The Best Of Lester Del Rey Part 20

There was a dark, tight fear in her eyes as she glanced back to the street. "I thought-maybe the organ ..."

He opened it for her and found the switch. He started to explain the controls, but the smile on her lips warned him that it was unnecessary. Her calloused fingers ran over the stops, and she began playing, softly as if to herself. He went back to one of the pews, listening. For two years he had blamed the organ, but now he knew that there was no fault with the instrument, but only with its player before. The music was sometimes strange for his church, but he liked it.

A couple who had moved into the old Surrey farm beyond the town came in, holding hands, as if holding each other up. And a minute later, Buzz Williams stumbled in and tried to tiptoe down the aisle to where Amos sat. Since his parents had died, he'd been the town problem. Now he was half-drunk, though without his usual boisterousness.

"I ain't got no car and I been drinking," he whispered. "Can I stay here till maybe somebody comes or something?"

Amos sighed, motioning Buzz to a seat where the boy's eyes had centered.

Somewhere, there must.be a car for the four waifs who had remembered G.o.d when everything else had failed them. If one of the young couple could drive, and he could locate some kind of vehicle, it was his duty to see that they were sent to safety.

Abruptly, the haven of the church and the music came to an end, leaving him back hi the real world-a curiously unreal world now.

He was heading down the steps, trying to remember whether the Jameson boy had taken his rebuilt flivver when a panel truck pulled up in front of the church.

Doc Miller got out, wheezing as he squeezed through the door.

He took in the situation at a glance. "Only four strays, Amos? I thought we might have to pack them in." He headed for Buzz. "I've got a car outside,Buzz. Gather up the rest of this flock and get going!"

"I been drinking," Buzz said, his face reddening hotly.

"Okay, you've been drinking. At least you know it, and there's no traffic problem. Head for Salina and hold your speed under forty and you'll be all right." Doc swept little Angela Anduccini from the organ and herded her out, while Buzz collected the couple. "Get going, all of you!"

They got, with Buzz enthroned behind the wheel and Angela beside him. The town was dead. Amos closed the organ and began shutting the doors to the church.

"I've got a farm tractor up the street for us, Amos," Doc said at last. "I almost ran out of tricks. There were more fools than you'd think who thought they could hide it out right here. At that, I probably missed some. Well, the tractor's nothing elegant, but it can take back roads no car would handle. We'd better get going. Nellie has already gone, with a; full load."

Amos shook ibis head. He had never thought it out, but the decision had been in his mind from the beginning. Ruth still lay waiting a decent burial. He could no more leave her now than when she was alive. "You'll have to go alone, Doc."

"I figured." The doctor sighed, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I'd remember to my dying day that believers have more courage than an atheist!

Nope, we're in this together. It isn't sensible, but that's how I feel. We'd better put out the candles, I guess."

Amos snuffed them reluctantly, wondering how he could persuade the other to leave. His ears had already caught the faint sounds of shooting, indicating that the aliens were on their way.

The uncertain thumping of a laboring motor sounded from the street, then wheezed to silence. There was a shout, a pause, and the motor caught again. It seemed to run for ten seconds before it backfired, and was still.

Doc opened one of the doors. In the middle of the street, a man was pus.h.i.+ng an ancient car while his wife steered. But it refused to start again. He grabbed for tools, threw up the hood, and began a frantic search for the trouble.

"If you can drive a tractor, there's one half a block down," Doc called out.

The man looked up, snapped one quick glance behind him, and pulled the woman hastily out of the car. In almost no time, the heavy roar of the tractor sounded. The man revved it up to full throttle and tore off down the road, leaving Doc and Amos stranded. The sound of the aliens was clearer now, and there was some light coming from beyond the bend of the street.

There was no place to hide, except in the church. They found a window where the paint on the imitation stained gla.s.s was loose and peeled it back enough for a peephole. The advance scouts of the aliens were already within view.

They were das.h.i.+ng from house to house. Behind them, they left something that sent up clouds of glowing smoke that seemed to have no fire connected to its brilliance. At least, no buildings were burning.

Just as the main group of aliens came into view, the door of one house burst open. A scrawny man leaped out, with his fat wife and fatter daughter behind him. They raced up the street, tearing at their clothes and scratching frantically at their reddened skin.

Shouts sounded. All three jerked, but went racing on. More shots sounded. At first, Amos thought it was incredibly bad shooting. Then he realized that it was even more unbelievably good marksmans.h.i.+p. The aliens were shooting at the hands first, then moving up the arms methodically, wasting no chance for torture.

