I fired and worked the bolt and fired again and worked the bolt once more but did not shoot the third time, for there was no need. The car had left the road and was tumbling down the hillside, crashing through the thickets, banging into trees. And as it rolled the light from the single headlight still miraculously burning, swept across the sky like a probing searchlight.
Then the light was gone and the silence closed in once again. There was no further sound of something crashing down the hill.
I lowered the rifle and released the bolt and eased it back in place with the trigger held.
I let out the breath that I had been holding and took another one, a deep breath.
For it had been no human car; there’d not been humans in it.
When it had come around the curve, in that fleeting second when I could see the outline of it, I had seen that the single light had been not on either side but positioned directly in the center of the windshield.
XXII
A car stood in the little yard in front of the cabin as I pulled up before it.
“What is going on?” I asked of no one in particular. “Is there anyone,” asked Joy, “that Carleton would loan the cabin to?”
“Not that I know about,” I told her.
I got out and walked around in front of the car.
The wind was swaying the small pine trees and they were talking back. The waves chuckled on the beach and I could hear the chunk-chunk sound of Stirling’s boat as it pounded gently against the pier.
Joy and the Dog came from the car and stood there beside me. I had kept the engine running, and the headlights bathed the cabin in their light.
The cabin’s door opened and a man came out. Apparently he had dressed hastily, for he was still buckling his belt. He stood and stared at us and then came slowly down the steps off the little porch. He wore pajama tops and he had bedroom slippers on his feet.
We stayed and waited for him and he came toward us hesitantly, across the yard, blinking in the light. He probably was no more than middle-aged, but he looked older. His face was rough with stubble and his uncombed hair stuck out in all directions.
“You folks looking for someone?” he asked.
He stopped about six feet away and peered at us, the light bothering his vision.
“We came up to spend the night,” I said. “We didn’t know anyone was here.”
“You own the cabin, mister?”
“No, a friend of mine.”
The man swallowed. I could see him swallow. “We ain’t got no right here,” he said. “We just moved in because it seemed the thing to do. There was no one using it.”
“You just moved in without asking anyone?”
“Look, mister,” said the man, “I don’t want no trouble. There were other cabins here we could have moved into, but it just so happens that we picked this one. We had no place to go and the missus, she was sick. From worry, mostly, I’d suppose. She never was a hand to be sick before.”
“How come no place to go?”
“Lost my job,” he said, “and there was no other work and we lost the house. The bank foreclosed on us. And the sheriff threw us out. The sheriff didn’t want to, but he had to. The sheriff felt real bad about it.”
“The people in the bank?”
“New people,” he said. “Some new people came in and bought the bank. The other people, the folks that were there before, they’d not have thrown us out. They would have given us some time.”
“And new people bought the place you worked,” I said.
He looked at me, surprised. “How did you know that?” he asked.
“It figures,” I told him.
“Hardware store,” he said. “Just up the road a piece. Up by the all-night service station. Sold sports stuff mostly. Hunting and fishing stuff and bait. Not much of a job. Didn’t pay too much, but it made us a living.”
I didn’t say anything more. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’m sorry about the lock,” he said. “We had to break the back-door lock. If we could have found a cabin that wasn’t locked, we would have used that one. But they all were locked.”
“One of the bedroom windows was unlatched,” I told him. “It shoves a little hard, but you could have got it up. Stirling always left it that way so friends of his could get in if they wanted to. You had to stand on a chunk of wood or something to reach the window, but you could have gotten in.”
“This Stirling? He’s the man who owns the place?”
I nodded.
“You tell him we are sorry. Sorry about moving in and busting up the lock. I’ll wake the others now and we’ll get out right away.
“No,” I said. “You stay right where you are. If you had a place where the lady could catch a bit of sleep.”
“I’m all right,” said Joy. “I can sleep out in the car.”
“You’ll get cold,” said the man. “This time of year it gets right chilly out.”
“Some blankets on the floor, then. We’ll make out.”
“Look,” asked the man, “why ain’t you sore at me?”
“Friend,” I told him, “this isn’t any time for anyone to be getting sore at anyone. The time is here when we have to work with one another and take care of one another. We have to hang together.”
He peered at me suspiciously, a bit uneasily.
“You a preacher or something of the sort?” he asked me.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
I said to Joy: “I want to drive up to the service station and phone Stirling. To tell him we’re all right. He might have been expecting us back at the laboratory.”
“I’ll go back in,” said the man, “and figure out a way so you can spend the night. If you want us to get out, we will.”
“Not at all,” I said.
We got back into the car and I turned around. The man Stood watching us.
“What is going on?” asked Joy as we started up the road toward the main highway.
“It’s just the beginning,” I told her. “There’ll be more and more of it. More who lose then-jobs and more who lose their homes. Banks bought up to shut off credit. Business places bought and closed to destroy jobs. Houses and apartment buildings purchased and the people evicted and no place for them to go.”
“But it’s inhuman,” she protested.
