William Fitzgerald Jenkins - Operation Terror

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Then Lockley had been a quiet and well-conducted citizen inclined to
pessimism about future events, but duly considerate of the rights of
others. Now he'd changed. He felt only one emotion, which was hatred
such as he'd never imagined before. He had only one motive, which was
to take total and annihilating vengeance for what had been done to
Jill.

He plodded on and on. He had to make a march of not less than twenty
miles from the Park's beginning. He journeyed on foot because there
were terror beams to pass and automobile engines did not run when his
protective device operated. He could not arm himself from the cars
that ditched, because all chemical explosive weapons and their
ammunition blew at the same time. He was a minute figure among the
mountains, marching alone upon a winding highway, moving resolutely to
destroy--alone--the invaders from outer space and the men who worked
with them for the conquest of earth. For his purpose he carried the
strangest of equipment, a device made of a pocket radio and a cheese
grater.

He had food in his pockets, but he could not eat. During the afternoon
he became impatient of its weight and threw it away. But he thirsted
often. More than once he drank from small streams over which the
highway builders had made small concrete bridges.

At three in the afternoon a truck came up from behind. Here he
trudged between steep cliffs which made him seem almost a midget. The
highway went through a crevice between adjoining mountainsides. There
was no place for him to conceal himself. When he heard the engine, he
stopped and faced it. The truck had picked up many men from wrecked
cars along its route. There were scorched and scratched and wounded
men, hurt by the explosion of their firearms. The truck brought them
along and overtook Lockley.

He waited very calmly since it did not seem likely that they would
realize that one man had caused the crashes. The driver of the truck
with the picked-up men did not even think of such a thing. Lockley
seemed much more likely the victim of still another wreck.

The overtaking truck slowed down. There would be no strangers in
Boulder Lake Park. There would only be the task force aiding the
monsters, as Lockley reasoned it out. So the truck slowed, preparatory
to taking Lockley aboard.

At a hundred and twenty-five yards from Lockley, weapons in the truck
cab blew themselves violently apart. The engine, stopped in gear,
acted as a violently applied brake. The truck swerved off the highway.
It turned over and was still.

Lockley turned and walked on. He considered coldly that it was
perfectly safe for him to go on. There were no weapons left behind
him. The men themselves were shaken up. They would attempt to make no
trouble beyond a report of their situation and a plea for help. The
report could be made by the radio, which was not smashed.

Half an hour later, Lockley felt the tingling which meant that his
instrument was protecting him from a terror beam. The tingling lasted
only a short time, but fifteen minutes later it came back. Then it
returned at odd intervals. Five minutes--eight--ten--three--six--one.
Each time the terror beam should have paralyzed him and caused intense
suffering. A man with no protective device would have had his nerves
shattered by torment coming so violently at unpredictable intervals.

Lockley tried to reason out why this nerve-wracking application of the
terror beam hadn't been used before. To an unprotected man it would be
worse than continuous pain. No living man could remain able to resist
any demand if exposed to such torture.

The beam was evidently swung at random intervals, and the phenomenon
lasted for an hour and a half. Anyone but Lockley behind a cloud of
ions would have been reduced to shivering hysteria. Then, suddenly,
the beamings stopped. But Lockley left his device in operation.

Half an hour later still--close to five o'clock--it appeared that the
invaders assumed that any enemy should have been softened up for
capture. They sent an expedition to find out what had happened to
their trucks and cars.

Lockley saw four cars and a light truck in close formation moving
toward him from the Lake. They were close, as if for mutual
protection. They moved steadily, as if inviting the fate that had
overtaken others. The short wave reports from smashed trucks seemed
improbable to them, but the expedition was equipped to investigate
even such unlikely happenings.

The four cars in the lead contained five men each. Each man was armed
with a rifle containing a single cartridge in its chamber and none in
its magazine. The rifles pointed straight up. There was more
ammunition in the light truck behind, and it was in clips ready for
use, but the truck body was of iron. If that ammunition detonated, it
could do no harm. If it did not, it would be available for use against
the single man mentioned by the driver of the last truck to be
wrecked.

