“But how? When?”
“Not right away,” she said. “Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. You’re on a different time track now.”
She stood there, a thin slip of a girl, in her chaste white robe, belted at the waist, talking of different time tracks and of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered. “How much do you understand?” he asked. “Of this time track business? I know your father mentioned it, but there was so much else.…”
“There are equations that you have to know to understand it all,” she said. “There are, I suppose, only a few men who really understand it. But basically it’s quite simple. It’s a cause-and-effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here.…”
He made a motion of futility with his hand. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t know what a picnic is. So we are even now.”
“Someday I’ll take you on a picnic.”
“I wish you would,” she said, “Is it something nice?”
20
Bentley Price came home a bit befuddled, but somewhat triumphant, for he had talked his way past a roadblock set up by the military, had yelled a jeep off the road, and honked his way through two blocks clotted by refugees and spectators who had stayed in the area despite all efforts by the MPs to move them out. The driveway was half-blocked by a car, but he made his way around it, clipping a rose bush in the process.
Night had fallen and it had been a busy day and all that Bentley wanted was to get into the house and collapse upon a bed, but before he did he must clear the car of cameras and other equipment, for it would never do, with so many strangers in the neighborhood, to leave it locked in the car, as had been his habit. A locked car would be no deterrent to someone really bent on thievery. He hung three cameras by their straps around his neck and was hauling a heavy accessories bag out of the car when he saw, with outrage, what had happened to Edna’s flower bed.
A gun stood in the center of it, its wheels sunk deep into the soil, and around it stood the gun crew. The gun site was brightly lighted by a large spotlight that had been hung high in the branches of a tree and there could be no doubt of the havoc that had been wrought upon the flowers.
Bentley charged purposefully upon the gun, brushing aside one astounded cannoneer, to square off, like an embattled bantam rooster, before a young man who had bars upon his shoulder straps.
“You have your nerve,” said Bentley. “Coming here when the owner happens to be gone.…”
“Are you the owner, sir?” asked the captain of the gun crew.
“No,” said Bentley, “I am not, but I am responsible. I was left here to look out for the joint and.…”
“We are sorry, sir,” said the officer, “if we have displeased you, but we had our orders, sir.”
Bentley shrilled at him. “You had orders to set up this contraption in the middle of Edna’s flower bed? I suppose the orders said to set up in the middle of a flower bed, not a few feet forward or a few feet back, but in the middle of a bed which a devoted woman has slaved to bring up to perfection.…”
“No, not precisely that,” said the officer. “We were ordered to cover the mouth of the time tunnel and to do that we needed a clear line of fire.”
“That don’t make no sense,” said Bentley. “Why would you want to cover the tunnel, with all them poor people coming out of it?”
“I don’t know,” said the officer. “No one bothered to explain to me. I simply got my orders and I’m about to carry them out, flower bed or no flower bed, owner or no owner.”
“Somehow,” said Bentley, “you don’t sound like no gentleman to me and that’s what you’re supposed to be, ain’t it, an officer and a gentleman. There wouldn’t be any gentleman set up no gun in the middle of a flower bed and there wouldn’t be any officer aim his gun at a bunch of refugees and.…”
A shrill scream split the night and Bentley spun around and saw that there was something very terrible happening in the tunnel. There were people still coming out of it, but they weren’t marching out four and five abreast, the way they had before. They were running out of it, fighting to get out, and overriding them and plowing through them was a horror that Bentley, in that moment, never quite got sorted in his mind. He had the impression of wicked teeth and drooling jaws, of mighty talons protruding from massive, furry paws, of terrible power and ferocity, and quite by habit his hands went down to grip a camera and bring it to his eye.
Through the lens, he saw that there was not one, but two of the creatures, one almost through the tunnel and the other close behind. He saw the bodies of people flying through the air like limp dolls thrown about by children, and others that were crushed beneath the monster’s treading feet. And he saw, as well, writhing tentacles, as if the creatures could not quite make up their minds if they were animals or octopi.
Behind him sharp orders rang out and almost at his elbow the gun belched sudden flame that lit up all the houses and the yards and gardens. A thunderclap concussion knocked him to one side and as he hit the ground and rolled, he saw a number of things slantwise out of the corner of his eyes. The tunnel had suddenly blinked out in an explosion that was little more than a continuation of the concussion, although it was more mind-numbing and nerve-shaking than the concussion and there were dead people and a dead monster that smoked as if it had been fried. But while one of the monsters lay upon the lawn beneath the great oak tree that had marked the tunnel, the other monster was very much alive and somehow the one live monster and the gun and gun crew were very much mixed up and people were running, screaming and in terror.