“Of course, it is inhuman.” And, of course, it was. These things weren’t human. They didn’t care what happened to the human race. The human race was nothing to them, nothing more than a form of life cluttering up a planet that could be used for other things. They would use the humans just as the humans once had used the animals that had cluttered up the land. They’d get rid of them, any way they could. They’d shove them to one side. They’d squeeze them tight together. They’d fix it so they’d die.
I tried to envision how it all would work and it was a hard thing to envision. The basic pattern was there, but the scope was far too large to grasp. To be effective, the scope of the operation must necessarily be worldwide. And if the operation had filtered down to a small-town bank and a crossroads store, then it must mean that, in the United States, at least, the operation—so far as industry, business, and finance were concerned—must be nationwide. For no one would buy up a crossroads business until he had in hand as well the mighty industrial complexes which were the lifeblood of the country. And no one would bother with a small-town bank unless he had the bigger banks under his control as well. For years the bowling balls had been buying stock or taking options on it, had been, more than likely, infiltrating psuedo-humans, such as Atwood, into strategic positions. For they could not afford to move so openly as they now were moving until they had the basic business of the country held within their hands.
And there were places, of course, where the operation wouldn’t work. It would be effective only in those nations where private enterprise had flourished, where the people owned the industrial and financial institutions, and where natural resources came under priva
te ownership. It would not work in Russia and it would not work in China, but perhaps it didn’t have to. Perhaps it didn’t have to work anywhere except in the majority of the great industrial nations. Close down the bulk of the world’s industry and shut up the world’s financial institutions and the world was whipped. There would be no trade and no flow of currency or credit and the thing that we called civilization would grind to a shuddering halt.
But there was still a question to which there was no answer —a question that bobbed just beneath the surface, popping into view a dozen times a thought: Where had the money come from?
For it would take money, perhaps more money than there was in all the world.
And there was another question just as pertinent: When and how had the money all been paid?
The answer was that it couldn’t have been paid. For if it had, the banks would be overflowing with it and the banking systems would be aware that there was something wrong.
Thinking of that, I remembered something that Dow Crane had said just that afternoon. The banks, he had said, were bursting at their seams with money. Overflowing with it. Cash money that people had been bringing in for a week or so.
So maybe it had been paid, or a big part of it. All at once, all engineered so the payments would span no more than a week, all the sales and options and agreements set up in such a fashion that there would have been nothing to disturb the financial picture, to tip off anyone that there was something going on.
And if it had reached that point, I told myself, then mankind’s position was impossible, or very close to it.
But even after all the conjecture, all the hinted answers, there was still the question: Where had all the money come from?
Certainly not from anything the bowling balls had brought from their alien planet and had sold on Earth. For if they had sold enough of it, whatever it might be, to get together the working capital they needed, there would have been some sign of it. Unless, of course, it were something of such fantastic value, something, perhaps, that no one had ever thought of as existing—something so valuable that it would appeal to the man who bought certain secret treasures and hugged them close against him, not sharing them, knowing they would decrease in value if he ever dared to share them. Unless it was something like that, it would be impossible to introduce to Earth any trade goods of an alien nature without notice being given them.
“We now communicate,” said the Dog, “with the biologist in his laboratory.”
“That is right,” I told him. “He’ll be wondering where we are.”
“We must warn him,” said the Dog, “to be very careful. I cannot recall if we did or not. Those things in the sack we handed him can be extremely tricky.”
“Never fear,” I reassured the Dog. “Stirling will take due care. He probably knows more about them now than either of us.”
“So we make the call,” said Joy, “and then we get some sleep and tomorrow dawns and what do we do then?”
“Damned if I know,” I confessed. “We’ll think of something. We’ll have to think of something. We’ve got to let the people know what is going on. We’ll have to figure out a way to tell them so they will understand and so they will believe.”
We reached the main highway, and down ahead of us was the glow of the all-night service station. I pulled into it and up in front of a pump. The man came out.
“Fill her up,” I said. “You got a pay phone in there?”
He gestured with his thumb. “Right over in the corner, next to the cigarette machine.”
I went inside and dialed and fed in the coins when the operator told me to. I heard the buzzing of the signal at the other end.
Someone answered—a gruff, official voice that was not Stirling’s voice.
“Who is this?” I asked. “I was calling Carleton Stirling.”
The voice didn’t tell me. “Who are you?” it asked.
It burned me. Something like that always burns me, but I held my temper and told him who I was.
“Where are you calling from?”
“Now, look—”
“Mr. Graves,” the voice said, “this is the police. We want to talk with you.”
“Police! What’s going on down there?”
“Carleton Stirling’s dead. The janitor found him an hour or so ago.”
XXIII
I pulled the car up in front of the biology building and got out.
“You better stay here,” I told the Dog. “The janitor doesn’t like you and I would rather not explain a talking dog to the policeman who is waiting up there.”
The Dog sighed gustily, his whiskers blowing out. “I suppose,” he said, “it would be somewhat of a shock. Although the now dead biologist took me very calmly. Somewhat better, I might say, than you did yourself.”
