Larry and Alice stood back from the grassy bank. His arm was around her waist and he felt the trembling of her body. “All those people,” she whispered. “All those people.”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he said. “They were just in the way. It wasn’t on purpose.”
“That won’t help the dead ones. And a few million people are going to be screaming for the bombers.”
The ports were down. The sun came out but it cast little illumination into the interior of the ship they could see most clearly.
There was a distant clattering. From the dark interior of the ships corroded snouts were pushed out into the sunshine. They were very obviously machines. They teetered at the top of the ramp, then with a clattering of treads, they rolled down the ramps, out onto the grass. They seemed to be made of the same substance as the ships. Though they had rounded backs like beetles, there was an odd familiarity about them. Five came from each ship nearest them, and he counted four that came from one of the far ships. From two ships nothing emerged.
When they began work Larry snapped his fingers and said, “Of course! Bulldozers.”
There was a thin slanted blade at the front of each one, with the dark mouth of a narrow hopper above the blade. Each machine was roughly the size of a freight car. They lumbered into loose formation with some outside the circle of ships, others inside the circle. The blades dropped and they began to scrape the uneven soil.
They were amazingly efficient in their clumsiness. Larry watched in fascination, Alice completely forgotten. The dirt peeled up the edge of the blade into the hopper. And disappeared. There was no residue, no smoke, no elimination of any sort.
One of them went directly at a high mound and, with no reduction in speed, ate its way completely through the mound. The top of the mound collapsed onto the rounded back, fell off in chunks. The next scraper ate up the chunks and, in a few minutes, the hill was no more.
He saw one of the scrapers heading toward where several bodies were silent, a few more trying desperately to crawl away. He gagged and turned his head as the flesh slid up the blade into oblivion.
It was efficient, and yet clumsy. He saw two of the scrapers meet on a converging track, nudge each other and go off at a crazy angle. One of them headed directly into the side of one of the big ships. The treads continued to revolve as it dug itself down into the ground.
When the hub of the vast wheel was level and clear, all of the ships moved toward the center and the scrapers worked on the area where the ships had been, on the rounded depressions where the mammoth weight of the ships had smashed the earth.
The scraper that had dug itself into the ground was overturned when the ship moved. It lay on its side, treads still turning, moving it around and around, much like a beetle trying to get back onto its legs.
Some few of the throng, mostly men, had drifted back. They watched from a very respectful distance.
As though on some signal, all of the scrapers except two turned back to the ships, crawled up the ramps and disappeared inside. After they were in, the treads on the overturned one stopped. One scraper was left outside the circle, standing silently. Larry saw the scar on its side and knew that it was the one which had had the collision.
“You want to go?” he asked Alice.
Her face was pale, her jaw set. “We stay,” she said.
He looked at the cleared area. The scrapers had missed patches here and there. Not many. Just a few. Where they had worked, the ground was scraped raw, scraped level.
Two military aircraft appeared over the trees, slowly circled the area, light observation planes.
Other machines came down the ramp. If the others had looked like beetles, these looked like tall spiders, with wheels at the end of each leg. From the small body of the spider tubes pointed downward at the ground. They lined up in loose formation and suddenly the tubes erupted with a blue-white glare, a roar of flame that rendered both Larry and Alice temporarily blind.
When they could see again, they found that it was impossible to look down at the area. The flames made an almost metallic roar. The sound lasted for a full half hour and, even with their backs turned to it, they felt the heat, saw the ghastly illumination on the leaves in front of them.
He thought of the possibility of radiation burns, and they went over the crest of the hill. When the sound was gone they returned.
The raw dirt had been transformed to a flat, silvery floor. It looked oddly like a lake of silver. The last of the spider things was disappearing into the nearest ship. Where the scrapers had done their job poorly, there were humps in the silver lake. The overturned scraper was half melted. A spider thing lay on its side beside the scraper. The other scraper stood, unharmed, outside the wide silver area. He saw that the ships had moved again to permit the place where they rested to be silvered over.
The area still radiated heat. The ships were silent. Larry said, “If they’re going to do more, they’re going to have to wait for it to dry.”
Alice glanced at the fading day. “We better find the car.”
A hundred yards down the road they met the military guard. “Restricted area,” he said flatly. “Get out and stay out.”
“What goes on?” Larry asked.
“The airforce is going to give those killers a taste of some two-ton bombs.”
“But they didn’t kill anybody on purpose,” Larry said.
The guard spat, tucked his thumb in his belt and leaned toward Larry. “Mister, are you with us or against us? There’s a lot of you crack-pot Martian lovers crawling out of the woodwork.”
Alice tugged at his arm. “Come on, Larry.”
“Do like the lady says, bud, or I’ll drop on you like the door on a space ship.”
Larry went down the road with her. It was dusk. They got in the car and turned on the radio.
“...martial law declared to cover those areas within the continental United States where the enemy ships have landed. Our observers report that the enemy ships are setting up defense areas, clearing the ground, paving it. It will be many days before the complete casualty figures are available, but the best estimates state that, in the sixty-three known places within our borders where the enemy has landed, average casualties were one hundred. Thus, nearly seven thousand have already died. This is the first time in the history of modern warfare that there have been civilian deaths within the borders of the United States. All attempts to communicate with the invader have failed. This Wednesday will go down in our history as the day when a great nation girded itself for a battle to the death against...”
Alice turned it off. “It’s beginning to sound like one of your yarns, Larry.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly.
“But did you get the impression I did? I mean about their efficiency?”
He frowned as he started the motor, backed the car out. “Yes. The people from space should be horribly efficient and deadly. Those gimmicks of theirs are effective enough, but they use them the way a child would play with a ten-ton truck. The whole picture seems to be sort of out of focus.”
“What do you think about the air force?”
“I think their.bombs will rattle off those hulls like peas off a plate glass window. I think they’ll have to break out the atomic bomb.”
“That would be an approved part of the plot, eh?”
He slowed the car, gave her an odd look and said, “Alice, this may sound silly, but would you please pinch me? Hard.”
She reached over and got a fold of flesh just above his knee between finger and thumb.
“Hey!” he yelled.
“Feel better?”
“I could still have been working too hard. Maybe when you’re in a mental institution and you imagine you get pinched, it hurts.”