The professor got out of the car. Scowling, she beckoned to the bald-headed man, who was so invigorated by the nearness of medical attention that by error he got out unassisted, and then was astonished that he did not drop dead.
“Come along!” growled the professor. “Dick, you keep an eye on Burke. I’m going to see if anything at all can be done. We know how people can protect themselves, now. They’ve only to use what their great-grandfathers believed in!”
Lane nodded. The professor seized the bald-headed man’s arm and marched him toward what was obviously the office part of the building. Her manner and grip suggested marching a malefactor to jail than one taking a patient to a doctor. She vanished through the doorway, thrusting the bald-headed man before her.
Lane lighted a cigarette. Carol looked at him unhappily. Burke squirmed in the back seat. To the west, the crimson of the sky grew deeper above shadowed mountainsides.
Impulsively, Carol touched Lane’s hand.
“I know,” said Lane. “Thanks for sympathizing, but we’ll make out. Don’t worry. One Gizmo doesn’t make a dust storm, but the trouble is that we needed that one. Our difficulty isn’t a new one. Plenty of people think they’re what the Gizmos consider them—lower animals. They don’t want to think about anything but their own skins and their own stomachs and their own vanity. That’s about all a lower animal does think about. Except dogs. If humans were as intelligent and as loyal as dogs …”
He brooded. Carol watched his face. But there was nothing to be gained by upbraiding Burke. He was the way he was. Presently Carol sighed, and Lane patted her hand. He didn’t take his hand away. In the back seat, Burke was desperately anxious not to call further attention to himself. When his cigar burned short he took out another and lighted it.
The sun set. There were small twilight noises. A dog barked, a long distance away. A bird called in the lonely half-light. The car, cooling off, made small snapping sounds. A vagrant night wind, blowing over newly cut grass, brought fresh, fragrant, cool air to the car. Night fell, while Professor Warren and the bald-headed man remained in the doctor’s office.
Sunset moved across the nation. Everywhere the situation was confused; there were numerous places where no one at all had seen anything out of the ordinary. There were other places where dogs and cats and canaries lay dead, and people were perplexed and grieved. These things happened where humans lived—even in their homes.
There was still no search for an explanation; veterinary surgeons puzzled helplessly over dead farm animals which had simply stopped breathing, fought crazily, and died of suffocation. Animal husbandry departments of agricultural colleges were kept busy on telephones, explaining harassedly that the described symptoms were familiar but so far unexplained. They’d been reported in isolated cases for two or three weeks. During the past few days they’d increased markedly. Yesterday and today the animal plague—and it could be nothing but a plague—had flared up with explosive violence until it began to seem a threat to the meat and dairy industry of the nation. As a matter of precaution it was advised that the drinking of fresh milk be stopped. Many calves had died.
But nobody thought of Gizmos, because people thought rationally. And it was not rational to think of Gizmos as the cause of traffic accidents and the depopulation of Serenity, Colorado, and the plague which first drove animals out of forests in Minnesota and Maine and Georgia and Oregon, and then caused them to die in fighting convulsions.
Professor Warren had taken on a large assignment in essaying to save at least some few lives by convincing a country doctor that there were Gizmos, and explaining their actions. But there was a bald-headed man whose life Lane had saved once, and she was averse to having him go back and risk his life again when he could so easily be protected. And there were other lives which might be saved, too.
So she did not come out of the doctor’s office immediately. Lane and Carol waited for her, while the sunset colors reached their greatest intensity, and faded, and there was night. Somehow, they were acutely aware of the presence of Burke in the back of the car; his cigar was not fragrant, and from time to time he stirred unhappily.
But for him, the young night might have seemed enchanted. The only light was from the stars and the bright rectangles of windows in the doctor’s home. Glimmers from other houses of the village were widely separated and indistinct.
Somehow they were not impatient to go on. They talked very quietly. Neither of them could have told how it happened, but they were closer together than they’d been on the move. And of course they said nothing that Burke could not hear. He heard everything. Yet once, without any reference to Burke or his doings preceding it, Lane said angrily under his breath: “Damn Burke!”
In the obscurity of the unlighted car Carol smiled at him. Her fingers, now intertwined with his, tightened just a little.
Eventually the doctor’s office door opened wide, pouring lamplight out into the darkness, and Professor Warren emerged, seeming very weary. She came to the car and got in.
“You can go on, Dick,” she said drearily. “I convinced the doctor. He had a dozen frantic calls while I was in there—it seems as if I talked for ages—and he gave good advice to his patients about Gizmos. I couldn’t have bettered it, knowing what I know. It’ll do some good. I meant for him to check my results, but he believed me. He’s actually read some of my published papers. Quite a biologist. So he called the editor of a Roanoke paper whom he knows personally. He told the man who I was, and that what I said was true.”
Lane started the motor and drove out on the highway, heading north. He’d been on the go for something over thirty-six hours, without relaxation. There was a place called Monterey which would be a good stopping place for tonight. He estimated the distance. Perhaps an hour. Possibly more.
“What about the newspaper?” he asked the professor.
