Shadows were beginning to creep into the room. Porter put out a hand and turned on his desk lamp. The light revealed the clutter of papers. Looking at them, he groaned. The clock on the wall said it was almost 5:30. He had promised to pick up Alice at 7:30 and that left him little time to get through with his paperwork. There was a new eating place out in Maryland that some of Alice’s friends had been recommending, with Alice mentioning it off and on for the past several weeks. Tonight, they planned to go there. He relaxed in his chair and thought about Alice Davenport. Her old man, the senator, and Porter had never gotten along too well, but, so far, the old man had raised no objection to their seeing one another. Which, Porter thought, was rather decent of the old buzzard. Despite her parentage, however, Alice was all right. She was a lot of fun, bright and cheerful, well-informed, a good conversationalist. Except that, at times, she had the unfortunate tendency to engage in long and partisan discussion of her currently favorite social enthusiasm. Right at the moment, it was the Indian claim to the Black Hills and the Bighorn, which she passionately believed should be returned to the federated tribes. A few months earlier, it had been the blacks of South Africa. Which all came, Porter told himself dourly, from too good an education in exactly the wrong disciplines. She didn’t always talk about these things and tonight perhaps she wouldn’t. In the last few months, they had spent some happy times together, for Alice, when she left off her crusader togs, was a good companion.
It wouldn’t take more than half an hour or so, he estimated, if he really applied himself, to get his desk at least haphazardly cleared off. That would give him time to get home, get showered and shaved and change his clothes. For once, he promised himself, he’d pick Alice up on time. But, first, he needed a cup of coffee.
He started across the room.
“Do you know,” he asked Marica, “if there’s any coffee left out in the lounge?”
“There should be,” she told him. “There might be some sandwiches left but they will be stale.”
He grumbled at her. “All I need is a cup of coffee.”
He was halfway across the room when one of the teletype machines came to sudden, insane life. A bell rang loudly and insistently, clamoring for attention.
He turned about and went swiftly back across the room. It was Associated Press, he saw. He came up to the machine, grasped each side of it with his hands. The printer, blurring across the paper, was typing a string of bulletins.
Then, Bulletin—Large object reported to have fallen from the sky in Minnesota.
The machine stopped, the printer quivering.
“What is it?” Marcia asked, standing at his shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Porter. “Perhaps a meteorite.”
He said to the machine. “Come on. Come on. Tell us what it is.”
The telephone on his desk shrilled at them.
Marica took a step and picked it up.
“All right, Grace,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”
The teletype came to life: What may be a vehicle from outer space landed today near the town of Lone Pine in northern Minnesota . . .
At his elbow, Marcia said, “That was Grace on the line. The President wants to see you.”
Porter nodded and turned away from the machine. Bells on other machines began to ring, but he walked away, heading for the door and going the few steps down the corridor.
As he came into the outer office, Grace nodded at the door. “You’re to go right in,” she said.
“What is it, Grace?”
“I don’t really know. He’s talking to the Army Chief of Staff. Something about a new satellite that has been discovered.”
Porter strode across the office, knocked on the inner door, then turned the knob and went in.
President Herbert Taine was hanging up the phone.
“That was Whiteside,” he said. “He’s got a hair up his ass. Seems some of our tracking stations have sighted something new in orbit. According to the general, something so big it scares you. Not ours, he says. Most unlikely, too, to be Soviet. Too big for either of us to put up. Neither of us has the booster power to put up anything as big as the trackers spotted. Whitehead’s all upset.”
“Something out of space?” asked Porter.
“Whitehead didn’t say that. But it was what he was thinking. You could tell he was. He was about to come unstuck. He’ll be coming over as soon as he can get here.”
“Something fell, or landed, I don’t know which, yet, in northern Minnesota,” said Porter. “It was just beginning to come in on the teletype when you phoned.”
“You think the two of them could be tied up?”
“I don’t know. It’s too early to know what came down in Minnesota. I just caught part of a bulletin. It might be no more than a big meteorite. Anyhow, apparently, something came down out of the sky.”
“Jesus, Dave, we have plenty of trouble without something like this happening,” said the President. Porter nodded. “I quite agree, sir.”
“How was today’s briefing?”
“They roughed me up. Mostly the Black Hills and the energy situation.”
“You doing all right?”
“Sir, I’m doing what I’m paid to do. I am earning my wages.”
“Yes,” said the President. “I suppose you are. It ain’t easy, though.” A knock came on the door, which opened a ways, Grace sticking in her head. “Marcia gave me this,” she said, waving a sheet of paper ripped from the teletype.
“Give it to me,” said the President. She walked across the room and handed it to him. Quickly he read it and pushed it across the desk to Porter.
“It makes no sense,” he complained. “A big black box, it says, sitting on a bridge. A meteorite wouldn’t be a black box, would it?”
“Hardly,” said Porter. “A meteorite would come in with a hell of a rush. It would dig a monstrous crater.”
