THE DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON, VERMONT

                         By WILLIAM FITZGERALD

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                 Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


To this day nobody pretends to understand the Devil of East Lupton,
Vermont. There are even differences of opinion about the end to which
that devil came. Mr. Tedder is sure he was the fiend in question, and
that he ceased to be fiendish when he rid himself of the pot over his
head.

Other authorities believe that heavy ordnance did the trick, and point
to a quarter-mile crater for proof. It takes close reasoning to decide.

But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that
came out of Somewhere to Here, and caused all the catastrophes by
his mere arrival--why--then the Devil was the Whatever-it-was in the
leathery, hide-like covering on the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from
the constable.

On that morning, Mr. Tedder ran like a deer--or as nearly like a deer
as Mr. Tedder could hope to run. The resemblance was not close. Deer
do not hesitate helplessly between possible avenues of escape. Deer
do not plunge out of concealing thickets to scuttle through merely
shoulder-high brush because a pathway shows. But Mr. Tedder did.

The constable, behind him, shouted wrathfully. There was a thirty-day
jail-sentence waiting for someone for vagrancy--which is to say, for
not having any money. Mr. Tedder was elected.

He would not gain any money by staying in jail, but the constable who
arrested him and the justice of the peace who sentenced him would
receive fees for their activity. That was why this township was
notoriously a bad place for tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and itinerant
workmen in need of a job.

"I can't go much further," Mr. Tedder thought. His heart thumped
horribly. There was an agonizing stitch in his side. His breath was a
hoarse, honking noise as it rushed in and out. Despair filled him as
exhaustion neared.

He pounded, sobbing for breath, up a little ten-foot rise. His eyes
tried to blur with tears. Then he lurched down the other side of the
ridge and saw that he was in the neglected, broken-limbed orchard of an
abandoned farm.

The house was partly collapsed and wholly ruined. A remaining
shed leaned crazily. Vines climbed over a rail fence--three parts
rotten--and went on along a strand of barbed wire nailed to tree-trunks.

He could run no further. He looked, despairing, for a hiding place. His
haggard, ineffectual face turned desperately. He saw something dark and
large. To his blurred eyes it looked like a cow. He ran toward it. It
shrank back, stirring....

There was a thin, high screaming noise, like gas escaping through a
punctured tire, but a tire inflated to a monstrous pressure. There was
a vast, foggy vaporousness. The dark shape made convulsive movements,
but Mr. Tedder was too lost in panic to take note. He ran blindly
toward it.

"Ug!" gasped Mr. Tedder.

The scream descended in pitch. A pungent, ammoniacal smell filled
the air. Mr. Tedder ran into a wisp of fog which tore at his lungs.
He choked and fell--which was fortunate, because the air was clearer
near the ground. He lay kicking among dead leaves and dry grass-stems
while a gray vapor spread and spread, and a very gentle breeze urged it
sidewise among the unkempt trees of the orchard.

[Illustration: Mr. Tedder ran into a wisp of fog which tore at his
lungs.]

The noise died away in a long-continued moan which included gurglings.
It still sounded like gas escaping from very high pressure.

The gurglings were like spoutings of liquid within.

       *       *       *       *       *

But Mr. Tedder was in no mood to analyze. He had been breathless to
begin with. He had been strangled on top of that. Now he writhed in the
dry grass, ready to sob because the constable would presently lay hands
on him and haul him to jail.

He heard the constable shout again, furiously. Then Mr. Tedder heard
him cough. The constable bellowed, "Fire!" and fled.

He ran into a tendril of wispy, creeping vapor which did look a lot
like smoke. He fell down, strangling. Again the air was clearer among
the tangled stalks of frost-killed grasses. The constable coughed and
wheezed.

Presently he staggered away to report that a vagabond had set fire to
the woods to hinder pursuit. But there was no fire. The chill vapor
which looked like smoke very gradually dissipated. A cursory glance
would send the fire-fighters home again.

Mr. Tedder lay sobbing and gasping on the ground, expecting at any
instant to be seized. He panted in despair. But the constable did not
reappear. He never returned. Mr. Tedder was alone, his escape good.

