Selected Stories (31 page)

“I ain’t got time for you now,” said Kelly. “Bring that tractor down to the beach.”

“Where’s that
Daisy Etta?
” Al’s voice was oddly strained.

“Right behind us.” Kelly tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “On the beach.”

Al’s pop eyes clicked wide almost audibly. He turned on his heel and jumped off the machine and started to run. Kelly uttered a wordless syllable that was somehow more obscene than anything else he had ever uttered, and vaulted into the seat of the machine. “Hey!” he bellowed after Al’s rapidly diminishing figure. “You’re runnin’ right into her.” Al appeared not to hear, but went pelting down the beach.

Kelly put her into fifth gear and poured on the throttle. As the tractor began to move he whacked out the master clutch, snatched the overdrive lever back to put her into sixth, rammed the clutch in again, all so fast that she did not have time to stop rolling. Bucking and jumping over the rough ground the fast machine whined for the beach.

Tom was fumbling back to the welder, his ears telling him better than his eyes how close the Seven was—for she was certainly no nightingale, particularly without her exhaust stack. Kelly reached the machine as he did.

“Get behind it,” snapped Tom. “I’ll jam the tierod with the shackle, and you see if you can’t bunt her up into that pocket between those two hummocks. Only take it easy—you don’t want to tear up that generator. Where’s Al?”

“Don’t ask me. He run down the beach to meet
Daisy.
”

“He
what?
”

The whine of the two-cycle drowned out Kelly’s answer, if any. He got behind the welder and set his blade against it. Then in a low gear, slipping his clutch in a little, he slowly nudged the machine toward the place Tom indicated. It was a little hollow in between two projecting banks. The surf and the high-tide mark dipped inland here to match it; the water was only a few feet away.

Tom raised his arm and Kelly stopped. From the other side of the projecting shelf, out of their sight now, came the flat roar of the Seven’s exhaust. Kelly sprang off the tractor and went to help Tom, who was furiously throwing out coils of cable from the rack of the welder. “What’s the game?”

“We got to ground that Seven some way,” panted Tom. He threw the last bit of cable out to clear it of kinks and turned to the panel.

“How was it—about sixty volts and the amperage on ‘special application’?” He spun the dials, pressed the started button. The motor responded instantly. Kelly scooped up ground clamp and rod holder and tapped them together. The solenoid governor picked up the load and the motor hummed as a good live spark took the jump.

“Good,” said Tom, switching off the generator. “Come on, Lieutenant General Electric, figure me out a way to ground that maverick.”

Kelly tightened his lips, shook his head. “I dunno—unless somebody actually claps this thing on her.”

“No, boy, can’t do that. If one of us gets killed—”

Kelly tossed the ground clamp idly, his lithe body taut. “Don’t give me that, Tom. You know I’m elected because you can’t see good enough yet to handle it. You know you’d do it if you could. You—”

He stopped short, for the steadily increasing roar of the approaching Seven had stopped, was blatting away now in that extraordinary irregular throttling that
Daisy Etta
affected.

“Now, what’s got into her?”

Kelly broke away and scrambled up the bank. “Tom!” he gasped. “Tom—come up here!”

Tom followed, and they lay side by side, peering out over the top of the escarpment at the remarkable tableau.

Daisy Etta
was standing on the beach, near the water, not moving. Before her, twenty or thirty feet away, stood Al Knowles, his arms out in front of him, talking a blue streak.
Daisy
made far too much racket for them to hear what he was saying.

“Do you reckon he’s got guts enough to stall her off for us?” said Tom.

“If he has, it’s the queerest thing that’s happened yet on this old island,” Kelly breathed, “an’ that’s saying something.”

The Seven revved up till she shook, and then throttled back. She ran down so low then that they thought she had shut herself down, but she caught on the last two revolutions and began to idle quietly. And then they could hear.

Al’s voice was high, hysterical. “—I come t’ he’p you, I come t’ he’p you, don’ kill me, I’ll he’p you—” He took a step forward; the dozer snorted and he fell to his knees. “I’ll wash you an’ grease you and change yo’ ile,” he said in a high singsong.

“The guy’s not human,” said Kelly wonderingly.

“He ain’t housebroke either,” Tom chuckled.

“—lemme he’p you. I’ll fix you when you break down. I’ll he’p you kill those other guys—”

“She don’t need any help!” said Tom.

