The Best of Lester del Rey

1

there was the continuous shrieking thunder of an alien rocket overhead as the Reverend Amos Strong stepped back into the pulpit. He straightened his square, thin shoulders slightly, and the gaunt hollows in his cheeks deepened. For a moment he hesitated, while his dark eyes turned upward under bushy, grizzled brows. Then he moved forward, placing the torn envelope and telegram on the lectern with his notes. The blue-veined hand and knobby wrist that projected from the shiny black serge of his sleeve hardly trembled.

Unconsciously, his eyes turned toward the pew where his wife should be, before he remembered that Ruth would not be there this time. She had been delayed by the arrival of the message and had read it before sending it on to him. Now she could not be expected. It seemed strange to him. She hadn’t missed service since Richard was born nearly thirty years ago.

The sound of the rocket hissed its way into silence over the horizon, and Amos stepped forward, gripping the dusty surface of the rickety lectern with both hands. He straightened and forced his throat into the pattern that would give, his voice the resonance and calm it needed.

“I have just received final confirmation that my son was killed in the battle of the moon,” he told the puzzled congregation, which had been rustling uncertainly since he was first interrupted. He lifted his voice, and the resonance in it deepened. “I had asked, if it were possible, that this cup might pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, Lord, but as Thou wilt.”

He turned from their shocked faces, closing his ears to the sympathetic cries of others who had suffered. The church had been built when Wesley was twice its present size, but the troubles that had hit the people had driven them into the worn old building until it was nearly filled. He pulled his notes to him, forcing his mind from his own loss to the work that had filled his life.

“The text today is drawn from Genesis,” he told them. “Chapter seventeen, seventh verse; and chapter twenty-six, fourth verse. The promise which God made to Abraham and again to Isaac.” He read from the Bible before him, turning to the pages unerringly at the first try. “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

“And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries: and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

He had memorized most of his sermon, no longer counting on inspiration to guide him as it had once done. He began smoothly, hearing his own words in snatches as he drew the obvious and comforting answer to their uncertainty. God had promised man the earth as an everlasting’ covenant. Why then should men be afraid or lose faith because alien monsters had swarmed down out of the emptiness between the stars to try man’s faith? As in the days of bondage in Egypt or captivity in Babylon, there would always be trials and times when the faint-hearted should waver, but the eventual outcome was clearly promised.

He had delivered a sermon from the same text in his former parish of Clyde when the government had first begun building its base on the moon, drawing heavily hi that case from the reference to the stars of heaven to quiet the doubts of those who felt that man had no business in space. It was then that Richard had announced his commission in the lunar colony, using Amos’ own words to defend his refusal to enter the ministry. It was the last he saw of the boy.

He had used the text one other time, over forty years before, but the reason was lost, together with the passion that had won him fame as a boy evangelist. He could remember the sermon only because of the shock on the bearded face of his father when he had misquoted a phrase. It was one of his few clear memories of the period before his voice changed and his evangelism came to an abrupt end.

He had tried to recapture his inspiration after ordination, bitterly resenting the countless intrusions of marriage and fatherhood on his spiritual forces. But at last he had recognized that God no longer intended him to be a modern Peter the Hermit, and resigned himself to the work he could do. Now he was back in the parish where he had first begun; and if he could no longer fire the souls of his flock, he could at least help somewhat with his memorized rationalizations for the horror of the alien invasion.

Another ship thundered overhead, nearly drowning his words. Six months before, the great ships had exploded out of nothing in space and had fallen carefully to the moon, to attack the forces there. In another month they had begun a few forays against Earth itself.

And now, while the world haggled and struggled to unite against them, they were establishing bases all over and apparently setting out to conquer the world mile by mile.

Amos saw the faces below him turn up, hate-filled and uncertain. He raised his voice over the thunder, and finished hastily, moving quickly through the end of the service.

He hesitated as the congregation stirred. The ritual was over and his words were said, but there had been no real service. Slowly, as if by themselves, his lips opened, and he heard his voice quoting the Twenty-seventh Psalm. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”

His voice was soft, but he could feel the reaction of the congregation as the surprisingly timely words registered. “Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.” The air seemed to quiver, as it had done long ago when God had seemed to hold direct communion with him, and there was no sound from the pews when he finished. “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart;-wait, I say, on the Lord.”

The warmth of that mystic glow lingered as he stepped quietly from the pulpit. Then there was the sound of motorcycles outside, and a pounding on the door. The feeling vanished.

Someone stood up and sudden light began pouring in from outdoors. There was a breath of the hot, droughty physical world with its warning of another dust storm, and a scattering of grasshoppers on the steps to remind the people of the earlier damage to their crops. Amos could see the bitterness flood back over them in tangible waves, even before they noticed the short, plump figure of Dr. Alan Miller.

“Amos! Did you hear?” He was wheezing as if he had been running. “Just came over the radio while you were in here gabbling.”

He was cut off by the sound of more motorcycles. They swept down the single main street of Wesley, heading west. The riders were all in military uniform, carrying weapons and going at the top speed of their machines. Dust erupted behind them, and Doc began coughing and swearing. In the last few years, he had grown more and more outspoken about his atheism; when Amos had first known him, during the earlier pastorate in Wesley, the man had at least shown some respect for the religion of others.

“All right,” Amos said sharply. “You’re in the house of God, Doc. What came over the radio?”

Doc caught himself and choked back his coughing fit. “Sorry. But damn it, man, the aliens have landed in Clyde, only fifty miles away. They’ve set up a base there! That’s what all those rockets going over meant.”

There was a sick gasp from the people who had heard, and a buzz as the news was passed back to others. Faces grayed. Some dropped back to the hard seats, while others pressed forward, trying to reach Doc, shouting questions at him.

Amos let himself be shoved aside, hardly noticing the reaction of his flock. It was Clyde where he had served before coming here again. He was trying to picture the alien ships dropping down, scouring the town ahead of them with gas and bullets. The grocer on the corner with his nine children, the lame deacon who had served there, the two Aimes sisters with their horde of dogs and cats and their constant crusade against younger sinners. He tried to picture the green-skinned, humanoid aliens moving through the town, invading the church, desecrating the altar! And there was Anne Seyton, who had been Richard’s sweetheart, though of another faith….

“What about the garrison nearby?” a heavy farmer yelled over the crowd. “I had a boy there, and he told me they could handle any ships when they were landing! Shell their tubes when they were coming down…”

Doc shook his head. “Half an hour before the landing, there was a cyclone up there. It took the roof off the main building and wrecked the whole training garrison.”

“Jim!” The big man screamed out the name, and began dragging his frail wife behind him, out toward his car. “If they got Jim…”

Others started to rush after him, but another procession of motorcycles stopped them. This time they were traveling slower, and a group of tanks were rolling behind them. The rear tank drew abreast, slowed, and stopped, while a duty-faced man in a major’s untidy uniform stuck his head out.

“You folks get under cover! Ain’t you heard the news? Go home and stick to your radios, before a snake plane starts potshooting the bunch of you for fun. The snakes’ll be heading straight over this town if they’re after Topeka, like it looks!” He jerked back down and began swearing at someone inside. The tank jerked to a start and began heading away toward Clyde.

There had been enough news of the sport of the alien planes in the papers. The people melted from the church. Amos tried to stop them for at least a short prayer and to give them time to collect their thoughts, but gave up after most of the people began moving away. A minute later, he was standing alone with Doc Miller.

“Better get home, Amos,” Doc suggested. “My car’s half a block down. Suppose I give you a lift?”

Amos nodded wearily. His bones felt dry and brittle, and there was a dust in his mouth thicker than that in the air. He felt old, and for the first time, almost useless. He followed the doctor quietly, welcoming the chance to ride the six short blocks to the little house the parish furnished him.

A car of ancient age and worse repair rattled toward them as they reached Doc’s auto. It stopped, and a man in dirty overalls leaned out, his face working jerkily. “Are you prepared, brothers? Are you saved? Armageddon has come, as the Book foretold. Get right with God, brothers! The end of the world as foretold is at hand, amen!”

“Where does the Bible foretell alien races around other suns?” Doc shot at him.

The man bunked, frowned, and yelled something about sinners burning forever in hell before he started his rickety car again. Amos sighed. Now, with the rise of their troubles, fanatics would spring up to cry doom and false gospel more than ever, to the harm of all honest religion. He had never decided whether they were somehow useful to God or whether they were inspired by the forces of Satan.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions,” he quoted to Doc as they started up the street. “It’s quite possibly an allegorical reference to other worlds in the heavens.”

Doc grimaced, and shrugged. Then he sighed, and dropped one hand from the wheel onto Amos’ knee. “I heard about Dick, Amos. I’m sorry. The first baby I ever delivered—and the best-looking!” He sighed again, staring toward Clyde as Amos found no words to answer. “I don’t get it. Why don’t we ever drop atom bombs on them? Why didn’t the moon base use their missiles?”

Amos had no answer to that, either. There was a rumor that all the major powers had sent their whole supply of atomic explosives up to the moon base early in the invasion, and that a huge meteorite had buried the stockpile under tons of debris, where there had been no chance to excavate it. It matched the other cases of accidents that had beset all human resistance.

He got out at the unpainted house where he lived, taking Doc’s hand silently and nodding his thanks.

