Murray Leinster (18 page)

The essential rightness of his character was shown by the fact that he rifled no purses. He looted nothing. The Bank of South Lupton lay open to him, and it did not occur to him to fill his pockets. He got on a bicycle and rode off like mad, the absurd pot bobbing on his head as he pedaled.

He came to a car that had smashed into a ditch and turned over. Flames licked at its gasoline-tank. Mr. Tedder leaped off the bicycle and dragged out an unconscious man and a little girl. He hauled them to safety and tried to put out the fire. He failed.

He pedaled on madly in quest of a doctor, when attempts to rouse these two people failed as had all the rest. He was in a new panic now, somehow. He remembered, though vaguely, talk of a broadcast of years before concerning the landing of Martians upon the earth. Mr. Tedder was not quite sure whether Martians had landed or not, but somehow it suddenly frightened him to remember the frost covered globe which had smashed trees in landing.

‘You’d think I was Orson Welles or somebody,’ he gulped.

He reached the town of West Lupton. The names of towns in Vermont are not good evidence of Yankee ingenuity. The town itself was a tiny place of five hundred people. As he pedaled into it, it looked like the scene of a massacre. Its inhabitants lay unconscious everywhere. There were not even flies in the air.

Mr. Tedder did not give up for two full hours, during which he pedaled desperately in quest of some other conscious human being. By now his fear had come to be for himself, and it grew until it made him almost unaware of the ill-fitting, bumping pot upon his head. But at long last his teeth chattered.

‘M-maybe,’ said Mr. Tedder quaveringly to himself, ‘I’m the only man left alive in these parts…’

With the terror came an impulse to hide. It was then late afternoon. It would soon be dark. He did not want to be in a town filled with still, not-dead forms after dark! He pedaled down a side road. It became a cart-track and climbed. It dwindled to a footpath. He dived into the obscurity of woodland as the shadows grew deep.

He came at last to an empty, rocky hilltop. Sunset was over.

Only a lingering dim red glow remained in the west. Presently stars shone down. He looked up at them, sweating.

If that frost-covered thing had come from the stars, something from it - a sort of devil - had stricken down the hundreds of unconscious people Mr. Tedder had seen. Maybe it was getting ready for more of its kind. He stared upward and imagined other spheres swinging down out of the darkness overhead to gouge long furrows in the ground. Maybe such things were falling all over the world____

But he could look across-country for miles. Presently he saw joyfully that there were electric lights. He saw motorcar headlights on the highways. In particular, he saw that the very last town he had entered was now brightly lighted and there was traffic moving in and out….

‘Well,’ he thought with relief. ‘Whatever it was, it ain’t permanent.’ Come morning he would have somebody cut loose the pot from his head.

He could not find fuel to make a fire, but he snatched some fitful sleep toward dawn. He was bitterly cold when he woke, and at earliest daylight he made his way back toward town.

The dawn light was still gray and dreary when he reached it. The streets were empty. But there was a motor-truck stopped by a store, its motor purring. And there was a man tumbled in a heap above a bunch of big-city newspapers he had just put out of the truck for delivery. The man was alive, but unconscious. There was a cat in a motionless furry heap beside him, as if it had come out to rub against his legs and had collapsed without warning.

Mr. Tedder, shivering, turned the man over. He was insensible. He could not be roused. Mr. Tedder felt hysteria stirring within him. The pot hurt his head, now. The places where it rubbed most often were getting sore. Then he noticed the headlines.

DISASTER IN VERMONT - DEVIL LOOSE, SAY VILLAGERS

Unexplained Mass Unconsciousness Strikes Countryside 128

In the gray twilight of dawn, with a softly purring truck behind him and before him an unconscious man, Mr. Tedder read.

