Operation Terror Part 15

It was a ticklish job getting the car out of the garage and into the street. Lockley was afraid that starting the motor would make a noise which in the silence of the town's absolute abandonment could be heard for a long way. The grinding of the starter, though, lasted only for seconds. It might make men listen, but they could hardly locate it before the motor caught and ran quietly. Also, the trailer-truck was still in motion and making its own noise. Of course it was probably posting watchers and listeners here and there to try to find Lockley and Jill.

So Lockley backed the car into the street as silently as was possible.

He did not turn on the lights. He stopped, headed away from the area in which the truck rumbled. He sent the car forward at a crawl. Then an idea occurred to him and cold chills ran down his spine. It is possible to use a short wave receiver to pick up the ignition sparks of a car. Normally such sparkings are grounded so the car's own radio will work. But sometimes a radio is out of order. It was characteristic of Lockley's acquired distrust of luck and chance that he thought of so unlikely a disaster.

He eased the car into motion, straining his ears for any sign that the truck reacted. Then he moved the car slowly away from the business district. It required enormous self-control to go slowly. While among the lighted streets the urge to flee at top speed was strong. But he clenched his teeth. A car makes much less noise when barely in motion.

He made it drift as silently as a wraith under the trees and the street lamps.

They got out of town. The last of the street lamps was behind them.

There was only starlight ahead, and an unknown road with many turns and curves. Sometimes there were roadsigns, dimly visible as uninformative shapes beside the highway. They warned of curves and other driving hazards, but they could not be read because Lockley drove without lights. He left the car dark because any glare would have been visible to the men of the trailer-truck for a very long way.

Starlight is not good for fast driving, and when a road pa.s.ses through a wooded s.p.a.ce it is nerve-racking. Lockley drove with foreboding, every sense alert and every muscle tense. But just after a painful progress through a series of curves with high trees on either side which he managed by looking up at the sky and staying under the middle of the ribbon of stars he could see, Lockley touched the brake and stopped the car.

"What's the matter?" asked Jill, as he rummaged under the instrument panel.

"I think," said Lockley, "that I must have damaged something in that truck. Otherwise they'd have turned their beam on us just to get even.

"But maybe they'll be able to make a repair. In any case there are other beams. Those are probably stationary and the truck knows where they are and calls by truck radio to have them shut off when it wants to go by. That would work. Using the Wild Life truck was really very clever."

He wrenched at something. It gave. He pulled out a length of wire and started working on one end of it.

"If they guess we got a car," he observed, "they'll expect us to run into a road block beam that would wreck the car and paralyze us. I'm taking a small precaution against that. Here." He put the wire's end into her hand. "It's the lead-in from this car's radio antenna. It ought to warn us of beams across the road as my watch spring did in the hills. Hold it."

"I will," said Jill.

"One more item," he said. He got out of the car and closed the door quickly. He went to the back. There was the sound of breaking gla.s.s.

He returned, saying, "No brake lights will go on now. I'll try to do something about that dome light." With a sharp blow he shattered it.

"Now we could be as hard to trail as that Wild Life truck was the other night."

Jill groped as the car got into motion again.

"You mean it was--Oh!"

"Most likely," agreed Lockley, "it was the thing that went out of the park and occupied Maplewood, flinging terror beams in all directions.

Some of the truck's crew would have had footgear to make hoofprints.

They committed a token burglary or two. And there was the illusion of aliens studying these queer creatures, men."

They went on at not more than fifteen miles an hour. The car was almost soundless. They heard insects singing in the night. There was a steady, monotonous rumbling high above where Air Force planes patrolled outside the Park. After a time Jill said, "You seemed discouraged when you talked to that general."

"I was," said Lockley. "I am. He played it safe, refused to admit that anybody in authority over him could possibly be mistaken. That's sound policy, and I was contradicting the official opinion of his superiors.

I've got to find somebody of much lower rank, or much higher.

Maybe--"

Jill said in a strained voice, "Stop!"

He braked. She said unsteadily, "Holding the wire, I smell that horrible smell."

He put his hand on the wire's end. He shared the sensation.

"Terror beam across the highway," he said calmly. "Maybe on our account, maybe not. But there was a side road a little way back."

He backed the car. He'd smashed the backing lights, too. He guided himself by starlight. Presently he swung the wheel and faced the car about. He drove back the way he had come. A mile or so, and there was another hard-surface road branching off. He took it. Half an hour later Jill said quickly, "Brakes!"

The road was blocked once more by an invisible terror beam, into which any car moving at reasonable speed must move before its driver could receive warning.

