Day of the beasts v1 0, p.5
Day of the Beasts (v1.0), page 5
“You think that it’ll strike again?”
“I’m sure of it,” asserted the other decisively. “Not only that, but there’s one other point that’s just struck me, which we don’t seem to have taken into account.”
“What’s that?” asked the other.
“So far, we’ve been treating this as simply an isolated incident. But for all we know, there might be more of those creatures in the country.”
The sheriff’s voice was strangely quiet and restrained. “I think I’d better run you back into town, Major and let you get back to Washington as soon as possible. We may need to call the military in on this if it gets out of hand. I wouldn’t like to have to tackle it with the help I have.”
“I guess not. I’ll leave right away. There’s nothing more I can do around here, anyway. I thought this might tie in with what happened yesterday at the establishment, but so far, I don’t seem to be able to get a lead on it.”
It was a little after ten o’clock that night. The military plane which had picked them up at the small airfield thirty miles from town began to lose altitude slowly. Brad Norton shivered a little as he leaned further back in his seat and stared along the rows of empty seats in front of him. Apart from Sergeant Gourlay and the robot steward, the plane was empty. Up front, in the control cabin, he knew that there would be no one seated in the chairs in front of the controls. Everything was operated by remote control from the airfield at Washington, where more robots would be seated in front of the banks of gleaming switches and 44 levers, sending out the short-wave impulses which were guiding the plane through the darkening sky to its destination, guiding it far more safely and surely than had been possible in the days before robotics.
He noticed that Gourlay was sleeping, his head leaning forward on his chest, not even the subtle change in the basic rhythm of the engines being sufficient to waken him, In a few moments, the plane would dip and glide down out of the air, coming in to land at the airfield, which he could see now, still far in the distance, a long lane of colored lights laid out against the overall haze of light from the city itself.
“Almost there, Major.” He swiveled in his seat to turn and stare at the robot which stood beside him. The metallic voice had sounded almost human.
“It seems strange,” he said musingly, “but I can just remember the time when Washington covered an area less than a third of that down there. That must have been almost fifteen years ago.”
“Yes, Major.* The thin, piping voice began,to irritate him. “But that would be when the government decentralized everything in preparation for the war with the Reds.”
Brad nodded slowly. “A war which, oddly enough, never materialized, because the Reds landed on Mars the same year and mankind exploded outward toward the planets instead of inward, destroying himself.”
“We land in ten minutes, sir.” The other moved away, along the corridor. Brad watched it curiously. He had never gotten over the shock of realizing how lifelike and humanoid they were making the robots these days.
Even the city had altered to an extent which he scarcely found credible. The robots had taken over everything. The traffic moved under the control of these mechanical creatures. They acted as housemaids; they taught in the schools; they saw to it that the life of the city flowed on uninterrupted, unchanged.
Some day, he thought wearily, if we’re not careful, we’ll wake up and find that the robots are ruling .us, instead of the other way around. Whenever that happens, there’ll no longer be any real place for mankind on earth. He’ll have to go out to the planets or the stars if he’s ever to find himself again.
In the other seat, Sergeant Gourlay stirred, opened his eyes and sat up. He rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth.
“That Washington, sir?” he asked gruffly.
“We’ll be landing in about five minutes.”
“I can’t say that I’ll be sorry. I still think I’ve been dreaming all that happened back there in the New Mexico desert. But we didn’t, did we?”
“No, I’m afraid not”
“Are you going to see the general right away, sir? As soon as you land?”
Brad nodded. “I think I’d better. The sooner we take positive action, the better. God alone knows what might have been happening back there in the short space of time it took us to get here. I can imagine what General Hartley will say when he hears our report.”
“I doubt whether he’ll be quite as skeptical as that sheriff.”
“No, perhaps not He’s been out in space himself. He knows a little of what lies out there.”
A minute later, the runway came up at them out of the darkness in a blaze of light which flashed by the windows on either side. Seconds later, the wheels touched down in a perfect landing, and they were taxiing along the runway toward the main buildings.
“I’ll let the general know we’re here,” Brad said, turning to Sergeant Gourlay. “Better let him know that we’re coming.”
He walked over to a phone booth and dialed a number. The robot exchange put him through seconds later. He heard the phone burr at the other end of the line; then a crisp decisive voice was saying:
“Hartley here.”
“Norton here, sir.”
“Where are you, man?” demanded the other harshly. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for the past twelve hours.”
’Things have been happening down in the vicinity of the research establishment, sir. I think I ought to see you right away, if that’s possible.”
“Possible? listen, Norton. Get here right away. That’s an order. At the moment, Pm not concerned with what’s been happening down at the research establishment. I’m more concerned .with what’s been happening in New York and half a dozen other cities throughout the country.” Norton started to speak again, but there was a sudden, sharp click at the other end of the line, and the phone went dead.
The nightmare began to rush in on him again as he opened the door of the phone booth and stepped outside.
