The Visitors (v1.0)

9. LONE PINE

Kathy struggled up from the depths of sleep. Someone was pounding at the door. Behind the drapes, the windows were faintly lighted by a weak and early dawn. She searched, fumbling, for the unaccustomed lamp on the unaccustomed bedside table. The room, even barely glimpsed, held a brutal barrenness. Where the hell am I? she wondered. Then remembered where she was:

Lone Pine!

Lone Pine and someone hammering at the door.

She found the lamp switch and turned it. Throwing back the covers, she searched with her feet for the slippers on the floor, found them, scuffed them on. She found her robe, lying across the foot of the bed, and struggled into it.

The pounding still continued.

"All right! All right!" she yelled. "I'll be there."

Pulling the robe close about her, she shuffled to the door, pulled the bolt and opened it.

Frank Norton stood outside.

"Miss Foster," he said, "I hate to bother you at this hour, but something's happening. The thing that fell out of the sky is cutting down trees and eating them."

"Eating trees!"

He nodded. "That's right. It is cutting them down and chewing them up. It's gulping down big trees."

"Please," she said, "will you get Chet up. He's next door. Number three. I'll be right out."

Norton turned away and she closed the door. The room was miserably cold. When she breathed, faint wisps of her breath hung in the air.

Swiftly, gasping with the cold, she got into her clothes, stood in front of a mirror to run a comb through her hair. She didn't look her best, she knew. She looked a sight, but the hell with it. What would one expect, routed out of bed at this time in the morning.

Norton was crazy, she told herself. The thing across the river couldn't be eating trees. It might be no more than a joke, but Norton didn't seem like someone who would spend much time in joking. But why in the world would the contraption over there be gulping trees?

When she went outside, Chet already had emerged, laden with his camera gear.

"You look good," he said to Kathy, "even at this ungodly hour."

"Go chase yourself," said Kathy.

"I'm sorry," said Norton, "for routing you out even before the sun is up. But I expected you would want to know. I thought about it for all of thirty seconds."

"It's all right," said Kathy. "It goes with the job."

"There are other newspaper people in town," said Norton. "They came in during the night. Dribbling in. Trowbridge from the Minneapolis Star, someone from the Kansas City Star, a couple of people from the Des Moines Register and Tribune. All of them brought photographers. I expect there will be others later in the day."

"How are they getting in?" asked Chet. "The roads were blocked."

"The state patrol got them unblocked. Got people turned around and turned back. A few ears left there. I suppose yours is among them. The patrol pushed them over to the shoulder of the road. They're letting in the press and a few others, but keeping the public out."

"Any TV people?" asked Kathy.

"Several crews," said Norton. "They're raising hell. They want to get across the river, but there's no way to get there."

"No boats?"

"They've been looking for boats. Not many people here have boats. What boats there are are out at lakes in the area. No one uses boats on the river."

There were few people in evidence as they walked down the street. All of them, Kathy told herself, must be down at the end of the ruined bridge watching the thing chew up the trees.

Well before they reached the river, they heard the occasional crash of a falling tree and a growling sound that rose and fell.

"That's the thing chewing up the trees?" asked Kathy.

"That's right," said Norton. "It knocks down a tree and grabs it.. 7

"But those are big trees," objected Chet.

"The thing itself is big," said Norton. "Wait until you see it."

A good-sized crowd was gathered at the shattered bridge. Three TV crews were in position on the roadway. The ear that had been flattened by the falling object had disappeared. A state patrol car was parked beside the road and two troopers lounged against it. Neither of them, Kathy noted, was the trooper who had been there the night before.

Across the river lay the object. Kathy sucked in her breath in amazement. Everyone had been telling her how big it was, but, even so, she had not been prepared for the size of it. So big, that while most of the trees in front of it towered over it, it still stood up for half their height or more. Big and black—the blackest thing she had ever seen. But strangely, otherwise unspectacular. No antennae sprouted from it; nothing sprouted from it. None of the gadgets which the TV shows on UFOs delighted in tacking on their flying saucers. Just a gaunt, overgrown black box. And, strangely too, with no menace in it. Nothing except its size to make it a thing to be frightened of.

In front of it, one of the big trees slowly tilted and then came crashing down. In front of the object lay piled-up litter of other downed trees. From the thing came a steady growling of wood being chewed up, ground up, ingested, whatever the thing might be doing to the trees. The tree that had fallen seemed to have acquired a life of its own. It was bobbing and switching back and forth. And, slowly, it was being drawn in toward the front of the machine.