“I was interviewed,” said Professor Warren bitterly. “On the doctor’s telephone. Quite a clever young reporter! He got all my facts straight, but didn’t believe one, and then he asked to talk to the doctor again, and the doctor swore at him and said the story of a patient of his bore out what I said, and his experience of today convinced him I was right—about car wrecks, anyhow. The traffic deaths for today are over a thousand, Dick, and the total’s not nearly in yet! The reporter got the editor on the wire to the doctor again. My story’s preposterous. That it happens to be true doesn’t matter. It will be printed in tonight’s and tomorrow’s papers. The wire services will pick up some sort of garbled version of it. It will be printed as a freak. But, Dick—”
“What?” asked Lane. But he could almost guess.
“The headline,” said the professor bitterly, “will be, Spooks At War With Humans, Says Scientist.” Then she said more bitterly still: “I wish I could resign from the human race!”
But it was an entirely rational, scientific attitude to take, at that. The newspaper couldn’t be blamed.
Tonight, though, a new sort of evidence appeared to make it rational to look at Gizmos differently. The new evidence was indisputable. With what Lane and Professor Warren and Carol had to say, it probably determined the outcome of the war.
Chapter 10
The confusion in human affairs reached a new high during the night. Hot Springs, Va., was not the only town to shut its figurative gates. It did react early, because Hot Springs is a resort catering to visitors who arc heavy spenders. By quarantining the outer world, Hot Springs became apparently a safe place for them to do their spending. So long as that state of affairs lasted, everybody would be happy. But other communities shut themselves off from the world with the same firm resolution.
Some were mere villages. Most were relatively small towns. Cities could not barricade themselves against infection without starving. So municipal councils of sizable places met and disputed at length. They tried to compromise between the presumed need to keep out infection and the certain need to bring in food. Some of the compromises were peculiar.
&
nbsp; Albany, New York, adopted emergency regulations which made it an offense for anybody to open a store or leave his own home. Reno, Nevada, passed a municipal ordinance which imposed splendid sanitary precautions on all its permanent residents, but excused all visitors from any quarantine measures whatsoever. Tucson, Arizona, established a three-man board with authority to do whatever was necessary to protect the public health. Athens, Georgia, forbade groups of more than three, except for the purpose of public worship.
On the other hand, the national government sanely put all laboratories manufacturing biologicals on twenty-four-hour standby readiness, so that they could begin to turn out immunizing shots as soon as the “virus” causing the trouble should be identified. Meanwhile it sent teams of investigators to beard the plague in its lair, so to speak, and at the risk of their lives gather specimens for examination. A good many of those investigators died. It is probable that some of them guessed at the actual nature of the death-causing agent before they died of suffocation. It is also rather likely that few of them believed it.
But one indisputable set of observations was made in Chicago, at the airports and the weather bureau and nearby air force radar stations. They were painstaking, official observations of arbitrary, unreasonable, preposterous facts that could not be explained. They were revealing, but it wasn’t possible to conclude anything from them for lack of the information that Lane and the professor and Carol were desperately trying to convey.
The first official observation was probably made at the main Chicago airport, some time after midnight. The field lights glared beneath a cloudless night sky. The curious shapes of radar scanners moved restlessly above their appropriate buildings. There was a distant droning in the air. A winking, alternately red-and-white light appeared against the heavens and drifted among the stars. The buildings of the airport were starkly lighted, with extraordinarily deep shadows where they were in darkness. Windows glowed. A visual beacon rotated sedately, sending its beam into the night. Headlights moved along the airport highways.
Off in the darkness twin landing lights appeared. Something which roared loudly came slanting downward behind those yellow, glaring eyes. When it touched ground the field lights showed a gigantic aluminum cigar with stubby wings. It roared and slowed, and then turned on the ground and came rolling clumsily toward the terminal.
Everything was normal everywhere. The sky-glare from the city was very bright above the horizon. Lamps glowed like earthbound stars along the roads. There was nothing unusual to see or hear—except on the radar screens.
Somebody looked at one of them, and stared blankly, and called other men, and they gaped at the screen and someone plunged to a telephone and frantically dialed the number of Civilian Air Defense. An instant later someone was calling the air force station, and a man went running down a corridor to tell what he’d seen in the dispatcher’s office. There was incredulity, dismay, bewilderment and apprehension everywhere. There were also outbursts of frantic fury. The radar screen reported a state of things which seemed either impossible or a realization of that emergency the Distant Early Warning radar system had been built to give warning of.
Radar said that something was moving toward Chicago, flying upwind across Lake Michigan. According to the radar, it was impossibly large and it moved with unlikely deliberation. Its speed was roughly thirty miles an hour. It had a shape—a bulbous head and a trailing, tenuous tail which frayed away to nothingness and reappeared without any discoverable organization in its parts. On the screens it actually looked like nothing on earth, but it would have been very like a crawling slug leaving bits of slime behind it which gathered together and followed while changing form and density. But it was flying—it was in mid-air. By its trailing tail it seemed to have moved over the lake from the most thinly inhabited parts of Wisconsin. But it headed upwind for Chicago.
