William Fitzgerald Jenkins - Operation Terror
W >>
William Fitzgerald Jenkins >> Operation Terror
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11
The recorded voice ended abruptly. The news announcer's voice came
back. He said that the member of the 'copter crew had given some other
information before he was arbitrarily cut off.
"I'll bet," said Lockley when the newscast ended, "I'll bet the other
information was that the invaders have managed to tell him that earth
must surrender to them!"
"Why?"
"What else would they want to say? To come and play patty-cake, when
they can push the Army around at will and have managed to keep planes
from flying anywhere near them? They may not know we've got atom
bombs, but I'll bet they do! Part of that extra information could have
been a warning not to try to use them. It would be logical to bluff
even on that, though they couldn't make good."
Jill said very carefully, "You hinted once that they might be men,
pretending to be monsters. But that would mean that somebody I care
about would probably be killed because he'd seen them and knew they
weren't creatures from beyond the stars."
"I think you can forget that idea," said Lockley. "They don't act like
men. Chasing away the plane that was going to land for us, and not
using the beam on the fugitives it was plainly going to land
for--that's not like men preparing to take over a continent! And
nudging the Army back to make the cordoned space larger--that's not
like our most likely human enemy, either. They'd wipe out the cordon
by stepping up the terror beam to death ray intensity."
"Suppose they couldn't?"
"They wouldn't have landed with a weapon that couldn't kill anybody,"
said Lockley. "It's much more likely that they're monsters. But they
don't act like monsters, either."
Jill was silent for a moment.
"Not even monsters who wanted to make friends?"
"They," said Lockley drily, "would hardly make a surprise landing.
They'd have parked on the moon and squeaked at us until we got
curious, and then they'd arrange to land, or to meet men in orbit, or
something. But they didn't. They made a surprise landing, and cleared
a big space of humans, keeping themselves to themselves. But if they
do think we're animals, like rabbits, they'd kill people instead of
stinging them up a bit, or paralyzing them for a while and then
letting them go. That's not like any monster I can imagine!"
"Then--"
"You'd better go to sleep," said Lockley. "We've got a long day's hike
before us tomorrow."
"Yes-s-s," agreed Jill reluctantly. "Good-night."
"'Night," said Lockley curtly.
He stayed awake. It was amusing that he was uneasy about wild animals.
There were predators in the Park, and he had only an improvised club
for a weapon. But he knew well enough that most animals avoid man
because of a bewildering sudden development of instinct.
Grizzly bears, before the white man came, were so scornful of man
that they could be considered the dominant species in North America.
They'd been known to raid a camp of Indians to carry away a man for
food. Indian spears and arrows were simply ineffective against them.
When Stonewall Jackson was a lieutenant in the United States Army,
stationed in the West to protect the white settlers, he and a
detachment of mounted troopers were attacked without provocation by a
grizzly who was wholly contemptuous of them. The then Lieutenant
Jackson rode a horse which was blind in one eye, and he maneuvered to
get the bear on the horse's blind side so he could charge it. With his
cavalry sabre he split the grizzly's skull down to its chin. It was
the only time in history that a grizzly bear was ever killed by a man
with a sword. But no grizzly nowadays would attack a man unless
cornered. Even cubs with no possible experience of humankind are
terrified by the scent of men.
All that was true enough. In addition, preparations for the Park
included much activity by the Wild Life Control unit, which persuaded
bears to congregate in one area by putting out food for them, and took
various other measures for deer and other animals. It had seeded trout
streams with fingerlings and the lake itself with baby big-mouthed
bass. The huge trailer truck of Wild Life Control was familiar enough.
Lockley had seen it headed up to the lake the day before the landing.
Now he found himself wondering sardonically to what degree the Wild
Life Control men determined where mountain lions should hunt.
He'd slept in the open innumerable times without thinking of mountain
lions. With Jill to look after, though, he worried. But he was
horribly weary, and he knew somehow that in the back of his mind there
was something unpleasant that was trying to move into his conscious
thoughts. It was a sort of hunch. Wearily and half asleep, he tried to
put his mind on it. He failed.
He awoke suddenly. There were rustlings among the trees. Something
moved slowly and intermittently toward him. It could be anything, even
a creature from Boulder Lake. He heard other sounds. Another creature.
The first drew near, not moving in a straight line. The second
creature followed it, drawing closer to the first.
Lockley's scalp crawled. Creatures from space might have some of the
highly-developed senses which men had lost while growing
civilized--full keenness of scent, for example.
Such a creature might be able to find Lockley and Jill in the darkness
after trailing them for miles. And so primitive a talent, in a
creature farther advanced than men, was somehow more horrifying than
anything else Lockley had thought of about them. He gripped his club
desperately, wholly aware that a star creature should be able to
paralyze him with the terror beam....