When he realized it, he sat up abruptly. His meek face expressed
astonishment. He stared all about him. There was still a small space
from which an ever-thinner gray vapor seeped away. There was a reek as
of ammonia in the air--a highly improbable smell around an abandoned
farmhouse.

Presently Mr. Tedder got to his feet. He brushed off the leaves and
grass-stems which clung to his shabby garments. He was a few yards from
a distinctly tumbledown woodshed and almost under a gnarled apple-tree
to which a few leaves still clung, and where he could observe a single,
dried-up apple clinging tenaciously to its parent bough.

The sight of the apple gave him pause. He hunted busily. He found
windfalls. Untended, the apples would be wormy and small and belated at
best. But Mr. Tedder had learned not to be over-fastidious. He found a
dozen or more scrubby objects which were partly eatable. He ate them.

It was then that he heard a bubbling noise, like something boiling in a
pot. The sounds came from the place where the gray mist rose. He went
to the spot, and wrinkled his nose. The smell of ammonia was stronger.
It seemed to come from a collapsed object on the ground which was
remotely like a deflated hide. A liquid came from a small rent in it
and bubbled furiously to nothingness.

A student of physics would have said that it had an extraordinarily
low boiling-point, like a liquefied gas. Mr. Tedder said nothing. He
regarded the flaccid skin-like thing surprisedly. He had seen it a
little while since, inflated and moving about.

There must have been something inside it to move it.

Mr. Tedder could see, of course, where it had a tiny tear. It had moved
or been moved back against a single strand of barbed wire, hidden
among vine-stems. It had punctured, and there it was. But Mr. Tedder
could never have imagined a creature which required an extremely cold
gas like ammonia and hydrogen, mixed, at extremely high pressure, in
order to live. He could not have conceived of such a creature wearing
a flexible garment to contain that high-pressure, low-temperature gas
for it to breathe. Assuredly he would never envision anything, beast
or devil, which at released pressure and the temperature of a Vermont
autumn day would melt to liquid and boil away to nothing.

"It don't make sense," he muttered, scratching his unkempt head.

So Mr. Tedder, who could not think comprehendingly, did not think at
all. He saw something on the ground--no, two things. They were metal,
and they smouldered and smoked like the flat thing, because they were
cold. They were unbelievably cold. One looked rather like an aluminum
pot. But pots do not have chilly linked-metal straps in the place of
handles, nor hemispherical knobs, a good inch and a half in diameter,
on one rim. The other object looked like a gun. Not a real gun, of
course. But vaguely, approximately, like a gun just the same.

He picked up the pot. It was all of an inch and a half thick. It was
very light for such a thickness. Mr. Tedder cheered suddenly. It was
undoubtedly aluminum. There is a market for scrap aluminum. East Lupton
was out of bounds, of course, but there might be a junk-dealer in South
Lupton. This ought to be worth fifty cents, and he might get a quarter
for it.

"Two bits is still two bits," he thought.

He touched the other thing gingerly. It was still bitterly cold, but
the frost melted under the warmth of his finger. It would weigh fifteen
pounds or so. Another twenty-five cents....

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Tedder marched on happily. Then he came upon broken branches,
freshly crushed down from trees. He saw another gray mist before him.
He approached it cautiously. He saw where something had crashed down
through the trees and knocked off the top of a six-inch maple. He
pushed on inquisitively....

The thing had ploughed into soft earth and almost buried itself. A
foot-thick tree was splintered and had crashed to cover the object that
had broken it. Mr. Tedder saw whiteness through the toppled branches.
It seemed to be a sphere not much over ten feet in diameter, and it was
completely covered with frost. A chilly mist oozed away from it. Mr.
Tedder stared at it with the metal pot in one hand and the gun--if it
was a gun--in the other.

There was silence save for the faintly sibilant whispering of the trees
overhead. There was the lurid coloring of Vermont in the fall. A bird
called somewhere, a long distance away. Then Mr. Tedder heard a motor
running. It sounded very queer.

"_Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK!_" It was
running in the frost-covered sphere under the fallen tree.

"I'll be darned!" he said aloud.

