The trooper said nothing.
Douglas said to Kathy, “You’re determined to go with us?”
“You’re damned right I am.”
“Stick close to me, then. Hang on tight.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Kathy.
“Here,” said Chet, handing Kathy a camera. “Drape this over your neck. I’ll help one of these TV jerks with his stuff.”
“What will you do with the rest of your stuff?” she asked. “All of us will pile what we can’t take here on the road. The troopers will guard it for us.”
“The hell we will,” the trooper said.
He turned and walked back to the ear, where his partner was talking on the radio.
“You guys were tough with the troopers,” Norton said. “We’ll apologize later,” said Chet. “Goddammit, we got a job to do.”
“There are laws about crossing fire lanes and such.”
“This here ain’t no fire lane,” said Chet. “This here is a river.”
“O.K.,” said Norton. “I’ll cross with you. On the other side of Kathy. Me and the Kansas City Star will see she doesn’t drown.”
One of the troopers came back. “You can cross,” he said. “No further objection from us. But on your own responsibility. It’s your ass.” He said, looking directly at Douglas, “You can also take note of that.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Douglas. “Most willingly. And thank you.
The line was forming on the river bank. There was some shouting and shoving. Trowbridge hurried down the bank and took command.
“Cut out the horseplay,” he shouted. “Get in line, grab hold of the man next to you. Take it easy. Take a deep breath. That water’s cold. It will freeze your balls.”
He suddenly became aware of Kathy.
“I’m sorry, Kathy.”
“Don’t think a thing of it,” said Kathy. “You can’t say a thing I haven’t heard before.”
The line edged into the water.
“Jesus,” sang out a TV man, who was in the lead, “this water is like ice.”
“Easy,” someone said. “Take it easy, men.”
They inched across. In the deepest part of the stream, the water came to a tall man’s waist.
Kathy, as she hit the water, gritted her teeth. But as she inched along with the others, one hand engulfed in the big fist of Douglas, the other held, vise-like, in Norton’s hand, she forgot the cold and concentrated on making her way across.
The head of the line reached the opposite bank, clustered there to help the others.
Teeth chattering, Kathy climbed the river bank, Chet’s camera swinging, bumping against her.
Chet reached back a hand to help her up the last few feet, took the camera from her.
“Run around a bit,” he told her. “Jog around. Keep moving. You’ll be warmer that way. You look like a drowned rat.”
“So do you,” she said. “So do all the rest of us.”
Some of the others were running up the slight incline that sloped down to the river. She ran along with them. To their left, the object from the sky loomed tall above them, like a great black wall reaching into the sky. The crashes of the falling trees and the deep, rising and falling rumble of the object chewing them up was louder than it had been across the river.
Photographers scattered, their cameras aimed.
Here, close to it, the object was more impressive than seen from farther off. Here the true dimensions of it became apparent. Too, the imperturbability of it—the great black box lurching slowly along, paying no attention, or at least giving the impression of paying no attention, to the humans who swarmed about it. As if it might be unaware of them, or being aware of them, ignored them. As if we didn’t exist, thought Kathy, as if we were not worth paying attention to, little scurrying life forms that were beneath its notice.
She gravitated toward the rear end of the object and tried to make out how it moved. There were no treads, no wheels, nothing to propel it. As a matter of fact, it seemed to have no moving parts and, come to think of it, no part of it seemed to touch the ground. She considered crouching down and putting her hand between the ground and the great black mass to see if there actually were some ground clearance, but, at the last minute, her courage failed her. You could lose a hand with a stunt like that, she told herself.
The box, she saw, was not actually a box. The side that she could see went straight up, but the rear end (and maybe the front end, too, she told herself) curved outward slightly, that area of it closest to the ground flaring out slightly. For some reason she could not quite reconcile, the whole thing reminded her of a turtle in its shell.
She walked in back of it and stubbed her toe, pitching forward, but catching herself before she fell. She looked to see what she had stubbed her toe on. Whatever it was, was white and smooth and close to the ground. Squatting down, she brushed away the forest duff that covered it. It was, she saw, a newly cut tree stump, sheared off smoothly, only a couple of inches above the ground.
Stunned, she rubbed the palm of her hand across the smoothness of the stump. Little drops of resin were oozing out of it and smeared her palm. The object, she realized, was not knocking down the trees, as she had thought. It was cutting them close against the ground and pushing them, with its great weight, so they fell in front of it.
And that meant, she told herself, that this harvesting of the trees was not a simple matter of forcibly crashing its way through them. It meant that the object was designed to do this very thing. And, as she did, the back end of the turtle-like shell twitched and then rolled up—like an automatic garage door responding to a signal.
It slid up five or six feet and three large white objects were expelled from it Along with the three white objects came a sudden gush of chewed up bark and pine needles, resembling the mulch spewed out by a lawn mower
Then the back of the object slid down again.
Chutes? Kathy wondered. Had she seen chutes out of which the baled white masses and the mulch had been expelled? She could not be sure she had.
She walked up cautiously to one of the bales, put out a hand, then pulled it back, suddenly frightened, reluctant to touch the bale. She swore luridly at herself for her timidity and put out her hand again. The white material was tightly packed, compressed, but not bound by wires or by anything at all. She dug her fingers into it and the substance resisted the digging. She managed to pull loose a small fragment of the material.
It was, she saw, almost exactly like cotton. Funny thing, she thought, a bale of cotton emerging from this monster that was eating trees.
From across the river came a metallic squealing, and looking to find out what had caused it, she saw that a large truck equipped with a crane had backed up to the other end of the bridge. The crane was lifting an oblong structure of wood off the truck bed. Beneath the structure the crane had lifted were others, stacked upon the truck. It must be, she told herself, the army engineers with their prefabricated bridge. Maybe, she thought, we will not have to wade again across the river, wondering as she thought it how long it might require to put the bridge together. She hoped that it would not take long, for it would be a comfort not to have to plunge again into the chilling cold of the river.
She heard the pound of feet behind her and, turning, saw that Chet was charging towards her, followed by the other photographers and newsmen.
“What have we got here?” Chet panted. “Where did those bales come from?”
“The thing just spewed them out,” she said.
Chet was squaring off, his camera to his face, the others rushing in behind him. The TV crews frantically went about setting up their equipment, some of them using hand-held minicams, while the others manipulated tripods and electronic gear.
Slowly, Kathy backed away. There was nothing more that she could do—and it was a damn shame, she told herself. This was a break for the afternoon papers. It would be in the evening papers and on the evening TV news shows before the Tribune went to press. That was the way it sometimes went, she told herself philosophically. You won a few, you lost a few. There was not much that could be done about it.
What did it all mean, she wondered—this box-like monster eating trees and then, from the other end of it, expelling bales of stuff that looked like cotton, along with bushels of junk that probably was the by-product of its eating of the trees. It made sense, she told herself, that bales had been processed from the trees that had been ingested, but what could that white stuff be? She should know, she thought, searching frantically for a knowledge that she knew must be tucked somewhere in her memory, tucked away in those college days when she had struggled valiantly with biology, but not too successfully. Science, she recalled, science and math had been her two worst subjects and she never had done too well in either of them.