Tom thumped him on the shoulder, because there were simply no words to be said. Suddenly he stiffened, snapped his fingers.
“There’s our ground,” he said urgently, pointing seaward. “The water—the wet beach where the surf runs. If we can get our ground clamp out there and her somewhere near it—”
“Ground the pan tractor. Run it out into the water. It ought to reach—partway, anyhow.”
“That’s it—c’mon.”
They slid down the bank, snatched up the ground clamp, attached it to the frame on the pan tractor.
“I’ll take it,” said Tom, and as Kelly opened his mouth, Tom shoved him back against the welding machine. “No time to argue,” he snapped, swung on to the machine, slapped her in gear and was off. Kelly took a step toward the tractor, and then his quick eyes saw a bight of the ground cable about to foul a wheel of the welder. He stopped and threw it off, spread out the rest of it so it would pay off clear. Tom, with the incredible single-mindedness of the trained operator, watched only the black line of the trailing cable on the sand behind him. When it straightened he stopped. The front of the tracks were sloshing in the gentle surf. He climbed off the side away from the Seven and tried to see. There was movement, and the growl of her motor now running at a bit more than idle, but he could not distinguish much.
Kelly picked up the rod holder and went to peer around the head of the protruding bank. Al was on his feet, still crooning hysterically, sidling over toward Daisy Etta. Kelly ducked back, threw the switch on the arc generator, climbed the bank and crawled along through the sawgrass paralleling the beach until the holder in his hand tugged and he knew he had reached the end of the cable. He looked out at the beach; measured carefully with his eye the arc he would travel if he left his position and, keeping the cable taut, went out on the beach. At no point would he come within seventy feet of the possessed machine, let alone fifty. She had to be drawn in closer. And she had to be maneuvered out to the wet sand, or in the water—
Al Knowles, encouraged by the machine’s apparent decision not to move, approached, though warily, and still running off at the mouth. “—we’ll kill ’em off an’ then we’ll keep it a secret and th’ bahges’ll come an’ take us offen th’ island and we’ll go to anothah job an’ kill lots mo’… an’ when yo’ tracks git dry an’ squeak we’ll wet ’em with blood, and you’ll be rightly king o’ the hill … look yondah, look yondah, Daisy Etta, see them theah, by the otheh tractuh, theah they are, kill ’em, Daisy, kill ’em, Daisy, an’ lemme he’p … heah me. Daisy, heah me, say you heah me—” and the motor roared in response. Al laid a timid hand on the radiator guard, leaning far over to do it, and the tractor still stood there grumbling but not moving. Al stepped back, motioned with his arm, began to walk off slowly toward the pan tractor, looking backwards as he did so like a man training a dog. “C’mon, c’mon, theah’s one theah, le’s kill’m, kill’m, kill’m …”
And with a snort the tractor revved up and followed.
Kelly licked his lips without effect because his tongue was dry, too. The madman passed him, walking straight up the center of the beach, and the tractor, now no longer a bulldozer, followed him; and there the sand was bone dry, sun-dried, dried to powder. As the tractor passed him, Kelly got up on all fours, went over the edge of the bank onto the beach, crouched there.
Al crooned, “I love ya, honey, I love ya, ’deed I do—”
Kelly ran crouching, like a man under machine-gun fire, making himself as small as possible and feeling as big as a barn door. The torn-up sand where the tractor had passed was under his feet now; he stopped, afraid to get too much closer, afraid that a weakened, badly grounded arc might leap from the holder in his hand and serve only to alarm and infuriate the thing in the tractor. And just then Al saw him.
“There!” he screamed; and the tractor pulled up short. “Behind you! Get’m, Daisy! Kill’m, kill’m, kill’m”
Kelly stood up almost wearily, fury and frustration too much to be borne. “In the water,” he yelled, because it was what his whole being wanted. “Get’er in the water! Wet her tracks, Al!”
