"It saw you, Sergeant," said the colonel.
"I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I didn't move. I moved the launcher barrel a couple of inches. That was all."
"One of your men, then."
"Sir, all those men I trained myself. No one sees them, no one hears them."
"It saw something. Or heard something. It sensed some danger and then it disappeared. You're sure about this disappearance, Sergeant?"
"Colonel, I am sure."
Dawson was sitting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it, reducing the twig to bits of wood. Clark stayed squatting to one side, using the launcher, its butt resting on the ground, as a partial support to his squatting pose.
"Sergeant," Dawson said, "I don't know what the hell we're going to do about all this. I don't know what the army's going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We've got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they'd line up and we'd line up and they came at us, we could clobber them. We have more and better armaments than the people of future had and we can do the job. But not when they're trying to keep clear of us, not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get, maybe, one of them. God knows how much else we'd kill, including people. We haven't the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We got to hunt these monsters down, one by one…"
"But even when we hunt them down, sir…"
"Yes, I know. But say that you are lucky. Say you bag one now and then. There still will be hundreds of them hatching and in a week or so, a month or so, thousands of them hatching. And the first ones growing bigger and meaner all the time. And while we hunt for them, they wipe out a town or two, an army camp or two…"
"Sir," said Sergeant Clark, "it is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy."
The colonel got up from the log. "There hasn't nothing beat us yet," he said. "Nothing has ever beat us all the way. It won't this time. But we have to find out how to do it. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use to you until you can find something to aim the firepower and the sophistication at and it stays put until you pull the trigger."
The sergeant got to his feet, tucked the launcher underneath his arm. "Well, back to work," he said.
"Have you seen a photographer around here?"
"A photographer?" said the sergeant. "What photographer? I ain't seen no photographer."
"He said his name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him."
"If I happen onto him," said the sergeant, "I'll tie a knot into his tail."
42
The Reverend Jake Billings was in conference with Ray MacDonald, formerly his assistant public relations manager, who had been appointed, within the last twelve hours, to the post of crusade operations chief.
"I really do not think, Ray," said the Reverend Billings, "that this business of crucifixion will advance our cause. It strikes me as being rather crude and it could backlash against us. As witness what one paper had to say of the attempt at Washington…"
"You mean someone has already gotten around to editorializing on it? I had not expected such prompt reaction."
"The reaction is not good," said the Reverend Billings, with some unaccustomed heat. "The editorial called it a cheap trick and a pantywaisted effort. The young man's arms, it turns out, were fastened to the crossbar with thongs — not nails, but thongs. The entire editorial, of course, is in a somewhat facetious vein, but nevertheless…"
"But they are wrong," MacDonald said.
"You mean that you used nails!"
"No, that's not what I mean. I mean that thongs were the way that it was done. The Romans ordinarily did not use nails…"
"You are trying to tell me that the Gospels erred?"
"No, I'm not trying to tell you that. What I am saying is that ordinarily — ordinarily, mind you, perhaps not always — the arms were tied, not nailed. We did some research on it and…"
"Your research is no concern of mine," said Billings icily.
"What I do care about is that you gave some smart-assed editorial writer the chance to poke fun at us. And even if that had not happened, I think the whole idea stinks. You didn't check with me. How come you didn't check with me?"
"You were busy, Jake. You told me to do my best. You told me I was the man who could come up with ideas and I did come up with ideas."
"I had this call from Steve Wilson," Billings said. "He chewed me out. There is no doubt that official Washington — the White House, at least — is solidly against us. When he gets around to it, Wilson will brand us as sensationalists. He brushed us off contemptuously in his press briefing this afternoon. That was before this silly crucifixion business. Next, time around, he'll blast us out of the water."
"But we have a lot of people with us. You go out to the countryside, to the little towns…"
"Yes, I know. The rednecks. They'll be for us, sure, but how long do you think it is before redneck opinion can have any significant impact? What about the influential pastors in the big city churches? Can you imagine what the Reverend Dr. Angus Windsor will tell his congregation and the newspapers and the world? He's the one who started all of this, but he'll not go along with solemn young men packing crosses through the street and getting crucified on a public square. For years I have tried to conduct my ministry with dignity and now it's been pulled down to the level of street brawling. I have you to thank for this and…"
"It's not too different," protested MacDonald, "from the stunts we've used before. Good old circus stuff. Good old show biz. It's what you built the business on."
"But with restraint."
"Not too much restraint. Skywriting and parades and miles of billboards…"
"Legitimate advertising," said Billings. "Honest advertising. A great American tradition. The mistake you made was to go out in the streets. You don't know about the streets. You ran up against the experts there. These Miocene kids know about the streets. They have been there, they have lived there. You had two strikes on you before you started out. What made you think you could compete with them?"
"All right, then, what shall we do? The streets are out, you say. So we pull off the streets. Then what do we do? How do we get attention?"
The Reverend Jake Billings stared at the wall with glassy eyes. "I don't know," he said. "I purely do not know. I don't think it makes much difference what we do. I think that gurgling noise you hear is our crusade going down the drain."
43
It was the dog that did it. Bentley Price hadn't had a drink all day. The road was a narrow, winding mountain road, and Bentley, exasperated beyond endurance at what had happened to him, was driving faster than he should. After hours of hunting for it, he had finally found the camp — a very temporary camp by the looks of it, with none of the meticulous neatness of the usual army camp, simply a stopping place in a dense patch of woods beside a stream that came brawling down the valley. Filled with a deep sense of duty done and perseverance paying off, he had slung cameras around his neck and gone plodding toward the largest of the tents and had almost reached it when the colonel had come out to stop his further progress. "Who the hell are you," the colonel had asked, "and where do you think you're going?" "I am the Global News," Bentley had told him, "and I am out here to take some pictures of this monster hunt. I tell the city editor it isn't worth the time, but he disagrees with me and it's no skin off my nose no matter where I'm sent, so leave us get the lead out and do some monster hunting so I can get some pictures."