William Fitzgerald Jenkins - Operation Terror
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William Fitzgerald Jenkins >> Operation Terror
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Lockley suddenly stopped short. He felt himself go white. He grasped
Jill's hand and whirled. He practically dragged her back to the patch
of woods they'd just left.
"What's the matter?" The sight of his face made her whisper.
He motioned to her for silence. He'd smelled something. It was faint
but utterly revolting. It was the smell of jungle and of foulness.
There was the musky reek of reptiles in it. It was a collection of all
the smells that could be imagined. It was horrible. It was infinitely
worse than the smell of skunk.
Silence. Stillness. Birds sang in the distance. But nothing happened.
Absolutely nothing. After a long time Lockley said suddenly, "I've got
an idea. It fits into that broadcast. I have to take a chance to find
out. If anything happens to me, don't try to help me!"
He'd smelled the foul odor at least fifteen minutes before, and had
dragged Jill back, and there had been no other sign of monsters or
not-monsters upon the earth. Now he crouched down and crawled among
the bushes. He came to the place where he'd smelled the ghastly smell
before. He smelled it again. He drew back. It became fainter, though
it remained disgusting. He moved forward, stopped, moved back. He went
sideways, very, very carefully, extending his hand before him.
He stopped abruptly. He came back, his face angry.
"We were lucky we couldn't use the car," he said when he was near Jill
again. "We'd have been killed or worse."
She waited, her eyes frightened.
"The thing that paralyzes men and animals," he told her, "is a
projected beam of some sort. We almost ran into it. It's probably akin
to radar. I thought they'd put watchers on the highways. They did
better. They project this beam. When it blocks a highway, anybody who
comes along that highway runs into it. His eyes become blinded by
fantastic colored lights, and he hears unbearable noises and feels
anguish and they smell what we smelled just now. And he's paralyzed.
Such a beam was turned on me yesterday and I was captured. A beam like
that on the highway at the lake paralyzed three men who were carried
away, and later two others whose car ditched and who stayed paralyzed
until the beam was turned off."
"But we only smelled something horrible!" protested Jill.
"You did. I rushed you away. I'd smelled it before. But I went back.
And I smelled it, and I crawled forward a little way and I began to
see flashes of light and to hear noises and my skin tingled. I pushed
my hand ahead of me--and it became paralyzed. Until I pulled it back."
Then he said, "Come on."
"What will we do?"
"We change our line of march. If we drove into it or walked into it
we'd be paralyzed. It's a tight beam, but there's just a little
scatter. Just a little. You might say it leaks at its edges. We'll try
to follow alongside until it thins out to nothing or we get where we
want to go. Unless," he added, "they've got another beam that crosses
it. Then we'll be trapped."
He led the way onward.
They covered four miles of very bad going before Jill showed signs of
distress and Lockley halted beside a small, rushing stream. He saw
fish in the clear water and tried to improvise a way to catch them. He
failed. He said gloomily, "It wouldn't do to catch fish here anyhow. A
fire to cook them would show smoke by day and might be seen at night.
And whatever's at the Lake might send a terror beam. We'll leave here
when you're rested."
He examined the stream. He went up and down its bank. He disappeared
around a curve of the stream. Jill waited, at first uneasily, then
anxiously.
He came back with his hands full of bracken shoots, their ends tightly
curled and their root ends fading almost to white.
"I'm afraid," he observed, "that this is our supper. It'll taste a lot
like raw asparagus, which tastes a lot like raw peanuts, and a
one-dish meal of it won't stick to your ribs. That's the trouble with
eating wild stuff. It's mostly on the order of spinach."
"I'll carry them," said Jill.
She actually looked at him for the first time. Until she found herself
anxious because he was out of sight for a long time, she hadn't really
regarded him as an individual. He'd been only a person who was helping
her because Vale wasn't available. Now she assured herself that Vale
would be very grateful to him for aiding her. "I'm rested now," she
added.
He nodded and led the way once more. He watched the sun for direction.
Two or three miles from their first halt he said abruptly, "I think
the terror beam should be over yonder." He waved an arm. "I've got an
idea about it. I'll see."
"Be careful!" said Jill uneasily.
He nodded and swung away, moving with a peculiar tentativeness. She
knew that he was testing for the smell which was the first symptom of
approach to the alien weapon.
