The Genocides

“There must be,” Orville insisted. Under the pressure of hours of crisis, he had lost track of his original motive—to save the Andersons for his personal revenge, for slower agonies. His desire was more primary—self-preservation. “If there are no houses left, there must still be someplace to hide: a burrow, a cave, a culvert…” Something he bad said touched the chord of memory. A burrow? A cave?

“A cave! Blossom, a long time ago, when I was sick, you told me you’d been in a cave. You’d never seen a mine, but you’d been in a cave. Was that near here?”

“It’s by the lake shore—the old lake shore. Near Stromberg’s Resort. It’s not far, but I haven’t been in it since I was a little girl. I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“How big a cave is it?”

“Very big. At least, I thought so then.”

“Could you take us there?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard enough in the summertime to find your way around through the Plants. All the old landmarks are gone, and with the snow besides…”

“Take us there, girl! Now!” Anderson rasped. He was himself again, more or less.

They left the half-naked woman behind them lying in the snow. Not through cruelty: it was simply forgetfulness. When they had gone, the woman looked up and said, “Please.” But the people whom she had thought to address were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. She got to her feet and dropped her blanket.

It was very cold. She heard the humming sound again and ran blindly back into the woods, heading in the opposite direction from that which Blossom had taken.

The three incendiary spheres glided to the spot where the woman had lain, quickly converted the blanket there to ash, and moved on after Mrs. Wilks, following the spoor of blood.

Much of the old lake shore was still recognizable under the mantle of snow: the conformation of the rocks, the stairways going down to the water—they even found a post that had once been part of the resort’s pier. From the pier Blossom estimated it would be a hundred yards to the cave entrance. She went along the rockface that rose ten feet above the old beach and played the lamplight into likely crevasses. Wherever she directed him, Buddy cleared the snow with a shovel, which, along with an axe, he had rescued from the commonroom. The other searchers scraped off the snow (which had drifted more than a yard deep among the boulders) with their hands, niittened or bare, as luck would have it.

The work went slowly, for Blossom remembered the entrance to the cave as being halfway up the rockface, so that one had to clamber over snowy rocks to be able to dig. Despite the hazard this involved, they did not have time to be careful. Behind the clouds, from which the snow sifted steadily down, there was no moon; the digging went on in near-total darkness. At regular intervals one of them would call a sudden halt to the work and they would stand there straining to hear the telltale bum of their pursuers that someone had thought he’d heard.

Blossom, under the unaccustomed weight of responsibility, became erratic, running from rock to rock. “Here!” she would say, and then, running: “Or here?” She was a good two hundred yards from the old pier, and Buddy began to doubt that there was a cave.

If there were not, then surely they had come to an end.

The prospect of death disturbed him most in that he could not grasp the purpose of these burnings. If this were an invasion (and even his father could not doubt that now; the Good Lord did not need to build machines to wreak his vengeance), what did the invaders want? Were the Plants themselves the invaders? No, no—they were only Plants. One bad to suppose that the real invaders—the ones inside the incendiary globes (or whoever had built them and put them to work)—wanted the Earth for no other reason than to grow their damn Plants. Was Earth, then, their farm? If so, why had there been no harvest?

It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.

The opening to the cave was discovered inadvertently— Denny Stromberg fell through it. Without that happy chance, they might well have gone the whole night without finding it, for everyone in their party had passed it by.