The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs - M. V. Carey [16]
“Some kind of clamp,” said Detweiler. “John, do you know what it is?”
John Aleman took the object from Detweiler and turned it this way and that in his hands. “Beats me,” he said. “Looks like it’s off some sort of machine.”
“Or an aircraft?” asked Detweiler.
“Maybe,” said Aleman. “The metal—it’s some kind of alloy. I don’t know just what. It doesn’t look like steel. It’s more like pewter. And there’s no residue of oil on it. Look. You close it like this and the prongs lock. It could be some sort of switch, but it’s not like any switches that I’ve ever seen.”
Barron glared around the meadow and then looked up at the cliffs. “Not like any you’ve seen?” he said.
They were silent then, thinking of the blazing cliffs and the clouds of smoke, and of the strange craft that had lifted from the meadow. De Luca felt his singed hair. His face was bewildered.
“Someone was here,” said Aleman quietly. His square, blunt-featured face was grim.
“Somebody came and … and did something to Simon and went away again. But where did they come from? And where did they go? Who were they?”
No one answered. From the hills above them came the lonely cry of a coyote. Pete shivered at the wailing sound, and at the memory of the flying saucer. He wondered if aliens had walked in the meadow—if aliens were hiding there right now.
Chapter 8
Attack!
SIMON DE LUCA was brought back from the meadow by truck. After he was carried into one of the cottages on the lane, Mary Sedlack and Mrs. Barron examined him. They tested his reflexes, peered into his eyes with a small flashlight, and decided that he had suffered a mild concussion.
“Mrs. Barron acts as if she had medical training,” said Bob to Elsie Spratt. The Three Investigators were in the ranch-house kitchen with the cook, who sat nervously rubbing her deformed finger.
“Mrs. Barron was in nurse’s training when she was a girl,” said Elsie. “She does volunteer work one day a week at the hospital in town. Pity she married that old grouch.
She’d have made a great nurse.”
The boys heard a car in the drive. Jupe got up and went to the open door. A few minutes before, Charles Barron had driven to the gate to demand that Lieutenant Ferrante notify his superiors at Camp Roberts that a herder had been attacked. Barron was back now, and Mrs. Barron stood in the lane talking with him.
“Well?” she said. “What happened?”
Barron snorted. “That snivelling excuse for an officer has a field telephone, but it’s like everything else around here. It isn’t working.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Barron happily. “When the rescuers are in our atmosphere, they’re able to disrupt our electrical field.”
“Ernestine, you don’t even know what an electrical field is!” cried Charles Barron.
“No, actually, I don’t,” she said. “But it’s terribly important, isn’t it? When extra-terrestrial visitors cause the field to stop functioning, everything stops — the radio, telephones, cars, everything!”
“Our car still works,” Barron pointed out.
“Perhaps the interference isn’t complete,” said Mrs. Barron. “When the visitors return, it will be complete.”
“And when will that be?” Barron asked, exasperated.
“They will let us know,” she replied. She went up the steps into the big house.
Barron said several things under his breath, then followed his wife.
“Good for her!” said Elsie Spratt, who had come to the ranch-house door to stand beside Jupe. “She got the last word for a change!”
Elsie went back to the table and sat down. “That old goat she’s married to is enough to drive a saint mad,