William Fitzgerald Jenkins - Operation Terror

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Lockley hesitated. "It's not likely," he said carefully, "that he was
left there injured. But if you feel that somebody has to make sure,
I'll do it. For one thing, I can climb faster. My car is ditched back
yonder. You go and wait by it. At least it's farther from the lake and
you should be safer there. I'll make sure about Vale."

He explained in detail how she could find the car. Up this hillside to
a slash through the forest for a highway. Due south from an abandoned
bulldozer. Keep out of sight. Never show against a skyline.

She swallowed again. Then she said, "If he needs help, you could--do
more than I can. But I'll wait there where the woods begin. I can hide
if I need to, and I--might be of some use."

He realized that she deluded herself with the hope that he, Lockley,
might bring an injured Vale down the mountainside and that she could
be useful then. He let her. He went through the camp with her to put
her on the right track. He gave her the pocket radio, so she could
listen for news. When she went on out of sight in brushwood, he turned
back toward the mountain on which Vale had occupied an observation
post. It was actually a million-year-old crater wall that he climbed
presently. And he took a considerable chance. As he climbed, for some
time he moved in plain view. If the crew of the ship in Boulder Lake
were watching, they'd see him rather than Jill. If they took action,
it would be against him and not Jill. Somehow he felt better equipped
to defend himself than Jill would be.

He climbed. Again the world was completely normal, commonplace. There
were mountain peaks on every hand. Some had been volcanoes
originally, some had not. With each five hundred feet of climbing, he
could see still more mountains. The sky was cloudless now. He climbed
a thousand feet. Two. Three. He could see between peaks for a full
thirty miles to the spot where he'd been at daybreak. But he was
making his ascent on the back flank of this particular mountain. He
could not see Boulder Lake from there. On the other hand, no creature
at Boulder Lake should be able to see him. Only an exploring party
which might otherwise sight Jill would be apt to detect him, a slowly
moving speck against a mountainside.

He reached the level at which Vale's post had been assigned. He moved
carefully and cautiously around intervening masses of stone. The wind
blew past him, making humming noises in his ears. Once he dislodged a
small stone and it went bouncing and clattering down the slope he'd
climbed.

He saw where Vale could have been as he watched something come down
from the sky. He found Vale's sleeping bag, and the ashes of his
campfire. Here too was the communicator. It had been smashed by a huge
stone lifted and dropped upon it, but before that it had been moved.
It was not in place on the bench mark from which it could measure
inches in a distance of scores of miles.

There was no other sign of what had apparently happened here. The
ashes of the fire were undisturbed. Vale's sleeping bag looked as if
it had not been slept in, as if it had only been spread out for the
night before. Lockley went over the rock shelf inch by inch. No red
stains which might be blood. Nothing....

No. In a patch of soft earth between two stones there was a hoofprint.
It was not a footprint. A hoof had made it, but not a horse's hoof,
nor a burro's. It wasn't a mountain sheep track. It was not the track
of any animal known on earth. But it was here. Lockley found himself
wondering absurdly if the creature that had made it would squeak, or
if it would roar. They seemed equally unlikely.

He looked cautiously down at the lake which was almost half a mile
below him. The water was utterly blue. It reflected only the crater
wall and the landscape beyond the area where the volcanic cliffs had
fallen. Nothing moved. There was no visible apparatus set up on the
shore, as Vale had said. But something had happened down in the lake.
Trees by the water's edge were bent and broken. Masses of brushwood
had been crushed and torn away. Limbs were broken down tens of yards
from the water, and there were gullies to be seen wherever there was
soft earth. An enormous wave had flung itself against the nearly
circular boundary of the lake. It had struck like a tidal wave dozens
of feet high in an inland body of water. It was extremely convincing
evidence that something huge and heavy had hurtled down from the sky.

But Lockley saw no movement nor any other novelty in this wilderness.
He heard nothing that was not an entirely normal sound.

But then he smelled something.

It was a horrible, somehow reptilian odor. It was the stench of
jungle, dead and rotting. It was much, much worse than the smell of a
skunk.