But Lockley saw them coming. They came sedately down a long straight
stretch of road. He climbed a rocky wall beside the highway to a
little ravine that led away from the road. He posted himself where he
was extremely unlikely to be seen. Then he waited.

The cavalcade of cars appeared. It drove briskly toward Lockley at
something like thirty miles an hour. Perhaps ten yards separated the
lead car from the second. The truck was a trifle closer to the four
man-carrying vehicles. They swept along, every man alert. They would
pass forty feet below Lockley.

He did nothing. His device was already turned on. He watched in
detached calm.

The lead car stopped as if it had run into a brick wall, while rifles
inside it blew holes in its top. The second car crashed into it,
rifles detonating. The third car. The fourth. The truck piled into the
others with a gigantic flare and furious report, each separate brass
cartridge case exploding in the same instant. The truck became scrap
iron.

Lockley went away along the small ravine. From now on he would avoid
the highway. He estimated that he would arrive at Boulder Lake itself
about half an hour after dark. It occurred to him that then Jill would
have been a prisoner of the invaders for something more than twelve
hours, at least ten of them at their headquarters.

Before he began the climb that would take him to the invaders, Lockley
stopped at a small stream.

He drank thirstily.

CHAPTER 10

There was a three-day-old moon in the sky when the last colors faded
in the west. When darkness fell it was already low. It gave little
light; not much more than the stars alone. It did help Lockley while
it lasted however. He knew the terrain about Boulder Lake but not in
detail. And it would not be wise for him to move openly to wreak
destruction on the enemies of his nation.

He used the moonlight for his approach by the least practical route to
the lake. When it dimmed and went behind the mountains, he continued
to climb, sliding dangerously, then descend and climb again as the
rough going demanded. His mind was absorbed with reflections upon what
he meant to do. The wrecks on the highway would have given notice to
the invaders that he could do damage. They would take every possible
precaution against him.

It was typical of Lockley that he painstakingly imagined every
obstacle that might be put in his way. During the last half hour of
his scrambling travel, for example, he was tormented by a measure his
enemies might have used to make him advertise his presence. If they
simply laid rifle cartridges on the ground at intervals of twenty-five
or fifty yards, he could not cross that line with his device in
operation without blowing up those shells. It was a possible
countermeasure that caused him to sweat with worry.

But it wasn't thought of by anyone else. To contrive it, a man would
have to know how the detonation field worked and how far it extended.
Nobody but Lockley knew. Therefore no one could contrive this defense
against him.

He worked his way to Boulder Lake's back door through brushwood and
over boulders. Presently he looked down upon his destination. To his
right and left rocky masses were silhouetted against the starry sky.
He gazed down on the lake and the shoreline where the hotel would be
built, and the places where roads came out of the wilderness.

There were changes since the time he'd looked down from Vale's survey
post and before the terror beam captured him. He catalogued them
mentally, but the sight before him was intolerable. Everything he saw,
here where space monsters were believed to hold sway, was in reality
the work of men. Rage filled him at the sight. Hatred. Fury....

In the rest of the world an entirely different sort of emotion was
felt about the subject of the invaders. The United States had
announced to all the world that American and other scientists, working
together, had solved the mystery of the alien weapon. They had
produced a duplicate of the terror beam. It was no less effective and
no less an absolute weapon than the invaders'. And a defense had been
found which was complete. It was being rushed into production. The
experimental counter beam generators would be moved into position to
frustrate and defeat the monsters who had landed upon earth. Military
detachments, protected by the counter generators, would move upon
Boulder Lake at dawn. By sunset tomorrow the aliens would be dead or
captive, and their ship would undoubtedly be in the hands of
scientists for study.

Moreover, the United States would provide counter weapons for other
nations. In no more than months every continent and nation on earth
would be equipped to defy any alien landing that might take place.
The world would be able to defend itself. It would be equipped to do
so. And this was the resolve of the United States because the world
could not exist half free and half enslaved by creatures from a
distant planet. The news poured out from all sources. The alien weapon
was understood and now could be defied. Soon all the world would be
provided with counter weapons. It was necessary for all the world to
be prepared and prepared it would be.

This was the information which made all the world rejoice, though not
yet at ease because aliens still occupied a tiny part of the earth.
But all the world was eager for confirmation of the news it had just
received.

