35
Judy was at her desk. Notes were beginning to accumulate on the spindle. The lights on the console were blinking.
"You get any sleep?" asked Wilson.
She looked up at him. "A little. I lay awake thinking, scared. It's not good, is it, Steve?"
"Not good," he said. "It's too big for us to handle. If it weren't for the time element, it wouldn't be so bad. If we only had a little time."
She gestured toward the door leading to the lounge. "You won't tell them that, will you?"
He grinned. "No, I won't tell them that."
"They've been asking when you're going to see them."
"Fairly soon," he said.
"I might as well tell you," she said. "No use waiting. I am going home. Back to Ohio."
"But I need you here."
"You can get a girl from the secretarial pool. Couple of days and you won't know the difference."
"That's not what I mean…"
"I know what you mean. You need me to shack up with. It's been like that for how long — six months? It's this damn town. It makes everything dirty that it touches. Somewhere else it might have worked for us. But it isn't working here."
"Damn it, Judy," he said, "what's got into you? Because I didn't come out last night…"
"Partly that, perhaps. Not all that, of course. I know why you had to stay. But it was so lonely and so many things had happened and I sat there thinking and got scared. I tried to call my mother and the lines were busy. A poor scared girl, for Christ's sake, running back to Mama. But suddenly everything was different. I wasn't a sleek, competent Washington hussy, any longer; I was a kid in pigtails in a little town deep in Ohio. It all started with my getting scared. Tell me honest now, I had a right to be scared."
"You had a right," he said soberly. "I'm half scared myself. Everyone is scared."
"What's going to happen to us?"
"Damned if I know. But that wasn't what we were talking about."
"Monsters running loose," she said. "Too many mouths to feed. Everyone fighting one another or getting set to fight."
"We were talking about you going to Ohio. I'm not going to ask you do you really mean it, because I know you do. I suppose that you are lucky to have a place to run to. Most of us have no place. I'd like to ask you to stay, but that would be unfair. What's more, it would be selfish. But I still wish you would."
"I have a plane reservation," she said. "With the phone tied up and all, I was surprised to get one. The country's in a panic. In a time like this you get that terrible helpless feeling."
"You won't like Ohio. Once you get there, you won't like it. If you're scared in Washington, you'll be scared in Ohio."
"I still am going, Steve. Come six-fifteen tonight and I'll be on that plane."
"There's nothing I can say?"
"There's nothing you can say," she said.
"Then you'd better let the press in. I have some news for them."
36
Senator Andrew Oakes hitched himself up slightly from the depths of the chair in which he'd sank. "I'm not right sure, Mr. President," he said, "that it's wise to bring home all the troops. We need to keep our bases manned. And it seems to me we're allowing ourselves to get flustered just a mite too soon. Some itty bitty monsters raid a chicken coop out in West Virginia and we start bringing home the troops. It don't seem scarcely right. And I'm not sure it was too smart, either, to tell the newsmen about these little monsters. We'll get the country all up tight."
"Senator," said Congressman Nelson Able, "I think you may have gotten your protocol somewhat twisted. We were not invited here to decide whether the troops were to be brought back home, but rather to learn that they were being brought back and to be told the reason for it."
"I still believe," said Senator Oakes, "that President Henderson would want to know our thoughts. He might not agree with them, but I think that he should hear them."
"That's right, Andy," said the President. "You know that through the years I have listened to you often and almost as often have been fascinated by what you had to say. Which is not to say I agreed with you. Most commonly I don't."
"I am well aware of that," said Oakes, "but it has not stopped me from saying what I think. And I think it's plain damn foolishness to fly back the troops. It's not going to take the total strength of our military might to run down some little chicken-killing monsters."
"I think the point has been made," said Senator Brian Dixon, "that the monsters will not stay little monsters. The only sensible way for us to tackle them is to run them down before there get to be any more of them and before they have a chance to grow."
"But how do we know," persisted Oakes, "that they will really grow or increase in numbers? We're taking the word of people who came scurrying back to us because they couldn't face them. And they couldn't face them because they had let down their guard. They had no military and they had no weapons…"
"Now just a minute, Senator," protested Congressman Able. "It's all right for you to make your military speeches up on the Hill. You get a good press there and can impress the public. But this is just among ourselves. We won't be impressed."
"Gentlemen," said the President, "as I see it, this is all beside the point. With all due deference to the Senator, the military will be brought back home. It will be brought home because the Secretary of Defense and the Chiefs of Staff have told me the forces are needed here. Among ourselves, we discussed it very thoroughly earlier in the day. The feeling was that we cannot take the chance of anything going wrong. We may be aiming at overkill, but that is better than negligence. It may be true that we have been given poor information by the people from the future, but I am not inclined to think so. They have faced the monsters for twenty years and it seems to me that they would know far more of them than we do. I have talked with members of the Academy of Sciences and they tell me, while the characteristics attributed to the monsters may be unusual, that these characteristics do not go contrary to any established biologic rule. So I don't think that you can say there has been any lack of responsibility in the reaching of our decisions. Because of the press of circumstances, we have moved faster than we ordinarily would, but we simply haven't got the time to go at any of this with due deliberation."
Oakes did not reply, but settled back in his chair, grunting softly to himself.
"There was a report of a monster loose in the Congo," said Congressman Wayne Smith. "Have you, sir, any further information?"
"None," said the President. "We can't be sure one did get through. The reports are unreliable."
"There has been no request for aid to hunt it down?"
"No request," said the President. "Nothing official at all."
"How about the tunnels, sir? The news reports seem to be in some conflict. Some of them, we know, have closed, but I can't seem to get a clear idea of what is going on."
"You probably know as much as we do here, Wayne. Here at home, the Virginia tunnel is closed, of course. Two more were closed without our intervention, one in Wisconsin, the other down in Texas. I suppose those were shut down by the people up in the future when the monsters were coming in too close, Either that or there were malfunctions. Otherwise than that, all the tunnels in the United States still are operating."