Our Children's Children (10 page)

“Mr. Manning,” said someone at his elbow.

Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there.

“Mr. Price's pictures,” said the copy boy, handing them to him.

Manning looked at the one on top and drew his breath in sharply. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said to himself aloud, “will you look at that!”

It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was springing, perhaps toward the gun crew, probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley's super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity—the bared mouthful of fangs, the talons gleaming in the fur of one uplifted paw, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. Its eyes shone wickedly and a thick ruff of fur around its neck stood up on end. The very shape of it was evil. It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up one's spine—not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning, mindless fear.

Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand, he fanned them out as one would fan a hand of playing cards. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead monster crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies.

“That goddamned Price,” said Manning soulfully. “He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew.”

23

“We can't cancel your TV appearance,” Wilson told the President. “It's bad enough right now. It will be worse if we cancel your appearance. We can fix it, a paragraph or two at the start of it. Say that the Virginia incident is too recent to make much comment upon it. Assurance that it will be run down, that it will be found and killed. That we're already closing in on it.…”

“But we aren't,” said the President. “We don't know where the hell it is. There's been no report of it. You remember what Gale said—how fast they could move. Traveling in the dark, this thing could be deep into the mountains of West Virginia and well hidden out before it's daylight.”

“There's more reason right now than there ever was,” said Frank Howard, who had been working on the speech text with Reynolds, “for you to talk to the people. The country, the entire country, will be in an uproar and we'll have to tame them down.”

“You know, Frank,” said the President, “I don't seem to care right now to tame the country down. Can't you get it through your head that this is not a political matter? It's far more than that. I can't be sure just how much danger the country may be facing, but I know that there is danger. I've asked Gale to step down here and tell us what he thinks. He knows more of it than we do.”

“What you refuse to understand, sir,” said Wilson, “is that the country's waiting to hear from you. They would like some sort of assurance, but if you can't give them that, you can let them know that we are on the job. Seeing and hearing you, in itself, will be visible proof that everything has not entirely gone to pot. They need some physical evidence that the government is aware of what is going on.…”

The box on the President's desk purred. “Yes?” said the President.

“A call for Mr. Wilson, sir, an urgent call. Can he take it there?”

The President lifted the receiver and handed to Wilson.

“This is Henry,” said Hunt's voice. “Sorry for breaking in, but I thought that you should know. One of the other tunnels failed out in Wisconsin. It just came in on AP.”

“Failed, you say. Not like Virginia. Nothing came through?”

“Apparently. The message said it failed. Blinked out. Wasn't there anymore.”

“Thank you, Henry. Thanks for telling me.”

He said to the President, “Another tunnel is out. Cut off. Disappeared. I suppose the people did it at the other end. Gale told us, you remember, they had men on guard who were prepared to collapse the tunnels if anything went wrong.”

“I do recall,” said the President. “The invaders must be getting at them. I don't like to think about it. It must take a lot of courage to do a thing like that. The ones at the other end of the Virginia tunnel apparently didn't have the chance to do it.”

“About the speech, sir,” said Reynolds. “The time is getting short.”

“All right. I suppose I have to. Do the best you can. But don't say anything about having it tracked down and cornered.”

“You'll have to tell them what it is,” said Wilson. “There has to be an explanation of what the monster is. We'll have to tell the people it's monsters such as this the tunnel folks are fleeing.”

“There'll be a scream to shut down the tunnels,” Reynolds said.

“Let them scream,” said the President. “We don't know of any way of shutting them except firing into them. And, without reason, we can't fire into crowds of refugees—our own refugees.”

“In a short while,” said Howard, “there may be no need. One tunnel has shut down of itself. There will be others of them. In a few hours, maybe, all of them.”

“I hope not,” said the President. “No matter what else happens, no matter what problems they may bring us, I can't help but hope all the people do get through.”

Kim stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Gale is here, sir.”

“OK. Send him in.”

Gale came into the room. He half-stumbled as he walked across the room, then stiffened and marched up to within a few feet of the desk. His face was haggard.

“I am so sorry, sir,” he said. “I can't properly express the regrets of myself or of my people. We thought we had taken safeguards.”

“Please sit down, Mr. Gale,” said the President. “You can help us now. We need your help.”

Gale sat carefully in the chair. “You mean about the alien. You want to know more about it. I could have told you more this afternoon, but there was so much to tell and I never thought.…”

“I'll accept your word for that. You did make provisions to guard against what happened. Perhaps you did the best you could. Now we need your help to find this creature. We need to know something about its habits, what we can expect. We have to hunt it down.”

“Luckily,” said Reynolds, “there is only one of them. When we get it.…”

“It is unfortunately,” said Gale, “not as lucky as you think. The aliens are bisexual creatures.…”

“You mean.…”

“That's exactly what I mean,” said Gale. “The young are hatched from eggs. Any of the adults can lay fertilized eggs. And lay them in great numbers. Once hatched, the young need no care, or at least are given no care and.…”

“Then,” said the President, “we must find it before it starts laying eggs.”

