The newspapers ran out of space for large-type headlines and had more or less to confine themselves to printing the facts. It was quaint, though, that a small news story from Roanoke, Virginia, was crowded out of type altogether. Even the later editions had no room for it. They had to report public reaction in Chicago, and related happenings.
That reaction was remarkable. One of the most astonishing things about the human brain is its ability to hold firmly to two mutually contradictory beliefs at the same time. The death of Serenity and the astonishing number of people who died in their sleep on Tuesday night had been followed by the murder of refugee animals in a Minnesota cornfield and an astronomical increase in traffic deaths on Wednesday, and the Chicago cattle-massacre in the small hours of Thursday morning. The existence of a lower-animal plague—an epizootic—which could also kill men seemed to be established. But also something which in the Chicago manifestation was definitely not a disease was no less established. The similarity between the Chicago affair and the murder of animals in Minnesota was complete, so far as the manner of death was concerned. That motorists were suffocated obviously fitted in. It had been noted, by the way, that the victims of car accidents had rarely been traveling at high speed when the accidents took place. They were driving at a leisurely pace—often under thirty miles an hour—with the car windows open. It would seem that anybody should have concluded that there was only one inimical agency at work.
Maybe some people did, but they were in an unheard minority. Public opinion believed with passionate unanimity in an unknown disease which killed men and animals indiscriminately, and also in something else which might be Russian—or from outer space—but was alive and deadly and killed animals and men. Death was assumed to be abroad in the land, at once a disease to be avoided and an entity to be fought. So small towns barricaded themselves behind barriers, and enacted strict quarantine laws which had very little sense behind them, and demanded the stationing of antiaircraft batteries at every crossroad post office. Larger towns took even more stringent measures. Guided missile defenses were especially in demand. If there was anybody, anywhere, who pointed out that the cattle in Chicago did not die of disease, he was denounced for his denial of the general belief that they had. But anyone who observed that if the cattle had died of plague antiaircraft batteries would be useless was regarded as subversive.
The confusion might have been instructive, Lane considered sardonically, if it didn’t make for inconvenience to people on important business like himself and his party. They spent the night at the only motel in Monterey, with the Monster in the room occupied by Carol and the professor, and Burke snoring heavily between nightmares in the room with Lane. When morning came, it developed that there had been so many traffic accidents in Virginia that the governor of West Virginia had ordered the border between the two states closed to traffic. It was illegal, but it was enforced.
Lane abandoned Route Two-twenty and headed east for the Shenandoah Valley. He was stopped by a barrier and guards at Staunton, and navigated narrow country roads around it to be stopped again at Harrisonburg, where a trigger-happy guard put a bullet through the top of the car’s windshield. Burke fainted.
They made a tedious, time-consuming detour around Harrisonburg, and lost three hours trying to get up on the Skyline Drive, which did not pass through any towns and might give them a clear run for a reasonable distance. They didn’t make it. They plodded through more back-country lanes, instead. New Market was tranquil. There were dogs and children in plain sight, and people moved naturally about; there was no sign of anything inconsistent with a perfectly commonplace small town on a commonplace summer day. But Luray was blocked to traffic. Again they wandered interminably along trails with tire-tracks on them, but which had never seen a bulldozer. More than once they forded small brooks and followed meandering signs, only to arrive at a farmhouse beyond which that trail did not go. Then they had to backtrack and try another fork. They had been traveling fourteen exhausting hours when they found Strasburg. It was untouched by the alarm that filled so many other places. They slept there, but at four next morning they were on their way. The only news they heard was from the car radio, which pictured public confusion many times confounded. It developed now that Chicago had not been the only target of a radar-reflecting cloud—Gizmos. The Kansas City stockyards were a shambles. Shipping pens in Texas had been visited by whinings heard in the midst of the bellowing of maddened steers. In the corn belt, cattle fattening for market died in the center of patches of torn-up ground. The St. Louis hog market posed a problem at once in the disposal of dead swine and the defense of the city’s population, should the plague return.
They’d planned to head for Winchester and so to Washington. Professor Warren’s professional reputation was sound. She should have only to explain and offer to demonstrate her discoveries, and everything would be taken care of. But Lane still held his own contact in reserve.
As they pulled out of the sleeping town of Strasburg at four o’clock in the morning, however, an all-night radio reported that the Rock Creek Park Zoo, in Washington, had been visited by a radar-reflecting cloud which came upwind along the Potomac and wiped out the entire display of animals. There were also no pets left in an entire quarter of Washington. The news broadcast said that inhabitants of the city were already streaming out on every highway. They seemed to be especially worried by the fact that planes had tried to break up the cloud with explosives before it reached Washington, and had failed. Bridges and highways were already filled with traffic. Measures were being taken to check the exodus.
When the news report ended, Lane said grimly: “That changes our plans. We don’t go into Washington.”
“But,” said the professor, “I need to go to Washington, Dick. Let me have half an hour’s talk with a competent biologist in the Department of Agriculture and I guarantee—”
“You didn’t hear why Dick doesn’t want to go into Washington,” Carol said.