"The damn thing just sucks them in and chews them up," said Norton. "Since it started half an hour or so ago, it has moved almost its length. I'd figure that to be three hundred feet or more.

"What is it doing?" asked Kathy. "Trying to chew a path through the woods?"

"If that's what it's doing," Norton told her, "it has a long way to go. That forest extends for twenty miles or more, all of it heavy growth."

She stood and watched. There wasn't much to see. Just the huge black box knocking down trees and gobbling them up. The frightening thing about it, she thought, was its stow, deliberate movement, its sense of power, its seeming confidence that nothing could prevent it from doing what it was doing.

She walked over to the police ear.

"Yes, miss," said one of the troopers. "Anything we can do to help?"

"The car," she said. "The one that was lying crushed at the end of the bridge. It isn't there now.

"A truck came and hauled it away," the trooper said. "The driver had the proper papers to requisition it and we let him take it. We checked by radio and were told it was all right."

"Where did the order come from?"

"Miss," the trooper said, "I can't tell you that."

"The FBI?"

"Miss, I cannot discuss it."

"Well, all right," she said, "perhaps you can't. Can you tell me what is going to happen next?"

"The army engineers will be coming in to build a temporary bridge. We expect them any time. One of those prefabricated bridges, as I understand it."

Chet came walking up. He said to her, "I've taken all I can from here. We ought to get up closer. Trowbridge and me and some of the others have been talking about it. We think we can wade the river. The stream below the pool is fast, but not too deep. Or that's what the locals te1~ us. If we join hands, form a chain, help one another, we can get across.

One of the troopers said, "You can't cross the river. We have our orders. No one is to cross the river."

Kathy said, "If you are going to cross, count me in. I'm going, too."

"The hell you are," said Chet. "You stay here and guard the equipment that we have to leave behind. I'll just take one camera and some film reloads across.~~

"Chet White," said Kathy, "I am going. If the others go, I'll go along.

"You'll get your ass soaked. That water's cold."

"I've been soaked before. And cold before."

"The trouble," said Chet, "is them TV jerks. They want to carry a lot of equipment over. They want us to help. That stuff of theirs is heavy."

The trooper who had spoken earlier moved in close to them.

"You can't cross that river," he said. "We have orders."

"Show me them orders," said Chet belligerently.

"We haven't got written orders. Our orders are verbal. Over the radio. No one's to cross that stream."

Trowbridge, of the Minneapolis Star, came up. "I heard you," he said to the trooper. "You'll have to use force to stop us. I don't think you'll use force."

The second trooper joined the first. "You goddamned newspaper people," he said, disgusted. He said to his partner, "Get on the radio. Tell them what is going on."

Another man joined them. "I'm Douglas, Kansas City Star," he told the trooper. "We'll make note of your order, but we have to get across. It's our job to get across. That's federal land over there. You're state. Lacking a court order.

The trooper said nothing.

Douglas said to Kathy, "You're determined to go with us?"

"You're damned right I am."

"Stick close to me, then. Hang on tight."

"Thank you, sir," said Kathy.

"Here," said Chet, handing Kathy a camera. "Drape this over your neck. I'll help one of these TV jerks with his stuff."

"What will you do with the rest of your stuff?" she asked. "All of us will pile what we can't take here on the road. The troopers will guard it for us."

"The hell we will," the trooper said.

He turned and walked back to the ear, where his partner was talking on the radio.

"You guys were tough with the troopers," Norton said. "We'll apologize later," said Chet. "Goddammit, we got a job to do."

"There are laws about crossing fire lanes and such."

"This here ain't no fire lane," said Chet. "This here is a river."

"O.K.," said Norton. "I'll cross with you. On the other side of Kathy. Me and the Kansas City Star will see she doesn't drown."

One of the troopers came back. "You can cross," he said. "No further objection from us. But on your own responsibility. It's your ass." He said, looking directly at Douglas, "You can also take note of that."

"Thank you, sir," said Douglas. "Most willingly. And thank you.

The line was forming on the river bank. There was some shouting and shoving. Trowbridge hurried down the bank and took command.

"Cut out the horseplay," he shouted. "Get in line, grab hold of the man next to you. Take it easy. Take a deep breath. That water's cold. It will freeze your balls."

He suddenly became aware of Kathy.

"I'm sorry, Kathy."

"Don't think a thing of it," said Kathy. "You can't say a thing I haven't heard before."

The line edged into the water.

"Jesus," sang out a TV man, who was in the lead, "this water is like ice."

"Easy," someone said. "Take it easy, men."

They inched across. In the deepest part of the stream, the water came to a tall man's waist.

