His mind dwelt exclusively upon the fact that any human being who came within a half-mile of him must fall unconscious and remain so. To the human race he was a menace; a devil. And that if he should manage to get the thick and clumsy pot off his head, he too would fall unconscious and remain so. He was in the most horrible solitary confinement imaginable.
He was invulnerable, to be sure. He could rob with impunity and do murder without fear of any penalty. But nobody could speak to him. Ever.
On the fourth day he went into East Lupton for food.
On the fifth day aeroplanes flew overhead, back and forth. One suddenly went spinning, out of control, dipping down toward the treetops. It recovered, a bare few hundred feet up and three-quarters of a mile away. The planes disappeared.
On the sixth day bombs fell. The first racking explosions terrified him incomparably. He fled through the underbrush. He came out of it and saw soldiers. They made a cordon about an area of woodland probably two miles square. They toppled in unconscious heaps as. Mr. Tedder drew near them, and as if that were a signal there were distant boomings and artillery shells fell close to where he peered out. Mr. Tedder ran away. He dodged shells and bombs until night fell, then he ran, weeping bitterly to himself.
"I ain't done nothing wrong!" The thought beat through his imprisoned head.
Of course the troops could not stop him. He pelted through their lines, unheeding. Presently he reached the village of East Lupton. No figures moved in it. Desperate, he entered it. There were many soldiers among the heaps of shallow-breathing, staring-eyed folk who lay slackly wherever unconsciousness had overtaken them.
Mr. Tedder found food, and wolfed it. The store in which he found it was a country-village general store and sold everything. Mr. Tedder was half-mad, now. The thing he wore was an intolerable burden. One of the sore places on his head from its, rubbing was excruciatingly painful. It was infected.
Other sore places were developing. And he was a sort of devil, working havoc wherever he moved. He took weapons—for which he had no need—and metal-cutting tools he would not dare to use. . . . And he saw newspapers.
GUNS TO BLAST DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON
He read the news account. The one-mile circle of insensibility had been deduced. Its cause was not understood, but it was certain that some sensate thing was its center. It moved. It had made definite travels and returned to its starting-point. Troops now cordoned the place where it nested restlessly, and artillery was being massed. A barrage that nothing could survive would presently be poured in. . . .
Mr. Tedder looked at a powerful, sleek car. He could take it and go anywhere, and all of humanity was powerless to stop him—or to help him. Anyone who came near him would fall senseless. Even he, if he took off the thing on his head....
A motor-truck came rolling into the village, its driver stricken unconscious at the wheel. It seemed certain to roll on and on.
Mr. Tedder screamed at it. But something deflected its wheels. It curved sedately from the highway and ploughed across a sidewalk and crashed into the corner of a house.
When the sun rose, Mr. Tedder was back at the abandoned farm which for no reason at all he considered his headquarters. His eyes were red with bitter weeping. His meek expression was utterly woebegone. But his determination was made.
Great bombers roared high overhead, so high they were mere specks. Things dropped from them. Boomings began, all around the horizon. Shells struck and blasted. The tumult, once begun, was unending.
Mr. Tedder cringed. Shaken and battered, he filed at the chain-link strap which held the pot on his head. The metal was soft, but the links shifted under his fingers, which trembled uncontrollably.
A shell burst fifty yards away. Mr. Tedder was moved to sheer hysteria. He could do no such fine work as filing. He took the snips he had appropriated the night before. Once the thing was off his head, he would know nothing; no terror, no pain; nothing at all. The pot which had ridden him like the Old Man of the Sea would kill him. But he wanted to be rid of it. He did not want to be near it even in death. "Just get it off me!" he shouted. He was a little mad now.
The earth shook under him. Blast-waves beat at him. Half-deafened, sobbing, he crawled to the well. He pulled at the rotten boards. He hung his head over the noisome depth. He used the metal-snips—he had trouble getting them under the chain-link strap—to chew at the soft metal. The earth trembled under concussions. Bits of loose earth and rotted wood tumbled into the well from its edges.
The snips met triumphantly.... The pot tumbled down into the well and floated for a moment, rocking. Then it tilted and filled and sank. A thin, scummy veil of bubbles arose. Some light metals react readily with water. Potassium violently, sodium freely, lithium readily. The pot was of an alloy which would be highly useful where it was permanently too cold for water ever to turn liquid. But on earth …
Mr. Tedder sat up. He felt giddy; light-headed; incredibly relieved. But a shell fell thirty yards away, and a bomb exploded horribly just over the ridge, and something ripped through the half-collapsed house and exploded on beyond. There had been a devil in this woods. The devil of East Lupton, Vermont. The artillery searched for it, to exorcise it, but Mr. Tedder was not unconscious.
"It's gone!" he cried joyfully. "And I'm okay now."
It would never occur to him that designers of a weapon who planned for the tightening of a fastening-strap when it was turned on, so that it could not possibly make its own wearer a victim, would also arrange for it to be turned off if the fastening-strap should be broken or cut. It would be the most obvious of safety devices.
But Mr. Tedder's intellectual processes would never grasp such a thing. He simply knew that he was not unconscious and that the bombardment went on. It was overwhelming. It was maddening. Mr. Tedder put his hands over his ears and wept, cringing to the earth and awaiting death.
Then the earth seemed to buckle beneath him. It raised up and dealt him a violent blow. Over where the frosted sphere lay self-buried in the ground, there was a sudden, incredible, impossible flare. A shell had hit the enigmatic globe in which an untended motor had run so long. The sphere exploded.
The violence of the explosion suggested power much greater than anything human. The fuel-store of the sphere must have detonated. It made a crater a quarter-mile across, and every least fragment of the sphere itself was atomized and destroyed.
The explosion seemed to the military to mark the death of something spectacular. They stopped the barrage and explosions.
They found Mr. Tedder unconscious. He was sleeping as if drugged, from reaction to the end of strain. Near him there was a caved-in well which, of course, was not worth digging out.
It was assumed that Mr. Tedder had remained unconscious through all the career of the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. He was hospitalized, and kindly told what had happened, and ultimately turned loose with a new suit of clothes and a five-dollar bill. And Mr. Tedder disappeared into the vast obscurity of the world of tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and itinerant workmen.
And to this day nobody pretends that they really understood anything about the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even marked differences of opinion concerning its ending. Mr. Tedder thinks he was the Devil, and that he somehow ceased to be fiendish when he got the pot off his head. Other authorities think that heavy ordnance destroyed the Devil, and point to a quarter-mile crater as proof.
But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that came out of the Somewhere into the Here and caused all the catastrophes by his mere arrival. . . . Why, in that case, and strictly speaking, the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont, was the Whatever-it-was which was in a leathery, hidelike garment or pressure-suit the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from the constable. And that Devil was destroyed by a rusty barbed wire which was strung between two trees on an abandoned farm. And it was killed long before so much as the existence of a Devil in those parts was suspected.