Lane did not answer. The professor was already in the car. He held the door for Carol, who urged the Monster to climb in. She had practically to lift him. Burke started the motor, and the car moved off.
“They’ll figure,” Burke said zestfully, “that we’ll head back to get to a hard surface road. I’m goin’ to fool ’em. No runnin’ into an ambush for me! Those critters are smart!” He added: “I bet they’re Martians! They could’ve landed a long while ago and been building up their invasion army and studyin’ us, and now they’re ready to take over. But they don’t know us humans!”
The professor said querulously: “Dick, you heard news on the telephone. What was it?”
Lane ground his teeth. He had heard the sort of information which would be sent first to laboratories turning out biologicals. It was news of an outbreak of the plague now believed in, duly credited first to lower animals, and now to men. Lane had heard the official report on an outbreak of sudden death in the village of Serenity, Colorado. And he knew that village.
Some three months back he’d been on the West Coast in his hunt for the uncanny cause of deaths among wild creatures. He’d stopped overnight in the tiny village of Serenity because there’d been several reports of inexplicable forest tragedies nearby. The village nestled in a valley whose floor was higher than the highest tips of the Virginia mountains, and the peaks about it were crowned with eternal snow. Lane remembered it distinctly. Some few miles from the houses, there’d been a grizzly bear and her two cubs found dead in a half-acre of crushed underbrush and toppled small trees. Lane had gone over the battlefield very painstakingly with a Colorado game commission man. They’d found no solution to the death of the bear.
Later, they’d dined in the village on mountain trout and listened to local opinions about that killing and other improbable occurrences the inhabitants of Serenity could report. Lane and the game commission man left the village next morning without even a tentative idea of the cause of any of the occurrences, including the death of the grizzly.
Now, Lane interpreted the news he’d heard in pictures of intolerable detail. He remembered the village: about a hundred houses and three stores. He could see it in his mind’s eye, nestling among the mountains. He could envision it as of the night just past: lights shining in the houses, stars and a slanting moon overhead. There was that tranquil medley of night noises which to all men is assurance of peace and security and calm.
The lights in the houses had almost all winked out when the first disturbance came. At eleven o’clock Mountain Time there were sudden sounds outside the houses. Pet cats fought and spat and clawed. Dogs barked frenziedly, and snarled and yelped as if in terror. There was an extraordinary clamor, quite enough to wake all the inhabitants of the houses.
Lights came on. People went outside with lanterns and flashlights to see what caused the uproar. But the sound grew less as lights began to flicker on, and as moving lanterns shone outdoors. By the time all the village was awake and looking for the cause of alarm among their pets, there was no noise. There was only the sound of human voices calling to dogs and cats, and asking fretful questions of other human voices.
Then someone found his dog. It was dead—unwounded, but with bared teeth and glazed eyes. Someone else found his. Most people did not discover their pets, but all who found a dog or cat found it dead. Every domestic pet left outdoors had died—unnaturally. Nobody thought of the months-past similar death of a grizzly and her cubs.
There was angry discussion across property lines in the village of Serenity. It looked like poison; the few owners who identified their own animals leaped to that conclusion immediately. The inhabitants of Serenity raged at the unknown person responsible for such happenings. But it was near the middle of the night. Citizens growled furiously over the carelessness of somebody who’d left poison about, or the unthinkable villainy of anybody who’d distributed poison to pet animals. Angrily, they went back to bed. They fumed as they went to sleep.
These things were known because a rural mail-carrier left the village at a quarter to midnight, himself growling over the loss of a good dog. He drove through the darkness over mountain trails to a mail distribution center for the semiweekly mail. By going at such an hour, he could be back with it near sunrise and be able to join two friends on a fishing trip into the wilds. He didn’t make it.
Lane saw the later event, in his mind’s eye, as clearly as if he’d been present. Much later in the night, when the village slept again, there were whinings in the air about the houses of Serenity. There were then no lights, so no lights wavered as if units of heated gases passed before them. Stars, though, did shift slightly in their places as faint, shrill whinings moved among the houses. These whinings descended chimneys, and entered open windows, and penetrated screens—as a smoke ring can pass through a screen without destruction—and hovered invisibly in the darkness inside the village homes. Then there was silence, as if by agreement all must wait until an appointed instant.
That instant came. Abruptly, noises rose everywhere. There were shouts among the houses. There were gaspings. Windows smashed here and there as if blindly fighting human beings tried to get the air they were denied by smashing windows. The noise was not at great as when the pets of the village died. It did not even last as long. Presently there was absolute silence once more.
But presently there was a glimmer of light inside one of the houses. A tiny night-light had been overturned. After a while there were flames. They rose, and in time they licked through a roof and leaped and roared in the silent human settlement.
But nobody stirred anywhere, nor called to ask what was the matter. That single house burned to the ground, there among the high mountains, and nobody moved in any of the other silent buildings.
The rural mail carrier found out what had happened when he came back shortly after sunrise.
And Dick Lane, riding in the mountains of western Virginia, swallowed hard as he pictured the reality of what he had been told on the telephone. Hatred filled him, as well as indignation. He would have felt anger if he heard of fish caught wantonly and flung ashore to be left to rot. That would have seemed unconscionable. But the village of Serenity had been destroyed so that men and women and children would serve the Gizmos in that revolting fashion. And Lane, two thousand miles from Serenity, Colorado, trembled with disgust and horror.
Carol looked anxiously at his face.
“Dick—is there something else you’re worried about?”
He shook his head, struggling to bring his hatred under control. Presently he heard Professor Warren explaining just what had been found out. Burke asked surprisingly shrewd questions which had a peculiar slant to them. Burke was a leathery-faced individual with incongruously bright blue eyes. He nodded, as Professor Warren explained.
“First they tried to kill Mr. Lane,” he said with something close to zest, “and when he fooled ’em with dead leaves they followed him. They hadn’t had anybody beat ’em before. And they knew he knew. You see what I’m drivin’ at?”
“No,” said the professor.
“Suppose they’re Martians,” said Burke, with enthusiasm. “Or that they come from Jupiter, or Venus, or somewhere. Suppose they landed in a forest. What’d we do if we landed on Mars or Jupiter and found there was forests with animals in ’em.”