Virus H

It can’t happen to us — but, brother, it’s going to. It has started. Walesville, Ohio, 30 miles from Portsmouth, was the first one. It will take a hell of a while because it’s a thorough job. It might not get to you for years. But it’s coming.

There were a little over 14 thousand people in Walesville. Plus, of course, those who were caught on their way through.

I’ve seen it. I don’t know when we’ll be printing pictures of it. But we probably will. And it will give you a hell of a jolt. I flew over Hiroshima back in September of ’45. I covered the Bengal famine in ’44 for AP. I once saw a pretty girl jump from a hotel window 23 stories above the concrete sidewalk. But I have seen Walesville. Compared to that, everything else I have ever seen has been like looking into the heart of a daffodil.

Just think of the arrogant stupidity of even our theories about the look and design of alien spacecraft — or about the construction of alien forms of life themselves. We assumed three-dimensional vehicles and three-dimensional forms of life.

Three years ago I left the Trib and went to Washington as a civil service A.T. 11. Administrative Technician. That’s a smoke-screen designation which means public-relations expert. Fourteen thousand a year. Up until a couple of weeks ago it was a fairly undemanding job. I put a high shine on some brass, put some sugar coating on some new agricultural regulations, made a few other bills more palatable.

Three weeks ago last Monday I was taken off a dull job and shunted over to the Pentagon. The Emergency Committee had just been formed by secret order of the President. An obscure young Air Force Major General named Klippe was chairman. He’d had something to do at one time with that saucer situation. And he had a good technical background. An extremely bright apple. There were five other men on the committee. Hassling, from the Institute of Advanced Studies, looking like a giant sloth. Ratty-looking little gray-haired Dr. Grinder from Cal Tech. Cold-eyed, tomb-faced Senator Swyth. Rear Admiral John Paul Plover of the CIA, incongruous tricky aluminum pipe stuck in his Boston bull mug. And lean one-legged Brigadier General Max Marker, strategy expert from the General Staff and Command School.

Klippe knew me, and he introduced me and explained my function. I was surveyed with the usual stony skepticism. They never love you until they need you. With various aides and technicians the committee staff totaled about 15. We were all gathered in a big conference room. Klippe had just started when I came in. He went back to the beginning.

“There’s no need to caution any of you people about security. You’re all cleared for top secret. This project is top secret and important.”

“It must be,” Grinder said dryly. “Military escort to the airport. I have not even a toothbrush.”

That brought a mild laugh. But Klippe didn’t look as if he had ever smiled in his life or ever would again.

“Briefly, gentlemen, here is the reason why this Emergency Committee has been brought together. A strange phenomenon has occurred near Walesville, Ohio. Original reports were not believed. A tongue-in-the-cheek article appeared in the Walesville paper. One of the wire services picked it up, gave it limited coverage. An Air Force officer investigated. He reported to me the day before yesterday, in the evening. I was at the spot at dawn yesterday. I had an audience with the President early yesterday morning. Regulars have been flown there and the area is blocked off. Rigid censorship has been imposed. We all leave for the spot by plane in half an hour.”

“I am afraid I will have to follow along later, General,” Senator Swyth said in his sepulchral voice.

“I am afraid, Senator, that you will have to come with us. It is the President’s wish.”

Swyth looked annoyed. “Just what is the nature of this — phenomenon?”

“I will not attempt to describe it. I will merely say, gentlemen, that it is an area where most of the fundamental laws of nature, as we know them, seem to be suspended and altered in random, unpredictable fashion.” There was a silence during which the stenotype operator clicked out his last few words. I looked at the technical experts, Hassling and Grinder. I saw sudden intense interest. It is an attribute of the large scale mind that it can achieve a suspension of disbelief without undue effort. Marker and Admiral Plover looked puzzled.

“It can be something new under the sun,” Klippe said. “It can be a weapon. It can be gone when we get there. The committee represents science, intelligence, defense and government. The President wants to know what it is, and wants valid recommendations as to what to do about it.”

It was not gone when we got there. Our military sedans were passed through the roadblock. It was a mile down a country road, in a pasture. The two farm families in the blockaded area had been evacuated. We all looked toward it as the light colonel in charge of the battalion reported to Klippe.

