"It's been a long day, Steve," he said.
Wilson bit into a sandwich. "Rough," he said.
"What's going on right now?" asked Anders.
"Perhaps quite a bit. Nothing that I know of. There's nothing I can tell, nothing that I know."
Gates chuckled. "You can talk, can't you?"
"Sure I can talk. But I can't give you anything. You guys know procedure. If I should happen to say something that makes sense, it is off the record."
"Well, hell, yes, of course," said Anders. "You news-papered yourself. You know how it is."
"I know how it is," said Wilson.
"What bothers me," said Hunt, "is how anyone, even the President, knows where to take hold of a thing like this. There is no precedent. Nothing like this has ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. As a rule a crisis will build up; you can see it coming and be halfway ready for it. But not this one. This one exploded without warning."
"That's bothering me, too," said Anders. "How do you find a handle?"
"You're stuck with it," said Wilson. "You can't just ignore it. You do the best you can. You try to find out what it's all about. In a case like this, you have to be somewhat skeptical and that doesn't allow you to move as fast as you'd like to move. You have to talk with a lot of people, you have to check around and you have to develop some sort of judgment. I suspect you might pray a lot. Oh, not informal praying, nothing like that…"
"Is that what the President did?" asked. Anders.
"That's not what I said. I was just trying to think through a hypothetical question."
"What do you think of it, Steve?" asked Gates. "You, not the President."
"It's hard to tell," said Wilson. "It's all too new. I found myself, just a while ago, wondering if it was all delusion, if it might not be gone by morning. Of course, I know it won't be. But it boggles the mind to think of it. I have brought myself to believe these people are really from the future. But even if they're not, they're here and we have to deal with them. I suppose it doesn't really matter where they came from."
"You, personally, still have doubts?"
"You mean are they from the future? No, I don't think I have any real doubts about that. Their explanation holds up. Why should they lie about it? What would they gain by lying?"
"But, still, you…"
"Now, wait a minute. I don't want you to start speculating the answer that we have is wrong. That would be unrealistic. This was among friends, remember? Just sitting down and talking."
The pressroom door came open and, at the sound of its opening, Wilson looked up. Brad Reynolds stood in the doorway, his face had a pitifully stricken look.
"Steve," he said, "Steve, I have to see you."
"What's going on?" asked Hunt.
Through the open door came the frantic clanging of a bell on one of the teletypes, signaling a bulletin.
Wilson rose to his feet so swiftly that he jiggled the coffee table, tipping his cup. Coffee ran across the table and dripped onto the carpet.
He strode across the room and gripped Reynolds by the arm.
"A monster got through!" Reynolds blurted out. "Global has it. It's on radio."
"For the love of God," said Wilson. He glanced back over his shoulder at the newsmen and saw that they had heard.
"What's this about monsters?" shouted Anders. "You never told us about any monsters."
"Later," said Wilson savagely. He pushed Reynolds back into the pressroom and slammed the door.
"I thought you and Frank were working on the TV speech," he said. "How did you…"
"The radio," said Reynolds. "We heard it on the radio. What will we do about the TV talk? He can't go on TV without mentioning this and it's only an hour away."
"We'll take care of that," said Wilson. "Does Henderson know?"
"Frank went to tell him. I came to you."
"Do you know what happened? Where it happened?"
"Down in Virginia. Two of them came through the tunnel. The gun got one of them. The other one got through. It killed the gun crew…"
"You mean one of them is running loose?"
Reynolds nodded miserably.
22
Tom Manning turned sideways from his desk and ran new paper into the typewriter. He wrote:
Third Lede Monster
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Global)-An alien beast is loose on the Earth tonight. No one knows where it is. It came out of a time tunnel in Virginia and disappeared after killing the crew of an artillery piece posted in front of the tunnel, placed to prevent the very thing that happened. A second beast came through with it, but this one was killed by the gun.
There are unconfirmed reports that several other people, in addition to the gun crew, were killed by the tunnel monster.
Eyewitnesses said that the beast was large and unbelievably quick in its movements. No one got a good look at it. "It moved too fast to really see it," said one eyewitness. Within seconds after emerging from the tunnel it disappeared. There is no clue as to where it may be now.
"Mr. Manning," said someone at his elbow. Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there. "Mr. Price's pictures," said the copy boy, handing them to him.
Manning looked at the one on top and drew his breath in sharply. "Jesus H. Christ," he said to himself aloud, "will you look at that!"
It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was springing, perhaps toward the gun crew, probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley's super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity — the bared mouthful of fangs, the talons gleaming in the fur of one uplifted paw, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. Its eyes shone wickedly and a thick ruff of fur around its neck stood up on end. The very shape of it was evil. It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up one's spine — not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning, mindless fear.
Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand, he fanned them out as one would fan a hand of playing cards. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead monster crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies.
"That goddamned Price," said Manning soulfully. "He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew."
23
"WE can't cancel your TV appearance," Wilson told the President. "It's bad enough right now. It will be worse if we cancel your appearance. We can fix it, a paragraph or two at the start of it. Say that the Virginia incident is too recent to make much comment upon it. Assurance that it will be run down, that it will be found and killed. That we're already closing in on it…"
"But we aren't," said the President. "We don't know where the hell it is. There's been no report of it. You remember what Gale said — how fast they could move. Traveling in the dark, this thing could be deep into the mountains of West Virginia and well hidden out before it's daylight."
"There's more reason right now than there ever was," said Frank Howard, who had been working on the speech text with Reynolds, "for you to talk to the people. The country, the entire country, will be in an uproar and we'll have to tame them down."
"You know, Frank," said the President, "I don't seem to care right now to tame the country down. Can't you get it through your head that this is not a political matter? It's far more than that. I can't be sure just how much danger the country may be facing, but I know that there is danger. I've asked Gale to step down here and tell us what he thinks. He knows more of it than we do."