Clue Number Four, thought Baer, screams in the night and then the kids disappear and Dan has a scratched face. But he said only: ""I"m looking forward to talking to the police who spoke with Dan. That should get us somewhere."
At the station they had to wait about fifteen minutes before getting in to see Chief Wallace. He was in his office, a small, windowless, but flawlessly air-conditioned room with a few functional chairs, some metal bookcases, and a large desk as littered as Baer"s own back at the Museum. The chief was a bulky man and beginning to go to fat, but he had a surprisingly sensitive-looking face, mild eyes that blinked at his visitors from behind mod steel-rimmed gla.s.ses.
He stood up as they came in. "Miss Hermanek, glad to meet you. Pat Follett says you"re moving in next door to him."
"Yes," said Nancy, taking the front edge of a chair while Baer was introducing himself.
Then, when all were seated, she went on: "I - I understand that two of your men have been to the house to talk to my fiancee. I"ve been trying to get Dan to talk to me, myself - I have the feeling there"s something wrong, seriously wrong. I"d like to know what report your men made, if that"s at all possible."
Chief Wallace cleared his throat and teetered in his chair; he appeared to be waiting to hear more.
Baer put in; ""Let me state it plainly, chief. There is some doubt about Dan Post"s health and sanity, about what he may have done with his children." He couldn"t look at Nancy, not even from the corner of his eye. "Are you a physician, Dr. Baer?" ""No sir, just here as a friend of the family. Of Nancy here. But what I hear of the young man"s behavior suggests to me that there"s some problem here that ought to be looked into."
The chief glanced down at papers on his desk and scratched his ear. ""When Pat Follett called again today I got out the report on Post and looked at it again. It"s very brief. Devenny and Harkins just say that they learned the children had been sent to school - "
Nancy broke in: "Where?"
The chief looked up at her over his gla.s.ses. "They don"t say that, Miss." He bent his head again. "" - and that they looked through the house and found nothing. Yes, I remember that struck me as odd the first time I glanced at it. Now they"re both capable men, but that"s not the way a report like this is usually worded. We want something more specific man just "found nothing"."
Nancy said: "Dan and I were planning to start the children in public school in September, here in Wheat-field Park. After we were married."
"Was there any discussion of sending them anywhere else? Boarding school, summer camp - ?"
"A couple of camps were mentioned." It was a reluctant admission. "But they wouldn"t depart without baggage, and in the middle of the night. Mrs. Follett saw them playing Tuesday evening, and Wednesday morning they were gone."
Baer, watching and listening, could see Chief Wallace settling into the opinion mat this was a nice young girl undergoing some conflict with her man, who was possibly not as much hers as she had thought. The chief had the report of his trusted men right in front of him, didn"t he, saying however vaguely, that there was nothing much wrong?
Just as Baer himself had thought, off and on, up to an hour or so ago. But now Baer had been in the house himself. And there was . . . something. If he were a child, he might say that his mind still felt sore from mat visit.
Hardly scientific, nor was it the sort of thing you told a cop.
Nancy had named the summer camps, and now Chief Wallace was smiling at her rea.s.suringly. "Let"s just see if we can do a little checking." He reached for his phone.
While the chief was waiting for his first call to go through, Baer suggested: "a.s.suming that the children are not findable at those camps, would there be any objection if Miss Hermanek and I talked to the two detectives ourselves?"
"No objection from me, except they"re not on duty today. Harkins worked last night, and he"s off now on a weekend trip to Wisconsin, won"t be available until Monday.
Devenny was taking his kid in to see the Cubs today, I think he said. h.e.l.lo? Well, keep trying."" This last was into the telephone.
As soon as he put the phone down it rang, but only to announce other problems.
Accident on the highway, and Nancy gathered that a man was killed. She thought of Dan, in spite of his recent calmness on the telephone, as wandering crazed somewhere, and her heart gave a couple of hollow thumps. But Chief Wallace while discussing the dead man on the phone did not look up at Nancy, nor did his expression change.