“No change, sir. The area hasn’t shrunk or grown any. The same screwy things go on, sir.” Grinder, purposeful as a ferret, had started to crawl between the rusty strands of the farmer’s fence. “Hey, you!” the light colonel shouted. Grinder paid no heed.

“Let him go,” Klippe said. “We’ll all go in and take a closer look.”

It was an area about 200 yards long, 100 yards wide and 50 yards high. There was an odd sheen to the air within that area. Things beyond it suffered subtle distortion. The limits were fuzzy rather than clear cut. It was a place that was just... not right. You could sense that. We were all quiet. You had the feeling that you should hear a sustained note of eerie music. But the day was warm and quiet. I heard wind in the leaves and a brook somewhere nearby.

Rocks floated aimlessly within the shining area. Some of them were half the size of a sedan. They moved about without purpose, like peas in boiling water, though much more slowly. From time to time one of them would fall heavily to the earth as though it had hit some pocket. Leaves and twigs and bits of grass floated in the area too. They would fall also, and just as quickly and solidly as the rocks. They fell as if they were in a vacuum.

“How did that soldier get in there!” Klippe snapped.

I hadn’t seen the body at first. It floated as did the rocks. It was a badly misshapen body, doubtless from the many times it had fallen. When a rock would fall it would imbed itself partially in the ground. After a minute or so it would begin to move, then drift free and join the others. When rocks touched in the air they rebounded without sound. When they fell they fell without sound.

The colonel looked uncomfortable. “I think it started bothering him. He wasn’t a very stable type, sir. It happened late yesterday, at dusk. He started yelling and ran toward it. He seemed to bounce off it a couple of times. Two other men nearly reached him but he... got through.”

“What happened to him then?” Hassling said.

“He... floated. I think he died immediately. We tried to get him out but we couldn’t reach him. We shoved a long pole in there with a grapple lashed to the end.”

“It went in easily?”

“Yes. But it... bent. I thought it was refraction, like when you put a stick into clear water. But when we brought it out, it was still bent.”

Hassling wanted to see it. We walked over. I could see Grinder standing with his hands behind him, a few yards from the disturbance, peering steadily at it. The colonel showed us the pole. It was of hard wood. It was bent sharply, neatly, geometrically, permanently. About a 20-degree bend.

Klippe let everybody get a good look at the area. He set up a field office in a command car, got everybody gathered around, and listed the experiments everybody wanted to try. Grinder and Hassling wanted equipment flown in. Klippe listed it. They both had a look of suppressed excitement. They wanted to measure temperature, surface tension, check for radioactivity, and for any waves or rays it might be emitting. General Max Marker said, “If it isn’t a weapon, I can at least see how it could be used as one. I’d like to drop some H.E. in there. I’d like to seal a tank and put a line on it and put a couple goats in it and drag it through there. I’d like to see some 20-millimeter tracer fired through it.”

Grinder and Hassling became indignant. They didn’t want Marker messing with it until they could check it carefully and try to get samples of the atmosphere inside it in sealed containers for qualitative analysis. Klippe reassured them.

“But what is it, gentlemen?” he demanded.

There was no answer. Hassling rumbled something about a vortex of unknown forces, a dislocation in space, rupture in the continuum.

Two days later nobody was any closer. Grinder, in tones of intense irritation, explained the technical problem to Klippe. “The bloody awful thing won’t stay still. Perform a test fifteen times and you get twelve different results.”

Not one of us had guessed what it was. We were too used to thinking in terms of tough metallic shells, and big ports that unscrewed soundlessly to permit tentacled you-name-its to emerge.

It was a space ship.

There wasn’t any hysteria. The Emergency Committee went at their task in a sane orderly way. This was Man, attacking a problem, in the best sense of the word attack.

Now consider this. The story is off the rails. Ingredients are missing. Traditionally we should have had national and international hysteria, scare headlines, and, of course, three practically essential people. You know those people well. The old professor, his beautiful daughter, and the young engineer who has a really wild idea of what to do about things. The idea works, always. Man triumphs.

It wasn’t like that. We were just a competent group out there eight miles from Walesville, Ohio, trying to make sense out of nonsense.

