The Onslaught from Rigel/Chapter IV
But when Tholfsen and Murray returned with the coal, Vanderschoof was missing as well as Stevens, and that evening when the car in which Marta Lami had accompanied Roberts on the exploration of the Brooklyn Heights district drew up at the Institute, it had only one occupant.
“What happened to Miss Lami?” asked Ben.
Roberts gazed at him, surprised. “Didn't you send them? While we were at the St. George Hotel a car came along with Stevens and two of those new men in it. One was the Greek. They spoke to her for a minute and she said they brought a message from you that she was to go with them.”
“M-hm,” said Ben. “I see. Well, as long as they don't come back, it's all right.”
The car whirled out the Albany Post Road in a silence that was indicative of the rivalry that had already sprung up between Stevens and Vanderschoof. As for Pappagourdas he found himself demoted to the position of a “yes man.”
They had provided themselves with a liberal supply of guns and ammunition, and with the foolish conservatism of the very rich, refusing to believe that money was valueless, had raided store after store until they had acquired a considerable supply of currency.
“This is the Bear Mountain Bridge, isn't it?” said the dancer. “Let's stop at West Point and pick up a cadet. They're so ornamental.”
Stevens glanced at her sourly from the wheel. “We've got to hurry if we want to get to Albany,” he said.
“Still,” offered Vanderschoof protectingly, “why not stop at the Point? We might find some people there. I know Colonel Grayson. Played golf with him there last summer. Ha, ha! When I holed out an eighteen-footer at the seventh, he was so mad, he wouldn't speak to me all the rest of the afternoon. It was the turning point of the battle. Ha, ha!”
Stevens, with a grunt, swung the wheel round and began the ascent of the long bridge ramp. He realized he had been outmaneuvered. To cover his retreat, he remarked, “Isn't that a bird?”
“The high muck-a-muck said something about birds last night,” said the dancer, “but he's such a Holy Joe that I didn't pay any attention.”
“Aren't the birds all dead?” asked the Greek, respectfully. “I saw some in the gutter outside my window and they were turned to iron.”
The car coughed to the rise, made it and slid across the bridge.
“It is a bird,” said the dancer, “and what a bird! Papa, look at the ostrich.”
Pappagourdas and Vanderschoof followed her pointing finger. Along its direction they saw, a couple of hundred feet behind and above them, the widespread wings and heavy body of the same type of four-winged bird Roberts had encountered. Vanderschoof tugged at his pocket. “Maybe it'll come close enough to give us a shot,” he said hopefully.
The bird was certainly gaining on them, though the speedometer of the car had risen beyond forty miles an hour. As it drew nearer, they could make out the high-domed, most un-birdlike head set with pop-eyes fixed in a permanent expression of astonishment, the short bill, slightly hooked at the tip, and the huge expanse of the wings. It seemed to be inspecting them as a smaller avian might inspect a bug crawling across a road.
As it drew nearer, it swooped to within a couple dozen feet of the car; they noticed that its feet, folded back beneath the body, had a metallic luster. Then Vanderschoof fired, with a bang that almost deafened the rest. The bird seemed surprised rather than frightened or resentful. At the sound of the gun it bounded upward a few feet and then swung again, moving along parallel with the car and twisting its neck to take a good look at the passengers. The chance was too good to be missed; both Pappagourdas and Vanderschoof fired this time, steadying themselves against the motion of the car. One of the shots evidently went home, for a couple of feathers floated down, and the bird, with a series of ear-piercing squawks, spiralled down the side of the mountain toward the river-bank, three or four hundred feet below.
“Bull's eye!” yelled Pappagourdas. “Gimme the cigar! Let's stop the car and go get it.”
“What's the use,” said Stevens, “you couldn't eat it, anyway. Listen to him yell, would you?”
Above the sound of the motor the screeching of the wounded bird still reached them faintly from the bottom of the cliff.
