The Body Snatchers Page 6

  “Well,” Wilma said, “we’ll get along. Sorry to have missed seeing Becky.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Becky’s father replied. “I thought surely she’d be home. She’s back in town, you know.”

  “Yes, we know,” said Uncle Ira, “and so is Miles.” I wondered how they could possibly know we were back, or that we’d even been gone. Then something happened, without warning, that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle and stand erect.

  “Oh, Miles,” Wilma suddenly said, in a cruel imitation of her last talk with me—and the venom in her caricature of herself made me shiver—“I’ve been meaning to stop in and see you about—what happened.” Then she laughed falsely, in a hideous burlesque of embarrassment.

  Then they all laughed, and I knew these people weren’t Wilma, Uncle Ira, Aunt Aleda and Becky’s father; I knew they were not human beings at all, and I was very nearly sick. I put my hand on Becky’s arm, and we crept away from the house.

  At the sidewalk, Becky said, “Oh, Miles,” in a sick, subdued sort of moan. I just nodded, and we kept on, walking fast, putting distance between us and that corrupted old house.

  Becky was clinging to my arm. “Miles,” she cried, nearly hysterical, “this is too much for us. They’re after us, all of them, and they’ll get us for sure. Miles, we’ve got to run.”

  I STOPPED and took her by both arms, just above the elbows, staring down into her face. “Yes, I want you out of here, out of this town, and a thousand miles away. I’ll get my car; you head for San Francisco—go to the FBI. They’ll know where Jack and Theodora are. And I’ll run too. But I’ll be running and fighting at the same time—right here in Santa Mira. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be keeping out of their way, but I’ve got to stay here until Jack brings help. I want you out of the way, though, and safe.”

  She stared back at me, bit her lip, then shook her head. “I don’t want safety without you. What good is that?” I started to speak, but she said, “Don’t argue, Miles. There isn’t time.” After a moment I said, “All right.” and took hold of her arm, and we started on down the street.

  We weren’t going uselessly home, to walk into a trap. But we had to get off these streets, and there was nowhere to go. There was a filling station in the block, and I went into the little green outside telephone booth, not daring to glance at the watching attendant. I dialed the operator, then gave her Mannie Kaufman’s number; it seemed to me now that we needed all the help we could get.

  The telephone rang at the other end of the line; after the third ring I heard Mannie’s voice say, “Hel—” Then the line went dead. A moment later the operator said, “What number are you calling, please?” I told her, the ringing began again, and kept on, and this time there was no answer. I knew she’d simply plugged me into a ringing circuit, and that Mannie’s telephone wasn’t ringing, and neither was anyone else’s. The telephone exchange was in their hands, and probably had been for a long time.

  I broke the connection, and dialed Jack’s number. We’d decided he and Theodora would go back home, and then make as inconspicuous a departure as possible later in the day. When Jack answered, I knew they’d let this call go through to listen in on whatever we said, and so I spoke fast. “Jack, there’s trouble; they’re out to get us. Better not wait any longer.”

  “All right, Miles. What are you going to do?”

  I had to stop and think how to say this to Jack. I wanted anyone else listening to think I was leaving town. And I needed a way to say that to Jack so he’d know it wasn’t true. He’s a literary man, and I tried to think of some figure in literature whose name was a symbol for falsehood, but for the moment I couldn’t. Then I remembered—a Biblical name, Ananias, the liar. “Well. Jack,” I said, “there’s a woman I know who runs a small hotel a couple hours’ drive from here—Mrs. Ananias. You know her?”

  “Yes, Miles,” Jack said, and I could tell he was smiling. “I know Mrs. Ananias.”

  “Well, believe me, Jack, you can rely on me just as much—Becky and I are leaving town, right now, and to hell with it. You understand me, lack. You know what we’re going to do?”

