by Allen Wold
"At first," Corey said, "I thought she was talking about something like a badger or an armadillo."
"Sure is going to be a different kind of sport," Fenister agreed. "How long is it going to take us to get there tomorrow?" he asked, turning to Arnold.
"Less than an hour," Arnold said. "The site's in an area called the sand fields, down in Churchill County. You familiar with the area?"
"Hell, yes," Fenister said. "Right next to Durk Attweiler's farm."
"That's where we're going," Arnold said.
"Goddamn, that's all Durk needs, is monsters in his backyard. He know about this?"
"He showed me a crivit taking a pig last week."
"She-it," Corey said. "I guess our story about handling pigs had some truth to it after all."
"Ironically, yes," Arnold said. "We'll be taking one down with us tomorrow afternoon. But right now, let's go take a look at the equipment and decide what we need."
"We may have to jury-rig some stuff," Fenister said as he and Corey got to their feet.
"We've got a shop," Arnold said, following suit. He turned back to the others. "We'll see you later then," he said, then he and the two hunters left.
"There are some interesting implications in those transcripts you sent us last night," Penny said to Mark and Anne after Arnold and the hunters had left. "One report told about going for crivits for the breeding stock, and another one reported that they had been brought in. The two were just two hours apart, if your clock monitor can be trusted."
"An hour's flight by skyfighter can cover a pretty large area," Anne said.
"True," Penny agreed, "but if you consider the time it would take to load eight or so large carnivores, even if they cooperated, then you have a flight time one way of probably less than fifteen minutes."
"That does narrow the area considerably," Mark said. "And I think I see your point. Except for this one research station, the only place the Visitors keep crivits is guarding a prison camp."
"Right," Penny said. "And I didn't know there was a prison camp within fifteen minutes' flight of the RTP."
"Neither did I," Anne said. "And you know, that's just the kind of intelligence we've been hoping to uncover with our bugs at the Visitor headquarters. We've assumed that the people the Visitors have taken into custody were sent off to someplace like Florida or Mississippi."
"Looks like we get to do another global search tonight," Mark said. "I'll bet there have been references to this hypothetical camp that we just never recognized."
"And if you find it," Penny said, "then what? Help people escape?"
"That's a possibility," Mark said, "though not likely, since we're not equipped to do a job like that and it could jeopardize our own security. But if there's a secret camp here, then we might have a better chance of locating certain people who have just disappeared."
"Whatever we do or don't do," Anne said, "the more we know the better."
"We'll learn an awful lot more when the crivit comes tomorrow," Penny said. "Speaking of which, I'd better find Arnold and the others. I have to drive Corey and Fenister back to Corey's place when they're through."
"All right then," Anne said as they all got up to leave. "Let us know tomorrow how it comes out."
It was nearly eleven that night when Durk Attweiler finally made up his mind to do a little "hunting." He'd thought about it on and off all day long, but the prospect of spying on the Visitors had daunted even him.
But he knew that the people he'd shown the crivit to would be back, and when they came, there would be plenty of risk without compounding it by being ignorant of the extent of the Visitors' activities. Besides, he was curious.
He kept his anxiety over what he was to do under control by not thinking about it. Instead he just acted. And the first thing he did was to get down his shotgun and select shells suitable for rabbits or squirrels. It had been a long time since he'd done any midnight poaching, but that would be a good excuse for being out if anybody caught him.
Then he opened a cabinet in his kitchen and moved several canisters aside so he could reach the pint jars in which he kept his personal stock of his last batch of moonshine. Just one little sip, he said, to calm his nerves. Then he smiled to himself and poured more of the potent spirits into a smaller bottle he could easily slip into his jacket pocket. Just as a kind of insurance, he told himself.
Leaving the lights on, he left the house. He didn't intend to meet anybody, human or alien, while he was out, but if he did, it would be better if he didn't have to try to explain why he had snuck out. Lights on would look either like he was still at home, or intending to be out only a short time. Precautions like that came naturally to someone who ran an illegal still.
He left the farmyard and walked through a soybean field to his eastern fence line, and on north along it to where the forest on the other side was densest. He'd seen a squirrel nest somewhere around here, but in the dark it took him a moment to find it. It was not his practice to bag squirrels in their nest, but he knew other people who did. Besides, that was why he had come out, wasn't it? Just in case somebody should ask.
The first shot, nerve-rackingly loud in the stillness of the night, tore the nest apart. He heard two small thuds coming from under the tree where the nest had been and went to retrieve whatever had been there.
Both squirrels were still alive, and thrashing weakly, which enabled him to find them in the almost absolute blackness at the edge of the forest. Quickly he broke their necks and tied them by their hind legs to his belt with a bit of string. Hell, he might even get a good meal out of this expedition.
That done, he stood there for a long moment, listening to hear if anybody had been aroused by his shot and was coming to investigate. After fifteen minutes, with no sign of an investigation, he moved on. He went north to where he could go through the fence easily, and cut across Thurston's property toward the sand fields.