He moved to fling himself into flight. Then light blinded him. Closing
his eyelids did not shut it out. There were all colors, intolerably
vivid, and they flashed in revolving combinations and forms which
succeeded each other in fractions of seconds. He could see nothing but
this light. Then there came sound. It was raucous. It was cacophonic.
It was an utterly unorganized tumult in which musical notes and
discords and bellowings and shriekings were combined so as to be
unbearable. And then came pure horror as he found that he could not
move. Every inch of his body had turned rigid as it became filled with
anguish. He felt, all over, as if he were holding a charged wire.

He knew that he fell stiffly where he stood. He was blinded by light
and deafened by sound and his nostrils were filled with the nauseating
fetor of jungle and decay. These sensations lasted for what seemed
years.

Then all the sensations ended abruptly. But he still could not see;
his eyes were still dazzled by the lights that closing his eyelids had
not changed. He still could not hear. He'd been deafened by the sounds
that had dazed and numbed him. He moved, and he knew it, but he could
not feel anything. His hands and body felt numb.

Then he sensed that the positions of his arms and legs were changed.
He struggled, blind and deaf and without feeling anywhere. He knew
that he was confined. His arms were fastened somehow so that he could
not move them.

And then gradually--very gradually--his senses returned. He heard
squeakings. At first they were faint as the exhausted nerve ends in
his ears only began to regain their function. He began to regain the
sense of touch, though he felt only furriness everywhere.

He was raised up. It seemed to him that claws rather than fingers
grasped him. He stood erect, swaying. His sense of balance had been
lost without his realizing it. It came back, very slowly. But he saw
nothing. Clawlike hands--or handlike claws--pulled at him. He felt
himself turned and pushed. He staggered. He took steps out of the need
to stay erect. The pushings and pullings continued. He found himself
urged somewhere. He realized that his arms were useless because they
were wrapped with something like cord or rope.

Stumbling, he responded to the urging. There was nothing else to do.
He found himself descending. He was being led somewhere which could
only be downward. He was guided, not gently, but not brutally either.

He waited for sight to return to him. It did not come.

It was then he realized that he could not see because he was
blindfolded.

There were whistling squeaks very near him. He began helplessly to
descend the mountain, surrounded and guided and sometimes pulled by
unseen creatures.

CHAPTER 3

It was a long descent, made longer by the blindfold and clumsier by
his inability to move his arms. More than once Lockley stumbled. Twice
he fell. The clawlike hands or handlike claws lifted him and thrust
him on the way that was being chosen for him. There were whistling
squeaks. Presently he realized that some of them were directed at him.
A squeak or whistle in a warning tone told him that he must be
especially careful just here.

He came to accept the warnings. It occurred to him that the squeaks
sounded very much like those button-shaped hollow whistles that
children put in their mouths to make strident sounds of varying pitch.
Gradually, all his senses returned to normal. Even his eyes under the
blindfold ceased to report only glare blindness, and he saw those
peculiar, dissolving grayish patterns that human eyes transmit from
darkness.

More squeakings. A long time later he moved over nearly level grassy
ground. He was led for possibly half a mile. He had not tried to speak
during all his descent. It would have been useless. If he was to be
killed, he would be killed. But trouble had been taken to bring him
down alive from a remaining bit of crumbling crater wall. His captors
had evidently some use for him in mind.

They abruptly held him still for a long time--perhaps as much as an
hour. It seemed that either instructions were hard to come by, or some
preparation was being made. Then the sound of something or someone
approaching. Squeaks.

He was led another long distance. Then claws or hands lifted him.
Metal clanked. Those who held him dropped him. He fell three or four
feet onto soft sand. There was a clanging of metal above his head.

Then a human voice said sardonically, "Welcome to our city! Where'd
they catch you?"

Lockley said, "Up on a mountainside, trying to see what they were
doing. Will you get me loose, please?"

Hands worked on the cord that bound his arms close to his body. They
loosened. He removed the blindfold.

He was in a metal-walled and metal-ceilinged vault, perhaps eight feet
wide and the same in height, and perhaps twelve feet long. It had a
floor of sand. Some small amount of light came in through the circular
hole he'd been dropped through, despite a cover on it. There were
three men already in confinement here. They wore clothing appropriate
to workmen from the construction camp. There was a tall lean man, and
a broad man with a moustache, and a chunky man. The chunky man had
spoken.

