Our Children's Children

41

Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark said to Colonel Eugene Dawson, "I had it in my sights and then it wasn't there. It disappeared. It went away. I'm sure it didn't move. I saw it move before it stopped. It blurred when it moved. Like a cartoonist drawing something moving fast, lettering in a SWISH, but this was without a swish. When it disappeared there wasn't any swish. The first time I could see that it was moving. But not when I had it in my sights. It didn't move then. It didn't blur. It didn't swish."

"It saw you, Sergeant," said the colonel.

"I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I didn't move. I moved the launcher barrel a couple of inches. That was all."

"One of your men, then."

"Sir, all those men I trained myself. No one sees them, no one hears them."

"It saw something. Or heard something. It sensed some danger and then it disappeared. You're sure about this disappearance, Sergeant?"

"Colonel, I am sure."

Dawson was sitting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it, reducing the twig to bits of wood. Clark stayed squatting to one side, using the launcher, its butt resting on the ground, as a partial support to his squatting pose.

"Sergeant," Dawson said, "I don't know what the hell we're going to do about all this. I don't know what the army's going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We've got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they'd line up and we'd line up and they came at us, we could clobber them. We have more and better armaments than the people of future had and we can do the job. But not when they're trying to keep clear of us, not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get, maybe, one of them. God knows how much else we'd kill, including people. We haven't the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We got to hunt these monsters down, one by one…"

"But even when we hunt them down, sir…"

"Yes, I know. But say that you are lucky. Say you bag one now and then. There still will be hundreds of them hatching and in a week or so, a month or so, thousands of them hatching. And the first ones growing bigger and meaner all the time. And while we hunt for them, they wipe out a town or two, an army camp or two…"

"Sir," said Sergeant Clark, "it is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy."

The colonel got up from the log. "There hasn't nothing beat us yet," he said. "Nothing has ever beat us all the way. It won't this time. But we have to find out how to do it. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use to you until you can find something to aim the firepower and the sophistication at and it stays put until you pull the trigger."

The sergeant got to his feet, tucked the launcher underneath his arm. "Well, back to work," he said.

"Have you seen a photographer around here?"

"A photographer?" said the sergeant. "What photographer? I ain't seen no photographer."

"He said his name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him."

"If I happen onto him," said the sergeant, "I'll tie a knot into his tail."