Lockley had no such soothing anticipations. He shook with fury because
what he saw before him was so appalling as to be almost unbelievable.

It was not dark in the space he looked down upon. There were bright
floodlights placed here and there to drench a large area with light.
There were few figures in sight. But what the floodlights showed made
Lockley quiver with hatred.

The floodlights were of typically human type. There were vehicles
parked on a level grassy space. They were of human manufacture. There
was no space ship in the lake, but there was a three-stage rocket set
up, ready for firing. It was of the kind used by humans to put
artificial satellites into orbit. Lockley even knew its designation,
and that it used the new solid fuels for propulsion.

In the lair of the creatures from outer space there was nothing from
outer space. There was nothing in view which was alien or unearthly or
extra-terrestrial. And Lockley made inarticulate growling sounds
because he saw with absolute clarity and certainty that there never
had been anything from outer space at this spot.

There were no monsters. There never had been. And the truth was more
horribly enraging than the deception had been.

Because this could mean the death of the world. This was an attempt to
fight the last war on earth in disguise. Humans had posed as non-human
beings so that America would fight against phantoms while its great
military rival pretended to help and actually stabbed from behind.

It was completely logical, of course. An admitted attack by terror
beams in the form of death rays would involve retaliation by America.
Against a human enemy great, roaring missiles could circle earth to
plunge down upon that enemy's cities to turn them and their
inhabitants into incandescent gas. An attack known to be by humans and
upon humans must touch off the world's last war in which every living
thing might die. No conceivable success at the beginning could prevent
full retaliation. But if the attack were believed to be from space,
then American weapons and valor would be spent against creatures which
were no more than ghosts.

Lockley moved forward. Only he could know the situation as it
presented itself here. Even vengeance for Jill should be put aside, if
it called for action irrelevant to this state of things. But it did
not. A full and terrible revenge for her required exactly the action
the coolest of cold-blooded resolutions would suggest be taken now.
And Lockley moved on and downward to take it.

He began to crawl downhill toward the lights, unaware that there were
some gaps in his picture of the total scene. For example, these lights
could be detected by aircraft overhead. The fact did not occur to
Lockley. He was not given pause by the relaxation of the enemy's
disguise so far as air observation was concerned. He didn't think of
it. He moved on.

He drew near the lighted area. He did not walk, he crawled. He began
to listen with fury-sharpened ears. If he could get close to that huge
rocket, close enough to detonate its solid fuel stores....

That would be at once revenge and expedience. If the rocket's fuel
blew up instead of burning as intended, it would annihilate the camp.
It would wipe out every living creature present. But there would be
fragments left by the explosion. There would be corpses. There would
be wreckage. And that wreckage and those corpses would be unmistakably
human. The last war on earth might not be avoided, but at the worst it
would be fought against America's actual enemy and not against
imaginary monsters.

It was worth dying to accomplish even that. But Jill....

Lockley's progress was infinitely slow, but he needed to take the
greatest pains. He listened carefully.

He heard the faint high roaring of the planes overhead. They were far
away. There were sounds of insects, and the cries of night birds, and
the rustling of leaves and foliage.

There was another sound. A new sound. It was inexplicable. It was a
strange and intermittent muttering. There was a certain irregular
rhythm to it, a familiar rhythm.

He crawled on.

There was movement suddenly, off to his left. Then it stopped. It
could be a man on watch against him simply shifting his position.
Lockley froze, and then went on with even greater caution. He felt
the ground before him for small twigs that might crack under his
weight.

The muttering continued. Presently Lockley realized that it was a
human voice. It was resonant and with many overtones, but still too
faint for him to distinguish words.

He crossed a slight rise that had much brushwood. The brushwood grew
in clumps and he circled them with a patient caution foreign to his
feelings.

The muttering changed and went on. Lockley pressed himself to the
ground. Men went past him a hundred feet away. He saw them in outline
against the illuminated parked cars and trucks and in the space around
the huge rocket. They carried no rifles, probably no firearms at all.
Lockley's march up the highway had warned them of the uselessness of
guns, at least at short range. They were watching for him now. Perhaps
these men were relieving other watchers on the hillside.