“I think it's a damn shame to shoot up the poor thing,” said Marta Lami.
“Oh, he'll be all right,” declared Vanderschoof. “Don't believe we touched anything but one wing, and it'll just sit and eat ground-berries till it gets well.”
It was perhaps half an hour later, and the distant hills were beginning to acquire a fine powder of dusk when they saw the second bird—a rapidly moving speck, far behind them and to one side of the road. Vanderschoof saw it first and called the attention of the rest, but they quickly lost interest.
He continued to observe it. Were there two? He thought so, yet—. A moment later he was sure there was more than one, as the car breasted a rise and gave them a better view. They seemed to be following fast. The ridiculous idea that they meant to do something about their fallen comrade came to him, to be dismissed instantly. Yet the birds were certainly following them and he thought he made out a third, behind the others.
The car coasted down a long slope, crossed a bridge and began to go up a hairpin rise. Vanderschoof looked back. The birds were invisible; he looked again, in the right direction this time and saw them, so much larger and nearer that he cried out. The others ceased their low-voiced conversation at the sound of his voice. “What's the matter, papa?” asked the dancer.
“Those birds. Look.”
“Why it looks almost as though they were following us.”
She sat upright in the seat and squinted at them under an upraised hand. The queer birds were close enough now so that the difference between their fore-wings and the steadily beating hind wings could be made out.
“You don't suppose they could be mad at us?” she asked.
“Don't be foolish,” said Stevens, without turning around. “Birds aren't intelligent enough for that.” A long straight stretch lay before him and he let the car out. Vanderschoof, watching with a trace of anxiety, saw the birds also put on more speed. “They are following us,” he declared with conviction.
“Look,” said Marta Lami, “that one is carrying something, too.”
As she spoke, the bird, flying high, gained a position just above and ahead of the car, dropped the object and instantly wheeled off and down to one side. There was a heavy thud on the road ahead, and a big rock bounded and rolled a score of feet before the car.
Marta Lami screamed. Vanderschoof swore, with feeling. “Get out your guns and drive them off,” said Stevens. “You fools, why did you have to shoot at them in the first place?”
Before he had finished speaking Vanderschoof had his revolver out and was firing at the second of the birds, now swinging into position above them with another rock. He missed, but the bird, surprised, dropped its burden too soon, and they had the satisfaction of seeing it bounce among the trees at the right of the road.
“Keep after them, that's right,” said Stevens. “We're not far from the Point and we can get under cover there.”
Both the men in the back were shooting now—Vanderschoof slowly and with deliberate aim; Pappagourdas in a panic-stricken rafale at the third bird, which, higher than the others, paid not the slightest attention to them but jockeyed for position. Stevens began to twist the steering wheel—the car described a fantastic series of zigzags.
“What are they?” he asked. “I never saw anything like them.”
“I don't know,” replied Vanderschoof. (Bang!) “Like the condors (Bang!) I used to see in South America, only bigger.”
Crash! The third rock burst in a shower of fragments not ten feet away, one piece striking the windshield with a ping, and sending a long diagonal crack across it. The first of the three birds was swinging up again with another rock, screeching hoarse communications at the others.
Marta Lami had fallen silent. As the bird began to circle above them, picking its position, Pappagourdas suddenly ceased firing, with a curse. “Have you got any more bullets?” he asked. “Mine are all gone….” His voice broke suddenly, half-hysterical, “It is the cranes of Ibicos,” he cried.
The stone struck behind them. Evidently the bird had a healthy respect for Vanderschoof's aim, which had kept it at such a height that it could not aim accurately. But as the next stone missed they changed their tactics, screaming to each other. The third bird, whose turn it was to drop a stone, merely flew along parallel with them, high enough to be out of range, waiting for the return of the others. When they arrived, all three strung out in a line and released their rocks simultaneously. There was a resounding crash, the car reeled perilously on the edge of the steep road, then righted and drove on with a clattering bang. Looking over the side Vanderschoof could see where the big rock had struck the right running board, tearing a foot or two of it loose to trail on the road.
