“I didn’t realize, Dick,” said the professor querulously, “how many Gizmos there must have been to destroy even the gnats where we had our trailer. Those dust spheres must have had hundreds of thousands of Gizmos in them. Altogether there must be—it is inconceivable how many there must be! And any one of them can kill a human being. Dick, this is a serious business.”
“I’ve been suspecting it for some time,” said Lane dryly, “even if I don’t agree that they are Martians.”
Burke spoke with a sudden return to his former manner of complete confidence and zest.
“Yes, sir! Those Gizmos are Martians, or Jupiterians, or something from space. It stands to reason they don’t belong on Earth! And they’re smart as men. Maybe there was gas-creatures on Earth before they came, like there’d be meat-creatures in the woods on Jupiter or Mars if we went there. But these Gizmos come from off of Earth. They’re smart. They’ve got a civilization, they’ve got military tactics, they’ve got over-all strategy. They got a general plan for conquerin’ Earth, and it looks bad.”
“I’ll agree that it looks bad,” said Lane. “How bad I don’t know. But if they can appear in swarms everywhere, it certainly doesn’t look good!”
The car now moved in a generally northeast direction between lines of green-clad mountains. It had left the thunderstorm far behind. It went along a gravel-surfaced road between strong, tight fences with here and there a farmhouse. Several times they saw cattle alive. Once more Lane stopped the car and the motor, to listen. The sounds of the countryside were perfectly commonplace. Birds flew up from the top strands of the wire fences as the car came near.
“There are birds and bugs again around here,” said Lane.
“And Gizmos,” said Carol quietly.
She pointed. A living partridge flapped and flailed upon the ground. As they watched, it lay still. And Lane, coldly searching, saw grass beyond it quiver slightly, as if there were a bubble of heated gases above the dying bird. He started the motor again.
The death of that particular partridge was an extremely minor episode in the developing state of things. There had been other incidents which were equally indicative of something startlingly unusual.
In a backwoods settlement in Alabama, a colored farmer had secured an herb doctor to put an end to an epidemic among his chickens. Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury. At midnight of the night before, this herb doctor had burned a particularly offensive mess of feathers, roots, gums, dusts, and grisly oddments within the affected chicken house. As it burned, the herb doctor recited mysterious words learned by rote and without individual meaning. Actually they came from the Gulf of Guinea by way of some generations of thaumaturgists, and their original significance was bloodcurdling. A truly horrible reek came out of the musky chicken house. A completely offensive aroma stayed behind. The herb doctor came out of the structure and, coughing, said that thereafter the farmer’s chickens would be completely safe in their shelter.
And they were. The herb doctor had cast a spell to drive away the spirits, the demons, the invisible fiends who caused healthy chickens to be found dead under their roosts each morning. His spells and the fumigation left the living fowl stupefied where they roosted, but his professional assurance was well-founded. Those chickens were now safe against Gizmos. They and their dwelling stank of odors even Gizmos disliked. So the herb doctor had done an efficient and highly professional job of chasing the Gizmos.
There were other irrelevant happenings. There was a sufferer from asthma in Tarzana, California, who waked in the night with a familiar sensation of suffocation, his breath cut off. He felt the wild terror which suffocation produces, but he was more or less accustomed to it. If he heard a thin whining in his ears, he paid no attention. This was a very bad attack. But instead of futile beatings at the air before him, he groped beside his bed as his senses reeled. He had readied a tiny glass capsule placed upon a clean handkerchief. He crushed the capsule and thrust the handkerchief to his face. The pungent smell of amyl nitrate filled the air. Then he could breathe again. There was no gradual improvement in his breathing, as usually happened. One instant he was suffocating, the next instant he was breathing perfectly. The smell of amyl nitrate was objectionably strong. He lay back, wide awake but reassured. His ears rang and his heart pounded from his fright, but he was accustomed to attacks of asthma.
He did not hear a high-pitched whine rise in tone until it was an infinitesimal shriek. It did not occur to him that a Gizmo had shared the fumes of amyl nitrate with him; he had never heard of Gizmos. He probably did not even know that amyl nitrate in the least possible concentration will make an internal-combustion engine backfire itself to destruction. Certainly he did not reason that an entity of gas, with a gas metabolism, would react to the smell of amyl nitrate as a human would react to a bath in nitric acid.
The asthmatic man dozed off presently, very grateful that so severe an asthmatic attack had been so brief.
Such incidents were not numerous. It was typical of the over-all situation, however, that grim occurrences such as the fate of the village of Serenity and slaughterings of domestic animals, were as consistently misunderstood as affairs connected with herb doctors and attacks of “asthma.”
There had been migrations from the forests in Maine and Minnesota and Georgia and Oregon—that is, migrations that had been observed as they took place. Elsewhere, people in innumerable places had seen foxes slinking harriedly through fields of soy beans, and deer warily following each other in places where deer had not been seen in years. There can be no question but that many wild creatures fled from the forests to human-occupied land as if choosing a peril they knew—men—rather than invisible horrors which whined in the wilderness.
