Operation Terror Part 18

"I'll be back," he repeated.

He went away, trailing the watch spring.

He was extra cautious now. The smell recurred and grew stronger. He began to feel the first faint flashes of light in his eyes. It was the symptom which followed the smell when approaching a terror beam. Then a faint, discordant murmur, originating in his own ears. He turned on the device made of two graters and the elements of a pocket radio. The smell ceased. The faint flashes of light stopped. There was no longer a raucous sound.

He turned off the ion producing device. The symptoms returned. He turned it on and off. He took a step forward. He tested again. The cloud of ions from the innumerable jagged points was invisible, but somehow it refracted or reflected--in any case, neutralized--the weapon of the beings at Boulder Lake. He went on and presently he felt the very faintest possible tingling of his skin and heard the barest whisper of a sound, and smelled the jungle reek as something so diluted that he was hardly sure he smelled it.

He went on, and those faint sensations ceased. Presently, impatient of his own timorousness, he turned the device off again. He had walked through the terror beam.

He started back with the device turned on once more and at the point where he'd felt the beam's manifestations faintly, he stopped to savor his now seemingly useless triumph. If the monsters had a detonating beam this meant nothing. Yet it could have meant everything. He paid close attention and distinctly but weakly experienced the effect of the terror beam.

Then he didn't. Not at all. The sensations were cut off.

He heard Jill cry out shrilly. He plunged toward the place where he had left her. He raced. He leaped. Once he fell, and frantically swore at the wet stuff that had caused him to slip. He reached the tree stump and Jill was not there. He saw the saucer-sized tracks her feet had made on the saturated fallen leaves. They led toward the road.

He heard a car door slam and a motor roar. He plunged onward more desperately than before.

The motor raced away. And Lockley got out on the highway only in time to see the rear of a brown-painted, military-marked car some three hundred yards away. It swept around a curve of the highway and was gone. It was going through the s.p.a.ce where the road was blocked by a terror beam, headed obviously for Boulder Lake.

What had happened was self-evident. From her place beside the huge stump she'd seen a military car approaching. And she and Lockley had been trying to reach the cordon of troops around Boulder Lake. There was no reason to distrust men in uniform or in a military car. She'd run to flag it down. She had. By a coincidence, it was undoubtedly where a carload of collaborating humans would have stopped to have the road-blocking beam cut off by their monster allies. She'd approached the stopped car. And something frightened her. She screamed.

But she'd been pulled into the car, which went on before the beam could come on again to stop it.

CHAPTER 9

It was very likely that at that moment Lockley despised himself more bitterly than any other man alive. He blamed himself absolutely for Jill's capture. If there were humans acting with the alien invaders, her fate would unquestionably be more horrible than at the hands of the monsters alone. After all, there was one nation most likely to deal with extra-terrestrial creatures to help them in the conquest of earth, and its troops were not notorious for their kindly behavior to civilians.

And Jill was their captive. He'd been carried past the place where a terror beam blocked the road. The military markings might mean the car was stolen, or that its markings and paint were counterfeit. It seemed certain that Jill had gone up to it in confidence that there could only be American soldiers in such a car, and when near it found out her mistake too late.

These were not things that Lockley thought out in detail at the beginning. He ran after the car like a mad man, unable to feel anything but horror and so terrible a fury that it should have killed its objects by sheer intensity.

Presently he heard hoa.r.s.e, gasping sounds. He realized that the sounds were the breath going in and out of his own throat, while Jill was carried farther and farther away from him in a car which traveled ten yards to his one. He sobbed then, and suddenly he was strangely and unnaturally calm. He was able to think quite coolly. The only difference between this and normal thinking was that now he could only think about one thing--full and complete and terrible revenge for the crimes committed and to be committed against Jill. She would be taken to Boulder Lake. So he would go to Boulder Lake, and somehow, in some manner, he would destroy utterly all living beings there and every trace of their coming.

Which, of course, was both natural and unreasonable. But reason would have been unnatural at such a time as this.

He moved along the highway in a pa.s.sion of ultimate resolve. In the rest of the world, time pa.s.sed without knowledge of his emotional state. The rest of the world was suffering emotional agonies of its own.

