off the face of the moon, and again I saw the pods, row after row of them, lying evil and motionless at our feet. If we were caught, what about these pods? We had no right to waste ourselves! We were here – with the pods – and even though it was hopeless, even though it made capture an absolute certainty, we had to use ourselves against these pods. If there was any luck to be had, this was how it had to be used.
A minute passed before the first edge of the next wide bank of fog bit into the face of the moon. It covered it slowly, the light dimming, and then, once again, it was full dark, and we stood, and walked silently down the hill, into the monstrous field below us. The nearest building was the barn, and we hurried to it, occasionally brushing the dry, brittle surfaces of the great pods, stepping over the loose tile of the ditches between the rows.
I found the tractor gas just inside the open door, six great metal drums of it lined up along the wall on the dirt-packed floor, and the excitement flared up in me, and strength pulsed with my blood through my veins. This was futile, of course; there were hundreds of pods. But the chance to make a stand had to be taken. I shook two benzedrine tablets into Becky's hand, took a couple myself, and we choked them down. Then Becky helped me heave the first drum onto its side. It took me ten minutes, prowling that barn, lighting one match after another, to find the rusted wrench up on one of the low rafters. Then we rocked the big metal drum, got it rolling, and trundled it out through the door and down to the nearest of the tiled irrigation ditches. The drum in position, the hexagonal metal plug over the lip of the tile, I started the plug with the wrench, then turned it loose with my hand, the gasoline spurting through my fingers. Then the plug dropped out, and in a steady, rhythmic gurgle the gasoline poured into the ditch and began to flow sluggishly down the slant of the tiles. I wedged the drum in place with a clod of dirt, and left it.
Presently six drums of low-test farm gasoline lay side by side at the head of the irrigation ditches, and the first one was already empty. Ten minutes passed; we simply sat there, silently. Then the flow from the last of the drums ceased, except for a slow dripping sound, and I knelt beside the open ditch, the sharp reek of gasoline stinging at my eyes. I lit a match, dropped it into the still slow-flowing pool, and it promptly went out. I lit another, and this time brought it slowly down, till the bottom edge of flame touched the shiny surface; I could see my face reflected in the pool. The flame caught, a little flicker of blue that grew into a circle, half-dollar size for a moment, then swelling to the shape and diameter of a saucer. And then it flared, puffed up smokily so that I jerked my head back, and the flame – red spikes mixing with the blue now – moved down the tiled ditch, widening to its edges, and then in another instant it began to race.
The heat grew and multiplied on itself, the flames began to sound – a liquid crackle – and they reddened and shot suddenly high, and the black smoke began to roll. Standing now, we followed the line of flame with our eyes, watched it climbing in height, running down that field in parallel lines, shooting down connecting ditches with a subdued roaring sound, and the black silhouettes of the pods were suddenly sharp against the smoky red flame. The first pod burst into a round torch of pale, almost incandescent flame, the smoke white; then the second, then the fourth and fifth together, then the third. And now the soft, explosive puffs of pods bursting into flame came steady as a clock tick, one after another down the rows, flaring into mushrooming incandescence, and the sudden sound of hundreds of voices moving toward us through the wheat washed at our ears like surf.
For perhaps a minute I thought we had won, and then of course the gasoline – only six drums of it flowing into that great field – burned out. One after another, the racing red hues of flame slowed and stopped, dwindling, at all the points where the last trickles of gasoline had flowed into the ground. The rows of burning torches still glowed, but the flames were redder, the white smoke increasing, and no new ones were catching. The flames – higher than a man at their peak – were suddenly only waist-high, sinking rapidly, and the red lines of fire, once solid and bright, were broken. At almost the same moment, the flames, covering perhaps half an acre of field, subsided to flickering inch-high tongues – and the hundreds of advancing figures were upon us.
They hardly touched us; there was no anger, no emotion in them. Stan Morley, the jeweller, simply laid a hand loosely on my arm, and Ben Ketchel stood beside Becky, in case she should try to run, while the others, gathering around us, looked at us without curiosity.
The two of us, then, in the midst of a straggling mob of hundreds of people, began slowly climbing the hill we'd come down. No one held us, there was very little talk, no excitement; we simply plodded, all of us, on up that hill. One arm around Becky's waist, my other hand on her elbow, I helped her as well as I could, my eyes on the ground, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, except how tired I was.
And then – the vast low murmur of hundreds of voices all around us sounded again, and I lifted my head. Even as I looked, the murmur stopped abruptly, and I saw that everyone had stopped; they stood stock still, facing the little valley we'd climbed from, and their faces were raised to the sky in the moonlight.
Now I followed their gaze, and in the clear, thin light of the moon I saw what they'd seen. The sky above us was peppered with dots. More than dots; a great awesome swarm of dark, circular blobs drifted, ascending slowly and steadily into the sky. A last trail of mist left the face of the moon, the sky brightened, and I watched the great pods, the field they had come from almost empty now, steadily rising. Then the last few of the pods still on the ground actually moved, leaning to one side to snap the brittle stems that held them. Then they, too, rose with the others, and we watched the great swarm, slowly diminishing in size, never touching or bumping, climbing steadily higher and higher into the sky and the spaces beyond it.
Chapter twenty-one
Revelation is the word for a vast complex of thought that reveals itself to your mind instantaneously, with the enormous impact of absolute truth. Standing motionless with Becky, my mouth agape, head far back, staring up at that incredible sight in the night sky, I knew a thousand things it would take minutes to explain, and others I can never explain in a lifetime.
Quite simply, the great pods were leaving a fierce and inhospitable planet. I knew it, utterly and instantaneously, and a wave of terrible exultation, so violent it left me trembling, swept through my body; because I knew Becky and I had played our part in what was now happening. We hadn't, and couldn't possibly have been – I saw this now – the only souls who had stumbled and blundered onto what had been happening in Santa Mira. There'd been others, of course, individuals, and little groups, who had done what we had – who had fought, struggled, and simply refused to give up. Some others may have won, many had lost, but all of us who had not been caught and trapped without a chance had fought implacably, and a fragment of a wartime speech moved through my mind:
Did this incredible alien life form 'think' this or 'know' it? Probably not, I thought, or anything our minds could conceive. But it had sensed it; it could tell with certainty that this planet, this little race, would never receive them, and would never yield. And Becky and I, in refusing to surrender, but instead fighting their invasion to the end, giving up any hope of escape in order to destroy even a few of them, had provided the final and conclusive demonstration of that unchangeable fact. And so now, to
I don't know how long we stood looking up at the sky. Presently the tiny dots became specks and a moment later, blinking my eyes against the strain, I stared again, and they were gone.
For a time I simply held Becky close, squeezing her to me so hard I realized I could hurt her. Then I was aware of the murmur again – quieter now, and more subdued – of the voices around us. We looked up, and they were moving, past us and beyond us, on up the hill back to the doomed town they had come from. They straggled by, their faces bland and emotionless, a few of them glancing at us as they passed, most of them not even interested now. Then Becky and I walked down the hill, passing through them, each of us dirty, our clothes smeared and wrinkled, and we limped, shuffling through the grass and weeds, one shoe off, one shoe on, in awkward and stumbling victory. Silently we passed the last of the figures around us, and then we were walking across the empty barren fields, toward the highway and the rest of our kind.
We stayed, that night, with the Belicecs. We found them in their home, where they'd been held, fighting sleep to the end – released now and free. Theodora was asleep in a chair; Jack sat staring out of his great front
