stopped her typing, got up and started for the city desk, fighting down her anger. Jerry hadn’t called as yet and her story, as she wrote it, seemed sillier and sillier. If she had to miss that concert . . .
Gold was on one phone, listening, speaking only now and then, his fingers stabbing at, the typewriter, making notes. Annie was busy on another phone. Garrison had sat down again and was dialing.
“This is Garrison,” he said into the phone. “We need a good photographer. Who you got back there? Where is Allen? This is an out-of-town assignment. Important. Top priority.”
He listened. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You mean Allen isn’t there. He’s the man for the job we have. Where is he? Can you reach him?”
A wait, then, “Yes, I forgot. I do remember now. Allen’s on vacation.
All right, then. Send him up.”
He hung up the phone and turned to Kathy. “I have something for you,” he said.
“Not now,” she said. “Not tonight. Not overtime. I’m almost through for the day. And I have tickets for the symphony tonight.”
“But, good god, girl, this could be important. The most important assignment you have ever had. Maybe our first space visitor . . .”
“First space visitor?”
“Well, maybe yes, maybe no. We don’t know quite yet . . .”
Gold was holding out the phone to him. He took it and spoke into it. “Just a minute, Frank. I’ll be right with you.”
Annie said, “There’ll be a plane waiting, ready to go. There’ll be a car at Bemidji.”
“Thanks,” said Garrison. He asked Gold, “What have you got?”
“Good story, far as it goes,” said Gold. “Solid. Lots of facts. Loads of detail. Sounds exciting. Something did fall out of the sky up there.”
“Solid enough to go after?”
“I’d say so,” said Gold.
Garrison swung around to Kathy. “I hate to ask this of you,” he said. “But there’s no one else. No one I can reach out and grab quite fast enough. Everyone is working. You and White fly up to Bemidji. There’ll be a car there, waiting for you. Play story. I’ll guarantee you that. Byline. The works. You ought to be in Lone Pine by six or before. Phone before eight. We can make the first edition that way, with what you have.”
“All right,” she said. “If you’ll buy this pair of tickets. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be out the price of these tickets.”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll buy them. I’ll work them into my expense account somehow.” He dug his wallet out of his pocket. “How much?”
“Thirty bucks.”
“That’s too much. That’s more than you paid for them.”
“They’re good seats. Anyhow, that’s what you’ll have to pay for them.�
��
“All right. All right,” he said, stripping out bills.
“And if Jerry Conklin calls, be sure someone tells him what happened. He was to be my date tonight. Promise.”
“I promise,” said Garrison, handing her the money.
He lifted the receiver and said, “Some last minute details, Frank, that needed taking care of. You heard? I have the damnedest staff. They read me like a book. I’ll have someone up there by six o’clock or so. I’ll ask them to look you up. But how come? You have a paper of your own. Why give this all to us?”
“Today was-my press day,” said Norton. “Won’t publish again until this time next week. This kind of news doesn’t wait. I wanted to give you a jump on it. A couple of state patrol cars came roaring into town just a few minutes ago. Otherwise everything’s the same.”
“I wonder if you’d mind keeping us filled in,” asked Garrison, “until our people get there. Something happens, just give us a call.”
“Be glad to,” Norton said.
4. WASHINGTON, D.C.
It had been a rough day. The press, at the early afternoon briefing, had been out for blood. Principally, the questions had had to do with the movement by the Native American Association for the return to the federated tribes of the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Montana Bighorn region, although there had been considerable sniping about the energy situation, centered on the administration’s proposal to develop a southwestern desert solar energy system and its advocacy of substantial funds for research into a cryogenic transmission system. The press had stormed out considerably indignant at his unsatisfactory answers, but, David Porter told himself, that was not unusual. For the past several months, the press, in general, had been either enraged or disgusted at him. Any day now, he felt sure, there would be a move by some factions of the media to get him canned.
A hush hung over the pressroom office, scarcely broken by the teletype machines ranged against the wall, chuckling among themselves as they continued to spew out the doings of the world. Marcia Langley, his assistant, was gathering up and putting away, getting ready to leave for the day. The telephone console on Marcia’s desk was quiet; for the first time in the day no lights were blinking, signalling incoming calls. This was the calm of the news-gathering period. The last afternoon editions had gone to press, the morning editions were being readied for the presses.
The Complete Serials Page 156