And at about the time that Lane drove away from a newly murdered partridge, some thirty miles or so from Murfree, in western Virginia, there was a considerable group of human beings in Minnesota surveying the area the refugee animals occupied.
The news of the exodus had traveled far, long before dawn. There were farmers whose fields had been uninvaded, and there were those whose crops were partly but not wholly ravaged, and some who had found bears in their barnyards that morning. They had come to where county agents were gathering to confer on the problem of what could be done. Valuable crops were endangered by rabbits and woods-mice and deer and groundhogs and hordes of every kind of herbivorous animal. There were fish and game officials, and representatives of the SPCA. There was even a Department of Agriculture man, roused in his hotel room and driven eighty miles to arrive at dawn. He faced a kind of emergency even the Department had never had dumped in its lap before. And of course there were reporters. Most of them were for local newspapers, but there were one or two press association men, come in hope of a news story.
It was a somehow appalling spectacle in the early light. There was a giant cornfield, with green, straight, leafy stalks rising well over a man’s height in mathematically exact furrows which seemed to reach to the horizon. There was a road blocked to traffic by a state policeman’s car parked crosswise. Behind this barrier there were other cars, on the road and off it, with still other cars arriving and people moving forward from them on foot. News of the animal migration had traveled fast.
And there were animals in the com. Rabbits nibbled, and groundhogs gorged, and bears waddled recklessly among the stalks, stripping off half-ripe ears to feast on. Timid deer surged here and there, sometimes brave enough to crop the tenderer corn-leaves, but much more often driven in small bands of spasms of terror in which they knocked down and trampled dozens of times as much as they could have consumed. Here a fox could be seen, dining daintily off something small and bloody, while others of its victim’s kind eddied and hopped within yards. Skunks moved irritably in the press, their plumelike tails already warning of tempers frayed by crowding.
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sp; There were noises in the cornfield—animal noises. There were panics and frights and moments of precarious calm at one spot or another. But the cornstalks went down, and the farmer whose crop was vanishing before his eyes talked desperately with the county agents and fish and game officials and the representative of the Department of Agriculture. His family had been evacuated from the farmhouse far up the road. Stock in the barn and barnyard was at the mercy of predators who moved about in bewilderment and suspicion at the quantity of prey about. His hens were subject to weasels. And the tassels of his very fine corn crop dipped and dropped, and there was a steady sound of munching, and small squealings, and gruntings, and hoarse noises which no animals should have made at all.
There was no action. There was only steady, progressive destruction. The humans, both official observers and gaping curiosity seekers, could do nothing but stare. They could say nothing to each other except more or less varied expressions of amazement, surprise, and bewilderment. When the change came, the humans did not notice it at first. It did not begin where there were people. Perhaps only a small part of the animal horde heard the first thin whinings.
The killings of the animals began three-quarters of a mile from the parked state police car. It began in a clump of half a dozen deer, who abruptly went mad with desperation and charged crazily through the crowded rows of corn. They carried vicious, high-pitched whinings with them. Then a bear reared up and fought nothingness. More whinings came, and rabbits kicked convulsively, and skunks used their weapons of defense, and foxes snapped and gave battle to unseen things, and field mice and ground squirrels tried to squeak as they strangled, and even weasels rolled over and over with their demoniac fangs rending only air.
The humans realized what threatened when a spitting fury—a wildcat—plunged blindly through their midst, giving battle to emptiness. Then rabbits hopped among the cars and onlookers, and died in convulsions. Foxes ran blindly among the people, biting furiously at invisible things, and then they collapsed and died as the humans scattered.
The people did not hear the whinings which were all about them. The animals made a dismal, widespread din of despair and defiance and utterly desperate ferocity. But the people made an uproar, too. The congregation of onlookers was instantly a confusion of shouting, struggling participants in the panic. They fled to their own cars, or fought to get into any other they could reach.
They cranked up windows and started motors, and there was immediately a chaos of snarled traffic. Fenders clashed. Horns bellowed. Then cars deserted the roadway and crashed through fences and cut wide swathes in the com, to get around the jam.
In minutes there were only frantic, fugitive dust streaks racing away at top speed, except that there were some stalled cars, and some with tangled bumpers. Their owners struggled to escape by riding upon any one which managed to get into motion.
In half an hour, the press association men were indignantly swearing at staff men in the cities. They’d gotten to the nearest telephones to phone in their stories. The office men regarded the subject of the tales as freak stuff, of no earth-shaking importance. The scale of the phoned narratives made them something else, but by precedent such accounts should later be discredited or at the least scaled down to the possible. But the field men furiously insisted that animal husbandry departments of governments and colleges be queried about this massive outbreak of an animal epidemic. Department of Agriculture offices must be questioned on crop damage. Game officials must be hounded into committing themselves on the danger to human beings from carnivores like wildcats and bears which abandoned their natural haunts. Above all, health departments must be urged into statements on the danger of this animal plague to humans.
