'I can,' said a soft voice. All three officers turned, looked out the front door.
Shattuck, obviously bored and annoyed with the whole business, was standing and watching the milling soldiers. His son sat curled nearby on a swing bench. There was a kitten in his lap.
Chester had noticed the abundance of half-wild cats swarming about the ranch on his first arrival. Now, though, it occurred to him to wonder how the cats and farm fowl coexisted. He mentioned it to the rancher.
'That's what I'm talking about,' Shattuck said, pleased. 'It's just like the coyote.'
'What coyote?' Chester asked.
'Normally the dogs keep them well clear of the henhouse,' the rancher explained. 'But when it gets as cold as it's been lately, we let them sleep on the porch. I wouldn't put a good dog out in the snow any more than I would a good man.
'Those damn coyotes are smart enough to know when the dogs are tied up here instead of out back. That's when they come in quick and quiet, and I end up losing a hen a week. I'd rather do that than lose Cotton or Gin. They're part of the family.'
'I understand,' a new voice said. Chester saw that Jean Calumet had left the barn to join the little group on the porch. 'I've got three dogs myself, back home . . . Don't have the temperature problems you do, though. '
Shattuck examined the younger man with a fresh eye. 'Where you from, son?'
'Little town near Baton Rouge,' came the reply. Shattuck nodded as if that explained everything.
'About the coyote,' Chester reminded the rancher curiously.
'Yeah. We came out one morning, a couple of days ago, and found two of them, a male and his bitch, lying side by side just outside the henhouse. They'd dug under the fence I'd put up around it. So I guess they'd already been inside and were coming out again, with one bird between them.
'When they come out, something had stopped them clean. They just lay there in the yard. I thought they were dead at first, but you could see their eyes move and that they were still breathing. So David and I took them way out behind the tank. When we checked them yesterday evening, we saw where they'd gotten up and run off. I don't expect them to come back again. Something shook them up pretty bad.
'Now, this doctor here has been saying that something knocked these fellows down and frazzled them good without killing them. They look just like those two coyotes.'
'Make a note, Captain,' Chester told the special forces officer, 'of when we can expect them to come around again.'
'Yes, sir.'
Under the captain's direction, stretchers were used to ferry the motionless black-clad shapes to the waiting helicopters. When the whup-whup of many blades had faded to the south, Calumet spoke quietly to the rancher.
'You realize what this means, don't you; Mr. Shattuck?'
'Always did hate rhetorical questions,' came the piercing voice of Beth Shattuck. 'They're what pass for smarts in Hollywood. Ask a lot of questions that you can make other folk give the answers to and they think you're downright brilliant. Suppose you tell us what it means, good-lookin'.'
Slightly unsettled at the compliment, Calumet wrestled with a reply. 'It means,' he finally burst out, 'that that thing up m your hayloft is dangerous. It paralyzed a couple of animals, and now it's apparently done the same thing to a large group of armed men. I saw guns in that room. Did any of you hear a shot?'
'Can't say as we did,' Shattuck confessed. Calumet smiled grimly.
'That means that the craft-' He pointed toward the glowing object up in the barn. '-incapacitated nearly dozen experienced, no doubt ruthless individuals? whether they were directly in front of it or out on road, before any of them could resist in any way. I believe any reasonable legal authority, on learning that, would classify the device as dangerous and order it removed by the proper supervisory personnel.
'What will your Mr. Wheaton have to say about that?' he finished.
'Don't know,' Shattuck admitted.
'He was called back to San Francisco on business,' his wife informed them, 'but he'll be back if we need him, don't you worry. All we have to do is give him a call.'
'Give him a call?' Chester looked confused. 'I thought you didn't have a telephone out here.'
'We don't. We got a lady in Cisco takes phone calls for us and relays them to the ranch via CB radio. We can get messages out the same way. One of them sent Cable hotfooting out of here two days ago. Took the plane from Abilene to Dallas and then out to the coast.' Her expression turned angry.
'Now, that thing up there hasn't killed a soul. It didn't kill those coyotes, and I don't expect it really injured those men. But I can see how you could jumble it up in a court to where you'd make it look like the thing was dangerous.'
'Please believe me, Mrs. Shattuck,' Calumet pleaded, 'we don't want to take anything that's rightfully yours. You'll be suitably reimbursed just for finding it, I promise in the name of the government. In fact, in a few days you should be hearing from-'
'The President?' David blurted from the swing. 'Ah, he called two nights ago. It was something!'
'I see,' murmured Calumet, clearly surprised. 'Uh, what did he say?'
'Pretty much what you all have told us, Mr. Calumet,' Shattuck informed them. 'Went on about how important the proper study of that thing would be to the country. How I ought to do my patriotic duty and turn it over to you without causing anyone any trouble and about how, like you just said, the government would make things right by us.' He paused.
'I told him that if he wanted to make things right by us, he ought to take a look at how our taxes have gone up here for the past eight years.'
'What did he say?' inquired a fascinated Chester.
'Said he'd look into it. Sounded like he meant it, too.' The rancher pulled a pipe from a shirt pocket, commenced stuffing it with tobacco. At least, Chester was fairly sure it was tobacco.
'Reckon he's no better and no worse than any other Washington politician. They all sound sincere. Anyhow,' Shattuck finished, lighting up, 'I told him we'd cooperate.'
'You did!' Calumet seemed to rise off the ground, turned to shout toward the barn. 'Sarah, Perry-we can have it.'
'In four days time,' Beth Shattuck put in. Calumet turned back, blinking.
'In four days? Why four days?'
'Well,' she went on, since her husband was puffing away, 'we don't believe like some folks do in keeping the lights up until New Year's. It's Christmas we celebrate!. People think it's kind of funny of us to take them down so early, but then, they think we're kind of funny too.'
'That's for sure,' David put in, evidently relishing his family's notoriety.
'And they're right, for the most part,' his mother went on. 'For hereabouts, we are somethin' out of ordinary. Of course, we think everybody else around is a bit crazy, so there's a nice balance struck.'
'Four days,' Calumet grumbled. 'I suppose we can wait, but-' He indicated the empty living room '-what if more of their types show up?'
'Now, I have to admit, that's a problem,' agreed Shattuck, speaking around the stem of his pipe. 'Soviets, you think?'
'Possibly,' replied Chester guardedly. 'One of them, their leader, was our driver. They knew exactly what was going on all the time, through him. But we have nothing far to indicate who they were working for.' He indicated the fluorescent alien craft.
'That would have been worth anybody's trouble. Sure it might have been the Soviets, maybe the Chinese.' his surprise, he found he was chuckling. 'Or perhaps the French, or the Rockefeller Foundation, I don't know. Whoever it was will find out how monumentally unsuccessful they were.
'So if you don't mind, just as a precaution, we'll post a suitable guard around the ranch for the next four days.'
'You don't mean you're going to let them keep it up there?' a startled Calumet broke in.
'What difference will four days make, Mr. Calumet?' Chester wanted to know, speaking in a sharp military manner for the first time. He was feeling a little lightheaded. 'Remember the unfavorable publicity we could generate. We don't want Mr. Wheaton flying back from San Francisco with a planeload of panting photographers drooling at his heels.
