"You're off limits, mister," the colonel had told him. "You are way off limits, in more ways than one. I don't know how you got this far. Didn't someone try to stop you?" "Sure, said Bentley, up the road a ways. A couple of soldier boys. But I pay no attention to them. I never pay attention to someone who tries to stop me. I got work to do and I can't fool around…"
And then the colonel had thrown him out of there. He had spoken in a clipped, military voice and had been very icy-eyed. "We've got trouble enough," he said, "without some damn fool photographer mucking around and screwing up the detail. If you don't leave under your own power, I'll have you escorted out". While he was saying this, Bentley snapped a camera up and took a picture of him. That made the situation even worse, and Bentley, with his usual quick perception, could see his cause had worsened, so had beat a dignified retreat to avoid escort. When he had passed the soldier boys who had tried to stop him they had yelled at him and thumbed their noses. Bentley had slowed down momentarily, debating whether to go back and reason with them, then had thought better of it. They ain't worth the time, he told himself.
Now the dog.
The dog came bursting out of high weeds and brush that grew along the road. His ears were laid back, his tail tucked in and he was kiyodeling in pure, blind panic. The dog was close and the car traveling much too fast. Bentley jerked the wheel, the car veered off the road, smashed through a clump of brush. The tires screamed as Bentley hit the brakes. The nose of the car slammed hard into a huge walnut tree and stopped with a shuddering impact. The left-hand door flew open and Bentley, who held a lofty disdain for such copouts as seat belts, was thrown free. The camera which he wore on a strap around his neck, described a short arc and brought up against his ear, dealing him a blow that made his head ring as if there were a bell inside it. He landed on his back and rolled, wound up on hands and knees. He surged erect and found that he had ended up on the edge of the road.
Standing in the middle of the road was a monster. Bentley knew it was a monster; he had seen two of them only yesterday. But this one was small, no bigger than a Shetland pony. Which did not mean the horror of it was any less.
But Bentley was of different fiber from other men. He did not gulp; his gut did not turn over. His hands came up with swift precision, grabbed the camera firmly, brought it to his eye. The monster was framed in the finder and his finger pressed the button. The camera clicked and as it clicked the monster disappeared.
Bentley lowered the camera and let loose of it. His head still rang from the blow upon the ear. His clothes were torn; a gaping rent in a trouser leg revealed one knobby knee. His right hand was bloody from where his palm had scraped across some gravel. Behind him the car creaked slightly as twisted metal settled slowly into place. The motor pinged and sizzled as water from the broken radiator ran across hot metal.
Off in the distance the still-running dog was yipping frantically. In a tree up the hillside an excited squirrel chattered with machine-gun intensity. The road was empty. A monster had been there. From where he stood, Bentley could see its tracks printed in the dust. But it was no longer there.
Bentley limped out into the road, stared both up and down it. There was nothing on the road.
It was there, said Bentley stubbornly to himself. I had it in the finder. It was there when I shot the picture. It wasn't until the shutter clicked that it disappeared. Doubt assailed him. Had it been there or not when he'd shot the picture? Was it on the film? Had he been robbed of a photo by its disappearance?
Thinking about it, it seemed that it had been there, but he could not be sure.
He turned about and started limping down the road as rapidly as he could. There was one way to find out. He had to get to a phone, he had to somehow get a car. He must get back to Washington.
44
"We have made three contacts with the monsters," Sandburg said. "There are yet to be results. No one has had a chance to fire at them. They disappear and that's the end of it."
"You mean," said Thorton Williams, "that they duck away…"
"No, I don't mean that," said the Secretary of Defense. "They just aren't there, is all. The men who saw them swore they didn't move at all. They were there and then they weren't. The observers, all reporting independently, not knowing of the other reports, have been very sure of that. One man could be wrong in his observation; it's possible that two could be. It seems impossible that three observers could err on exactly the same point."
"Have you, has the military, any theory, any idea of what is going on?"
"None," said Sandburg. "It must be a new defensive adaptation that they have developed. These creatures, as you all by now must understand, are very much on the defensive. They know they have to survive. For the good of the species, they can't take any chances. Cornered, I suppose that they would fight, but only if they were cornered and there was no way out. Apparently they have come up with something new under this sort of situation. We have talked with Dr. Isaac Wolfe, the refugee biologist who probably knows more about the monsters than any other man, and this business of disappearing is something he has never heard of. He suggests, simply as a guess, that it may be an ability that only the juvenile monsters have. A sort of juvenile defense mechanism. It may have gone on unobserved up in the future because the people up there had little opportunity to observe the juveniles; they had their hands full fighting off the adult monsters."
"How are you doing with getting men into the area?" asked the President.
"I haven't any figures," said Sandburg, "but we're piling them in as fast as we can get them there. The refugee camps have formed their own caretaking committees and that takes off some of the pressure, frees some troops. Agriculture and Welfare are taking over a lot of the transport that is needed to get food and other necessities into the camps and that, as well, has freed military personnel. We expect the first overseas transport planes to begin landing sometime tonight and that will give us more men."
"Morozov was in this morning," said Williams, "with an offer to supply us men. In fact, he rather insisted upon it. We, of course, rejected the offer. But it does raise a point. Should we, perhaps, ask for some assistance from Canada, perhaps Mexico, maybe Britain, France, Germany — others of our friends?"
"Possibly we could use some of their forces," said Sandburg. "I'd like to talk with the Chiefs of Staff and get their reactions. What we need, and haven't been able to manage, are some rather substantial forces, both north and south — down in Georgia, say, and in upstate New York. We should try to seal off the monsters' spread, if they are spreading, and I suppose that is their intention. If we can contain them, we can handle them."
"If they stand still," said the President.
"That is right," said Sandburg. "If they stand still."
"Maybe we should move on to something else," suggested the President. "Reilly, I think you have something to report."
"I'm still not too solid on it yet," said Reilly Douglas, "but it is a matter that should be discussed. Frankly, I am inclined to think there may be a rather tricky legal question involved and I've had no chance to go into that aspect of it. Clinton Chapman came to see me last night. I think most of you know Clint."