The forest was dark, but the sand fields, being without much in the way of trees or overhead foliage, were dimly lit from the sky. It was enough for him to find his way around the edge of the sand fields as he walked back toward Thurston's house toward the south.
He was more nervous being this close to where the crivits lived than he was at trespassing on Visitor property. Every little sound coming from the sand fields made him think that maybe one of the crivits was on his trail. He tried to reassure himself that as long as the ground underfoot was firm clay, the sand monsters couldn't get to him, but that didn't make him any the less jumpy.
Though he had not made it a habit of trespassing on Thurston's property in the past, he still had a general idea of the shape and extent of the sand fields. So it was with some surprise that he suddenly found himself walking on soft sand where there should have been hard clay. In a near panic he scrambled backward to more secure footing, and paused, panting, to hear if any crivits had detected him.
Apparently they hadn't. He knelt on the ground to see what he had walked into, and discovered that the soil bore the marks of large tires. This close to the ground it was also possible now to see that there were no plants at all in this disturbed area.
He moved forward carefully until he was right on the edge of the sand. With his imagination providing a crivit just out of sight, waiting to reach out and grab him, he felt with his hands until the nature of the soil suddenly came clear to him. This was not the natural sand of the area, contaminated with clay, gravel, rocks, and organic matter. This was pure quartz sand.
He looked down the line of the new sand, toward the Thurston house to the south. From here, he could see that a track had been cleared through the scraggly trees. In the darkness, it appeared to be about ten or twelve feet across, wide enough to serve as a road except for its surface. No one would pave a road with sand.
But if this was just the surface of a trench filled with sand, then it made sense. A road not for human or alien vehicles, but for sand-burrowing crivits.
He got to his feet and dusted off his knees.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, he could see it more clearly, in spite of the darkness. He followed the crivit trench toward the Thurston house, staying a good two yards from the edge, just in case crivits could in fact reach that far out.
The question of what had been done with the soil that had been removed to make the trench was answered when he got to what he felt should be the back side of the Thurston farmyard, maybe a quarter mile from the house. Here the thick, dense red clay had been piled to one side, where there were no trees to interfere with the actions of the earth-moving equipment. He walked around the far side of the pile, away from the trench, trying to get a better view of what lay beyond. He did not want to climb the pile, since his footprints would give away the fact that he had been there, and once that was known, he was sure the lizards would come looking for him.
He heard the sounds of movement before he saw the lights, and stepped back into the deeper shadows under the trees. From here, his perspective allowed him to see a bit more of the farmyard beyond the mounds of clay soil, where lights from the house and one of the barns shone into the night. He listened to the sounds and decided that several of the Visitors were carrying something to the now invisible end of the sand trench.
Keeping to the trees, he moved around to the side to better see what was going on. The grove ended a little way farther on, and unless he wanted to expose himself against the western horizon, he could go no farther. The mounds of clay still concealed most of the action, but from this new point he could see that a chain-link fence had been erected, enclosing an area of about a quarter acre.
Within the fenced area were a few solitary trees and what had once been an abandoned meadow. The trees now looked oddly damaged, and the meadow, instead of being of a nearly uniform height, had places where the grasses and wild flowers appeared to have been mowed, random swaths cut through the green.
Two Visitors, their red uniforms almost black in the night, stood in the middle of the fenced area. One of them appeared to be holding some kind of animal, about the size of a large cat or a small dog. Durk heard a few muttered words, and then the Visitor threw the animal into the air, as if tossing it over a low fence. Then they both turned away, knelt to something that Durk could not see beause of the knee-high plants, and he heard a metallic rattling. When they stood up again, one of them was holding another one of the small animals. It too was tossed through the air.
Then the two Visitors waited silently. Durk wished he could see better and started to move forward, in spite of the risk of being caught, when suddenly there came a frantic scream from somewhere just in front of the two Visitors.
"Got one," Durk heard a male voice distinctly say. And at the same time, the meadow and the branches of the few solitary trees moved, as if other animals in them had taken fright.
"Got the other," a female voice said, and now Durk understood what he had been witnessing. The sand trench led to the place just beyond where the two Visitors were standing, and they had tossed the animals into the sand to feed one of the crivits. Whatever the feed animals were, there were obviously others in the area, which had reacted with instinctual panic when the first of their number had been taken.
"Hold on," a third voice, another male, said, calling from somewhere behind the mounds of clay. "Okay, winch it in."
The two Visitors Durk could see turned away from the baiting and went to a shadowed shape he'd noticed but hadn't been able to make out before. A moment later the sound of a winch coming to life came to him. One of the two Visitors stayed at the bulky shape of the winch while the other disappeared behind it for a moment, then came back pushing what looked like a hand cart of some kind. The third Visitor came into view, skirting the far edge of what must have been the fenced-in baiting area.
After a while the one at the winch turned it off, and the other two moved the cart close to the short, invisible fence. Moving as if they were unlocking a gate, they fiddled a moment, then did something with the hand cart. The winch whined for a moment, and Durk was just able to see the top of a heavy wire cage rising up as if being dragged up a slope toward them. It leveled off, the winch stopped, they unhooked the cable, then closed the gate.