“Wait,” he cried, but Stevens shook his head.
They had a bit of luck at this point. The hunt for more stones or something of the kind delayed their enemies, and when they next saw the birds winging up behind them, the white classical lines of the West Point administration building already loomed ahead, clear in the gathering gloom.
Stevens turned in, swung the car around at the door, and halted it with screaming brakes, just as the first of the birds overhead overshot the mark and turned to come back. In an instant the banker was out of the car, dragging at Marta Lami's hand. Vanderschoof climbed numbly out the other side, and ran around the car toward the door of the building, but the Greek missed his footing where the running board should have been and fell prone, just as one of the birds dived down with a yell of triumph and dropped his stone accurately onto the struggling man.
“Run!” shouted Stevens.
“But—the Greek,” panted Vanderschoof as they climbed the steps.
“Hell with him. Or here—wait.” Stevens turned and thrust his fist through the glass upper portion of the door. Out in the dusk the three bird-forms were settling round their fallen foe. The flash of the banker's gun stabbed the night and was answered by a scream. Before he could take aim again, with a quick beat of wings, they were gone and when, daring greatly, he ran out a few moments later, he found that Pappagourdas was gone also.
He found the others on one of the benches in the outer office of the building, the girl with her face buried in her hands in an agony of fright and reaction. Vanderschoof, too old and cool a hand to give way in this fashion, looked up.
“What are they, Stevens?” he asked.
The Wall Street man shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I don't know,” he said. “Some new kind of high-power bird that developed while we were all being made into machines by that comet, I suppose. It's terrible…. They've got the Greek.”
“Can't we get after them? There ought to be airplanes here.”
“In this light? Can you fly one? I can't and I don't imagine the little girl here can.”
The “little girl” lifted her head. She had recovered. “What did we come to this joint for, anyhow?” she asked. “To hang crêpe on the chandeliers?”
The words had the effect of an electric shock.
“Why, of course,” said Stevens, “we did come here to see if we could find someone, didn't we?” and turning round he pushed open the door into the next room. Nothing.
“Wait,” he said. “Not much use trying to do anything tonight. We haven't any flashlights.”
“Aw, boloney,” said the dancer, “what do you want us to do? Sit here and count our fingers? Go on, big boy, find a garage, you can get a light from one of the cars.”
“Won't those birds see it?”
“You got a yellow streak a mile wide, haven't you? Birds sleep at night.”
Stevens took a half-unwilling step toward the door. “Let me come with you,” said Vanderschoof, rising.
“What's the matter, papa? You got a little yellow in you, too?”
He was dignified. “Not at all. Here I'll leave my gun with you, Miss Lami.”
“We'll be seeing you,” said Stevens, over his shoulder. “Don't worry.” And they were gone.
To the dancer their absence was endless. She would have given anything for the velvet kick of a good drink of gin—“but I suppose it would burn out my bearings,” she mused ruefully. Heavens, she must spend the rest of her days as a robot. In the fading light she ruefully contemplated the legs that had delighted the audiences of two continents, now become ingenious mechanical devices beyond the power of delighting anyone but their owner.
More clearly than the rest, she realized that very little was left of the old relation between the sexes. What would happen when the forceful Stevens made the discovery also? Probably he would make a thinking robot of her to serve his ambition. Well, she had chosen to go with them—they seemed to offer more amusement than the stuffy prigs of the colony….
What was that?
She listened intently. A subdued rattling, slightly metallic in character. It might be a rat—no, too mechanical. The men—probably it was them, or one of them, returning. She glanced out of the window. Not there. The sound again—not from outdoors, but behind her—within the room? She gripped the gun Vanderschoof had given her. Rattle, rattle. She wished furiously for a light.