He would have to organize his thoughts this afternoon. When night fell and the people could move about without the danger of being shot at by chance alien planes, the church bell would summon them, and they would need spiritual guidance. If he could help them to stop trying to understand God, and to accept Him…

There had been that moment in the church when God had seemed to enfold him and the congregation in warmth—the old feeling of true fulfillment. Maybe, now in the hour of its greatest need, some measure of inspiration had returned.

He found Ruth setting the table. Her small, quiet body moved as efficiently as ever, though her face was puffy and her eyes were red. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, Amos. But right after the telegram, Anne Seyton came. She’d heard—before we did. And…”

The television set was on, showing headlines from the Kansas City Star, and he saw there was no need to tell her the news. He put a hand on one of hers. “God has only taken what he gave, Ruth. We were blessed with Richard for thirty years.”

“I’m all right.” She pulled away and picked up a pot, turning toward the kitchen, her back frozen in a line of taut misery. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Anne’s here. Dick’s wife! They were married before he left, secretly—right after you talked with him about the difference in religion. You’d better see her, Amos. She knows about her people in Clyde.”

He watched his wife move fromjhe room, his heart heavy with her grief, while the words penetrated. He’d never forbidden marriage, he had only warned the boy, who had been so much like Ruth. He hesitated, and finally turned toward the tiny second bedroom. There was a muffled answer to his knock, and the lock clicked rustily.

“Anne?” he said. The room was darkened, but he could see her blonde head and the thin, almost unfemi-nine lines of her figure. He put out a hand and felt her slim fingers in his palm. As she turned toward the weak light, he saw no sign of tears, but her hand shook with her dry shudders. “Anne, Ruth has just told me that God has given us a daughter…”

“God!” She spat the word out harshly, while the hand jerked back. “God, Reverend Strong? Whose God? The one who sends meteorites against Dick’s base, plagues of insects and drought against our farms? The God who uses tornadoes to make it easy for the snakes to land? That God, Reverend Strong? Dick gave you a daughter, and he’s dead! Dead! Dead!”

Amos backed out of the room. He had learned to stand the faint mockery with which Doc pronounced the name of the Lord, but this was something that set his skin into goose pimples and caught at his throat. Anne had been of a different faith, but she had always seemed religious before.

It was probably only hysteria. He turned toward the kitchen to find Ruth and send her in to the girl.

Overhead, the staccato bleating of a ramjet cut through the air in a sound he had never heard. But the radio description fitted it perfectly. It could be no Earth ship with such a noise!

Then there was another and another, until they blended together into a steady drone.

And over it came the sudden firing of a heavy gun, while a series of rapid thuds came from the garden behind the house. Rover let out two loud barks, and then screamed in animal agony!

Amos stumbled toward the back door, but Ruth was already ahead of him. “Dick’s dog! Now they’ve got his dog!” she cried out.

Before Amos could stop her, she threw back the door and darted out. There was another burst of shots and a sick cry. Ruth was crumpling before he could get to the doorway.

2

There were no more shots as he ran to her and gathered her into his arms. The last of the alien delta planes had gone over, heading for Topeka or whatever city they were attacking.

Ruth was still alive. One of the ugly slugs had caught her in the abdomen, ripping away part of her side, and the wound was bleeding horribly. But he felt her heart still beating, and she moaned faintly when he lifted her.

Then, as he put her on the couch, she opened her eyes briefly, saw him, and tried to smile. Her lips moved, and he dropped his head to hear.

“I’m sorry, Amos. Foolish. Nuisance. Sorry.”

Her eyes closed, but she smiled again after he bent to kiss her lips. “Glad now. Waited so long.”

Anne stooa in the doorway, staring unbelievingly. But as Amos stood up, she unfroze and darted to the medicine cabinet, to come back and begin snipping away the ruined dress and trying to staunch the flow of blood.

Amos reached for the phone, unable to see it clearly. He mumbled something to the operator, and a minute later to Doc Miller. He’d been afraid that the doctor would still be out. He had a feeling that Doc had promised to come, but could remember no words.

The flow of blood outside the wound had been stopped, but Ruth was white, even to her lips. Anne forced him back to a chair, her fingers gentle on his arm.

“I’m sorry, Father Strong. I—I…”

He stood up after a few minutes and went over to stand beside Ruth, letting his eyes turn toward the half-set table. There was a smell of scorching food in the air, and he went out to the old wood-burning stove to pull the pans off and drop them into the sink. Anne followed, but he hardly saw her, until he heard her begin to cry softly. There were tears this time.

“The ways of God are not the ways of man, Anne,” he said, and the words released a flood of his own emotions. He sank tiredly onto a stool, his hands falling limply onto his lap. He dropped his head against the table, feeling the weakness and uncertainty of age. “We love the carnal form and our hearts are broken when it is gone. Only God can know all of any of us or count the tangled threads of our lives. It isn’t good to hate God!”

She moved beside him as he rose and returned to the living room. “I don’t, Father Strong. I never did.” He couldn’t be sure of the honesty of it, but he made no effort to question her, and she sighed. “Mother Ruth isn’t dead yet!”

He was saved from any answer by the door being slammed open as Doc Miller came rushing in. The plump little man took one quick look at Ruth and was beside her, reaching for plasma and his equipment. He handed the plasma bottle to Anne, and began working carefully.

“There’s a chance,” he said finally. “If she were younger or stronger, I’d say there was an excellent chance. But now, since you believe in it, you’d better do some fancy praying.”

“I’ve been praying,” Amos told him, realizing that it was true. The prayers had begun inside his head before she was outside the door, and they had never ceased.

They moved her gently, couch and all, into the bedroom, where the blinds could be drawn, and where the other sounds of the house couldn’t reach her. Doc gave Anne a shot of something and sent her into the other bedroom. He turned to Amos, but didn’t insist when the minister shook his head.

“I’ll stay here, Amos,” Doc said, “with you. As long as I can until I get another emergency call. The switchboard girl knows where I am.”

He went back into the bedroom without closing the door. Amos stood in the center of the living room, his head bowed, for long minutes.

It was a whining sound that finally called him back to the world around him. He went to the back door and stared out. The Scotty was still alive, pulling its little body along the dirt of the garden toward the house. The whole hind section was paralyzed, and the animal must have been in agony from the horrible wound on its back. But it saw him and whined again, struggling toward him.

He went out automatically. He had never been fond of the dog, nor it of him. But now there was an understanding between them. “Shh, Rover,” he told the dog. “Quiet, boy. The mistress is all right.”

Rover whined again, and a wet tongue caressed Amos’ hand. He bent as gently as he could to examine the wound. Then he stood up, trying to reassure the animal.

He found Richard’s hunting rifle in one of the trunks and made sure it was unrusted. He loaded it carefully, feeling his skin crawl at the touch of the gun. It seemed strange to use the weapon on Rover when the dog and Richard had both found such pleasure in hunting wjth this same gun. But he couldn’t see the animal suffering.

Rover looked up and tried to bark as he saw the gun. Amos dropped beside him, feeling that the dog knew what he meant to do. The eyes looked up at him with a curious understanding as he placed the muzzle near the animal’s head. Amos stopped, wondering. The wound was a horrible thing—but Doc might be able to save the animal, even though he was no veterinarian. If it had been a wounded human, the attempt would have to be made.

Rover drew back his lips, and Amos stopped, expecting a growl. He even reached out to put the gun away. But the wet tongue came out again, brushing across his hand, accepting the fate intended, and blessing him for it. He patted the dog’s head, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. It was merciful. There wasn’t even time for a cry of pain.

If the dog had fought him, if it had struggled against its fate in a final desire to live… But it had submitted to what it considered a superior being. Only man could defy a Higher Will. Rover had accepted… and Rover was dead. He buried the small body in the soft dirt of the garden.

Doc stood in the doorway when he started back for the house. “I heard the shot and thought you were trying something foolish,” the doctor said. “I should have known better, I guess, with your beliefs. Then I waited here, listening for a snake plane, ready to pull you back. According to the television, they must be returning by now.”

Amos nodded. He found Ruth still in a coma, with nothing he could do. Then he remembered the planes and turned to watch the television. Topeka was off the air, but another station was showing news films.

Hospitals, schools, and similar places seemed to have been the chief targets of the aliens. Gas had accounted for a number of deaths, though those could have been prevented if instructions had been followed. But the incendiaries had caused the greatest damage.

And the aliens had gotten at least as rough treatment as they had meted out. Of the forty that had been counted, twenty-nine were certainly down.

“I wonder if they’re saying prayers to God for their dead?” Doc asked. “Or doesn’t your God extend his mercy to races other than man?”

Amos shook his head slowly. It was a new question to him. But there could be only one answer. “God rules the entire universe, Doc. But these evil beings surely offer him no worship!”

“Are you sure? They’re pretty human!”

Amos looked back to the screen, where one of the alien corpses could be seen briefly. They did look almost human, though squat and heavily muscled. Their skin was green, and they wore no clothes. There was no nose, aside from two orifices under their curiously flat ears that quivered as if in breathing. But they were human enough to have passed for deformed men, if they had been worked on by good make-up men.

They were creatures of God, just as he was! And as such, could he deny them? Then his mind recoiled, remembering the atrocities they had committed, the tortures that had been reported, and the utter savageness so out of keeping with their inconceivably advanced ships. They were things of evil who had denied their birthright as part of God’s domain. For evil, there could be only hatred. And from evil, how could there be worship of anything but the powers of darkness?