For the first time in years, Amos felt fear and anger curdle solidly in his stomach. He stood up, feeling his shoulders square back and his head come up as he moved toward the door. His lips were moving in words that he only half understood. "Arise, O Lord; O G.o.d, lift up Thine hand; forget not the humble.Wherefore doth the wicked contemn G.o.d? He hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not requite it. Thou hast seen it, for Thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with Thy hand: the poor commiteth himself unto Thee; Thou art the helper of the fatherless. Break Thou the arm of the wicked and the evil ones; seek out their wickedness till Thou find none . . ."

"Stop it, Amos!" Doc's voice rasped harshly in his ear. "Don't be a fool! And you're misquoting that last verse!"

It cut through the fog of his anger. He knew that Doc had deliberately reminded him of his father, but the trick worked, and the memory of his father's anger at misquotations replaced his cold fury. "We can't let that go on!"

Then he saw it was over. The aliens had used up their targets. But there was the sight of another wretch, unrecognizable in half of his skin . . .

Doc's voice was as sick as Amos felt. "We can't do anything. I can't understand a race smart enough to build star s.h.i.+ps and still stupid enough for this. But it's good for our side, in the long run. While our armies are orga- nizing, the snakes are wasting time on this. And it makes our resistance get Rougher, too."

The aliens didn't confine their sport to humans. They worked just as busily on a huge old tomcat they found. And all the corpses were being loaded onto a big wagon pulled by twenty of the creatures.

The aliens obviously had some knowledge of human behavior. At first they had pa.s.sed up all stores and had concentrated on living quarters. The scouts had pa.s.sed on by the church without a second glance. But they moved into a butcher shop at once, to come out again carrying meat, which was piled on the wagon with the corpses.

Now a group was a.s.sembling before the church, pointing up toward the steeple where the bell was. Two of them shoved up a mortar of some sort. It was pointed quickly and a load was dropped in. There was a m.u.f.fled explosion, and the bell rang sharply, its pieces rattling down the roof and into the yard below.

Another shoved the mortar into a new position, aiming it straight for the door of the church. Doc yanked Amos down between two pews. "They don't like churches, d.a.m.n it! A fine spot we picked. Watch out for splinters!"

The door smashed in and a heavy object struck the altar, ruining it. Amos groaned at the shattering sound it made.

There was no further activity when they slipped back to their peepholes. The aliens were on the march again, moving along slowly. In spite of the delta planes, they seemed to have no motorized ground vehicles, and the wagon moved on under the power of the twenty green-skinned things, coming directly in front of the church.

Amos stared at it in the flickering light from the big torches burning in the hands of some of the aliens. Most of the corpses were strangers to him. A few he knew. And then his eyes picked out the twisted, distorted upper part of Ruth's body, her face empty in death's relaxation.

He stood up wearily, and this time Doc made no effort to stop him. He walked down a line of pews and around the wreck of one of the doors. Outside the church, the air was still hot and dry, but he drew a long breath into his lungs. The front of the church was in the shadows, and no aliens seemed to be watching him.

He moved down the stone steps. His legs were firm now. His heart was pounding heavily, but the clot of feelings that rested leadenly in his stomach had no fear left in it. Nor was there any anger left, nor any purpose.

He saw the aliens stop and stare at him, while a jabbering began among them.

He moved forward with the measured tread that had led him down the aisle when he married Ruth. He came to the wagon and put his hand out, lifting one of Ruth's dead-limp arms back across her body."This is my wife," he told the staring aliens quietly. "I am taking her home with me."

He reached up and began trying to move the other bodies away from her. Without surprise, he saw Doc's arms moving up to help him, while a steady stream of whispered profanity came from the doctor's lips.

Amos hadn't expected to succeed. He had expected nothing.

Abruptly, a dozen of the aliens leaped for the two men. Amos let them overpower him without resistance. For a second, Doc struggled; then he too relaxed while the aliens bound them and tossed them onto the wagon.

4.

He hath bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his right hand as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion: he poured- out his fury like fire.

The Lord was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

The Lord hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary, he hath given up into the hand of this -enemy the walls of her palaces; they have made a noise in the house of the Lord, as in the day of a solemn feast.

Lamentations 2:4, 5,7 THE BOOK OF THE JEWS.

Amos' first reaction was one of dismay at the rain of his only good suit. He struggled briefly on the substance under him, trying to find a better spot. A minister's suit might be old, but he could never profane the altar with such stains as these. Then some sense of the ridiculousness of his worry reached his mind, and he relaxed as best he could.

He had done what he had to do, and it was too late to regret it. He could only accept the consequences of it now, as he had learned to accept everything else G.o.d had seen fit to send him. He had never been a man of courage, but the strength of G.o.d had sustained him through as much as most men had to bear. It would sustain him further.

Doc was facing him, having flopped around to lie near him. Now the doctor's lips twisted into a crooked grin. "I guess we're in for it now. But it won't last forever, and maybe we're old enough to die fast. At least, once we're dead, we won't know it, so there's no sense being afraid of dying."

