“You’re wrong there,” he said coldly. “It can.”
Jill frowned again. Not because of his statement, but because she hadn’t succeeded in diverting his mind from gloomy things. She had reason enough for sadness, herself. If she spoke of it, Lockley would try to encourage her. But he was concerned with more than his own emotions. Without really knowing it, Jill had come to feel a great confidence in Lockley. It had been reassuring that he could find food, and perhaps more reassuring that he could chase away a bear. Such talents were not logical reasons for being confident that he could solve the alien’s seemingly invincible weapon, but she was inclined to feel so. And if she could encourage him to cope with the monsters—why—it would be even a form of loyalty to Vale. So she believed.
In the late afternoon Lockley said, “Another four or five miles and we ought to be out of the Park and on another highway we’ll hope won’t be blocked by a terror beam. Anyhow there should be an occasional farmhouse where we can find some sort of civilized food.”
Jill said hungrily, “Scrambled eggs!”
“Probably,” he agreed.
They went on and on. Three miles. Four. Five. Five and a half. They descended a minor slope and came to a hard-surfaced road with tire marks on it and a sign sternly urging care in driving. There were ploughed fields in which crops were growing. There was a row of stubby telephone poles with a sagging wire between them.
“We’ll head west,” said Lockley. “There ought to be a farmhouse somewhere near.”
“And people,” said Jill. “I look terrible!”
He regarded her with approval.
“No. You look all right. You look fine!”
It was pleasing that he seemed to mean it. But immediately she said, “Maybe we’ll be able to find out about…about.…”
“Vale,” agreed Lockley. “But don’t be disappointed if we don’t. He could have escaped or been freed without everybody knowing it.”
She said in surprise, “Been freed! That’s something I didn’t think of. He’d set to work to make them understand that we humans are intelligent and they ought to make friends with us. That would be the first thing he’d think of. And they might set him free to arrange it.”
Lockley said, “Yes,” in a carefully noncommittal tone.
Another mile, this time on the hard road. It seemed strange to walk on so unyielding a surface after so many miles on quite different kinds of footing. It was almost sunset now. There was a farmhouse set well back from the road and barely discernable beyond nearby growing corn. The house seemed dead. It was neat enough and in good repair. There were clackings of chickens from somewhere behind it. But it had the feel of emptiness.
Lockley called. He called again. He went to the door and would have called once more, but the door opened at a touch.
“Evacuated,” he said. “Did you notice that there was a telephone line leading here from the road?”
He hunted in the now shadowy rooms. He found the telephone. He lifted the receiver and heard the humming of the line. He tried to call an operator. He heard the muted buzz that said the call was sounding. But there was no answer. He found a telephone book and dialed one number after another. Sheriff. Preacher. Doctor. Garage. Operator again. General store.… He could tell that telephones rang dutifully in remote abandoned places. But there was no answer at all.
“I’ll look in the chicken coops,” said Jill practically.
She came back with eggs. She said briefly, “The chickens were hungry. I fed them and left the chicken yard gate open. I wonder if the beam hurts them too?”
“It does,” said Lockley.
He made a light and then a fire and she cooked eggs which belonged to the unknown people who owned this house and who had walked out of it when instructions for immediate evacuation came. They felt queer, making free with this house of a stranger. They felt that he might come in and be indignant with them.
“I ought to wash the dishes,” said Jill when they were finished.
“No,” said Lockley. “We go on. We need to find some soldiers, or a telephone that works.…”
“I’m not a good dishwasher anyhow,” said Jill guiltily.
Lockley put a banknote on the kitchen table, with a weight on it to keep it from blowing away. They closed the house door. They’d eaten fully and luxuriously of eggs and partly stale bread and the sensation was admirable. They went out to the highway again.
“West is still our best bet,” said Lockley. “They’ve blocked the highway to eastward with that terror beam.”
