William Fitzgerald Jenkins - Operation Terror

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The newscast stopped and a commercial called the attention of
listeners to the virtues of an anti-allergy pill. Jill watched
Lockley's face. He did not relax.

The broadcast resumed. With this full and certain hope of a defense
against the invasion weapon, said the announcer, it remained important
not to destroy the alien ship if it could be captured for study. The
use of atom bombs was, therefore, again postponed. But they would be
used if necessary. Meanwhile, against such an emergency, the areas of
evacuation would be enlarged. People would be removed from additional
territory so if bombs were used there would be no humans near to be
harmed.

Another commercial. Lockley turned off the radio.

"What do you think?" asked Jill.

"I wish they hadn't made that broadcast," said Lockley. "If there were
only monsters involved and they didn't understand English, it would be
all right. But with humans helping them, it sets a deadline. If we're
going to counter their weapon, they have to use it before we finish
the job."

After a moment he said bitterly, "There was a time, right after the
last big war, when we had the bomb and nobody else did. There couldn't
be a cold war then! There were years when we could destroy others and
they couldn't have fought back. Now somebody else is in that position.
They can destroy us and we can't do a thing. It'll be that way for a
week, or maybe two, or even three. It'll be strange if they don't take
advantage of their opportunity."

Jill tried to eat the food Lockley had laid out. She couldn't. She
began to cry quietly. Lockley swore at himself for telling her the
worst, which it was always his instinct to see. He said urgently,
"Hold it! That's the worst that could happen. But it's not the most
likely!"

She tried to control her tears.

"We're in a fix, yes!" he said insistently. "It does look like there
may be a flock of other space ship landings within days. But the
monsters don't want to kill people. They want a world with people
working for them, not dead. They've proved it. They'll avoid
massacres. They won't let the humans who're their allies destroy the
people they want alive and useful."

Jill clenched her fists. "But it would be better to be dead than like
that!"

"But wait!" protested Lockley. "We've duplicated the terror beam. Do
you think they'll leave it at that? The men who know how to do it will
be scattered to a dozen or a hundred places, so they can't possibly
all be found, and they'll keep on secretly working until they've made
the beams and a protection against them and then something more deadly
still! We humans can't be conquered! We'll fight to the end of time!"

"But you yourself," said Jill desperately, "you said there couldn't be
a defense against the beam! You said it!"

"I was discouraged," he protested. "I wasn't thinking straight. Look!
With no equipment at all, I found out how to detect the stuff before
it was strong enough to paralyze us. You know that. The scientists
will have equipment and instruments, and now that they've got the beam
they'll be able to try things. They'll do better than I did. They can
try heterodyning the beam. They can try for interference effects. They
may find something to reflect it, or they can try refraction."

He paused anxiously. She sobbed, once. "But other weapons--"

"There may not be any. And there's bound to be some trick of
refraction that'll help. It thins out at the edges now. That's how we
get warning of it. It's refracted by ions in the air. That's why it
isn't a completely tight beam. Ions in the air act like drops of mist;
they refract sunshine and make rainbows after rain. And we got the
smell-effect first. That proves there's refraction."

He watched her face. She swallowed. What he'd said was largely without
meaning. Actually, it wasn't even right. The evidence so far was that
the nerves of smell were more sensitive than the optic nerves or the
auditory ones, while nerves to bundles of muscle were less sensitive
still. But Lockley wasn't concerned with accuracy just now. He wanted
to reassure Jill.

Then his eyes widened suddenly and he stared past her. He'd been
speaking feverishly out of emotion, while a part of his mind stood
aside and listened. And that detached part of his mind had heard him
say something worth noting.

He stood stock-still for seconds, staring blankly. Then he said very
quietly, "You made me think, then. I don't know why I didn't, before.
The terror beam does scatter a little, like a searchlight beam in thin
mist. It's scattered by ions, like light by mist-droplets. That's
right!"

He stopped, thinking ahead. Jill said challengingly, "Go on!" Again
what he'd said had little meaning to her, but she could see that he
believed it important.

