The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  Lieutenant Hanson was no combat soldier; he was a scientist. He had made no appointment. He had entered without knocking, in a most unmilitary manner. And—and—

  “MISTER!” roared Colonel Pollard. “WHERE ARE YOUR TROUSERS?”

  For Lieutenant Hanson obviously was wearing none. Nor was he wearing socks or shoes. And the tattered tails of his shirt barely concealed his shredded shorts.

  “SPEAK UP, DAMMIT!”

  Vacantly, the Lieutenant glanced at his lower limbs and back again. He began to tremble. “They—they ate them!” he blurted. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Lord knows how he does it! He’s about eighty, and he’s a—a foreman in a cuckoo-clock factory! But it’s the perfect weapon! And it works, it works, it works!” He laughed hysterically. “The gnurrs come from the voodvork out!” he sang, clapping his hands. “The voodvork out, the—”

  Here Colonel Pollard rose from his chair, vaulted his desk, and tried to calm Lieutenant Hanson by shaking him vigorously. “Disgraceful!” he shouted in his ear. “Turn your back!” he ordered the blushing Katie Hooper. “NONSENSE!” he bellowed when the Lieutenant tried to chatter something about gnurrs.

  And, “Vot iss nonzense, soldier boy?” enquired Papa Schimmelhorn from the doorway.

  Colonel Pollard let go of the Lieutenant. He flushed a deep red cordovan. For the first time in his military career, words failed him.

  The Lieutenant pointed unsteadily at Colonel Pollard. “Gnurrs iss nonzense!” he giggled. “He says so!”

  “Ha!” Papa Schimmelhorn glared. “I show you, soldier boy!”

  The Colonel erupted. “Soldier boy? SOLDIER BOY? Stand at attention when I speak to you! ATTENTION, DAMN YOU!”

  Papa Schimmelhorn, of course, paid no attention whatsoever. He raised his secret weapon to his lips, and, the first bars of Come to the Church in the Wildwood moaned around the room.

  “Mister Hanson!” raged the Colonel. “Arrest that man! Take that thing away from him! I’ll prefer charges! I’ll—”

  At this point, the gnurrs came from the voodvork out.

  It isn’t easy to describe a gnurr. Can you imagine a mouse-colored, mouse-sized critter shaped like a wild boar, but sort of shimmery? With thumbs fore and aft, and a pink, naked tail, and yellow eyes several sizes too large? And with three sets of sharp teeth in its face? You can? Well, that’s about it—except that nobody has ever seen a gnurr. They don’t come that way. When the gnurrs come from the voodvork out, they come all over—like lemmings, only more so—millions and millions and millions of them.

  And they come eating.

  The gnurrs came from the voodvork out just as Papa Schimmelhorn reached “… the church in the vale.” They covered half the floor, and ate up half the carpet, before he finished, “No scene is so dear to my childhood.” Then they advanced on Colonel Pollard.

  Mounting his desk, the Colonel started slashing around with his riding crop. Katie Hooper climbed a filing case, hoisted her skirt, and screamed. Lieutenant Hanson, secure in his nether nakedness, held his ground and guffawed insubordinately.

  Papa Schimmelhorn stopped tootling to shout, “Don’dt vorry, soldier boy!” He started in again, playing something quite unrecognizable—something that didn’t sound like a tune at all.

  Instantly, the gnurrs halted. They looked over their shoulders apprehensively. They swallowed the remains of the Colonel’s chair cushion, shimmered brightly, made a queasy sort of creaking sound, and turning tail, vanished into the wainscoting.

  Papa Schimmelhorn stared at the Colonel’s boots, which were surprisingly intact, and muttered, “Hmm-m, zo!” He leered appreciatively at Katie Hooper, who promptly dropped her skirt. He thumped himself on the chest, and announced, “They are vunderful, my gnurrs!” to the world at large.

  “Wh—?” The Colonel showed evidences of profound psychic trauma. “Where did they go?”

  “Vere they came from,” replied Papa Schimmelhorn.

  “Where’s that?”

  “It iss yesterday.”

  “That—that’s absurd!” The Colonel stumbled down and fell into his chair. “They weren’t here yesterday!”