The thought of worship triggered his mind into an awareness of his need to prepare a sermon for the evening. It would have to be something simple; both he and his congregation were in no mood for rationalizations. Tonight he would have to serve God through their emotions. The thought frightened him. He tried to cling for strength to the brief moment of glory he had felt in the morning, but even that seemed far away.

There was the wail of a siren outside, rising to an ear-shattering crescendo, and the muffled sound of a loudspeaker with its amplifier driven to high distortion levels.

He stood up at last and moved out onto the porch with Doc as the tank came by. It was limping on treads that seemed to be about to fall apart, and the amplifier and speaker were mounted crudely on top. It pushed down the street, repeating its message over and over.

“Get out of town! Everybody clear out! This is an order to evacuate! The snakes are coming! Human forces have been forced to retreat to regroup. The snakes are heading this way, heading toward Topeka. They are looting and killing as they go. Get out of town! Everybody clear out!”

It paused, and another voice blared out, sounding like that of the major who had warned the town earlier. “Get the hell out, all of you! Get out while you’ve still got your skins outside of you. We’ve been licked. Shut up, Blake! We’ve had the holy living pants beat off us, and we’re going back to momma. Get out, scram, vamoose! The snakes are coming! Beat it!”

It staggered down the street, rumbling its message, and now other stragglers began following it—men in trucks, piled together like cattle; men in ancient cars of every description. Then another amplifier sounded from one of the trucks.

“Stay under cover until night! Then get out! The snakes won’t be here at once. Keep cool. Evacuate in order, and under cover of darkness. We’re holing up ourselves when we get to a safe place. This is your last warning. Stay under cover now, and evacuate as soon as it’s dark.”

There was a scream from the sky, and alien planes began dipping down. Doc pulled Amos back into the house, but not before he saw men being cut to ribbons by missiles that seemed to fume and burst into fire as they hit. Some of the men on the retreat made cover. When the planes were gone, they came out and began regrouping, leaving the dead and hauling the wounded with them.

“Those men need me!” Amos protested.

“So does Ruth,” Doc told him. “Besides, we’re too old, Amos. We^?d only get in the way. They have their own doctors and chaplains, probably. Those poor devils are risking their lives to save us, damn it. The Army must have piled all its movable wounded together and sent them to warn us and to decoy the planes away from the rest who are probably sneaking back through the woods and fields. They’re heroes, Amos, and they’d hate your guts for wasting what they’re trying to do. I’ve been listening to one of the local stations, and they’ve already been through hell.”

He turned on his heel and went back to the bedroom. The television program tardily began issuing evacuation orders to all citizens along the road from Clyde to To-peka, together with instructions. For some reason, the aliens seemed not to spot anything smaller than a tank hi movement at night, and all orders were to wait until then.

Doc came out again, and Amos looked up at him, feeling his head bursting, but with one clear idea fixed in it. “Ruth can’t be moved, can she, Doc?”

“No, Amos.” Doc signed. “But it won’t matter. You’d better go in to her now. She seems to be coming to. I’ll wake the girl and get her ready.”

Amos went into the bedroom as quietly as he could, but there was no need for silence. Ruth was conscious, as if some awareness of her approaching death had forced her to make the most of these last few minutes of her life. She put out a frail hand timidly to him. Her voice was weak, but clear.

“Amos, I know. And I don’t mind now, except for you. But there’s something I had to ask you. Amos, do you… ?”

He dropped beside her when her voice faltered, wanting to bury his head against her, but not daring to lose the few remaining moments of her sight. He fought the words out of the depths of his mind, and then realized it would take more than words. He bent over and kissed her again, as he had first kissed her so many years ago.

“I’ve always loved you, Ruth,” he said. “I still do love you.”

She sighed and relaxed. “Then I won’t be jealous of God anymore, Amos. I had to know.”

Her hand reached up weakly, to find his hair and to run her fingers through it. She smiled, the worn lines of her face softening. Her voice was content and almost young. “And forsaking all others, cleave only unto thee…”

The last syllable whispered out, and the hand fell.

Amos dropped his head at last, and a single sob choked out of him. He folded her hands tenderly, with the worn, cheap wedding ring uppermost, and arose slowly with his head bowed.

“Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Father, I thank thee for this moment with her. Bless her, O Lord, and keep her for me.”

He nodded to Doc and Anne. The girl looked sick and sat staring at him with eyes that mixed shock and pity.

“You’ll need some money, Anne,” he said. “I don’t have much, but there’s a little…”

She drew back and shook her head. “I’ve got enough, Reverend Strong. I’ll make out; Doctor Miller has told me to take his car. But what about you?”

“There’s still work to be done,” he said. “I haven’t even written my sermon. And the people who are giving up their homes will need comfort. In such hours as these, we all need God to sustain us.”

She stumbled to her feet and into her bedroom. Amos opened his old desk and reached for pencil and paper.

3

Darkness was just beginning to fall when they helped Anne out into the doctor’s car, making sure that the tank was full. She was quiet, and had recovered herself, but she avoided Amos whenever possible. She turned at last to Doc Miller.

“What are you going to do? I should have asked before, but…”

“Don’t worry about me, girl,” he told her, his voice as hearty as when he was telling an old man he still had forty years to live. “I’ve got other ways. The switchboard girl is going to be one of the last to leave, and I’m driving her in her car. You go ahead, the way we mapped it out. And pick up anyone else you find on the way. It’s safe; it’s still too early for men to start turning to looting, rape, or robbery. They’ll think of that after the shock of this wears off a little.”

She held out a hand to him, and climbed in. At the last minute, she pressed Amos’ hand briefly. Then she stepped on the accelerator and the car took off down the street at top speed.

“She hates me,” Amos said. “She loves other men too much and God too little to understand.”

“And maybe you love your God too much to understand that you love men, Amos. Don’t worry, she’ll figure it out. The next time you see her, she’ll feel different. Look, I really do have to see that Nellie gets off the switchboard and into a car. I’ll see you later.”

Doc swung off toward the telephone office, carrying his bag. Amos watched him, puzzled as always at anyone who could so fervently deny God and yet could live up to every commandment of the Lord except worship. They had been friends for a long time, while the parish stopped fretting about the friendship and took it for granted, yet the riddle of what they found in common was no nearer solution.

There was the distant sound of a great rocket landing, and the smaller stutterings of the peculiar alien ramjets. The ships passed directly overhead, yet there was no shooting this time.

For a moment, Amos faced the bedroom window where Ruth lay, and then he turned toward the church. He opened it, throwing the doors wide. There was no sign of the sexton, but he had rung the bell in the tower often enough before. He took off his worn coat and grabbed the rope.

It was hard work, and his hands were soft. Once it had been a pleasure, but now his blood seemed too thin to suck up the needed oxygen. The shirt stuck wetly to his back, and he felt giddy when he finished.

Almost at once, the telephone in his little office began jangling nervously. He staggered to it, panting as he lifted the receiver, to hear the voice of Nellie, shrill with fright. “Reverend, what’s up? Why’s the bell ringing?”

“For prayer meeting, of course,” he told her. “What else?”

“Tonight? Well, I’ll be—” She hung up.

He lighted a few candles and put them on the altar, where their glow could be seen from the dark street, but where no light would shine upward for alien eyes. Then he sat down to wait, wondering what was keeping the organist.

There were hushed calls from the street and nervous cries. A car started, to be followed by another. Then a group took off at once. He went to the door, partly for the slightly cooler air. All along the street, men were moving out their possessions and loading up, while others took off. They waved to him, but hurried on by. He heard telephones begin to ring, but if Nellie was passing on some urgent word, she had forgotten him.

He turned back to the altar, kneeling before it. There was no articulate prayer in his mind. He simply clasped his gnarled fingers together and rested on his knee, looking up at the outward symbol of his life. Outside, the sounds went on, blending together. It did not matter whether anyone chose to use the church tonight. It was open, as the house of God must always be in times of stress. He had long since stopped trying to force religion on those not ready for it.

And slowly, the strains of the day began to weave themselves into the pattern of his life. He had learned to accept; from the death of his baby daughter on, he had found no way to end the pain that seemed so much a part of life. But he could bury it behind the world of his devotion, and meet whatever his lot was to be without anger at the will of the Lord. Now, again, he accepted things as they were ordered.

There was a step behind him. He turned, not bothering to rise, and saw the dressmaker, Angela Anduccini, hesitating at the door. She had never entered, though she had lived in Wesley since she was eighteen. She crossed herself doubtfully, and waited.

He stood up. “Come in, Angela. This is the house of God, and all His daughters are welcome.”

There was a dark, tight fear in her eyes as she glanced back to the street. “I thought—maybe the organ…”

He opened it for her and found the switch. He started to explain the controls, but the smile on her lips warned him that it was unnecessary. Her calloused fingers ran over the stops, and she began playing, softly as if to herself. He went back to one of the pews, listening. For two years he had blamed the organ, but now he knew that there was no fault with the instrument, but only with its player before. The music was sometimes strange for his church, but he liked it.

A couple who had moved into the old Surrey farm beyond the town came in, holding hands, as if holding each other up. And a minute later, Buzz Williams stumbled in and tried to tiptoe down the aisle to where Amos sat. Since his parents had died, he’d been the town problem. Now he was half-drunk, though without his usual boisterousness.

“I ain’t got no car and I been drinking,” he whispered. “Can I stay here till maybe somebody comes or something?”

