THE DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON
THE DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON
Murray Leinster
To this day nobody pretends
to understand the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even differences of
opinion about the end to which that devil came. Mr. Tedder is sure he was the
fiend in question, and that he ceased to be fiendish when he rid himself of
the pot over his head.
Other authorities believe
that heavy ordnance did the trick, and point to a quarter-mile crater for
proof. It takes close reasoning to decide.
But if by the Devil of East
Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that came out of Somewhere to Here, and caused
all the catastrophes by his mere arrivalwhythen the Devil was the
Whatever-it-was in the leathery, hidelike covering on
the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from the constable.
On that morning, Mr. Tedder
ran like a deeror as nearly like a deer as Mr. Tedder could hope to run. The
resemblance was not close. Deer do not hesitate helplessly between possible
avenues of escape. Deer do not plunge out of concealing thickets to scuttle
through merely shoulder-high brush because a pathway shows. But Mr. Tedder did.
The constable, behind him,
shouted wrathfully. There was a thirty-day jail-sentence waiting for someone
for vagrancy which is to say, for not having any money. Mr. Tedder was
elected.
He would not gain any money
by staying in jail, but the constable who arrested him and the justice of the
peace who sentenced him would receive fees for their activity. That was why
this township was notoriously a bad place for tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and
itinerant workmen in need of a job.
"I can't go much
further," Mr. Tedder thought. His heart thumped horribly. There was an
agonizing stitch in his side. His breath was a hoarse, honking noise as it
rushed in and out. Despair filled him as exhaustion neared.
He pounded, sobbing for
breath, up a little ten-foot rise. His eyes tried to blur with tears. Then he
lurched down the other side of the ridge and saw that he was in the neglected,
broken-limbed orchard of an abandoned farm.
The house was partly collapsed
and wholly ruined. A remaining shed leaned crazily. Vines climbed over a rail
fence three parts rottenand went on along, a strand of barbed wire nailed to
tree-trunks.
He could run no further. He
looked, despairing, for a hiding place. His haggard, ineffectual face turned
desperately. He saw something dark and large. To his blurred eyes it looked
like a cow. He ran toward it. It shrank back, stirring
There was a thin, high
screaming noise, like gas escaping through a punctured tire, but a tire inflated
to a monstrous pressure. There was a vast, foggy vaporousness.
The dark shape made convulsive movements, but Mr. Tedder was too lost in panic
to take note. He ran blindly toward it.
"Ug!"
gasped Mr. Tedder.
The scream descended in
pitch. A pungent, ammoniacal smell filled the air.
Mr. Tedder ran into a wisp of fog which tore at his lungs. He choked and
fellwhich was fortunate, because the air was clearer near the ground. He lay
kicking among dead leaves and dry grass-stems while a gray vapor spread and
spread, and a very gentle breeze urged it sidewise among the unkempt trees of
the orchard.
The noise died away in a
long-continued moan which included gurglings. It
still sounded like gas escaping from very high pressure.
The gurglings
were like spoutings of liquid within.
But Mr. Tedder was in no mood
to analyze. He had been breathless to begin with. He had been strangled on top
of that. Now he writhed in the dry grass, ready to sob because the constable
would presently lay hands on him and haul him to jail.
He heard the constable shout
again, furiously. Then Mr. Tedder heard him cough. The constable bellowed,
"Fire!" and fled.
He ran into a tendril of
wispy, creeping vapor which did look a lot like smoke. He fell down,
strangling. Again thy, air was clearer among the tangled stalks of frost-kills
grasses. The constable coughed and wheezed.
Presently he staggered away
to report that a vagabond had set fire to the woods to hinder pursuit. But
there was no fire. The chill vapor which looked like smoke very gradually
dissipated. A cursory glance would send the firefighters home again.
Mr. Tedder lay
sobbing and gasping on the ground expecting at any instant to be seized. He
panted in despair. But the constable did not reappear. He never returned. Mr.
Tedder was alone, his escape good.
When he realized it, he sat
up abruptly. His meek face expressed astonishment. He stared all about him.
There was still a small space from which an ever-thinner gray vapor seeped
away. There was a reek as of ammonia in the aira highly improbable smell
around an abandoned farmhouse.
Presently Mr. Tedder got to
his feet. He brushed off the leaves and grass-stems which clung to his shabby
garments. He was a few yards from a distinctly tumbledown woodshed and almost
under a gnarled apple-tree to which a few leaves still clung, and where he
could observe a single, dried-up apple clinging tenaciously to its parent
bough.
The sight of the apple gave
him pause. He hunted busily. He found windfalls. Untended, the apples would be
wormy and small and belated at best. But Mr. Tedder had learned not to be
over-fastidious. He found a dozen or more scrubby objects which were partly
eatable. He ate them.
It was then that he heard a
bubbling noise, like something boiling in a pot. The sounds came from the
place where the gray mist rose. He went to the spot, and wrinkled his nose. The
smell of ammonia was stronger. It seemed to come from a collapsed object on the
ground which was remotely like a deflated hide. A liquid came from a small
rent in it and bubbled furiously to nothingness.
