If that frost-covered thing had come from the stars, something from it—a sort of devil—had stricken down the hundreds of unconscious people Mr. Tedder had seen. Maybe it was getting ready for more of its kind. He stared upward and imagined other spheres swinging down out of the darkness overhead to gouge long furrows in the ground. Maybe sich things were falling all over the world. . . .
But he could look across-country for miles. Presently he saw joyfully that there were electric lights. He saw motorcar headlights on the highways. In particular, he saw that the cry last town he had entered was now brightly lighted and here was traffic moving in and out...
"Well," he thought with relief. "Whatever it was, it ain't permanent." Come morning he would have somebody cut loose the pot from his head.
He could not find fuel to make a fire, but he snatched some fitful sleep toward dawn. He was bitterly cold when he woke, and at earliest daylight he made his way back toward town.
The dawn light was still gray and dreary when he reached it. The streets were empty. But there was a motor-truck stopped by a store, its motor purring. And there was a man tumbled in a heap above a bunch of big-city newspapers he had just put out of the truck for delivery. The man was alive, but unconscious. There was a cat in a motionless furry heap beside him, as if it had come out to rub against his legs and had collapsed without warning.
Mr. Tedder, shivering, turned the man over. He was insensible. He could not be roused. Mr. Tedder felt hysteria stirring within him. The pot hurt his head, now. The places where it rubbed most often were getting sore. Then he noticed the headlines.
DISASTER IN VERMONT—DEVIL
LOOSE, SAY VILLAGERS
Unexplained Mass Unconsciousness Strikes Countryside
In the gray twilight of dawn, with a softly purring truck behind him and before him an unconscious man, Mr. Tedder read.
"South Lupton struck by strange, creeping unconsciousness that moved like a wall or an invisible flood of oblivion… Entire villages insensible for half an hour. . . . Some inhabitants undisturbed where they fell, others hauled about. and pawed, but unharmed. . . . The same inexplicable insensibility moved along roads. . . . Man driving with his little daughter lost consciousness and came to to find his car overturned and burning, and himself and the little girl lying some distance away. . . . Farmers found their horses struggling up from unconsciousness. . . ."
Mr. Tedder's throat went dry. He looked around furtively. This town had borne the look of a shambles yesterday, when he was here. From the hilltop he had seen it alive. But now it was dead again. . . . Suddenly he remembered a white dog that had come running toward him across a wide pasture. When he got to the dog it was unconscious. . . .
"I wonder if . . ." He could not face the thought.
Mr. Tedder shivered. He almost whimpered. But after a little he picked up the unconscious man before him. He dragged him into the back of the truck. He drove clumsily and unaccustomedly out of the town. There was a long, straight stretch of road. Mr. Tedder went well out upon it. He stopped and let the unconscious man carefully down to the side of the road. He got back in the driver's seat and drove away. He watched through the back-view mirror.
When he was a little more than half a mile away, the still figure stirred, rolled over, and got dazedly upright.
Mr. Tedder swallowed noisily. He drove on a little way and found a place where he could turn. He headed back. The owner of the truck still stood bewildered in the road. Mr. Tedder drove toward him. When he was still half a mile away, the man crumpled up and lay in a heap on the road. He was a flaccid, limp, insensible figure when Mr. Tedder brought the truck to a stop and loaded him in again.
He turned once more and rode on toward South Lupton. Mr. Tedder's face was a sickly gray color. The meekness of his normal expression was replaced by an odd, fixed horror. He had found two things which he believed came from the frosted ten-foot sphere. One was a weapon which destroyed everything when a knob on its side was touched. The other was this pot, with a strap which now held it fast upon his head.
The pot was a weapon too. It did not affect the one who wore it. The tightening of the strap when it went on was to make sure—pure anguish sharpened Mr. Tedder's perceptions —that it could not fall off while it was operating. If it did, the person—or the devil—wearing it would fall a victim too. It did not fit a man because it was designed for the brain-case of something else, something Mr. Tedder had seen vaguely as a dark moving object backing into a rusty barbed wire strung between two trees. If the pot—or helmet—had been turned on then, Mr. Tedder would never have seen anything. He would have fallen unconscious a half-mile away.
He made a little sobbing noise in his throat. He drove unskillfully to South Lupton. One general store was open. He went into it and filled his pockets with canned food, a loaf of bread, and matches. He took two blankets from a shelf. He stepped carefully over the two clerks and four customers in the store. They were on the floor, of course. He walked out of the store and away from the little town.
"I got to get back there," he said unsteadily. "I got to!" A long while later he strode across rolling pasture-land. A white dog ran to intercept him. He saw it as a distant white speck. When he came up to it, it was a still, senseless heap. He went on to the woods and into them. It took him two hours to find the gash blasted in the woods by the gun-like thing. Then it took him another half-hour to find the gun.
He shivered when he picked it up, and carried it gingerly, but he noted that the metal was deeply pitted now. On the side that was next to the damp earth, the metal was eaten away to a depth of a quarter of an inch or more.
He found the abandoned orchard, and the half-collapsed and wholly ruined house. Then he sat down and stared dully at nothing, trying to think of a solution to his predicament.
Night fell but he sat in a sort of lethargy of despair for a long while. Ultimately he rolled up in the blankets. The pot on his head was horribly uncomfortable. It had not been made for a human head, and it did not fit. Twice during the night, also, he woke with a feeling of strangulation. He had stirred in his sleep and the tight chin-strap had choked him. The second time he found himself close to the metal gun. He had almost touched it. He made an inarticulate sound, such as a man might make who found himself about to step on a rattlesnake.
He got up and found the well of the abandoned farm. He dropped a clod of earth in it. It splashed. He dropped in the gun-like thing. Bubbling sounds followed. They lasted a long time.
He stayed at the abandoned farm for three days living on the canned stuff he had taken. His cheeks grew sunken and his eyes querulously pathetic. Also, a sore place started from the rubbing of the pot on his head. On the second day he found the frosted globe again. The motor in it still ran.
"Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thudCHUNK!" There was no sign that anything had come out. Perhaps there had only been one Whatever-it-was in it, and that had succumbed to a rip in its artificial hide by a bit of barbed wire. No trace of that thing remained, now. It had evaporated.
"Jellyfish. Like jellyfish," he told himself.
Mr. Tedder did not think in scientific terms nor speculate from what planet or star the Whatever-it-was had come. If he had been told that on the planet Jupiter there was an atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen under enormous pressure, it would have meant nothing to him. The suggestion that the specific gravity of the giant planet meant that only light metals like sodium, potassium, and lithium—all interacting readily with water—could exist there. . . . Such a suggestion would have had exactly no meaning at all.