He saw other men. They seemed to move restlessly around the lighted
area.

The muttering was louder now. He could almost catch the words. He made
another hundred yards toward the rocket and the voice changed again.
Then he was dazed. The voice was speaking to him! Calling him by name!

_"Lockley! Lockley! Don't do anything crazy! Everything can be
explained! You'll recognize my voice. You talked to me on the
telephone from Serena!_"

Lockley did recognize the voice. It was that of the general who'd
sounded pompous and indignant as he refused to listen to Lockley's
statements. Now, coming out of many loudspeakers and echoing hollowly
from cliffs, it was the same voice but with an intonation that was
persuasive and forthright.

"_You startled me_," said the voice crisply. "_You'd found out there
were humans involved in this business. It was important that the fact
be suppressed. I tried to browbeat you, which was a mistake. While I
was talking to you your suspicion was reported on short wave by the
Wild Life driver. I tried to overawe you. You're the wrong kind of man
for that. But everything can be explained. Everything! Here's Vale to
prove it!_"

There was only an instant's pause. Then Vale's voice came out of the
loudspeakers spread all about.

"_Lockley, this is Vale. The whole thing's faked. There's a good
reason for it, but you stumbled on the facts. They had to be kept
secret. I didn't even tell Jill. This isn't treason, Lockley. We
aren't traitors! Come out and I'll explain everything. Here's
Sattell._"

And Sattell's voice boomed against the hills.

"_Vale's right, Lockley! I didn't know what was up. I was fooled as
much as anybody. But it's all right! It's perfectly all right! When
you understand you'll realize that you had to be deceived just as I
was. Come on out and everything will be explained to your
satisfaction. I promise!_"

Lockley grimaced. How did Sattell get up here? And the general in
command of the cordon? More than that, why did they call his name
instead of simply trying to kill him? Why post watchers on the
hillsides if they were anxious to explain and not to murder? How could
they hope to deceive him after Jill....

There was a pause, and then what was evidently considered a decisive
message came. It was Jill's voice, weary and desperate. It said,
"_Please come out and listen! Please come and let them explain
everything. They can do it. I understand and I believe them. It's
true. It's not treason. I--I beg you to come out and let them tell
you why all this has happened...._"

Her voice trailed off. It had trembled. It was tense. It was strained.
And Lockley cursed softly, shaking with rage. Then the first voice
returned, "_Lockley! Lockley! Don't do anything crazy! Everything can
be explained. You'll recognize my voice. You talked to me on the
telephone from Serena._"

This voice repeated, word for word and intonation for intonation,
exactly what it had said before. The other voices followed in the same
order. They were taped.

In Lockley's state of mind, the taping took away all authority from
the voices. Jill, in particular, sounded as she might have if torture
had been used to break her will and force her to say what her captors
wished. She could not put any warning into it, because she could have
been forced to repeat and repeat the message until her captors were
satisfied.

That would all be avenged now. All of it. And Jill would be grateful
to Lockley even if they never saw each other again; grateful for the
monstrous blast that would wipe this place clean of living creatures.

Lockley suddenly saw a way by which his vengeance could be increased
by just a little. It could be made even more satisfying and just.
Hiding under brushwood while the voices tirelessly repeated their
recorded persuasion, he made a very simple device. It switched onto
the instrument he carried. If his hand clenched, it would go on. If
his hand relaxed, it would go on. So if he could get within a hundred
and twenty-five yards of the rocket he could show himself and let them
know what waited for them, and why.

With infinite patience he got to a place almost near the circle of
unarmed guards about the rocket. He waited. The guards were tense.
They did not like trying to protect something with no weapons. They
were jumpy. The endlessly repeated messages booming into the night
frayed their nerves. They were plainly on edge.

Their tenseness made the oldest trick in the world serve Lockley's
purpose. He threw a stone from an especially dark shadow. It struck
and bounced upon another stone, and it created a rustling of brushwood
at a place distant from Lockley. And the unarmed guards plunged for
that place to seize whatever or whoever had made the disturbance.

They were too eager. They stumbled upon each other.

And Lockley ran, and a voice cried out in terror. And then Lockley
stood with his back to the rocket's lower parts, and he waved the
cheese grater derisively and shouted.