If it were meant to provoke him into argument, it failed. Amos considered it a completely hopeless philosophy, but it was better than none, probably. His own faith in the hereafter left something to be desired; he was sure of immortality and the existence of heaven and h.e.l.l, but he had never been able to picture either to his own satisfaction.

The wagon had been swung around and was now being pulled up the street, back toward Clyde, Amos tried to take his mind off the physical discomforts of the ride by watching the houses, counting them to his own. They drew near it finally, but it was Doc who spotted the important fact. He groaned. "My car!"

Amos strained his eyes, staring into the shadows through the glare of the torches. Doc's car stood at the side of the house, with its left front door open! Someone must have told Anne that he hadn't left, and she'd forgotten her anger with him to swing back around the alien horde to save him!

He began a prayer that they might pa.s.s on without the car being noticed, and it seemed at first that they would. Then there was a sudden cry from the house, and he saw her face briefly at a front window. She must have seen Doc and himself lying on the wagon!

He opened his mouth to risk a warning, but it was too late. The door of the house swung back, and she was standing on the front steps, lifting Richard's rifle to her shoulder. Amos' heart seemed to hesitate with the tension of his body. The aliens still hadn't noticed. If she'd only wait ...

The rifle cracked. Either by luck or some skill he hadn't suspected, one ofthe aliens dropped. She was running forward now, throwing another cartridge into the barrel. The gun barked again, and an alien fell to the ground, bleating horribly.

There was no attempt at torture this tune, at least. The leading alien finally jerked out a tubelike affair from a scabbard at his side and a single sharp explosion sounded. Anne jerked backward as the heavy slug hit her forehead, the rifle spinning from her dead hands.

The wounded alien was trying frantically to crawl away. Two of his fellows began working on him mercilessly, with as little feeling as if he had been a human. His body followed that of Anne toward the front of the wagon, just beyond Amos' limited view.

She hadn't seemed hysterical this time, Amos thought wearily. It had been her tendency to near hysteria that had led to his advising Richard to wait, not the difference in faith. Now he was sorry he'd had no chance to understand her better.

Doc sighed, and there was a peculiar pride under the thickness of his voice.

"Man," he said, "has one virtue which is impossible to any omnipotent force like your G.o.d. He can be brave. He can be brave beyond sanity for another man or for an idea. Amos, I pity your G.o.d if man ever makes war on Him!"

Amos flinched, b'ut the blasphemy aroused only a shadow of his normal reaction. His mind seemed numbed. He lay back, watching black clouds scudding across the sky almost too rapidly. It looked unnatural, and he remembered how often the accounts had mentioned a tremendous storm that had wrecked or hampered the efforts of human troops. Maybe a counterattack had begun, and this was part of the alien defense. If they had some method of weather control, it was probable. The moonlight was already blotted out by the clouds.

Half a mile farther on, there was a shout from the aliens, and a big tractor chugged into view, badly driven by one of the aliens who had obviously only partly mastered the human machine. With a great deal of trial and error, it was backed into position and coupled to the wagon. Then it began churning along at nearly thirty miles an hour, while the big wagon bucked and bounced behind. From then on, the ride was a physical h.e.l.l. Even Doc groaned at some of the b.u.mps, though his bones had three times more padding than Amos could boast.

Mercifully, they slowed when they reached Clyde. Amos wiped the blood off his bitten lip and managed to wriggle to a position where most of the bruises were on his upper side. Beyond the town there was a flood of brilliant lights where the alien rockets stood, and he could see a group of strange machines driven by nonhu-man creatures busy-unloading the great s.h.i.+ps. But the drivers of the machines looked totally unlike the other aliens.

One of the alien trucks swung past them, and he had a clear view of the creature steering it. It bore no resemblance to humanity. There was a conelike torso, covered with a fine white down, ending in four thick stalks to serve as legs. From its broadest point, four sinuous limbs spread out to the truck controls. There was no head, but only eight small tentacles waving above it.

He saw a few others, always in control of machines, and no machines being handled by the green-skinned people, as they pa.s.sed through the ghost city that had been Clyde. Apparently there were two races allied against humanity, which explained why such barbarians could come in s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ps. The green ones must be sun-ply the fighters, while the downy cones were the technicians. From their behavior, though, the pilots of the planes must be recruited from the fighters.

Clyde had grown since he had been there, unlike most of the towns about. There was a new supermarket just down the street from Amos' former church, and the tractor jolted to a stop in front of it. Aliens swarmed out and began carrying the dead loot from the wagon into big food lockers, while two others liftedDoc and Amos.

