Chapter 4

With a pile of dead aliens in front of us, the next question was what do we do now? Well, while we surely had a few minutes, the obvious thing was to see what we could loot from the aliens that might be useful to us. We had replaced the spent magazines in our rifles with fresh ones, so there was little excuse to put it off any longer.

We still were very cautious as we approached the dead aliens. For one thing, we did not know if there were any more of the critters left in the flying box. That seemed to be the first thing that we should check out, so we went around to the open door and carefully looked inside. We could see what looked like a pilot's station up front and some benches along each side of the craft. The craft looked empty, but we were not yet ready to enter the vehicle. That was just too big a chance to take. What if the vehicle decided to take off with us inside? There would have been no way for us to escape. Thanks, but no thanks!

Okay, having satisfied some of our curiosity, we were in a little better emotional shape and walked over to the dead ones who looked safe to approach. Though we were sure that the aliens were dead, blood was still leaking from their wounds. Hell, that would not have happened with humans: the blood would have started congealing as soon as it hit the air. Could it be that the aliens did not have a clotting factor in their blood? If that were the case, they would be easy to kill if we had the patience to allow them to bleed to death. Well, that was a question for another time, interesting as it was.

We had to struggle, but we managed to strip the harness from each carcass. There were several pouches fastened to the harness with complicated clasps, but it would still be possible to remove a pouch from the harness now that we knew how they were attached. The pouches were also that difficult to open. If a weapon were inside a closed pouch, there would be no such thing as a quick draw.

Most of the things we found had no obvious function, at least, not to us. However, we had no trouble recognizing the ray gun pistols. Each alien had one in a pouch that almost defied being opened. I would have refused to use it if I had to go through such a complicated procedure to reach my pistol. We wondered why the aliens put up with such nonsense, but we figured that we might never find out.

Out of curiosity at this stage, Sam tried to figure out how to use the ray gun. There were three buttons on the weapon, and one of them had to be the trigger. Sam's hand was larger than mine, so I stood back while he tried to work out how to use the weapon. It was hard for him to reach the button that was surely supposed to be pressed by his thumb. He figured that was the trigger, but what were the other two buttons?

One of them might have been the safety, but we could not guess what was the purpose of the other button. Well, there was only one way to find out—push the buttons to see what would happen.

He was careful to point the weapon at the pile of dead aliens as he pushed each button. The first time, he tried pushing the top button before the bottom button. He then pushed the trigger. Nothing happened. Okay, he would reverse the sequence. Still, nothing happened.

Dammit, maybe you had to push all three buttons at the same time. This took two hands despite the fact that Sam's hands were unusually large for a human. This time, when he pushed all three buttons while aiming the weapon at the pile of aliens, they vanished in a puff of smoke.

One of the buttons was easier to reach than the others: the one on the bottom of the pair on the right side of the ray gun. Hey, maybe that was the real trigger. Sam tried pushing just this button and a spot on the ground vanished in another puff of smoke. Okay, we had made a wrong guess, but that was no big deal when trying to figure out the workings of such an alien artifact.

As an experiment, Sam pushed the lone button on the left side of the ray gun, and that rendered the trigger ineffective. Aha! Maybe that was the safety. He pushed it again, and the ray gun fired as expected.

Now we needed to know what was the use of the third button. After some fiddling around, Sam found that this button adjusted the width of the ray beam. If he pushed it once before pressing the trigger, he got a narrow beam. Pressing that button twice produced a wide beam. Also, pressing the safety always reset the beam into its narrow width.

Now we were looking for range. The most distant of the chip collectors was about 350 yards away from where we were standing. Sam set up for the narrow beam and pressed the trigger. A spot on the side of the machine suddenly appeared. Sam held the trigger down and was able to make a cut in the side of the vehicle's protective panel. Well, that was impressive and probably as far away as one would normally want to use such a weapon.

He switched to the wide beam and shot at the same machine. This time, the whole top section of the vehicle simply disappeared in a puff of smoke. Shit, that was one hell of an effective weapon. The only improvement we could think of for it was to add a shoulder stock so that it would be easier to aim.

The only thing left to learn now was how long the weapon would operate before it had to be recharged with whatever power it used. We assumed that the ray gun had something like a battery inside that had to be recharged periodically, but we had no practical way to test that. The only test that we could think of was to hold the trigger down until the charge ran dry. As far as we were concerned, we only had four of the weapons at the moment, and we did not want to waste any of the killing power. Therefore, we sidestepped that question for now. Maybe, if we could capture more of the ray guns, we could afford to test one of them that way, but that was something of a moot question right now.

We pushed our courage to the maximum and climbed into the empty craft. We were looking for more ray guns. We found four in a strange rack along one wall. We grabbed those and got the hell out of the flying box. Our nerves could not take any more of being inside something that we did not understand.

We moved back among the trees and discussed our future plans. There was no doubt that we wanted more of the ray guns, and the only way we knew of to get one was from a dead alien. We needed to practice some more with the ray gun before we started to depend on it. For one thing, if we used a ray gun to kill an alien, how sure could we be that we would not accidentally blast his ray gun out of existence? The answer to that was target practice, and we didn't have the time for that at the moment.

We decided to wait around to see if more of the aliens were going to show up. If they did, we might have the opportunity to get some more of the guns. That was worth wasting a day. Also, we needed to destroy the other three machines before we left for home. No matter how we sliced it, we were going to wait around in case more aliens showed up. It was a good thing that Tilly had made up a lunch for us.

We had another problem in that we had to assume that the alien headquarters knew that we had killed the first four that had shown up. If they were as clever as I thought they were, they had some sort of television view of everything that had happened this morning. I know that I would have had such a gadget running. Undoubtedly, the aliens had gotten a good look at us and knew that we were armed and dangerous. Surely, they would send out a trained squad of soldiers to hunt us down. They surely would not give up at this point.

A final worry was the fact that they could follow us home simply by following our tracks in the snow. Tilly and Sam, Jr. were not going anywhere in this weather, so we could not let the aliens get close enough to do them any harm. Sure, there were only two of us, but we knew these woods very well from our hunting here, so I felt that we could defeat anything short of 20 troopers just by dashing helter- skelter through the woods.