Telephones hummed; short-waves flickered through darkness. A voice said authoritatively that it was a Gizmo, meaning a radar blip with no known cause except a belief that it was an area of extra-high ionization in the air. But it was the great-grandfather of all Gizmos. Its bulbous head was a good two miles in diameter, flattened to rise no higher than four thousand feet, and descending no lower than two. Its tail was ten—twenty—thirty miles in length, depending on the tenuity at which one ceased to measure it. It moved on a specific course. It would presently arrive at Chicago unless it sheered off. And there was nothing in the heavens or on earth or in the sea which should produce such an image on a radar-screen.
So much was undeniable from the beginning. And this was no observation by a mere human, who might delude himself. This was a report from complex electronic devices. It was images formed on phosphors coated on radar screen tubes, excited by accelerated electrons whose pattern of impact was governed by echoes from the original of the image. Phosphors do not imagine. Electrons are not affected by panic. As a radar image it was a faithful report—in its own terms, without interpretation—of something which actually was.
Not only airport radars revealed it; at air force installations the image appeared. The weather bureau cloud-pattern radar showed it, from a different angle and in different perspective, but absolutely the same thing. And nothing like it could exist. A bomber fleet would appear as specks; this was like a cloud or a solid object of preposterous size—yet it could not be solid. It was too big. It could not be a cloud because it had movement of its own. It did not float with the wind. Its motion was affected by the wind, but was still its own.
Pilots went running to their planes. There were thunderous roarings down runways and planes lifted and snarled away into the night. And the radar report was not one to call for a mere investigatory scramble. There was an emergency alert at all fields within striking distance. Half the available striking force of nearby airfields went aloft and toward the deliberately moving incredibly huge source of the alarming radar reflections.
They found it, and they found nothing. Their own radars pinpointed its borders. They fired rockets into it. Ultimately they plunged into it, backwards and forwards and sidewise. There was no nucleus, no solid object, no perceptible thing to cause the phenomenon. Some pilots expressed the opinion that when in the strange reflecting object their jet motors operated a little differently; some thought better, some thought worse. Some pilots returned to their bases to be replaced by others with full fuel tanks. The radar-perceived object was too huge to be affected by planes flying through it. It moved on toward Chicago. Once a pilot reported that the jet flame of other planes than his own seemed to be longer than usual. But he was not sure of that, either. It is not likely that the observation was accurate. Gizmos flying in swarms needed space between individuals, just as birds in a flock need it. Radar would not pick up millions of small things separately, but report the mass. This night, radar did.
And at twenty past two o’clock in the morning, the Gizmo swarm reached Chicago. Sirens throughout the city had roused the citizens. Radio and television stations which had gone off the air went back on to give due notice of the coming of the inexplicable thing, with encouraging statements that nothing was actually expected to happen, but with warnings that traffic jams must be avoided. Citizens of Chicago were told to stay home. They would be told everything that happened; they would have the best advice on measures to be taken for their own protection, if protection was needed.
The Gizmo swarm descended upon the stockyards.
Even roaring jet planes, circling desperately in the invisible cloud, had their thunder drowned out by the noise from the penned beasts when the Gizmos arrived. Confined in pens, the doomed cattle bellowed as whinings descended upon them. Their composite cry of despair carried all over the city. There was no one in Chicago, wakened by sirens and terrified by broadcast warnings, who did not hear it. A watchman in the stockyards used the telephone in a glass-enclosed booth from which he viewed the cattle pens. He told of whinings that rose to a shrill keening. He babbled of the beasts below him fighting madly, climbing upon
each other, flinging their horns about, uttering cries no creature had ever uttered.
Suddenly his voice broke off and there were sounds of things being smashed. The line went dead.
When morning came the stockyards were filled with murdered animals. Cattle, sheep—the sheep had fought terribly—and swine were all dead. A few human beings died with them, but less than twenty—guards and watchmen and the like. It is on record, however, that there were workmen making repairs on the inside of a cold-storage room, in one of the larger packing houses. They worked comfortably through the whole episode, not having heard the sirens or the broadcasts nor even the ghastly outcry of the dying animals. When their work was finished they came out to an astonishing stillness. Day was breaking. They looked upon acres of massacred hoofed animals. They met masked police and firemen and doctors from the hospitals, gingerly examining the scene.
This produced the greatest series of separate insanities in the history of human reactions. It was past all doubt that something existed which nobody had guessed at—invisible, lethal and purposeful. There was a body of vociferous persons who demanded that war be immediately declared upon Russia, because the Russians must have done it. There was a smaller, louder group which in a strangely exultant fashion insisted that flying saucers were now proven, that the cattle in Chicago had been killed by invaders from space, and that the air force pilots who denied seeing flying saucers on the way to Chicago should be court-martialed. Of course less indignant but firmly convinced individuals maintained that the cattle had been killed by spores of a disease which were carried upon a wind current. The fact that the radar cloud moved against the wind did not shake their conviction. They considered that the observations of the wind and its velocity must have been wrong.
War with the Gizmos Page 13