"Why, a searchlight beam is stopped by a cloud, which is many
mist-droplets in one place. It's scattered until it simply doesn't
penetrate!" Lockley suddenly seemed indignant at his own failure to
see something that had been so obvious all along. "If we could make a
cloud of ions, it should stop the terror beam as clouds stop light! We
could--"

Again he stopped short, and Jill's expression changed. She looked
confident again. She even looked proud as she watched Lockley
wrestling with his problem, unconsciously snapping his fingers.

"Vale and I," he said jerkily, "had electronic base-measuring
instruments. Some of their elements had to be buried in plastic
because otherwise they ionized the air and leaked current like a
short. If I had that instrument now--No. I'd have to take the plastic
away and it couldn't be done without smashing things."

"What would happen," asked Jill, "if you made what you're thinking
about?"

"I might," said Lockley. "I just possibly might make a gadget that
would create a cloud of ions around the person who carried it. And it
might reflect some of the terror beam and refract the rest so none got
through to the man!"

Jill said hopefully, "Then tonight we go into a deserted town and
steal the things you need...."

Lockley interrupted in a relieved voice, "No-o-o-o. What I need, I
think, is a cheese grater and the pocket radio. And there should be a
cheese grater in the house."

He listened at the barn door gap, and then went out. Presently he was
back. He had not only a cheese grater but also a nutmeg grater. Both
were made of thin sheet metal in which many tiny holes had been
punched, so that sharp bits of torn metal stood out to make the
grating surface. Lockley knew that sharp points, when charged
electrically, make tiny jets of ionized air which will deflect a
candle flame. Here there were thousands of such points.

He set to work on the car seat, pushing the pistol with its three
remaining bullets out of the way. The pistol was reserved for Jill in
case of untoward events, when it would be of little or no practical
value.

He operated on the tiny radio with his pocket-knife to establish a
circuit which should oscillate when the battery was turned on. There
was induction, to raise the voltage at the peaks and troughs of the
oscillations. A transistor acted as a valve to make the oscillations
repeated surges of current of one sign in the innumerable sharp points
of the graters. And there was an effect he did not anticipate. The
ion-forming points were of minutely different lengths and patterns, so
the radiation inevitably accompanying the ion clouds was of minutely
varying wave lengths. The consequence of using the two graters was, of
course, that rather astonishing peaks of energy manifested themselves
in ultra-microscopic packages for a considerable distance from the
device. But Lockley did not plan that. It happened because of the
materials he had to use in lieu of something better.

When it was finished he told Jill, "I can only check ion production
here. If it works, it ought to make a lighter-flame flicker when near
the points. If it does that, I'll go up the road to where the
trailer-truck stopped. I've a pretty good idea that the road's blocked
by a terror beam there."

Absorbed, he threw the switch. And instantly there was a racking,
deafening explosion. The pistol on the car seat blew itself to bits,
smashing the windshield and ripping the cushion open. The three
cartridges in its cylinder had exploded simultaneously.

Lockley seized a pitchfork. He stood savagely, ready for anything.
Powder smoke drifted through the barn. Nothing else happened.

After long, tense moments, Lockley said slowly, "That could be another
weapon the monsters have turned on. It's been imagined. They could be
using a broadcast or a beam we haven't suspected to disarm the troops
of the cordon. They could have a detonator beam that sets off
explosives at a distance. It's possible. And if that's what they're
turning on they only have to sweep the sky and the bombers aloft will
be wiped out."

But there were no sounds other than the slowly diminishing drip of
water from the barn roof, and the house eaves, and the few trees in
the barnyard.

"Anyhow they've ruined our only weapon," said Lockley coldly. "It
would be a detonation beam setting off the cartridges. That would be a
perfect protection against atomic bombs, if the chemical explosive
that makes them go off could be triggered from a distance. Clever
people, these monsters!"

Then he said abruptly, "Come on! It's ten times more necessary for us
to get to where somebody can make use of our information!"

"Go where?" asked Jill, shaken once more.

"We take to the woods until dark," said Lockley, "and meanwhile I'll
check this supposedly promising gadget--though it looks pretty feeble
if the monsters have a detonating beam--against the road blocking beam
up yonder. Come on!"

He stuffed his pockets with food. He led the way.

The morning had now arrived. The sun was visible, red at the eastern
horizon.