Amos sighed, motioning Buzz to a seat where the boy’s eyes had centered. Somewhere, there must.be a car for the four waifs who had remembered God when everything else had failed them. If one of the young couple could drive, and he could locate some kind of vehicle, it was his duty to see that they were sent to safety.

Abruptly, the haven of the church and the music came to an end, leaving him back hi the real world—a curiously unreal world now.

He was heading down the steps, trying to remember whether the Jameson boy had taken his rebuilt flivver when a panel truck pulled up in front of the church. Doc Miller got out, wheezing as he squeezed through the door.

He took in the situation at a glance. “Only four strays, Amos? I thought we might have to pack them in.” He headed for Buzz. “I’ve got a car outside, Buzz. Gather up the rest of this flock and get going!”

“I been drinking,” Buzz said, his face reddening hotly.

“Okay, you’ve been drinking. At least you know it, and there’s no traffic problem. Head for Salina and hold your speed under forty and you’ll be all right.” Doc swept little Angela Anduccini from the organ and herded her out, while Buzz collected the couple. “Get going, all of you!”

They got, with Buzz enthroned behind the wheel and Angela beside him. The town was dead. Amos closed the organ and began shutting the doors to the church.

“I’ve got a farm tractor up the street for us, Amos,” Doc said at last. “I almost ran out of tricks. There were more fools than you’d think who thought they could hide it out right here. At that, I probably missed some. Well, the tractor’s nothing elegant, but it can take back roads

no car would handle. We’d better get going. Nellie has already gone, with a; full load.”

Amos shook ibis head. He had never thought it out, but the decision had been in his mind from the beginning. Ruth still lay waiting a decent burial. He could no more leave her now than when she was alive. “You’ll have to go alone, Doc.”

“I figured.” The doctor sighed, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “I’d remember to my dying day that believers have more courage than an atheist! Nope, we’re in this together. It isn’t sensible, but that’s how I feel. We’d better put out the candles, I guess.”

Amos snuffed them reluctantly, wondering how he could persuade the other to leave. His ears had already caught the faint sounds of shooting, indicating that the aliens were on their way.

The uncertain thumping of a laboring motor sounded from the street, then wheezed to silence. There was a shout, a pause, and the motor caught again. It seemed to run for ten seconds before it backfired, and was still.

Doc opened one of the doors. In the middle of the street, a man was pushing an ancient car while his wife steered. But it refused to start again. He grabbed for tools, threw up the hood, and began a frantic search for the trouble.

“If you can drive a tractor, there’s one half a block down,” Doc called out.

The man looked up, snapped one quick glance behind him, and pulled the woman hastily out of the car. In almost no time, the heavy roar of the tractor sounded. The man revved it up to full throttle and tore off down the road, leaving Doc and Amos stranded. The sound of the aliens was clearer now, and there was some light coming from beyond the bend of the street.

There was no place to hide, except in the church. They found a window where the paint on the imitation stained glass was loose and peeled it back enough for a peephole. The advance scouts of the aliens were already within view. They were dashing from house to house. Behind them, they left something that sent up clouds of glowing smoke that seemed to have no fire connected to its brilliance. At least, no buildings were burning.

Just as the main group of aliens came into view, the door of one house burst open. A scrawny man leaped out, with his fat wife and fatter daughter behind him. They raced up the street, tearing at their clothes and scratching frantically at their reddened skin.

Shouts sounded. All three jerked, but went racing on. More shots sounded. At first, Amos thought it was incredibly bad shooting. Then he realized that it was even more unbelievably good marksmanship. The aliens were shooting at the hands first, then moving up the arms methodically, wasting no chance for torture.

For the first time in years, Amos felt fear and anger curdle solidly in his stomach. He stood up, feeling his shoulders square back and his head come up as he moved toward the door. His lips were moving in words that he only half understood. “Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up Thine hand; forget not the humble. Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? He hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not requite it. Thou hast seen it, for Thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with Thy hand: the poor commiteth himself unto Thee; Thou art the helper of the fatherless. Break Thou the arm of the wicked and the evil ones; seek out their wickedness till Thou find none…”

“Stop it, Amos!” Doc’s voice rasped harshly in his ear. “Don’t be a fool! And you’re misquoting that last verse!”

It cut through the fog of his anger. He knew that Doc had deliberately reminded him of his father, but the trick worked, and the memory of his father’s anger at misquotations replaced his cold fury. “We can’t let that go on!”

Then he saw it was over. The aliens had used up their targets. But there was the sight of another wretch, unrecognizable in half of his skin…

Doc’s voice was as sick as Amos felt. “We can’t do anything. I can’t understand a race smart enough to build star ships and still stupid enough for this. But it’s good for our side, in the long run. While our armies are organizing, the snakes are wasting time on this. And it makes our resistance get Rougher, too.”

The aliens didn’t confine their sport to humans. They worked just as busily on a huge old tomcat they found. And all the corpses were being loaded onto a big wagon pulled by twenty of the creatures.

The aliens obviously had some knowledge of human behavior. At first they had passed up all stores and had concentrated on living quarters. The scouts had passed on by the church without a second glance. But they moved into a butcher shop at once, to come out again carrying meat, which was piled on the wagon with the corpses.

Now a group was assembling before the church, pointing up toward the steeple where the bell was. Two of them shoved up a mortar of some sort. It was pointed quickly and a load was dropped in. There was a muffled explosion, and the bell rang sharply, its pieces rattling down the roof and into the yard below.

Another shoved the mortar into a new position, aiming it straight for the door of the church. Doc yanked Amos down between two pews. “They don’t like churches, damn it! A fine spot we picked. Watch out for splinters!”

The door smashed in and a heavy object struck the altar, ruining it. Amos groaned at the shattering sound it made.

There was no further activity when they slipped back to their peepholes. The aliens were on the march again, moving along slowly. In spite of the delta planes, they seemed to have no motorized ground vehicles, and the wagon moved on under the power of the twenty green-skinned things, coming directly in front of the church.

Amos stared at it in the flickering light from the big torches burning in the hands of some of the aliens. Most of the corpses were strangers to him. A few he knew. And then his eyes picked out the twisted, distorted upper part of Ruth’s body, her face empty in death’s relaxation.

He stood up wearily, and this time Doc made no effort to stop him. He walked down a line of pews and around the wreck of one of the doors. Outside the church, the air was still hot and dry, but he drew a long breath into his lungs. The front of the church was in the shadows, and no aliens seemed to be watching him.

He moved down the stone steps. His legs were firm now. His heart was pounding heavily, but the clot of feelings that rested leadenly in his stomach had no fear left in it. Nor was there any anger left, nor any purpose.

He saw the aliens stop and stare at him, while a jabbering began among them.

He moved forward with the measured tread that had led him down the aisle when he married Ruth. He came to the wagon and put his hand out, lifting one of Ruth’s dead-limp arms back across her body.

“This is my wife,” he told the staring aliens quietly. “I am taking her home with me.”

He reached up and began trying to move the other bodies away from her. Without surprise, he saw Doc’s arms moving up to help him, while a steady stream of whispered profanity came from the doctor’s lips.

Amos hadn’t expected to succeed. He had expected nothing.

Abruptly, a dozen of the aliens leaped for the two men. Amos let them overpower him without resistance. For a second, Doc struggled; then he too relaxed while the aliens bound them and tossed them onto the wagon.

4

Amos’ first reaction was one of dismay at the rain of his only good suit. He struggled briefly on the substance under him, trying to find a better spot. A minister’s suit might be old, but he could never profane the altar with such stains as these. Then some sense of the ridiculousness of his worry reached his mind, and he relaxed as best he could.

He had done what he had to do, and it was too late to regret it. He could only accept the consequences of it now, as he had learned to accept everything else God had seen fit to send him. He had never been a man of courage, but the strength of God had sustained him through as much as most men had to bear. It would sustain him further.

Doc was facing him, having flopped around to lie near him. Now the doctor’s lips twisted into a crooked grin. “I guess we’re in for it now. But it won’t last forever, and maybe we’re old enough to die fast. At least, once we’re dead, we won’t know it, so there’s no sense being afraid of dying.”

If it were meant to provoke him into argument, it failed. Amos considered it a completely hopeless philosophy, but it was better than none, probably. His own faith in the hereafter left something to be desired; he was sure of immortality and the existence of heaven and hell, but he had never been able to picture either to his own satisfaction.

The wagon had been swung around and was now being pulled up the street, back toward Clyde, Amos tried to take his mind off the physical discomforts of the ride by watching the houses, counting them to his own. They drew near it finally, but it was Doc who spotted the important fact. He groaned. “My car!”

Amos strained his eyes, staring into the shadows through the glare of the torches. Doc’s car stood at the side of the house, with its left front door open! Someone must have told Anne that he hadn’t left, and she’d forgotten her anger with him to swing back around the alien horde to save him!

He began a prayer that they might pass on without the car being noticed, and it seemed at first that they would. Then there was a sudden cry from the house, and he saw her face briefly at a front window. She must have seen Doc and himself lying on the wagon!

He opened his mouth to risk a warning, but it was too late. The door of the house swung back, and she was standing on the front steps, lifting Richard’s rifle to her shoulder. Amos’ heart seemed to hesitate with the tension of his body. The aliens still hadn’t noticed. If she’d only wait…

The rifle cracked. Either by luck or some skill he hadn’t suspected, one of the aliens dropped. She was running forward now, throwing another cartridge into the barrel. The gun barked again, and an alien fell to the ground, bleating horribly.