A student of physics would
have said that it had an extraordinarily low boiling-point, like a liquefied
gas. Mr. Tedder said nothing. He regarded the flaccid skin-like thing surprisedly. He had seen it a little while since, inflated
and moving about.
There must have been
something inside it to move it.
Mr. Tedder could see, of
course, where it had a tiny tear. It had moved or been moved back against a
single strand of barbed wire, hidden among vinestems.
It had punctured, and there it was. But Mr. Tedder could never have imagined a
creature which required an extremely cold gas like ammonia and hydrogen, mixed,
at extremely high pressure, in order to live. He could not have conceived of
such a creature wearing a flexible garment to contain that high-pressure,
low-temperature gas for it to breathe. Assuredly he would never envision
anything, beast or devil, which at released pressure and the temperature of a
Vermont autumn day would melt to liquid and boil away to nothing.
"It don't
make sense," he muttered, scratching his unkempt head.
So Mr. Tedder, who could not
think comprehendingly, did not think at all. He saw something on the groundno,
two things. They were metal, and they smouldered and
smoked like the flat thing, because they were cold. They were unbelievably
cold. One looked like an aluminum pot. But pots do not have chilly linked-metal
straps in the place of handles, nor hemispherical knobs, a good inch and a half
in diameter, on one rim. The other object looked like a gun. Not a real gun, of
course. But vaguely, approximately, like a gun just the same.
He picked up the pot. It was
all of an inch and a half thick. It was very light for such a thickness. Mr.
Tedder cheered suddenly. It was undoubtedly aluminum. There is a market for
scrap aluminum. East Lupton was out of bounds, of course, but there might be a
junk-dealer in South Lupton. This ought to be worth fifty cents, and he might
get a quarter for it.
"Two
bits is still two bits," he thought.
He touched the other thing
gingerly. It was still bitterly cold, but the frost melted under the warmth of
his finger. It would weigh fifteen pounds or so. Another twenty-five cents...
Mr. Tedder marched on
happily. Then he came upon broken branches, freshly crushed down from trees. He
saw another gray mist before him. He approached it cautiously. He saw where
something had crashed down through the trees and knocked off the top of a
six-inch maple. He pushed on inquisitively. . . .
The thing had ploughed into
soft earth and almost buried itself. A foot-thick tree was splintered and had
crashed to cover the object that had broken it. Mr. Tedder saw whiteness
through the toppled branches. It seemed to be a sphere not much over ten feet
in diameter, and it was completely covered with frost. A chilly mist oozed away
from it. Mr. Tedder stared at it with the metal pot in one hand and the gunif
it was a gunin the other.
There was silence save for
the faintly sibilant whispering of the trees overhead. There was the lurid
coloring of Vermont in the fall. A bird called somewhere, a long distance
away. Then Mr. Tedder heard a motor running. It sounded very queer.
"Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thudCHUNK!" It was running in the frost-covered sphere under the
fallen tree.
"I'll be darned!"
he said aloud.
It occurred vaguely to Mr.
Tedder that this and the deflated object back yonder were somehow connected.
He picked his way cautiously around the smashed branches and shattered trees.
Well away, he felt cheerful because he had escaped the law and picked up
salable junk. The two objects were pretty heavy, too. The pot would fit on his
head, though, and would be easier to carry so. He put it over his battered soft
hat and drew the chain-link strap under his chin. Then he examined the thing
like a gun. There was a knob on one side, an inch and a half in diameter. He
tugged at it.
There was a sharp buzzing
sound. Something that looked like flame came out of the end. It spread out in a
precisely shaped, mathematically perfect cone, and blotted out brushwood,
treeseverything.
Mr. Tedder jerked the knob
back, startled, on the first sounding of the noise. The flame-like appearance
lasted less than half a second. But where the flame had played upon foliage and
brush there wasn't anything left. Nothing at all but a little
fine ash, sifting down toward earth. And the grass and topsoil were
eaten away as if a virulent acid had been spilled over them.
Mr. Tedder stood frozen for
the tenth part of a heartbeat. Then in one motion he threw away the gun and
fled. The pot flopped down over his eyes, blinding him. He hit his head a
terrific blow against a low-hanging limb. Instantly, it seemed to him, the
chain-link strap tightened. He went almost mad with terror. But when he got the
pot back so he could see, he fled with the heavy thing bobbing and bumping on
his head.
Presently, his own panting
slowed him down. He remembered the knob on the rim of the pot. He stopped and
fumbled with it. It came off in his hand with a crystalline fracture to show
where it had broken in his first collision. He couldn't get the pot off.
He worked for a long time,
sweating in something close to hysterical panic. He was terrified of the thing
he had thrown away, and by transference, of the pot on his head. He desired
passionately to be rid of it. He felt a sort of poignant desperation. But he
would have to get somebody to cut the strap in order to be freed.
