Operation Terror by Murray Leinster (poetry books to read txt) 📕

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[78] 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[79] '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—"

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[80] 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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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.

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 dem[84]onstrated. 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