“That is right,” said Gale, “although I fear you may be too late already. From what we know of them, I would suspect that the creature would start laying eggs within a few hours after its emergence from the tunnel. It would recognize the crisis. You must, first of all, disabuse yourself of any thoughts you may have suggesting that the aliens are no more than monsters. They are a great deal more than that. They are highly intelligent. Their mental and physical processes are geared to a ritualistic violence—at least we think it's ritualistic—but that doesn't mean they're stupid. This creature knows that it's the sole representative of its species in this particular time, and it will realize, as well, that it may remain the only one, that the future of the species in this time bracket may rely upon it alone. This will not be an intellectual realization only, but I would suspect, from what I know of them, that its body will realize and respond to the situation as well and that all its physical resources will be aimed at producing eggs, as many eggs as it can manage. Furthermore, realizing that eventually it will be hunted down and slain and that the nests of eggs will be hunted as well, it will scatter its clutches of eggs over as much territory as it can. It will seek out desolate and uninhabited spots on which to make its nests, it will hide them carefully, it will locate them in the least accessible spots. It is fighting, you understand, not only for itself, but for the species. Perhaps not at all for itself, but only for the species.”

The other four in the office sat in stricken silence. Finally the President stirred uneasily and spoke. “You give us no chance, then, of finding it before it has laid its eggs.”

“I would think there is no chance at all,” said Gale. “It probably already has laid some of them. It will continue laying them. I suppose I should give you some hope, if for no other reason than to lighten my own guilt, the guilt of my people. But it would be unfair to tell you less than truth. I am very sorry, sir.”

“I would suspect,” said the President, “that it might be heading for the mountains. But that supposition is based only on my knowledge there are mountains to the west.”

“It would know as well,” said Gale. “It has as good a geographical knowledge of this area as any of us here. The geography is the same five hundred years into the future as it is today.”

“Then,” said the President, “assuming that it would have headed for the mountains, we must not only head it off, but we will have to give some thought to evacuating the people from that area as well.”

“You're thinking nuclear,” said Wilson. “Blanketing the area with bombs. You can't do that, sir. Only as a last resort and perhaps not even then. The tonnage would have to be massive and the fallout.…”

“You're jumping to conclusions, Steve. I agree with you—only as a last resort and perhaps not even then.”

“There is one thing I must speak of,” said Gale. “Do not underestimate the enemy. Either its intelligence or its ferocity. It is a killer. Even with great odds against it, it still is a killer. Now, under these circumstances, it probably will try to avoid confrontation, will run rather than fight, will try to keep itself alive to build up whatever margin it can for the survival of the species. But get it into a corner and it will strike back. You see, it doesn't mind dying. It has no fear of death.”

The President nodded gravely. “I appreciate that,” he said. “But there is something else.”

“Anything,” said Gale.

“You told us your people could supply us with specifications for the building of the tunnels.”

“That is true,” said Gale.

“The point is this,” said the President. “If we are to do anything at all we should do it quickly. If we delay, a dangerous social and economic, not to say political, situation may build up. I am sure that you can understand this. And this matter of the monster has given us even less time than I thought we had. For that reason it seems to me important that we have the specifications and talk with your people who can explain them to us as soon as possible.”

“Mr. President,” said Reynolds, “we have less than two hours to get your talk shaped up.”

“Certainly,” said the President. “I am sorry to have held you up. Steve, you can stay a moment, please.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Howard, following Reynolds toward the door.

“Now, where were we?” said the President. “Oh, yes, I was saying that we need to get to work on the matter of the tunnels. I plan to have some of our physicists and engineers come in and confer with your people.…”

“Does that mean, sir, that you will help us?”

“I would think so, Mr. Gale, although at the moment I'm in no position to make a positive commitment. But I don't see much else that we can do. We can't keep you here. We can't possibly absorb you into our population. It would wreck our economy. The first step would seem to be to talk with your physicists and find out what's involved—what kind of fabrications we will need, what kind of engineering, how much labor. Until we know that, we can't do any planning. And there's the matter, as well, of selecting sites.”

“We have that all worked out,” said Gale. “Our geologists have made a study, as well as is possible, of the Miocene terrain. It would be an easy matter to have a tunnel emerge above an oceanic arm or in the middle of a lake or a volcanic area. Stable land surfaces have been pinpointed and mapped out. We can't be entirely sure, of course, but our people, operating within their best knowledge, have done at least the preliminary work.”

“Then,” said the President, “we won't have to worry about that. But we do need something to get started on.”

“The men you want to talk with,” said Gale, “were among the first to come through the tunnel. I presume they are wherever you have been taking the people who came from the Virginia tunnel.”

“Fort Myer,” said the President. “Or at least the most of them went there. The army set up a number of inflatable shelters.”

“I can give you their names,” said Gale, “but I'll have to go with whoever is sent to contact them. Without me, they'd refuse to come. You can understand our situation, sir. We could take no chances of our men or their information falling into other than official hands.”

The President frowned. “I'm reluctant to let you leave, even for a short time. You can, of course, walk out of here any time you wish. You are in no way detained. But we may have need of your advice on a moment's notice. Our information so far is sketchy. You have done an excellent job of supplying us with it, of course, but situations can arise.…”

“I understand,” said Gale. “Alice, perhaps. They know her and if she carried a note from me, on a White House letterhead.…”

“That would be fine,” said the President, “if she would be willing. Steve, I wonder if you'd undertake to accompany her.”

“Certainly, sir. But my car's not here. Judy drove it home.”

“You can have a White House car and driver. Perhaps we'd better send along a Secret Service man. It may seem a silly precaution, but a lot is riding on this.”