Invasion of the Body Snatchers Read Online Free PDF Page A

that I'm promising a thing. If you've got something up at your house that I ought to report, I'll probably report it; that's all I can tell you."
    Jack smiled. "All right; that's good enough. I think maybe you'll decide not to report this one." He nodded toward his house - "Let's go on up."
    I pulled out into the road again, and the headlights caught a figure, maybe a hundred yards ahead, walking toward us. It was a woman, in housedress and apron, arms huddled across her chest, hands cupping her elbows; it gets cool here, in the evenings. Then I saw it was Theodora, Jack's wife.
    I pulled toward her in low gear, then stopped beside her. She said, "Hello, Miles," then spoke to Jack, looking into the car through my open window. "I couldn't stay up there alone, Jack. I just couldn't; I'm sorry."
    He nodded. "I should have brought you along; it was stupid of me not to."
    Opening the car door, I leaned forward to let Theodora into the back seat, then Jack introduced her to Becky, and we drove on up to the house.
    four

    Jack's house is a green frame house sitting by itself on the side of a hill, and the garage is a part of the basement. The garage was empty, the door open, and Jack motioned me to drive right in. We got out of the car then, Jack snapped on a light, closed the garage door, then opened a door leading into the basement proper, motioning us to walk on in ahead of him.
    We stepped into an ordinary basement: laundry tubs, a washing machine, a wooden sawhorse, stacked newspapers, and against one wall, on the floor, some cardboard cartons and several used paint cans. Jack walked past us across the room to another door, then stopped, turning toward us, his hand on the doorknob. He had a pretty good second-hand billiard table in there, I knew; he'd told me he used it a lot, just knocking the balls around by himself, doing a lot of his writing in his head. Now he looked at Becky, glancing at his wife, too. "Get hold of yourself," he said, then walked in, pulled the chain on the overhead light, and we followed after him.
    The light over a billiard table is designed to light up the table surface brilliantly. It hangs low so it won't shine in your eyes as you play, and it leaves the ceiling in darkness. This one had a rectangular shade to confine the light to the table top only, and the rest of the room was left in semi-gloom. I couldn't see Becky's face very clearly, but I heard her gasp. Lying on the bright green table top under the sharp light of the 150-watt bulb, and covered with the rubberized sheet Jack kept on the billiard table, lay what was unmistakably a body. I turned to look at Jack, and he said, "Go ahead; pull it off."
    I was irritated; this worried and scared me, and there was too damn much mystery to suit me; it occurred to me that the writer in Jack was laying on the dramatics a little heavily. I grabbed the rubber sheet, yanked it off, and tossed it to a corner of the table. Lying on the green felt, on its back, was the naked body of a man. It was maybe five feet ten inches tall - it isn't too easy to judge height, looking down on a body that way. He was white, the skin very pale in the brilliant shadowless light, and at one and the same time, it looked unreal and theatrical, and yet it was intensely, over real. The body was slim, maybe 140 pounds, but well-nourished and well-muscled. I couldn't judge the age, except that he wasn't old. The eyes were open, staring directly up into the overhead light, in a way that made your own eyes smart. They were blue, and very clear. There was no wound visible, and no other obvious cause of death. I walked over beside Becky, slipped my arm under hers, and turned to Jack. "Well?"
    He shook his head, refusing to comment. "Keep looking. Examine it. Notice anything strange?"
    I turned back to the body on the table. I was getting more and more irritated. I didn't like this; there was something strange about this dead man on the table, but I couldn't tell what, and that only made