If it were meant to provoke him into argument, it failed. Amos considered it a completely hopeless philosophy, but it was better than none, probably. His own faith in the hereafter left something to be desired; he was sure of immortality and the existence of heaven and hell, but he had never been able to picture either to his own satisfaction.
The wagon had been swung around and was now being pulled up the street, back toward Clyde, Amos tried to take his mind off the physical discomforts of the ride by watching the houses, counting them to his own. They drew near it finally, but it was Doc who spotted the important fact. He groaned. “My car!”
Amos strained his eyes, staring into the shadows through the glare of the torches. Doc’s car stood at the side of the house, with its left front door open! Someone must have told Anne that he hadn’t left, and she’d forgotten her anger with him to swing back around the alien horde to save him!
He began a prayer that they might pass on without the car being noticed, and it seemed at first that they would. Then there was a sudden cry from the house, and he saw her face briefly at a front window. She must have seen Doc and himself lying on the wagon!
He opened his mouth to risk a warning, but it was too late. The door of the house swung back, and she was standing on the front steps, lifting Richard’s rifle to her shoulder. Amos’ heart seemed to hesitate with the tension of his body. The aliens still hadn’t noticed. If she’d only wait…
The rifle cracked. Either by luck or some skill he hadn’t suspected, one of the aliens dropped. She was running forward now, throwing another cartridge into the barrel. The gun barked again, and an alien fell to the ground, bleating horribly.
There was no attempt at torture this tune, at least. The leading alien finally jerked out a tubelike affair from a scabbard at his side and a single sharp explosion sounded. Anne jerked backward as the heavy slug hit her forehead, the rifle spinning from her dead hands.
The wounded alien was trying frantically to crawl away. Two of his fellows began working on him mercilessly, with as little feeling as if he had been a human. His body followed that of Anne toward the front of the wagon, just beyond Amos’ limited view.
She hadn’t seemed hysterical this time, Amos thought wearily. It had been her tendency to near hysteria that had led to his advising Richard to wait, not the difference in faith. Now he was sorry he’d had no chance to understand her better.
Doc sighed, and there was a peculiar pride under the thickness of his voice. “Man,” he said, “has one virtue which is impossible to any omnipotent force like your God. He can be brave. He can be brave beyond sanity for another man or for an idea. Amos, I pity your God if man ever makes war on Him!”
Amos flinched, but the blasphemy aroused only a shadow of his normal reaction. His mind seemed numbed. He lay back, watching black clouds scudding across the sky almost too rapidly. It looked unnatural, and he remembered how often the accounts had mentioned a tremendous storm that had wrecked or hampered the efforts of human troops. Maybe a counterattack had begun, and this was part of the alien defense. If they had some method of weather control, it was probable. The moonlight was already blotted out by the clouds.
Half a mile farther on, there was a shout from the aliens, and a big tractor chugged into view, badly driven by one of the aliens who had obviously only partly mastered the human machine. With a great deal of trial and error, it was backed into position and coupled to the wagon. Then it began churning along at nearly thirty miles an hour, while the big wagon bucked and bounced behind. From then on, the ride was a physical hell. Even Doc groaned at some of the bumps, though his bones had three times more padding than Amos could boast.
Mercifully, they slowed when they reached Clyde. Amos wiped the blood off his bitten lip and managed to wriggle to a position where most of the bruises were on his upper side. Beyond the town there was a flood of brilliant lights where the alien rockets stood, and he could see a group of strange machines driven by nonhuman creatures busy-unloading the great ships. But the drivers of the machines looked totally unlike the other aliens.
One of the alien trucks swung past them, and he had a clear view of the creature steering it. It bore no resemblance to humanity. There was a conelike torso, covered with a fine white down, ending in four thick stalks to serve as legs. From its broadest point, four sinuous limbs spread out to the truck controls. There was no head, but only eight small tentacles waving above it.
He saw a few others, always in control of machines, and no machines being handled by the green-skinned people, as they passed through the ghost city that had been Clyde. Apparently there were two races allied against humanity, which explained why such barbarians could come in space ships. The green ones must be sun-ply the fighters, while the downy cones were the technicians. From their behavior, though, the pilots of the planes must be recruited from the fighters.
Clyde had grown since he had been there, unlike most of the towns about. There was a new supermarket just down the street from Amos’ former church, and the tractor jolted to a stop in front of it. Aliens swarmed out and began carrying the dead loot from the wagon into big food lockers, while two others lifted Doc and Amos.
But they weren’t destined for the comparatively merciful death of freezing in the lockers. The aliens threw them into a little cell that had once apparently been a cashier’s cage, barred from floor to ceiling. It made a fairly efficient jail, and the lock that clicked shut as the door closed behind them was too heavy to be broken.
There was already one occupant—a medium-built young man whom Amos finally recognized as Smithton,-the Clyde dentist. His shoulders were shaking with sporadic sobs as he sat huddled in one corner. He looked at the two arrivals without seeing them. “But I surrendered,” he whispered to himself. “I’m a prisoner of war. They can’t do it. I surrendered…”
A fatter-than-usual alien, wearing the only clothes Amos had seen on any of them, came waddling up to the cage, staring in at them, and the dentist wailed off into silence. The alien drew up his robe about his chest and scratched his rump against a counter without taking his eyes off them. “Humans,” he said in a grating voice, but without an accent, “are peculiar. No standardization.”
“I’ll be damned!” Doc swore. “English!”
The alien studied them with what might have been surprise, lifting his ears. “Is the gift of tongues so unusual, then? Many of the priests of the Lord God Almighty speak all the human languages. It’s a common miracle, not like levitation.”
“Fine. Then maybe you’ll tell us what we’re being held for?” Doc suggested.
The priest shcugged. “Food, of course. The grethi eat any kind of meat—even our people—but we have to examine the laws to find whether you’re permitted. If you are, we’ll need freshly killed specimens to sample, so we’re waiting with you.”
“You mean you’re attacking us for food?”
The priest grunted harshly. “No! We’re on a holy mission to exterminate you. The Lord Almighty commanded us to go down to Earth where abominations existed and to leave no living creature under your sun.”
He turned and waddled out of the store, taking the single remaining torch with him, leaving only the dim light of the moon and reflections from farther away.
Amos dropped onto a stool inside the cage. “They had to lock us in a new building instead of one I know,” he said. “If it had been the church, we might have had a chance.”
“How?” Doc asked sharply.