No sooner had he finished that call than another came in, something about finding an explanation for a delay in answering a burglary complaint last night. The beautiful suburbs, thought Baer.
He saw that Nancy was getting her nervous, restless look again. She was not looking too good at all, in fact, and Baer recalled that she had earlier refused lunch at the Museum.
He stood up and touched her arm. "Chief, we"re going out to get something to eat if that"s okay with you. Missed our lunch. Then we"ll call back here and see what you"ve learned about the camps, and get Detective Devenny"s address and phone number if that"s okay with you."
Chief Wallace, phone still at ear, got halfway out of his seat to wave them good-bye.
Baer got the idea that the Chief was not reluctant to see them go.
"Shall we check the house again, Nancy?"
"Yes, let"s try."
A few minutes later Baer pulled the Toronado to a halt on the south side of Benham Road, opposite the house. Now the garage doors were open and Dan"s car was gone.
""Son of a gun. Maybe we just missed him.""
"Yes." Nancy sounded fatalistically depressed.
Trying to keep a conversation going, Baer drove out to Main Street, turned south, and then west on Roosevelt Road, looking for a pa.s.sable drive-in restaurant. While they were inside waiting for their orders to be brought to their booth, Nancy again tried calling Dan at home, with no result.
She had lost her impatience now, but gloomily, as if she were on the point of giving up. They took their time over sandwiches and coffee, and then Baer called Chief Wallace back and was given Devenny"s home phone number, and also the information that the children were not at either of the summer camps whose names Nancy had given as possibilities.
Mrs. Devenny, when called, said that her husband wasn"t home yet. No, she didn"t know just when he would be there.
Five-fifteen. Baer in a cloud of rumination gazed out through the plate-gla.s.s window beside his front-booth seat, and nursed his second refill of coffee. Suddenly he saw amid the pa.s.sing stream of eastbound traffic a face, man"s face, leap out at him in unwonted familiarity, dead already. She did not see him flee the house. But Nancy"s mental state was not disabling panic, she still functioned. She picked up the microphone of the car"s radio and worked it as she had seen the policemen work it earlier.
"This is an emergency," she reported, keying the b.u.t.ton for transmission, her voice calm and almost lifeless with shock. "Car One reporting. People are being killed at three- twenty-six Benham Road. There"s a big fire, too."
And now the woman of the diary came into her mind, for Nancy had just this moment seen the devil come out onto her porch, framed by the h.e.l.l-flames from what had been the doorway of her house.
A male voice on the radio was starting to demand that she identify herself, and she overrode it calmly. "This is not a hoax. If you look out your window you can see the fire, it"s on the highest point in town."
Then she let the microphone fall from her hand, for she realized that the devil in the shape of a giant crab or insect was coming straight for her, having thrown the fallen bodies of the two policemen out of its way. A limping, slightly drunken devil whose six legs sc.r.a.ped and tremored at the gra.s.s uncertainly, but it was coming toward her all the same. She found that she had already raised the window and locked the car door, and now she slid into the driver"s seat.
Even as she turned the key in the ignition, fingers moving with what in her terror seemed fatal slowness, she felt a certain paradoxical happiness. Whatever devil it was, it was not Dan. He might be dead, but he had not willingly deserted her.
The engine roared into life just as the menacing shape reared up outside the window to her right. Something smashed in through that window"s shatterproof gla.s.s even as Nancy"s foot found the accelerator and her fingers slid the selector lever into drive. One glance to her right as the car began to move showed her a metallic-looking cable or arm come reaching in, groping on the right-hand door for the b.u.t.ton that would release its lock and let it be opened from outside.
The powerful police car shot west on Benham, gathering speed, just as something inside the door gave way with a snapping of metal that testified to the force applied. The devil had not found the lock release and was not going to bother with it. Before the auto had gone a hundred feet, Nancy had the impression first that the gla.s.s was being ripped out of the right front door, and then that the whole door was going. Then something like a steel cable with a bright metal ball at the end came in front of her. With the amazing dexterity of an elephant"s trunk, it s.n.a.t.c.hed the ignition key from its socket, then took hold of the steering wheel and effortlessly overcame her own grip with a hard twist to the right.
