The Aliens [сборник]

He nursed his car around a curve engineered for forty miles an hour. He was doing better than seventy. The road became a straightaway and,the speedometer needle climbed higher, higher, and higher yet

Norma said faintly: "The filling-station man-"

"I think," said Burt grimly, "it will kill him. It will have to wait until another car comes. Then it will take that to follow us. It will kill the people… It has to catch us. We have its weapon!"

"But how-" chattered Norma, "h-how did it know-?"

Burt said bitterly: "It knows all my memories. It can work out how I'll think. It can figure out the choices I'll make. What I'll do-where I'll go.-whether I stay on this road or dodge aside…"

The car went roaring onward through the night. Trees, hillsides, open fields, appeared for an instant and were gone.

A long time later, winking headlights appeared behind.

They were not often visible. They blinked into view and vanished again. Sometimes they were not seen for minutes on end.'

When they reappeared, though, they were always a little nearer.

They, turned their car again, and again, and yet again.

Norma finally grasped the necessity of introducing randomness into their choice of possible paths. She said, "Right" or "left" or "straight ahead" when time for a new choice turned up. A long time later they drove beside a rushing, foaming mountain stream, under trees which arched completely over the narrow highway. Now and again the headlights glared out over the speeding water. Now and again they could look up and see vast mountain-flanks silhouetted against the starfilled sky overhead. The road curved and climbed steeply, and they were riding into a very small town indeed, and there was a barrier with a red lantern on it, and half a dozen cars bunched beyond it, and people standing about. A state trooper flagged them to a stop. His band was grimly at his pistol-holster until he had peered into the car and had seen both Burt's and Norma's faces.

"All traffic's stopped," he said curtly. "There's a maniac running loose in a car. Roads aren't safe. You'll be all right here Stick around." '

Burt nodded, and steered the car to a place among the others. He stopped it. Norma said in a whisper:

"Should we say anything?"

"No," Burt told her. "What we have to say wouldn't be believed here. But it might reach the newspapers. We'd be suspected of mania-especially with that bank loot in the back! We talk to the FBI and nobody else."

He looked keenly out at the people from the other stopped cars. There were a dozen or more, talking uneasily in groups.

Now and again a voice came abruptly from the short-wave set in the trooper's car. That would be state police headquarters.

It was two-thirty in the morning, and very cool. The town was a very small one indeed-no more than twenty or thirty houses and two stores. But two highways crossed in it, and the state trooper was halting all traffic on both. Burt considered. He got out to learn the news. Norma came with They listened. The waiting motorists talked in hushed tones. They told each other, over and over, the grisly tale of murder. The maniac had started his career when he killed a filling-station attendant in a small town.' Somebody'd just learned that the bank had been robbed there! The dead motorist's wife had described the maniac as pale as death, with glittering eyes and possessed of incredible strength. Thirty miles east the maniac had gone into a service area, killed a diner-cook and a gas attendant, and then waited for another car to turn in. Four men were in the car. The maniac killed two, crippled a third, and the fourth fled into the darkness. The survivors' description of the maniac-who had gone away eastward in their car-confirmed the' first account. One of them used a telephone in the diner to report the atrocity. Four dead there, one injured. There was further alerting of all state police-cars."

A trooper found a car abandoned. It was the one taken from the four men of whom two had been killed. It had run, out of gas. The bodies of a man and woman were found nearby. Apparently they had stopped to offer help, the maniac had killed them, and then it had gone on in their car. When they heard where this last event had happened, Burt and Norma tensed. They'd turned off the main highway. The alien had followed, infallibly. Burt had made the decision to turn The alien had made the same decision