IV
During the next fifteen minutes, things began to move. If Brad had been surprised by the ease with which the robot plane had carried diem from far down in the New Mexico desert up to Washington and set them down once more on terra firma without a single hitch, he was even more surprised by the way they were transported to the vast, skyrearing building which housed the Military Commission.
They went up in the elevator to the top floor. At the end of a corridor, two figures stood one on either side of the glass-paneled door. Brad noticed with a sense of surprise that they were not robots as he had anticipated. They were men dressed in the uniforms of the military police, and there were weapons stuffed into their belts. They looked like tough, capable men. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, he told himself fiercely, for the general to take precautions like this.
“Major Norton, sir?” asked one of the guards.
He nodded, showing his papers.
“You’re to go right in, sir. The general’s waiting for you. You too, Sergeant.”
There was no arguing with that. Brad knocked on the door, heard a gruff bark from inside, and stepped inside with the sergeant close on his heels.
General Carl Hartley was a small, compact man, ruddy-skinned, hair greying at the temples, but with the iron-grey usually associated with military men. The angles of his body showed that he was still an athletic man, and there was no sign that he was going to fat like many of his colleagues.
He said cordially: “Sit down, gentlemen. Smoke if you wish.”
“I have my own brand of cigarettes, sir,” said Brad. He drew out his case as he spoke, and the other thrust back the cigar he was offering.
The general waited with a kind of paternal patience while Brad lit his cigarette and flicked the spent match into the tray. The general lowered himself slowly into his chair, hesitated for a moment, then took out a cigar and lit it with an exaggerated slowness.
Hartley pulled the cigar reluctandy from between his lips, blew a ring of smoke into the air, then said slowly: “I know you’ve been down to the research establishment in New Mexico during the past few days, checking on the position there, but “I’m afraid that will have to wait, important as it undoubtedly is. You’re being reassigned.” “Reassigned, sir?” Brad looked at the other in surprise. He leaned forward in his seat and said tightly: “Has something else happened nearer home?”
“I’m not sure how much you know or what you’ve guessed, Major. You’re right when you say that something has happened. The reports are scanty as yet, and “I’m not sure how much credence can be attached to them. No doubt there’s some hysteria, but several hundred people can’t all be wrong, especially when these things have been seen at several scattered points throughout the country.” Hartley didn’t meet Brad’s eyes as he went on slowly: “This may sound incredible, more like the ravings of a madman, Major, but during the past twenty-four hours we’ve received fifty-four reports of gigantic creatures attacking humans all over the country.” He rearranged the objects on his desk with long, slender fingers, still not looking the other squarely in die eye. “I don’t expect you to believe this without proof of some kind. That’s why I’m assigning you to investigate these incidents. You’ll have the usual full backing of the Military Commission, of course.”
Norton said thinly: “You said earlier, sir, that we might have guessed something. I’m afraid it’s a little more conclusive than that. We know about these creatures.”
“You know?” Hartley stared at him incredulously.
Norton nodded. “We saw one of these creatures at a small town fifteen miles from the research establishment. At least we saw the result of what must have been an attack on a truck. The driver was dragged into the desert. There seems little doubt that he was killed.”
“I see.” The general sucked in his lips and looked thoughtful. There was a moment of stunned silence.
It was all happening a little too quickly for Brad. None of this could really be so, he tried to tell himself. These creatures simply couldn’t exist.
He heard himself ask in a level voice which sounded unnatural even in his own ears: “Where do you think these creatures could have come from, sir? Have there been any opinions given by other organizations?”
Hartley shrugged and shook his head a little unhappily. “None that I know of. We’ve had the space exploration boys on the case since early morning. So far they haven’t come up with anything. In fact, I’m beginning to get sickened by their continual utterances that these things can’t possibly exist, unless—”
“Unless what, sir?” Sergeant Gourlay leaned forward in his seat, speaking like a drowning man clutching at a straw.
“Unless the Reds have some weapon we know nothing about,” said the other decisively.
Brad shook his head. It was all too pat. He himself doubted that the Soviet scientists could have developed any means of interfering with the metabolic rate of normal creatures, to create creatures such as these. There was another explanation, he felt sure, and the more he thought about it, the more frightened he became.
“Do you think it possible that the Reds have such a weapon, sir?” he asked. “And even if they have, how did those creatures come to be here?”
“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, Major. That’s why I’m reassigning the sergeant and yourself. I want you to investigate these happenings. They aren’t isolated. “I’m certain of that. If things go on as they are, we’ll be forced to bring in every available unit of the Army, and possibly the Air Force, too.”
“Has there been much damage, sir?”
“Plenty in New York. For the moment, they seem to have been beaten off, but they’ll return.”
“And we’re to be there when they do. Is that it, sir?”
“In a nutshell—yes. I realize you’ve had scarcely any sleep for twenty-four hours, but I’m afraid that can’t be helped. I’ve got a plane standing by at the airport for you. You’ll leave within half an hour.”