But they weren't destined for the comparatively merciful death of freezing in the lockers. The aliens threw them into a little cell that had once apparently been a cas.h.i.+er's cage, barred from floor to ceiling. It made a fairly efficient jail, and the lock that clicked shut as the door closed behind them was too heavy to be broken.

There was already one occupant-a medium-built young man whom Amos finally recognized as Smithton,-the Clyde dentist. His shoulders were shaking with sporadic sobs as he sat huddled in one corner. He looked at the two arrivals without seeing them. "But I surrendered," he whispered to himself. "I'm a prisoner of war. They can't do it. I surrendered . . ."

A fatter-than-usual alien, wearing the only clothes Amos had seen on any of them, came waddling up to the cage, staring in at them, and the dentist wailed off into silence. The alien drew up his robe about his chest and scratched his rump against a counter without taking his eyes off them. "Humans," he said in a grating voice, but without an accent, "are peculiar. No standardization."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned!" Doc swore. "Englis.h.!.+"

The alien studied them with what might have been surprise, lifting his ears.

"Is the gift of tongues so unusual, then? Many of the priests of the Lord G.o.d Almighty speak all the human languages. It's a common miracle, not like levitation."

"Fine. Then maybe you'll tell us what we're being held for?" Doc suggested.

The priest shcugged. "Food, of course. The grethi eat any kind of meat-even our people-but we have to examine the laws to find whether you're permitted.

If you are, we'll need freshly killed specimens to sample, so we're waiting with you."

"You mean you're attacking us for food?"

The priest grunted harshly. "No! We're on a holy mission to exterminate you.

The Lord Almighty commanded us to go down to Earth where abominations existed and to leave no living creature under your sun."

He turned and waddled out of the store, taking the single remaining torch with him, leaving only the dim light of the moon and reflections from farther away.

Amos dropped onto a stool inside the cage. "They had to lock us in a new building instead of one I know," he said. "If it had been the church, we might have had a chance."

"How?" Doc asked sharply.

Amos tried to describe the pa.s.sage through the big unfinished bas.e.m.e.nt under the church, reached through a trap door. Years before, a group of teen-agers had built a sixty-foot tunnel into it and had used it for a private club until the pa.s.sage had been discovered and bricked over from outside. The earth would be soft around the bricks, however. Beyond, the outer end of the tunnel opened in a wooded section, which led to a drainage ditch that in turn connected with the Republican River. From the church, they could move to the stream and slip down that without being seen. There was even an alley-or had been one-behind the store that would take them to the shadow of the trees around the church.

Doc's fingers were fumbling with the lock as Amos finished. He grunted and reached for his pocket, taking out a few corns. "They don't know much about us, Amos, if they expect to hold us here, where the lock is fastened from the inside. Feel those screws."

Amos fumbled over the lock surface. There were four large screws on the back of the lock, holding it to the door. The cas.h.i.+er's cage had been designed to keep others out, not to serve as a jail. At best, he thought, it was a poor chance. Yet was it merely chance? It seemed more like the hand of G.o.d to him.

"More like the stupidity of the aliens, to my mind," Doc objected. He was testing the screws with a quarter now. He nodded in some satisfaction, then swpre. "d.a.m.n it, the quarter fits the slot, but I can't get enough leverage toturn the screw. Hey, Smithton or whatever your name is, pull out that money drawer and knock the bottom out. I need a couple of narrow slats."

Smithton had been praying miserably-a childhood prayer for laying himself down to sleep. But he succeeding in kicking out splinters from the drawer bottom.

Doc selected two and clamped them around the quarter, trying to hold them in place while he turned them. It was rough going, but the screws turned. Three came loose finally, and the lock rotated on the fourth until they could force the cage open.

Doc stopped and pulled Smithton to him. "Follow me, and do what I do. No talking, no making a separate jump, or I'll break your neck. All right!"

The back door was locked, but from the inside. They opened it to a backyard filled with garbage. The alley wasn't as dark as it should have been, since open lots beyond let some light come through. They hugged what shadows they could until they reached the church hedge. There they groped along, lining themselves up with the side office door. There was no sign of aliens.

Amos broke ahead of the others, being more familiar with the church. It wasn't until he had reached the door that he realized it could have been locked; it had been kept that way part of the time. He grabbed the handle and forced it back-to find it unlatched.

For a second, he stopped to thank the Lord for their luck. Then the others were with him, crowding into the little kitchen where social suppers were prepared. He'd always hated those functions, but now he blessed them for providing a hiding place that gave them time to find their way.

There were sounds in the church, and odors, but none that seemed familiar to Amos. Something made the back hairs of his neck p.r.i.c.kle. He took off his shoes and tied them around his neck, and the others followed suit.

The way to the trap door lay down a small hall, across in front of the altar, and into the private office on the other side.