There was no attempt at torture this tune, at least. The leading alien finally jerked out a tubelike affair from a scabbard at his side and a single sharp explosion sounded. Anne jerked backward as the heavy slug hit her forehead, the rifle spinning from her dead hands.

The wounded alien was trying frantically to crawl away. Two of his fellows began working on him mercilessly, with as little feeling as if he had been a human. His body followed that of Anne toward the front of the wagon, just beyond Amos’ limited view.

She hadn’t seemed hysterical this time, Amos thought wearily. It had been her tendency to near hysteria that had led to his advising Richard to wait, not the difference in faith. Now he was sorry he’d had no chance to understand her better.

Doc sighed, and there was a peculiar pride under the thickness of his voice. “Man,” he said, “has one virtue which is impossible to any omnipotent force like your God. He can be brave. He can be brave beyond sanity for another man or for an idea. Amos, I pity your God if man ever makes war on Him!”

Amos flinched, but the blasphemy aroused only a shadow of his normal reaction. His mind seemed numbed. He lay back, watching black clouds scudding across the sky almost too rapidly. It looked unnatural, and he remembered how often the accounts had mentioned a tremendous storm that had wrecked or hampered the efforts of human troops. Maybe a counterattack had begun, and this was part of the alien defense. If they had some method of weather control, it was probable. The moonlight was already blotted out by the clouds.

Half a mile farther on, there was a shout from the aliens, and a big tractor chugged into view, badly driven by one of the aliens who had obviously only partly mastered the human machine. With a great deal of trial and error, it was backed into position and coupled to the wagon. Then it began churning along at nearly thirty miles an hour, while the big wagon bucked and bounced behind. From then on, the ride was a physical hell. Even Doc groaned at some of the bumps, though his bones had three times more padding than Amos could boast.

Mercifully, they slowed when they reached Clyde. Amos wiped the blood off his bitten lip and managed to wriggle to a position where most of the bruises were on his upper side. Beyond the town there was a flood of brilliant lights where the alien rockets stood, and he could see a group of strange machines driven by nonhuman creatures busy-unloading the great ships. But the drivers of the machines looked totally unlike the other aliens.

One of the alien trucks swung past them, and he had a clear view of the creature steering it. It bore no resemblance to humanity. There was a conelike torso, covered with a fine white down, ending in four thick stalks to serve as legs. From its broadest point, four sinuous limbs spread out to the truck controls. There was no head, but only eight small tentacles waving above it.

He saw a few others, always in control of machines, and no machines being handled by the green-skinned people, as they passed through the ghost city that had been Clyde. Apparently there were two races allied against humanity, which explained why such barbarians could come in space ships. The green ones must be sun-ply the fighters, while the downy cones were the technicians. From their behavior, though, the pilots of the planes must be recruited from the fighters.

Clyde had grown since he had been there, unlike most of the towns about. There was a new supermarket just down the street from Amos’ former church, and the tractor jolted to a stop in front of it. Aliens swarmed out and began carrying the dead loot from the wagon into big food lockers, while two others lifted Doc and Amos.

But they weren’t destined for the comparatively merciful death of freezing in the lockers. The aliens threw them into a little cell that had once apparently been a cashier’s cage, barred from floor to ceiling. It made a fairly efficient jail, and the lock that clicked shut as the door closed behind them was too heavy to be broken.

There was already one occupant—a medium-built young man whom Amos finally recognized as Smithton,-the Clyde dentist. His shoulders were shaking with sporadic sobs as he sat huddled in one corner. He looked at the two arrivals without seeing them. “But I surrendered,” he whispered to himself. “I’m a prisoner of war. They can’t do it. I surrendered…”

A fatter-than-usual alien, wearing the only clothes Amos had seen on any of them, came waddling up to the cage, staring in at them, and the dentist wailed off into silence. The alien drew up his robe about his chest and scratched his rump against a counter without taking his eyes off them. “Humans,” he said in a grating voice, but without an accent, “are peculiar. No standardization.”

“I’ll be damned!” Doc swore. “English!”

The alien studied them with what might have been surprise, lifting his ears. “Is the gift of tongues so unusual, then? Many of the priests of the Lord God Almighty speak all the human languages. It’s a common miracle, not like levitation.”

“Fine. Then maybe you’ll tell us what we’re being held for?” Doc suggested.

The priest shcugged. “Food, of course. The grethi eat any kind of meat—even our people—but we have to examine the laws to find whether you’re permitted. If you are, we’ll need freshly killed specimens to sample, so we’re waiting with you.”

“You mean you’re attacking us for food?”

The priest grunted harshly. “No! We’re on a holy mission to exterminate you. The Lord Almighty commanded us to go down to Earth where abominations existed and to leave no living creature under your sun.”

He turned and waddled out of the store, taking the single remaining torch with him, leaving only the dim light of the moon and reflections from farther away.

Amos dropped onto a stool inside the cage. “They had to lock us in a new building instead of one I know,” he said. “If it had been the church, we might have had a chance.”

“How?” Doc asked sharply.

Amos tried to describe the passage through the big unfinished basement under the church, reached through a trap door. Years before, a group of teen-agers had built a sixty-foot tunnel into it and had used it for a private club until the passage had been discovered and bricked over from outside. The earth would be soft around the bricks, however. Beyond, the outer end of the tunnel opened in a wooded section, which led to a drainage ditch that in turn connected with the Republican River. From the church, they could move to the stream and slip down that without being seen. There was even an alley—or had been one—behind the store that would take them to the shadow of the trees around the church.

Doc’s fingers were fumbling with the lock as Amos finished. He grunted and reached for his pocket, taking out a few corns. “They don’t know much about us, Amos, if they expect to hold us here, where the lock is fastened from the inside. Feel those screws.”

Amos fumbled over the lock surface. There were four large screws on the back of the lock, holding it to the door. The cashier’s cage had been designed to keep others out, not to serve as a jail. At best, he thought, it was a poor chance. Yet was it merely chance? It seemed more like the hand of God to him.

“More like the stupidity of the aliens, to my mind,” Doc objected. He was testing the screws with a quarter now. He nodded in some satisfaction, then swpre. “Damn it, the quarter fits the slot, but I can’t get enough leverage to turn the screw. Hey, Smithton or whatever your name is, pull out that money drawer and knock the bottom out. I need a couple of narrow slats.”

Smithton had been praying miserably—a childhood prayer for laying himself down to sleep. But he succeeding in kicking out splinters from the drawer bottom.

Doc selected two and clamped them around the quarter, trying to hold them in place while he turned them. It was rough going, but the screws turned. Three came loose finally, and the lock rotated on the fourth until they could force the cage open.

Doc stopped and pulled Smithton to him. “Follow me, and do what I do. No talking, no making a separate jump, or I’ll break your neck. All right!”

The back door was locked, but from the inside. They opened it to a backyard filled with garbage. The alley wasn’t as dark as it should have been, since open lots beyond let some light come through. They hugged what shadows they could until they reached the church hedge. There they groped along, lining themselves up with the side office door. There was no sign of aliens.

Amos broke ahead of the others, being more familiar with the church. It wasn’t until he had reached the door that he realized it could have been locked; it had been kept that way part of the time. He grabbed the handle and forced it back—to find it unlatched.

For a second, he stopped to thank the Lord for their luck. Then the others were with him, crowding into the little kitchen where social suppers were prepared. He’d always hated those functions, but now he blessed them for providing a hiding place that gave them time to find their way.

There were sounds in the church, and odors, but none that seemed familiar to Amos. Something made the back hairs of his neck prickle. He took off his shoes and tied them around his neck, and the others followed suit.

The way to the trap door lay down a small hall, across in front of the altar, and into the private office on the other side.

They were safer together than separated, particularly since Smithton was with them. Amos leaned back against the kitchen wall to catch his breath. His heart seemed to have a ring of needled pain around it, and his throat was so dry that he had to fight desperately against gagging. There was water here, but he couldn’t risk rummaging across the room to the sink.

He was praying for strength, less for himself than for the others. Long since, he had resigned himself to die. If God willed his death, he was ready; all he had were dead and probably mutilated, and he had succeeded only in dragging those who tried to help him into mortal danger. He was old, and his body was already treading its way to death. He could live for probably twenty more years, but aside from his work, there was nothing to live for—and even in that, he had been only a mediocre failure. But he was still responsible for Doc Miller, and even for Smithton now.

He squeezed his eyes together and squinted around the doorway. There was some light in the hall that led toward the altar, but he could see no one, and there were drapes that gave a shadow from which they could spy the rest of their way. He moved to it softly, and felt the others come up behind him.

He bent forward, parting the drapes a trifle. They were perhaps twenty feet in front of the altar, on the right side. He spotted the wreckage that had once stood as an altar. Then he frowned as he saw evidence of earth piled up into a mound of odd shape.

He threw the cloth back farther, surprised at the curiosity in him, as he had been surprised repeatedly by the changes taking place hi himself.

There were two elaborately robed priests kneeling in the center of the chapel. But his eye barely noticed them before it was attracted to what stood in front of the new altar.

A box of wood rested on an earthenware platform. On it were four marks, which his eyes recognized as unfamiliar, but which his mind twisted into a sequence from no alphabet he had learned; yet in them was .always more than they were. And above the box was a veil, behind which Something shone brightly without light.