There had not been time for the car to build up speed enough to make it roll with the tight right turn, but wheels screeched as it jolted up onto the gra.s.sy shoulder of the road and then across the Folletts" lawn. Nancy threw her own door open and moved instinctively to jump, the centrifugal force of the turn adding momentum to her movement. She felt a steel-hard arm tear at her clothing as she fell free.
The gra.s.s came up to hit her, and momentum whipped her through an easy somersault. She came upright to see the police car jouncing into a small tree that bent down unbroken under the vehicle and brought it to a stop. Some shape that was not human was moving in the driver"s seat ...
"Nancy! This way!" The voice coming from behind her was Dan"s, and she turned to see him, a specter in a bloodied, dirty white bathrobe, framed in the shattered French windows of the Folletts" house, with their faces gaping whitely on either side of his, all of them plainly visible in the light of the burning house atop the hill.
In a moment Nancy was on her feet again and running toward them, moving in a high-speed limp with one of her sandals gone somewhere. Flames roared behind her in the night, and in the distance people shouted.
Dan vanished again from the darkened cave of the French windows, now only a dozen strides ahead of Nancy, but now Patrick Follett"s lean figure stood there in pajamas. He had a revolver in his hand, and was shooting at something behind Nancy. The expression on Follett"s face was one of comically exaggerated horror.
Had Dan really been there at all? Nancy took two more limping, running strides, and then felt the gentle touch between her shoulder blades. Immediately she went down, the neat short Follett gra.s.sblades whipping at her face as she rolled over once more on the lawn. Her voluntary muscles were suddenly useless, though her nerves were still awake to all sensation.
The rolling fall left her with her face turned back toward the east. The house on the hill was now beginning a slow collapse into flaming ruins, even as great cracks spread around it through the earth. As Nancy watched in utter helplessness, there ran from the house a human figure dressed in white and trailing smoke. The figure collapsed on the lawn just outside the house, even as a good part of the building came down in an avalanche of crackling stucco and breaking wood. And now the earth-cracks grew and spread, as if the age-old mound beneath the house were no more than an egg, some great roc"s egg that now was breaking rapidly and just about to hatch . . .
The collector"s mobile unit had now fully shaken off the effects of the water-pistol spray, and was now proceeding methodically from the stopped car to pick up the paralyzed specimen designated Nancy. The collector meant to put her aboard the ship, as soon as the entrance hatch had come conveniently above ground. Then, the collector calculated, there would probably still be time to send the mobile unit after one more specimen, one of the aged-but-preserved type to round out the collection. Then it would be desirable to take off quickly, and begin at once the long voyage home. The dominant race of this planet now had technological capabilities that would be dangerous if they could once be brought to bear on the invader.
The remote-control unit reached the still body of the immobilized female, and reached with two cable-like limbs to pick her up. And all around it the lawn erupted with a hundred acid jets of water.
Dan, with his one usable hand gripping the valve of the Folletts" lawn-sprinkler system, saw the machine jump and twist in mid-air again. This time the convulsion did not cease after a single spasm. As soon as the heavy body fell to earth, nearly on top of Nancy, it was immediately flipped into the air again by the wild thrashing of its limbs.
The a.s.sault of the sprinklers continued against the crab, a thousand tiny sprays that drenched every square inch of its body.
The collector could no longer use it purposefully against Nancy, but in its convulsions it threatened to fall on her and break some bones by accident. Dan left his place at the valve, and ran out of the Folletts" house. Follett and his wife came with him, Patrick now having discarded his revolver. It took all of them to gather up Nancy"s dead weight and carry her inside; Dan"s left arm was wounded and useless, since the enemy"s last laser shot at him.
There was the dart, steely and blunt and pressed somehow against Nancy"s back, right over her spine.
Follett was looking at her face. "I"m afraid she"s gone, Dan."