Bentley scrambled to his feet and took one quick glance around and in that single glance he saw the gun crew dead, ripped and flung and trampled, with the gun tipped over, smoke still trailing from its muzzle. From down the street came shrill, high screams and he caught, for an instant only, the flickering motion of something large and dark, moving very swiftly, whipping across one corner of a yard, with a picket fence exploding in a shower of white slivers as the dark thing went straight through it.
He sprinted around the corner of the house and burst through the kitchen door, clawing for the phone, dialing almost by instinct, praying that the line was open.
“Global News,” said a raspy voice. “Manning.”
“Tom, this is Bentley.”
“Yes, Bentley. What is it now? Where are you?”
“I am home. Out at Joe’s place. And I got some news.”
“Are you sober?”
“Well, I stopped by a place I know and had a drink or two. Sunday, you know. None of the regular places open. And when I come home I found a gun crew out in the yard, right in Edna’s flower bed.…”
“Hell,” said Manning, “that is not any news. We had that a couple of hours ago. They set up guns at all the tunnels for some reason.”
“I know the reason.”
“Well, now, that’s nice,” said Manning.
“Yeah, there was a monster come through the tunnel and.…”
“A monster! What kind of monster?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Bentley. “I never got a real good look at it. And there wasn’t only one monster. There was two of them. One of them the gun killed, but the other got away. It killed the gun crew and tipped over the gun and all the people ran screaming and it got away. I saw it bust right through a picket fence.…”
“Now, Bentley,” said Manning, “stop talking quite so fast. Take it a little slow and tell me. You say one monster got away. There is a monster loose.…”
“There sure is. He killed the gun crew and maybe other people, too. The tunnel is shut down and there’s a dead monster out there.”
“Now tell me about the monster. What kind of monster was it?”
/> “I can’t tell you that,” said Bentley, “but I got pictures of it.”
“Of the dead one, I suppose.”
“No, the live one,” said Bentley, his voice bright with scorn. “I wouldn’t never bother with no dead monster when there’s a live one.”
“Now, listen, Bentley. Listen closely. Are you in shape to drive?”
“Sure, I’m in shape to drive. I drove out here, didn’t I?”
“All right. I’ll send someone else out there. And you—I want you to get in here as quickly as you can with the pictures that you have. And, Bentley.…”
“Yes?”
“You’re sure you’re right? There really was a monster?”
“I’m sure I’m right,” said Bentley piously. “I only had a drink or two.”
21
Steve Wilson went into the press lounge in search of coffee and sandwiches. A dozen or so newsmen still were there.
“Anything new, Steve?” asked Carl Anders, of the AP.
Wilson shook his head. “Everything seems to be quiet. If there were anything of consequence going on, I think that I would know it.”
“And tell us?”
“And tell you,” Wilson said sharply. “You know damn well we’ve played fair with you.”
“Yeah? How about the guns?”
“Simply routine emergency precaution. How about some sandwiches or did you guys eat them all?”
“Over there in the corner, Steve,” said John Gates, of the Washington Post.
Wilson piled two sandwiches on a plate and got a cup of coffee. As he came back across the room, Gates slid over on the davenport where he had been lounging and patted a place beside him. Wilson sat down, putting the plate and cup of coffee on the table that stood in front of the davenport.
Anders came over to take a nearby chair. Henry Hunt, the New York Times man, sat down on the davenport on the other side of Wilson.
“It’s been a long day, Steve,” he said.
Wilson bit into a sandwich. “Rough,” he said.
“What’s going on right now?” asked Anders.
“Perhaps quite a bit. Nothing that I know of. There’s nothing I can tell, nothing that I know.”
Gates chuckled. “You can talk, can’t you?”
“Sure I can talk. But I can’t give you anything. You guys know procedure. If I should happen to say something that makes sense, it is off the record.”
“Well, hell, yes, of course,” said Anders. “You news-papered yourself. You know how it is.”
“I know how it is,” said Wilson.
“What bothers me,” said Hunt, “is how anyone, even the President, knows where to take hold of a thing like this. There is no precedent. Nothing like this has ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. As a rule a crisis will build up; you can see it coming and be halfway ready for it. But not this one. This one exploded without warning.”
“That’s bothering me, too,” said Anders. “how do you find a handle?”
“You’re stuck with it,” said Wilson. “You can’t just ignore it. You do the best you can. You try to find out what it’s all about. In a case like this, you have to be somewhat skeptical and that doesn’t allow you to move as fast as you’d like to move. You have to talk with a lot of people, you have to check around and you have to develop some sort of judgment. I suspect you might pray a lot. Oh, not informal praying, nothing like that.…”
“Is that what the President did?” asked Anders.
“That’s not what I said. I was just trying to think through a hypothetical question.”
“What do you think of it, Steve?” asked Gates. “You, not the President.”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Wilson. “It’s all too new. I found myself, just a while ago, wondering if it was all delusion, if it might not be gone by morning. Of course, I know it won’t be. But it boggles the mind to think of it. I have brought myself to believe these people are really from the future. But even if they’re not, they’re here and we have to deal with them. I suppose it doesn’t really matter where they came from.”