"Walk on the grass!" commanded Lockley.

There was no point in leaving footprints, though there was no reason
to believe the explosion on the car seat had been heard. Lockley,
indeed, considered that if the aliens had just used a previously
undisclosed weapon, there would be explosions of greater or lesser
violence all over the evacuated territory and all other areas within
its range. There wouldn't be many farmhouses without a shotgun put
away somewhere. There would be shotgun shells, too. If the aliens had
a detonator beam as well as one that produced the terror beam's
effects, then all hope of resistance was probably gone.

They crossed to the house and moved alongside it. They went with
instinctive furtiveness out of the lane and quickly into the woodland
on the farther side. They were soaked almost immediately. Fallen
leaves clung to their shoes. Drooping branches smeared them with
wetness. Lockley went barely out of sight of the highway and then
trudged doggedly in the direction the Wild Life Control trailer-truck
had taken. He handed Jill the ribbon of bronze that had been the
mainspring of his watch.

"We might pick up the beam from the wetness underfoot," he said, "but
we'll play it safe and use this too."

They went on for a long way. Lockley fumed, "I don't like this! We
ought to be there--"

"I think," said Jill, "I smell it."

"I'll try it," said Lockley.

He detected the jungle smell and its concomitant revolting odors. He
led Jill back.

"Wait here, by this big tree stump. I'll be able to find you and
you're safe enough from the beam."

He turned away. Jill said pleadingly, "Please be careful!"

"A little while ago," he told her gloomily, "I felt that I had too
much useful information to take any chances with my life, let alone
yours. I'm not so sure of my importance now. But I think you still
need somebody else around."

"I do!" said Jill. "And you know it! I'd much rather--"

"I'll be back," he repeated.

He went away, trailing the watch spring.

He was extra cautious now. The smell recurred and grew stronger. He
began to feel the first faint flashes of light in his eyes. It was the
symptom which followed the smell when approaching a terror beam. Then
a faint, discordant murmur, originating in his own ears. He turned on
the device made of two graters and the elements of a pocket radio. The
smell ceased. The faint flashes of light stopped. There was no longer
a raucous sound.

He turned off the ion producing device. The symptoms returned. He
turned it on and off. He took a step forward. He tested again. The
cloud of ions from the innumerable jagged points was invisible, but
somehow it refracted or reflected--in any case, neutralized--the
weapon of the beings at Boulder Lake. He went on and presently he felt
the very faintest possible tingling of his skin and heard the barest
whisper of a sound, and smelled the jungle reek as something so
diluted that he was hardly sure he smelled it.

He went on, and those faint sensations ceased. Presently, impatient of
his own timorousness, he turned the device off again. He had walked
through the terror beam.

He started back with the device turned on once more and at the point
where he'd felt the beam's manifestations faintly, he stopped to savor
his now seemingly useless triumph. If the monsters had a detonating
beam this meant nothing. Yet it could have meant everything. He paid
close attention and distinctly but weakly experienced the effect of
the terror beam.

Then he didn't. Not at all. The sensations were cut off.

He heard Jill cry out shrilly. He plunged toward the place where he
had left her. He raced. He leaped. Once he fell, and frantically swore
at the wet stuff that had caused him to slip. He reached the tree
stump and Jill was not there. He saw the saucer-sized tracks her feet
had made on the saturated fallen leaves. They led toward the road.

He heard a car door slam and a motor roar. He plunged onward more
desperately than before.

The motor raced away. And Lockley got out on the highway only in time
to see the rear of a brown-painted, military-marked car some three
hundred yards away. It swept around a curve of the highway and was
gone. It was going through the space where the road was blocked by a
terror beam, headed obviously for Boulder Lake.

What had happened was self-evident. From her place beside the huge
stump she'd seen a military car approaching. And she and Lockley had
been trying to reach the cordon of troops around Boulder Lake. There
was no reason to distrust men in uniform or in a military car. She'd
run to flag it down. She had. By a coincidence, it was undoubtedly
where a carload of collaborating humans would have stopped to have the
road-blocking beam cut off by their monster allies. She'd approached
the stopped car. And something frightened her. She screamed.