The only change in the Thing was that it kept getting more opaque. The reason for that was obvious. Those rocks that fell kept chipping and splitting. Sometimes one would fall on another. The grass and twigs and small trees kept getting ground up finer. The floating soldier had disappeared. Perhaps a rock fell exactly when he did. The air inside the thing kept getting more and more murky with floating ground-up debris.

I was generally ignored. My job wouldn’t start until they found out what it was. If it turned out to be something unpalatable, I had to guide the eventual press coverage so as to sugar coat it. Marker was convinced that it was a Russian experiment, and a second cousin of psychological warfare. He thought they’d dropped it there like a leaflet. Hassling wouldn’t buy that. Grinder had stopped talking to anybody except the bright young men he had imported, with Klippe’s permission. We had two floors in the Walesville Hotel. The battalion personnel, of course, encamped at the area. Walesville was convinced we were setting up some kind of atomic installation. The citizens were busy signing petitions objecting to it.

On the sixth day it changed. The whirling inner motion stopped. Everything fell and it was crystal clear again. It had that strange sheen. Grinder and Hassling went to work again.

I heard Grinder make his new complaint to Klippe. “Now the damn thing is absolutely impervious. Come with me. I’ll show you.”

I tagged along. They’d spray-painted a section of it so they could see what they were working on. They’d borrowed some OD paint from the battalion quartermaster. The scum of paint stuck to a curved featureless surface. By walking over to one side you could see the back of the layer of paint. It gave me a weird feeling to be that close to it. I touched it where it wasn’t painted. It was damn cold. The moisture on my fingertips froze at once and I had to pull my fingers gingerly off of it. It made me remember a pre-school winter long ago in Scranton when some big boys talked me into touching my tongue to a metal lamp post when it was two degrees above zero. They ran. I stood and yelled, glued to the post, until my mother came out with a pan of hot water and unstuck me.

One of Grinder’s people used a diamond drill, running off one of the battalion generators. He could get through the paint and that was that. He couldn’t get a micromillimeter deeper.

At the subsequent conference Admiral Plover suggested tank trucks full of concrete and high-pressure hoses. He wanted to cement the whole thing over and go home and forget about it. Hassling and Grinder became more indignant than even Marker had made them.

I was on the way back to Walesville at three o’clock the next afternoon, riding in a jeep with a sergeant. We both heard the damnedest noise coming along behind us that either of us had ever heard. That was when it had started, but we didn’t know it then. It sounded as if a hundred thousand tons of rock was being rolled down the highway in a big tin barrel. The sergeant, bless him, was quick. He yanked the wheel without even taking time to look back. We bounced through a big shallow ditch and stopped way out in the middle of a field.

I looked at the highway. There was a big blue-and-silver bus on it. I saw something go by. It wasn’t a thing, it was an effect that I saw go by. Imagine that a solid three-lane concrete highway can develop a wave, as if the concrete is water. The wave crest went by. It went by the bus too. No bus. The sound went on down the highway toward Walesville. We heard it booming into the distance. We heard it fade away, with faint after-echo like thunder. The sergeant and I walked to the highway.

I will not describe the highway now, or what was left of the bus. The same thing happened to the highway and the bus that happened to Walesville. I will tell you about Walesville as I saw it at 5:30.

First you must imagine a very methodical stubborn child. This child has a big sand box. He has made a whole village in the sand box. Buildings, cars, people and all. All out of sand, carefully colored. On a rainy afternoon this child borrows his mother’s eggbeater. He starts at one corner of his sand box and he digs it in deep and churns his way back and forth for a couple of hours until he is right back where he started. Plain sand. But with little bits of flecks of color.

Walesville was a flat gray-brown waste two miles long and a mile and a half wide. Nothing stuck up more than six inches from that surface. The late sun slanted across it. I bent over and picked up a handful of the odd soil. It was like picking up sand on a beach and looking at it closely. You see infinitesimal shells, tiny bits of colored rock. These were larger pieces, but the effect was the same. I held pieces of concrete, pieces of brick, a small bright piece of metal, some bits of paper, a piece of wood varnished on one side, some soil and a piece of pink bone with a small shred of flesh attached to it. I dropped the handful hastily and rubbed my hand on the side of my pants. A flock of birds flew across the expanse, headed for distant trees, peeping excitedly as they flew.