  “Perfectly,” he said. “I understand you perfectly.” I knew that he did. “Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked, and I knew he was thinking about Becky, about how I might want her to go with them. “Suggest a place to meet, Miles,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, and I’d made up my mind Becky should go with them, “remember the man in your newspaper clipping? The teacher?” I knew Jack would know I meant Budlong, and while I was talking, I was leafing through the telephone book, hunting up his address. “He’s got something we have to have; it’s the only next step I can think of. We’ll meet you there in exactly one hour.”

  “Fine,” he said, and hung up.

  BECKY and I went over to my house then, and I made her wait in the drive where I could see her while I went into the garage, checked the luggage compartment of my convertible, and backed it out. Becky got in and we started for the home of L. Bernard Budlong, the man who might have the answer we didn’t.

  Time was running out, was working against us, and I knew it. At any moment a patrol car—or any other car on the street—might suddenly force us to the curb. The last thing I wanted to do was to sit talking in the home of some college professor, but we had to; I didn’t know what else to do next. But I was terribly conscious of the light green convertible we were riding in. Everyone in town knew it, and I wondered if telephones were being lifted in the houses we passed, and if the air at this moment were filled with messages about us.

  A great deal of Marin County, California, is hilly, and Santa Mira is built on and among a series of hills, the streets winding through or curving over them. I knew all of them, every foot of every street and hill, and now I headed for a little dead-end street maybe three blocks from Budlong’s house. It ended at a hill too steep for building, and overgrown with weeds, underbrush and scrubby eucalyptus. We reached it, and parked beside a clump of small trees, more or less out of sight. We got out, and I left my ignition key in the car, the motor running. We were through with the car, and anyone finding it with the motor on might just possibly waste time waiting for us to come back.

  We climbed the hill then, along a path I’d followed more than once as a kid, hunting small game with a rifle. On the path no one could see us from more than a dozen feet away, and I knew how to follow this path and others, keeping just below the crests of this hill and the next, to reach Budlong’s back yard.

  Presently his house lay below us, at the base of the hill we stood on. It was a two-story house of brown-stained, wood-shingled siding, with a good-sized yard enclosed at the rear and at one side by a high grape-stake fence, and by a tall row of shrubbery on the third side. Nothing moved, no one was in sight in the house and yard below, and we came quietly down the hill, opened the high gate in the back fence, crossed the yard, and walked around the side of the house, unseen—I felt certain—by anyone.

  The house had a side entrance. I rang the bell, and we stood waiting while I wondered if Budlong were there. I felt that quite likely he wasn’t. He was, though. After eight or ten seconds a man in his middle or late thirties appeared, looked out at us through the glass, then unbolted and opened the door. He looked at me questioningly—wondering, I imagined, why we’d used the side door.

  “We got confused,” I said. “Guess we must have used the wrong door. Professor Budlong?”

  “Yes,” he said. He wore glasses, had brownish, slightly wavy hair and the kind of intelligent, young-looking face teachers so often seem to have. He wore a pair of old slacks and a sweater.

  “I’m Miles Bennell, Dr. Bennell, and—”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve seen you around town, and—”

  “I’ve seen you too,” I said. “I knew you were with the college, but didn’t know your name. This is Miss Becky Driscoll.”

  “How do you do.” He opened the door wider and stood to one side. “Come in
, won’t you?”

  We stepped inside, and he led us along a hall to a sort of study—there were a desk and a chair, a filing cabinet and a low couch. “Sit down.” Budlong indicated the couch. He sat in the chair at the desk. “What can I do for you?”

  I told him. For reasons too long and complicated to explain, I said, we were very interested in anything he could tell us about a newspaper story in which he’d been quoted. We hadn’t seen the actual story, I explained, but only a reference to it in the Tribune.

  Budlong was grinning by the time I finished. “That story,” he said. “I guess I’ll never hear the end of it. What do you want to know, Doctor—what the story said?”

  “Yes, and everything else you can add,” I told him.

  “Well,” Budlong said, “the story made some statements it shouldn’t have.” He smiled ruefully. “Newspaper reporters—I guess I’ve lived a sheltered life; I’d never met one before. This one called me one morning: I was professor of botany and biology, was I not? I said yes. He asked, then, if I’d drive out to the Parnell farm. There was something I ought to see, he said, and described what it was in just enough detail to arouse my curiosity. So I drove out there, and on a trash pile near the barn, Parnell showed me some large hulls, or pods of some sort, apparently vegetable in origin. The reporter asked me what they were. So I told him the truth”—Budlong grinned—“that I hadn’t the least idea.

