The Visitors (v1.0)

19. LONE PINE

"They're cute," said Kathy.

"I can't see anything cute in them," said Chet. "They're just little black oblong boxes scampering around."

Scampering they were, hastening from bate to bale, ingesting each bale in turn, doing it neatly and precisely, down to the last shred of cellulose. There was no scuffling or fighting among themselves for possession of a bale; they were well mannered. If one of them was working on a bale, another did not try to horn in, but found another bale. They had eaten a number of bales, but there were still plenty of bales left. The voracious youngsters had barely made a dent in them. A mile or more of bales was spread along the lane cut through the forest and the adult visitor, at the far end of the swath, still was burrowing its way into the forest, regularly ejecting bales.

"It seems to me," said Kathy, "that they are growing. Would that be possible? They seem bigger than they were just an hour or So ago.

"I can't think so," said Chet. "They've been feeding for only a few hours."

"It seems to me, too, that they are growing," said Quinn, the New York Times man. "I suppose it could be possible. They may have an extremely efficient metabolic system. Much more efficient than any kind of life on Earth."

"If they are growing now," said Kathy, "it won't be more than a few more days before they can be cutting their own trees and extracting cellulose."

Norton said, "If that is the case, there goes the wilderness area."

"I suppose that somewhere along the line," said Quinn, "the forestry people will have to make up their minds what they want to do about it. This thing is our guest at the moment, I would think, but how long can we put up with a guest that eats everything in sight?"

"Or a guest that litters a brood of young on your living room floor," said Norton.

"The problem is," said Chet, "what can be done about it. You can't just shoo this thing out of the woods like you'd shoo a pig out of a potato patch."

"No matter what you say," said Kathy, "I think those little things are nice. They are in such a hurry and they are so hungry."

She tried again, as she had tried unsuccessfully before, to pick out the one she'd helped to regain its feet. But there seemed to be no way to distinguish one from the other. They were all alike.

And she remembered, too, that moment after she had helped the youngster to its feet and then reached out to pat the mother. She could still feel, in the imagination of memory, the gentle twitching of the hide and then the hide folding over her hand in a soft embrace. I can't believe, she told herself fiercely, that there can be too much wrong with a creature of any sort at all that would respond like that—a gesture of recognition? a sign of gratitude for a service rendered? the friendliness of one life to another? or an apology for subjecting another intelligence to the trouble it had brought?

If only, she thought, she could put this in the story that in another couple of hours she'd phone into the Tribune. But there was no way that she could. If Johnny didn't throw it out to start with, the ogres on the copy desk would not ~et it pass. It would be an intrusion of the reporter into the story. It was something for which there would be no kind of proof, no documentation. How, Kathy asked herself, does one document a handshake with an alien?

Norton was asking Quinn, "Have you folks gotten anything out of the governmental observers?"

"Nothing much," said Quinn. "They've taken the visitor's temperature, or at least the temperature of its skin. They may have checked for a heartbeat, and I suspect they did, although they Won't own up to it. They know it isn't metal, but they don't know what it is. It hasn't any treads or wheels to move on. It just floats along a few inches above the ground. As if it were disregarding the force of gravitation. One observer was speculating that it may know how to control and use gravity and his fellow observers probably will pin his ears back for his ill-considered muttering. And they know it is sending out signals. And that's about all they know."

"I'm not sure," said Chet, "they'll ever know much more. I wouldn't know where to start to find out any more."

"They have ways," said Quinn. "They'll learn other things but probably not all we need to know. We may be dealing here with something outside our knowledge. We may have to change some of our thinking before we understand it."

A silence fell—a relative silence. The growling and the crunching of the visitor in its chewing up of trees had stopped. Now the sounds that had been drowned out by the chomping of the trees came through—the chirps and calls of distant birds, the sough of the wind blowing through the pines, the chatter and gurgle of the river.

The newsmen and photographers who were in the cleared swath swung around to look. For a moment nothing happened. Maybe, Kathy told herself, it is only resting for a moment. But why, she wondered, should it be resting now? Since the time it had started on its strange harvest of the trees, it had not stopped to rest, but had continued to bore into the forest, lengthening the swath that it left behind it.

The visitor began to lift, so slowly that at first its movement was barely perceptible, then gathering speed. It rose above the pines and hung there for a moment—and there had not been any sound. There had been no roar of motors, no noise emitted by propulsive mechanisms. There was no flame, no smoke, no sign that any propulsive device had been used. It had simply floated up until it hung above the trees, hanging there as silently as it had risen. In the light of the westering sun, the green 101 that had been painted on its side stood out in sharp relief against its blackness.

So slowly that it seemed to be doing no more than drifting in the wind, it began to move eastward and upward. It built up speed and swung from the east to the south, its apparent size diminishing as it moved.

So it is going, Kathy thought; it is leaving us. It came and stayed a while. It processed food for its babies and now is on its way, its purpose filled, its function done.

She stood and watched until it was a small dot in the sky and finally the dot was gone. She brought herself back to the cleared swath in which she stood. And the place, she thought, somehow seemed lonelier, as if a valued friend had left.

The youngsters that it had left behind it still continued their scurrying about, feeding greedily on the bales of cellulose. One of the observers was busily painting numbers on them, but on them the paint was red, not green.