He halted half a mile from where Jill watched, resting again while she
gazed after him. He moved backward and forward. He marked a place with
a stone. He came well back from it and seemed to remove his wrist
watch. He laid it on a boulder and stamped on it. He stamped again and
again, shifting it between stampings. Then he pounded it with a small
rock. He stood up and came back, trailing something which glittered
golden for an instant.
He halted before he reached the rock he'd placed as a marker. He did
cryptic things, facing away from Jill. From time to time there was a
golden glitter in the air near him.
He came back. As he came, he wound something into a little coil. It
was the silicon bronze mainspring of his non-magnetic watch. He held
it for her to see and put it in his pocket.
"I know what the terror beam is--for what good it'll do!" he said
bitterly. "It's a beam of radiation on the order of radar, and for
that matter X-rays and everything else. Only an aerial does pick it up
and this watchspring makes a good one. I could barely detect the smell
at a certain place, but when I touched the laid out spring, it picked
up more than my body did and it became horrible! Then I moved in to
where my skin began to tingle and I saw lights and heard noises. The
spring made all the difference in the world. I even found the
direction of the beam."
Jill looked frightened.
"It comes from Boulder Lake," he told her. "It's the terror beam, all
right! You can walk into it without knowing it. And I suspect that if
it were strong enough it would be a death ray, too!"
Jill seemed to flinch a little.
"They're not using it at killing strength," said Lockley coldly.
"They're softening us up. Letting us find out we're frustrated and
helpless, and then letting us think it over. I'll bet they intended
the four of us to escape from that compost pit thing so we could tell
about it! But we'll know, now, if we find dead men in rows in a
wiped-out town, we'll know what killed them, and when they ask us
politely to become their slaves, we'll know we'll have to do it or
die!"
Jill waited. When he seemed to have finished, she said, "If they're
monsters, do you think they want to enslave us?"
He hesitated, and then said with a grimace, "I've a habit, Jill, of
looking forward to the future and expecting unpleasant things to
happen. Maybe it's so I'll be pleasantly surprised when they don't."
"Suppose," said Jill, "that they aren't monsters. What then?"
"Then," said Lockley, "it's a cold war device, to find out if the
other side in the cold war can take us over without our suspecting
they're the ones doing it. Naturally those in this ship will blow
themselves up rather than be found out."
"Which," said Jill steadily, "doesn't offer much hope for...."
She didn't say Vale's name. She couldn't. Lockley grimaced again.
"It's not certain, Jill. The evidence is on the side of the monsters.
But in either case the thing for us to do is get to the Army with what
I've found out. I've had a stationary beam to test, however crudely.
The cordon must have been pushed back by a moving or an intermittent
beam. It wouldn't be easy to experiment with one of those. Come on."
She stood up. She followed when he went on. They climbed steep
hillsides and went down into winding valleys. The sun began to sink in
the west. The going was rough. For Lockley, accustomed to wilderness
travel, it was fatiguing. For Jill it was much worse.
They came to a sere, bare hillside on which neither trees nor
brushwood grew. It amounted to a natural clearing, acres in extent.
Lockley swept his eyes around. There were many thick-foliaged small
trees attempting to advance into the clear space. He grunted in
satisfaction.
"Sit down and rest," he commanded. "I'll send a message."
He broke off branches from dark green conifers. He went out into the
clearing and began to lay them out in a pattern. He came back and
broke off more, and still more. Very slowly, because the lines had to
be large and thick, the letters S.O.S. appeared in dark green on the
clayey open space. The letters were thirty feet high, and the lines
were five feet wide. They should show distinctly from the air.
"I think," said Lockley with satisfaction, "that we might get
something out of this! If it's sighted, a 'copter might risk coming in
after us." He looked at her appraisingly. "I think you'd enjoy a good
meal."
"I want to say something," said Jill carefully. "I think you've been
trying to cheer me up, after saying something to arouse me--which I
needed. If the creatures aren't monsters, they'll never actually let
anybody loose who's seen that they aren't. Isn't that true? And if it
is--"
"We know of six men who were captured," insisted Lockley, "and I was
one of them. All six escaped. Vale may have escaped. They're not good
at keeping prisoners. We don't know and can't know unless it's
mentioned on a news broadcast that he's out and away. So there's
absolutely no reason to assume that Vale is dead."
"But if he saw them, when he was fighting them--"
"The evidence," insisted Lockley again, "is that he saw monsters. The
only reason to doubt it is that they blindfolded four of us."