“He had the advantage of me,” I told the Dog, “He had the true scientific outlook.”
And I wondered a second later how I could come even close to joking, for Stirling had been my friend and it might well be that I had brought about his death, although at the moment I had no idea of how he might have died.
I remembered him that morning, sprawled upon the chair in the monitoring room with less than another day of life left to him, and how he’d come awake without rancor or surprise and how he’d talked the crazy kind of talk one knowing him had come to expect of him.
“Wait for us,” I told the Dog. “We shouldn’t be too long.”
Joy and I climbed the steps and I was ready to pound upon the door when I found the door to be unlocked. We climbed the stairs and the door to Stirling’s lab was open. Two men were perched upon the lab bench, waiting for us. They had been talking, but when they had heard us coming down the hall they had stopped their talking—we had heard them stop their talking—and sat there waiting for us.
One of them was Joe Newman, the kid who had called me about the bowling balls rolling down the road. “Hi, Parker,” he said, hopping off the bench. “Hi, Joy.” “Hi, yourself,” said Joy.
“Meet Bill Liggett,” said Joe Newman. “He’s from homicide.”
“Homicide?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said Joe. “They think someone bumped Stirling off.”
I swung around to the detective.
He nodded at me. “He was asphyxiated. As if he had been choked. But there wasn’t a mark upon him.” “You mean—”
“Look, Graves, if someone strangles a man, he leaves marks on his throat. Bruises, discolorations. It takes a lot of pressure to choke a man to death. Usually there is considerable physical damage.”
“And there wasn’t?” “Not a mark,” said Liggett.
“Then he could have simply strangled. On something that he ate or drank. Or from muscular contraction.” “The doc says not.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense.” “Maybe it will,” said Liggett, “after the autopsy.” “It doesn’t seem possible,” I said. “I saw him just this evening.”
“Far as we can tell,” said Liggett, “you were the last man to see him alive. He was alive when you saw him, wasn’t he?” “Very much alive.” “What time?”
“Ten-thirty or so. Maybe close to eleven.” “The janitor said he let you in. You and a dog. He remembers because he told you no dogs were allowed. Says you told him the dog was a specimen. Was he, Graves?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “That was just a gag.”
“Why did you bring the dog up? The janitor told you not to.”
“I wanted to show him to Stirling. We had talked about him. He was a remarkable dog in many ways. He’d been hanging around my apartment building for days and was a friendly dog.”
“Stirling like dogs?”
“I don’t know. Not especially, I guess.”
“Where is this dog now?”
“Down in the car,” I said.
“Your car blow up tonight?”
“1 don’t know,” I said. “I heard on the radio it did. They thought that I was in it.”
br /> “But you weren’t.”
“Well, that’s apparent, isn’t it? You guys find out who it was?”
Liggett nodded. “Young punk who’d been pulled in a couple of times before for stealing cars. Just for the rides. Drive them a few blocks, then leave them.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Yeah, isn’t it,” said Liggett. “You driving a car now?”
“He’s driving my car,” said Joy.
“You’ve been with him all evening, lady?”
“We had dinner,” Joy said. “I’ve been with him ever since.”
Good gal, I thought. Don’t tell this cop a thing. All he’ll do is just muck up the situation.
“You waited down in the car while he and the dog came up?”
Joy nodded.
“Seems,” said Liggett, “there was a ruckus of some sort out in your neighborhood tonight. You know anything about it?”
“Not a thing,” said Joy.
“Don’t mind him,” said Joe. “He asks a lot of questions. He looks suspicious, too. He has to. That’s how he earns a living.”
“It does beat hell,” said Liggett, “how you two could be mixed up in so many things and still come out so clean.”
“It’s the way we live,” said Joy.
“Why were you up at the lake?” asked Liggett.
“Just for the ride,” I said.
“And the dog was with you?”
“Sure, he was. We took him along. He’s good company.”
The bag was gone from the hook where Stirling had hung it and I couldn’t see it anywhere. I couldn’t look too hard or Liggett would have noticed.
“You’ll have to go down to headquarters,” Liggett told me. “The both of you. There are some things we want to get cleared up.”
“The Old Man knows about all this,” said Joe. “The city desk phoned him about it as soon as you called in to the laboratory.”
“Thanks, Joe,” I told him. “I imagine we’ll be able to take care of ourselves.”
Although I wasn’t as sure of that as I made it sound. If we went downstairs and the Dog began shooting off his mouth so that Liggett could hear him, there would be hell to pay. And there was the rifle in the car, with its magazine half full and the barrel fouled with powder from the shots I’d taken at the car. I’d have a rough time explaining what I’d been shooting at, even why I carried a rifle in the car at all. And in my pocket was a loaded pistol, and another pocket was loaded down with mixed-up pistol and rifle ammunition. No one—no good citizen—went around in perfect peace and the best intentions with a loaded rifle in his car and a loaded pistol in his pocket.