“Kill’m, kill’m—”
As the tractor started to turn, there was a commotion over by the pan tractor. It was Tom, jumping, shouting, waving his arms, swearing. He ran out from behind his machine, straight at the Seven. Daisy Etta’s motor roared and she swung to meet him, Al barely dancing back out of the way. Tom cut sharply, sand spouting under his pumping feet, and ran straight into the water. He went out to about waist deep, suddenly disappeared. He surfaced, spluttering, still trying to shout. Kelly took a better grip on his rod holder and rushed.
Daisy Etta, in following Tom’s crazy rush, had swung in beside the pan tractor, not fifteen feet away; and she, too, was now in the surf. Kelly closed up the distance as fast as his long legs would let him; and as he approached to within that crucial fifty feet, Al Knowles hit him.
Al was frothing at the mouth, gibbering. The two men hit full tilt; Al’s head caught Kelly in the midriff as he missed a straightarm, and the breath went out of him in one great whoosh! Kelly went down like tall timber, the whole world to one swirling red-gray haze. Al flung himself on the bigger man, clawing, smacking, too berserk to ball his fists.
“Ah’m go’ to kill you,” he gurgled. “She’ll git one, I’ll git t’other, an’ then she’ll know—”
Kelly covered his face with his arms, and as some wind was sucked at last into his laboring lungs, he flung them upward and sat up in one mighty surge. Al was hurled upward and to one side, and as he hit the ground Kelly reached out a long arm, and twisted his fingers into the man’s coarse hair, raised him up, and came across with his other fist in a punch that would have killed him had it landed square. But Al managed to jerk to one side enough so that it only amputated a cheek. He fell and lay still. Kelly scrambled madly around in the sand for his welding-rod holder, found it and began to run again. He couldn’t see Tom at all now, and the Seven was standing in the surf, moving slowly from side to side, backing out, ravening. Kelly held the rod-clamp and its trailing cable blindly before him and ran straight at the machine. And then it came—that thin, soundless bolt of energy. But this time it had its full force, for poor old Peebles’ body had not been the ground that this swirling water offered. Daisy Etta literally leaped backwards toward him, and the water around her tracks spouted upward in hot steam. The sound of her engine ran up, broke, took on the rhythmic, uneven beat of a swing drummer. She threw herself from side to side like a cat with a bag over its head. Kelly stepped a little closer, hoping for another bolt to come from the clamp in his hand, but there was none, for—
“The circuit breaker!” cried Kelly.
He threw the holder up on the deck plate of the Seven in front of the seat, and ran across the little beach to the welder. He reached behind the switchboard, got his thumb on the contact hinge and jammed it down.
Daisy Etta leaped again, and then again, and suddenly her motor stopped. Heat in turbulent waves blurred the air over her. The little gas tank for the starting motor went out with a cannon’s roar, and the big fuel tank, still holding thirty-odd gallons of Diesel oil, followed. It puffed itself open rather than exploded, and threw a great curtain of flame over the ground behind the machine. Motor or no motor, then, Kelly distinctly saw the tractor shudder convulsively. There was a crawling movement of the whole frame, a slight wave of motion away from the fuel tank, approaching the front of the machine, and moving upward from the tracks. It culminated in the crown of the radiator core, just in front of the radiator cap; and suddenly an area of six or seven square inches literally blurred around the edges. For a second, then, it was normal, and finally it slumped molten, and liquid metal ran down the sides, throwing out little sparks as it encountered what was left of the charred paint. And only then was Kelly conscious of agony in his left hand. He looked down. The welding machine’s generator had stopped, though the motor was still turning, having smashed the friable coupling on its drive shaft. Smoke po
ured from the generator, which had become little more than a heap of slag. Kelly did not scream, though, until he looked and saw what had happened to his hand—
When he could see straight again, he called for Tom, and there was no answer. At last he saw something out in the water, and plunged in after it. The splash of cold salt water on his left hand he hardly felt, for the numbness of shock had set in. He grabbed at Tom’s shirt with his good hand, and then the ground seemed to pull itself out from under his feet. That was it, then—a deep hole right off the beach. The Seven had run right to the edge of it, had kept Tom there out of his depth and—
He flailed wildly, struck out for the beach, so near and so hard to get to. He gulped a stinging lungful of brine, and only the lovely shock of his knee striking solid beach kept him from giving up to the luxury of choking to death. Sobbing with effort, he dragged Tom’s dead weight inshore and clear of the surf. It was then that he became conscious of a child’s shrill weeping; for a mad moment he thought it was he himself, and then he looked and saw that it was Al Knowles. He left Tom and went over to the broken creature.