It occurred vaguely to Mr. Tedder that this and the deflated object
back yonder were somehow connected. He picked his way cautiously around
the smashed branches and shattered trees. Well away, he felt cheerful
because he had escaped the law and picked up salable junk. The two
objects were pretty heavy, too. The pot would fit on his head, though,
and would be easier to carry so. He put it over his battered soft hat
and drew the chain-link strap under his chin. Then he examined the
thing like a gun. There was a knob on one side, an inch and a half in
diameter. He tugged at it.

There was a sharp buzzing sound. Something that looked like flame came
out of the end. It spread out in a precisely shaped, mathematically
perfect cone, and blotted out brushwood, trees--everything.

Mr. Tedder jerked the knob back, startled, on the first sounding of the
noise. The flame-like appearance lasted less than half a second. But
where the flame had played upon foliage and brush there wasn't anything
left. Nothing at all but a little fine ash, sifting down toward earth.
And the grass and topsoil were eaten away as if a virulent acid had
been spilled over them.

Mr. Tedder stood frozen for the tenth part of a heartbeat. Then in
one motion he threw away the gun and fled. The pot flopped down over
his eyes, blinding him. He hit his head a terrific blow against a
low-hanging limb. Instantly, it seemed to him, the chain-link strap
tightened. He went almost mad with terror. But when he got the pot back
so he could see, he fled with the heavy thing bobbing and bumping on
his head.

Presently his own panting slowed him down. He remembered the knob on
the rim of the pot. He stopped and fumbled with it. It came off in his
hand with a crystalline fracture to show where it had broken in his
first collision. He couldn't get the pot off.

He worked for a long time, sweating in something close to hysterical
panic. He was terrified of the thing he had thrown away, and by
transference, of the pot on his head. He desired passionately to be rid
of it. He felt a sort of poignant desperation. But he would have to get
somebody to cut the strap in order to be freed.

He came to the edge of the thicket beyond East Lupton. He looked out
upon rolling country, undulating to the mountains' foot. There was a
cluster of houses in the distance. Still terrified, and with the pot
bumping on his head, Mr. Tedder struck out for the village.

He saw a tiny bundle of fur in his way. It was a dead rabbit. He passed
on. He saw, very far ahead, a white dog running from a farmhouse to
intercept him. But Mr. Tedder was not afraid of dogs. He was afraid of
the pot on his head. Presently he saw the dog no more than ten feet
away. It lay sprawled out, motionless. It looked dead. Then he saw the
throb-throb of a heartbeat. It was asleep, or unconscious. He hastened
on.

       *       *       *       *       *

He came to the highway and ran toward a wagon for help. And there was
a horse lying down between the shafts. The man in the wagon, too, had
sagged limply. Both were alive, but both were unconscious.

"Something screwy here," he thought.

Mr. Tedder had his own terror, but this was an emergency even more
immediate than his own. He tried to help the man. He did get him down
to the road, and laid him solicitously on the dead-grass bank by the
side of the road. He loosened his clothing and went on toward the
village at a run to summon help. Afterward he would get the pot off
his head.

But the village was unconscious, too, when he got there. Male and
female, man, woman, child, and beast, the inhabitants of South Lupton
lay in crumpled heaps.

He saw a small boy unconscious over a toy wagon. A woman had collapsed
into a laundry-basket beside a clothes-line. A little farther on, a
mule lay with its legs spraddled absurdly. Then he saw two men flung
head-long as if they had been running when weakness overtook them. It
began to look as if alarm had come to the village.

People had thronged out of their houses to fall in heaps on the
sidewalk, at their doors--everywhere. He saw a car that had run into a
gas-pump, and just beyond another car which had run off the road and
stalled on a hillside. Dogs, cats, chickens--the very pigeons and crows
lay motionless on the ground.

Mr. Tedder felt a horrible panic, and the pot on his head bumped him,
but he tried desperately to rise to the emergency this situation
constituted. He tried to rouse the unconscious people lying in the
street. He loosened clothing, he sprinkled water, he chafed hands--to
no avail. His meek, normally apprehensive features went consciously
stern and resolute.