  Papa Schimmelhorn regarded him pityingly. “Of course nodt! They vere nodt here yesterday because yesterday vas then today. They are here yesterday, ven yesterday is yesterday already. It iss different.”

  Colonel Pollard wiped his clammy brow, and cast an appealing glance at Lieutenant Hanson.

  “Perhaps I can explain, sir,” said the Lieutenant, whose nervous system apparently had benefited by the second visit of the gnurrs. “May I make my report?”

  “Yes, yes, certainly.” Colonel Pollard clutched gladly at the straw. “Ah—sit down.”

  Lieutenant Hanson pulled up a chair, and—as Papa Schimmelhorn walked over to flirt with Katie—he began to talk in a low and very serious voice.

  “It’s absolutely incredible,” he said. “All the routine tests show that he’s at best a high grade moron. He quit school when he was eleven, served his apprenticeship, and worked as a clockmaker till he was in his fifties. After that, he was a janitor in the Geneva Institute of Higher Physics until just a few years ago. Then he came to America and got his present job. But it’s the Geneva business that’s important. They’ve been concentrating on extensions of Einstein’s and Minkowski’s work. He must have overheard a lot of it.”

  “But if he is a moron—” The Colonel had heard of Einstein, and knew that he was very deep indeed “—what good would it do him?”

  “That’s just the point, sir! He’s a moron on the conscious level, but subconsciously he’s a genius. Somehow, part of his mind absorbed the stuff, integrated it, and came up with this bassoon thing. It’s got a weird little L-shaped crystal in it, impinging on the reed, and when you blow, the crystal vibrates. We don’t know why it works—but it sure does!”

  “You mean the—uh—the fourth dimension?”

  “Precisely. Though we’ve left yesterday behind, the gnurrs have not. They’re there now. When a day becomes our yesterday, it becomes their today.”

  “But—but how does he get rid of them?”

  “He says he plays the same tune backwards, and reverses the effect. Damn lucky, if you ask me!”

  Papa Schimmelhorn, who had been encouraging Katie Hooper to feel his biceps, turned around. “You vait!” he laughed uproariously. “Soon, vith my gnurr-pfeife I broadcast to the enemy! Ve vin the var!”

  The Colonel shied. “The thing’s untried, unproven! It—er—requires further study—field service—acid test.”

  “We haven’t time, sir. We’d lose the element of surprise!”

  “We will make a regular report through channels,” declared the Colonel. “It’s a damn’ machine, isn’t it? They’re unreliable. Always have been. It would be contrary to the principles of war.”

  And then Lieutenant Hanson had an inspiration. “But, sir,” he argued, “we won’t be fighting with the gnurr-pfeife! The gnurrs will be our real weapon, and they’re not machines—they’re animals! The greatest generals used animals in war! The gnurrs aren’t interested in living creatures, but they’ll devour just about anything else—wool, cotton, leather, even plastics—and their numbers are simply astronomical. If I were you, I’d get through to the Secretary right away!”

  For an instant, the Colonel hesitated—but only for an instant. “Hanson,” he said decisively, “you’ve got a point there—a very sound point!”

  And he reached for the telephone.

  It took less than twenty-four hours to organize Operation Gnurr. The Secretary of Defense, after conferring with the President and the Chiefs of Staff, personally rushed over to direct preliminary tests of Papa Schimmelhorn’s secret weapon. By nightfall, it was known that the gnurrs could:

  a. completely blanket everythin
g within two hundred yards of the gnurr-pfeife in less than twenty seconds;

  b. strip an entire company of infantry, supported by chemical weapons, to the skin in one minute and eighteen seconds;

  c. ingest the contents of five Quartermaster warehouses in just over two minutes; and,

  d. come from the voodvork out when the gnurr-pfeife was played over a carefully shielded shortwave system.

  It had also become apparent that there were only three effective ways to kill a gnurrby—shooting him to death, drenching him with liquid fire, or dropping an atomic bomb on him—and that there were entirely too many gnurrs for any of these methods to be worth a hoot.

  By morning, Colonel Powhattan Fairfax Pollard—because he was the only senior officer who had ever seen a gnurr, and because animals were known to be right up his alley—had been made a lieutenant-general and given command of the operation. Lieutenant Hanson, as his aide, had suddenly found himself a major. Corporal Colliver had become a master-sergeant, presumably for being there when the manna fell. And Katie Hooper had had a brief but strenuous date with Papa Schimmelhorn.

