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2. LONE PINE

The water boiled beneath Jerry Conklin's fly. Conklin twitched the rod, but there was nothing there. The trout—and from the size of the boil, it must have been a big one—had sheered off at the last instant of its strike.

Conklin sucked in his breath. The big ones were there, he told himself. The attendant at the station had been right; there were big rainbow lurking in the pool.

The sun was shining brightly through the trees that grew along the river. The dappled water danced with little glints of sunlight shining off the tiny waves on the surface of the pool, set in motion by the rapids that came down the ledges of broken rock just upstream.

Carefully, Conklin retrieved his fly, lifted the rod to cast again, aiming at a spot just beyond where he had missed the strike.

In mid-cast, the sun went out. A sudden shadow engulfed the pool, as if some object had interposed itself between the sun and pool.

Instinctively, Conklin ducked. Something struck the upraised fly rod and he felt the tremor of it transmitted to his hand, heard the sickening splinter of bamboo. My God, he thought, an eighty-dollar rod, the first and only extravagance he had allowed himself.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the square of blackness coming down upon him. The blackness struck the bank behind him and he heard, as if from far off, the crunch of tortured metal as it came down upon his ear.

He tried to turn toward the bank and stumbled, going to his knees. He shipped water in his waders. He dropped the rod. Then, without knowing how he did it, not even intending to do it, he was running down the stream along the edge of the pool, slipping and sliding as his feet came down on the small, water-polished stones, at the pool's edge, the shipped water sloshing in his waders.

The far end of the square of blackness, tipping forward, came down on the far river bank. Timbers squealed and howled and there was the rasping of drawn nails and bolts as the bridge came apart. Looking back, he saw timbers and planks floating in the pool.

He had no wonder of what had happened. In the confused turmoil of his mind, in his mad, instinctive rush to get away, there was no room for wonder. It was not until he reached sunlight again that he realized he was safe. The high banks of the river had protected him from harm. The blackness lay across the river, resting on the banks, not blocking the stream.

The pool ended and he strode out into the shallow stretch of fast-running water below it. Glancing up, he saw for the first time the true dimensions of the structure that had fallen. It towered far above him, like a building. Forty feet, he thought—maybe fifty feet—up into the air, more than four times that long.

From some distance off he heard a vicious, flat crack that sounded like a rifle going off and in the same instance a single spot in that great mass of blackness flashed with a blinding brilliance, then winked out.

My God, he thought, the rod busted, the car smashed, and I am stranded here—and Kathy! I better get out of here and phone her.

He turned about and started to scramble up the steep river bank. It was hard going. He was hampered by his waders, but he couldn't take them off, for his shoes were in the ear and the car now lay, squashed flat more than likely, beneath the massive thing that had fallen on the bridge.

With a swishing sound, something lashed out of nowhere and went around his chest—a thin, flexible something like a piece of wire or rope. He lifted his hands in panic to snatch at it, but before his hands could reach it, he was jerked upward. In a blurred instant, he saw the swiftly flowing water of the river under him, the long extent of greenery that lined the river's banks. He opened his mouth to yell, but the constriction of the wire or rope or whatever it might be had driven much of the air out of his lungs and he had no breath to yell.

Then he was in darkness and whatever it was that had jerked him there was gone from about his chest. He was on his hands and knees. The platform on which he found himself was solid—solid, but not hard, as if he had come to rest on top of thick, yielding carpeting.

He stayed on his hands and knees, crouching, trying to fight off the engulfing terror. The bitter taste of gall surged into his mouth and he forced it back. His gut had entwined itself into a hard, round ball and he consciously fought to relax the hardness and the tightness.

At first it had seemed dark, but now he realized there was a faint, uncanny sort of light, a pale blue light that had a spooky tone to it. It was not the best of light; there was a haze in it and he had to squint his eyes to see. But at least this place where he found himself was no longer dark and he was not blind.

He rose to his knees and tried to make out where he was, although that was hard to do, for intermixed with the blue light were flares of other light, flaring and flickering so swiftly that he could not make them out, not quite sure of the color of them or where they might be coming from. The flickerings revealed momentarily strange shapes such as he could not remember ever having seen before and that was strange, he thought, for a shape, no matter what its configuration, was no more than a shape and should not cause confusion. Even between the flashes, there was one shape that he could recognize, rows of circular objects that he had thought at first were eyes, all of them swivelling to stare at him with a phosphorescent glare, like the eyes of animals at night when a beam of light caught them by surprise. He sensed, however, that what he was seeing really weren't eyes, nor were they the source of the faint, blue, persistent light that filled the place. But, eyes or not, they stayed watching him.

