"Buck DeWeese, Flin Flon. Mr. Solo?"
"Right here."
"Can you spare me a minute? Gene Coulson—the kid you sent up—is working out fine. We've got the corner of something very big here, I think. Have you seen the film we sent down?"
Film? He remembered the spool on his desk and glanced over to it, untouched. "Ah, not yet. But it is here." He wheeled his chair over to where he could reach it, and stretched to drop it into a slot in the side of the desk.
"Take a look at it and call me back. We've got a lot of stuff for your technical boys to chew on—footage of claw marks in the steel plates at the radar station, a duplicate of the film of the radar scope that tracked the thing, and a little bit of very shaky and underexposed Super-8 a woman shot of it. Now, I don't claim to know what it is yet—but I've lived around here for quite a while and I know a lot of things it isn't. It isn't a shadow, and it isn't a cloud, and it isn't dust and it isn't a lens reflection, a large bear or swamp gas. As for what it is, it's big, it's fast, it's mean and it kills people and tears buildings to pieces without working up a sweat. And it's real."
About halfway through this speech the rear-projection screen in his desktop flickered and an unsteady image appeared. The automatic circuitry functioned and the picture steadied. By the time DeWeese paused, Napoleon could see the marks that had been described. They were great vaguely triangular gouges in the heavy metal which gaped shattered and torn as though a berserker had gone over them with a huge, hooked, pointed sledgehammer.
"I, ah, have your film up at the moment," he said slowly. "I see what you mean about the claw marks."
"The substance is half-inch armor plate; I don't think we remembered to include a scale—the first big gash is nineteen inches long by three inches wide at the widest."
Solo didn't say anything. For the moment there didn't seem to be any appropriate comment.
The picture jumped slightly and became a fuzzy gray pattern which drifted from side to side almost imperceptibly. "Mr. DeWeese—the second part is the radar display?"
"Right. It's a real-time record; the thing appears about ten seconds in—that'll give you a chance to see a normal readout. It runs about eight minutes. Shall I hang on?"
"You may as well." The fuzzy gray pattern oscillated slowly from right to left, and a blob of light began to form at about seven o'clock, moving horizontally. And a chime sounded three times behind him.
Quickly he muted DeWeese's audio and, keeping one eye on the screen, answered the call. The voice was tense and urgent.
"Come in, New York—New York Headquarters come in please!"
"Solo here."
"Hong Kong. There's another riot, and this place is under heavy attack. I think there's a couple mortars out there—can you hear 'em?"
"We'll get you support inside four hours, Hong Kong. Nobody's available in force nearer than Osaka. Hold on!" He tapped a quick code and an illuminated map faded in on the wall. "I can authorize our team in Taiwan to help you out. They'll be there inside two hours." With one corner of his mind he observed that the blob of light had begun to move upward on the screen and seemed to be growing a little larger.
"We can hold out in here as long as the walls hold, sir," Hong Kong was saying. "Tell your Formosan boys to drop us a few hundred sandbags when they come over."
"Right. And two field arsenals are hereby authorized too."
"Thanks loads. I'll do something for you sometime." Napoleon let the map fade and said, "Monitor?" "Trust me, sir," said the familiar cool voice. He made a note to find out who it belonged to and seduce her when all this was over.
He opened the voice circuit on Channel D again and sank back to watch the radar trace and catch his breath. Suddenly he wondered if the embattled Hong Kong office had remembered to secure the sewer entrances. They would have, since he'd used them himself two or three times for business purposes.
The glow had stopped a little way below the center. "What scale is the radar trace on?" he asked aloud.
"One hundred," said DeWeese without a pause. "Each bend is twenty miles."
"Then the thing stopped about twenty-five miles south by slightly east of the station."
"That's right."
(And what in the name of Melville was a whaling factory ship doing in Equatorial Pacific waters in the middle of November? And what was going on in the harem in Swat?)
On the screen the image moved slightly downward again, going back towards the direction from which it had appeared, and then, somehow, began to fade. It shrank slightly, began to dissipate around the edges, and then brightened to a sharp intense point of light which flared and vanished.
Napoleon must have made some sound of reaction, because Buck commented, "Personally, I felt the last little bit was the most interesting."
"Mmmm. Next is the home-movie film?"
"Yes. I clipped in some leader. There's a scratch mark to warn you where it starts because the thing's only on about the first fifty frames or so, and it's clearest on the first."
The scratch flickered and Napoleon squinted. Every thing was a greenish-black with lighter areas in it, the corner of a house in the foreground—and a rearing hump of a figure dark against the stripes of reddish orange that must mark a sunset. The image tilted and blurred, then recomposed as the thing moved ponderously behind the edge of the stand of trees near the house. But it was already clearly beyond the end of a farther line of trees, at least two miles away. And it rose up above the sunset at that distance. He tapped the reverse button and brightened the light. A little more detail showed.
He stopped it on the first frame.
"I'll pass this on to our technical division," he said. "Do you have anything beyond the odd manner of its disappearance on radar to make you think it's not a real monster or other natural phenomenon?"
"Oh it's real, all right—but there's something else behind it. I don't want to go into the reasons I think so, but I'm betting on it."
"Very well, Mr. DeWeese. And we're betting on you."
He tapped another key and called Simpson in Section Eight. "We have something for you to study and try to explain concerning that strange thing in Manitoba."
"Oh yes—the Flin Flon Monster."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You should follow the popular press. One of the wire services picked up the story and fastened on the name of the town. It's now a minor national catch-phrase, more or less illustrating my old maxim: When you want to test a new monster, do it near a place with a funny name and no one will dare to take the stories seriously."
"I see. No wonder Mr. DeWeese was so defensive." Channel D chirruped again. "Anyway, I have some film for you. I'll send it down with a note of explanation." He shifted his weight in the chair, touched a switch and continued, "Solo here."
"Good morning, Mr. Solo," said a cheery voice. "Tuber, in Denver."
"Ah, yes. Have you succeeded in keeping the Brass polished and happy?"
"More than that—we're after one who is probably a plant. What I need you to find out for me..."
Napoleon closed his eyes for a moment and massaged them with thumb and forefinger. No wonder Waverly looked so old. Suddenly he wondered if the detachments from Formosa and Osaka had taken off yet—they should have the pacifying gas as part of the standard kit, but it hadn't gotten to all the offices yet. Was the plan to steal the gold from France's reserve only a robbery or something political as well? And did he sense the hand of the British ex-officer and gentleman, Johnnie Rainbow, behind it? And what did it have to do with gold smuggling in Alaska? And what was Askandi doing in a helicopter when he'd been sent a jet and couldn't fly a copter? Then he remembered Mr. Whicker and the budget summary and looked around. There was no sign of him in the office; he must have left again. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. And oh Lord, he thought as he passed Jack Tuber's call through to the top security files and disconnected, when will I have a minute for lunch?