Kathy, as she hit the water, gritted her teeth. But as she inched along with the others, one hand engulfed in the big fist of Douglas, the other held, vise-like, in Norton's hand, she forgot the cold and concentrated on making her way across.

The head of the line reached the opposite bank, clustered there to help the others.

Teeth chattering, Kathy climbed the river bank, Chet's camera swinging, bumping against her.

Chet reached back a hand to help her up the last few feet, took the camera from her.

"Run around a bit," he told her. "Jog around. Keep moving. You'll be warmer that way. You look like a drowned rat."

"So do you," she said. "So do all the rest of us."

Some of the others were running up the slight incline that sloped down to the river. She ran along with them. To their left, the object from the sky loomed tall above them, like a great black wall reaching into the sky. The crashes of the falling trees and the deep, rising and falling rumble of the object chewing them up was louder than it had been across the river.

Photographers scattered, their cameras aimed.

Here, close to it, the object was more impressive than seen from farther off. Here the true dimensions of it became apparent. Too, the imperturbability of it—the great black box lurching slowly along, paying no attention, or at least giving the impression of paying no attention, to the humans who swarmed about it. As if it might be unaware of them, or being aware of them, ignored them. As if we didn't exist, thought Kathy, as if we were not worth paying attention to, little scurrying life forms that were beneath its notice.

She gravitated toward the rear end of the object and tried to make out how it moved. There were no treads, no wheels, nothing to propel it. As a matter of fact, it seemed to have no moving parts and, come to think of it, no part of it seemed to touch the ground. She considered crouching down and putting her hand between the ground and the great black mass to see if there actually were some ground clearance, but, at the last minute, her courage failed her. You could lose a hand with a stunt like that, she told herself.

The box, she saw, was not actually a box. The side that she could see went straight up, but the rear end (and maybe the front end, too, she told herself) curved outward slightly, that area of it closest to the ground flaring out slightly. For some reason she could not quite reconcile, the whole thing reminded her of a turtle in its shell.

She walked in back of it and stubbed her toe, pitching forward, but catching herself before she fell. She looked to see what she had stubbed her toe on. Whatever it was, was white and smooth and close to the ground. Squatting down, she brushed away the forest duff that covered it. It was, she saw, a newly cut tree stump, sheared off smoothly, only a couple of inches above the ground.

Stunned, she rubbed the palm of her hand across the smoothness of the stump. Little drops of resin were oozing out of it and smeared her palm. The object, she realized, was not knocking down the trees, as she had thought. It was cutting them close against the ground and pushing them, with its great weight, so they fell in front of it.

And that meant, she told herself, that this harvesting of the trees was not a simple matter of forcibly crashing its way through them. It meant that the object was designed to do this very thing. And, as she did, the back end of the turtle-like shell twitched and then rolled up—like an automatic garage door responding to a signal.

It slid up five or six feet and three large white objects were expelled from it Along with the three white objects came a sudden gush of chewed up bark and pine needles, resembling the mulch spewed out by a lawn mower

Then the back of the object slid down again.

Chutes? Kathy wondered. Had she seen chutes out of which the baled white masses and the mulch had been expelled? She could not be sure she had.

She walked up cautiously to one of the bales, put out a hand, then pulled it back, suddenly frightened, reluctant to touch the bale. She swore luridly at herself for her timidity and put out her hand again. The white material was tightly packed, compressed, but not bound by wires or by anything at all. She dug her fingers into it and the substance resisted the digging. She managed to pull loose a small fragment of the material.

It was, she saw, almost exactly like cotton. Funny thing, she thought, a bale of cotton emerging from this monster that was eating trees.

From across the river came a metallic squealing, and looking to find out what had caused it, she saw that a large truck equipped with a crane had backed up to the other end of the bridge. The crane was lifting an oblong structure of wood off the truck bed. Beneath the structure the crane had lifted were others, stacked upon the truck. It must be, she told herself, the army engineers with their prefabricated bridge. Maybe, she thought, we will not have to wade again across the river, wondering as she thought it how long it might require to put the bridge together. She hoped that it would not take long, for it would be a comfort not to have to plunge again into the chilling cold of the river.

She heard the pound of feet behind her and, turning, saw that Chet was charging towards her, followed by the other photographers and newsmen.

"What have we got here?" Chet panted. "Where did those bales come from?"

"The thing just spewed them out," she said.

Chet was squaring off, his camera to his face, the others rushing in behind him. The TV crews frantically went about setting up their equipment, some of them using hand-held minicams, while the others manipulated tripods and electronic gear.