  Nobody was satisfied. Katie complained that Papa Schimmelhorn and the gnurrs had the same idea in mind, only his technique was different. Jerry Colliver, who had been dating Katie regularly, griped that the old buzzard with the muscles had sent his Hooper rating down to zero. Major Hanson had awakened to the possibility of somebody besides the enemy tuning in on the Papa Schimmelhorn Hour. Even General Pollard was distressed—“I could overlook everything, Hanson,” he said sourly, “except his calling me ‘soldier boy.’ I won’t stand for it! The science of war cannot tolerate indiscipline. I spoke to him about it, and all he said was, ‘It iss all right, soldier boy. You can call me Papa.’”

  Major Hanson disciplined his face, and said, “Well, why not call him Papa, sir? After all, it’s just such human touches as these that make history.”

  “Ah, yes—History.” The General paused reflectively. “Hmm, perhaps so, perhaps so. They always called Napoleon ‘the little Corporal.’”

  “The thing that really bothers me, General, is how we’re going to get through without our own people listening in. I guess they must’ve worked out something on it, or they wouldn’t have scheduled the—the offensive for five o’clock. That’s only four hours off.”

  “Now that you mention it,” said General Pollard, coming out of his reverie, “a memorandum did come through—Oh, Miss Hooper, bring me that memo from G-I, will you?—Thank you. Here it is. It seems that they have decided to—er—scramble the broadcast.”

  “Scramble it, sir?”

  “Yes, yes. And I’ve issued operational orders accordingly. You see, Intelligence reported several weeks ago that the enemy knows how to unscramble anything we transmit that way. When Mr. Schimmelhorn goes on the air, we will scramble him, but we will not transmit the code key to our own people. It is assumed that from five to fifteen enemy monitors will hear him. His playing of the tune will constitute Phase One. When it is over, the microphones will be switched off, and he will play it backwards. That will be Phase Two, to dispose of such gnurrs as appear locally.”

  “Seems sound enough.” Major Hanson frowned. “And it’s pretty smart, if everything goes right. But what if it doesn’t? Hadn’t we better have an ace up our sleeve?”

  He frowned again. Then, as the General didn’t seem to have any ideas on the subject, he went about his duties. He made a final inspection of the special sound-proof room in which Papa Schimmelhorn would tootle. He allocated its observation windows—one to the President, the Secretary, and General Pollard; one to the Chiefs of Staff; another to Intelligence liaison; and the last to the functioning staff of Operation Gnurr, himself included. At ten minutes to five, when everything was ready, he was still worrying.

  “Look here,” he whispered to Papa Schimmelhorn, as he escorted him to the fateful door. “What are we going to do if your gnurrs really get loose here? You couldn’t play them back into the voodvork in a month of Sundays!”

  “Don’dt vorry, soldier boy!” Papa Schimmelhorn gave him a resounding slap on the back. “I haff yet vun trick I do nodt tell you!”

  And with that vague assurance, he closed the door behind him.

  “Ready!” called General Pollard tensely, at one minute to five.

  “Ready!” echoed Sergeant Colliver.

  In front of Papa Schimmelhorn, a red light flashed on. The tension mounted. The seconds ticked away. The General’s hand reached for a sabre-hilt that wasn’t there. At five exactly—

  “CHARGE!” the General cried.

  And Papa Schimmelhorn started tootling Come to the Church in the Wildwood.

  The gnurrs, of course, came from the voodvork out.

  The gnurrs came from the voodvork out, and a hungry gleam was in their yellow eyes. They carpeted the floor. They started piling up. They surged against the massive legs of Papa Schimmelhorn, their tiny electric-razor sets of teeth going like all get out. His trousers vanished underneath the flood—his checkered coat, his tie, his collar, the fringes of his beard. And Papa Schimmelhorn, all undismayed, lifted his big bassoon out of gnurrs’ way and tootled on. “Come, come, come, come. Come to the church in the vildvood…”

  Of course, Major Hanson couldn’t hear the gnurr-pfeife—but he had sung the song in Sunday school, and now the words resounded in his brain. Verse after verse, chorus after chorus— The awful thought struck him that Papa Schimmelhorn would be overwhelmed, sucked under, drowned in gnurrs…

  And then he heard the voice of General Pollard, no longer steady—

  “R-ready, Phase Two?”