In his mind, a surge of power pulsed, making something that might almost have been words through his thoughts.

“I am that i am, who brought those out of bondage from Egypt and who wrote upon the wall before Bel-shazzar, mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, as it shall be writ large upon the Earth, from this day forth. For I have said unto the seed of Mikhtchah, thou art my chosen people and I shall exalt thee above all the races under the heavens!”

5

The seed of Mikhtchah. The seed that was the aliens…

There was no time and all time, then. Amos felt his heart stop, but the blood pounded through his arteries with a vigor it had lacked for decades. He felt Ruth’s hand in his, stirring with returning life, and knew she

had never existed. Beside him, he saw Doc Miller’s hair turn snow white, arid knew that it was so, though there was no way he could see Doc from his position.

He felt the wrath of the Presence rest upon him, weighing his every thought from his birth to his certain death, where he ceased completely and went on forever, and yet he knew that the Light behind the veil was unaware of him, but was receptive only to the two Mikhtchah priests who knelt unaware.

All of that was with but a portion of his mind so small that he could not locate it, though his total mind encompassed all time and space, and that which was neither; yet each part of his perceptions occupied all of his mind that had been or ever could be, save only the present, which somehow was a concept not yet solved by the One before him.

He saw a strange man on a low mountain, receiving tablets of stone that weighed only a pennyweight, engraved with a script that all could read. And he knew the man, but refused to believe it, since the garments were not those of his mental image, and the clean-cut face fitted better with the strange Egyptian headpiece than with the language being spoken.

Amos saw every prayer of his life tabulated. But nowhere was there the mantle of divine warmth which he had felt as a boy and had almost felt again the morning before. And there was a stirring of unease at his thought, mixed with wrath; yet while the thought was in his mind, nothing could touch him.

Yet each of those things was untrue, because he could find no understanding of that which was true.

It ended as abruptly as it had begun, either a microsecond or a million subjective years after. It left him numbed, but newly alive. And it left him dead as no man had ever been hopelessly dead before.

He knew only that before him was the Lord God Almighty, who had made a covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, and with their seed; and that mankind had been rejected, while God now was on the side of the enemies of Abraham’s seed, and all the nations of earth.

Even that was too much for a human mind no longer in touch with the Presence, and only a shadow of it remained.

Beside him, Amos heard Doc Miller begin breathing again, brushing the white hair back from his forehead wonderingly as he muttered a single word. “God!”

One of the Mikhtchah priests looked up, his eyes turning about; there was a glazed look on his face, but it was leaving.

Then Smithton screamed! His open mouth poured out a steady, unwavering screaming, while his lungs panted in and out. His eyes opened, staring horribly. Like a wooden doll on strings, the man stood up and walked forward. He avoided the draperies and headed for the Light behind the veil. Abruptly, the Light was gone, but Smithton walked toward it as steadily as before. He stopped before the falling veil, and the scream cut off sharply.

Doc had jerked silently to his feet, tugging Amos up behind him. The minister lifted himself, but he knew there was no place to go. It was up to the will of God now…. Or…

Smithton turned on one heel precisely. His face was rigid and without expression, yet completely mad. He walked mechanically forward toward the two priests. They sprawled aside at the last second, holding two obviously human-made automatics, but making no effort to use them. Smithton walked on toward the open door at the front of the church.

He reached the steps, with the two priests staring after him. His feet lifted from the first step to the second and then he was on the sidewalk.

The two priests fired!

Smithton jerked, halted, and suddenly cried out in a voice of normal, rational agony. His legs kicked frantically under him and he ducked out of the sight of the doorway, his faltering steps sounding farther and farther away. He was dead—the Mikhtchah marksmanship had been as good as it seemed always to be—but still moving, though slower and slower, as if some extra charge of life were draining out like a battery running down.

The priests exchanged quick glances and then darted after him, crying out as they dashed around the door into the night. Abruptly^ a single head and hand appeared again, to snap a shot at the draperies from which Smithton had come. Amos forced himself to stand still, while his imagination supplied the jolt of lead in his stomach. The bullet hit the draperies, and something else.

The priest hesitated, and was gone again.

Amos broke into a run across the chapel and into the hall at the other side of the altar. He heard the faint sound of Doc’s feet behind him.

The trap door was still there, unintentionally concealed under carpeting. He forced it up and dropped through it into the four-foot depth of the incompleted basement, making room for Doc. They crouched together as he lowered the trap and began feeling his way through the blackness toward the other end of the basement. It had been five years since he had been down there, and then only once for a quick inspection of the work of the boys who had dug the tunnel.

He thought he had missed it at first, and began groping for the small entrance. It might have caved in, for that matter. Then, two feet away, his hand found the hole and he drew Doc after him.

It was cramped, and bits of dirt had fallen in places and had to be dug out of the way. Part of the distance was on their stomachs. They found the bricked-up wall ahead of them and began digging around it with then-bare hands. It took another ten minutes, while distant sounds of wild yelling from the Mikhtchah reached them faintly. They broke through at last with bleeding hands, not bothering to check for aliens near. They reached a safer distance in the woods, caught their breaths, and went on.

The biggest danger lay in the drainage trench, which was low in several places. But luck was with them, and these spots lay in shadow.

Then the little Republican River lay in front of them, and there was a flatbottom boat nearby.

Moments later they were floating down the stream, resting their aching lungs, while the boat needed only a trifling guidance. It was still night, with only the light from the moon, and there was little danger of pursuit by the alien planes. Amos could just see Doc’s face as the man fumbled for a cigarette.

He lighted it and exhaled deeply. “All right, Amos—you were right, and God exists. But damn it, I don’t feel any better for knowing that. I can’t see how God helps me—nor even how He’s doing the Mikhtchah much good. What do they get out of it, beyond a few miracles with the weather? They’re just doing God’s dirty work.”

“They get the Earth, I suppose—if they want it,” Amos said doubtfully. He wasn’t sure they did. Nor could he see how the other aliens tied into the scheme; if he had known the answers, they were gone now. “Doc, you’re still an atheist, though you now know God is.”

The plump man chuckled bitterly. “Fm afraid you’re right. But at least I’m myself. You can’t be, Amos. You’ve spent your whole life on the gamble that God is right and that you must serve Him—when the only way you could serve was to help mankind. What do you do now? God is automatically right—but everything you’ve ever believed makes Him completely wrong, and you can only serve Him by betraying your people. What kind of ethics will work for you now?”

Amos shook his head wearily, hiding his face in his hands. The same problem had been fighting its way through his own thoughts. His first reaction had been to acknowledge his allegiance to God without question; sixty years of conditioned thought lay behind that. Yet now he could not accept such a decision. As a man, he could not bow to what he believed completely evil, and the Mikhtchah were evil by every definition he knew.

Could he tell people the facts, and take away what faith they had hi any purpose in life? Could he go over to the enemy, who didn’t even want him except for their feeding experiments? Or could he encourage people to fight, with the old words that God was with them—when he knew the words were false? Yet their resistance might doom them to eternal hellfire for opposing God.

It hit him then that he could remember nothing clearly about the case of a hereafter—either for or against it. Wtrat iappened to a people when God deserted them? Were they only deserted in their physical form, and still free to win their spiritual salvation? Or were they completely lost? Did they cease to have souls that could survive? Or were those souls automatically consigned to hell, however noble they might be?

No question had been answered for him. He knew that God existed, but he had known that before. He knew nothing now beyond that. He did not even know when God had placed the Mikhtchah before humanity. It seemed unlikely that it was as recent as his own youth. Otherwise, how could he account for the strange spiritual glow he had felt as an evangelist?

“There’s only one rational answer,” he said at last. “It doesn’t make any difference what I decide! I’m only one man.”

“So was Columbus when he swore the world was round. And he didn’t have the look on his face you’ve had since we saw God, Amos! I know now what the Bible means when it says Moses’ face shone after he came down from the mountain, until he had to cover it with a veil. If I’m right, there’s little help for mankind if you decide wrong!”

Doc tossed the cigarette over the side and lit another, and Amos was shocked to see that the man’s hands were shaking. The doctor shrugged, and his tone fell back to normal. “I wish we knew more. You’ve always thought almost exclusively in terms of the Old Testament and a few snatches of Revelation—like a lot of men who became evangelists. I’ve never really thought about God—I couldn’t accept Him, so I dismissed Hun. Maybe that’s why we got the view of Hun we did. I wish I knew where Jesus fits in, for instance. There’s too much missing. Too many imponderables and hiatuses. We have only two facts, and we can’t understand either. There is a manifestation of God which has touched both Mikhtchah and mankind; and He has stated now that He plans to wipe out mankind. We’ll have to stick to that.”

Amos made one more attempt to deny the problem that was facing him. “Suppose God is only testing man again, as He did so often before?”

“Testing?” Doc rolled the word on his tongue, and seemed to spit it out. The strange white hair seemed to make him older, and the absence of mockery in his voice left him almost a stranger. “Amos, the Hebrews worked like the devil to get Canaan; after forty years of wandering around a few square miles, God suddenly told them this was the land—and then they had to take it by the same methods men have always used to conquer a country. The miracles didn’t really decide anything. They got out of Babylon because the old prophets were slaving night and day to hold them together as one people, and because they managed to sweat it out until they finally got a break. In our own time, they’ve done the same things to get Israel, and with no miracles! It seems to me God always took it away, but they had to get it back by themselves. I don’t think much of that kind of a test in this case.”