Slowly, Kathy backed away. There was nothing more that she could do—and it was a damn shame, she told herself. This was a break for the afternoon papers. It would be in the evening papers and on the evening TV news shows before the Tribune went to press. That was the way it sometimes went, she told herself philosophically. You won a few, you lost a few. There was not much that could be done about it.

What did it all mean, she wondered—this box-like monster eating trees and then, from the other end of it, expelling bales of stuff that looked like cotton, along with bushels of junk that probably was the by-product of its eating of the trees. It made sense, she told herself, that bales had been processed from the trees that had been ingested, but what could that white stuff be? She should know, she thought, searching frantically for a knowledge that she knew must be tucked somewhere in her memory, tucked away in those college days when she had struggled valiantly with biology, but not too successfully. Science, she recalled, science and math had been her two worst subjects and she never had done too well in either of them.

A word came floating up. Cellulose. Could that be it? Trees, she remembered vaguely, were made up, in a large part, of cellulose. Perhaps all plants had some cellulose in them. But how much? Enough to make it worth the effort to chew up trees and extract the cellulose? Did cellulose look like cotton? And if this stuff really should be cellulose, what the hell did that big black box want of cellulose?

All the time that she had been thinking this, she had been backing up, step by slow step, head tilted back to stare up at the bigness of the thing, trying to get a better perspective of it, the better to measure its size and massiveness.

A tree stopped her. She had backed into it. Lowering her head to look around, she saw that she had backed into the fringe of the forest through which the big blackness was cutting a swath.

A low voice came from behind her. "Kathy," it said. "Kathy, is that you?"

The moment she heard the voice she recognized it, knowing who it was who spoke. She turned quickly, heart pounding.

"Jerry," she said. "Jerry, what are you doing here?"

And there the damn fool stood, grinning at her, enjoying the fact that he had sneaked up on her and frightened her. He was wearing waders and there were scratches on his face and jagged tears in the woolen shirt he wore.

"Jerry," she said again, not crediting what she saw.

He put a finger to his lips, cautioning her. "Not too loud," he said.

She flew at him and his arms came tight around her. "Careful," he said. "Careful. Let's move back a ways." Propelling her deeper into the tangled cover even as he said it.

She lifted her eyes to him and could feel the tears running down her cheeks. "But, Jerry, why careful? I'm so glad to see you. I was sent up here by the city desk and I left word for you.

"Careful," he said, "because I can't be seen."

"I don't understand," she protested. "Why can't you be seen? Why are you here at all?"

"I parked the car and went fishing in the pool. Then this thing came down and smashed the car.

"So that was your car?"

"You saw the car? I suppose it was smashed."

"It was flattened. They hauled it away."

"Who hauled it away?"

"I don't know. It was hauled away, is all. Maybe the FBI."

"Damn!" he said.

"Why damn?"

"That was one of the things I was afraid of. They'll find the license plates. It can be traced to me.

"Jerry, why are you hiding? What have you got to hide?"

"I was in that thing out there. Inside of it. Something reached down and jerked me inside of it."

"Inside of it? But you got away."

"It threw me out," he said. "I landed in a tree. That saved me."

"Jerry, I don't understand any of this. Why should you be jerked inside of it?"

"To find out what I was, I think. I'm not sure. Not sure of anything at all. I spent all night, lost, huddled in the woods. I damn near froze to death. I did a lot of thinking."

"You thought and got something figured out. Tell me what it was."

"I figured out I can't be one of those kooks who have been inside a flying saucer."

"This is no saucer, Jerry."

"It's the next thing to it. It's from outer space. It's alive. I know."

"You know.

"Yes, I know. No time to tell you now."

"Why don't you come with me. I don't want you running around in the woods alone."

"Those are newspaper people out there, aren't they?"

"Yes, of course, they are."

"They'd take me apart. They would ask me questions."

"No, they wouldn't. I wouldn't let them."

"And there are state troopers at the bridge."

"Yes. Two of them."

"More than likely they are watching for me. They probably figured out someone had parked his car to go fishing in the pool. These waders—they'd know me from the waders."

"All right," she said. "All right. What do you want to do?"

"I scouted down the stream," he said. "When I saw the troopers, I knew I couldn't get across. There's a shallow stretch of water I can wade across. A quarter mile downstream. Just opposite the far edge of the town. Later on, you can meet me there."

"If that's the way you want it, Jerry. I still think you could walk right out with me."

He shook his head. "I have it figured out. I know what will happen if anyone ever finds out I was inside that thing. I'll see you later. Now get back before someone comes looking for you."

"Kiss me first," said Kathy. "You big lug, you never even kissed