There were whistling, squealing noises. They were very much like the
squeaks his captors had directed at each other and at him when he was
blindfolded and being led downhill to imprisonment in the compost pit
shell. Very much like, but not identical. Nevertheless, Lockley's hair
seemed to stand up on end and he raised his club in desperation.
The whistling squeals grew shriller. Then there was an indescribable
sound and one of the two creatures rushed frantically away. It
traveled in great leaps through the blackness under the trees.
And then there was a sudden whiff of a long-familiar odor, smelled a
hundred times before. It was the reek of a skunk, stalked by a
carnivore and defending itself as skunks do. But a skunk was nothing
like a terror beam. Its effluvium offended only one sense, affected
only one set of sensation nerves. The terror beam....
Lockley opened his mouth to laugh, but did not. The thing at the back
of his mind had come forward. He was appalled.
Jill said shakily, "What's the matter? What's happened? That smell--"
"It's only a skunk," said Lockley evenly. "He just told me some very
bad news. I know how the terror beam works now. And there's not a
thing that can be done about it. Not a thing. It can't be!"
He raged suddenly, there in the darkness, because he saw the utter
hopelessness of combatting the creatures who'd taken over Boulder
Lake. There was nothing to keep them from taking over the whole earth,
no matter what sort of monsters or not-monsters they might be.
CHAPTER 6
It was nine o'clock at night when Lockley killed the porcupine, and
ten by the time Jill had gone back to sleep huddled between the
projecting roots of a giant tree. Shortly after midnight Lockley had
been awakened when a skunk defeated a hungry predator within a hundred
yards of their bivouac. But some time in between, there was another
happening of much greater importance elsewhere.
Something came out of Boulder Lake National Park. All humans had
supposedly fled from it. It was abandoned to the creatures of the
thing from the sky. But something came out of it.
Nobody saw the thing, of course. Nobody could approach it, which was
the point immediately demonstrated. No human being could endure being
within seven miles of whatever it was. It was evidently a vehicle of
some sort, however, because it swung terror beams before it, and
terror beams on either side, and when it was clear of the Park it
played terror beams behind it, too. Men who suffered the lightest
touch of those sweeping beams of terror and anguish moved frantically
to avoid having the experience again. So when something moved out of
the Park and sent wavering terror beams before it, men moved to one
side or the other and gave it room.
On a large-scale map in the military area command post, its progress
could be watched as it was reported. The reports described a
development of unbearable beam strength which showed up as a bulge in
the cordon's roughly circular line. That bulge, which was the cordon
itself moving back, moved outward and became a half-circle some miles
across. It continued to move outward, and on the map it appeared like
a pseudopod extruded by an enormous amoeba. It was the area of
effectiveness of a weapon previously unknown on earth--the area where
humans could not stay.
Deliberately, the unseen moving thing severed itself from the similar
and larger weapon field which was its birthplace and its home. It
moved with great deliberation toward the small town of Maplewood,
twenty miles from the border of the Park.
Jeeps and motorcycles scurried ahead of it, just out of reach of its
beams. They made sure that houses and farms and all inhabited places
were emptied of people before the moving terror beams could engulf
them. They went into the town of Maplewood itself and frantically made
sure that nothing alive remained in it. They went on to clear the
countryside beyond.
The unseen thing from the Park moved onward. High overhead there was a
dull muttering like faraway thunder, but it was planes with filled
bomb racks circling above the starlit land. There were men in those
planes who ached to dive down and destroy this separated fraction of
an invasion. But there were firm orders from the Pentagon. So long as
the invaders killed nobody, they were not to be attacked. There was
reason for the order in the desire of the government to be on friendly
terms with a race which could travel between the stars. But there was
an even more urgent reason. The aliens had not yet begun to murder,
but it was suspected that they had a horrifying power to kill. So it
was firmly commanded that no bomb or missile or bullet was to be used
unless the invaders invited hostilities by killing humans. Their
captives--the crew of a helicopter--might be freed if aliens and men
achieved friendship. So for now--no provocation!
The thing which nobody saw moved comfortably over the ground between
the park and Maplewood. In the center of the weapon field there was a
something which generated the terror beam and probably carried
passengers. Whatever it was, it moved onward and into Maplewood and
for seven miles in every direction troops watched for it to move out
again. Artillerymen had guns ready to fire upon it if they ever got
firing coordinates and permission to go into action. Planes were ready
to drop bombs if they ever got leave to do so. And a few miles away
there were rockets ready to prove their accuracy and devastating
capacity if only given a launching command. But nothing happened. Not
even a flare was permitted to be dropped by the planes far up in the
sky. A flare might be taken for hostility.