Presently he tried to summon help by telephone, but there was a local
exchange and the operator lay unconscious in her chair. In the end, and
in desperation, Mr. Tedder commandeered a bicycle on which to seek aid.

The essential rightness of his character was shown by the fact that he
rifled no purses. He looted nothing. The Bank of South Lupton lay open
to him, and it did not occur to him to fill his pockets. He got on a
bicycle and rode off like mad, the absurd pot bobbing on his head as he
pedaled.

He came to a car that had smashed into a ditch and turned over. Flames
licked at its gasoline-tank. Mr. Tedder leaped off the bicycle and
dragged out an unconscious man and a little girl. He hauled them to
safety and tried to put out the fire. He failed.

He pedaled on madly in quest of a doctor, when attempts to rouse these
two people failed as had all the rest. He was in a new panic now,
somehow. He remembered, though vaguely, talk of a broadcast of years
before concerning the landing of Martians upon the earth. Mr. Tedder
was not quite sure whether Martians had landed or not, but somehow it
suddenly frightened him to remember the frost-covered globe which had
smashed trees in landing.

"You'd think I was Orson Welles or somebody," he gulped.

He reached the town of West Lupton. The names of towns in Vermont are
not good evidence of Yankee ingenuity. The town itself was a tiny place
of five hundred people. As he pedaled into it, it looked like the scene
of a massacre. Its inhabitants lay unconscious everywhere. There were
not even flies in the air.

Mr. Tedder did not give up for two full hours, during which he pedaled
desperately in quest of some other conscious human being. By now his
fear had come to be for himself, and it grew until it made him almost
unaware of the ill-fitting, bumping pot upon his head. But at long last
his teeth chattered.

"M-maybe," said Mr. Tedder quaveringly to himself, "I'm the only man
left alive in these parts...."

With the terror came an impulse to hide. It was then late afternoon. It
would soon be dark. He did not want to be in a town filled with still,
not-dead forms after dark! He pedaled down a side road. It became a
cart-track and climbed. It dwindled to a footpath. He dived into the
obscurity of woodland as the shadows grew deep.

He came at last to an empty, rocky hilltop. Sunset was over. Only a
lingering dim red glow remained in the west. Presently stars shone
down. He looked up at them, sweating.

If that frost-covered thing had come from the stars, something from
it--a sort of devil--had stricken down the hundreds of unconscious
people Mr. Tedder had seen. Maybe it was getting ready for more of its
kind. He stared upward and imagined other spheres swinging down out of
the darkness overhead to gouge long furrows in the ground. Maybe such
things were falling all over the world....

       *       *       *       *       *

But he could look across-country for miles. Presently he saw joyfully
that there were electric lights. He saw motorcar headlights on the
highways. In particular, he saw that the very last town he had entered
was now brightly lighted and there was traffic moving in and out....

"Well," he thought with relief. "Whatever it was, it ain't permanent."
Come morning he would have somebody cut loose the pot from his head.

He could not find fuel to make a fire, but he snatched some fitful
sleep toward dawn. He was bitterly cold when he woke, though, and at
earliest daylight he made his way back toward town.

The dawn light was still gray and dreary when he reached it. The
streets were empty. But there was a motor-truck stopped by a store, its
motor purring. And there was a man tumbled in a heap above a bunch of
big-city newspapers he had just put out of the truck for delivery. The
man was alive, but unconscious. There was a cat in a motionless furry
heap beside him, as if it had come out to rub against his legs and had
collapsed without warning.

Mr. Tedder, shivering, turned the man over. He was insensible. He could
not be roused. Mr. Tedder felt hysteria stirring within him. The pot
hurt his head, now. The places where it rubbed most often were getting
sore. Then he noticed the headlines.

            DISASTER IN VERMONT. DEVIL LOOSE, SAY VILLAGERS

         Unexplained Mass Unconsciousness Strikes Countryside

In the gray twilight of dawn, with a softly purring truck behind him
and before him an unconscious man, Mr. Tedder read.