Amos could feel all his values slipping and spinning. He realized that he was holding himself together only because of Doc; otherwise, his mind would have reached for madness, like any intelligence forced to solve the insoluble. He could no longer comprehend himself, let alone God. And the feeling crept into his thoughts that God couldn’t wholly understand him, either.

“Can a creation defy anything great enough to create it, Doc? And should it, if it can?”

“Most kids have to,” Doc said. He shook his head. “It’s your problem. All I can do is point a few things out. And maybe it won’t matter, at that. We’re still a long ways inside Mikhtchah territory, and it’s getting along toward daylight.”

The boat drifted on, while Amos tried to straighten out his thoughts and grew more deeply tangled hi a web of confusion. What could any man who worshipped God devoutly do if he found his God was opposed to all else he had ever believed to be good?

A version of Rant’s categorical imperative crept into his mind; somebody had once quoted it to him—probably Do

“We’re being followed!” Doc whispered suddenly. He pointed back, and Amos could see a famt light shining around a curve in the stream. “Look—there’s a building over there. When the boat touches shallow water, run for it!”

He bent to the oars, and a moment later they touched bottom and were over the side, sending the boat back into the current. The building was a hundred feet back from the bank, and they scrambled madly toward it. Even in the faint moonlight, they could see that the building was a wreck, long since abandoned. Doc went in through one of the broken windows, dragging Amos behind him.

Through a chink in a wall they could see another boat heading down the stream, lighted by a torch and carrying two Mikhtchah. One rowed, while the other sat in the prow with a gun, staring ahead. They rowed on past.

“We’ll have to hole up here,” Doc decided. “It’ll be light in half an hour. Maybe they won’t think of searching a ruin like this.”

They found rickety steps, and stretched out on the bare floor of a huge upstairs closet. Amos groaned as he tried to find a position in which he could get some rest. Then, surprisingly, he was asleep.

He woke once with traces of daylight coming into the closet, to hear sounds of heavy gunfire not far away. He was just drifting back to sleep when hail began cracking furiously down on the roof. When it passed, the gunfire was stilled.

Doc woke him when it was turning dark. There was nothing to eat, and Amos’ stomach was sick with hunger. His body ached in every joint, and walking was pure torture. Doc glanced up at the stars, seemed to decide on a course, and struck out. He was wheezing and groaning in a way that indicated he shared Amos’ feelings.

But he found enough energy to begin the discussion again. “I keep wondering what Smithton saw, Amos. It wasn’t what we saw. And what about the legends of war in heaven? Wasn’t there a big battle there once, in which Lucifer almost won? Maybe Lucifer simply stands for some other race God cast off?”

“Lucifer was Satan, the spirit of evil. He tried to take over God’s domain.”

“Mmm. I’ve read somewhere that we have only the account of the victor, which is apt to be pretty biased history. How do we know the real issues? Or the true outcome? At least he thought ,he had a chance, and he apparently knew what he was fighting.”

The effort of walking made speech difficult. Amos shrugged, and let the conversation die. But his own mind ground on.

If God was all-powerful and all-knowing, why had He let them spy upon Him? Or was He still all-powerful over a race He had dismissed? Could it make any difference to God what man might try to do, now that He had condemned him? Was the Presence they had seen the whole of God—or only one manifestation of Him?

His legs moved on woodenly, numbed to fatigue and slow from hunger, while his head churned with his basic problem. Where was his duty now? With God or against Him?

They found food in a deserted house, and began preparing it by the hooded light of a lantern while they listened to the news from a small battery radio that had been left behind. It was a hopeless account of alien landings and human retreats, yet given without the tone of despair they should have expected. They were halfway through the meal before they discovered the reason.

“Flash!” the radio announced. “Word has just come through from the Denver area. Our second atomic missile has exploded successfully! The alien base has been wiped out, and every alien ship is ruined. It is now clear that the trouble with the earlier bombs we assembled lay in the detonating mechanism. This is being investigated, while more volunteers are being trained to replace this undependable part of the bomb. Both missiles carrying suicide bombers have succeeded. Captive aliens of both races are being questioned in Denver now, but the same religious fanaticism found in Portland seems to make communication difficult.”

It went back to reporting alien landings, while Doc and Amos stared at each other. It was too much to absorb at once—the official admission of two races, the fact that bombs had been assembled and tried, and the casual acceptance of suicide missions. It was as if God could control weather and machines, but not the will of determined men. Free will or…

Amos groped in his mind, trying to dig out something that might tie in the success of human suicide bombers, where automatic machinery was miraculously stalled, together with the reaction of God to his own thoughts of the glow he had felt in his early days. Something about men…

“They can be beaten!” Doc said in a harsh whisper.

Amos sighed as they began to get up to continue the impossible trek. “Maybe. We know God was at Clyde. Can we be sure He was at the other places to stop the bombs by His miracles?”

They slogged on through the night, cutting across country in the dim moonlight, where every footstep was twice as hard. Amos turned it over, trying to use the new information for whatever decision he must reach. If men could overcome those opposed to them, even for a time…

It brought him no closer to an answer.

The beginnings of dawn found them in a woods. Doc managed to heave Amos up a tree, where he could survey the surrounding terrain. There was a house beyond the edge of the woods, but it would take dangerous minutes to reach it. They debated, and then headed on.

They were just emerging from the woods when the sound of an alien plane began its stuttering shriek. Doc turned and headed back to where Amos was, behind him. Then he stopped. “Too late! He’s seen something. Gotta have a target!”

His arms swept out, shoving Amos violently back under the nearest tree. He swung and began racing across the clearing, his fat legs pumping furiously as he covered the ground in straining leaps. Amos tried to lift himself from where he had fallen, but it was too late.

There was the drumming of gunfire and the earth erupted around Doc. He lurched and dropped, to twitch and lie still.

The plane swept over, while Amos disentangled himself from a root. It was gone as he broke free. Doc had given it a target, and the pilot was satisfied, apparently.

He was still alive as Amos dropped beside him. Two of the shots had hit, but he managed to grin as he lifted himself on one elbow. It was only a matter of minutes, however, and there was no help possible. Amos found one of Doc’s cigarettes and lighted it with fumbling hands.

“Thanks,” Doc wheezed after taking a heavy drag on it. He started to cough, but suppressed it, his face twisting in agony. His words came in an irregular rhythm, but he held his voice level. “I guess I’m going to hell, Amos, since I never did repent—if there is a hell! And I hope there is! I hope it’s filled with the soul of every poor damned human being who died in less than perfect grace. Because I’m going to find some way—”

He straightened suddenly, coughing and fighting for breath. Then he found one final source of strength and met Amos’ eyes, a trace of his old cynical smile on his face.

“—some way to urge Lucifer to join us!” he finished. He dropped back, letting all the fight go out of his body. A few seconds later, he was dead.

6

Amos lay through the day in the house to which he had dragged Doc’s body. He did not even look for food. For the first time in his life since his mother had died when he was five, he had no shield against his grief. There was no hard core of acceptance that it was God’s_. will to hide his loss at Doc’s death. And with the realization of that, all the other losses hit at him as if they had been no older than the death of Doc.

He sat with his grief and his newly sharpened hatred, staring toward Clyde. Once, during the day, he slept. He awakened to a sense of a tremendous sound and shaking of the earth, but all was quiet when he finally became conscious. It was nearly night, and time to leave.

For a moment, he hesitated. It would be easier to huddle here, beside his dead, and let whatever would happen come to him. But within him was a sense of duty that drove him on. In the back of his mind something stirred, telling him he still had work to do.

He found part of a stale loaf of bread and some hard cheese and started out, munching on them. It was still too light to move safely, but he was going through woods again, and he heard no alien planes. When it grew darker, he turned to the side roads that led in the direction of Wesley.

In his mind was the knowledge that he had to return there. His church lay there; if the human fighters had pushed the aliens back, his people might be there. If not, it was from there that he would have to follow them.

His thoughts were too deep for conscious expression, and too numbed with exhaustion. His legs moved on steadily. One of his shoes had begun to wear through, and his feet were covered with blisters, but he went grimly on. It was his duty to lead his people, now that the aliens were here, as he had led them in easier times. His thinking had progressed no further.

He holed up in a barn that morning, avoiding the house because of the mutilated things that lay on the doorstep where the aliens had apparently left them. And this time he slept with the soundness of complete fatigue, but he awoke to find one fist clenched and extended toward Clyde. He had been dreaming that he was Job, and that God had left him sitting unanswered on his boils until he died, while mutilated corpses moaned around him, asking for leadership he would not give.

It was nearly dawn before he realized that he should have found himself some kind of a car. He had seen none, but there might have been one abandoned somewhere. Doc could probably have found one. But it was too late to bother, now. He had come to the outskirts of a tiny town, and started to head beyond it, before realizing that all the towns must have been well searched by now. He turned down the small street, looking for a store where he could find food.

There was a small grocery with a door partly ajar. Amos pushed it open, to the clanging of a bell. Almost immediately a dog began barking, and a human voice came sharply from the back.

“Down, Shep! Just a minute, I’m acoming.” A door to the rear opened, and a bent old man emerged, carrying a kerosene lamp. “Darned electric’s off again! Good thing I stayed. Told them I had to mind my store, but they wanted to take me with them. Had to hide out in the old well. Darned nonsense about…”

He stopped, his eyes blinking behind thick lenses, and his mouth dropped open. He swallowed, and his voice was startled and shrill. “Mister, who are you?”