"Did you see any of 'em?" he demanded now.

Lockley shook his head. The three looked at each other and nodded.
Lockley saw that they hadn't been imprisoned long. The sand floor was
marked but not wholly formed into footprints, as it would have been
had they moved restlessly about. Mostly, it appeared, they'd simply
sat on the sand floor.

"We didn't see 'em either," said the chunky man. "There was a hell of
a explosion over at the lake this mornin'. We piled in a car--my
car--and came over to see what'd happened. Then something hit us. All
of us. Lights. Noise. A godawful stink. A feeling all over like an
electric shock that paralyzed us. We came to blindfolded and tied.
They brought us here. That's our story so far. What's happened to
you--and what really happened to us?"

"I'm not sure," said Lockley.

He hesitated. Then he told them about Vale, and what he'd reported.
They'd had no explanation at all of what had happened to them. They
seemed relieved to be informed, though the information was hardly
heartening.

"Critters from Mars, eh?" said the moustached man. "I guess we'd act
the same way if we was to get to Mars. They got to figure out some way
to talk to who lives here. I guess that makes us it--unless we can
figure out something better."

Lockley, by temperament, tended to anticipate worse things in the
future than had come in the past. The suggestion that the occupants of
the spaceship had captured men to learn how to communicate with them
seemed highly optimistic. He realized that he didn't believe it. It
seemed extremely unlikely that the invaders from space were entirely
ignorant of humanity. The choice of Boulder Lake as a landing place,
for example, could not have been made from space. If there was need
for deep water to land in--which seemed highly probable--then it would
have been simple good sense to descend in the ocean. The ship could
submerge, and it could move about in the lake. Vale had said so. Such
a ship would almost inevitably choose deep water in the ocean for a
landing place. To land in a crater lake--one of possibly two or three
on an entire continent suitable for their use--indicated that they had
information in advance. Detailed information. It practically shouted
of a knowledge of at least one human language, by which information
about Crater Lake could have been obtained. Whoever or whatever made
use of the lake was no stranger to earth!

Yes.... They'd needed a deep-water landing and they knew that Boulder
Lake would do. They probably knew very much more. But if they didn't
know that Jill waited for him where the trail toward his ditched car
began, then there was no reason to let them overhear the information.

"I was part of a team making some base line measurements," said
Lockley, "when this business started. I began to check my instruments
with a man named Vale."

He told exactly, for the second time, what Vale said about the thing
from the sky and the creatures who came out of it. Then he told what
he'd done. But he omitted all reference to Jill. His coming to the
lake he ascribed to incredulity. Also, he did not mention meeting the
fleeing population of the construction camp. When his story was
finished he sounded like a man who'd done a very foolhardy thing, but
he didn't sound like a man with a girl on his mind.

The broad man with the moustache asked a question or two. The tall man
asked others. Lockley asked many.

The answers were frustrating. They hadn't seen their captors at all.
They'd heard squeaks when they were being brought to this place, and
the squeaks were obviously language, but no human one. They'd been
bound as well as blindfolded. They hadn't been offered food since
their capture, nor water. It seemed as if they'd been seized and put
into this metal compartment to wait for some use of them by their
captors.

"Maybe they want to teach us to talk," said the moustached man, "or
maybe they're goin' to carve us up to see what makes us tick. Or
maybe," he grimaced, "maybe they want to know if we're good to eat."

The chunky man said, "Why'd they blindfold us?"

Lockley had begun to have a very grim suspicion about this. It came
out of the realization of how remarkable it was that a ship designed
to be navigable in deep water should have landed in a deep crater
lake. He said, "Vale said at first that they weren't human, though
they were only specks in his binoculars. Later, when he saw them
close, he didn't say what they look like."

"Must be pretty weird," said the tall man.

"Maybe," said the man with the moustache, attempting humor, "maybe
they didn't want us to see them because we'd be scared. Or maybe they
didn't mean to blindfold us, but just to cover us up. Maybe they
wouldn't mind us seeing them, but it hurts for them to look at us!"

Lockley said abruptly, "This box we're in. It's made by humans."

The moustached man said quickly, "We figured that. It's the shell of
a compost pit for the hotel that's goin' to be built around here.
They'll sink it in the ground and dump garbage in it, and it'll rot,
and then it'll be fertilizer. These critters from space are just using
it to hold us. But what are they gonna do with us?"

There were faint squeakings. The cover to the round opening lifted.
Three rabbits dropped down. The cover closed with a clang. The rabbits
shivered and crouched, terrified, in one corner.

"Is this how they're gonna feed us?" demanded the chunky man.

"Hell, no!" said the tall man, in evident disgust. "They're dumped in
here like we were. They're animals. So are we. This is a temporary
cage. It's got a sand floor that we can bury things in. It won't be
any trouble to clean out. The rabbits and us, we stay caged until
they're ready to do whatever they're goin' to do with us."

"Which is what?" demanded the chunky man.

There was no answer. They would either be killed, or they would not.
There was nothing to be done. Meanwhile Lockley evaluated his three
fellow captives as probably rather good men to have on one's side, and
bad ones to have against one. But there was no action which was
practical now. A single guard outside, able to paralyze them by
whatever means it was accomplished, made any idea of escape in
daylight foolish.

"What kind of critters are they?" demanded the chunky man. "Maybe we
could figure out what they'll do if we know what kind of thing they
are!"

"They've got eyes like ours," said Lockley.

The three men looked at him.

"They landed by daylight," said Lockley. "Early daylight. They could
certainly have picked the time for their landing. They picked early
morning so they could have a good long period of daylight in which to
get settled before night. If they'd been night moving creatures,
they'd have landed in the dark."

The tall man said, "Sounds reasonable. I didn't think of that."

"They saw me at a distance," said Lockley, "and I didn't see them.
They've got good eyes. They beat me up to the top of the mountain and
hid to see what I'd do. When they saw me looking the lake over after
checking up on Vale, they paralyzed me and brought me here. So they've
got eyes like ours."

"This guy Vale," said the chunky man. "What happened to him?"

Lockley said, "Probably what'll happen to us."

"Which is what?" asked the chunky man.

Lockley did not answer. He thought of Jill, waiting anxiously at the
edge of the woods not far from the camp. She'd surely have watched him
climbing. She might have followed his climb all the way to where he
went around to Vale's post. But she wouldn't have seen his capture and
she might be waiting for him now. It wasn't likely, though, that she'd
climb into the trap that had taken Vale and then himself. She must
realize that that spot was one to be avoided.

She'd probably try to make her way to his ditched car. She'd heard him
ask on short wave for a helicopter to come to that place to pick her
up. It hadn't been promised; in fact it had been refused. But if she
remained missing, surely someone would risk a low-level flight to find
out if she were waiting desperately for rescue. A light plane could
land on the highway if a helicopter wasn't to be risked. Somehow Jill
must find a way to safety. She was in danger because she'd waited
loyally for Vale to come to her at the camp. Now....

Time passed. Hot sunshine on their prison heated the metal. It became
unbearably hot inside. There came squeakings. The cover of the compost
pit shell lifted. Half a dozen wild birds were thrust into the
opening. The cover closed again. Lockley listened closely. It was
latched from the outside. There would naturally be a fastening on the
cover of a compost pit to keep bears from getting at the garbage it
was built to contain.

The heat grew savage. Thirst was a problem. Once and only once they
heard a noise from the world beyond their prison. It was a droning hum
which, even through a metal wall, could be nothing but the sound of a
helicopter. It droned and droned, very gradually becoming louder.
Then, abruptly, it cut off. That was all. And that was all that the
four in the metal tank knew about events outside of their own
experience.

