Philip Dick - The Crawlers

HE built, and the more he built the more he enjoyed building. Hot sunlight filtered down; summer breezes stirred around him as he toiled joyfully. When he ran out of material he paused awhile and rested. His edifice wasn't large; it was more a practice model than the real thing. One part of his brain told him that, and another part thrilled with excitement and pride. It was at least large enough to enter. He crawled down the entrance tunnel and curled up inside in a contented heap.

Through a rent in the roof a few bits of dirt rained down. He oozed binder fluid and reinforced the weak place. In his edifice the air was clean and cool, almost dust- free. He crawled over the inner walls one last time, leaving a quick-drying coat of binder over everything? What else was needed? He was beginning, to feel drowsy; in a moment he’d be asleep.

He thought about it, and then he extended a part of himself up through the still-open entrance. That part watched and listened warily, as the rest of him dozed off in a grateful slumber. He was peaceful and content, conscious that from a distance all that was visible was a light mound of dark clay. No one would notice it: no one would guess what lay beneath.

And if they did notice, he had methods of taking care of them.

The farmer halted his ancient Ford truck with a grinding shriek of brakes. He cursed and backed up a few yards. “There’s one. Hop down and take a look at it. Watch the cars—they go pretty fast along here.”

Ernest Gretry pushed the cabin door open and stepped down gingerly onto the hot mid-morning pavement. The air smelled of sun and drying grass. Insects buzzed around him as he advanced cautiously up the highway, hands in his trouser pockets, lean body bent forward. He stopped and peered down.

The thing was well mashed. Wheel marks crossed it in four places and its internal organs had ruptured and burst through. The whole thing was snail-like, a gummy elongated tube with sense organs at one end and a confusing mass of protoplasmic extensions at the other.

What got him most was the face. For a time he couldn’t look directly at it: he had to contemplate the road, the hills, the big cedar trees, anything else. There was something in the little dead eyes, a glint that was rapidly fading. They weren’t the lustreless eyes of a fish, stupid and vacant. The life he had seen haunted him, and he had got only a brief glimpse, as the truck bore down on it and crushed it flat.

“They crawl across here every once in awhile,” the farmer said quietly. “Sometimes they get as far as town. The first one I saw was heading down the middle of

Grant Street, about fifty yards an hour. They go pretty slow. Some of the teen-age kids like to run them down. Personally I avoid them, if I see them.”

Gretry kicked aimlessly at the thing. He wondered vaguely how many more there were in the bushes and hills. He could see farmhouses set back from the road, white gleaming squares in the hot Tennessee sun. Horses and sleeping cattle. Dirty chickens scratching. A sleepy, peaceful countryside, basking in the late-summer sun.

“Where’s the radiation lab from here?” he asked.

The farmer indicated. “Over there, on the other side of those hills. You want to collect the remains? They have one down at the Standard Oil Station in a big tank. Dead, of course. They filled the tank with kerosene to try to preserve it. That one’s in pretty good shape, compared to this. Joe Jackson cracked its head with a two-by-four. He found it crawling across his property one night.”

Gretry got shakily back into the truck. His stomach turned over and he had to take some long deep breaths. “I didn’t realize there were so many. When they sent me out from Washington they just said a few had been seen.”

“There’s been quite a lot.” The farmer started up the truck and carefully skirted the remains on the pavement. “We’re trying to get used to them, but we can’t. It’s not nice stuff. A lot of people are moving away. You can feel it in the air, a sort of heaviness. We’ve got this problem and we have to meet it.” He increased speed, leathery hands tight around the wheel. “It seems like there’s more of them, born all the time, and almost no normal children.”

BACK in town, Gretry called Freeman lone distance from the booth in the shabby hotel lobby. “We’ll have to do something. They’re all around here. I’m going out at three to see a colony of them. The fellow who runs the taxi stand knows where they are. He says there must be eleven or twelve of them together.”

“How do the people around there feel?”

“How the hell do you expect? They think its God's Judgment. Maybe they’re right.”

“We should have made them move earlier. We should have cleaned out the whole area for miles around. Then we wouldn’t have this problem.” Freeman paused. “What do you suggest?” “That island we took over for the A-bomb tests.”

“It’s a damn big island. There was a whole group of natives we moved off and resettled.” Freeman choked. “Good God, are there that many of them?”

“The staunch citizens exaggerate, of course. But I get the impression there must be at least a hundred.”

Freeman was silent a long time. “I didn’t realize,” he said finally. “I’ll have to put it through channels, of course. We were going to make further tests on that island. But I see your point.”

“I’d like it,” Gretry said. “This is a bad ‘business. We can’t have things like this. People can’t live with this sort of thing. You ought to drop out here and take a look. It’s something to remember.”

“I’ll—see what I can do. I’ll talk to Gordon. Give me a ring tomorrow.”

Gretry hung up and wandered out of the drab, dirty lobby onto the blazing sidewalk. Dingy stores and parked cars. A few old men hunched over on steps and sagging cane-bottom chairs. He lit a cigarette and shakily examined his watch. It was almost .three. He moved slowly toward the taxi stand.

The town was dead. Nothing stirred. Only the motionless old men in their chairs and the out-oftown cars zipping along the highway. Dust and silence lay over everything. Age, like a gray spider web, covered all the houses and stores. No laughter. No sounds of any kind.

No children playing games.

A dirty blue taxicab pulled up silently beside him. “Okay, mister,” the driver said, a rat-faced man in his thirties, tooth pick hanging between his crooked teeth. He kicked the bent door open. “Here we go.”

“How far is it?” Gretry asked, as he climbed in.

“Just outside town.” The cab picked up speed and hurtled noisily along, bouncing and bucking. “You from the FBI?”

“No.”

“I thought from your suit and hat you was.” The driver eyed him curiously. “How’d you hear about the crawlers?”

“From the radiation lab.” “Yeah, it’s that hot stuff they got there.” The driver turned off the highway and onto a dirt side- road. “It’s up here on the Higgins farm. The crazy damn things picked the bottom of old lady Higgins’ place to build their houses.” “Houses?”

“They’ve got some sort of city, down under the ground. You’ll see it—the entrances, at least. They work together, building and fussing.” He twisted the cab off the dirt road, between two huge cedars, over a bumpy field, and finally brought it to rest at the edge of a rocky gully. “This is it.”

It was the first time Gretry had seen one alive.