As the press association reporters squabbled with skeptical office men, undeniable cases of deaths among the onlookers came to them. A state policeman brought out bodies. Later he would feel cold chills down his back when he realized the chances he’d taken. People who’d gone to see an incredible thing they’d heard about on a party-line phone had died of their curiosity. Their faces were purple and their tongues protruded: they had suffocated.
This was the thing which forced belief. While doctors tried to establish some physical condition which would have caused human beings to suffocate of themselves—because there was no mark of exterior violence on any of the victims—the press association wires began to hum with the story. Helicopters took off with photographers to snap the death scene from the air. Health department emergency crews went racing to find out what had really happened. They would wear respirators and carry elaborate equipment for the securing of biological specimens for research upon the germ or virus responsible for the deaths. The mass of dead animal bodies called for the dispatch of bulldozers to cover up the bodies lest the contagion spread.
But the significance of this happening in Minnesota, to Lane and Professor Warren and Carol in Virginia, was mostly in the lurid headlines it produced. They saw the headlines on a rack outside a drugstore. Lane swerved into a filling station to fill up the car’s tank, and while the pump clattered he went across the street and bought papers.
“I’m going to telephone again,” said Professor Warren desperately, when she’d read the account and seen the pictures. “Those men who run the bulldozers to cover up the carcasses, and those who look for bacteriological material—they’ll disturb the Gizmos at their feeding, as you did those about the dead rabbits. They’ll be angered and attack the men. Somehow I’ve got to make somebody see sense. Sending unwarned men to bury those animals is murder.”
Lane grimaced. Something had drawn his eyes to a distant mountainside, clearly visible from this place on the edge of this small town. He watched the mountainside. There was a vague blurring of the details of the forest on the mountain. The blurring was greatest in the center of a roughly spherical area. It moved, slowly but definitely, far away.
“I’m afraid,” said Lane detachedly, “that their danger is almost unimportant compared to the danger to the rest of us. Look there!”
He pointed. Carol drew in her breath, sharply. The professor looked, and tears of rage and frustration came into her eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Lane,” said Burke, with a complacent and yet uneasy satisfaction. “Everybody’s in plenty of danger. These here Martians or Jupiterians or whatever, are carryin’ out a first-class military plan! That thing on the mountainside is a corps of Gizmos, movin’ to get ready for G-day—Gizmo day. That’s going to be something, when it comes!”
Chapter 8
The Gizmos did not attack. On the morning Lane spotted a mass formation of them in motion down a mountain chain, radar throughout the United States reported an unprecedented number of slow-moving blips which did not represent aircraft. They were then explained as areas of extra-high ionization in the atmosphere. And this explanation was quite accurate so far as it went, but like a deplorable number of scientific explanations it did not go far enough. It described the proximate cause of an observed phenomenon and blandly stopped there. There was something more than a condition of ionization involved.
This morning, areas of ionization were numerous and many were extraordinarily large. For a time, there was some concern lest they interfere with regular radar operation. But the Gizmo masses moved at a maximum speed of a little over thirty miles an hour, plus or minus the pull of the wind where they were. A moment’s inspection could distinguish between such a blip on a radar screen and a spot made by a fast-moving plane.
But there were more than five hundred such blips on screens at one time, counting all radar stations. Nobody can guess how many separate groups were involved, though assuredly the total was high in the thousands. Certainly there were massings of Gizmos all over the nation; rather, there was distribution of masses of Gizmos everywhere. But there was still no association of such radar phenomena with outbreaks of plague among domestic and wild animals, the death of the village of Serenity, the slaughter of pets nearly everywhere, and such oddities as an unusual asthmatic attac
k experienced by a man in Tarzana, California.
The blips made no sort of sense, even when correlated with each other. Had they been spotted in strategic fashion—concentrated at key railroad junction cities, near industrial centers, even near the larger centers of human population—somebody would have suspected a military purpose. Invasion would have seemed credible, though Gizmos themselves were still unknown. But the massing of Gizmos at it appeared on radar screens, with a pattern changing frequently through the day, did not fit into any specific design, and so was not accorded any serious attention.
Near noon, Lane stopped at a country store and put through a call to the friend who headed the research department of a pharmaceutical house. He put it on record that if men did seek bacteriological specimens or move bulldozers to cover up the multitude of dead animals in Minnesota, some of them would fall victims to a supposed plague. He observed that some of those who wore respirators—biologists seeking tissue specimens—would be victims of the death they tried to interpret. But he prophesied that no one would be attacked by the plague if he held a lighted cigar or cigarette in his mouth.
It was a highly reasonable prophecy, but he did not dare say more. After all, less than twenty-four hours had passed since his own first contact with Gizmos, and the actual history of those hours was too fantastic to be believed.
War with the Gizmos Page 10