‘South Lupton struck by strange, creeping unconsciousness that moved like a wall or an invisible flood of oblivion… ■< Entire villages insensible for half an hour.
_iS
. Some inhabitants undisturbed where they fell, others hauled about and pawed, but unharmed.
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.. The same inexplicable insensibility moved along roads. ? ? Man driving with his little daughter lost consciousness and came to to find his car overturned and burning, and himself and the little girl lying some distance away. . i. Farmers found their horses struggling up from unconsciousness.
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5
·’

Mr. Tedder’s throat went dry. He looked around furtively.
This town had borne the look of a shambles yesterday, when he was here. From the hilltop he had seen it alive. But now it was dead again. s. ·. Suddenly he remembered a white dog that had come running toward him across a wide pasture. When he got to the dog it was unconscious… i

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wonder if..’ He could not face the thought.

Mr. Tedder shivered. He almost whimpered. But after a little he picked up the unconscious man before him. He dragged him into the back of the truck. He drove clumsily and unac-customedly out of the town. There was a long, straight stretch of road. Mr. Tedder went well out upon it. He stopped and let the unconscious man carefully down to the side of the road. He got back in the driver’s seat and drove away,* He watched through the back-view mirror.

When he was a little more than half a mile away, the still figure stirred, rolled over, and got dazedly upright.

Mr. Tedder swallowed noisily. He drove on a litde way and found a place where he could turn. He headed back. The owner of the truck still stood bewildered in the road. Mr. Tedder drove toward him. When he was still half a mile away, the man crumpled up and lay in a heap on the road. He was a flaccid, limp, insensible figure when Air. Tedder brought the truck to a stop and loaded him in again.

He turned once more and rode on toward South Lupton. Mr.

Tedder’s face was a sickly gray color.- The meekness of his normal expression was replaced by an odd, fixed horror. He had found two things which he believed came from the frosted ten-foot sphere. One was a weapon which destroyed everything when a knob on its side was touched. The other was this pot, with a strap which now held it fast upon his head.

The pot was a weapon too. It did not affect the one who wore it. The tightening of the strap when it went on was to make sure

- pure anguish sharpened Mr. Tedder’s perceptions - that it could not fall off while it was operating. If it did, the person -or the devil - wearing it would fall a victim too. It did not fit a man because it was designed for the brain-case of something else, something Mr. Tedder had seen vaguely as a dark moving object backing into a rusty barbed wire strung between two trees. If the pot - or helmet - had been turned on then, Mr. Tedder would never have seen anything. He would have fallen unconscious a half-mile away…

He made a little sobbing noise in his throat. He drove un-skillfully to South Lupton. One general store was open. He went into it and filled his pockets with canned food, a loaf of bread, and matches. He took two blankets from a shelf. He stepped carefully over the two clerks and four customers in the store. They were on the floor, of course. He walked out of the store and away from the litde town.

‘I got to get back there,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I got to!’

A long while later he strode across rolling pasture-land. A white dog ran to intercept him. He saw it as a distant white speck. When he came up to it, it was a still, senseless heap. He went on to the woods and into them. It took him two hours to find the gash blasted in the woods by the gun-like thing. Then it took him another half-hour to find the gun.

He shivered when he picked it up, and carried it gingerly, but he noted that the metal was deeply pitted now. On the side that was next to the damp earth, the metal was eaten away to a depth of a quarter of an inch or more.

He found the abandoned orchard, and the half-collapsed and wholly ruined house. Then he sat down and stared dully at nothing, trying to think of a solution to his predicament.:

Night fell but he sat in a sort of lethargy of despair for a long while. Ultimately he rolled up in the blankets.; The pot on his head was horribly uncomfortable. It had not been made for a human head, and it did not fit. Twice during the night, also, he woke with a feeling of strangulation. He had stirred in his sleep and the tight chin-strap had choked him. The second time he found himself close to the metal gun. He had almost touched it. He made an inarticulate sound, such as a man might make who found himself about to step on a ratdesnake.

He got up and found the well of the abandoned farm. He dropped a clod of earth in it. It splashed. He dropped in the gun like-thing. Bubbling sounds followed. They lasted a long time.

