“Can anybody guess the time?” he asked, after aeons seemed to have passed.
“It feels like next Thursday,” said the voice of the moustached man, “but it’s probably ten or eleven o’clock. Looks like we’re just going to be left here till they get around to us.”
“I think we’d better not wait,” said Lockley. “We’ve been pretty quiet. They probably think we’re well-behaved specimens of this planet’s wild life. They won’t expect us to try anything this late. Suppose we get out.”
“How?” demanded the chunky man.
Lockley said carefully, “This box is resting on top of the ground. I’ve dug down through the sand and found the bottom edge of the metal sidewall. If it’s resting only on dirt, not stone, we ought to be able to dig out with our hands. I’ll start now. You listen.”
He began to dig with his hands, first clearing away the sand for a reasonable space. He felt a certain sardonic interest in what might happen. He strongly suspected that nothing undesirable would take place.
It was at least quaint that aliens from outer space should accept a bottomless metal shell as a suitable prison for animals. It was quaint that they’d put in a sandy floor. How would they know that such a thing meant a cage, on earth?
Of course the whole event might have been a test of animal intelligence. Almost any animal would have tried to burrow out.
Lockley dug. The earth was hard, and its upper part was filled with tenacious grass roots. Lockley pulled them away. Once he’d gotten under them, the digging went faster. Presently he was under the metal side wall. He dug upward. His hand reached open air.
“One of you can spell me now,” he reported in a low tone. “It looks like we’ll get away. But we’ve got to make our plans first. We don’t want to be talking outside the tank, or even when the hole’s fair-sized. For instance, will we want to keep together when we get outside?”
“Nix!” said the chunky man. “We wanna tell everybody about these characters. We scatter. If they catch one they don’t catch any more. We couldn’t fight any better for bein’ together. We better scatter. I call that settled. I’m scatterin’!”
He crawled to Lockley in the darkness.
“Where you diggin’? OK. I got it. Move aside an’ give me room.”
“Everybody agrees on that?” asked Lockley.
They did. Lockley was relieved. The chunky man dug busily. There was only the sound of breathing, and the occasional fall of thrown-out earth against the metal of the thing that confined them. The chunky man said briskly, “This dirt digs all right. We just got to make the hole bigger.”
In a little while the chunky man stopped, panting. The tall man said, “I’ll take a shot at it.”
There was a breakthrough to the air outside. The atmosphere in the tank improved. The smell of fresh-dug dirt and cool night air was refreshing. The moustached man took his turn at digging. Lockley went at it again. Soon he whispered, “I think it’s OK. I’ll go ahead. No talking outside!”
He shook hands all around, whispered “Good luck!” and squirmed through the opening to the night. Innumerable stars glittered in the sky. They were reflected on the water of the lake, here very close. Lockley moved silently. In the blackness just behind him, his eyes had become adjusted to almost complete darkness. He headed away from the shining water. He got brushwood between himself and his former companions. He stood very, very still.
He heard them murmuring together. They were outside. But they had proposed entirely separate efforts at escape. He went on, relieved. It happened that the next time he’d see them, circumstances would be entirely different. But he believed they were competent men.
Guided by the Big Dipper, he moved directly toward the place where Jill should be waiting for him. By the angle of the Dipper’s handle he knew that it was almost midnight. Jill would surely have known that nearly the worst had happened. He’d have to find her.…
It was two o’clock when he reached the place where Jill had intended to wait. He showed himself openly. He called quietly. There was no answer. He called again, and again.
He saw something white. It was a scrap of paper speared on a brushwood branch which had been stripped of leaves to make the paper show clearly. Lockley retrieved it and saw markings on it which the starlight could not help him to read. He went deep into the woods, found a hollow, and bent low, risking the light of his cigarette lighter for a swift look at the message.
“I saw creatures moving around in the camp. They weren’t men. I was afraid they might be hunting me. I’ve gone to wait by the car if I can find it.”
She’d written in English, in full confidence that creatures from space would not be able to read it. Lockley was not so sure, but the message hadn’t been removed. If it had been read, there’d have been an ambush waiting for him when he found it. So it appeared.
He headed through the night toward the ditched small car.
It seemed a very long way, though he did stop and drink his fill from a little mountain stream over which a highway bridge had almost been completed. In the night, though, and with hard going, it was not easy to estimate how far he’d gone. In fact, he was anxiously debating if he mightn’t have passed the abandoned bulldozer when he came upon the place where blasting had been going on. Still, it was a very long way to be negotiated over still-remaining tree stumps and the unfilled holes from which others had been pulled.
He reached the bulldozer and turned south, and at long last reached the highway. His car should be no more than a quarter-mile away. He moved toward it, close to the road’s edge. He heard music. It was faint, but vivid because it was the last sound that anybody would expect to hear in the hours before dawn in a wilderness deserted by mankind. He scraped his foot on the roadway. The music stopped instantly. He said, “Jill?”
He heard her gasp.
“I found where Vale had been,” he said steadily. “There was no blood there. There’s no sign that he’s been killed. Then I was caught myself. I was put with three other men who were believed killed but who are still alive. We escaped. It is within reason to hope that Vale is unharmed and that he may escape or somehow be rescued.”