The United States had become popular among peoples who disliked all things American except those they were given free, and who continued to dislike the givers. Now though, the United States had been invaded from s.p.a.ce by creatures using weapons of unprecedented type and effect. If the United States were conquered, there was no other nation likely to remain free. So a great deal of anti-Americanism faded under pressure of an ardent desire for America to be successful in its self-defense.

Moreover, antic.i.p.ating other alien landings which could take place anywhere, the United States offered to share its stock of atom bombs with any nation so invaded. American popularity increased. The fact that the USSR made no such proposal also had its effect. The United States invited scientists of every country to help in solving the menace of the terror beam, and committed itself to share any discoveries for defense against it with all the world. Again there was an improvement in the public image of the United States abroad.

But Lockley knew nothing of this. His pocket radio no longer existed to give him news. It had been rebuilt into something else, whose most conspicuous parts were cheese and nutmeg graters, slung over his shoulder as he marched. But if he had known of changes in the popularity of his country, he wouldn't have been interested. He could fix his mind only on one subject and matters related to it.

He tramped along the highway, possessed by a cold demon of hatred. He was on foot for lack of a car. He was unarmed. At the moment he believed that all the rest of humanity was disarmed, in effect if not in fact. So he had no plans, only an infinite hatred.

But because he would have to pa.s.s through terror beams to get at those he meant to destroy, he realized that it was necessary to make sure that he would be able to pa.s.s through them, that his equipment for reaching Boulder Lake was in good order. It was still turned on. He turned it off to be economical of its batteries. He went on, thinking of only one subject, examining every possibility for revenge with a pa.s.sionate patience, undiscouraged because one idea after another was plainly impossible, but continuing obsessively to think of others.

He smelled the foetid odor, which cut through his absorption because of its connotations. He turned on his device and went doggedly ahead.

He knew he had entered a terror beam by the faint perceptions which came through the cloud of ions his instrument produced. Then they ceased. He knew that the beam had been cut off. He heard a motor rev up. A car or truck had stopped beyond the road-blocking beam and waited for it to be cut off, as it had been.

Lockley stepped into the woods hating the vehicle bitterly as it approached, but wanting to save destruction for those where Jill had been taken.

He was hidden when the car appeared. It was a perfectly commonplace car with a whip aerial at its rear. It came confidently along the highway. A hundred yards from him, there were explosions. Smoke came out of the open windows. The engine stopped and the car bucked crazily and went into the ditch beside the highway. A man plunged out, slapping at his leg. A revolver in its holster had exploded all its sh.e.l.ls. The leather holster had saved him from serious injury, but his clothing was on fire. Other men, two of them, got out hastily. Things had exploded in the back of the car, too. The three men swore agitatedly.

Then one of them said something which stimulated the others to frantic flight down the highway away from the ditched car. The third man limped anxiously after the faster-moving two.

Lockley, watching and hating with undivided attention, knew when the terror beam came on again. He felt it, very faint because of his protection, but quite distinct. The explosions had taken place when the car was in the area now covered again by the terror beam. The men in the car, astonished and scorched, had fled because the beam was due to come back on and they didn't want to be caught in it.

Lockley noted that the human confederates of the monsters had no protection against the beam to match his own. Perhaps the monsters themselves were protected only near the projectors. This was an item affecting his plans of revenge for Jill. He stored it away in his mind. Then he realized that the weapons in the car had exploded just like the pistol on his own seat cus.h.i.+on. The explosion was not a.s.sociated with the terror beam. There'd been no beam in action when his own pistol blew up. It did not seem reasonable that if the monsters possessed a detonation beam that they'd turn it on their own confederates.

No. Rational beings would do nothing so self-contradictory.

Then Lockley looked down at the cheese grater-pocket radio device of his own manufacture. He considered the fact that his own pistol had exploded the instant he'd turned the gadget on. The weapons in the other car detonated when that car was near him.

He plodded onward thinking very clearly and precisely about the matter. He even remembered to turn off his gadget because he would need it to avenge Jill. But when he tried to think of any subject unconnected with revenge, his mind became confused and agitated.

