Then Wong Lee gasped. The thing was still coming; it had crawled right through that white cloud of death. It was nearer now and he could see what had been its face. He saw too the shattered horror that had been its body and the impossible method of its forward progress.
A cold fear gripped his stomach. It did not occur to him, yet, to run. But he knew that he had to stop that thing before it reached him or he would go mad.
Forgetting, in his greater terror, the danger of falling shells, he jumped to his feet, pointed his heavy service automatic at the crawling monstrosity, now but ten feet distant, and pulled the trigger. Again and again and again. He saw the bullets strike.
He had not quite emptied the clip when he heard the scream of the coming shell. He tried to throw himself back into the shellhole, just a little too late. He was off balance, falling backward when the shell struck. It struck and exploded just behind the thing that crawled. He heard the clang of a fragment of steel ricocheting off his helmet. Almost miraculously, he was otherwise unhit.
The impact on his helmet stunned him.
When consciousness returned, Wong Lee found himself lying quietly in the bottom of his shellhole. At first he thought the battle had ceased or moved on. Then the drifting smoke over the rim of the crater and the constant shaking of the ground beneath him told him that it was not so. The battle continued; the shattered eardrums of Wong Lee brought him no auditory impressions of it.
Yet he heard. Not the thunder of battle, but a quiet, calm voice that seemed to be speaking within his own mind. It asked, dispassionately, «What are you?» It seemed to be speaking Chinese, but that made it no less bewildering. Strangest of all, it did not ask who he was, but what.
Wong Lee struggled to a sitting position and looked about him. He saw it lying there beside him, scant inches away.
It was a human head, or what had been one. With growing horror he saw that it was the head of the thing that had crawled toward him. The shell that had struck just behind it had blown it here, though without the body that had enabled it to crawl.
Well, it was dead now, all right.
Or was it?
Again, in the mind of Wong Lee, that quiet query, «What are you?» made itself heard. And suddenly, not knowing how he knew, Wong Lee was certain that the asker of that question was the severed, horribly mutilated head beside him in the shellhole.
Wong Lee screamed. He tore off his gas mask as he scrambled to his feet and screamed again. He gained the top rim of the shellhole and began to run.
He’d taken out ten paces when, almost at his feet, the thousand-pound demolition bomb struck and exploded. Soil and rock from the explosion of the bomb rose high into the air and descended. The falling soil and rock filled completely most of the smaller shellholes around the new crater.
In one of these, now buried under seven feet of soil, lay the mutilated head that had once been part of the body of Johnny Dix, now the unbreakable prison of an alien being.
Helpless to leave his new bonds of matter, helpless to move at all in space or to move in time other than to drift with the time-stream of this plane, the Stranger—until an hour ago a being of pure thought—began calmly and systematically to study the possibilities and limitations of his new mode of existence.
Erasmus Findly, in his monumental History of the Americas, devotes an entire volume to the dictator John Dix and the rise of imperialism in the United States immediately following the successful conclusion of the Sino-American War. But Findly, as do most modem historians, scouts the legendary character often given the figure of Dix.
«It is natural,» he says, «that so sudden a rise from complete obscurity to complete and tyrannical control of the greatest government on the face of the earth should lead to such legends as those which the superstitious believe about Dix.
«It is undoubtedly true that Dix went through the Sino-American War as a buck private, without distinguishing himself. For this reason, possibly, he had most records of himself destroyed after his rise to power. Or possibly there was some mark on those records which made him wish them destroyed.
«But the legend that he was reported missing during the crucial battle of that war—the Battle of the Panamints—and was not seen until the following spring, when the war was over, is probably untrue.
«According to the legend, in the spring of 1982 John Dix, naked and covered with dirt, walked up to a Panamint valley farm house, where he was given food and clothing and from there he proceeded to Los Angeles, then under reconstruction.
«Equally absurd are the legends of his invulnerability; the statements that dozens of times the bullets of assassins passed through his body without seeming even to cause him inconvenience.
«The fact that his enemies, the true patriots of America, got him at last is proof of the falseness of the invulnerability legend. And the crowning horror of that scene in the Rose Bowl, so vividly described by many contemporary witnesses, was undoubtedly a trap-door conjuring trick engineered by his enemies.»
Calmly and systematically, the Stranger had begun the study of the nature of his prison. With patience, he found the key.
Exploring, he tapped a memory in the head of Johnny Dix. A single episode suddenly became as vivid to him as though it were an experience of his own.
He was on a small boat, passing an island in a harbor. Beside him was a man who seemed very tall. He knew the man was his father and that this was happening when he was seven years old and they had taken a trip to a place called New York. His father said, «That’s Ellis Island, kid, where they let the immigrants in. Damn foreigners; they’re ruining this country. No chance any more for a real American. Somebody ought to blow Europe off the map.»
Simple enough, but each thought of that memory brought connotations that explained it to the Stranger. He knew what a boat was, what and where Europe was, and what an American was. And he knew that America was the only good country on this planet; that all the other countries were made up of contemptible people—and that even in this country the only good ones were the white ones who had been here a long time.
He explored further, found out many things that had bewildered him. He began to correlate these memories into a picture of the world in which he was now trapped. It was a strange, warped picture—although he had no way of learning that. It was a narrow ultra-nationalistic point of view, for one thing. And there were worse things than that.
He learned—and assimilated—all the hates and prejudices of buck private Johnny Dix, and they were many and violent. He knew nothing to the contrary of this strange world and so they became his hates and his prejudices, just as the memories became his memories.
Although he did not suspect it was so, the Stranger was finding his way into a narrower prison than his physical one; he was becoming trapped into the thoughts of a mind that had been neither strong nor straight.
There emerged a mentality which was a strange blend of the powerful mind of a strong entity and the narrow beliefs and prejudices of a Johnny Dix.
He saw the world through a dark, distorted lens. He saw that things must be done.
«Those fatheads in Washington,» he—or Johnny Dix—had said, «oughta be kicked out. Now if I was running this country—»
Yes, the Stranger saw what things he must do to put this world right. This was a good country—parts of it—surrounded by bad countries, and the bad ones ought to be taught a lesson, if not exterminated. The yellows ought to be all killed, men, women, and children. There was a black race that ought to be sent back to a place called Africa, where they belonged. And even among white Americans, there were people who had more money than they should have, and it ought to be taken away from them and given to people like Johnny Dix. Yes, we needed a government that could tell people like that where to head in. And enough military power so we could tell the rest of the world where to head in, too.