“The louse,” growled Kelly. “The rotten little double-crossing polecat!” He stood up. “Hey, you Al! Come out o’ that. I mean now! If she don’t get you I will, if you don’t move.”

Al was crying now. “Shut up!” he screamed. “I know who’s bawss hereabouts, an’ so do you!” He pinned at the tractor. “She’ll kill us all iff’n we don’t do what she wants!” He turned back to the machine. “I’ll k-kill ’em fo’ you. I’ll wash you and shine you up and f-fix yo’ hood. I’ll put yo’ blade back on. …”

Tom reached out and caught Kelly’s legs as the tall man started out, blind mad. “Git back here,” he barked. “What you want to do—get killed for the privilege of pinnin’ his ears back?”

Kelly subsided and came back, threw himself down beside Tom, put his face in his hands. He was quivering with rage.

“Don’t take on so,” Tom said. “The man’s plumb loco. You can’t argue with him any more’n you can with
Daisy,
there. If he’s got to get his,
Daisy
’ll give it to him.”

“Aw, Tom, it ain’t that. I know he ain’t worth it, but I can’t sit up here and watch him get himself killed. I can’t, Tom.”

Tom thumped him on the shoulder, because there were simply no words to be said. Suddenly he stiffened, snapped his fingers.

“There’s our ground,” he said urgently, pointing seaward. “The water—the wet beach where the surf runs. If we can get our ground clamp out there and her somewhere near it—”

“Ground the pan tractor. Run it out into the water. It ought to reach—partway, anyhow.”

“That’s it—c’mon.”

They slid down the bank, snatched up the ground clamp, attached it to the frame on the pan tractor.

“I’ll take it,” said Tom, and as Kelly opened his mouth, Tom shoved him back against the welding machine. “No time to argue,” he snapped, swung on to the machine, slapped her in gear and was off. Kelly took a step toward the tractor, and then his quick eyes saw a bight of the ground cable about to foul a wheel of the welder. He stopped and threw it off, spread out the rest of it so it would pay off clear. Tom, with the incredible single-mindedness of the trained operator, watched only the black line of the trailing cable on the sand behind him. When it straightened he stopped. The front of the tracks were sloshing in the gentle surf. He climbed off the side away from the Seven and tried to see. There was movement, and the growl of her motor now running at a bit more than idle, but he could not distinguish much.

Kelly picked up the rod holder and went to peer around the head of the protruding bank. Al was on his feet, still crooning hysterically, sidling over toward
Daisy Etta.
Kelly ducked back, threw the switch on the arc generator, climbed the bank and crawled along through the sawgrass paralleling the beach until the holder in his hand tugged and he knew he had reached the end of the cable. He looked out at the beach; measured carefully with his eye the arc he would travel if he left his position and, keeping the cable taut, went out on the beach. At no point would he come within seventy feet of the possessed machine, let alone fifty. She had to be drawn in closer. And she had to be maneuvered out to the wet sand, or in the water—

Al Knowles, encouraged by the machine’s apparent decision not to move, approached, though warily, and still running off at the mouth. “—we’ll kill ’em off an’ then we’ll keep it a secret and th’ bahges’ll come an’ take us offen th’ island and we’ll go to anothah job an’ kill lots mo’… an’ when yo’ tracks git dry an’ squeak we’ll wet ’em with blood, and you’ll be rightly king o’ the hill … look yondah, look yondah,
Daisy Etta,
see them theah, by the otheh tractuh, theah they are, kill ’em,
Daisy,
kill ’em,
Daisy,
an’ lemme he’p … heah me.
Daisy,
heah me, say you heah me—” and the motor roared in response. Al laid a timid hand on the radiator guard, leaning far over to do it, and the tractor still stood there grumbling but not moving. Al stepped back, motioned with his arm, began to walk off slowly toward the pan tractor, looking backwards as he did so like a man training a dog. “C’mon, c’mon, theah’s one theah, le’s
kill’m, kill’m, kill’m
…”

And with a snort the tractor revved up and followed.

Kelly licked his lips without effect because his tongue was dry, too. The madman passed him, walking straight up the center of the beach, and the tractor, now no longer a bulldozer, followed him; and there the sand was bone dry, sun-dried, dried to powder. As the tractor passed him, Kelly got up on all fours, went over the edge of the bank onto the beach, crouched there.