  “R-ready!” replied Sergeant Colliver.

  A green light flashed in front of Papa Schimmelhorn.

  For a moment, nothing changed. Then the gnurrs hesitated. Apprehensively, they glanced over their hairy shoulders. They shimmered. They started to recede. Back, back, back they flowed, leaving Papa Schimmelhorn alone, triumphant, and naked as a jaybird.

  The door was opened, and he emerged—to be congratulated and reclothed, and (much to Sergeant Colliver’s annoyance) to turn down a White House dinner invitation in favor of a date with Katie. The active phases of Operation Gnurr were over.

  * * * *

  In far-away Bobovia, however, chaos reigned. Later it was learned that eleven inquisitive enemy monitors had unscrambled the tootle of the gnurr-pfeife, and that tidal waves of gnurrs had inundated the enemy’s eleven major cities. By seven fifteen, except for a few hysterical outlying stations, Bobovia was off the air. By eight, Bobovian military activity had ceased in every theatre. At twenty after ten, an astounded Press learned that the surrender of Bobovia could be expected momentarily… The President had received a message from the Bobovian Marshalissimo, asking permission to fly to Washington with his Chief of Staff, the members of his Cabinet, and several relatives. And would His Excellency the President—the Marshalissimo had radioed—be so good as to have someone meet them at the airport with nineteen pairs of American trousers, new or used?

  VE Day wasn’t in it. Neither was VJ Day. As soon as the papers hit the streets—BOBOVIA SURRENDERS!—ATOMIC MICE DEVOUR ENEMY!—SWISS GENIUS’ STRATEGY WINS WAR!—the crowds went wild. From Maine to Florida, from California to Cape Cod, the lights went on, sirens and bells and auto horns resounded through the night, millions of throats were hoarse from singing Come to the Church in the Wildwood.

  Next day, after massed television cameras had let the entire nation in on the formal signing of the surrender pact, General Pollard and Papa Schimmelhorn were honored at an impressive public ceremony.

  Papa Schimmelhorn received a vote of thanks from both Houses of Congress. He was awarded academic honors by Harvard, Princeton, M.I.T., and a number of denominational colleges down in Texas. He spoke briefly about cuckoo-clocks, the gnurrs, and Katie Hooper—and his
remarks were greeted by a thunder of applause.

  General Pollard, having been presented with a variety of domestic and foreign decorations, spoke at some length on the use of animals in future warfare. He pointed out that the horse, of all animals, was best suited to normal military purposes, and he discussed in detail many of the battles and campaigns in which it had been tried and proven. He was just starting in on swords and lances when the abrupt arrival of Major Hanson cut short the whole affair.

  Hanson raced up with sirens screaming. He left his escort of MP’s and ran across the platform. Pale and panting, he reached the President—and, though he tried to whisper, his voice was loud enough to reach the General’s ear. “The—the gnurrs!” he choked. “They’re in Los Angeles!”

  Instantly, the General rose to the occasion. “Attention, please!” he shouted at the microphone. “This ceremony is now over. You may consider yourselves—er—ah—DISMISSED!”

  Before his audience could react, he had joined the knot of men around the President, and Hanson was briefing them on what had happened. “It was a research unit! They’d worked out a descrambler—new stuff—better than the enemy’s. They didn’t know. Tried it out on Papa here. Cut a record. Played it back today! Los Angeles is overrun!”

  There were long seconds of despairing silence. Then, “Gentlemen,” said the President quietly, “we’re in the same boat as Bobovia.”

  The General groaned.

  But Papa Schimmelhorn, to everyone’s surprise, laughed boisterously. “Oh-ho-ho-ho! Don’dt vorry, soldier boy! You trust old Papa Schimmelhorn. All ofer, in Bobovia, iss gnurrs! Ve haff them only in Los Angeles, vere it does nodt matter! Also, I haff a trick I did nodt tell!” He winked a cunning wink. “Iss vun thing frightens gnurrs—”

  “In God’s name—what?” exclaimed the Secretary.

  “Horzes,” said Papa Schimmelhorn. “It iss the smell.”