But she'd been pulled into the car, which went on before the beam
could come on again to stop it.

CHAPTER 9

It was very likely that at that moment Lockley despised himself more
bitterly than any other man alive. He blamed himself absolutely for
Jill's capture. If there were humans acting with the alien invaders,
her fate would unquestionably be more horrible than at the hands of
the monsters alone. After all, there was one nation most likely to
deal with extra-terrestrial creatures to help them in the conquest of
earth, and its troops were not notorious for their kindly behavior to
civilians.

And Jill was their captive. He'd been carried past the place where a
terror beam blocked the road. The military markings might mean the car
was stolen, or that its markings and paint were counterfeit. It seemed
certain that Jill had gone up to it in confidence that there could
only be American soldiers in such a car, and when near it found out
her mistake too late.

These were not things that Lockley thought out in detail at the
beginning. He ran after the car like a mad man, unable to feel
anything but horror and so terrible a fury that it should have killed
its objects by sheer intensity.

Presently he heard hoarse, gasping sounds. He realized that the sounds
were the breath going in and out of his own throat, while Jill was
carried farther and farther away from him in a car which traveled ten
yards to his one. He sobbed then, and suddenly he was strangely and
unnaturally calm. He was able to think quite coolly. The only
difference between this and normal thinking was that now he could
only think about one thing--full and complete and terrible revenge for
the crimes committed and to be committed against Jill. She would be
taken to Boulder Lake. So he would go to Boulder Lake, and somehow, in
some manner, he would destroy utterly all living beings there and
every trace of their coming.

Which, of course, was both natural and unreasonable. But reason would
have been unnatural at such a time as this.

He moved along the highway in a passion of ultimate resolve. In the
rest of the world, time passed without knowledge of his emotional
state. The rest of the world was suffering emotional agonies of its
own.

The United States had become popular among peoples who disliked all
things American except those they were given free, and who continued
to dislike the givers. Now though, the United States had been invaded
from space by creatures using weapons of unprecedented type and
effect. If the United States were conquered, there was no other nation
likely to remain free. So a great deal of anti-Americanism faded under
pressure of an ardent desire for America to be successful in its
self-defense.

Moreover, anticipating other alien landings which could take place
anywhere, the United States offered to share its stock of atom bombs
with any nation so invaded. American popularity increased. The fact
that the USSR made no such proposal also had its effect. The United
States invited scientists of every country to help in solving the
menace of the terror beam, and committed itself to share any
discoveries for defense against it with all the world. Again there was
an improvement in the public image of the United States abroad.

But Lockley knew nothing of this. His pocket radio no longer existed
to give him news. It had been rebuilt into something else, whose most
conspicuous parts were cheese and nutmeg graters, slung over his
shoulder as he marched. But if he had known of changes in the
popularity of his country, he wouldn't have been interested. He could
fix his mind only on one subject and matters related to it.

He tramped along the highway, possessed by a cold demon of hatred. He
was on foot for lack of a car. He was unarmed. At the moment he
believed that all the rest of humanity was disarmed, in effect if not
in fact. So he had no plans, only an infinite hatred.

But because he would have to pass through terror beams to get at those
he meant to destroy, he realized that it was necessary to make sure
that he would be able to pass through them, that his equipment for
reaching Boulder Lake was in good order. It was still turned on. He
turned it off to be economical of its batteries. He went on, thinking
of only one subject, examining every possibility for revenge with a
passionate patience, undiscouraged because one idea after another was
plainly impossible, but continuing obsessively to think of others.

He smelled the foetid odor, which cut through his absorption because
of its connotations. He turned on his device and went doggedly ahead.
He knew he had entered a terror beam by the faint perceptions which
came through the cloud of ions his instrument produced. Then they
ceased. He knew that the beam had been cut off. He heard a motor rev
up. A car or truck had stopped beyond the road-blocking beam and
waited for it to be cut off, as it had been.

Lockley stepped into the woods hating the vehicle bitterly as it
approached, but wanting to save destruction for those where Jill had
been taken.