“So would anything else,” said the President. “Anything that fell out of the sky. A decaying satellite . . .”
“That is my understanding,” said Porter. “They’d come in fast and dig a crater. If they were big, that is.”
“This one sounds like it is big.”
The two men faced one another across the desk, staring at one another.
“Do you suppose . . .” the President started to say, then stopped in mid-sentence.
The intercom on the President’s desk purred and he flipped up the toggle. “What is it, Grace?” he asked. “It’s General Whiteside, sir.”
“O.K.,” he said. “Put him on.” He lifted the phone and said, out of the side of his mouth, to Porter, “He’s heard about the Minnesota business.” He spoke into the phone and then sat listening. From where he sat, Porter could catch the buzz and hum of the torrent of words the man at the other end of the line was pouring into the phone. He waited.
Finally, the President said, “All right, let’s keep our shirts on. Let me know when you have anything more.” He hung up and turned to Porter. “He’s buying it,” he said. “Someone in the National Guard phoned him from Minnesota. Says the thing came down and landed, that it didn’t crash, that it is still there, that it is the size of a good-sized building, all black, like a big box.”
“Strange,” said Porter. “Everyone is calling it a big box.”
“Dave,” asked the President, “what do we do if it should turn out to be a visitor out of space?”
“We handle it as it comes.”
“We have to get some facts fast.”
“That’s right. The news wires will give us some of them. We ought to send out an investigating team, fast as we can. Get hold of the FBI in Minneapolis.”
“The area should be secured,” said the President. “We can’t have the public piling in, interfering.”
He looked at Porter. “What I’m afraid of is panic.”
Porter glanced at his watch. “The first evening news programs will be hitting TV in another hour or less. Even now, they’ll be flashing bulle
tins. The news will spread fast. I imagine my phones are ringing now. Asking White House reaction, for Christ’s sake. They probably know more about it than we do.”
“Is Marcia still out there?”
“She was getting ready to leave, but not now. With this, she’ll stay on. The woman’s a pro.” There was a pause.
“We may need to issue some sort of statement.”
“Not yet,” said Porter. “Not too fast. No shooting from the hip. We’ve got to know more about it . . .”
“Something to give the people,” said the President. “Some assurance that we are doing what we can.”
“They won’t start wondering for a while what we are doing. They’ll be all agog over the news itself.”
“Maybe a briefing.”
“Perhaps,” said Porter. “If there is enough to go on before the night is over. No one knows about this new object in orbit, I take it. Only Whiteside and the two of us—and, of course, the trackers. But they won’t say anything.”
“It’ll leak out,” said the President. “Given a little time, everything leaks out.”
“I’d rather we be the ones to tell them,” said Porter. “We don’t want to give the impression of any cover-up. That’s what the UFO believers have been saying all these years, that the UFO information has been covered up.”
“I agree with you,” said the President. “Maybe you better call a briefing. Go out and start the ball rolling. Then come back in again. I may have people with me, but barge in when you’re ready. There should be more information by that time.”
5. LONE PINE
The fish was gone. The rabbit had hopped into the darkness and now was hopping back again, hopping slowly and deliberately, its nose aquiver, a much puzzled rabbit, wondering, perhaps, Jerry told himself, what manner of briar patch it might have landed in. The coon was pawing and nuzzling at the floor. The muskrat had disappeared.
Jerry had done some cautious exploring, but never moving so far away as to lose his orientation to the spot on which he had been deposited when he had been jerked into the place. He had found nothing. Approaching some of the strange shapes that had been revealed in the flicker of the lights, the shapes had gone away, receding and flattening into the level floor. He had investigated the circular patches that he first had thought of as eyes. He had thought when he had first seen them that they were positioned in walls, but found that they were located in midair. He could pass his hand through them and when he did, it seemed to have no effect upon them. They still remained circular luminosities and they still kept on watching him. He had felt nothing when he touched them. They were neither hot nor cold and imparted no sensation.
The flickering still continued and the pale blue light persisted. It seemed to him that he could see slightly better than he had earlier, probably because his eyes had adjusted to the paleness of the light.
He had tried on several occasions to talk with the strange presence that he felt was there, but there had been no response, not the slightest indication that he had been heard. Except for the sense of being watched, there was no sign that anyone or anything in the place was aware of him. He did not have the feeling that the imagined observer was in any way hostile or malignant. Perhaps curious, but that was all. The alien smell continued, but he had become somewhat accustomed to it and now paid it slight attention.
The terror and apprehension had largely fallen from him. In its stead came a fatalistic numbness and a wonderment that such an event could happen. How could it be, he asked himself, that he had been so positioned in time and space for this incredible happening to befall him? From time to time, he thought of Kathy and the concert, but this was something, he told himself, that could not be remedied and the thought then was swept away by the concern for his predicament.