Brad was desperate enough to say: “Isn’t there any other way, sir?”
“You trying to say that you’re refusing this assignment, Major?” There was an odd edge to the other’s voice, a quiet smoothness which seemed suddenly out of place with the faint smile on his face, a smile which never reached his eyes.
“No, sir, of course not. It’s just that I can’t see where we would fit into a thing like this.”
“You’ve got a job to do, Major. We’ve all got a job to do, and it’s up to us to do it to the best of our ability. I’ve deliberately picked the two of you, because you’re my best men. You, Major, have been out to the planets, spent most of your life there during the past twenty years or so. You know what conditions are like there on half a dozen worlds. You know whether or not these creatures can have originated there and been brought back here to earth for some purpose we don’t know about yet.
“You’re an imaginative man, Major. You know that things aren’t always as they seem on the surface. You know, perhaps better than any of us, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by ordinary mortals. You, Sergeant, you’re the opposite in many respects. You’re a solid, down-to-earth military man. Don’t get me wrong; that’s a darned good thing to be in a case like this. You’ll offset the major’s imaginative tendencies. You’ll complement each other, and that’s exactly what I want.”
He stubbed out his cigar, then added, “I’m speaking to you alone because, at the moment, I want action, not the normal dragging procedure of military committees. Time’s short if things are as bad as they’re reported. There could be mass hysteria. That’s something we want to avoid at all costs. I’m reasonably certain we can handle these creatures with the weapons we have at our disposal.”
Brad stood up slowly. The interview was obviously at an end. If the general was right and they could handle these creatures as easily as he thought, then it ruled out one possibility. The Reds were unlikely to launch something like this unless it stood a good chance of success.
Outside in the empty corridor, with only the two military police looking on impassively, Brad felt the coldness in his face. He knew, without trying, that no one else in the whole of the vast building had any more to tell him. No one knew any more than the general about the reports which had flowed in suddenly from all over the country. Even if he had tried, official after official would simply hurry him on from one to the next and in the end, the result would still be the same. In exactly thirty minutes he would find himself with Sergeant Gourlay on board that plane, taking off into the dark sky with that terribly inanimate robot mechanism in the front, guiding them through the night until they had reached New York.
So it turned out to be. He shivered for a moment in the raw night air as he walked behind the robot servant to the waiting plane. It stood in front of the airport buildings, engines running smoothly with a faint, scarcely audible whine. The plane was a military one, of course. He had not expected it to be otherwise. Now they had suddenly become very important people.
He turned his head for a moment, glancing about him, just before they boarded the plane. The clouds had closed in now, and it was threatening rain. But almost directly overhead, through a rift in the dark clouds, shone a single baleful star: an orange-red point of light which he recognized instantly.
Mars. Mars the red. Mars the inhospitable. And yet up there, under their plexiglass domes, men were working and living, breathing air taken there from earth, air which had never formed part of that planet Oh, yes, they would get the oxygen which had been locked in those orange, iron-ore rocks some day, but how soon, he didn’t know. Perhaps it was a forlorn hope anyway.
He shrugged and walked up the metal steps into the dimly lit interior of the plane.
“Here we go again, sir,” said Gourlay resignedly. “Pretty soon they’ll have to let us get some sleep.”
“Try to get some now,” suggested Brad quietly. “We won’t be in New York much before dawn. And God alone knows what we’ll find when we get there.”
He suited his words with actions and leaned back more comfortably into his deep seat, settling himself deeply into the soft cushions. He closed his eyes as the engines began to roar more fiercely in his ears, and the plane rolled smoothly forward along the runway, gathering speed.
In spite of the thoughts racing through his mind, of the tense fear which tended to knot the muscles of his stomach into a painful ball, he was asleep within minutes of the takeoff when the faintly shuddering motion of the plane vanished within seconds as they became airborne.
His dream was distorted. He remembered only snatches of it when he woke to find themselves in clouds and approaching New York along one of the air channels open to military aircraft. Brow knitted in thought, he tried to reconstruct the nature of his dream. Why he wanted to think over this dream rather than any other he had had in his life, he couldn’t quite fathom. Perhaps it was because it had been so intense and real while it had lasted. Perhaps it was because he had the odd feeling that it had something to do with what was happening now. Afterwards, he could never be really sure, but gradually, the major details of the dream came back to him.
A nightmare in many respects, filled with images of these gigantic creatures, a world which looked like earth, but which was not earth. The pictures floated hazily in his mind as he sat tautly in his seat, gazing useeeingly out of the window at the clouds nearby.
There was a machine in the image in his mind. The details of it were blurred, either because he could not remember them clearly, or because it was something he could not understand. Then, abruptly, in his dream, the scene dissolved in a blinking, coruscating flash, a leaping of incandescent gas.
The image faded and he was still left with the mystery. He grew aware that Sergeant Gourlay was speaking huskily.