The air was dry and hot, but there was, unexplainably, a feeling of dank mustiness in it, a sense of mustiness imparted, perhaps, by the odor that filled the place. A strange odor—not an overpowering smell, not a gagging smell, but uncomfortable in a way he could not determine, as if the smell could somehow penetrate his skin and fasten to him, become a part of him. He tried to characterize the odor and failed. It was not perfume, or yet the smell of rot. It was unlike anything he had ever smelled before.

The air, he told himself, while it was breathable, probably was deficient in oxygen. He found himself gasping, drawing in great rasping breaths of it to satisfy his body's needs.

At first, he had thought he was in a tunnel and why he should have imagined that he did not know, for as he looked further, he could see that he was in some great space that reminded him of a dismal cave. He tried to penetrate the depth of the space, but was unable to, for the blue light was too dim and the flickering of the place made it difficult to see.

Slowly and carefully, he levered himself to his feet, half expecting that his head would bump against a ceiling. But he was able to rise to his full height; there was sufficient head-room.

In the back of his mind a whisper of suspicion came to life and he fought to hold it back, for it was not a suspicion that he wanted to admit. But, gradually, as he stood stark in the blue-lit, flickering place, it forced itself upon him and he felt himself accepting it.

He was, the whisper said, inside the huge black box that had fallen astride the river. The rope or wire or tentacle, or whatever it might have been, had been extruded from it. Seizing him, it had jerked him here, in some manner passing him through the outer wall and depositing him here in its interior.

To one side of him he heard a slight sound that was between a shriek and a gulp and when he looked to see what had occasioned it, he realized there was something flopping on the floor. Bending over to peer at the place where the flopping was taking place, he saw that it was a fish, a rainbow from the size and shape of it. It was about sixteen inches long and muscular of body. When he put a hand down to grasp it, it had a hefty feel to it. He got his hand around it, but it slipped away from him and continued flopping on the floor.

Now, he told himself, let's look at all of this realistically. Let's step away from it and have a long, hard look at it. Let's not go jumping to conclusions; let's try to be objective.

Item: A huge blackness had fallen from the sky, landing on the bridge and, from the crunch of metal he had heard, probably crushing his parked ear.

Item: He was in a place that could be, more than likely was, the interior of the blackness that had fallen, a place quite unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Item: Not only he, but a fish, had been introduced into this place.

He took the items, one by one, into the computer of his mind, and tried to put them all together. They added up to one thing:

He was inside, had somehow been spirited or absorbed inside a visitor from space, a visitor that was picking up and looking over the fauna of the planet upon which it had landed.

First himself and then a fish. And in a little while, perhaps, a rabbit, a squirrel, a coon, a bear, a deer, a bobcat. After a time, he told himself, the place was going to get crowded.

The gleaming circular objects that were watching him could be receptors, watching and recording, extracting data and storing it, making note of him (and the fish as well), picking up every vibration of his brain, every quiver of his psyche, analyzing him, breaking down the kind of organism that he was and classifying him by whatever code that might apply, tucking him away in memory cells, writing him up in chemical equations, seeking an understanding of what he was and what might be his status and his purpose in the ecology of the planet.

Probably it was not only the circular objects that were doing the work. Perhaps the flashing lights and the mechanisms behind the flashing lights were a part of it as well.

He could be wrong, he thought. When he could really come to think of it, he must know that he was wrong. Yet it was the one explanation that squared with what had happened. He had seen the blackness fall; he had been snatched up from the river—he remembered the running water under him as he was hoisted in the air, he remembered the long lines of trees that grew along its banks, he remembered seeing the town of Lone Pine, set on its gravel terrace above the river's bed. He remembered all these things and the next that he had known had been the darkness of this cave-like place. Except for the interior of the object that had fallen on the river, there was no other place into which he might

have been tucked. (If all of this had happened, if he were not mistaken, then it

meant that the object that had fallen across the river was alive, or that it was operated by something that was alive, and not only alive, but intelligent.

He found himself instinctively fighting against what he was thinking, for in the context of human experience, it was utter madness to believe that an intelligence had landed on the Earth and forthwith snapped him up.

He was astonished to find that whatever terror he had felt had drained out of him. In its stead, there was now a coldness, a bleak coldness of the soul that, in a way, was far worse than terror.

Intelligence, he thought—if there was an intelligence here, there must be a way to talk with it, in some manner to work out a system of communication with it.

He tried to speak and the words dried up before his tongue could shape them. He tried again and the words came, but only in a whisper. He tried once more and this time the words came louder, booming in the hollowness of the cave in which he stood.

"Hello," he shouted. "Is there anyone around? Is there someone here?"

He waited and there was no answer, so he spoke again, even louder this time, shouting at the intelligence that must be there. The words echoed and reverberated and then died out. The circular, eye-like objects still kept on watching him. The flickering still continued. But no one, or nothing, answered.


1.  LONE PINE, MINNESOTA | The Visitors | 3.  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA