The Visitors (v1.0)

20. MINNEAPOLIS

It was after midnight before Johnny Garrison got away from his desk. Now, driving west on Highway 12, he tried to relax. Relaxation, he found, came hard. There was nothing to worry about now, he told himself. The final edition was all wrapped up and Gold would stay on until the presses had started and he could have a look at one of the first copies from the pressroom. Gold was a good man; he could be depended upon to know what to do if something should come up. The chances were that nothing would occur. At the last moment before closing, it had been possible to squeeze out a few inches of space on page one to put in a bulletin carrying the NASA announcement that the new object in orbit appeared to be breaking up. As a matter of fact, the bulletin of the announcement was all that had appeared. There had been no official elaboration. When Garrison phoned the Tribune's news bureau in Washington, to catch Matthews standing the dog watch (a procedure that was followed only when big news possibly might be breaking), Matthews had been upset and slightly bitter.

"The bastards knew about it hours ago," he fumed. "I am sure they did, but they held the announcement up. Waiting for that sewing circle at the White House to figure out how it should be handled. They finally wound up letting NASA make the announcement, probably figuring it would have less impact than it would have coming from the White House. If you ask me, the White House doesn't know what to do. They're scared down to their toenails. I tried to reach Dave Porter, but he couldn't be found; neither could any of his staff. I imagine Dave is crisped to a cinder. He has spent the last two days assuring us that the White House would come clean on this one."

"What's the matter with them down there?" Garrison asked.

"It's too big for them to handle, Johnny. Too big and too different. They are afraid of making mistakes. I have a feeling

that there is a hell of a squabble going on among the President's men, arguing what should be done, and not being able to get together on it. It's something entirely new, a situation that has never come up before, and there is no precedent. It's not simple; a lot like the energy situation."

"The energy situation's not simple, either."

"Well, hell, Johnny, you know what I mean."

"Yes," said Garrison. "Yes, I guess I do."

The highway was relatively deserted; only occasional ears moving on it. A few of the eating places that dotted the road were still lighted, but the other places of business were dark, the gas stations faint glows with the single light in the office burning, Off to the north, the twinkling glimmer of street lights swaying in the wind marked a suburban housing development off the highway.

We did it right, Garrison told himself, running the events of the past two days across his mind. Getting Kathy and Chet up to Lone Pine shortly after the landing had been a move that paid off. Kathy had done well. There had been a time, he recalled, when he had considered sending Jay to replace her; now he was glad he hadn't. Jay might, in certain regards, have done a slightly better job, he thought, but not enough to justify the shattering of Kathy's confidence. An editor, he reminded himself, did not have the sole job of getting stories in the paper; it also was his job to build a staff.

And aside from that, he thought, we kept the news objective. We wrote it as we saw it, we played it responsibly. We shunned any hint of sensationalism—straight, responsible reporting all the way. And there had been times when it had been difficult to determine that fine line between sensationalism and responsibility.

The sky was clear. A large, bright moon sailed halfway down the western sky. Here, beyond the glow of the inner city, the sky was speckled with a million stars. Cool, sharp air blew through the window at his left. He debated whether he would take the time for a good, stiff drink before he went to bed. Jane would be awake, perhaps in bed, but still awake, waiting for the sound of the car coming up the driveway. She would be up and waiting for him when he came in the door. He went a little soft inside, thinking of all the years Jane had been up and waiting for him, no matter what the hour. The kids would be in bed and fast asleep and the house would have that strangely empty feeling with the clatter of their running stilled and it would be good to sit in the living room a while and have a drink with Jane.

Ahead of him the moon was blotted out. A cloud, he thought, staring through the windshield in amazement. A tingle went along his spine, for a cloud was wrong. A cloud would not have dropped from overhead and it would not have moved so quickly and even if it had, it would be fuzzy at the edges, not so black, so sharp, so regular. He took his foot off the accelerator, began gently braking. The darkness that had swallowed the moon was blacking out the stars that gleamed above the horizon straight ahead of him. The car rolled to a stop in the right hand lane. Ahead of him, no more than half a mile ahead of him, the darkness that could not be a cloud came down to sit upon the road.

He opened the door and stepped out to the pavement. Another car came up beside him and stopped. A woman thrust her head out of the right hand window and asked, in a shrill, excited voice, "What is going on? What's that up ahead?"

