Operation Terror, Murray Leinster [top rated books of all time .txt] 📗

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[70] 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[71] 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[72] 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.[73]

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[74] 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[75] 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[76] 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.[77] 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