He was hidden when the car appeared. It was a perfectly commonplace
car with a whip aerial at its rear. It came confidently along the
highway. A hundred yards from him, there were explosions. Smoke came
out of the open windows. The engine stopped and the car bucked crazily
and went into the ditch beside the highway. A man plunged out,
slapping at his leg. A revolver in its holster had exploded all its
shells. The leather holster had saved him from serious injury, but his
clothing was on fire. Other men, two of them, got out hastily. Things
had exploded in the back of the car, too. The three men swore
agitatedly.

Then one of them said something which stimulated the others to frantic
flight down the highway away from the ditched car. The third man
limped anxiously after the faster-moving two.

Lockley, watching and hating with undivided attention, knew when the
terror beam came on again. He felt it, very faint because of his
protection, but quite distinct. The explosions had taken place when
the car was in the area now covered again by the terror beam. The men
in the car, astonished and scorched, had fled because the beam was due
to come back on and they didn't want to be caught in it.

Lockley noted that the human confederates of the monsters had no
protection against the beam to match his own. Perhaps the monsters
themselves were protected only near the projectors. This was an item
affecting his plans of revenge for Jill. He stored it away in his
mind. Then he realized that the weapons in the car had exploded just
like the pistol on his own seat cushion. The explosion was not
associated with the terror beam. There'd been no beam in action when
his own pistol blew up. It did not seem reasonable that if the
monsters possessed a detonation beam that they'd turn it on their own
confederates.

No. Rational beings would do nothing so self-contradictory.

Then Lockley looked down at the cheese grater-pocket radio device of
his own manufacture. He considered the fact that his own pistol had
exploded the instant he'd turned the gadget on. The weapons in the
other car detonated when that car was near him.

He plodded onward thinking very clearly and precisely about the
matter. He even remembered to turn off his gadget because he would
need it to avenge Jill. But when he tried to think of any subject
unconnected with revenge, his mind became confused and agitated.

Two miles along the highway, which had not yet turned to head in
toward Boulder Lake, there was a farmhouse. Lockley walked heavily to
the abandoned building. He found the door locked. Without conscious
thought, he forced it. He searched the closets. He found a shotgun and
half a box of shells. He considered them, then left the gun and all
the shells but three. He went out. Presently he laid a shotgun shell
down on the road. He paced off twenty-five yards and dropped another.
He dropped a third twenty-five yards farther on, and then carefully
counted off three hundred feet. The car had been just about that far
away when the explosions came.

He turned on his device. Two of the three shells exploded smokily. The
farthest away did not explode.

He did not rejoice. He went on without elation, but it became a part
of his painstaking search for vengeance that he knew he could set off
explosives within a hundred and twenty-five yards of himself. There
was something about the device he'd constructed which made explosives
detonate, up to a distance of a little over one hundred yards. He felt
no curiosity about it, though it was simple enough. The heterodyning
of extremely saw-toothed waves produced peaks of energy until the
saw-teeth began to smooth out. There were infinitesimal spots in
which, for infinitesimal lengths of time, energy conditions comparable
to sparks existed. This had not been worked out in advance, but the
reason was clear.

He came to the place where the main highway to Boulder Lake branched
off from the road he was following. He turned into it, walking
doggedly.

Three miles toward the lake, an engine sounded from behind him. He got
off the highway and turned the switch. A half-ton truck came trundling
openly along the road. It came closer and closer.

Small-arm ammunition exploded. The engine stopped and the light truck
toppled over onto its side. Lockley did not approach it. Its driver
might not be dead, and he would not find it possible to leave any man
alive who was associated with Jill's captors. He passed the truck and
went on up the highway.

Seven miles up the road a truck came down from Boulder Lake. Lockley
placed himself discreetly out of sight. He turned on his instrument. A
gun flew to pieces with a thunderous detonation. The truck crashed. It
was interesting to Lockley that automobile engines invariably went
dead at about the time that explosives went off. The fact was, of
course, that ionized air is more or less conductive. In an ion cloud
the spark plugs shorted and did not fire in the cylinders.

There were two other vehicles which essayed to pass Lockley as he
went on up the long way to the lake. Both came from the interior of
the Park. He left them wrecked beside the highway. Between times, he
walked with a dogged grimness toward the place where Vale had been the
first to report a thing come down from the sky. That had been how many
days ago? Three? Four?

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