Carol started a little at her aunt’s action. She looked mutely at Lane. He shrugged.
“Murfree’s courthouse should be somewhere over yonder,” he said, nodding toward his left. “We’re probably still five or six miles away, though.”
“And my feet hurt!” complained the professor. “I—”
There was a noise in the distance. She stopped, looking avidly toward the source of the sound. It increased and was plainly the motor of an automobile traveling on this highway. It came into view. It was a battered, dark-green car five or six years old.
“We hitch a ride,” said the professor with authority. “I’ve got to get somebody down here with equipment to make a proper study of those monstrosities!”
She waved her arms. The car braked and stopped. The man who drove it regarded them with lively interest.
“Can you give us a lift?” asked Lane.
It would not be wise to start a conversation with a sane person by trying to explain the emergency behind the request.
“Where d’you want to go?” asked the man. “Hop in.”
“We want,” said the professor firmly, “to get to a telephone. A pay telephone, because we have to make some long-distance calls.”
She climbed into the car. There were many parcels in the car, and she rearranged them to make room for herself in the back seat. Carol looked mutely at Lane, indicating the firepot in her hand in which coals still smoldered. He glanced at the Monster; the dog was exhausted from past terror, but he did not seem frightened now.
“I guess it’s all right,” he said slowly. “I’ve still got the gasoline and my lighter. And this car will travel fairly fast.”
She dumped the coals, and he emptied his own. It did not occur to either—not even to the professor—to abandon the queer objects which had been such effective defenses against the Gizmos during the night. The Monster had to be lifted into the car, and then Lane and Carol climbed in. The driver watched them wisely. He shifted the gear lever and the motor roared. The car jolted into motion and its clamor grew less.
The driver said brightly, “You’ll be that professor that’s studying turkey-buzzards back that way. Right?”
“Right,” said the professor.
“And she’s your niece,” said the driver, “and he’s that fellow that writes pieces about hunting.” “Right,” said the professor.
“My name’s Burke,” said the driver. “Glad to meet you. You found out what killed those cows and partridges and foxes and coons and such?”
Lane didn’t answer, and the professor only grunted. She was beginning to realize that in bright sunshine, with birds and insects filling the air with sound, the idea of living creatures which were not flesh and blood, and which suffocated more normal things so that they might gorge on the odors of decay—in bright sunshine an average person might tend to be skeptical. But…
“I found out,” said Burke. “I’m not sure I believe it, but I found out. So I’m leavin’ these parts. Got my luggage right here with me. I’m goin’ some place else.”
“What did you find out?” asked Lane.
“Never mind!” said Burke. “Never mind that! You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”
He pressed the accelerator. The car picked up speed. It ran onward through the new morning with the hillsides echoing back its roaring. The highway swung right to encircle an out-jutting part of a mountainside, and ran over a narrow bridge spanning a brook all of five feet wide. It turned left again, and then Burke swung off the gravel road and went bumping and bouncing down a still narrower road with a bed of powdery dust. The dust rose in a reddish cloud behind the car. “Nearest telephone’s along this way,” said Burke.
“That’s a new road we were on. This fellow built a fillin’ station where he thought the new road would come, an’ then the highway folks didn’t build it there. He got fooled.”
Lane said in a low tone to Caroclass="underline" “We should be safe now. It’s unthinkable that Gizmos could travel really fast. Even if they trailed us from the forest, they’d have been left behind now.”
Carol nodded. But her features looked oddly pinched, as if she had a premonition she could not bring herself to mention.
The car swerved around the curving boundary of a cornfield, its trail of swirling dust conspicuous behind it. It swung in to a modern filling station which seemed to belong on a well-traveled road instead of a dusty dirt one. Burke braked on its concrete apron.
“Telephone here,” he reported. “Hi, Sam! I brought you some phone customers.”
The filling station proprietor came out, leisurely. A cat accompanied him. The professor got out of the car and nodded briskly. She could see the phone. She went inside, fumbling in the pockets of her breeches for coins. The Monster lay on the floor of the car, panting. The filling station operator said humorously:
“Seen any more ha’nts?”
Burke said primly: “Hell! I didn’t say I saw anything! Y’ can’t see ’em! They’ll move danglin’ strings, an’ they make noises, an’ they’ll make tracks in flour sprinkled over a buried dead chicken. But y’ can’t see ’em!”
Lane and Carol exchanged startled glances. Then Lane’s face went expressionless. He could see Professor Warren inside the plate-glass window of the filling station. She put coins into the instrument.
“When I see ’em,” said Sam, “I’ll think about believin’ in ’em.”
Professor Warren greeted someone on the telephone. She began to speak, crisply and with authority, into the instrument. She evidently spoke with great precision and with scientific terminology.
“They’ve been killin’ things,” said Burke sagely. “They’re what’s killed off the game people’ve been talkin’ about. They killed those cows in the courthouse a while back.”
Sam said humorously: “They ain’t killed me yet.”
“They’ll get to you,” said Burke firmly. “They’ve been leavin’ us humans alone—so far. I’m not stayin’ around till they start killin’ people. I’m gettin’ out.”
“Scared?” asked Sam incredulously. “Scared of something you can’t see?”
“Yep,” said Burke. “I’m scared of anything I can’t fight. And how’re you goin’ to fight somethin’ you can’t see?”
Inside the station, Professor Warren’s expression turned to one of shock, her face bewildered and crimsoning. Then she bellowed infuriatedly into the transmitter. A sound came through the plate glass. It was the professor’s voice, expressing a violently disparaging opinion of the person at the other end of the line. Then she stopped and jiggled the hook furiously. She slammed down the receiver and came out, raging.
“Idiot!” she barked. “Lunatic! Fool! Imbecile! He pretends to think I’m joking and says it’s bad taste to get him out of bed to listen to a joke! He hung up on me! He says he’s going to complain to the dean!”
She stamped her feet, ready to weep from pure frustration. But at this instant the Monster whimpered. Then he yelped. Then he screamed, and tried to burrow beneath one of the seats of the car. He scratched desperately to make a place to hide, while he howled ever more shrilly and horribly.
By instinct, Lane swept his eyes about as his hand went to the two-gallon gasoline can which so far he had not used at all. Carol gasped and pointed.
Back along the dirt road on which the car had come to this place, there was a cloudlike stirring of the air. Over the top of the growing corn they saw a great movement of dust. At first glance—but only at first—it looked as if another car were on the way here. But this dust cloud was larger than a car could raise, and it was not stirred up to float and then settle back again. This cloud moved as a unit, and it did not merely sweep along the highway. It rolled. It was a monstrous ball of airborne reddish powder which rolled swiftly and terribly onward, at the height of a six-story building. It was unnatural. It was artificial. It was organized. It was horribly, terribly purposeful.