The Aliens [сборник]

Burt picked up the metal thing which was the weapon the creature had used for everything from the demonstration-murder of an oil-truck driver to the burning open of a small bank's safe. He was icy cold, and he had thought he could have no further emotional reactions, but his stomach turned at the sight of the movements of the thing in the street.

He put the weapon in his pocket. He started the car. He~ drove savagely away. By instinct he swerved to avoid hitting the writhing thing. It was not that he meant to spare it. In taking its weapon, he had destroyed it. But he felt an overwhelming. revulsion to touching it with anything-even the wheels of his car.

He roared away. But he could not help glancing behind~ in the rear-view mirror. The last glimpse he had of it showed it resuming human shape. When it was a bare speck in the mirror it was upraised on four stumpy projections, but the~ head-mask dangled emptily. It might be beginning to reform. arms and legs.

Burt jammed down the accelerator. He wanted to get away from there! Beside him, above the whistling of wind past the car's windows, he heard Norma's teeth chattering. Simply not having the alien in the car was enough to pro-. duce a completely fictitious feeling of safety. It was an enormous relief merely not to be near the monster any longer, True, Norma's legs-as she told Burt-had no sensation in~ them. She and Burt had both been left helpless while the alien opened the bank safe. Burt had been released from helplessness to carry loot. But Norma was still incapacitate.

"It'll be a hospital for you," said Burt grimly. "But the first need is to get as far away as possible from where we've marooned the thing. It hasn't got its weapon now. It has bide. But it's infernally intelligent and it could be deadly evil unarmed So we want to get away!"

Norma said quickly: "We shouldn't try to use the weapon to free me. It could, but we don't know how to use it."

Burt nodded. They were half an hour away from the place of their escape. The road was straight and empty before them. They were back in the foothills, and trees and hillsides flashed into view in the headlight rays and swept swiftly toward them, and then darted past and were gone. Burt brought out the weapon he'd picked up. He looked at it in the light of the instrument-board. It was completely cryptic. There was no handle designed for a human hand to grasp though the creature had been able to use its plastic human-seeming hands to hold and use it. It was flat and irregular in shape, and there were studs on both sides. They were recessed, and it was obviously from pressure upon different combinations of them that the instrument acted in different fashions-as a paralysis-beam or a heat-ray or-so the creature had said-could detonate as an atomic bomb. It would not be possible to guess in advance which studs would release Norma from her helplessness.

Burt put it away.

"When I get a chance I'm going to fix it so it can't be turned on accidentally."

He felt perfectly safe, but he had overlooked something. A human criminal parachuted among savages would be cock-of-the-walk only so long as he had modern weapons. If he were disarmed, he would need to hide. Burt inevitably thought of the alien as like a civilized man among primitives. He hadn't seen it, actually, except clothed and masked as a man. But the creature did not think of itself as a civilized man among savages. It had phrased its viewpoint with precision when it likened its view of men to Burt's view of rats and mice. Its attitude toward mankind was that of a man to rats. An armed human among intelligent rats would be at ease. Disarmed, he would be less at ease. But he would not hide. He.would try instantly and furiously to recover his weapons or make new ones. The alien would not try to hide because he was disarmed.

But Burt didn't happen to reason in that obvious fashion. He meant to drive the night through and get completely out of the area in which the thing must - he considered - conceal itself. He had evidence to demand instant belief and cooperation from the FBI. He had loot from a bank, and when the manner of its robbery was examined carefully, it would check with Burt's tale. The alien would have burned open a door, where a human would get in more easily. Even the burned-open safe would not appear a torch job when carefully looked over. There was the fact of the burned oil-truck. There was Norma's present condition. Above all, X-ray examination of the alien weapon would prove its non-human origin. A quiet and grim hunt would instantly be made for -the fugitive from space. It would be captured. Then the bargain Burt had offered would be forced upon it. It would tell whatever it knew that could be useful to humans. Or else.

Then Norma said shakily:

"I think my legs are coming to life again!"

Burt was not a particularly safe driver, for a while. He was desperately intent upon the symptoms of Norma's recovery from the paralysis-beam. He did not even notice when the car roared through a deep cut, past a place where the road's surface was seared with fire, and the rocky sidewalls were sooted, and the pass and weeds off the concrete were burned to gray ash. But the remains of the oil-truck had been taken away.