"I think it's another visitor," said Garrison. "Like the one up

north."

"Oh, my God!" the woman shrilled. "Let's get out of here."

The man behind the wheel said, "Take it easy, Gladys. It may

not be a visitor."

He got out of the car and joined Garrison, who had walked out ahead of the cars, standing in the glare of the headlights. He ranged himself alongside Garrison and stood staring at the thing that loomed on the road ahead.

"How sure are you?" he asked.

"Not entirely," Garrison told him. "It looks like one. It popped

into my mind it could be one of them."

"It's big," said the other man. "I read about the one up north

and saw pictures of it. But I had no idea it could be that big."

It was big. It blocked both the traffic lanes and the grassy median that ran between them. It was black and rectangular and loomed high against the sky. Once having settled, it did not move. It sat there, a lump of blackness.

The woman had gotten out of the car and came up to them.

"Let's turn around and get out of here," she said. "I don't like

it."

"Goddammit, Gladys," said the man, "quit your caterwauling.

There's nothing to be afraid of. That one up north never hurt no one.

"It killed a man. That's what it did."

"After he shot at it. We ain't shooting at it. We're not going to bother it."

It must be a visitor, Garrison told himself. It had the square blockiness that the photos had shown. It was exactly as Kathy had described the one at Lone Pine. Except for its size; he was not intellectually prepared for the sheer, overwhelming size of it.

Two other cars had come up behind them and stopped, the people in them getting out to walk up the road to where the three of them stood. Another car came along, but did not stop. It ran off the road, crossed the median, gained the eastward traffic lanes and went roaring off.

The NASA announcement had said that the object in orbit appeared to be breaking up. It was doing a hell of a lot more, Garrison told himself, than simply breaking up; the visitors that had clustered in the orbiting object were coming down to Earth. There was one here, spraddled across the road, and the likelihood was that it was not the only one that had come to Earth. There would be others, scattered all over the world. That first landing at Lone Pine probably had been no more than a test attempt at landing, a preliminary probing to have a look at the situation. The Lone Pine visitor, before it had spawned and then had taken off, had been sending signals to its fellows orbiting in space and now the invasion was on. If it could be called an invasion. Garrison reminded himself that probably it was not an invasion in the classical sense of the term. A reconnaissance in force—could that be what it was? Or simply a visit, intelligences of another world dropping in to say hello?

He started walking up the road toward the visitor. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that only one of the others who had been standing with him was following. With only a quick glance at the follower, he could not be sure which one of them it was. Perhaps, he thought, he should slow down and let the other man catch up with him, but decided against it. He did not feel like engaging in the meaningless chit chat that would come from the other, filled with questioning and wonder. Why do you think it landed here? What does it want? What kind of thing is it? ‘Where do you think it's from?

He increased his stride, almost running down the pavement When he came to within a few yards of the huge blackness, he swung to his right, to the far shoulder of the highway, and began making his way around it. There now was no question in his mind that it was a visitor—a huge black oblong box with no gadgets attached to it, with no external features at all. It sat there. It did not move. It did not click or purr. Going up to it, he laid his hand, spread wide, against its hide. The hide was hard, but not with the hardness of metal. It was warm, with a warmth that somehow had the feel of life. Like touching a man, he thought. Like stroking a dog or cat. A soft warmness, despite the hardness of the skin, that spoke of life.

Standing there, with his spread out hand against the warmness of the hide, a sudden chill ran through him, a chill that set his teeth on edge and made his face feel, for a moment, stiff and hard, as if it might be changing into stone. And, even as he felt the chill, his suddenly racing brain launched into a frantic scurry to analyze the chill. Not fear, said the analysis, not terror, not panic, no inclination to burst out screaming, no urge to run, no buckling of the knees—only that terrible coldness which was not the coldness of the body only, but a coldness of the mind, and a coldness of the mind that the mind could not understand.

Slowly he pulled his hand away from the hide and there was no need to pull it, for nothing held it there.

He let his arm drop to his side, but, otherwise, he made no movement and he felt the chill ebb out of him, not going quickly, but draining slowly from him until it was gone, although the memory of how it had been stayed with him.

