Chapter TWO: Catastrophe--or Weapon?

Santa Monica was a city under attack. Sweating policemen struggled with solid jams of cars driven by wild-eyed madmen. Horns hooted and blared. And through it all, like banshees screaming with eldritch mirth, the sirens wailed.

“They’ll declare martial law,” said Fallon. “I wonder how long they can hold those things back?”

“Webb,” whispered Joan, “what _are_ those things?”

Strangely, they hadn’t asked that before.

They’d hardly had time even to think it.

Fallon shook his head. “God knows. But it’s going to get worse. Hear that gunfire? My apartment isn’t far from here. We’ll get some clothes and a drink, and then....”

It was growing dark when they came out again. Fallon felt better, with a lot of brandy inside him and some warm clothes. Joan had a pair of his slacks and a heavy sweater.

He grinned, and said, “Those never looked as nice on me.”

Soldiers were throwing up barricades in the streets. The windows of Corbin’s big department store were shattered, the bodies of dead rays lying in the debris. The rattle of gunfire was hotter, and much closer.

“They’re being driven back,” murmured Fallon.

A squadron of bombers droned over, and presently there was the _crump_ and roar of high explosives along the beaches. The streets were fairly clear now, except for stragglers and laden ambulances, and the thinning groups of dead.

Fallon thought what must be happening in the towns farther south, with their flat low beaches and flimsy houses. How far did this invasion extend? What was it? And how long would it last?

He got his car out of the garage behind the apartment house. Joan took the wheel, and he lay down on his stomach on the back seat.

His back hurt like hell.

“One good thing,” he remarked wryly. “The finance company won’t be chasing me through this. Just go where the traffic looks lightest, and shout if you need me.”

He went to sleep.

It was morning when he woke. Joan was asleep on the front seat, curled up under a blanket. She had spread one over him, too.

Fallon smiled, and looked out.

The first thing he noticed was the unfamiliar roar of motors overhead, and the faint crackling undertone of gunfire. They were still under siege, then, and the defenders were still giving ground.

They were parked on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine. Crowds of white-faced, nervous people huddled along the streets. The only activity was around the newsboys.

Fallon got out, stiff and cursing, and went to buy a paper. An extra arrived before he got there. The boy ripped open the bundle, let out a startled squawk, and began to yell at the top of his lungs.

A low, angry roar spread down the boulevard. Fallon got a paper, and smiled a white-toothed, ugly smile. He shook Joan awake and gave her the paper.

“There’s your answer. Read it.”

* * * * *

She read aloud: “Japs Claim Sea Invasion Their Secret Weapon!

“Only a few minutes ago, the Amalgamated Press recorded an official broadcast from Tokyo, declaring that the fantastic wave of monsters which have sprung from the ocean at many points along the Western Coast was a new war-weapon of the Axis which would cause the annihilation of American and world-wide democratic civilization.

“The broadcast, an official High Command communique, said in part: ‘The Pacific is wholly in our hands. American naval bases throughout the ocean are useless, and the fleet where it still exists is isolated. In all cases our new weapon has succeeded. The Pacific states, with the islands, come within our natural sphere of influence. We advise them to submit peacefully.’”

Joan Daniels looked up at Fallon. At first there was only stunned pallor in her face. Then the color came, dark and slow.

“Submit peacefully!” she whispered. “So that’s it. A cowardly, fiendish, utterly terrible perversion of warfare--something so horrible that it....”

“Yeah,” said Fallon. “Save it.”

He was leafing through the paper. There was a lot more--hurried opinions by experts, guesses, conjectures, and a few facts.

Fallon said flatly. “They seem to be telling the truth. Fragmentary radio messages have come in from the Pacific. Monsters attacked just as suddenly as they did here, and at about the same time. They simply clogged the guns, smothered the men, and wrecked ground equipment by sheer weight of numbers.”

Joan shuddered. “You wouldn’t think....”

“No,” grunted Fallon. “You wouldn’t.” He flung the paper down. “Yah! Not an eyewitness account in the whole rag!”

Joan looked at him thoughtfully. She said, “Well....”

“They fired me once,” he snarled. “Why should I crawl back?”

“It was your own fault, Webb. You know it.”

He turned on her, and again his face had the look of a mean dog. “That,” he said, “is none of your damned business.”

She faced him stubbornly, her sapphire eyes meeting his slitted grey-green ones with just a hint of anger.

“You wouldn’t be a bad sort, Webb,” she said steadily, “if you weren’t so lazy and so hell-fired selfish!”

Cold rage rose in him, the rage that had shaken him when Madge told him she was through. His hands closed into brown, ugly fists.

Joan met him look for look, her bright hair tangling over the collar of his sweater, the strong brown curves of cheek and throat catching the early sunlight. And again, as it had in that moment on the cliff, something turned over in Fallon’s heart.

“What do you care,” he whispered, “whether I am or not?”

For the first time her gaze flickered, and something warmer than the sunlight touched her skin.

“You saved my life,” she said. “I feel responsible for you.”

Fallon stared. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed. “You fool,” he whispered. “You damned little fool!”

He kissed her. And he kissed her gently, as he had never kissed Madge.

They got breakfast. After that, Fallon knew, they should have gone east, with the tense, crawling hordes of refugees. But somehow he couldn’t go. The distant gunfire drew him, the stubborn, desperate planes.

They went back, toward the hills of Bel Air. After all, there was plenty of time to run.

Things progressed as he had thought they would. Martial law was declared. An orderly evacuation of outlying towns was going forward. Fallon got through the police lines with a glib lie about an invalid brother. It wasn’t hard--there was no danger yet the way he was going, and the police were badly overburdened.