The sergeant found one-half of a dime. He fingered it. His broad tan face showed no expression as he looked at the drab plain. The highway had been the same. There was a faint bluish tinge to the chopped area where the bus had been. The slant of the sun caught small fragments of glass and metal. A city dump, I thought. A dump where a city had been. Scratch one city. Scratch 14 thousand people. It was too big a concept to absorb all at once.

“Let’s go back,” the sergeant said.

We went back. We met others coming in. We tried to tell them, but they had to see for themselves. They said the Thing was gone. They said it had left a little after three. The ruin of the highway began a mile beyond the roadblock.

Klippe held the next conference at midnight. Generators supplied the lights. The battalion officers attended.

Klippe in a carefully dry voice said, “The area of destruction extends in a five-mile radius around Walesville. There isn’t a paved road or a single structure left in that area. Everything has been reduced to... rubble. Additional personnel will be here before dawn. Washington wants the entire area sealed. I think we can safely relate the destruction of Walesville to the phenomenon we have been investigating. Are there any comments?”

Hassling moved forward, his face in shadow. “Just this, General,” he said. “When human understanding cannot comprehend the purpose, I am forced to assume that the agency at work is other than human. This was selective force. It was not a blind weapon. If an entire city, its buildings, books, generators, garbage trucks, bank vaults and its children can be reduced without explosion to fragments no larger than the end of my thumb, we cannot resist such a force or the technology behind it. Our purpose is to understand, to communicate.

“I am prepared to accept the assumption that the phenomenon we have been investigating is a living creature operating by a set of rules we do not know. We must communicate. We must understand its purpose in doing such a dreadful thing, and convince it that there is no reason to continue such destruction. I recommend that we get men who by training have the best chance of establishing communication.”

“Shouldn’t we first find the... the phenomenon again?” Grinder asked.

“We will find it,” Hassling said quietly.

And we did. Last week. Twenty-one miles from Columbus. The first problem was the evacuation of Columbus. It was discussed at high levels and abandoned. It was felt that you just can’t move everybody out of a city that size.

The Thing was behaving as it had when I had first seen it. But with a grotesque difference. It had settled at the edge of a farm. Instead of rocks it was full of farm equipment, cattle, fence posts. It was a sickening difference.

The communications experts went to work. They used movable billboards, commercial artists, models of the solar system and the galaxy. They were very busy little men. If it wasn’t so serious, I could have laughed at their frantic efforts to communicate with a big bubble full of floating farm equipment and smashed dead cattle. They could just as well have been trying to get an answer from the moon, or a dead tree. I think they suspected that. But they had their orders, and there was a lot of brass around to see that they kept hopping. Outside of becoming increasingly more opaque, as it had before, the Thing did not react. I don’t think anyone expected it to.

Why they condescended to communicate at all, no one will ever know. And we won’t be around to wonder too long, I guess. Unless somebody comes up with an idea.

It happened after the motion stopped. Klippe had lost weight. Our nerves were bad. Somebody had done some talking and a lot of people had moved out of Columbus. Had I any friends there I would have told them to get out. I suspect that’s what happened.

The communications people were working just as hard after all the motion stopped.

At two o’clock last Wednesday afternoon I heard the yelling and went running over. Everybody stood and gaped at the side of the Thing. It had grown a door. Fifty yards of it had become opaque and had grown a door. Had I guessed for some wild reason that it would grow a door, I would have thought it in terms of the fantastic — a door 90 feet high and made of gold or something.

But this was just a door. A nice white front door with the usual three-pane window and a brass knob. It even had a mail slot. All that was missing was a house number and a mat saying welcome. It was about three inches ajar. The inference was just too plain. Come on in. There were two ordinary steps, a shallow stoop and that front door.

I give Klippe a mark for guts, ft was his party. He didn’t wait over a minute. Nobody made any move to stop him. He looked very small as he walked toward the door. He didn’t hurry. He walked with a measured stride, went up the two steps, pulled the door open anti walked through into blackness without hesitation and pulled it shut behind him.

They timed Klippe. He was in there six minutes and 12 seconds. He came out and shut the door. He walked toward us. I couldn’t read his face. People tried to ask him questions. He pushed his way through the crowd, went directly to his tent, took an Army Colt .45, put it in his mouth and blew the back of his head off.

The door was ajar again.