While the Visitor at the winch wound up the rest of the cable, the other two pulled on the hand cart, dragging it away toward the farmhouse. Durk knew what was inside the cage, but was also sure he was glad he couldn't see it. They'd removed a crivit from its natural environment, for what purpose he couldn't guess and didn't want to know.
But the people up at the Research Triangle Park would want to know. He'd get hold of them tomorrow, one way or another. Right now, the thought of the raw whiskey in his bottle seemed more interesting. But not here, he thought. Carefully, he made his way back around the clay piles to the trench, and from there to the sand fields.
He was still a hundred feet or so from the fence when a bright light probed through the woods in his direction. This was what he had prepared for. Quickly, he took out his bottle of shine and drank off as much as he could at one gulp without choking. Then, holding the bottle in his right hand, and carrying his shotgun in the crook of his left elbow, he continued walking toward his fence.
"Hold it right there," a woman's voice called out. its alien resonance was unmistakable.
"Wha?" he called back, and turned to face the light which had not yet caught him. "Whassa matter?" He deliberately thickened his speech and made himself weave slightly where he stood. The spotlight, aiming for the sound of his voice, at last found him. He shielded his eyes with his right arm, sloshing a bit of the moonshine over himself in the process.
"Put down that gun," the female alien called, coming nearer. Durk couldn't see her at all; the light was blinding him. "What are you doing here?" she went on as Durk carefully bent to lay his shotgun on the ground.
"Jus' doing a little squirrel hunting," he called back, making a visible effort to control his fictitious drunkenness. It wouldn't be all that fictitious in a moment or two.
"At night?" the Visitor asked sarcastically. She was within ten feet of him now, but he still couldn't see her other than as a vague shadow behind the brilliance of her light.
"Sure," he said, and reached down to his waist with his left hand.
"Be careful," the alien said in a tone of voice that Durk knew was serious. He jerked his hand away, then turned his left side toward the light so she could see the two squirrels dangling from his belt.
"You catch them in their nests at night," he said. Then he took a sip from his bottle.
"What's that?" the Visitor asked.
"Whiskey," Durk answered. He held out the bottle. "Want some?" She came up to him, took the bottle, sniffed its mouth.
"Gakhh," she said, handing it back. "How can you drink that stuff?"
"It's cheap," he said. He did not try to slur his voice now; the moonshine was providing enough of a slur by itself.
"Let me see those squirrels," the woman demanded. Durk fumbled with the string holding the animals to his belt a moment, sloshed moonshine, paused to put the cap back on, and put the bottle in his pocket, then managed to release his game and hold it out to her. She took the bodies, held them a moment.
"They're cold," she said.
"Been dead twenty minutes or more," he told her.
"How come I didn't hear any shooting?"
"I have no idea, lady. You want to take those squirrels home and do an autopsy?" He breathed heavily in her direction.
"No," she said and handed the animals back. "But I think you'd better be more careful about where you go hunting. These woods aren't safe, you know."
"Hell, hasn't been a bear anywhere around here in fifteen years."
"That's as may be," the woman said, and Durk could almost hear her smile, "but I'm here now, and so are other Visitors, and we're a match for any bear."
"Ah, right."
"Now pick up your rifle and go."
"Yes, ma'am," Durk said. Moving slowly, he retrieved his shotgun, and walked unsteadily t
oward the fence. The Visitor followed him and watched him climb unsteadily over.
"When we catch people trespassing," she said as he started to walk away, "we don't turn them over to the sheriff." He stopped to look back over his shoulder at where she stood in the darkness, "Get my meaning?" she asked.
"I do," he said, then turned and walked away.
Chapter 6
As Professor Morton Barnes was unlocking his office door the next morning, Alice Marshall, the secretary he shared with the others on the third floor, came out into the hall to speak with him.
"I just thought you'd like to know," she said. "We found out who those students were who got arrested after trashing the Visitor liaison office."
"Ah," Barnes said, pausing with his key still in the lock. "Anyone I know?"
"David Androvich was one of them," Alice said.
"Damn," Morton said, opening the door the rest of the way. "He was a good student. Had a real knack for math. Have his parents been informed?"
"Yes, and the others too."
"All right, I'll make a note in his file. Thank you."
He went in and sat down at his desk, but the news bothered him more than he thought it would. Compounded with his anxiety for his own safety, it left him completely unable to get to work on the papers that still needed grading.
Instead, he pulled out the grade book for the class in which Androvich was enrolled and made a note in the margin that the boy was "unofficially withdrawn, without penalty." After all, it wasn't Dave's fault that he'd been taken away.
Except of course that it was. If he'd attended to his studies and not tried to act against the Visitors in so foolish a way, he'd still be free.
Morton thought about Kenny Borgman's brief but frightening letter about his experiences in the Visitor prison camp, and about Dave and his friends now suffering the same fate. He wished there were something he could do, and even as he did so he realized that it was the same wish, basically, that had caused those students to do what they did, however misguided they had been.
