“Yes, Mr Barron,” said Detweiler. The foreman looked puzzled and curious, but not at all frightened.
“I think we should be armed,” said Barron. He took a key ring from his pocket and handed it to Banales, who had come out of the ranch house. “You know where the guns are,” he said. “Get a rifle for each of us, and make sure they’re loaded.”
“Charles, you won’t shoot anyone, will you?” said Mrs Barron.
“Not unless I have to,” her husband answered.
Unseen by any of the adults, Jupe tugged at Pete’s sleeve and beckoned to Bob. The three boys slipped back through the crowd on the lane and took shelter in the darkness between two of the cottages.
“If we want to know what really happened up there, we’d better beat Barron and the others up to the reservoir,” Jupe told his friends. “Barron might just decide to keep the facts to himself.”
Pete gulped. “Jupe, those guys have rifles.”
“Barron just promised not to shoot anyone,” said Jupe, stretching the truth. He trotted off in the direction of the parking area near the sheds.
“But Jupe,” pleaded Pete, running after him, “we just saw a flying saucer! There might be aliens up by the dam!”
“All the more reason for us to get there first!” said Jupe.
Pete groaned but followed along with Bob.
It was dark in the shadows near the sheds, but once the boys started across the fields to the north of the parking area, they moved swiftly. In the moonlight they could see the dam, and when they came to the edge of the pasture between the cultivated fields and the dam, they saw sheep grazing. Several bleated in protest as the boys passed. Pete jumped in fright at the sound, but he kept going. Soon the boys were scrambling over the rocks at one side of the dam.
That afternoon Hank Detweiler had mentioned there was a meadow beyond the dam, although he had not actually showed it to them. He believed that the valley containing Rancho Valverde had once been a lake bed. In some long ago age a great earthquake had torn the lake bed in two and lifted the northernmost section above the level of the rest of the valley. Part of this upper level was now covered by the reservoir, and the rest was a meadow that sloped up away from the reservoir to the base of the cliffs.
When the boys reached the top of the dam, they followed a path around the reservoir to the grassy land on the far side of the water. Pete looked fearfully around. Were the aliens up here? He could see no one but his friends. And there was no trace of the fire that had blazed on the cliffs. In the moonlight the boys saw only naked rocks and the grass that made a dark silver carpet between the reservoir and the cliffs.
“We should have brought a light,” said Bob. He started through the knee-high grass, but before he had gone many feet he stumbled and almost fell.
“Careful!” warned Jupe.
Bob took a step backward. “Jupe!” he said. “Pete! Hey! There’s something . . . something here!”
Jupe and Pete hurried to his side and knelt in the grass.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Pete. “A body! Is he . . . is he alive?”
Jupe leaned close to the still body of a man. “Yes. He’s still breathing.”
There was the sound of voices near the dam, and the clatter of dislodged stones rolling down an incline. Charles Barron and his men were coming.
Jupe gave a mighty heave and the man on the meadow rolled over on to his back. His face showed white in the moonlight. The eyes were closed and the mouth was partly open. His breath came in quick gasps.
There was a faint odour now. It was the smell of singed hair.
“All right!” Charles Barron shouted. “Hold it right there! One move and I’ll blow your head off!”
The boys blinked in the glare of flashlights.
“Why, it’s the boys from the salvage yard,” said Barron.
“Mr Barron, this man is hurt,” Jupiter called.
Barron and Hank Detweiler hurried forward.
“De Luca!” exclaimed Barron. “Simon de Luca!”
Detweiler knelt and held his flashlight close to the man’s face. He touched de Luca cautiously.
“He’s got a lump right behind the ear,” said Detweiler, “and . . . and some of his hair’s burned off!”
The unconscious man stirred.
“Okay, Simon,” said Detweiler. “We’re with you.”
The man opened his eyes and stared up at Detweiler.
“What happened?” asked Detweiler.
De Luca moved his head, then winced. “Did I fall?” he asked. He looked around slowly. “The sheep! Where are the sheep?”
“In the lower field, the other side of the dam,” said Detweiler.
De Luca sat up carefully. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I came out to check on the sheep. I came almost to the dam. Everything was okay.”
He looked anxiously at Detweiler. “I was in the lower meadow,” he said. “That’s the last thing I remember. How did I get here? Did you bring me?”
“No, we didn’t, Simon,” said Detweiler. “These boys found you here. Do you remember seeing anything? Flames? Smoke? Anything at all?”
“Nothing,” said de Luca. He put his head in his hands, and for the first time he touched his hair. “What’s happened?” he cried. “My hair! What is the matter with my hair?”
“Simon, you got kind of singed,” said Detweiler.
Banales knelt beside the injured man and began to talk softly in Spanish. The others spread out to search the meadow. The light of their torches showed them charred places on the ground, as if flames had burned fiercely and briefly in the green grass. There were sooty streaks on the cliffs where the blue fires had blazed. That was all, except for an object that Detweiler found near the base of the cliffs–a thing no bigger than a man’s hand. It was made of lustrous silver-grey metal and it was hinged in the middle. At either end was a series of prongs.
“Some kind of clamp,” said Detweiler. “John, do you know what it is?”
John Aleman took the object from Detweiler and turned it this way and that in his hands. “Beats me,” he said. “Looks like it’s off some sort of machine.”
“Or an aircraft?” asked Detweiler.
“Maybe,” said Aleman. “The metal–it’s some kind of alloy. I don’t know just what. It doesn’t look like steel. It’s more like pewter. And there’s no residue of oil on it. Look. You close it like this and the prongs lock. It could be some sort of switch, but it’s not like any switches that I’ve ever seen.”
Barron glared around the meadow and then looked up at the cliffs. “Not like any you’ve seen?” he said.
They were silent then, thinking of the blazing cliffs and the clouds of smoke, and of the strange craft that had lifted from the meadow. De Luca felt his singed hair. His face was bewildered.
“Someone was here,” said Aleman quietly. His square, blunt-featured face was grim.
“Somebody came and . . . and did something to Simon and went away again. But where did they come from? And where did they go? Who were they?”
No one answered. From the hills above them came the lonely cry of a coyote. Pete shivered at the wailing sound, and at the memory of the flying saucer. He wondered if aliens had walked in the meadow–if aliens were hiding there right now.
8
Attack!
SIMON DE LUCA was brought back from the meadow by truck. After he was carried into one of the cottages on the lane, Mary Sedlack and Mrs Barron examined him. They tested his reflexes, peered into his eyes with a small flashlight, and decided that he had suffered a mild concussion.
“Mrs Barron acts as if she had medical training,” said Bob to Elsie Spratt. The Three Investigators were in the ranch-house kitchen with the cook, who sat nervously rubbing her deformed finger.
“Mrs Barron was in nurse’s training when she was a girl,” said Elsie. “She does volunteer work one day a week at the hospital in town. Pity she married that old grouch. She’d have made a great nurse.”
The boys heard a car in the drive. Jupe got up and went to the open door. A few minutes before, Charles Barron had driven to the gate to demand that Lieutenant Ferrante notify his superiors at Camp Roberts that a herder had been attacked. Barron was back now, and Mrs Barron stood in the lane talking with him.
“Well?” she said. “What happened?”
Barron snorted. “That snivelling excuse for an officer has a field telephone, but it’s like everything else around here. It isn’t working.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs Barron happily. “When the rescuers are in our atmosphere, they’re able to disrupt our electrical field.”
“Ernestine, you don’t even know what an electrical field is!” cried Charles Barron.