Jill seemed to think very hard. Presently she said resolutely, "I'm
going to keep on hoping anyhow!"
"Good girl!" said Lockley.
They waited. He was impatient, both with fate and with himself. He
felt that he'd made Jill face reality when--if this S.O.S. signal
brought help--it wasn't necessary. And there was enough of grimness in
the present situation to make it cruelty.
After a very long time they heard a faint droning in the air. There
might have been others when they were trudging over bad terrain, and
they might not have noticed because they were not listening for such
sounds. There were planes aloft all around the lake area. They'd been
sent up originally in response to a radar warning of something coming
in from space. Now they flew in vast circles around the landing place
of that reported object. They flew high, so high that only contrails
would have pointed them out. But atmospheric conditions today were
such that contrails did not form. The planes were invisible from the
ground.
But the pilots could see. When one patrol group was relieved by
another, it carried high-magnification photographs of all the park, to
be developed and examined with magnifying glasses for any signs of
activity by the crew of the object from space.
A second lieutenant spotted the S.O.S. within half an hour of the
films' return. There was an immediate and intense conference. The
lengths of shadows were measured. The size and slope and probable
condition of the clearing's surface were estimated.
A very light plane, intended for artillery-spotting, took off from the
nearest airfield to Boulder Lake.
And Lockley and Jill heard it long before it came in sight. It flew
low, threading its way among valleys and past mountain-flanks to avoid
being spotted against the sky. The two beside the clearing heard it
first as a faint mutter. The sound increased, diminished, then
increased again.
It shot over a minor mountain-flank and surveyed the bare space with
the huge letters on it. Lockley and Jill raced out into view, waving
frantically. The plane circled and circled, estimating the landing
conditions. It swung away to arrive at a satisfactory approach path.
It wavered. It made a half-wingover, and it side-slipped crazily, and
came up and stalled and flipped on its back and dived....
And it came out of its insane antics barely twenty feet above the
ground. It raced away as close as possible to touching its wheels to
earth. It went away behind the mountains. The sound of its going
dwindled and dwindled and was gone. It appeared to have escaped from a
deliberately set trap.
Lockley stared after it. Then he went white.
"Idiot!" he cried fiercely. "Come on! Run!"
He seized Jill's hand. They fled together. Evidently, something had
played upon the pilot of the light plane. He'd been deafened and
blinded and all his senses were a shrieking tumult while his muscles
knotted and his hands froze on the controls of his ship. He hadn't
flown out of the beam that made him helpless. He'd fallen out of it.
And then he raced for the horizon. He got away. And it would appear to
those to whom he reported that he'd arrived too late at the
distress-signal. If fugitives had made it, they'd been overtaken and
captured by the creatures of Boulder Lake, and there'd been an ambush
set up for the plane. It was a reasonable decision.
But it puzzled the pilot's superior officers that he hadn't been
allowed to land the plane before the beam was turned on him. He could
have been paralyzed while on the ground, and he and his plane could
have yielded considerable information to creatures from another world.
It was puzzling.
Lockley and Jill raced for the woodland at the clearing's edge.
Lockley clamped his lips tight shut to waste no breath in speech. The
arrival and the circling of the plane had been a public notice that
there were fugitives here. If the beam could paralyze a pilot in
mid-air, it could be aimed at fugitives on the ground.... There could
be no faintest hope....
Wholly desperate, Lockley helped Jill down a hillside and into a
valley leading still farther down.
He smelled jungle, and muskiness, and decay, and flowers, and every
conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed
themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that
his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and
skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every kind of
message they could possibly report all at once.
He groaned. He tried to find a hiding-place for Jill so that if or
when the invaders searched for her, they would not find her. But he
expected his muscles to knot in spasm and cramp before he could
accomplish anything.
They didn't. The smell lessened gradually. The meaningless flashings
of preposterous color grew faint. The horrible uproar his auditory
nerves reported, ceased. He and Jill had been at the mercy of the
unseen operator of the terror beam. Perhaps the beam had grazed them,
by accident. Or it could have been weakened....
It was very puzzling.
CHAPTER 5
When darkness fell, Lockley and Jill were many miles away from the
clearing where he had made the S.O.S. They were under a dense screen
of leaves from a monster tree whose roots rose above ground at the
foot of its enormous trunk. They formed a shelter of sorts against
observation from a distance. Lockley had spotted a fallen tree far
gone with wood-rot. He broke pieces of the punky stuff with his
fingers. Then he realized that without a pot the bracken shoots he'd
gathered could not be cooked. They had to be boiled or not cooked at
all.
