Traffic control center in Westville paid no attention to the report; control was fully occupied with a reign of terror.
John Thomas interrupted his mother. “Has anybody been hurt?”
“Hurt? I don’t know. Probably. John Thomas, you’ve got to get rid of that beast at once.”
He ignored that statement; it seemed the wrong time to argue it. “What else happened?”
Mrs. Stuart did not know in detail. Near the middle of town Lummox came down a local chute from the overhead freeway. He was moving slowly now and with hesitation; traffic and large numbers of people confused him. He stepped off the street onto a slidewalk. The walk ground to a stop, not being designed for six tons of concentrated load; fuses had blown, circuit breakers had opened, and pedestrian traffic at the busiest time of day was thrown into confusion for twenty blocks of the shopping district.
Women had screamed, children and dogs had added to the excitement, safety officers had tried to restore order, and poor Lummox, who had not meant any harm and had not intended to visit the shopping district anyway, made a perfectly natural mistake. . . the big display windows of the Bon Marché looked like a refuge where he could get away from it all. The duraglass of the windows was supposed to be unbreakable, but the architect had not counted on Lummox mistaking it for empty air. Lummox went in and tried to hide in a model bedroom display. He was not very successful.
John Thomas’s next question was cut short by a thump on the roof; someone had landed. He looked up. “You expecting anyone, Mum?”
“It’s probably the police. They said they would. . .”
“The police? Oh, my!”
“Don’t go away. . . you’ve got to see them.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” he answered miserably and punched a button to unlock the roof entrance.
Moments later the lazy lift from the roof creaked to a stop and the door opened; a safety sergeant and a patrolman stepped out. “Mrs. Stuart?” the sergeant began formally. ” ‘In your service, ma’am.’ We. . .” He caught sight of John Thomas, who was trying not to be noticed. “Are you John T. Stuart?”
John gulped. “Yessir.”
“Then come along, right away. ‘Scuse us, ma’am. Or do you want to come too?”
“Me? Oh, no, I’d just be in the way.”
The sergeant nodded relieved agreement. “Yes, ma’am. Come along, youngster. Minutes count.” He took John by the arm.
John tried to shrug away. “Hey, what is this? You got a warrant or something?”
The police officer stopped, seemed to count ten, then said slowly, “Son, I do not have a warrant. But if you are the John T. Stuart I’m looking for. . . and I know you are. . . then unless you want something drastic and final to happen to that deep-space what-isit you’ve been harboring, you’d better snap to and come with us.”
“Oh, I’ll come,” John said hastily.
“Okay. Don’t give me any more trouble.”
John Thomas Stuart kept quiet and went with him.
In the three minutes it took the patrol car to fly downtown John Thomas tried to find out the worst. “Uh, Mister Patrol Officer? There hasn’t been anybody hurt? Has there?”
“Sergeant Mendoza,” the sergeant answered. “I hope not. I don’t know.”
John considered this bleak answer. “Well. . . Lummox is still in the Bon Marché?”
“Is that what you call it?-Lummox? It doesn’t seem strong enough. No, we got it out of there. It’s under the West Arroyo viaduct.. . I hope.”
The answer sounded ominous. “What do you mean: ‘you hope’?”
“Well, first we blocked off Main and Hamilton, then we chivvied it out of the store with fire extinguishers. Nothing else seemed to bother it; solid slugs just bounced off. Say, what’s that beast’s hide made of? Ten-point steel?”
“Uh, not exactly.” Sergeant Mendoza’s satire was closer to fact than John Thomas cared to discuss; he still was wondering if Lummox had eaten any iron. After the mishap of the digested Buick Lummox’s growth had taken an enormous spurt; in two weeks he had jumped from the size of a misshapen hippopotamus to his present unlikely dimensions, more growth than he had shown in the preceding generation. It had made him extremely gaunt, like a canvas tarpaulin draped over a scaffolding, his quite unearthly skeleton pushing through his skin; it had taken three years of a high-caloric diet to make him chubby again. Since that time John Thomas had tried to keep metal away from Lummox, most especially iron, even though his father and his grandfather had always fed him tidbits of scrap metal.