The sun had set now, but a fading glory remained in the sky. They saw the slenderest, barest crescent of a new moon practically hidden in the sunset glow. They walked upon a civilized road, with a fence on one side of it and above it a single sagging telephone wire that could be made out against the stars.
“I feel,” said Jill, “as if we were almost safe, now. All this looks so ordinary and reassuring.”
“But we’d better keep our noses alert,” Lockley told her. “We know that one beam comes nearly this far and probably—no, certainly crosses this road. There may be more.”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Jill. Then she said irrelevantly, “I’ll bet they do make him a sort of—ambassador to our government to arrange for making friends. He’ll be able to convince them!”
Again she referred to Vale. Lockley said nothing.
Night was now fully fallen. There were myriad stars overhead. They saw the telephone wire dipping between poles against the sky’s brightness. They passed an open gate where another telephone wire led away, doubtless to another farmhouse. But if there was no one at the other end of a telephone line, there was no point in using a phone.
There came a rumbling noise behind them. They stared at one another in the starlight. The rumbling approached.
“It—can’t be!” said Jill, marvelling.
“It’s a motor,” said Lockley. He could not feel complete relief. “Sounds like a truck. I wonder—”
He felt uneasiness. But it was absurd. Only human beings would use motor trucks.
There was a glow in the distance behind them. It came nearer as the sound of the motor approached. The motor’s mutter became a grumble. It was definitely a truck. They could hear those other sounds that trucks always make in addition to their motor noises.
It came up to the curve they’d rounded last. Its headlight beams glared on the cornstalks growing next to the highway. One headlight appeared around the turn. Then the other. An enormous trailer-truck combination came bumbling toward them. Jill held up her hand for it to stop. Its headlights shone brightly upon her.
Airbrakes came on. The giant combination—cab in front, gigantic box body behind—came to a halt. A man leaned out. He said amazedly, “Hey, what are you folks doin’ here? Everybody’s supposed to be long gone! Ain’t you heard about all civilians clearing out from twenty miles outside the Park? There’s boogers in there! Characters from Mars or somewhere. They eat people!”
Even in the starlight Lockley saw the familiar Wild Life Control markings on the trailer. He heard Jill, her voice shaking with relief, explaining that she’d been at the construction camp and had been left behind, and that she and Lockley had made their way out.
“We want to get to a telephone,” she added. “He has some information he wants to give to the Army. It’s very important.” Then she swallowed. “And I’d like to ask if you’ve heard anything about a Mr. Vale. He was taken prisoner by the creatures up there. Have you heard of his being released?”
The driver hesitated. Then he said, “No, ma’m. Not a word about him. But we’ll take care of you two! You musta been through plenty! Jud, you go get in the trailer, back yonder. Make room for these two folks up on the front seat.” He added explanatorily, “There’s cases and stuff in the back, ma’m. You two folks climb right up here alongside of me. You sure musta had a time!”
The door on the near side of the truck cab opened. A small man got out. Silently, he went to the rear
of the trailer and swung up out of sight. Jill climbed into the opened door. Lockley followed her. He still felt an irrational uneasiness, but he put it down to habit. The past few days had formed it.
“We’ve been cartin’ stuff for the soldiers,” explained the driver as Lockley closed the door behind him. “They keep track of where that terror beam is workin’, and they tell us by truck radio, and we dodge it. Ain’t had a bit of trouble. Never thought I’d play games with Martians! Did you see any of ’em? What sort of critters are they?”
He slipped the truck into gear and gunned the motor. Truck and trailer, together, began to roll down the highway. Lockley was irritated with himself because he couldn’t relax and feel safe, as this development seemed to warrant.
Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t used his head in this as in other matters during the few days just past.
He plainly hadn’t.
CHAPTER 7
The driver was avidly curious about the area where supposedly no human being could survive. He asked absorbed questions, especially and insistently about the aliens. Jill said that she’d seen a few of them, but only at a distance. They’d been investigating the evacuated construction camp. They were about the size of men. She couldn’t describe them, but they weren’t human beings. He seemed to find it unthinkable that she hadn’t examined them in detail.