Al crooned, “I love ya, honey, I love ya, ’deed I do—”

Kelly ran crouching, like a man under machine-gun fire, making himself as small as possible and feeling as big as a barn door. The torn-up sand where the tractor had passed was under his feet now; he stopped, afraid to get too much closer, afraid that a weakened, badly grounded arc might leap from the holder in his hand and serve only to alarm and infuriate the thing in the tractor. And just then Al saw him.

“There!” he screamed; and the tractor pulled up short. “Behind you! Get’m,
Daisy! Kill’m, kill’m, kill’m
”

Kelly stood up almost wearily, fury and frustration too much to be borne. “In the water,” he yelled, because it was what his whole being wanted. “Get’er in the water! Wet her tracks, Al!”

“Kill’m, kill’m—”

As the tractor started to turn, there was a commotion over by the pan tractor. It was Tom, jumping, shouting, waving his arms, swearing. He ran out from behind his machine, straight at the Seven.
Daisy Etta’s
motor roared and she swung to meet him, Al barely dancing back out of the way. Tom cut sharply, sand spouting under his pumping feet, and ran straight into the water. He went out to about waist deep, suddenly disappeared. He surfaced, spluttering, still trying to shout. Kelly took a better grip on his rod holder and rushed.

Daisy Etta,
in following Tom’s crazy rush, had swung in beside the pan tractor, not fifteen feet away; and she, too, was now in the surf. Kelly closed up the distance as fast as his long legs would let him; and as he approached to within that crucial fifty feet, Al Knowles hit him.

Al was frothing at the mouth, gibbering. The two men hit full tilt; Al’s head caught Kelly in the midriff as he missed a straightarm, and the breath went out of him in one great
whoosh!
Kelly went down like tall timber, the whole world to one swirling red-gray haze. Al flung himself on the bigger man, clawing, smacking, too berserk to ball his fists.

“Ah’m go’ to kill you,” he gurgled. “She’ll git one, I’ll git t’other, an’ then she’ll know—”

Kelly covered his face with his arms, and as some wind was sucked at last into his laboring lungs, he flung them upward and sat up in one mighty surge. Al was hurled upward and to one side, and as he hit the ground Kelly reached out a long arm, and twisted his fingers into the man’s coarse hair, raised him up, and came across with his other fist in a punch that would have killed him had it landed square. But Al managed to jerk to one side enough so that it only amputated a cheek. He fell and lay still. Kelly scrambled madly around in the sand for his welding-rod holder, found it and began to run again. He couldn’t see Tom at all now, and the Seven was standing in the surf, moving slowly from side to side, backing out, ravening. Kelly held the rod-clamp and its trailing cable blindly before him and ran straight at the machine. And then it came—that thin, soundless bolt of energy. But this time it had its full force, for poor old Peebles’ body had not been the ground that this swirling water offered.
Daisy Etta
literally leaped backwards toward him, and the water around her tracks spouted upward in hot steam. The sound of her engine ran up, broke, took on the rhythmic, uneven beat of a swing drummer. She threw herself from side to side like a cat with a bag over its head. Kelly stepped a little closer, hoping for another bolt to come from the clamp in his hand, but there was none, for—

“The circuit breaker!” cried Kelly.

He threw the holder up on the deck plate of the Seven in front of the seat, and ran across the little beach to the welder. He reached behind the switchboard, got his thumb on the contact hinge and jammed it down.

Daisy Etta
leaped again, and then again, and suddenly her motor stopped. Heat in turbulent waves blurred the air over her. The little gas tank for the starting motor went out with a cannon’s roar, and the big fuel tank, still holding thirty-odd gallons of Diesel oil, followed. It puffed itself open rather than exploded, and threw a great curtain of flame over the ground behind the machine. Motor or no motor, then, Kelly distinctly saw the tractor shudder convulsively. There was a crawling movement of the whole frame, a slight wave of motion away from the fuel tank, approaching the front of the machine, and moving upward from the tracks. It culminated in the crown of the radiator core, just in front of the radiator cap; and suddenly an area of six or seven square inches literally
blurred
around the edges. For a second, then, it was normal, and finally it slumped molten, and liquid metal ran down the sides, throwing out little sparks as it encountered what was left of the charred paint. And only then was Kelly conscious of agony in his left hand. He looked down. The welding machine’s generator had stopped, though the motor was still turning, having smashed the friable coupling on its drive shaft. Smoke poured from the generator, which had become little more than a heap of slag. Kelly did not scream, though, until he looked and saw what had happened to his hand—