Norton came out of the chair. "What's the matter, George? What's going on?"
The barber did not answer. The door slammed behind him.
Norton wrenched the door open, stepped out on the sidewalk. The barber was running down the street. The attendant from the gas station came running toward him.
"Over there, George," the attendant yelled, pointing to a vacant lot. "It came down near the river."
George plunged across the vacant lot. Norton and the attendant followed him. Kermit Jones, the banker, pelted along behind them, puffing and panting.
Norton came out of the vacant lot onto a low gravel ridge that lay above the river. Lying across the river at the bridge, covering the bridge, was a great black box—a huge contraption, its length great enough to span the river, one end of it resting on the opposite bank, its rear end on the near bank. It was not quite as broad as it was long and it stood high into the air above the river. At first appearance, it was simply an oblong construction, with no distinguishing features one could see—a box painted the blackest black he had ever seen.
Ahead of him the barber had stopped, was raising the rifle to his shoulder.
"No, George, no!" Norton shouted. "Don't do it!"
The rifle cracked and almost at the instant of its cracking a bolt of brilliant light flashed back from the box that lay across the river. The barber flared for an instant as the bolt of brilliance struck him, then the light was gone and the man, for the moment, stood stark upright, blackened into a grotesque stump of a man, the blackness smoking. The gun in his hands turned cherry red and bent, the barrel dropping like a length of wet spaghetti. Then George, the barber, crumpled to the ground and lay there in a run-together mass that had no resemblance to a man, the black, huddled mass still smoking, little tendrils of foul-smelling smoke streaming out above it.
2. LONE PINE
The water boiled beneath Jerry Conklin's fly. Conklin twitched the rod, but there was nothing there. The trout—and from the size of the boil, it must have been a big one—had sheered off at the last instant of its strike.
Conklin sucked in his breath. The big ones were there, he told himself. The attendant at the station had been right; there were big rainbow lurking in the pool.
The sun was shining brightly through the trees that grew along the river. The dappled water danced with little glints of sunlight shining off the tiny waves on the surface of the pool, set in motion by the rapids that came down the ledges of broken rock just upstream.
Carefully, Conklin retrieved his fly, lifted the rod to cast again, aiming at a spot just beyond where he had missed the strike.
In mid-cast, the sun went out. A sudden shadow engulfed the pool, as if some object had interposed itself between the sun and pool.
Instinctively, Conklin ducked. Something struck the upraised fly rod and he felt the tremor of it transmitted to his hand, heard the sickening splinter of bamboo. My God, he thought, an eighty-dollar rod, the first and only extravagance he had allowed himself.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the square of blackness coming down upon him. The blackness struck the bank behind him and he heard, as if from far off, the crunch of tortured metal as it came down upon his ear.
He tried to turn toward the bank and stumbled, going to his knees. He shipped water in his waders. He dropped the rod. Then, without knowing how he did it, not even intending to do it, he was running down the stream along the edge of the pool, slipping and sliding as his feet came down on the small, water-polished stones, at the pool's edge, the shipped water sloshing in his waders.
The far end of the square of blackness, tipping forward, came down on the far river bank. Timbers squealed and howled and there was the rasping of drawn nails and bolts as the bridge came apart. Looking back, he saw timbers and planks floating in the pool.
He had no wonder of what had happened. In the confused turmoil of his mind, in his mad, instinctive rush to get away, there was no room for wonder. It was not until he reached sunlight again that he realized he was safe. The high banks of the river had protected him from harm. The blackness lay across the river, resting on the banks, not blocking the stream.
The pool ended and he strode out into the shallow stretch of fast-running water below it. Glancing up, he saw for the first time the true dimensions of the structure that had fallen. It towered far above him, like a building. Forty feet, he thought—maybe fifty feet—up into the air, more than four times that long.
From some distance off he heard a vicious, flat crack that sounded like a rifle going off and in the same instance a single spot in that great mass of blackness flashed with a blinding brilliance, then winked out.
My God, he thought, the rod busted, the car smashed, and I am stranded here—and Kathy! I better get out of here and phone her.
He turned about and started to scramble up the steep river bank. It was hard going. He was hampered by his waders, but he couldn't take them off, for his shoes were in the ear and the car now lay, squashed flat more than likely, beneath the massive thing that had fallen on the bridge.
With a swishing sound, something lashed out of nowhere and went around his chest—a thin, flexible something like a piece of wire or rope. He lifted his hands in panic to snatch at it, but before his hands could reach it, he was jerked upward. In a blurred instant, he saw the swiftly flowing water of the river under him, the long extent of greenery that lined the river's banks. He opened his mouth to yell, but the constriction of the wire or rope or whatever it might be had driven much of the air out of his lungs and he had no breath to yell.
Then he was in darkness and whatever it was that had jerked him there was gone from about his chest. He was on his hands and knees. The platform on which he found himself was solid—solid, but not hard, as if he had come to rest on top of thick, yielding carpeting.
He stayed on his hands and knees, crouching, trying to fight off the engulfing terror. The bitter taste of gall surged into his mouth and he forced it back. His gut had entwined itself into a hard, round ball and he consciously fought to relax the hardness and the tightness.