Lockley came to her rescue. He observed that he’d been a prisoner of the invaders, and had escaped. Then the driver’s curiosity became insatiable. He wanted to know every imaginable detail of that experience. He expressed almost incredulous disappointment that Lockley couldn’t give even a partial description of the creatures. When convinced, he launched a detailed recital of the descriptions offered by the workmen from the camp. He pictured the aliens as hoofed like horses, equipped with horns like antelopes, fitted with multiple arms like octopi and huge multi-faceted eyes like insects.
He seemed to contemplate this picture with vast satisfaction as the truck growled and rumbled through the night.
The headlights glared on ahead of the truck. There were dark fields and darker mountains beyond them. From time to time little side roads branched off. They undoubtedly led to houses, but no speck of lamp light appeared anywhere. This part of the world was empty, with the loneliness of a landscape from which every hint of human activity had been removed.
Jill asked a question. The driver grew garrulous. He gave a dramatic picture of terror throughout the world, the suspension of all ordinary antagonisms in the face of this menace to every man and nation on the earth. There was peace even in the world’s trouble spots as appalled agitators saw how much worse things could be if the monsters took over the world to rule. But the driver insisted that the United States was calm. Us Americans, he assured Lockley, weren’t scared. We were educated and we knew that them scientists would crack this nut somehow. Like only yesterday a broadcast said this Belgian guy had come up with calculations that said this poison beam had to be something like a radar beam or a laser beam or something like that. And the American scientists were right out there in front, along with guys from England and France and Italy and Germany and even Russia. All the big brains of the world were workin’ on it! Those Martians were gonna wish they’d come visitin’ polite instead of barging in like they owned the world! They’d be lucky if they wound up ownin’ Mars!
Lockley pressed for details about the scientists’ results. He didn’t expect to get them, but the driver cheerfully obliged.
Radio, said the driver largely, worked by making waves like those on a pond. They spread out and reached places where there were instruments to detect them, and that was that. Radar made the same kind of waves, only smaller, which bounced back to where there was an instrument to detect them. These were ripple waves.
Lockley interpreted the term to mean sine waves, rounded at top and trough. It was a perfectly good word to express the meaning intended.
These were natural kindsa waves, pursued the driver. Lightning made them. Static was them, and sparks from running motors and blown fuses. Waves like that were generated whenever an electric circuit was made or broken besides their occurrence from purely natural causes.
“We can’t feel ’em,” said the driver expansively. “We’re used to waves like that. Animals couldn’t do anything about ’em and didn’t need to before there was men. So when we come along, we couldn’t notice ’em any more than we notice air pressure on our skin. We’re used to it! But these scientists say there’s waves that ain’t natural. They ain’t like ripples. They’re like storm waves with foam on ’em. And that’s the kind of waves we can notice. Like storm waves with sharp edges. We can notice them because they do things to us! These Martians make ’em do things. But now we know what kinda waves they are, we’re gonna mess them up! And I’m savin’ up a special kick for one o’ those Martians when they’re licked just as soon as I can find out which end of him is which an’ suited to that kinda attention!”
Lockley found himself suspicious and was annoyed. Jill was safe now. This driver was well-informed, but probably everybody was well-informed now. They had reason to become so!
The truck trundled through the night. High over head, a squadron of planes arrived to take its place in the ever-moving patrol around the Park. Another squadron, relieved, went away to the southwest. There was a deep-toned, faraway roaring from the engines aloft. All the sky behind the trailer seemed to mutter continuously. But the roof of stars ahead was silent.
Lockley stayed tense and was weary of his tenseness, Jill was safe. He tried to reason his uneasiness away. The cab of the truck wobbled and swayed. The feel of the vehicle was entirely unlike the feel of a passenger car. It felt tail-heavy. The driver had ceased to talk. He seemed to be musing as he drove. He’d asked about the invaders but seemed almost indifferent to any adventures Jill and Lockley might have had on their way out. He didn’t ask what they’d done for food. He was thinking of something else.