South Lupton struck by strange, creeping unconsciousness that moved
like a wall or an invisible flood of oblivion.... Entire village
insensible for half an hour.... Some inhabitants undisturbed where
they fell, others hauled about and pawed, but unharmed.... The same
inexplicable insensibility moved along roads.... Man driving with
his little daughter lost consciousness and came to to find his car
overturned and burning, and himself and the little girl lying some
distance away.... Farmers found their horses struggling up from
unconsciousness....

Mr. Tedder's throat went dry. He looked around furtively. This town
had born the look of a shambles yesterday, when he was here. From the
hilltop he had seen it alive. But now it was dead again.... Suddenly he
remembered a white dog that had come running toward him across a wide
pasture. When he got to the dog it was unconscious....

"I wonder if...." He could not face the thought.

Mr. Tedder shivered. He almost whimpered. But after a little he picked
up the unconscious man before him. He dragged him into the back of the
truck. He drove clumsily and unaccustomedly out of the town. There was
a long, straight stretch of road. Mr. Tedder went well out upon it.
He stopped and let the unconscious man carefully down to the side of
the road. He got back in the driver's seat and drove away. He watched
through the back-view mirror.

When he was a little more than half a mile away, the still figure
stirred, rolled over, and got dazedly upright.

Mr. Tedder swallowed noisily. He drove on a little way and found a
place where he could turn. He headed back. The owner of the truck still
stood bewildered in the road. Mr. Tedder drove toward him. When he was
still half a mile away, the man crumpled up and lay in a heap on the
road. He was a flaccid, limp, insensible figure when Mr. Tedder brought
the truck to a stop and loaded him in again.

He turned once more and rode on toward South Lupton. Mr. Tedder's face
was a sickly gray color. The meekness of his normal expression was
replaced by an odd, fixed horror. He had found two things which he
believed came from the frosted ten-foot sphere. One was a weapon which
destroyed everything when a knob on its side was touched. The other was
this pot, with a strap which now held it fast upon his head.

       *       *       *       *       *

The pot was a weapon too. It did not affect the one who wore it. The
tightening of the strap when it went on was to make sure--pure anguish
sharpened Mr. Tedder's perceptions--that it could not fall off while it
was operating. If it did, the person--or the devil--wearing it would
fall a victim too. It did not fit a man because it was designed for the
brain-case of something else, something Mr. Tedder had seen vaguely as
a dark moving object backing into a rusty barbed wire strung between
two trees. If the pot--or helmet--had been turned on then, Mr. Tedder
would never have seen anything. He would have fallen unconscious a
half-mile away....

He made a little sobbing noise in his throat. He drove unskillfully to
South Lupton. One general store was open. He went into it and filled
his pockets with canned food, a loaf of bread, and matches. He took two
blankets from a shelf. He stepped carefully over the two clerks and
four customers in the store. They were on the floor, of course. He
walked out of the store and away from the little town.

"I got to get back there," he said unsteadily. "I got to!"

A long while later he strode across rolling pasture-land. A white dog
ran to intercept him. He saw it as a distant white speck. When he came
up to it, it was a still, senseless heap. He went on to the woods and
into them. It took him two hours to find the gash blasted in the woods
by the gun-like thing. Then it took him another half-hour to find the
gun.

He shivered when he picked it up, and carried it gingerly, but he noted
that the metal was deeply pitted now. On the side that was next to the
damp earth, the metal was eaten away to a depth of a quarter of an inch
or more.

He found the abandoned orchard, and the half-collapsed and wholly
ruined house. Then he sat down and stared dully at nothing, trying to
think of a solution to his predicament.

Night fell but he sat in a sort of lethargy of despair for a long
while. Ultimately he rolled up in the blankets. The pot on his head was
horribly uncomfortable. It had not been made for a human head, and it
did not fit. Twice during the night, also, he woke with a feeling of
strangulation. He had stirred in his sleep and the tight chin-strap had
choked him. The second time he found himself close to the metal gun.
He had almost touched it. He made an inarticulate sound, such as a man
might make who found himself about to step on a rattlesnake.

He got up and found the well of the abandoned farm. He dropped a clod
of earth in it. It splashed. He dropped in the gun-like thing. Bubbling
sounds followed. They lasted a long time.