It seemed to him that from time to time he could detect some motion in the structure in which he was imprisoned. On a couple of occasions, there had been a lurching and a jerking as if violent movement were taking place. Of none of this, however, could he be positive. It might be, he told himself, no more than certain convolutions or biologic readjustments in the organism.
And that was the crux of it, he thought—was it biologic? There had been nothing to start with, at the time it had fallen from the sky, to indicate it was—and perhaps not even now. It could be, rather, a machine, a preprogrammed, computerized machine able to react appropriately to any number of arising situations. But there was about it the sense of the biologic, a feeling, for whatever reason, that it was alive.
While he had no evidence, he was becoming more and more convinced that it was a biologic being, a functioning consciousness that was observing him. A visitor from the stars that, immediately after it had landed, had set about learning what it could of the life indigenous to the planet, snatching up himself, a fish, a rabbit, a coon and a muskrat. From the five of them, he had no doubt, could be gleaned some basic information, perhaps even the beginning of an understanding of the principle upon which life here had evolved.
It was alive, he told himself; this great black box was a living thing. And even while he wondered how he could be so convinced, suddenly he knew, as if a voice had spoken to him, as if a special light of intellect had blinked inside his brain. It was like a tree, he thought. He could feel within it the same aliveness that he found in any tree. And that, he told himself, was ridiculous, for this thing was nothing like a tree. But the thought persisted: this thing inside of which he had been thrust was similar to a tree.
He tried to squeeze the idea out of his thinking, for it was, on the face of it, a silly idea at best. But it hung on, refusing to be banished, and now another idea came out of nowhere to link up with the idea of the tree—the unsummoned thought of home. But what this new idea meant, he did not know. Did it mean that this place was home to him? He rebelled at the thought, for it certainly was not home. It was about as far from home as any place he could imagine.
How, he wondered, had the idea come to him? Could it be that this living alien—if it was living alien—was trying to communicate with him, that it was planting suggestions in his mind, trying to bridge the gap that lay between their two intelligences? If that should be the case, and he could not bring himself to think it was, what then did the alien mean? What connection could there be between a tree and home? What connotation was he expected to derive from the two ideas?
Thinking this, he realized that he was more and more beginning to accept the premise that the big black box was a visitor from outer space and that it was not only alive, but intelligent.
The ground, he reminded himself, had been well laid for such a thought and such acceptance. It had been talked about and written about for years—that some day, an intelligence from outer space might come to visit Earth, with all the attendant speculation of what might happen then, of how the great unwashed, uncomprehending public might react to it. It was not a new idea; for years it had lain skin-deep in the public consciousness.
The rabbit came hopping up to him. Crouched tight against the floor, it stretched out its neck to sniff at the toes of his shoes. The coon, through with its worrying of the floor, went ambling off. The muskrat had not reappeared.
Little brothers, Jerry thought. These things are my little brothers, gathered with me in this place, common denizens of what this alien being regards as an alien planet, gathered here to be studied by it.
Something whipped around him. He was jerked from his feet and slammed against the wall. But he did not hit the wall. The wall opened in a slit and he went through, sailing free of it.
He was falling. In the darkness he could see very little, but below him he could make out a blob of shadow and jerked up his hands to protect his face. He crashed into a tree and the upward-thrusting, but resilient branches slowed his fall. Desperately he reached out with one hand, the other still up to protect his face. Grabbing blindly, his fingers closed around a branch. It bent beneath his weight, slowing his fall; with the other hand, he stabbed out and his fingers
found and closed upon a larger branch, which was stout enough to halt his fall.
For a moment he hung there, dangling in the tree, the sharp, welcome scent of pine redolent in his nostrils. A gentle wind was blowing and all around him, he could hear the murmur of the conifers.
He hung there, thankful—filled with a surging thankfulness that he had escaped from inside the alien structure. Although escaped, he knew on second thought, was not quite the word for it. He had been thrown out. They, or it, or whatever it might be, had gotten all it needed from him and had heaved him out. As it probably earlier had thrown out the fish and, in a little while, would heave out the rabbit, coon and muskrat.
His eyes by now had become partially adapted to the darkness and carefully he worked his way along the branch to the body of the tree. Once he reached it, he clutched it with both arms and legs, resting for a moment. Because of the thickness of the branches, he could not see the ground and had no idea how high he might be in the tree. Not high, he told himself, for he could not have been thrown out of the structure more than forty feet or so above the ground and he had fallen for at least a short distance before the tree had intervened to break the fall.
Slowly, he began his descent down the tree. It was not easy work, especially in the dark, for there were many branches sprouting from the trunk and he had to do some maneuvering to make his way down through them. The tree, he judged, was not very large or tall. The bole, he estimated, was no more than a foot in diameter, although, as he descended, it increased in size.
Finally, without warning, his feet touched the ground and his knees buckled under him. Carefully, he felt about with one foot to be certain he had reached the ground. Satisfied that he had, he released his hold on the trunk and fought his way clear of the low-growing, drooping branches.
The Complete Serials Page 157