"We'll call it a salad," he told Jill, "minus vinegar and oil and
garlic, and eat what we can."
She'd been pale with exhaustion before the sun sank, but he hadn't
dared let her rest more than was absolutely necessary. Once he'd
offered to carry her for a while, but she'd refused. Now she sat
drearily in the shelter of the roots, resting.
"We might try for news," he suggested.
She made an exhausted gesture of assent. He turned on the tiny radio
and tuned it in. There was no scarcity of news, now. A few days past,
news went on the air on schedule, mostly limited to five-minute
periods in which to cover all the noteworthy events of the world. Part
of that five minutes, too, was taken up by advertising matter from a
sponsor. Now music was rare. There were occasional melodies, but most
were interrupted for new interpretations of the threat to earth at
Boulder Lake. Every sort of prominent person was invited to air his
views about the thing from the sky and the creatures it brought. Most
had no views but only an urge to talk to a large audience. Something,
though, had to be put on the air between commercials.
The actual news was specific. Small towns around the fringe of the
Park area were being evacuated of all their inhabitants. Foreign
scientists had been flown to the United States and were at the
temporary area command post not far from Boulder Lake. Rocket missiles
were aimed and ready to blast the lake and the mountains around it
should the need arise. A drone plane had been flown to the lake with a
television camera transmitting back everything its lens saw. It
arrived at the lake and its camera relayed back exactly nothing that
had not been photographed and recorded before. But suddenly there was
a crash of static and the drone went out of control and crashed. Its
camera faithfully transmitted the landscape spinning around until its
destruction. Military transmitters were beaming signals on every
conceivable frequency to what was now universally called the alien
spaceship. They had received no replies. The foreign scientists had
agreed that the terror beam--paralysis beam--death beam--was
electronic in nature.
Lockley had thought Jill asleep from pure weariness, but her voice
came out of the darkness beside the big tree trunk.
"You found that out!" she said. "About its being electronic!"
"I had a sample stationary beam to check on," said Lockley. "They
haven't. Which may be a bad thing. Nobody's going to make useful
observations of something that makes him blind and deaf and paralyzed
while he's in the act. There are some things that puzzle me about
that. Why haven't they killed anybody yet? They've got the public
about as scared as it can get without some killing. And why didn't we
get the full force of the beam after the plane had been driven away?
They could have given us the full treatment if they'd wanted to. Why
didn't they?"
"If people run away from the towns," said Jill's voice, very tired and
sleepy, "maybe they think that's enough. They can take the towns...."
Lockley did not answer, and Jill said no more. Her breathing became
deep and regular. She was so weary that even hunger could not keep her
awake.
Lockley tried to think. There was the matter of food. Bracken shoots
were common enough but unsubstantial. It would need more careful
observation to note all the likely spots for mushrooms. Perhaps they
were far enough from the lake to take more time hunting food. They
were almost exactly in the situation of Australian bushmen who live
exclusively by foraging, with some not-too-efficient hunting. But
Australian savages were not as finicky as Jill and himself. They ate
grubs and insects. For this sort of situation, prejudices were a
handicap.
He considered the idea with sardonic appreciation. Two days of
inadequate food and such ideas came! But he and Jill wouldn't be the
only ones to think such things if matters continued as they were
going. The towns around Boulder Lake were being evacuated. The cordon
about it had been made to retreat. There was panic not only in
America, but everywhere. In Europe there were wild rumors of other
landings of other ships of space. The stock markets would undoubtedly
close tomorrow, if they hadn't closed today. There'd be the beginning
of a mass exodus from the larger cities, starting quietly but building
up to frenzy as those who tried to leave jammed all the routes by
which they could get away. If the creatures of the spaceship wanted
more than the flight of all humans from about their landing place,
there would be genuine trouble. Let them move aggressively and there
would be panic and disorder and pure catastrophe, with self-exiled
city dwellers desperate from hunger because they were away from market
centers. It looked as if a dozen or two monsters could wreck a
civilization without the need to kill one single human being directly.
He heard a sound. He turned off the radio, gripping the clumsy club
which was probably useless against anything really threatening.
The sound continued. There were rustlings of leaves, and then faint
rattling, almost clicking noises. Whatever the creature was, it was
not large. It seemed to amble tranquilly through the forest and the
night, neither alarmed nor considering itself alarming.