Two miles along the highway, which had not yet turned to head in toward Boulder Lake, there was a farmhouse. Lockley walked heavily to the abandoned building. He found the door locked. Without conscious thought, he forced it. He searched the closets. He found a shotgun and half a box of sh.e.l.ls. He considered them, then left the gun and all the sh.e.l.ls but three. He went out. Presently he laid a shotgun sh.e.l.l down on the road. He paced off twenty-five yards and dropped another.

He dropped a third twenty-five yards farther on, and then carefully counted off three hundred feet. The car had been just about that far away when the explosions came.

He turned on his device. Two of the three sh.e.l.ls exploded smokily. The farthest away did not explode.

He did not rejoice. He went on without elation, but it became a part of his painstaking search for vengeance that he knew he could set off explosives within a hundred and twenty-five yards of himself. There was something about the device he'd constructed which made explosives detonate, up to a distance of a little over one hundred yards. He felt no curiosity about it, though it was simple enough. The heterodyning of extremely saw-toothed waves produced peaks of energy until the saw-teeth began to smooth out. There were infinitesimal spots in which, for infinitesimal lengths of time, energy conditions comparable to sparks existed. This had not been worked out in advance, but the reason was clear.

He came to the place where the main highway to Boulder Lake branched off from the road he was following. He turned into it, walking doggedly.

Three miles toward the lake, an engine sounded from behind him. He got off the highway and turned the switch. A half-ton truck came trundling openly along the road. It came closer and closer.

Small-arm ammunition exploded. The engine stopped and the light truck toppled over onto its side. Lockley did not approach it. Its driver might not be dead, and he would not find it possible to leave any man alive who was a.s.sociated with Jill's captors. He pa.s.sed the truck and went on up the highway.

Seven miles up the road a truck came down from Boulder Lake. Lockley placed himself discreetly out of sight. He turned on his instrument. A gun flew to pieces with a thunderous detonation. The truck crashed. It was interesting to Lockley that automobile engines invariably went dead at about the time that explosives went off. The fact was, of course, that ionized air is more or less conductive. In an ion cloud the spark plugs shorted and did not fire in the cylinders.

There were two other vehicles which essayed to pa.s.s Lockley as he went on up the long way to the lake. Both came from the interior of the Park. He left them wrecked beside the highway. Between times, he walked with a dogged grimness toward the place where Vale had been the first to report a thing come down from the sky. That had been how many days ago? Three? Four?

Then Lockley had been a quiet and well-conducted citizen inclined to pessimism about future events, but duly considerate of the rights of others. Now he'd changed. He felt only one emotion, which was hatred such as he'd never imagined before. He had only one motive, which was to take total and annihilating vengeance for what had been done to Jill.

He plodded on and on. He had to make a march of not less than twenty miles from the Park's beginning. He journeyed on foot because there were terror beams to pa.s.s and automobile engines did not run when his protective device operated. He could not arm himself from the cars that ditched, because all chemical explosive weapons and their ammunition blew at the same time. He was a minute figure among the mountains, marching alone upon a winding highway, moving resolutely to destroy--alone--the invaders from outer s.p.a.ce and the men who worked with them for the conquest of earth. For his purpose he carried the strangest of equipment, a device made of a pocket radio and a cheese grater.

He had food in his pockets, but he could not eat. During the afternoon he became impatient of its weight and threw it away. But he thirsted often. More than once he drank from small streams over which the highway builders had made small concrete bridges.

At three in the afternoon a truck came up from behind. Here he trudged between steep cliffs which made him seem almost a midget. The highway went through a crevice between adjoining mountainsides. There was no place for him to conceal himself. When he heard the engine, he stopped and faced it. The truck had picked up many men from wrecked cars along its route. There were scorched and scratched and wounded men, hurt by the explosion of their firearms. The truck brought them along and overtook Lockley.

He waited very calmly since it did not seem likely that they would realize that one man had caused the crashes. The driver of the truck with the picked-up men did not even think of such a thing. Lockley seemed much more likely the victim of still another wreck.

The overtaking truck slowed down. There would be no strangers in Boulder Lake Park. There would only be the task force aiding the monsters, as Lockley reasoned it out. So the truck slowed, preparatory to taking Lockley aboard.