"This isn't good," he said coldly. "They may have picked some good places to block. We have to go almost at random, just picking roads that head away from the Park. I don't know how thoroughly they can cage us in, though."

There was a flicker of light in the sky. Lockley jerked his head around. It flashed again. Lightning. The sky was clouding up.

"It's getting worse," he said in a strained voice. "I've been taking every turn that ought to lead us away from the Park, but I've had to use the stars for direction. I didn't think that soldiers would keep us from getting away from here. I was almost confident. But what will I do without the stars?"

He drove on. The clouds piled up, blotting out the heavens. Once Lockley saw a faint glow in the sky and clenched his teeth. He turned away from it at the first opportunity. The glow could be Serena, and he could have been forced back toward it by the windings of the highway he'd followed without lights. Twice Jill warned him of beams across the highway. Once, driven by his increasing anxiety, his brakes almost failed to stop him in time. When the car did stop, he was aware of faint tinglings on his skin. There were erratic flas.h.i.+ngs in his eyes, too, and a discordant composite of sounds which by a.s.sociation with past suffering made him nauseated. Perhaps this extra leakage from the terror beam was through the metal of the car.

When he got out of that terror beam the sky was three-quarters blacked out and before he was well away from the spot there was only a tiny patch of stars well down toward the horizon. There were lightning flickers overhead. After a time he depended on them to show him the road.

Then the rain came. The lightning increased. The road twisted and turned. Twice the car veered off onto the road's shoulders, but each time he righted it. As time pa.s.sed conditions grew worse. It was urgent that he get as far as possible from Serena, because of the Wild Life truck which could seize Jill and himself if its beam generators were repaired, and whose occupants could murder them if they weren't.

But it was most urgent that he get away beyond the military cordon to find men who would listen to his information and see that use was made of it. Yet in driving rain and darkness, without car lights and daring to drive only at a crawl, he might be completely turned around.

"I think," he said at last, "I'll turn in at the next farm gate the lightning shows us. I'll try to get the car into a barn so it won't show up at daybreak. We might be heading straight back into the Park!"

He did turn, the next time a lightning flash showed him a turn-off beside a rural free delivery mailbox. There was a house at the end of a lane. There was a barn. He got out and was soaked instantly, but he explored the open s.p.a.ce behind the wide, open doors. He backed the car in.

"So," he explained to Jill, "if we have a chance to move we won't have to back around first."

They sat in the car and looked out at the rain-filled darkness. There was no light anywhere except when lightning glittered on the rain. In such illuminations they made out the farmhouse, dripping floods of water from its eaves. There was a chicken house. There were fences.

They could not see to the gate or the highway through the falling water, but there had been solid woodland where they turned off into the lane.

"We'll wait," said Lockley distastefully, "to see if we are in a tight spot in the morning. If we're well away--and I've no real idea where we are--we'll go on. If not, we'll hide till dark and hope for stars to steer by when we go."

Jill said confidently, "We'll make it. But where to?"

"To any place away from Boulder Lake Park, and where I'm a human being instead of a crackpot civilian. To where I can explain some things to people who'll listen, if it isn't too late."

"It's not," said Jill with as much a.s.surance as before.

There was a pause. The rain poured down. Lightning flashed. Thunder roared.

"I didn't know," said Jill tentatively, "that you believed the invaders--the monsters--had people helping them."

"The overall picture isn't a human one," he told her. "But there's a design that shows somebody knows us. For instance, n.o.body's been killed. At least not publicly. That was arranged by somebody who understood that if there was a ma.s.sacre, we'd fight to the end of our lives and teach our children to fight after us."

She thought it over. "You'd be that way," she said presently. "But not everybody. Some people will do anything to stay alive. But you wouldn't."

The rain made drumming sounds on the barn roof. Lockley said, "But what's happened isn't altogether what humans would devise. Humans who planned a conquest would know they couldn't make us surrender to them.

If this was a sort of Pearl Harbor attack by human enemies--and you can guess who it might be--they might as well start killing us on the largest possible scale at the beginning. If monsters with no information about us landed, they might perpetrate some ma.s.sacres with the entirely foolish idea of cowing us. But there haven't been any ma.s.sacres. So it's neither a cold war trick nor an unadvised landing of monsters. There's another angle in it somewhere. Monster-human cooperation is only a guess. I'm not satisfied, but it's the best answer so far."

Jill was silent for a long time. Then she said irrelevantly, "You must have been a good friend of ... of...."

"Vale?" Lockley said. "No. I knew him, but that's all. He only joined the Survey a few months ago. I don't suppose I've talked to him a dozen times, and four of those times he was with you. Why'd you think we were close friends?"