He came to the edge of the
thicket beyond East Lupton. He looked out upon rolling country, undulating to
the mountain's foot. There was a cluster of houses in the distance. Still
terrified, and with the pot bumping on his head, Mr. Tedder struck out for the
village.
He saw a tiny bundle of fur
in his way. It was a dead rabbit. He passed on. He saw, very far ahead, a white
dog running from a farmhouse to intercept him. But Mr. Tedder was not afraid of
dogs. He was afraid of the pot on his head. Presently he saw the dog no more
than ten feet away. It lay sprawled out, motionless. It looked dead. Then he
saw the throb-throb of a heartbeat. It was asleep, or unconscious. He hastened
on.
He came to the highway and
ran toward a wagon for help. And there was a horse lying down between the
shafts. The man in the wagon, too, had sagged limply. Both were alive, but both
were unconscious.
"Something screwy
here," he thought.
Mr. Tedder had his own
terror, but this was an emergency even more immediate than his own. He tried to
help the man. He did get him down to the road, and laid him solicitously on the
dead-grass bank by the side of the road. He loosened his clothing and went on
toward the village at a run to summon help. Afterward he would get the pot off
his head.
But the village was
unconscious, too, when he got there. Male and female, man, woman, child, and
beast, the inhabitants of South Lupton lay in crumpled heaps.
He saw a small boy
unconscious over a toy wagon. A woman had collapsed into a laundry-basket
beside a clothesline. A little farther on, a mule lay with its legs spraddled absurdly. Then he saw two men flung headlong as
if they had been running when weakness overtook them. It began to look as if
alarm had come to the village.
People had thronged out of
their houses to fall in heaps on the sidewalk, at their doorseverywhere. He
saw a car that had run into a gas-pump, and just
beyond another car which had run off the road and stalled on a hillside. Dogs,
cats, chickensthe very pigeons and crows lay motionless on the ground.
Mr. Tedder felt a horrible
panic, and the pot on his head bumped him, but he tried desperately to rise to
the emergency this situation constituted. He tried to rouse the unconscious
people lying in the street. He loosened clothing, he sprinkled water, he chafed handsto no avail. His meek, normally apprehensive
features went consciously stern and resolute.
Presently he tried to summon
help by telephone, but there was a local exchange and the operator lay
unconscious in her chair. In the end, and in desperation, Mr. Tedder commandeered
a bicycle on which to seek aid.
The essential rightness of
his character was shown by the fact that he rifled no purses. He looted
nothing. The Bank of South Lupton lay open to him, and it did not occur to him
to fill his pockets. He got on a bicycle and rode off like mad, the absurd pot
bobbing on his head as he pedaled.
He came to a car that had
smashed into a ditch and turned over. Flames licked at its gasoline-tank. Mr.
Tedder leaped off the bicycle and dragged out an unconscious man and a little
girl. He hauled them to safety and tried to put out the fire. He failed.
He pedaled on madly in quest
of a doctor, when attempts to rouse these two people failed as had all the
rest. He was in a new panic now, somehow. He remembered, though vaguely, talk of a broadcast of years before concerning the
landing of Martians upon the earth. Mr. Tedder was not quite sure whether
Martians had landed or not, but somehow it suddenly frightened him to remember
the frost-covered globe which had smashed trees in landing.
"You'd think I was Orson
Welles or somebody," he gulped.
He reached the town of West
Lupton. The names of towns in Vermont are not good evidence of Yankee
ingenuity. The town itself was a tiny place of five hundred people. As he
pedaled into it, it looked like the scene of a massacre. Its inhabitants lay
unconscious everywhere. There were not even flies in the air.
Mr. Tedder did not give up
for two full hours, during which he pedaled desperately in quest of some other
conscious human being. By now his fear had come to be for himself, and it grew
until it made him almost unaware of the ill-fitting, bumping pot upon his head.
But at long last his teeth chattered.
"M-maybe," said Mr.
Tedder quaveringly to himself, "IÅ‚m the only man
left alive in these parts . . ."
With the terror came an
impulse to hide. It was then late afternoon. It would soon be dark. He did not
want to be in a town filled with still, not-dead forms after dark! He pedaled
down a side road. It became a cart-track and climbed. It dwindled to a footpath.
He dived into the obscurity of woodland as the shadows grew deep.
He came at last to an empty,
rocky hilltop. Sunset was over. Only a lingering dim red glow remained in the
west. Presently stars shone down. He looked up at them, sweating.
If that frost-covered thing
had come from the stars, something from ita sort of devilhad 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 VERMONTDEVIL
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 surepure anguish sharpened Mr. Tedder's
perceptions that it could not fall off while it was operating. If it did, the
personor the devilwearing 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 potor helmethad 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 lithiumall interacting readily with
watercould exist there. . . . Such a suggestion would have had exactly no
meaning at all.
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 weaponsfor which he had no needand 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 himor 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-snipshe had trouble getting them under the chain-link strapto 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.
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