“There’ll be martial law by daybreak,” Lane said dryly. “They’ll call it a Civil Defense emergency. But they’re going to have to stop people running out of the city. Probably all cities.”
“Day before yesterday,” said Lane, “there were well over a thousand victims of traffic accidents which we know were caused by Gizmos. Yesterday was certainly no better. Did you hear any reference to traffic accidents in that broadcast?”
“No.” The professor was appalled. “Do you think it was so bad they’re censoring the news? They’re afraid to let people leave the cities, and afraid to tell them why?”
“I think,” Lane told her, “that I don’t envy anybody in authority the decisions he has to make. It’s going to occur—it’s already occurred to a lot of people that the radar-reflecting clouds which kill beasts in stockyards and zoos can also kill human beings. People have been killed in cities, so they’ll want to get out. If Gizmos arc killing people on the highways, they should be made to stay at home, but if you tell them the reason, they’ll feel that they’re doomed either way.”
Carol said, “Aunt Ann might call in and have someone come out to meet her and get her information and see what proof we can find.”
Professor Warren said, fuming, “I didn’t think! Of course I can’t take Carol into Washington if the people there are going crazy with fear!”
Lane said carefully, “Not all of them will react that way. There’s a part of the population which will react in an acceptable way to a situation which distresses them. Unfortunately, some of them may have to make decisions and they’ll want to be calm when they make them.”
The car rumbled on for a moment. Carol said unhappily: “Tranquilizers?”
“Exactly,” said Lane. “Precisely like the old tales of seamen breaking into the whisky stores in time of shipwreck. Very helpful, at a time when brains are needed!”
He stopped short. This was half-past four in the morning. There were hours yet to sunrise. The headlight beams bored on ahead. This was Route Eleven,
not notable for heavy traffic. They were perhaps ten miles out of Strasburg, and they had not yet met more than two pairs of headlights all the way. Here the highway dipped down, to rise again two hundred yards farther on, a brook and a bridge across it at the bottom of the depression. It was a commonplace spot on an ordinary highway; this was very early morning and a predawn chill was everywhere. There was actually a vague mistiness down in the hollow.
But Lane noticed that the mistiness was not still. It writhed and stirred in a boiling motion. His eyes glanced sharply at the rising part of the road beyond. In the headlight rays it was blurred and wavery. The headlight beams from the car passed through something that distorted the light, like small columns of heated gas. They were doubly disturbed when reflected back.
“Torches!” snapped Lane.
He pressed down on the accelerator, and the car went downhill, gathering speed. It went through the beginning of the mist and the fuzziness. Instantly angry whinings sounded all about. But the car gathered speed on the level bottom place, while the whinings grew shriller and more angry. But sparks flashed inside the car from a brazing torch.
Carol waved it and something flickered into blue flame. There was a stench, and the whinings grew to a keening howl. Something clapped itself over Lane’s nose and lips. He held his breath and drove on furiously, and the car breasted the rise beyond the hollow and roared away on the level highway. Its speed went up and up. It was fifty miles an hour when Carol speared the place before his face, and something screamed and flared.
“Thanks,” said Lane, gasping, as wind whipped away the reek of carrion. “They may follow for a little way, but we’re all right. See how things are in the back.”
The professor wailed: “I could have caught another specimen! But I didn’t have a pillowcase ready!”
“Burke?” said Lane sharply. “You okay?”
Carol swung the torch about. She used it, stabbing emptiness before Burke’s contorted, fear-crazed face. His breath stopped. There was a flicker of light, then, and he collapsed into shuddering limpness.
“That,” said Lane, “is how people in cars on the highway get killed—not in hollows, but anywhere. It disposes of the idea that Gizmos are intelligent and purposeful, but it doesn’t make things look any brighter.”
It didn’t. It only made them more understandable. Now that Gizmos had acquired the instinct to hunt instead of scavenging only, their pattern of action was clear. They were social creatures in the sense that they moved and fed in groups or flocks. As is usual among all social creatures, at any moment there were individuals separated from their fellows, and they would commit individual atrocities. Some, on the other hand, would be surfeited, not interested in hunting. But they all would tend to hunt by night and feed by day. In their native forests they drifted in grisly, faintly whining masses, flowing invisibly between the trees and through the underbrush. In a sense they grazed, in that they sought their subsistence on a broad, deep front, on which they murdered every bird, every animal, every insect. When they found running animals in any number, it was their custom to round them up into terrified groups whose frenzy made them mutually prevent each other’s escape. Then the Gizmos killed them.
It was an admirable device for food gathering. Lane pictured the over-all situation as one in which such masses of invisible horrors flowed slowly and terribly everywhere. They would be attracted from many miles by the scent of the stockyards. They would go blindly to that scent of prey. They had attacked this car because it had disturbed them, but, mindless as they now appeared to be, they killed human beings. They were capable of rage. They furiously attacked any place where one of them was held captive. They acted as if they were capable of enormous vindictiveness.