  “The things lying there on the trash pile simply looked to me like large seed pods of some sort. The farmer, Mr. Parnell, told me they’d come drifting down from the sky, which I didn’t doubt—where else would they come from? They didn’t seem at all remarkable to me, except possibly for their size; though I admitted that the gray substance they were filled with—they’d broken open in several places—did not resemble what we ordinarily think of as seeds. The reporter tried to interest me in the fact that several objects on the trash pile seemed very much alike, attributing this, somehow, to the pods. He pointed out two empty peach cans, I remember, which looked identical. And there was a broken ax handle, with another similar one beside it. But I couldn’t, myself, see anything very startling about that.

  “Then he tried another tack. He wanted a story, a sensational one, if possible, and was determined to get it.” Again Budlong shook his head, his expression ruefully amused. “Could these pods have come from outer space, he now wanted to know.” Budlong shrugged. “Well, I could only answer yes, they could have—I didn’t know where they’d come from. You see”—his face became serious now—“this is where the reporter trapped me. The theory, the notion, that some of our plant life drifted onto this planet from space, is hoary with age. It’s a perfectly respectable, reputable theory, and there is nothing sensational or even startling about it.”

  BUDLONG leaned back in his chair.

  “So, yes, I said, these could be spores from outer space; why not? But it was much more likely, I added, that they had originated right here on earth in the most commonplace manner, and I felt quite certain they could be identified—if one were to take the trouble—as something possibly rare, but perfectly well known.” He shook his head once more. “But the damage was done. The young man chose to print the first portion of my comments, omitting the second. Anyhow, two or three rather flamboyant and—I felt—misleading newspaper stories, quoting me, appeared in the local paper, which I complained about. And that’s the story, Dr. Bennell. Much ado about nothing, I’m afraid.”

  I smiled and nodded, matching my mood to his. “Be pretty slow, anyhow, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Drifting in from space?”

  “Infinitely so,” he said. “Though of course,” he added, “what is infinite slowness in infinite time? Once you assume these spores may have drifted here from space, then it is equally true that they may have been out there for millions of years. Hundreds of millions of years—it simply doesn’t matter. A corked bottle tossed into the ocean may circle the globe, given enough time. Expand the tiny distance that is the circumference of our globe into the immense distances of space, and it is still true that, given enough time, any of these distances may be crossed. So if these, or any spores, have ever drifted onto earth, they may well have begun their journey ages before there was an earth.”

  SMILING at Becky, he leaned forward. “But you aren’t a newspaper reporter, Doctor. The seed pods on the Parnell farm, if that is what they were, probably drifted there on the wind from not too great a distance, and were undoubtedly a completely well-known and classified specimen with which I simply didn’t happen to be familiar.” He grinned at us again, a very likable guy. “Why are you interested, Dr. Bennell?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, and hesitated, wondering how much I could, or should, say to him. “Have you heard anything about a—sort of delusion that has been occurring here in Santa Mira?”

  “Yes, a little.” He looked at me wonderingly for a moment. “You think there’s some connection between that and”—he grinned—“space spores?”

  “Possibly,” I said and smiled too. “Tell me this: Could these spores conceivably be some sort of weird alien organism with the ability to imitate—in fact, duplicate—a human body? Turn themselves, for all practical purposes, into a kind of human being, indistinguishable from the real thing?” The pleasant-faced, youthful-looking man at the desk looked at me curiously for a moment. Then, when he spoke after apparently considering my question, his tone was carefully polite. For the sake of good manners he was treating an utterly absurd question with a seriousness it did not deserve. “I’m afraid not, Dr. Bennell. There aren’t many things you can assert with absolute positiveness, but one of them is this: no substance in the universe could possibly reconstitute itself into the incredible structure of living bone, blood and infinitely complex cellular organization that is a human being—or any other living animal. It’s impossible, absurd, I’m afraid. Whatever you feel you may have observed, Doctor, you’re on the wrong tack. I know myself how easy it is, at times, to be carried away by a theory. But you’re a doctor, and when you think about it, you’ll know I’m right.”