A touch of strange, he thought, but more than a touch of strange. Rather a brush against something that he could not understand, that no human might be able to understand. A touch that was composed of the coldness and the vastness of deep space, of the glare of distant suns, of dark planets that were unlike the Earth, and the incomprehensibility of a life that had been spawned in the darkness of those planets. As if he had been hurled into a place that he did not know and perhaps could never know, that he could not even begin to know no matter how long a time he spent there. Incomprehensibility, that was it, he thought.

And, yet, the damn thing looked so ordinary, was so unspectacular, an almost old shoe structure.

He backed away from it, staring up at the great black wall of it that rose so high above him. And the hell of it was, he found, that he wanted once again to step close to it and lay his hand against it so that he again could feel the warmness of it, and perhaps the chill as well.

But he did not step closer to it, did not lay his hand against it. He backed a few steps away from it, then turned around and hurried back the way that he had come. Not running, for he sensed there was no reason he should run, but taking long, deliberate steps to get away from it as quickly as he could.

Out on the highway and clear of the visitor, he saw that several other cars had stopped and the cluster of people standing in the road had grown. He did not see the man who had followed him. Even had he seen him, he would not have recognized him, for he had caught only that one, quick, over-the-shoulder glimpse of him.

One man stepped out of the cluster to intercept him as he

came down the road. "What did you see?" the man asked. "Is

there anything going on?"

"Why don't you go and look?" Garrison asked him brusquely,

brushing swiftly past him.

It was strange, Garrison thought, that there was so little panic. If there was fear, it was being hidden. What was it about the visitors that seemed to inspire no fear? Maybe it was because the big black box had so few alien connotations. Perhaps because it was so totally unlike the common concept of something out of space. To a people brought up on the idiocies of TV and movie imaginations, the reality must seem quite commonplace.

His car was standing with the headlights burning and the engine running. He got into it, pulled up the road a car length or so, then cut to its left, drove across the median to reach the eastbound lanes. A mile down the road he pulled into a flanking service lane to reach a roadside phone booth.

Gold answered, his voice slightly flustered, on the second ring.

"I am glad you called," he said. "I was tempted to call you, but

hesitated, because I thought you'd be asleep."

"Why should you be calling me?"

"Well, another visitor has landed. Right in our lap this time. It's sitting on one of the runways at the airport."

"That's only half of it," said Garrison. "There's a second one. Came down on Highway 12, about a mile east of Ridgedale shopping center. It's blocking off the road."

"You there now?"

"That's right. It landed half a mile or so ahead of me. I better come on in. These may not be the only landings in the area. You have someone you can send out to keep an eye on this one?"

"I don't know. I'll look around. Jay was still here, so I sent him to the airport. Have a photographer out there as well."

"What's happening at the airport?"

"Not much, so far. The visitor is roosting out there, not bothering anyone, but the men in the tower are up tight. Not much air traffic out there now, but it'll pick up in a few hours. The visitor being there means there's one less runway to handle the planes."

"Anything on the wires? Any other landings in other places?"

"Fragmentary reports. Nothing solid. Nothing confirmed. Someone in Texas phoned the police to report one down. Another report from New Jersey. Simple reports of sightings, nothing official yet."

"I'm afraid the swarm that was in orbit out there is beginning to come in.

"Look, Johnny, why the hell don't you go on home, get some rest. There must be ways to bypass the visitor blocking the roads It'll be twenty hours before we can go to press again."

"No. If need be, I can go down to medical service and stretch out on a cot, get a few hours sleep later on. Any word from Kathy?"

"None. Why would you expect her to be calling? She's probably been asleep for hours."

"I think when she does phone, we should call her in. The Lone Pine thing is finished. The action will be down here so far as we are concerned. Anything happen at Lone Pine, Norton can fill us

in. We need Kathy. She's the one who knows about these things."

"O.K. I'll tell her if she calls."

"I'll see you in a while," said Garrison.

He hung up, fished in his pocket for another dime, inserted it in the slot and dialed.

Jane answered. "Johnny, I'm sitting up, waiting for you. When will you be home?"

"I started out," he said, "then something happened."

"And you aren't coming?"

"Not for a while. One of the visitors landed on the road just ahead of me. I have to get back to the office. Jim tells me another one landed at the airport."

"You mean one landed on Highway 12?" "That's right. Just east of Ridgedale." "Johnny, that's only four or five miles from here." "Yes, I know. But there's nothing…Johnny," she said, "that's too close. I'm getting scared."