Max Marker tried it. He walked with a swagger. It wasn’t as effective as Klippe’s steady pace. He was in there for four minutes. He came out with a mind that had been wiped utterly clean. He didn’t know his own name, or where he was. He walked with a small child’s aimless gait. He was incontinent and his square chin was shiny with saliva.

Swyth, to my surprise, was next. He came out looking as cold as ever. We gathered around him, waiting for the word. He looked at us. He started to cry. He wouldn’t tell us. He knew, but he wouldn’t tell us. I know why now. I know why it was that he couldn’t even begin to say the words.

Hassling came back out with his face purple. He was sweating heavily and breathing hard. His expression was one of truly gigantic indignation. He turned and pointed a shaking hand at the Thing and ripped at his collar with the other hand and said, “They... they say...” That’s as far as he got before the major artery burst close to his heart, dropping him dead at our feet.

I pitied Plover. He knew he had to do it. He didn’t want to. His face was the color of damp chalk. He was trembling all over. I let him get halfway to the door and then I found that I was running. I beat him to the door. He put up a token resistance. I went inside before I could change my mind.

It was complete black dark in there. That was the only impression I had time for. Then they started. It could have been just one. But the impression was clear that it was several.

Don’t be misled by bad guesses about telepathy. Once it has happened to you, you know that the thoughts don’t come sneaking in, you know it isn’t done with pictures. The thoughts come in like heavy silver spikes, driven deep into your head, a hard single stroke for each one. They are not simple thoughts. They are complex, complete explanations and ideas. They are just there. Understanding them is then like the memory process. You remember that you know because the ideas were driven so deeply.

I went back out the door into the world that had now become strange for me. I could not look at people the same way, nor at the familiar earth and sky. I’ll never look at any work of man the way I did before.

They gathered around me, several of them trying to ask questions at once. The body of Hassling had been taken away. I could not tell them. I had to have time to think. I looked at Swyth. We knew. We knew we knew. We looked away from each other, conscious of sharing a shameful secret.

Three days after Walesville was obliterated, the site was covered with a soft new carpet of green. It has been identified as a fast-growing, strong-rooted tropical plant which has mutated to survive in this climate. It apparently was sown at the same time destruction took place. That should give you a clue.

I can tell you, but words will not be as strong as what they told me. Why they bothered to tell, I don’t know. Maybe they were merely bored, and did it for amusement. It would be boring to be sent on such a routine job.

When I look at things from their angle, I see the earth like a ball, about the size of a basketball. It rotates slowly. I see the great forests, the quiet rivers, the shining ice caps. Then it changes. I see the sickness. I see the forests dwindle. I see the waste lands grow. I see sickness change the face of a world. I see the scabs that are cities. On the night side I see the infected glow of the cities. I see the pock marks of dry lakes, and the pustules of the mine headings.

It’s very simple. Humanity began as a harmless organism, eater of nuts and berries. We coexisted with the other wild harmless organisms. But then Old Hairy tied a stone to the end of a stick and the mutation had started. In your body at this moment are many micro-organisms that do not harm you. But should one of them mutate dangerously, you will sicken. You may die.

We were supposed to stay in the forests and eat the nuts and berries. Ecologically we were sound. By so eating we spread the seeds of the forest plants. But a cell went wrong. We outgrew our purpose.

We were an ecologically harmless organism, but we mutated.

As soon as they were able to get around to it, they sent a sanitation squad to clean up the mess, cure the sickness. Because to them the earth is the important thing, not the organisms that infest it.

They had come with their sprays and their poisons to clean out the potato bugs.

We don’t know who or what they are, or their function or where they come from.

Do we try to tell them about our perception of beauty and truth? Do we attempt to explain to them the human soul? The human soul, with its overtones of both Beethoven and Dachau?

What’s the defense?

Do we drop some bombs on them? Do we send a sickly child charging with a tack hammer? Same probable effect.

What answer does the virus give to the physician as he prepares the needle for the injection? What do potato bugs write on the petition they present to the man who runs the big spray truck?

In all the yarns somebody has always come up with an answer. Unless somebody does this time, in 15 or 20 years all the works of man will be neat rubble carefully covered with new green life. To come up with an answer means we must justify our existence.

Want to take a crack at it? Want to explain to them why they should leave us alone?

All the Columbus stations went off the air at 11:21 this morning.