“Get up, you,” he snarled. The weeping only got louder. Kelly rolled him over on his back—he was quite unresisting—and belted him back and forth across the mouth until Al began to choke. Then he hauled him to his feet and led him over to Tom.
“Kneel down, scum. Put one of your knees between his knees.” Al stood still. Kelly hit him again and he did as he was told.
“Put your hands on his lower ribs. There. O.K. Lean, you rat. Now sit back.” He sat down, holding his left wrist in his right hand, letting the blood drop from the ruined hand. “Lean. Hold it—sit back. Lean. Sit. Lean. Sit.”
Soon Tom sighed and began to vomit weakly, and after that he was all right.
This is the story of Daisy Etta, the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the missile test that they don’t talk about except to refer to it as the missile test that they don’t talk about. But you may have heard about it for all that—rumors, anyway. The rumor has it that an early IRBM tested out a radically new controls system by proving conclusively that it did not work. It was a big bird and contained much juice, and flew far, far afield. Rumor goes on to assert that a) it alighted somewhere in the unmapped rain forests of South America and that b) there were no casualties. What they really don’t talk about is the closely guarded report asserting that both a) and b) are false. There are only two people (aside from yourself, now) who know for sure that though a) is certainly false, b) is strangely true, and there were indeed no casualties.
Al Knowles may well know too, but he doesn’t count.
It happened two days after the death of Daisy Etta, as Tom and Kelly sat in (of all places) the coolth of the ruined temple. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was back in the shadows, tied up, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe Daisy was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like Daisy Etta, they found life too sweet to want any part of it spent under observation or in jail.
The warhead of the missile struck near the edge of their camp, just between the pyramid of fuel drums and the dynamite stores. The second stage alighted a moment later two miles away, in the vicinity of the five graves. Kelly and Tom stumbled out to the rim of the mesa, and for a long while watched the jetsam fall and the flotsam rise. It was Kelly who guessed what must have happened, and “Bless their clumsy little hearts,” he said happily. And he took the scribbled papers from Tom and tore them across.
But Tom shook his head, and thumbed back at the mound. “He’ll talk.”
“Him?” said Kelly, with such profound eloquence in his tone that he clearly evoked the image of Al Knowles, with his mumbling voice and his drooling mouth and his wide glazed eyes. “Let him,” Kelly said, and tore the papers again.
So they let him.
BRIGHT SEGMENT
HE HAD NEVER HELD a girl before. He was not terrified; he had used that up earlier when he had carried her in and kicked the door shut behind him and had heard the steady drip of blood from her soaked skirt, and before that, when he had thought her dead there on the curb, and again when she made that sound, that sigh or whispered moan. He had brought her in and when he saw all that blood he had turned left, turned right, put her down on the floor, his brains all clabbered and churned and his temples athump with the unaccustomed exercise. All he could act on was Don’t get blood on the bedspread. He turned on the overhead light and stood for a moment blinking and breathing hard; suddenly he leaped for the window to lower the blind against the street light staring in and all other eyes. He saw his hands reach for the blind and checked himself; they were red and ready to paint anything he touched. He made a sound, a detached part of his mind recognizing it as the exact duplicate of that agonized whisper she had uttered out there on the dark, wet street, and leaped to the light switch, seeing the one red smudge already there, knowing as he swept his hand over it he was leaving another. He stumbled to the sink in the corner and washed his hands, washed them again, every few seconds looking over his shoulder at the girl’s body and the thick flat finger of blood which crept curling toward him over the linoleum.
