Operation Terror | Page 2

lakeside hotel
had been designed and stakes were driven in the ground where its
foundation would eventually be poured. There were infant big-mouthed
bass in the lake and fingerling trout in many of the streams. A huge
Wild Life Control trailer-truck went grumbling about such trails as
were practical, attending to these matters. Yesterday Lockley had seen

it gleaming in bright sunshine as it moved toward Boulder Lake on the
highway nearest to his station.
But that was yesterday. This morning he awoke under a pale gray sky.
There was complete cloud cover overhead. He smelled conifers and
woods-mould and mountain stone in the morning. He heard the faint
sound of tree branches moving in the wind. He noted the cloud cover.
The clouds were high, though. The air at ground level was perfectly
transparent. He turned his head and saw a prospect that made being in
the wilderness seem entirely reasonable and satisfying.
Mountains reared up in every direction. A valley lay some thousands of
feet below him, and beyond it other valleys, and somewhere a stream
rushed white water to an unknown destination. Not many wake to such
a scene.
Lockley regarded it, but without full attention. He was preoccupied
with thoughts of Jill Holmes, and unfortunately she was engaged to
marry Vale, who was also working in the park some thirty miles to the
northeast, near Boulder Lake itself. Lockley didn't know him well since
he was new in the Survey. He was up there to the northeast with an
electronic survey instrument like Lockley's and on the same job. Jill
had an assignment from some magazine or other to write an article on
how national parks are born, and she was staying at the construction
camp to gather material. She'd learned something from Vale and much
from the engineers while Lockley had tried to think of interesting facts
himself. He'd failed. When he thought about her, he thought about the
fact that she was engaged to Vale. That was an unhappy thought. Then
he tried to stop thinking about her altogether. But his mind somehow
lingered on the subject.
At ten minutes to eight Lockley began to dress, wilderness fashion. He
began by putting on his hat. It had lain on the pile of garments by his
bed. Then he donned the rest of his garments in the exact reverse of the
order in which he'd removed them.
At 8:00 he had a small fire going. He had no premonition that anything
out of the ordinary was going to happen that day. This was still before

the first Alaskan report. At 8:10 he had bacon sizzling and a small
coffeepot almost enveloped by the flames. Events occurred and he
knew nothing at all about them. For example, the Military Information
Center had been warned of what was later privately called Operation
Terror while Lockley was still tranquilly cooking breakfast and
thinking--frowning a little--about Jill.
Naturally he knew nothing of emergency orders sending all planes aloft.
He wasn't informed about something reported in space and apparently
headed for an impact point at Boulder Lake. As the computed impact
time arrived, Lockley obliviously dumped coffee into his tin coffeepot
and put it back on the flames.
At 8:13 instead of 8:14--this information is from the tape records--there
was an extremely small earth shock recorded by the Berkeley,
California, seismograph. It was a very minor shock, about the intensity
of the explosion of a hundred tons of high explosive a very long
distance away and barely strong enough to record its location, which
was Boulder Lake. The cause of that explosion or shock was not
observed visually. There'd been no time to alert observers, and in any
case the object should have been out of atmosphere until the last few
seconds of its fall, and where it was reported to fall the cloud cover was
unbroken. So nobody reported seeing it. Not at once, anyhow, and then
only one man.
Lockley did not feel the impact. He was drinking a cup of coffee and
thinking about his own problems. But a delicately balanced rock a
hundred yards below his camp site toppled over and slid downhill. It
started a miniature avalanche of stones and rocks. The loose stuff did
not travel far, but the original balanced rock bounced and rolled for
some distance before it came to rest.
Echoes rolled between the hillsides, but they were not very loud and
they soon ended. Lockley guessed automatically at half a dozen
possible causes for the small rock-slide, but he did not think at all of an
unperceived temblor from a shock like high explosives going off thirty
miles away.

Eight minutes later he heard a deep-toned roaring noise to the northeast.
It was unbelievably low-pitched. It rolled and reverberated beyond the
horizon. The