Then there was stillness. Only the booming voice from the speakers
went on. It happened to be Sattell's voice.

"_ ... all right. It's perfectly all right. When you understand you'll
realize that you had to be deceived as I was. It was necessary. Come
out and everything--_"

Somebody cut off the recorder. There was a moment of blank indecision,
and then a man in uniform with two general's stars on his shoulders
came out of somewhere and walked to face Lockley.

"Ah, Lockley!" he said briskly. "That's the thing you smash cars and
explode ammunition with, eh? Do you think it will blow the rocket?"

"I'm going to try it!" said Lockley. "Listen." He showed how anything
that could be done to him would close the switch one way or the other.
"I wanted you to know before I blow it!" he said fiercely. "Where's
Jill? Jill Holmes? One of your cars picked her up and brought her
here. Where is she?"

"We sent her," said the general, "over to the construction camp, in
case you managed to get in the exact situation you're in. In other
words, she's safe. She'll be coming shortly, though. She was to be
notified the instant you appeared--if the rocket didn't blast as your
greeting."

Lockley ground his teeth.

"We'll have this settled before she gets here!"

Vale appeared. He walked forward and stood beside the general.

"We did a job that was several times too good, Lockley," he said
ruefully. "I'd rehearsed my song-and-dance until we thought it was
perfect. What made you suspicious, Lockley? Did you notice we kept the
communicator aimed right so you'd hear through to the end? A fine
point, that. We worried about it."

The headlights of a car moved against a mountainside.

"You see," said Vale, "the thing had to be done this way! Sattell
swore a blue streak when it was explained to him. He felt he'd been
made a fool of. But there are some things that can't be handled
forthrightly!"

Lockley felt physically ill. Jill had been--still was--engaged to
Vale. She'd been anxious about him. She'd been loyal to him. And he
was helping the invaders! He opened his mouth to speak bitterly, when
Sattell appeared. He lined up beside the general and Vale.

"They fooled me too, Lockley," he said wryly. "But it's all right.
They had to. They thought you were fooled. Those three men in the box
with you the other day, they said you were fooled, too. And they're
sharp secret service men!"

"You're very convincing, aren't you?" he raged. "But--"

"You believe," said Sattell, "I've joined up with spies and traitors.
You believe...."

He outlined, with precision, exactly what Lockley did believe; that
phantom monsters were to be credited with waging war against America
while another nation actually murdered Americans. It was a remarkably
accurate picture of Lockley's state of mind.

"But that's all wrong!" insisted Sattell. "This is a quick trick by
our own people for our own safety. For the benefit of all the world.
It's a trick to forestall just what I described!"

The far away headlights drew nearer. But no car could have come from
the construction camp as quickly as this.

"The fact is," said the general, "that our spies tell us that another
very great nation has developed this beam we've been demonstrating to
all the world. So did we. And we couldn't use it, but they would! If
they didn't use it against us, they'd use it for any sort of emergency
dirty trick. So we made up this invasion to persuade every country on
earth to arm itself against this particular weapon. Nothing less than
monsters in space would justify arming, in the eyes of some
politicians! Of course, they'll arm against us as well as--anybody
else."

He spoke matter-of-factly. A glance at Lockley's face would have told
him that persuasiveness would not work.

"This trick, with the defense we intended to reveal," the general
added, "should mean that a very nasty weapon won't ever be used,
either to start or end a war. Maybe the war won't occur because we've
said there are monsters who fly around in space ships."

Lockley had a confused impression that he was dreaming this. It was
not the way things should happen! This was not true! When he squeezed
or released the improvised switch in his hand, the rocket behind him
would disappear in a monstrous flame, and he and the three men who
faced him would, vanish, and there would be an explosion crater here
and a shattered mass of wrecked cars--

"It was an interesting job," said Vale. "The Army dumped a hundred
tons of high explosive into the lake. The two radars that reported a
ship in space were arranged to be operated by two special men, who got
their orders directly from the President. We picked a day with full
cloud cover; the radar operators inserted their faked tapes and made
their reports; and the Army set off the hundred-ton explosion in the
lake. From there on, it was just a matter of using the terror beam."

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