  I did know. I felt my face flush in complete confusion, unable to think, and I sat there and couldn’t look at Budlong. I felt I’d made a fool of myself and that, of all people, I, a doctor, should have had more sense.

  Budlong was a perceptive, tactful man. He stood up, stretching a little, as though our conversation had ended, and turned idly toward his desk, his back to my flushed face. “I’m glad you stopped in,” he said, and the gentle note of finality in his voice indicated that he wanted us to go—immediately. “I’ve been something of a hermit”—he gestured at his desk—“working on a technical paper that will mean a good deal to me professionally—or so I hope.”

  Trying to match his politeness, I walked to his desk and stood beside him, looking down at the desk top with pretended interest, before I said good-by. The desk was covered with reports, mostly handwritten; there were stacks of file-card notes, and several opened books, their edges bristling with paper markers. “Been working every day?” I said politely.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said pleasantly, and he stared at me. Then I nodded at his desk. There is a certain look papers get when they’ve been spread out and untouched for a long time, and these papers had it unmistakably. They weren’t dusty, but ever so slightly faded and discolored by the light. I picked up three or four of the pages, exposing a half-concealed sheet underneath. The portion of the sheet that had been covered by the others was a clear white; but the upper third of the page—exposed to the light and air—was faintly yellowed, and you could see perfectly clearly the ruler-straight dividing line between the two portions. “You haven’t touched these papers for a long, long time, Professor Budlong. You’re one of them, aren’t you?” I said, and from behind me Becky made a little sound in her throat.

  I went back to the davenport and sat down beside Becky. After a moment Budlong sat down in the chair at his desk, turning
a little to face me. “Becky’s cousin, Wilma Lentz,” I said pleasantly, “told me this about her uncle—and this was how she knew he wasn’t what he seemed: he had no emotions, Professor Budlong, no real feelings any more, but only the memory and pretense of them.” I nodded at his desk. “You said that paper meant a great deal to you when you began work on it. But not any more; you haven’t touched it for days, and never will again. Emotion—hope and ambition—you don’t have them any more, do you? You no longer care; your paper means nothing to you.”

  AFTER a moment, he shrugged. “It’s hard to see, now, why I was ever excited about it,” he said, glancing at his desk. “Emotion, you say. Hope and ambition. Well, I don’t miss them; I really don’t. And neither will you.”

  “Me?” I said, smiling.

  “Of course,” he said. “You, Miss Driscoll, you’ll change too.”

  “Is that so?” I said pleasantly. “Why?”

  Again he shrugged. “Because you must. The pods, while not precisely seed pods, are living matter—capable, just as are seeds, of enormous and complex growth and development, as you guessed. And they did drift through space—the original ones, anyway—over enormous distances and through millenniums of time. Having arrived, they have a function to perform, as natural to them as yours are to you. That’s why you must change; the pods must fulfill their function.”

  “And what’s their function?” I couldn’t keep a little edge of sarcasm out of my voice.

  His voice was bored now. “The function of all life everywhere—survival. Life exists throughout the universe, of course, but under conditions inconceivably different from ours. So of course the forms it takes are inconceivably different too. Some of that life exists on planets immeasurably older than ours. What happens, Doctor, when an ancient planet slowly dies? Well, the life form on it must prepare. For what? For survival, for leaving that planet. To arrive where? And when? There can be only one answer”—he leaned toward me—“universal adaptability—to any and all other life forms, under any and all other conditions it might possibly encounter.” He sat back in his chair. “These pods have achieved it. They are completely evolved life, its ultimate form. For they have the evolved ability to re-form and reconstitute themselves into perfect duplication, cell for living cell, of any life form they may encounter, in whatever conditions that life has suited itself for.”