"No. Get her to a hospital, will you? I"ve seen this before. She"s just paralyzed. That dart"ll have to be removed, how I don"t know. Now I"ve got to go after my kids "Wait, Dan, your arm - "Mrs. Follett tried to hold him, but he was outside again, running barefoot uphill toward the tottering, falling, flaming ruins of his house. In his front yard a human voice was crying out in pain, and he got his good arm around a burned woman wearing a torn white slip, and pulled her farther from the flames.
With a wild howling of sirens, fire engines were converging on the hill from east and west at once, their searchlights sweeping the battlefield that had been Dan"s and Nancy"s yard. Simultaneously with their arrival, what was left of the house shuddered and came down. But already something else stood where it had been, something that reared itself out of the soil on girder-like metal arms, grew taller as the house had been, like some mad giant robot swimmer surfacing.
But the collector had not yet got its starship free. Spray from broken water pipes ate and burned at the ship"s hull, and the flat bluish coat of flame that Dan remembered from the Indian dream now sprang out over the entire visible surface.
"Get water on that thing! Water!" Dan yelled as he ran to meet the charging arrival of the firemen from the trucks. Men wearing sloping hats and rubber coats surrounded him, glanced at his blood and wounds - things they had seen often enough before - and then gaped behind him at the blue blazing thing that pulled itself up out of the earth.
""Get water on it - hoses - quick. My kids are in that thing. It killed these men - "Motion about him at the bodies scattered in his yard. Now more police were on the scene, more guns drawn. Nowhere to shoot. Dragging at the body of their chief.
"Water!"
Somehow he was heeded. Firemen with tools were twisting at the hydrant across the street. Flat hoses stirred and bulged, becoming angry snakes.
"Water! G.o.ddam you, can"t you hurry? That fire"s not electrical." Not giving a d.a.m.n whether it was or not.
The enemy had no laser now, or it could not get another into use in time. No lance of flame to fight back with. Its fighting unit twitched and slowly melted, like hard sugar, in the persistent sprinklers some forty meters down the hill . . .
Men were aiming the nozzles of the ready hoses now. Armed with the fluid of life, the blood of Earth, from which all men and microbes sprang ....
The enemy ship was almost free before the crystal lances of the firemen struck out.
The blue flames, hopelessly inadequate defense against this kind of an a.s.sault, were splashed aside, were quenched like candles so only the firetrucks" searchlights now held away the dark.
Dan clutched at unknown shoulders frantically. "On that hatch there! See? That door!
Aim your hoses there."
The hatch resisted for a while, as the ship kept trying to get upright for a launch. Its tree-sized limbs flailed and shivered as the earth that held its weight now turned to mud.
And now the outer layers of the hull itself were beginning to melt and slide like soggy earth. The hatch fell open suddenly, the streams from hoses went pounding triumphantly inside.
The crystal caskets, fabricated somehow to contain the watery life of this strange and watery planet, were among the few parts of the ship that would not rapidly corrode and melt when wetted down. The caskets had to be forced open with the firemens" crowbars and axes. Millie"s case was the first one to be broken into, and Dan used one of the steel bars himself. She murmured ""Daddy"" and held up her arms as soon as he had pulled her out.
FOURTEEN.
They were riding toward the tallest office building in the world, with a dim moon not far above it in the sky, a bluish moon just hinting at what lay beyond. The big car, going deep into the city, swooped along the expressway, now rising over a cross-highway, now plunging into an underpa.s.s. Dan and Nancy, and the television reporter they had come to like during their week of sudden fame, were riding in the back seat of the sedan, and the government driver and the other government man, the important one, were up in front.
Dan"s left arm was still bandaged and he carried it in a sling, and his face and hands still bore small burn marks. But his wounds were a week old now and the pain was no longer continuous. Nancy"s whole body had been stiff for a couple of days after the doctors had taken a chance and forcibly pried the peculiar needle away from her spine, but the stiffness was gone now, and she seemed to be suffering no other after-effects.
Sunset was coming on, and the windows of the towers ahead now glittered orange with its reflection.