He stayed at the abandoned farm for three days, living on the
canned stuff he had taken. His cheeks grew sunken and his eyes
querulously pathetic. Also, a sore place started from the rubbing of
the pot on his head. On the second day he found the frosted globe
again. The motor in it still ran. "_Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK!
Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK!_" There was no sign that anything had
come out. Perhaps there had only been one Whatever-it-was in it, and
that had succumbed to a rip in its artificial hide by a bit of barbed
wire. No trace of that thing remained, now. It had evaporated.

"Jellyfish. Like jellyfish," he told himself.

Mr. Tedder did not think in scientific terms nor speculate from what
planet or star the Whatever-it-was had come. If he had been told that
on the planet Jupiter there was an atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen
under enormous pressure, it would have meant nothing to him. The
suggestion that the specific gravity of the giant planet meant that
only light metals like sodium, potassium, and lithium--all interacting
readily with water--could exist there.... Such a suggestion would have
had exactly no meaning at all.

His mind dwelt exclusively upon the fact that any human being who
came within a half-mile of him must fall unconscious and remain so.
To the human race he was a menace; a devil. And that if he should
manage to get the thick and clumsy pot off his head, he too would
fall unconscious and remain so. He was in the most horrible solitary
confinement imaginable.

He was invulnerable, to be sure. He could rob with impunity and do
murder without fear of any penalty. But nobody could speak to him. Ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the fourth day he went into East Lupton for food.

On the fifth day aeroplanes flew overhead, back and forth. One suddenly
went spinning, out of control, dipping down toward the treetops. It
recovered, a bare few hundred feet up and three-quarters of a mile
away. The planes disappeared.

On the sixth day bombs fell. The first racking explosions terrified him
incomparably. He fled through the underbrush. He came out of it and
saw soldiers. They made a cordon about an area of woodland probably
two miles square. They toppled in unconscious heaps as Mr. Tedder drew
near them, and as if that were a signal there were distant boomings
and artillery shells fell close to where he peered out. Mr. Tedder ran
away. He dodged shells and bombs until night fell, then he ran, weeping
bitterly to himself.

"I ain't done nothing wrong!" The thought beat through his imprisoned
head.

Of course the troops could not stop him. He pelted through their lines,
unheeding. Presently he reached the village of East Lupton. No figures
moved in it. Desperate, he entered it. There were many soldiers among
the heaps of shallow-breathing, staring-eyed folk who lay slackly
wherever unconsciousness had overtaken them.

Mr. Tedder found food, and wolfed it. The store in which he found it
was a country-village general store and sold everything. Mr. Tedder was
half-mad, now. The thing he wore was an intolerable burden. One of the
sore places on his head from its rubbing was excruciatingly painful. It
was infected. Other sore places were developing. And he was a sort of
devil, working havoc wherever he moved. He took weapons--for which he
had no need--and metal-cutting tools he would not dare to use.... And
he saw newspapers.

                  GUNS TO BLAST DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON

He read the news account. The one-mile circle of insensibility had been
deduced. Its cause was not understood, but it was certain that some
sensate thing was its center. It moved. It had made definite travels
and returned to its starting-point. Troops now cordoned the place where
it nested restlessly, and artillery was being massed. A barrage that
nothing could survive would presently be poured in....

Mr. Tedder looked at a powerful, sleek car. He could take it and go
anywhere, and all of humanity was powerless to stop him--or to help
him. Anyone who came near him would fall senseless. Even he, if he took
off the thing on his head....

A motor-truck came rolling into the village, its driver stricken
unconscious at the wheel. It seemed certain to roll on and on.

Mr. Tedder screamed at it. But something deflected its wheels. It
curved sedately from the highway and plowed across a sidewalk and
crashed into the corner of a house.

When the sun rose, Mr. Tedder was back at the abandoned farm which for
no reason at all he considered his headquarters. His eyes were red with
bitter weeping. His meek expression was utterly woebegone. But his
determination was made.

Great bombers roared high overhead, so high they were mere specks.
Things dropped from them. Boomings began, all around the horizon.
Shells struck and blasted. The tumult, once begun, was unending.