The birds? No—birds sleep at night. Rattle, rattle. Persistently. She stood up, trying to pierce the gathering dimness. No, the birds would make more noise. They moved surely, with hoarse screams, as though they thought themselves the lords of the world. This sound was small, like the chatter of a mechanical rat. What new horror in this strange world might it not conceal? On slenderest tiptoes she backed cautiously across the rug toward the outer door. Better the chance of the birds than this unknown terror of the darkness.
Holding the gun before her firmly, she stepped back, back, feeling with one hand for the door. Her hand met its smooth surface, then clicked as the metallic joints came in contact with the doorknob. She paused, breathless. Rattle, rattle, went the small sound, undiscouraged.
With a sudden jerk she flung the door open and tumbled down the steps, half-falling, and as she fell, as though in answer to the metallic clang of her body on the stone, a long pencil of violet light sprang silently out from somewhere back in the hills, moved thrice across the sky and then faded as swiftly as it had come.
She felt the beam of a flashlight in her eyes, and got up, hearing her voice with a sort of inward surprise as it babbled something slightly incoherent about “things—in there.”
Stevens' voice, rough with irritation. “What is it you're saying?” He shook her arm. “Come on, little woman, pull yourself together.”
“There must be someone else around here,” remarked Vanderschoof, irrelevantly. “Did you see that searchlight?”
Marta Lami pulled herself up short, shaking loose the hand with a touch of the arrogance that had made her the queen of the night life of New York.
“Something in there gives me the heeby-jeebies,” she said, pointing. “Sounds like some guy shooting craps with himself.”
Stevens laughed, somewhat forcedly. “Well, it's nothing to be scared of, unless it's one of those damn birds, and if it was that he'd be taking us apart now. Come on!”
He flung the door open and plunged in, the flashlight flickering before him. Empty.
There was a door at the further end, next to the one they had investigated before. Toward this he strode, clump, clump on the carpet, and flung it open likewise. Empty again. No, there was something. The questing beam came to rest on a brown army tunic behind the desk, followed it up quickly to the face and there held. For, staring at them with mechanical fixity was another of those simulations of the human face in metal with which they were by now, so familiar. But this one was different.
For it held the balance between the walking cartoons of men in metal, such as they themselves were, and the ugly and solid statues they had seen strewn about the streets of New York. It had the metal bands across the forehead that they possessed, above which issued the same wiry hair, but in this case curiously interwoven as though subjected to some great heat and melted into a single mass. And the nose was all of solid metal, and the eyes—the eyes … were the eyes of a statue, giving back no lustrous reflexion of glass.
A moment they paused breathless, then stepped forward, and as the beam of light shifted when Stevens moved, rattle, rattle, came the sound Marta Lami had heard, and when the light went back those unseeing eyes had moved.
For a few seconds no one spoke. Then:
“Good God, it's alive!” said Vanderschoof in a hushed voice and a thrill of horror went through the others as they recognized the truth of his words.
Stevens broke the spell, stepping swiftly to the desk. “Can we do anything for you?” he asked. No movement from the metal figure—only that ghastly rustle of the eyes as they turned here and there in the fixed head, searching for the light they would never find again. The Wall Street man lifted one of the hands, tried to flex the arm that held it. It dropped back to the deck with a crash. Yet the metal of which they were composed seemed in itself to be as pliant as that of their own arms.
A feeling of wonderment mingled with the horror of the spectators.
“What happened to him?” asked Marta Lami in a whisper as though she feared awakening a sleeper.
Stevens shrugged. “What's happened to all of us? He's alive, I tell you. Let's … get out of here. I don't like it.”
“But where to?” asked Vanderschoof.
“Follow the Albany road,” said Stevens. “We ought to move on. If those birds come back in the morning—” he left the sentence unfinished.
“But what about this poor egg?” asked Marta Lami.
“Leave him,” said Stevens, then suddenly giving way, “there's too much mystery about this whole business around here. I'm going, I tell you, going. You can stay here till you rot if you like. I'm clearing out.”