""Dan"" the reporter was saying, in his voice that any experienced television-watcher in the nation could have imitated, "There has been a suggestion made about which I"d like to have your personal feelings. Some scientists have suggested that there may be other interstellar probes, similar to the one you encountered, on the earth right now, sent by the same civilization that sent yours. It would seem that such probes could have found drier environments than Illinois, certainly, places in which their chances of survival should have been much better."
"You want to know what my feelings are?" Dan"s voice was low and even, and he was staring straight ahead. "All right. I think that there are other probes. I don"t believe I"ll ever walk into a house again without wanting the bas.e.m.e.nt checked out first." He was not smiling, not a trace. Nancy stroked his good arm.
He went on: "I don"t know where I"m going to be able to live the rest of my life.
Nancy"s father has suggested Key West. He was stationed there in the Navy. Humid, surrounded by ocean, and he tells me that if you dig down two feet you hit salt water.""
The white-haired man in the right front seat - not just a government man in the usual sense, but the adviser of a couple of presidents - turned and said: "Dan, if you and Nancy should seriously want something like that arranged, we can do it,"
"You"ve done a lot already, thanks," said Nancy. Dan said: "Present quarters in the hotel are fine for now. After the wedding . . . well, we"ll have to talk it over." His eyes held Nancy"s for a while.
The reporter asked: "How are the kids doing today?"
"They seem to be coming along," said Nancy. "Our two at least."
"No sedation of any kind for the past twenty-four hours," Dan amplified. "The doctors say their reactions now seem almost normal - I think so too. Of course, I expect there"ll be some mental scars remaining." He paused, and shook his head. "And then there"s Pete, and Red. I feel almost like a relative, after living through that business with them. I want to take an interest in their future. And Oriana"s, too. They"re all coming around, though more slowly than my guys. And even the Indians are all still alive. At least they"re breathing again, though some of them were in that thing five thousand years. Beginning with the Middle Archaic Culture . . . well, Nancy can tell you about that."
They were leaving the expressway now, ascending a long cloverleaf curve that brought them into a city neighborhood whose wide streets appeared to be lined chiefly with hospitals and parking lots. Most of the buildings were aging and somewhat grimy, though here and there appeared new steel and gla.s.s. Almost all of the visible pedestrians were black. Cars were parked b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper along most of the curbs, and traffic was slow and quiet. Blue-and-white police cars appeared every two or three blocks.
The sedan pulled through an iron gate in a tall brick wall, and into a parking lot marked DOCTORS ONLY with a large sign, a hospital administrator in shirtsleeves was waiting to show them to a s.p.a.ce. Dan and Nancy got out and went inside, while the others remained for the moment in the car, talking.
In the shabby lobby she pressed his good hand. "I"ll wait down here. They - they"ll probably let only one person at a time into the room up there, anyway."
"Listen, Nancy. You do understand why I want to see her. I feel responsible."
"Though you"re not. I understand."
"You know I didn"t have any real choice about what I was doing."
"I know. I understand."
Whether she did or not, he gave her a kiss, and then he went up on his lonely elevator ride, that delivered him into a hospital hallway of blue tile and blue paint, a hallway shabby and overused but clean. Above the nurses" outpost was a little sign: COUNTY HOSPITAL BURNS AND HAND SURGERY UNIT.
After they had garbed him in a sterile yellow gown and mask - he needed help to get the garments on, with his slung arm - they pointed out her room, which he would have known anyway from the yellow-gowned guard who stood outside.
When he went in, he saw two beds. No s.p.a.ce to spare in here, no private rooms. On one bed, only eyes looked out from a bandaged face, and under a sheet-tent supported on a low frame he caught a glimpse of red-burned flesh unclothed. He had thought no one could live with that much skin destroyed. Maybe no one could. This was a girl, a female anyway, and here she was exposed for casual eyes. It was total exposure but not nakedness. Nakedness was evidently only skin deep, and went when the skin went, sin gone with skin and nothing left to violate.