The clickings again. And suddenly Lockley knew what it was. Of course!
He'd heard it in the compost pit shell, when he was a prisoner of the
invaders from space. He rose and moved toward the noise. The creature
did not run away. It went about its own affairs with the same peaceful
indifference as before. Lockley ran into a tree. He stumbled over a
fallen branch on the ground. He came to the place where the creature
should be. There was silence. He flicked the flint of his pocket
lighter and in the flash of brightness he saw his prey. It had heard
his approach. It was a porcupine, prudently curled up into a spiky
ball and placidly defying all carnivores, including men. A porcupine
is normally the one wild creature without an enemy. Even men
customarily spare it because so often it has saved the lives of lost
hunters and half-starved travelers. It accomplishes this by its bland
refusal to run away from anybody.
Lockley classed himself as a half-starved traveler. He struck with
the club after a second spark from his lighter-flint.
Presently he had a small, barely smouldering fire of rotted wood. He
cooked over it, and the smell of cooking roused Jill from her
exhausted slumber.
"What--"
"We're having a late supper," said Lockley gravely. "A midnight snack.
Take this stick. There's a loin of porcupine on it. Be careful! It's
hot!"
Jill said, "Oh-h-h-h!" Then, "Is there more for you?"
"Plenty!" he assured her. "I hunted it down with my trusty club, and
only got stuck a half-dozen times while I was skinning and cleaning
it."
She ate avidly, and when she'd finished he offered more, which she
refused until he'd had a share.
They did not quite finish the whole porcupine, but it was an odd and
companionable meal, there in the darkness with the barely-glowing
coals well-hidden from sight. Lockley said, "I'm sort of a news
addict. Shall we see what the wild radio waves are saying?"
"Of course," said Jill. She added awkwardly: "Maybe it's the sudden
food, but--I hope you'll remain my friend after this is all over. I
don't know anyone else I'd say that to."
"Consider," said Lockley, "that I've made an eloquent and grateful
reply."
But his expression in the darkness was not happy. He'd fallen in love
with Jill after meeting her only twice, and both times she had been
with Vale. She intended to marry Vale. But on the evidence at hand
Vale was either dead or a prisoner of the invaders; if the last, his
chances of living to marry Jill did not look good, and if the first,
this was surely no time to revive his memory.
He found a news broadcast. He suspected that most radio stations
would stay on the air all night, now that it was officially admitted
that the object in Boulder Lake was a spaceship bringing invaders to
earth. The government releases spoke of them as "visitors," in a
belated use of the term, but the public was suspicious of reassurances
now. At the beginning the landing had seemed like another exaggerated
horror tale of the kind that kept up newspaper circulations. Now the
public was beginning to believe it, and people might stop going to
their offices and the trains might cease to ran on time. When that
happened, disaster would be at hand.
The news came in a resonant voice which revealed these facts:
Four more small towns had been ordered evacuated because of their
proximity to Boulder Lake. The radiation weapon of the aliens had
pushed back the military cordon by as much as five miles. But the big
news was that the aliens had broken radio silence. Apparently they'd
examined and repaired the short wave communicator from the helicopter
they'd knocked down.
Shortly after sundown, said the news report, a call had come through
on a military short wave frequency. It was a human voice, first
muttering bewilderedly and then speaking with confusion and
uneasiness. The message had been taped and now was released to the
public.
_"What the hell's this ...? Oh.... What do you characters want me to
do? This feels like the short wave set from the 'copter.... Hmm....
You got it turned on.... What'll I do with it, Broadcast? I don't know
whether you want me to talk to you or to back home, wherever that
is.... Maybe you want me to say I'm havin' a fine time an' wish you
was here.... I'm not. I wish I was there.... If this is goin' on the
air I'm Joe Blake, radio man on the_ '_copter two 'leven. We were
headin' in to Boulder Lake when I smelled a stink. Next second there
were lights in my eyes. They blinded me. Then I heard a racket like
all hell was loose. Then I felt like I had hold of a power
transmission line. I couldn't wiggle a finger. I stayed that way till
the 'copter crashed. When I come to, I was blindfolded like I am now.
I don't know what happened to the other guys. I haven't seen 'em. I
haven't seen anything! But they just put me in front of what I think
is the 'copter's short wave set an' squeaked at me_--"
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