"I think I will," said Clark.
16. LONE PINE
Stuffy Grant shuffled into the Pine Cafe, hoisted himself onto one of the stools at the counter. At the sound of the slamming front door, Sally came out of the back.
"You working in the morning?" asked Stuffy. "I thought Judy worked in the mornings."
"Judy has a cold," said Sally, "so I'm filling in for her."
The place was empty except for the two of them. "Where's everyone?" asked Stuffy. "With all the people who are in town.
"They sleep late," said Sally. "Those who are here. A lot of them are staying in Bemidji, driving here and back. There's no room for them here."
"Those two folks from the Tribune are here," said Stiffy. "The camera fellow and that girl writer."
"They got here early when there was still room at the motel."
"They're all right," said Stuffy. "Real white folks. That girl gave me five dollars for just answering a phone and then hanging on so no one else could get the line. Yesterday, the camera fellow slipped me a bottle for keeping watch of what was going on across the river so he could grab some sleep. Was supposed to run and wake him if anything happened. But nothing did. Good liquor, too. None of your cheap stuff."
"Most of the folks are nice," said Sally. "They tip good. Most folks around here don't tip at all."
"They ain't learning much, though," said Stuffy. "There don't seem much to learn from that thing out there. The men from Washington are working real hard at it and not coming up with much. I talked with one of them the other day. He'd been pawing through some of the rubbish the thing is throwing out, what's left after it makes those bales of white stuff. He was all excited about what he was finding but it didn't sound like much to me. He said he wasn't finding any pine seeds, or almost none. The cones had been broken up and the seeds were gone. He said that was unnatural. He seemed to think the thing was collecting the seeds and saving them. I told him maybe the thing was eating them; squirrels and such eat them. But he shook his head. He didn't seem to think so."
"What can I get you, Stiffy?"
"I guess some cakes."
"Sausage or bacon?"
"Naw, you charge too much for them. I can't afford it. Just the cakes. And plenty of syrup. I like lots of syrup."
"The syrup is there in the pitcher. You can use as much as you want."
"All right. Plenty of butter, then. A little extra butter. But don't charge me for it."
Sally went back into the kitchen to give the cook the order, then came back.
"How far has the visitor cut into the woods?" she asked. "I haven't seen it for a while."
"More than a mile, I'd say. It moves right along, day and night. Spitting out those bales of white stuff every few minutes. Leaving a long trail of them behind it. I wonder why it's doing that. It don't make no sense to me. Nothing about it makes any sense to me."
"There must be a reason for it."
"Maybe there is, but I don't see it. I wonder, too, why it picked us out."
"It had to be some place. It just happened to be us. If it was trees it was looking for, it picked a good place."
"I imagine," said Stiffy, "them forestry people ain't too entranced with it. They set a lot of store by them trees. I don't see why. They're just trees, like any other trees."
"It's a primitive wilderness area," said Sally.
"Yeah, I know," said Stiffy. "A lot of foolishness."
17. LONE PINE
The visitor had gotten lumpy. It had bumps all over it, but it kept on chopping down the trees and masticating them, or at least ingesting them, and at regular intervals the rear section of it slid up, ejecting bales of cellulose and great gobbets of waste from the chewed-up trees.
"We don't know what is going on," one of the two troopers told Kathy. "Maybe some of the people from Washington do, although I'm inclined to doubt it. In any case, they're not talking, so we don't know if they do or not. The lumps on the visitor were there this morning when it got light enough to see. They must have started in the night and they've been growing ever since. They are a lot bigger than they were when I first saw them."
"Any reason why I can't get closer?" asked Kathy. "Some of the other newsmen are.
"Just watch yourself," said the trooper. "Don't get too close. We don't want people getting hurt.~~
"The visitor has made no move to harm anyone," she said. "We've been practically living with it ever since it landed and it doesn't even notice us."
"You can never tell," the trooper said. "If I were you, I wouldn't push my luck. It killed a man, remember?"
"But he shot at it."
"Even so, I don't trust it. Not entirely, that is. This ain't one of us."
Kathy and the troopers stood midway between the visitor and the river, now spanned by the temporary structure laid down by the army engineers. Behind them and in front of them the wide swath cut through the forest by the visitor was littered with white bales and clumps of tree debris. Both the bales and the debris were regularly spaced, laid out very neatly.
"The other troopers," said the trooper, "are holding the sightseers the other side of the river. We're only letting in the official people and the press. You people know you're here on your own responsibility. That's been explained to you."
"Yes, of course, it has."
"I don't see," said the trooper, "how all these sightseers got here. There seems to be a couple hundred of them. We have all the roads blocked. But they just seep through, sort of."
"They park their cars short of the road blocks," Kathy said, "and walk in through the woods. It would take a picket line to keep them out."
"I suppose so," said the trooper. "They can be a nuisance."
"Here come Frank Norton and Chet, my photographer," said Kathy. "As soon as they reach here, we'll be going in."
The trooper shrugged. "Take it easy, now," he said. "Something's about to happen and I don't like it. I can feel it in the air.
Kathy waited for Norton and Chet to come up and the three of them walked up the swath.
Kathy asked Chet, "Did Jerry get on the plane all right?" Chet nodded. "We just made it. Only minutes to spare. I gave him the film. He said he'd deliver it. Meant to ask you—how come he showed up here? I seem to remember he turned up missing and you were hunting him."
"His car broke down and he walked into Lone Pine, looking for a phone. We ran into one another. It was a surprise to the both of us. Neither of us knew the other one was here."
"Seems to be a nice guy."
"Yes, he is."
"Not very talkative, though. Didn't have much to say."
"He never does," said Kathy.
They walked up on a group of newsmen clustered to one side of the visitor.
"Did you talk to Johnny this morning?" Kathy asked. "Yeah, I did. Checking on the film. He said someone delivered it, in plenty of time for the first edition, to the photo lab."
"He didn't say anything about sending someone up to replace me?"
"Not a word. Did you expect he would?"
"Well, I don't know," said Kathy. "There are others he might think would do a better job. Jay, for instance. He only pointed the finger at me because there was almost no one else in the newsroom at the time."
"I don't think you need to worry any. Johnny is a fair man. As long as you do the job, he will leave you here."
"If he tried to send someone else," said Kathy, "I'd yell like hell. This is my story, Chet, and I mean to keep it that way."