Rage, indeed, might have substituted for reason to make them trail Lane and the others across the mountains to where Burke had picked them up in the car. Fury over the death-cries of their fellows might have produced the cloud formation over the filling station. It need not have been hatred against them as specific persons; it could have been anger at prey which had turned upon them. They had no fangs to bare, nor any claws to extend. They could perform mass-movements out of emotion as other creatures crouched to spring.
Lane, driving through the dark, did not think of such fine details. He imagined creeping, crawling crowds of Gizmos flowing across the countryside, killing every living creature. If such a swarm should flow into a city…
The first report of such an event came from St. Joseph, Missouri.
Chapter 11
The St. Joseph incident did not get into the news reports. But on the outskirts of the town there was a gigantic poultry farm devoted to the raising of fowl for meat rather than the production of eggs. The chickens therefore ranged outdoors, with small buildings in which to roost at night. The fowl-runs extended in a long row beside a highway, to make the maximum display to motorists who passed. There were signs advertising live fowl, dressed fowl, plucked fowl, frozen fowl, and fowl in sections. There was even a group of roasting spits in a window of the sales building where one could order fresh-roasted chickens.
At nine o’clock in the morning frenzy struck the chickens in the farthest of the fowl-runs. At one end of that wire enclosure, chickens suddenly flung themselves crazily about, tumbling end over end, flapping hysterically. Others flapped and squawked madly away from that part of the run. Attendants at the farm went hurriedly to find out what was the matter. Up to this moment, the doings of the Gizmos had been matters St. Joseph had only read and heard about. People were jittery, but not quite scared.
A helper opened a gate into the last yard and went in. Struggling, frantic fowl were piled deep against the end of this particular enclosure. He heard whinings in the air, but he moved to clear away the panicky pile-up of chickens, which might suffocate in the press. He grabbed a flapping, frantic, but silent hen to toss it away from the fence. It did not writhe, it squirmed, its beak open but no sound coming out of it, its eyes glazing. At the same time, the helper heard a strident humming whine very close to him. The chicken in his hands ceased to struggle save for convulsive, dying shudders. There was no reason for it to die, but it seemed to do so.
Then something brushed against his face. Instinctively, he swiped at it with the feathered object in his hand. There was a frantic, high-pitched buzzing whine, and then his breathing ended. He tried to gasp and could not. He stood paralyzed by fright and shock, with the flapping chickens hurtling crazily about him. One struck him in the face and saved his life. Because at the impact the angry whining in his ears rose even higher, and he could breathe.
He fled.
He was incoherent, but he babbled that things tried to choke him, and the chickens in the next to the farthest run began to die as those in the farthest grew still. Invisible death came very slowly and very deliberately along the long line of fenced enclosures, and foot by foot the chickens in them died.
There were too many witnesses and the succession of events was much too clear for this to be taken for a plague. Those who had stopped to buy chickens, the men who worked at the farm, even a state patrolman saw it. He was the one who linked the whining with the deaths, and he concluded that the chickens were being killed by a cloud of insects which were too small to be seen clearly. His premise was wrong, but his reasoning was sound. He concluded that if one breathed through a cloth, the insects would be kept out of one’s lungs. He tried it, to drive the onlookers out of danger; he was an intelligent and a courageous man, that trooper.
The creeping cloud of suffocation enveloped the entire poultry farm after the state patrolman had gotten the people out of its way. It went on, invisibly, terribly, into the heart of the suburb whose edge touched the farm. There were two human deaths in that suburb. The patrolman tried to alarm everybody. He sent those he warned to warn others. Two stubborn, suspicious individuals refused to stir. He saved all the rest. Two-thirds of a new housing development was enveloped by something nobody could see but which could be heard as a thin,
hungrily complaining sound as its cause moved murderously onward.
It occupied six blocks of brand-new houses, with only two human fatalities. But then, as blindly and as mindlessly as it had entered the suburb, the swarm of monsters flowed in its grisly, slow-motion fashion off into woodland nearby, where it killed innumerable wild bees, rabbits, grubs, ants and beetles. Later there was another gruesome find there, too, but it had nothing to do with the Gizmos.
This did not get into the newspapers because the public was already jumpy enough. There were elaborate precautions in force to prevent further alarm. Preventing panic was something that could be done; they couldn’t think of anything else that seemed practical. But the means chosen for the prevention of terror had some odd side effects. For example, it was not possible for Professor Warren to reach anybody in Washington to tell them something even more useful to do.
The acceptance of telephone calls from the country districts—in fact all long-distance calls other than official ones—were stopped. This was to keep panic from being conveyed into the cities from the open country. When Professor Warren tried to make a call to Washington, she was politely told that no trunk lines were available. The same thing happened each of the other six times Lane stopped the car at a back-road garage or store where a telephone might be found.
“We just heard a news broadcast,” he said dryly, when she came out to the car after the seventh attempt. “Now there’s no reference to the trouble in St. Louis or Kansas City. Maybe they think people will forget if they ignore it. And the business in Chicago is played down. It’s said that bacteriologists think they’ve isolated a suspicious germ. Last night it was thought to be a Russian trick! There’s still no mention of any unusual number of traffic deaths. Two-thirds of the broadcast dealt with foreign news.”
War with the Gizmos Page 14