“A man who just escaped from the aliens,” Amos told him. He hadn’t realized the shocking appearance he must present $y” now. “One in need of food and a chance to rest until night. But I’m afraid I have no money on me.”

The old man tore his eyes away slowly, seeming to shiver. Then he nodded, and pointed to the back. “Never turned nobody away hungry yet,” he said, but the words seemed automatic.

An old dog backed slowly under a couch as Amos entered. The man put the lamp down and headed into a tiny kitchen to begin preparing food. Amos reached for the lamp and blew it out. “There really are aliens—worse than you heard,” he said.

The old man bristled, met his eyes, and then nodded slowly. “If you say so. Only it don’t seem logical God would let things like that run around in a decent state like Kansas.”

He shoved a plate of eggs onto the table, and Amos pulled it to him, swallowing a mouthful eagerly. He reached for a second, and stopped. Something was violently wrong, suddenly. His stomach heaved, the room began to spin, and his forehead was cold and wet with sweat. He gripped the edge of the table, trying to keep from falling. Then he felt himself being dragged to a cot. He tried to protest, but his body was shaking with ague, and the words that spilled out were senseless. He felt the cot under him, and waves of sick blackness spilled over him.

It was the smell of cooking food that awakened him finally, and he sat up with a feeling that too much time had passed. The old man came from the kitchen, studying him. “You sure were sick, Mister. Guess you ain’t used to going without decent food and rest. Feeling okay?”

Amos nodded. He felt a little unsteady, but it was passing. He pulled on the clothes that had been somewhat cleaned for him, and found his way to the table. “What day is it?”

“Saturday, evening,” the other answered. “At least the way I figure. Here, eat that and get some coffee in you.” He watched until Amos began on the food, and then dropped to a stool to begin cleaning an old rifle and loading it. “You said a lot of things. They true?”

For a second, Amos hesitated. Then he nodded, unable to lie to his benefactor. “I’m afraid so.”

“Yeah, I figured so, somehow, looking at you.” The old man sighed. “Well, I hope you make wherever you’re going.”

“What about you?” Amos asked.

The old man sighed, running his hands along the rifle. “I ain’t leaving my store for any bunch of aliens. And if the Lord I been doing my duty by all my life decides to put Himself on the wrong side, well, maybe He’ll win. But it’ll be over my dead body!”

Nothing Amos could say would change his mind. The old man sat on the front step of the store, the rifle on his lap and the dog at his side, as Amos headed down the street in the starlight.

Amos felt surprisingly better after the first half-mile. Rest and food, combined with some treatment of his sores and blisters, had helped. But the voice inside him was driving him harder now, and the picture of the old man seemed to lend it added strength. He struck out at the fastest pace he could hope to maintain, leaving the town behind and heading down the road that the old man had said led to Wesley.

It was just after midnight when he saw the lights of a group of cars or trucks moving along another road. He had no idea whether they were driven by men or aliens, but he kept steadily on. There were sounds of traffic another time, on a road that crossed the small one he followed. But he knew now that he was approaching Wesley, and he speeded up his pace.

When the first dawn light came, he made no effort to seek shelter. He stared at the land around him, stripped by grasshoppers that could have been killed off if men had worked as hard at ending the insects as they had at their bickerings and wars. He saw the dry, arid land, drifting into dust and turning a fertile country into a nightmare. Men could put a stop to that.

It had been no act of God that had caused this ruin, but man’s own follies. And without help from God, man might set it right in time.

God had deserted men. But mankind hadn’t halted. On his own, he’d made a path to the moon and had unlocked the atom. He’d found a means, out of his raw courage, to use hydrogen bombs against the aliens when miracles were used against him. He had done everything but conquer himself—and he could do that, if he were given time.

Amos saw a truck stop at the crossroads ahead and halted, but the driver was human. He saw the open door and quickened his step toward it. “I’m bound for Wes-ley!”

“Sure.” The driver helped him into the seat. “I’m going back for more supplies myself. You sure look as if you need treatment at the aid station there. I thought we’d rounded up all you strays. Most of them came in right after we sent out the word on Clyde.”

“You’ve taken it?” Amos asked.

The other nodded wearily. “We took it. Got ‘em with a bomb, like sitting ducks; we’ve been mopping up since. Not many aliens left.”

They were nearing the outskirts of Wesley, and Amos pointed to his own house. “If you’ll let me off there…”

“Look, I got orders to bring all strays to the aid station,” the driver began firmly. Then he swung and faced Amos. For a second, he hesitated. Finally he nodded quietly. “Sure, Glad to help you.”

Amos found the water still running. He bathed slowly. Somewhere, he felt his decision had been made, though he was still unsure of what it was. He climbed from the tub at last and began dressing. There was no suit that was proper, but he found clean clothes. His face in the mirror looked back at him, haggard and bearded as he reached for the razor.

Then he stopped as he encountered the reflection of his eyes. A shock ran over him, and he backed away a step. They were eyes foreign to everything in him. He had seen a shadow of what lay in them only once before, in the eyes of a great evangelist; and this was a hundred times stronger. He tore his glance away to find himself shivering, and he avoided them all through the shaving. Oddly, though, there was a strange satisfaction in what he had seen. He was beginning to understand why the old man had believed him, and why the truck driver had obeyed.

Most of Wesley had returned, and there were soldiers on the streets. As he approached the church, he saw -the first-aid station, hectic with business. And a camera crew was near it, taking shots for television of those who had managed to escape from alien territory after the bombing.

A few people called to him, but he went on until he reached the church steps. The door was still in ruins and the bell was gone. Amos stood quietly waiting, his mind focusing slowly as he stared at the people, who were just beginning to recognize him and to spread hasty words from mouth to mouth. Then he saw little Angela Anduccini, and motioned for her to come to him. She hesitated briefly, before following him inside and to the organ.

The little Hammond still functioned. Amos climbed to the pulpit, hearing the old familiar creak of the boards. He put his hands on the lectern, seeing the heavy knuckles and blue veins of age as he opened the Bible and made ready for his Sunday morning congregation. He straightened his shoulders and turned to face the pews, waiting as they came in.

There were only a few at first. Then more and more came, some from old habit, some from curiosity, and many only because they had heard that he had been captured in person, probably. The camera crew came to the back and set up their machines, flooding him with bright lights and adjusting their telelens. He smiled on them, nodding.

He knew his decision now. It had been made in pieces and tatters. It had come from Kant, who had spent his life looking for a basic ethical principle, and had boiled it down in his statement that men must be treated as ends, not as means. It had come from Rover’s passive acceptance of the decision of a god who could do nothing for him, and from the one rebellious act that had won Anne his respect. It had been distilled from Doc’s final challenge, and from the old man sitting in his doorway, ready to face any challenger.

There could be no words with which to give his message to those who waited. No orator had ever possessed such a command of language. But men with rude speech, and limited use of what they had, had fired the world before. Moses had come down from a mountain with a face that shone, and had overcome the objections of a stiff-necked people. Peter the Hermit had preached a thankless crusade to all of Europe, without radio or television. It was more than words or voice.

He looked down at them when the church was filled and the organ hushed.

“My text for today,” he announced, and the murmurs below him hushed as his voice reached out to the pews. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make men free!”

He stopped for a moment, studying them, feeling the decision in his mind, and knowing he could make no other. The need of him lay here, among those he had always tried to serve while believing he was serving God through them. He was facing them as an end, not as a means, and he found it good.

Nor could he lie to them now, or deceive them with false hopes. They would need all the facts if they were to make an end to their bickerings and to unite themselves in the final struggle for the fullness of their potential glory.

“I have come back from captivity among the aliens,” he began. “I have seen the hordes who have no desire but to erase the memory of man from the dust of the earth that bore him. I have stood at the altar of their God. I have heard the voice of God proclaim that He is also our God, and that He has cast us out. I have believed Him, as I believe Him now.”

He felt the strange, intangible something that was greater than words or oratory flow out of him as it had never flowed in his envied younger days. He watched the shock and the doubt arise and disappear slowly as he went on, giving them the story and the honest doubts

he still had. He could never know many things, or even whether the God worshipped on the alien altar was wholly the same God who had been in the hearts of men for a hundred generations. No man could understand enough. They were entitled to all his doubts, as well as to all of which he knew.

He paused at last, in the utter stillness of the chapel. He straightened and smiled down at them, drawing the smile out of some reserve that had lain dormant since he had first tasted inspiration as a boy. He saw a few smiles answer him, and then more—uncertain, doubtful smiles that grew more sure as they spread.

He could feel himself reach them, while the television camera went on recording it all. He could feel his regained strength welding them together. He could feel them suddenly one and indivisible as he went on.

But there was something else. Over the chapel there was a glow, a feeling of deepening communion. It lifted and enshrouded him with those below him. He opened himself up to it without reserve. Once he had thought it came only from God. Now he knew it came from the men and women in front of him. Like a physical force, he could sense it emanating from them and from himself, uniting them and dedicating them.

He accepted it, as he had once accepted God. The name no longer mattered, when the thing was the same.

“God has ended the ancient covenants and declared Himself an enemy of all mankind,” Amos said, and the chapel seemed to roll with his voice. “I say to you: He has found a worthy opponent.”