The thing from the Park stayed in Maplewood for two hours. At the end
of that time it moved deliberately back toward the Park. It left the
town untouched save for certain curious burglaries of hardware stores
and radio shops and a garage or two. It looked as if intensely curious
not-human beings had moved from their redoubt--Boulder Lake--to find
out what civilization human beings had attained. They could guess at
it by the buildings and the homes, but most notably in the technical
shops of the inhabitants.
It went slowly and deliberately back into the Park. Humans moved
cautiously back into the area that had been emptied. Not many, but
enough to be sure that the thing had really returned to the place from
which it had come. Soldiers were tentatively entering the
again-abandoned town of Maplewood when the unseen thing changed the
range of its weapon bearing on that little city. It was then
presumably not less than seven miles on its way back to Boulder Lake.
The military had congratulated themselves on what they'd learned. The
beam projectors at the lake had a range of much more than seven miles,
but this movable, unidentifiable thing carried a lesser armament. From
it, men and animals seven miles away were safe. This was notable news.
Then the unseen object did something. The terror beam that flicked
back and forth doubled in intensity. The soldiers just reentering
Maplewood smelled foulness and saw bright lights. Bellowings deafened
them. They fell with every muscle rigid in spasm. Beyond them other
men were paralyzed. For five minutes the invaders' mobile weapon
paralyzed all living things for a distance of fifteen miles. Then for
thirty seconds it paralyzed living things for a distance of thirty
miles. For a bare instant it convulsed men and animals for a greater
distance yet. And all these victims of the terror beam knew,
thereafter, an invincible horror of the beam.
The thing from the Park which nobody had seen went back into the Park.
And then men were permitted to return to exactly the same places
they'd been allowed to occupy before the thing began its excursion.
It seemed that nothing was changed, but everything was changed. If
there were mobile carriers of the invasion weapon, then victory could
not be had by a single atom bomb fired into Boulder Lake. There might
be a dozen separate mobile terror beam generators scattered through
the Park. Any atomic attack would need to be multiplied in its
violence to be certain of results. Instead of one bomb there might be
a need for fifty. They would have to destroy the Park utterly, even
its mountains. And the fallout from so many atom bombs simply could
not be risked. The invaders were effectively invulnerable.
While this undesirable situation was being demonstrated, Jill slept
heavily between two roots of a very large tree, and Lockley dozed
against a nearby tree trunk. He believed that he guarded Jill most
vigilantly.
He awoke at dawn with the din of bird song in his ears. Jill opened
her eyes at almost the same instant. She smiled at him and tried to
get up. She was stiff and sore from the hardness of the ground on
which she'd slept. But it was a new day, and there was breakfast. It
was porcupine cooked the night before.
"Somehow," said Jill as she nibbled at a bone, "somehow I feel more
cheerful than I did."
"That's a mistake," Lockley told her. "Start out with a few
premonitions and the day improves as they turn out wrong. But if you
start out hoping, the day ends miserably with most of your hopes
denied."
"You've got premonitions?" she asked.
"Definitely," he said.
It was true. As yet he knew nothing of last night's temporary
occupation of a human town, but he believed he knew how the terror
beam worked even if he couldn't figure out a way to generate it. He
could imagine no defense against it. But if Jill had awakened feeling
cheerful, there was no reason to depress her. She'd have reason enough
to be dejected later, beginning with proof of Vale's death and going
on from there.
"We might listen to the news," she suggested. "A premonition or two
might be ruled out right away!"
Silently, he turned on the little radio. Automatically, he set it for
the lowest volume they could hear distinctly.
The main item in the news was a baldly factual but toned-down report
of the thing from the lake which had left the park and examined a
small human town in detail and then had returned to the Park. There
were reports of peculiar hoofprints found where the invaders had been.
They were not the hoofprints of any earthly animal. There was an
optimistic report from the scientists at work on the problem of the
beam. Someone had come up with an idea and some calculations which
seemed to promise that the beam would presently be duplicated. Once it
was duplicated, of course a way to neutralize it could be found.
Lockley grunted. The broadcast was enthusiastic in its comments on the
scientists. It talked gobbledegook which sounded as if it meant
something but was actually nonsense. It barely touched on the fact
that human beings were now ordered out of a much larger space than had
been evacuated before. There was a statement from an important
official that panic buying of food was both unnecessary and unwise.
Lockley grunted again when the newscast ended.
"The idea that anything that can be duplicated can be canceled," he
announced gloomily, "is unfortunately rot. We can duplicate sounds,
but there's no way to make them cancel out! Not accurately!"
Jill had eaten a substantial part of the porcupine while the newscast
was on. It was not a satisfying breakfast, but it cheered her
immensely after two days of near-starvation.
"But," she observed, "maybe that won't apply to this business when you
report what you know. It's not likely that anybody else has stood just
outside a beam and made tests of what it's like and how it's aimed and
so on."
