Our Children's Children

22

Tom Manning turned sideways from his desk and ran new paper into the typewriter. He wrote:

Third Lede Monster

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Global)-An alien beast is loose on the Earth tonight. No one knows where it is. It came out of a time tunnel in Virginia and disappeared after killing the crew of an artillery piece posted in front of the tunnel, placed to prevent the very thing that happened. A second beast came through with it, but this one was killed by the gun.

There are unconfirmed reports that several other people, in addition to the gun crew, were killed by the tunnel monster.

Eyewitnesses said that the beast was large and unbelievably quick in its movements. No one got a good look at it. "It moved too fast to really see it," said one eyewitness. Within seconds after emerging from the tunnel it disappeared. There is no clue as to where it may be now.

"Mr. Manning," said someone at his elbow. Manning looked up. A copy boy stood there. "Mr. Price's pictures," said the copy boy, handing them to him.

Manning looked at the one on top and drew his breath in sharply. "Jesus H. Christ," he said to himself aloud, "will you look at that!"

It was the sort of picture that some press flack would dream up to advertise a horror movie, but without the phoniness of such a drawing. The creature was springing, perhaps toward the gun crew, probably moving fast, for there was a sense of power and swiftness in it. Bentley's super-fast film had frozen it in all its ferocity — the bared mouthful of fangs, the talons gleaming in the fur of one uplifted paw, the nest of writhing tentacles positioned around its squat, thick neck. Its eyes shone wickedly and a thick ruff of fur around its neck stood up on end. The very shape of it was evil. It was beast, but more than beast. There was in it some quality that sent a shiver up one's spine — not a shiver of horror, but of outlandish, unreasoning, mindless fear.

Manning swung back to the desk and laid the pictures on its top. With a swipe of his hand, he fanned them out as one would fan a hand of playing cards. All of them were horrifying. A couple of them showed, somewhat less well than Manning would have liked, the shambles where the tunnel mouth had been, with the dead monster crumpled on top of the trampled human bodies.

"That goddamned Price," said Manning soulfully. "He never got a shot of the monster and the gun crew."