Lockley found himself questioning the driver’s statements just after they got in. Driving for the Army. The Army kept track of where the terror beams existed, and notified this truck by truck radio, and he dodged all such road barriers. That was what he said. It seemed plausible, but—
“One thing strikes me funny,” said the driver, musingly. “Those critters blindfoldin’ you and those other guys. What’ you think they did it for?”
“To keep us from seeing them,” said Lockley, curtly.
“But why’d they want to do that?”
“Because,” said Lockley, “they might not have been Martians. They might not have been critters. They might have been men.”
On the instant he regretted bitterly that he’d said it. It was a guess, only, with all the evidence against it. The driver visibly jumped. Then he turned his head.
“Where’d you get that idea?” he demanded. “What’s the evidence? Why d’you think it?”
“They blindfolded me,” said Lockley briefly.
A pause. Then the driver said vexedly, “That’s a funny thing to make you think they was men! Hell! Excuse me, ma’m!—they coulda had all kindsa reasons for blindfoldin’ you! It coulda been part of their religion!”
“Maybe,” said Lockley. He was angry with himself for having said something which was needlessly dramatic.
“Didn’t you have any other reason for thinkin’ they were men?” demanded the driver curiously. “No other reason at all?”
“No other at all,” said Lockley.
“It’s a crazy reason, if you ask me!”
“Quite likely,” conceded Lockley.
He’d been indiscreet, but no more. He’d said what he thought, perhaps because he was tired of watching all the country round him for a menace to Jill, and then watching every word he spoke to keep her from abandoning hope for Vale.
Jill said, “Where are we headed for? I hope I can get to a telephone. I want to ask about somebody.… He wants to tell the soldiers something.”
“We’re headed for a
army supply dump,” said the driver comfortably, “to load up with stuff for the guys that’re watching all around the Park. We’ll be goin’ through Serena presently. Funny. Everybody moved out by the Army. A good thing, too. The folks in Maplewood couldn’t ha’ been got out last night before the Martians got there.”
The trailer-truck went on through the night. The driver lounged in his seat, keeping a negligent but capable eye on the road ahead. The headlights showed a place where another road crossed this one and there was a filling station, still and dark, and four or five dwellings nearby with no single sign of life about them. Then the crossroads settlement fell behind. A mile beyond it Jill said startledly, “Lights! There’s a town. It’s lighted.”
“It’s Serena,” said the driver. “The street lights are on because the electricity comes from far away. With the lights on it’s a marker for the planes, too, so they can tell exactly where they are and the Park too. They can’t see the ground so good at night, from away up there.”
The white street lamps seemed to twinkle as the trailer-truck rumbled on. A single long line of them appeared to welcome the big vehicle. It went on into the town. It reached the business district. There were side streets, utterly empty, and then the main street divided. The truck bore to the right. There were three and four-story buildings. Every window was blank and empty, reflecting only the white street lamps. No living thing anywhere. There had been no destruction, but the town was dead. Its lights shone on streets so empty that it would have seemed better to leave them to the kindly dark.
Jill exclaimed, “Look! That window!”
And ahead, in the dead and lifeless town, a single window glowed from electric light inside it, and it looked lonelier than anything else in the world.
“I’m gonna look into that!” said the driver. “Nobody’s supposed to be here.”
The truck came to a stop. The driver got out. There was a stirring, behind, and the small man who’d given his place to Jill and Lockley popped out of the trailer body. Lockley saw the name of a local telephone company silhouetted on the lighted windowpane. He opened the door. Jill followed him instantly. The four of them—driver, helper, Lockley and Jill—crowded into the building hallway to in vestigate the one lighted room in a town where twenty thousand people were supposed to live.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 206