They started off. For journeying in the Park, Lockley had the
advantage that as part of the preparation for making a new map, he'd
familiarized himself with all mapping done to date. He knew very
nearly where he was. He knew within a close margin just where the
terror beam stretched. He'd smashed his watch, which during sunshine
substituted admirably for a compass, but he could maintain a
reasonably straight line toward that part of the Park's border the
terror beam would cross.
They moved doggedly over mountain-flanks and up valleys, and once they
followed a winding hollow for a long way because it led toward their
destination without demanding that they climb. It was in this area
that, pushing through brushwood beside a running stream, they came
abruptly upon a big brown bear. He was no more than a hundred feet
away. He stared at them inquisitively, raising his nose to sniff for
their scent.
Lockley bent and picked up a stone. He threw it. It clattered on
rocks on the ground. The bear made a whuffing sound and moved
aggrievedly away.
"I'd have been afraid to do that," said Jill.
"It was a he-bear," said Lockley. "I wouldn't have tried it on a
she-bear with cubs."
They went on and on. At mid-morning Lockley found some mushrooms. They
were insipid and only acute hunger would make them edible raw, but he
filled his pockets. A little later there were berries, and as they
gathered and ate them he lectured learnedly on edible wild plants to
be found in the wilderness. Jill listened with apparent interest. When
they left the berry patch they swung to the left to avoid a steep
climb directly in their way. And suddenly Lockley stopped short. At
the same instant Jill caught at his arm. She'd turned white.
They turned and ran.
A hundred yards back, Lockley slackened his speed. They stopped. After
a moment he managed to grin mirthlessly.
"A conditioned reflex," he said wryly. "We smell something and we run.
But I think it's the old familiar terror beam that crosses highways to
stop men from using them. If it were a portable beam projector with
somebody aiming it, we wouldn't be talking about it."
Jill panted, partly with relief.
"I've thought of something I want to try," said Lockley. "I should
have tried it yesterday when I first smashed my watch."
He retraced his steps to the spot where they'd caught the first whiff
of that disgusting reptilian-jungle-decay odor which had bombarded
their nostrils. Jill called anxiously, "Be careful!"
He nodded. He got the coiled bronze watchspring out of his pocket. He
went very cautiously to the spot where the smell became noticeable.
Standing well back from it, he tossed one end of the spring into it.
He drew it back. He repeated the operation. He moved to one side.
Again he swung the gold-colored ribbon. He dangled it back and forth.
Then he drew back yet again and wrapped his left hand and wrists with
many turns of the thin bronze spring, carefully spacing the turns. He
moved forward once more.
He came back, his expression showing no elation at all.
"No good," he said unhappily. "In a way, it works. The spring acts as
an aerial and picks up more of the beam than my hand. But I tried to
make a Faraday cage. That will stop most electromagnetic radiation,
but not this stuff! It goes right through, like electrons through a
radio tube grid."
He put the spring back in his pocket.
"Well," he grimaced. "Let's go on again. I had a little bit of hope,
but some smarter men than I am haven't got the right gimmick yet."
They started off once more. And this time they did not choose a path
for easier travel, but went up a steep slope that rose for hundreds of
feet to arrive at a crest with another steep slope going downhill. At
the top Lockley said sourly, "I did discover one thing, if it means
anything. The beam leaks at its edges, but it's only leakage. It
doesn't diffuse. It's tight. It's more like a searchlight beam than
anything else in that way. You can see a light beam at night because
dust motes scatter some part of it. But most of the light goes
straight on. This stuff does the same. It's hard to imagine a limit to
its range."
He trudged on downhill. Jill followed him. Presently, when they'd
covered two miles or more with no lightening of his expression, she
said, "You said you understand how it works. Radio and radar beams
don't have effects like this. How does this have them?"
"It makes high frequency currents on the surface of anything it hits.
High frequency doesn't go into flesh or metal. It travels on the
surface only. So when this beam hits a man it generates high frequency
on his skin. That induces counter currents underneath, and they
stimulate all the sensory nerves we've got--of our eyes and ears and
noses as well as our skin. Every nerve reports its own kind of
sensation. Run current over your tongue, and you taste. Induce a
current in your eyes, and you see flashes of light. So the beam makes
all our senses report everything they're capable of reporting, true or
not, and we're blinded and deafened. Then the nerves to our muscles
report to them that they're to contract, and they do. So we're
paralyzed."
"And," said Jill, "if there's a way to generate high frequency on a
man's skin there's nothing that can be done?"
"Nothing," said Lockley dourly.
"Maybe," said Jill, "you can figure out a way to prevent that high
frequency generation."
He shrugged. Jill frowned as she followed him. She hadn't forgotten
Vale, but she owed some gratitude to Lockley. Womanlike, she tried to
pay part of it by urging him to do something he considered impossible.
"At least," she suggested, "it can't be a death ray!"
Lockley looked at her.
"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.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11