He had his breath now, and moved more carefully to the window. He drew down the blind and pulled the curtains and looked at the sides and the bottom to see that there were no crevices. In pitch blackness he felt his way to the opposite wall, going around the edges of the linoleum, and turned on the light again. The finger of blood was a tentacle now, fumbling toward the soft, stain-starved floorboards. From the enamel table beside the stove he snatched a plastic sponge and dropped it on the tentacle’s seeking tip and was pleased, it was a reaching thing no more, it was only something that could be mopped up.
He took off the bedspread and hung it over the brass head-rail. From the drawer of the china closet and from the gate leg table he took his two plastic table cloths. He covered the bed with them, leaving plenty of overlap, then stood a moment rocking with worry and pulling out his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger. Fix it right, he told himself firmly. So she’ll die before you fix it, never mind, fix it, right.
He expelled air from his nostrils and got books from the shelf in the china closet—a six-year-old World Almanac, a half-dozen paperbacked novels, a heavy catalog of jewelry findings. He pulled the bed away from the wall and put books one by one under two of the legs so that the bed was tilted slightly down to the foot and slightly to one side. He got a blanket and rolled it and slipped it under the plastic so that it formed a sort of fence down the high side. He got a six-quart aluminum pot from under the sink and set it on the floor by the lowest corner of the bed and pushed the trailing end of plastic down into it. So bleed now, he told the girl silently, with satisfaction.
He bent over her and grunted, lifting her by the armpits. Her head fell back as if she had no bones in her neck and he almost dropped her. He dragged her to the bed, leaving a wide red swath as her skirt trailed through the scarlet puddle she had lain in. He lifted her clear of the floor, settled his feet, and leaned over the bed with her in his arms. It took an unexpected effort to do it. He realized only then how drained, how tired he was, and how old. He put her down clumsily, almost dropping her in an effort to leave the carefully arranged tablecloths undisturbed, and he very nearly fell into the bed with her. He levered himself away with rubbery arms and stood panting. Around the soggy hem of her skirt blood began to gather, and as he watched, began to find its way lazily to the low corner. So much, so much blood in a person, he marveled, and stop it, how to make it stop if it won’t stop?
He glanced at
the locked door, the blinded window, the clock. He listened. It was raining harder now, drumming and hissing in the darkest hours. Otherwise nothing; the house was asleep and the street, dead. He was alone with his problem.
He pulled at his lip, then snatched his hand away as he tasted her blood. He coughed and ran to the sink and spat, and washed his mouth and then his hands.
So all right, go call up. …
Call up? Call what, the hospital they should call the cops? Might as well call the cops altogether. Stupid. What could I tell them, she’s my sister, she’s hit by a car, they going to believe me? Tell them the truth, a block away I see somebody push her out of a car, drive off, no lights, I bring her in out of the rain, only inside I find she is bleeding like this, they believe me? Stupid. What’s the matter with you, mind your own business why don’t you.
He thought he would pick her up now and put her back in the rain. Yes and somebody sees you, stupid.
He saw that the wide, streaked patch of blood on the linoleum was losing gloss where it lay thin, drying and soaking in. He picked up the sponge, two-thirds red now and the rest its original baby-blue except at one end where it looked like bread drawn with a sharp red pencil. He turned it over so it wouldn’t drip while he carried it and took it to the sink and rinsed it, wringing it over and over in the running water. Stupid, call up somebody and get help.
Call who?
He thought of the department store where for eighteen years, he had waxed floors and vacuumed rugs at night. The neighborhood, where he knew the grocery and the butcher. Closed up, asleep, everybody gone; names, numbers he didn’t know and anyway, who to trust? My God in fifty-three years you haven’t got a friend?
He took the clean sponge and sank to his knees on the linoleum, and just then the bank of blood creeping down the bed reached the corner and turned to a sharp streak; ponk it went into the pan, and pitti-pittipitti in a rush, then drip-drip-drip-drip, three to the second and not stopping. He knew then with absolute and belated certainty that this bleeding was not going to stop by itself. He whimpered softly and then got up and went to the bed. “Don’t be dead,” he said aloud, and the way his voice sounded, it frightened him. He put out his hand to her chest, but drew it back when he saw her blouse was torn and blood came from there too.
Selected Stories Page 25