But much was happening outside. Troop-carrying trucks had reached the
edge of Boulder Lake National Park, a very few hours after the workmen
from the camp had gotten out of it. They had a story to tell, and if
it lacked detail it did not lack imagination. The three missing men
had their fate described in various versions, all of which were
dramatic and terrifying. The two men who had been paralyzed by some
unknown agency described their sensations after their release. Their
stories were immediately relayed to all the news media. It now
appeared that dozens of men had seen the thing descend from the sky.
They had not compared notes, however, and their descriptions varied
from a black pear-shaped globe which had hovered for minutes before
descending behind the mountains into the lake, to detailed word
pictures of a silvery, torpedo-shaped vessel of space with portholes
and flaming rockets and an unknown flag displayed from a flagstaff.

Of course, none of those accounts could be right. The velocity of the
falling object, as reported from two radar installations, checked
against a seismograph record of the time of the impact in the lake and
allowed no leeway of time for it to hover in mid-air to be admired.

But there were enough detailed and first-hand accounts of alarming
events to make a second statement by the Defense Department necessary.
It was an over-correction of the first soothing one. It was intended
to be more soothing still.

It said blandly that a bolide--a slow-moving, large meteoric
object--had been observed by radar to be descending to earth. It had
been tracked throughout its descent. It had landed in Boulder Lake.
Air photos taken since its landing showed that an enormous disturbance
of the water of the lake had taken place. It had seemed wise to remove
workmen from the neighborhood of the meteoric fall, and the whole
occurrence had been made the occasion of a full-scale practice
emergency response by air and other defense forces. Investigation of
the possible bolide itself was under way.

The writer of the bulletin was obviously sitting on Vale's report and
that of the workmen so as to tell as little as possible and that
slanted to prevent alarm. The bulletin went on to say that there was
no justification for the alarming reports now spreading through the
country. This happening was not--repeat, was not--in any way
associated with the cold war of such long standing. It was simply a
very large meteor arriving from space and very fortunately falling in
a national park area, and even more fortunately into a deep crater
lake so that there was no damage even to the forests of the park.

The bulletin had no effect, of course. It was too late. It was
released at just about the time the temperature in the metal
prison--which seemed likely to become a metal coffin--had begun to
fall. The moving sun had gone behind a mountain and the compost pit
shell was in shadow once more.

Again the cover of that giant box was opened. A porcupine was dropped
inside. The cover went on again. This was, at a guess, about five
o'clock in the afternoon. The chunky man said drearily, "If this is
supposed to be the way they'll feed us, they coulda picked something
easier to eat than a porcupine!"

The box now held four men, three rabbits--panting in terror in one
corner--half a dozen game birds and the just-arrived porcupine. All
the wild creatures shrank away from the men. At any sudden movement
the birds tended to fly hysterically about in the dimness, dashing
themselves against the metal wall.

"I'd say," observed Lockley, "that his guess," he nodded at the tall
man, "is the most likely one. Rabbits and birds and porcupines would
be considered specimens of the local living creatures. We could be
considered specimens too. Maybe we are. Maybe we're simply being held
caged until there's time for a scientific examination of us. Let's
hope they don't happen to drop a bear down here to wait with us!"

The tall man said, "Or rattlers! I wonder what time it is. I'll feel
better when dark comes. They're not so likely to find rattlers in the
dark."

Lockley said nothing. But if Boulder Lake had been chosen for a
landing place on the basis of previously acquired information, it
wasn't likely that either bears or rattlesnakes would be put in
confinement with the men. The men would have been killed immediately,
unless there was a practical use to be made of them. He began to make
guesses. He could make a great many, but none of them added up exactly
right.

Only one seemed promising, and that assumed a lot of items Lockley
couldn't be sure of. He did know, though, that he'd been lifted up
before he was dropped into the round opening of this tank-like metal
shell. The top of the box was well above ground. It was not sunk in
place as it would eventually be. Evidently it was not yet in its
permanent position. The light inside was dim enough, but he could see
the other men and the animals and the birds. He could make out the
riveted plates which formed the box's sides and top.

Inconspicuously, he worked his hand down through the sand bottom of
the prison. Four inches down the sand ended and there was earth. He
felt around. He found grass stems. The box, then, rested on top of the
ground, which was perfectly natural for a compost pit shell not yet
placed where it would finally belong. The sand.... He explored
further.

He waited. The other three stayed quiet. The faint brightness around
the cover hole faded away. The interior of the tank-like box became
abysmally black.

"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."

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