“You, personally, still have doubts?”
“You mean are they from the future? No, I don’t think I have any real doubts about that. Their explanation holds up. Why should they lie about it? What would they gain by lying?”
“But, still, you.…”
“Now, wait a minute. I don’t want you to start speculating the answer that we have is wrong. That would be unrealistic. This was among friends, remember? Just sitting down and talking.”
The pressroom door came open and, at the sound of its opening, Wilson looked up. Brad Reynolds stood in the doorway. His face had a pitifully stricken look.
“Steve,” he said, “Steve, I have to see you.”
“What’s going on?” asked Hunt.
Through the open door came the frantic clanging of a bell on one of the teletypes, signaling a bulletin.
Wilson rose to his feet so swiftly that he jiggled the coffee table, tipping his cup. Coffee ran across the table and dripped onto the carpet.
He strode across the room and gripped Reynolds by the arm.
“A monster got through!” Reynolds blurted out. “Global has it. It’s on radio.”
“For the love of God,” said Wilson. He glanced back over his shoulder at the newsmen and saw that they had heard.
“What’s this about monsters?” shouted Anders. “You never told us about any monsters.”
“Later,” said Wilson savagely. He pushed Reynolds back into the pressroom and slammed the door.
“I thought you and Frank were working on the TV speech,” he said. “How did you.…”
“The radio,” said Reynolds. “We heard it on the radio. What will we do about the TV talk? He can’t go on TV without mentioning this and it’s only an hour away.”
“We’ll take care of that,” said Wilson. “Does Henderson know?”
“Frank went to tell him. I came to you.”
“Do you know what happened? Where it happened?”
“Down in Virginia. Two of them came through the tunnel. The gun got one of them. The other one got through. It killed the gun crew.…”
“You mean one of them is running loose?”
Reynolds nodded miserably.
22
Tom Manning turned sideways from his desk and ran new paper into the typewriter. He wrote:
Third Lede Monster
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Global)—An alien beast is loose on the Earth tonight. No one knows where it is. It came out of a time tunnel in Virginia and disappeared after killing the crew of an artillery piece posted in front of the tunnel, placed to prevent the very thing that happened. A second beast came through with it, but this one was killed by the gun.
There are unconfirmed reports that several other people, in addition to the gun crew, were killed by the tunnel monster.
Eyewitnesses said that the beast was large and unbelievably quick in its movements. No one got a good look at it. “It moved too fast to really see it,” said one eyewitness. Within seconds after emerging from the tunnel it disappeared. There is no clue as to where it may be now.
“Mr. Manning,” said someone at his elbow.
Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there.
“Mr. Price’s pictures,” said the copy boy, handing them to him.
Manning looked at the one on top and drew his breath in sharply. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said to himself aloud, “will you look at that!”
It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was springing, perhaps toward the gun crew, probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley’s super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity—the bared mouthful of fangs, the talons gleaming in the fur of one uplifted paw, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. Its eyes shone wickedly and a thick ruff of fur around its neck stood u
p on end. The very shape of it was evil. It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up one’s spine—not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning, mindless fear.
Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand, he fanned them out as one would fan a hand of playing cards. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead monster crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies.
“That goddamned Price,” said Manning soulfully. “He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew.”
23
“We can’t cancel your TV appearance,” Wilson told the President. “It’s bad enough right now. It will be worse if we cancel your appearance. We can fix it, a paragraph or two at the start of it. Say that the Virginia incident is too recent to make much comment upon it. Assurance that it will be run down, that it will be found and killed. That we’re already closing in on it.…”
“But we aren’t,” said the President. “We don’t know where the hell it is. There’s been no report of it. You remember what Gale said—how fast they could move. Traveling in the dark, this thing could be deep into the mountains of West Virginia and well hidden out before it’s daylight.”
“There’s more reason right now than there ever was,” said Frank Howard, who had been working on the speech text with Reynolds, “for you to talk to the people. The country, the entire country, will be in an uproar and we’ll have to tame them down.”
“You know, Frank,” said the President, “I don’t seem to care right now to tame the country down. Can’t you get it through your head that this is not a political matter? It’s far more than that. I can’t be sure just how much danger the country may be facing, but I know that there is danger. I’ve asked Gale to step down here and tell us what he thinks. He knows more of it than we do.”
“What you refuse to understand, sir,” said Wilson, “is that the country’s waiting to hear from you. They would like some sort of assurance, but if you can’t give them that, you can let them know that we are on the job. Seeing and hearing you, in itself, will be visible proof that everything has not entirely gone to pot. They need some physical evidence that the government is aware of what is going on.…”