Mr. Tedder cringed. Shaken and battered, he filed at the chain-link
strap which held the pot on his head. The metal was soft, but the links
shifted under his fingers, which trembled uncontrollably.

A shell burst fifty yards away. Mr. Tedder was moved to sheer hysteria.
He could do no such fine work as filing. He took the snips he had
appropriated the night before. Once the thing was off his head, he
would know nothing; no terror, no pain; nothing at all. The pot which
had ridden him like the Old Man of the Sea would kill him. But he
wanted to be rid of it. He did not want to be near it even in death.
"Just get it off me!" he shouted. He was a little mad now.

       *       *       *       *       *

The earth shook under him. Blast-waves beat at him. Half-deafened,
sobbing, he crawled to the well. He pulled at the rotten boards. He
hung his head over the noisesome depth. He used the metal-snips--he had
trouble getting them under the chain-link strap--to chew at the soft
metal. The earth trembled under concussions. Bits of loose earth and
rotted wood tumbled into the well from its edges.

The snips met triumphantly.... The pot tumbled down into the well and
floated for a moment, rocking. Then it tilted and filled and sank. A
thin, scummy veil of bubbles arose. Some light metals react readily
with water. Potassium violently, sodium freely, lithium readily.
The pot was of an alloy which would be highly useful where it was
permanently too cold for water ever to turn liquid. But on earth....

Mr. Tedder sat up. He felt giddy; light-headed; incredibly relieved.
But a shell fell thirty yards away, and a bomb exploded horribly just
over the ridge, and something ripped through the half-collapsed house
and exploded on beyond. There had been a devil in this woods. The devil
of East Lupton, Vermont. The artillery searched for it, to exorcise it,
but Mr. Tedder was not unconscious.

"It's gone!" he cried joyfully. "And I'm okay now."

It would never occur to him that designers of a weapon who planned for
the tightening of a fastening-strap when it was turned on, so that it
could not possibly make its own wearer a victim, would also arrange for
it to be turned off if the fastening-strap should be broken or cut. It
would be the most obvious of safety devices.

But Mr. Tedder's intellectual processes would never grasp such a thing.
He simply knew that he was not unconscious and that the bombardment
went on. It was overwhelming. It was maddening. Mr. Tedder put his
hands over his ears and wept, cringing to the earth and awaiting death.

Then the earth seemed to buckle beneath him. It raised up and dealt him
a violent blow. Over where the frosted sphere lay self-buried in the
ground, there was a sudden, incredible, impossible flare. A shell had
hit the enigmatic globe in which an untended motor had run so long. The
sphere exploded.

The violence of the explosion suggested power much greater than
anything human. The fuel-store of the sphere must have detonated. It
made a crater a quarter-mile across, and every least fragment of the
sphere itself was atomized and destroyed.

The explosion seemed to the military to mark the death of something
spectacular. They stopped the barrage and explored.

They found Mr. Tedder unconscious. He was sleeping as if drugged, from
reaction to the end of strain. Near him there was a caved-in well
which, of course, was not worth digging out.

It was assumed that Mr. Tedder had remained unconscious through all the
career of the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. He was hospitalized, and
kindly told what had happened, and ultimately turned loose with a new
suit of clothes and a five-dollar bill. And Mr. Tedder disappeared into
the vast obscurity of the world of tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and
itinerant workmen.

And to this day nobody pretends that they really understood anything
about the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even marked
differences of opinion concerning its ending. Mr. Tedder thinks he was
the Devil, and that he somehow ceased to be fiendish when he got the
pot off his head. Other authorities think that heavy ordnance destroyed
the Devil, and point to a quarter-mile crater as proof.

But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that
came out of the somewhere into the here and caused all the catastrophes
by his mere arrival.... Why, in that case, and strictly speaking, the
Devil of East Lupton, Vermont, was the Whatever-it-was which was in a
leathery, hide-like garment or pressure-suit the morning Mr. Tedder
ran away from the constable. And that Devil was destroyed by a rusty
barb on a forgotten, vine-grown strand of barbed wire which was strung
between two trees on an abandoned farm. And it was killed long before
so much as the existence of a Devil in those parts was suspected.