He stayed at the abandoned farm for three days living on the canned stuff he had taken. His cheeks grew sunken and his eyes querulously pathetic. Also, a sore place started from the rubbing of the pot on his head. On the second day he found the frosted globe again. The motor in it still ran. ‘
Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK
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’
There was no sign that anything had come out. Perhaps there had only been one Whatever-it-was in it, and that had succumbed to a rip in its artificial hide by a bit of barbed wire. No trace of that thing remained, now. It had evaporated.

‘Jellyfish. Like jellyfish,’ he told himself.

Mr. Tedder did not think in scientific terms nor speculate from what planet or star the Whatever-it-was had come. If he had been told that on the planet Jupiter there was atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen under enormous pressure, it would have meant nothing to him. The suggestion that the specific gravity of the giant planet meant that only light metals like sodium, potassium, and lithium - all interacting readily with water - could exist there … Such a suggestion would have had exactly no meaning at all.

His mind dwelt exclusively upon the fact that any human being who came within a half-mile of him must fall unconscious and remain so. To the human race he was a menace; a devil. And that if he should manage to get the thick and clumsy pot off his head, he too would fall unconscious and remain so.

He was in the most horrible solitary confinement imaginable.

He was invulnerable, to be sure. He could rob with impunity and do murder without fear of any penalty. But nobody could speak to him. Ever.

On the fourth day he went into East Lupton for food.

On the fifth day aeroplanes flew overhead, back and forth. One suddenly went spinning, out of control, dipping down toward the treetops. It recovered, a bare few hundred feet up and three-quarters of a mile away. The planes disappeared.

On the sixth day bombs fell. The first racking explosions terrified him incomparably. He fled through the underbrush. He came out of it and saw soldiers. They made a cordon about an area of woodland probably two miles square. They toppled in unconscious heaps as Mr. Tedder drew near them, and as if that were a signal there were distant boomings and artillery shells fell close to where he peered out. Mr. Tedder ran away. He dodged shells and bombs until night fell, then he ran, weeping bitterly to himself.

‘1 ain’t done nothing wrong!’ the thought beat through his imprisoned head.

Of course the troops could not stop him. He pelted through their lines, unheeding. Presently he reached the village of East Lupton. No figures moved in it. Desperate, he entered it. There were many soldiers among the heaps of shallow-breathing, staring-eyed folk who lay slackly wherever unconsciousness had overtaken them.

Mr. Tedder found food, and wolfed it. The store in which he found it was a country-village general store and sold everything. Mr. Tedder was half-mad now. The thing he wore was an intolerable burden. One of the sore places on his head from its rubbing was excruciatingly painful. It was infected. Other sore places were developing. And he was a sort of devil, working havoc wherever he moved. He took weapons - for which he had no need - and metal-cutting tools he would not dare to use. … And he saw newspapers.

GUNS TO BLAST DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON

He read the news account The one-mile circle of insensibility had been deduced. Its cause was not understood, but it was certain that some sensate thing was its center. It moved. It had made definite travels and returned to its starting-point. Troops now cordoned the place where it nested restlessly, and artillery was being massed. A barrage that nothing could survive would presently be poured in….

Mr. Tedder looked at a powerful, sleek car. He could take it and go anywhere, and all of humanity was powerless to stop him - or to help him. Anyone who came near him would fall senseless. Even he, if he took off the thing on his head.;.:

A motor-truckcame rolling into the village, its driver stricken unconscious at the wheel. It seemed certain to roll on and on.

Mr. Tedder screamed at it. But something deflected its wheels. It curved sedately from the highway and ploughed across a sidewalk and crashed into the comer of a house.

When the sun rose, Mr. Tedder was back at the abandoned farm which for no reason at all he considered his headquarters. His eyes were red with bitter weeping. His meek expression was utterly woebegone. But his determination was made.