Fallon kept the radio on as he drove. There was a lot of wild talk--it was too early yet for censorship. A big naval battle east of Wake Island, another near the Aleutians. The defense, for the present, was getting nowhere.

Up on the crest of a sun-seared hill, using powerful glasses from his car, Fallon shook his head with a slow finality.

The morning mists were clearing. He had an unobstructed view of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the vast bowl of land sloping away to the sea. The broad boulevards to the east were clogged with solid black streams. And to the west....

* * * * *

To the west there were barricades. There were clouds of powder smoke, and fleets of low-flying planes. And there was something else.

Something like a sluggish, devouring tide, lapping at the walls of the huge M-G-M studios in Culver City, swamping the tarmac at Clover Field, flowing resistlessly on and on.

Bombs tore great holes in the restless sea, but they flowed in upon themselves and were filled. Big guns ripped and slashed at the swarming creatures. Many died. But there were always more. Many, many more.

The shallow margin of the distant ocean was still churned to froth. Still the things came out of it, surging up and on.

Fighting, spawning, dying--and advancing.

Joan Daniels pressed close against him, shuddering. “It just isn’t possible, Webb! Bombers, artillery, tanks, trained soldiers. And we can’t stop them!” She stiffened suddenly. “Webb!” she cried. “Look there!”

Where the bombers swooped through the smoke, another fleet was coming. A fleet of flat triangular bodies with bat-like wings, in numbers that clouded the sun. Rays, blind and savage and utterly uncaring.

Machine guns brought them down by the hundred, but more of them came. They crashed into heavy ships, fouled propellers, broke controls.

Joan looked away, “And there are so few planes,” she whispered.

Fallon nodded. “The whole coast is under attack, remember, from Vancouver to Mexico. There just aren’t enough men, guns, or planes to go round. More are coming from the east, but....” He shrugged and was silent.

“Then--then you think we’ll have to surrender?”

“Doesn’t look hopeful, does it? Japan in control of the Pacific, and this here. We’ll hold out for a while, of course. But suppose these things come out of the sea indefinitely?”

“We’ve got to assume they can.” Joan’s eyes were dark and very tired. “What’s to prevent Japan from loaning her weapon to her friends? Think of these things swarming in over England.”

“War,” said Fallon somberly. “A hell of a long, rotten war.”

He leaned against the car, his grey-green eyes half closed. The breeze came in from the sea, heavy with the stench of amphibian bodies. The radio droned on. The single deep line between Fallon’s straight brows grew deeper. He began to talk, slowly, to Joan.

“The experts say that the Little Brown Brothers must have some kind of a movable projector capable of producing rays which upset the evolutionary balance and cause abnormal growth. Rays like hard X-rays, or the cosmic rays that govern reproduction.

“California Tech has dissected several types of monsters. They say that individual cell groups are affected, causing spontaneous growth in living individuals, and that metabolism has been enormously speeded, so that life-cycles which normally took years now take only a few weeks.

“They also say that huge numbers--the bulk of these creatures--are mutants, new individuals changed in the egg or the reproductive cell. All these monsters are growing and spawning at a terrific tempo. Billions of eggs, laid and hatched, even with the high mortality rate.

“They’re evolving, at a fantastic rate of speed. They’re growing legs and lungs and becoming mammals. They’re coming out of the sea, just as our ancestors did millions of years ago. They’re coming fast, and they’re hungry.”

He fixed the girl suddenly with a bright, sharp stare.

“Do you think a thing as big as that is man-made?”

* * * * *

There was a grim, stony weariness in her face. “The Japanese say so. What other explanation is there?”

“But,” said Fallon, “why not South America, too?”

“They were probably afraid the monsters might get out of hand and tackle their own people,” said Joan bitterly.

“Maybe.” Again Fallon’s eyes were distant. Then he clapped his hands sharply and sprang up. “Yes! Got it, Joan!”

The quick motion ripped at the wound across his back. He swayed and caught her shoulder, but he didn’t stop talking.

“Einar Bjarnsson! He was my last job. I interviewed him the day before the quake. I want to see him, Joan. Now!”

She took his wrists, half frightened. “What is it, Webb?”

“Listen,” he said softly. “Remember the radio calls from the islands? The monsters came out of the west here, didn’t they? Well, out there--_they came out of the east_!”

Fallon explained, as he sent the car screaming perilously along winding mountain roads. Einar Bjarnsson was an expert on undersea life. He had charted tide paths and sub-sea ‘rivers,’ mapped the continental shelves and the great deeps.

Bjarnsson’s recent exploration had been in the Pacific, using a specially constructed small submarine. His findings on deep-sea phenomena had occupied space in scientific journals and the Sunday supplements of newspapers throughout the world.

Two days before the big quake Einar Bjarnsson returned to the place he called home--a small bachelor cabin on a hilltop, crammed with scientific traps and trophies of his exploring. Webb Fallon drew the assignment of interviewing him.

“I was pretty sore at Madge, then,” Fallon confessed, “and I had a ferocious hangover. The interview didn’t go so well. But I remember Bjarnsson mentioning something about a volcanic formation quite close to the Pacific coast--something nobody had noticed before. It was apparently extinct, and the only thing that made it notable was its rather unusual conformation.”

Joan stared at him. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Fallon shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Only I recall that the epicenter of the recent quake was somewhere in the vicinity of Bjarnsson’s volcano. I remember that damned quake quite well, because it cost me my job.”

Joan opened her mouth and closed it again, hard. Fallon grinned.

“You were going to tell me it wasn’t the quake, but my own bad character,” he said mockingly.

There was something grim in the upthrust lines of her jaw. “I can’t make you out, Webb,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think there’s good stuff in you--and then I think Madge was right!”

Fallon’s dark oval face went ugly, and he didn’t speak again until Bjarnsson’s house came in sight.