What he said was partly to make her sure that it was he who appeared in the darkness. But it was technically true, too. It was within reason to hope for Vale’s ultimate safety. One can always hope, whatever the odds against the thing hoped for. But Lockley thought that the odds against Vale’s living through the events now in progress were very great indeed.
Jill stepped out into the starlight.
“I wasn’t—sure it was you,” she said with difficulty. “I saw the things, you know, at a distance. At first I thought they were men. So when I first saw you—dimly—I was afraid.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t better news,” said Lockley.
“It’s good news! It’s very good news,” she insisted as he drew near. “If they’ve captured him, he’ll make them understand that he’s a man, and that men are intelligent and not just animals, and that they should be our friends and we theirs.”
The girl’s voice was resolute. Lockley could imagine that all the time she’d been waiting, she’d been preparing to deny that even the worst news was final, until she looked on Vale’s dead body itself.
“Do you want to tell me exactly what you found out?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you while I work on the car,” said Lockley. “We want to get moving away from here before daybreak.”
He went down to the little car, wedged in the saplings it had splintered and broken. He began to clear it so he could lever it back on to the highway. He used a broken sapling, and as he worked he told what had happened, including the three men in the compost pit shell and the dumping of assorted small wild life specimens into it with them.
“But they didn’t kill you,” said Jill insistently, “and they didn’t kill those three, and there were the two others you say got over the paralysis and went back to the camp. Counting you, that’s six men they had at
their mercy that we know weren’t harmed. So why should they have harmed a seventh man?”
Lockley did not answer at once. None of the spared six, he thought, had put up a fight. Only Vale had exchanged blows with the crew of the spaceship. Nobody else had seen them.
“That’s right, about Vale,” he said after a moment in which he had been busy. “But this doesn’t look good!”
He felt under the car. He squeezed himself beneath its front end. There was a small, fugitive flicker of flame. It went out and he was silent.
Presently he got to his feet and said evenly, “We’re in a fix. One of the front wheels is turned almost at a right angle to the other. A king pin is broken. The car couldn’t be driven even if I managed to get it up on the road. We’ve got to walk. There ought to be soldiers on the way up to the lake today. If we meet them we’ll be all right. But this is bad luck!”
It happened that he was mistaken on both counts. There were no soldiers moving into the park, and it was not bad luck that his car couldn’t be driven. If he’d been able to get it on the road and trundling down the highway, the car would have been wrecked and they could very well have been killed. But this was for the future to disclose.
They took nothing from the car because they could not see beyond the present. They started out doggedly to follow the highway that soldiers would be likely to follow on the way to the lake. It was not the shortest way to the world outside the Park. It was considerably longer than a footpath would have been. But Lockley expected tanks, at least, against which eccentric unearthly weapons would be useless. So they headed down the main highway. Lockley was unarmed. They had no food. He hadn’t eaten since the morning before.
When day came—gray and still—and presently the dew upon grass and tree leaves glittered reflections of the sky, he moved aside into the woods and found a broken-off branch, out of which by very great effort he made a club. When he came back, Jill was listening attentively to the little pocket radio. She turned it off.
“I was hoping for news,” she explained determinedly. “The government knows that there are creatures in the spaceship, and he—” that would be Vale “—will be trying to make them understand what kind of beings we are. So there could be friendly communication almost any time. But there aren’t any news broadcasts on the air. I suppose it’s too early.”
He agreed, with reservations. They made their way along the dew-wetted surface of the highway. As the light grew stronger, Lockley glanced again and again at Jill’s face. She looked very tired. He reflected sadly that she was thinking of Vale. She’d never thought twice about Lockley. Even now, or especially now, all her thoughts were for Vale.
When sunlight appeared on the peaks around them, he said detachedly, “You’ve had no rest for twenty-four hours and I doubt that you’ve had anything to eat. Neither have I. If troops come up this highway we’ll hear the engines. I think we’d better get off the highway and try to rest. And I may be able to find something for us to eat.”
There are few wildernesses so desolate as to offer no food at all for one who knows what to look for. There is usually some sort of berry available. One kind of acorn is not bad to eat. Shoots of bracken are not unlike asparagus. There are some spiny wild plants whose leaves, if plucked young enough, will yield some nourishment and of course there are mushrooms. Even on stone one can find liverish rock-tripe which is edible if one dries it to complete dessication before soaking it again to make a soup or broth.
Before he searched for food, though, Lockley said abruptly, “You said you saw the creatures and they weren’t men. What did they look like?”
“They were a long way away,” Jill told him. “I didn’t see them clearly. They’re about the size of men but they just aren’t men. Far away as they were, I could tell that!”
Lockley considered. He shrugged and said, “Rest. I’ll be back.”
He moved away. He was hungry and he kept his eyes in motion, looking for something to take back to Jill. But his mind struggled to form a picture of a creature who’d be the size of a man but would be known not to be a man even at a distance; whose difference from mankind couldn’t be described because seen at such great distance. Presently he shook his head impatiently and gave all his attention to the search for food.
He found a patch of berries on a hillside where there was enough earth for berry bushes, but not for trees. Bears had been at them, but there were many left.
He filled his hat with them and made his way back to Jill. She had the pocket radio on again, but at the lowest possible volume. He put the berry-filled hat down beside her. She held up a warning hand. Speckles of sunshine trickled down through the foliage and the tree trunks were spotted with yellow light. They ate the berries as they heard the news.
A new official news release was out. And now, twelve hours after the last, wholly reassuring bulletin, there was no longer any pretense that the thing in Boulder Lake was merely a meteorite.
The pretext that it was a natural object, said the news broadcaster, resuming, had been abandoned. But reassurance continued. Photographic planes had been attempting to get a picture of the alien ship as it floated in the lake. So far no satisfactory image had been secured, but pictures of wreckage caused by an enormous wave generated in the lake by the alien spaceship’s arrival were sharp and clear. Troops have been posted in a cordon about the Boulder Lake Park area to prevent unauthorized persons from swarming in to see earth’s visitors from space. Details of its landing continue to be learned. Workmen from the construction camp have been questioned, and the two men who were paralyzed and then released have told their story. So far four human beings are known to have been seized by the occupants of the spaceship. One is Vale, an eye-witness to the ship’s descent and landing. The three others went to investigate the gigantic explosion accompanying the landing in the lake. They have not been seen since. This, however, does not imply that they are dead. Quite possibly the invaders—aliens—guests—who have landed on American soil are trying to learn how to communicate with the American people who are their hosts.
Lockley watched Jill’s face. As she heard the references to Vale, she went white, but she saw Lockley looking at her and said fiercely, “They don’t know that the visitors didn’t kill you and let you and the other three men escape. Someone ought to tell these broadcasters.…”
Lockley did not answer. In his own mind, though, there was the fact that of the two workmen who’d been paralyzed and released, the three men in the compost pit shell, and himself, none had seen their captors. But Vale had.
The broadcaster went on with a fine air of confidence, reporting that yesterday afternoon a helicopter had flown into the mountains to examine the landing site in detail since it could not be examined from a high-flying plane.
Lockley remembered the droning he and the others had heard through the metal plates of their prison.
The helicopter had suddenly ceased to communicate. It is believed to have had engine trouble. However, later on a fast jet had attempted a flight below the extreme altitude of the photographic planes. Its pilot reported that at fifteen thousand feet he’d suddenly smelled an appalling odor. Then he was blinded, deafened, and his muscles knotted in spasms. He was paralyzed. The experience lasted for seconds only. It was as if he’d flown into a searchlight beam which produced those sensations and then had flown out of it. He’d instinctively used evasive maneuvers and got away, but twice before he passed the horizon there were instantaneous flashes of the paralysis and the pain. Scientists determined that the report of the men who’d been paralyzed and released agreed with the report of the pilot. It was assumed that whatever or whoever had landed in Boulder Lake possessed a beam—it might as well be called a terror beam because of the effects it had—of some sort of radiation which produced the paralysis and the agony. Unless the three men missing from the construction camp had died of it, however, it was not to be considered a death ray.
The news went on with every appearance of frankness and conf
idence. It was natural for strangers on a strange planet to take precautions against possibly hostile inhabitants of the newly-found world. But every effort would be exerted to make friendly contact and establish peaceful communications with the beings from space. Their weapon appeared to be of limited range and so far not lethal to human beings. Occasional flashes of its effects had been noted by the troops now forming a cordon about the Park, but it only produced discomfort, not paralysis. Nevertheless the troops in question have been moved back. Meanwhile rocket missiles are being moved to areas where they can deliver atom bombs on the alien ship if it should prove necessary. But the government is extremely anxious to make this contact with extra-terrestrials a friendly one, because contact with a race more advanced than ourselves could be of inestimable value to us. Therefore atom bombs will be used only as a last resort. An atom bomb would destroy aliens and their ship together—and we want the ship. The public is urged to be calm. If the ship should appear dangerous, it can and will be smashed.
The news broadcast ended.
Jill said, obviously speaking of Vale, “He’ll make them realize that men aren’t like porcupines and rabbits! When they realize that we humans are intelligent people, everything will be all right!”
Lockley said reluctantly, “There’s one thing to remember, though, Jill. They didn’t blindfold the rabbits or the porcupine. They only blindfolded men.”
She stared at him.
“One of the men in the pit with me,” said Lockley, “thought they didn’t want us to see them because they were monsters. That’s not likely.” He paused. “Maybe they blindfolded us to keep us from finding out they aren’t.”
CHAPTER 4
“The evidence,” said Lockley as Jill looked at him ashen-faced, “the evidence is all for monsters. But there was something in that broadcast that calls for courage, and I want to summon it. We’re going to need it.”
“If they aren’t monsters,” said Jill in a stricken voice, “Then—then they’re men. And we have a cold war with only one country, and they’re the only ones who’d play a deadly trick like this. So if they aren’t monsters, in the ship, they must be men, and they’d kill anybody who found it out.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 202
