“Not proven,” he said wryly, “but I’d bet that they’re either here or they have been. And it ought to take a lot of Gizmos to kill all the things that chirp and twitter.”
Professor Warren stared at him as if appalled at the idea. And it was a startling thing, once one considered it. Any insect-eating bird captures bugs by hundreds or thousands every day, and there is no acre of open ground without its numerous feathered foragers. Woodlands shelter many more. Swifts and swallows carry on their hunting until late in the twilight, and bats carry on through the dark. It’s hard to realize the number of insects devoured in one acre in one day, and yet the number of insects is not diminished. To depopulate a field of its insect inhabitants is incredible destruction. To destroy also its birds, its field mice, its rabbits, its moles…
“I didn’t realize, Dick,” said the professor querulously, “how many Gizmos there must have been to destroy even the gnats where we had our trailer. Those dust spheres must have had hundreds of thousands of Gizmos in them. Altogether there must be—it is inconceivable how many there must be! And any one of them can kill a human being. Dick, this is a serious business.”
“I’ve been suspecting it for some time,” said Lane dryly, “even if I don’t agree that they are Martians.”
Burke spoke with a sudden return to his former manner of complete confidence and zest.
“Yes, sir! Those Gizmos are Martians, or Jupiterians, or something from space. It stands to reason they don’t belong on Earth! And they’re smart as men. Maybe there was gas-creatures on Earth before they came, like there’d be meat-creatures in the woods on Jupiter or Mars if we went there. But these Gizmos come from off of Earth. They’re smart. They’ve got a civilization, they’ve got military tactics, they’ve got over-all strategy. They got a general plan for conquerin’ Earth, and it looks bad.”
“I’ll agree that it looks bad,” said Lane. “How bad I don’t know. But if they can appear in swarms everywhere, it certainly doesn’t look good!”
The car now moved in a generally northeast direction between lines of green-clad mountains. It had left the thunderstorm far behind. It went along a gravel-surfaced road between strong, tight fences with here and there a farmhouse. Several times they saw cattle alive. Once more Lane stopped the car and the motor, to listen. The sounds of the countryside were perfectly commonplace. Birds flew up from the top strands of the wire fences as the car came near.
“There are birds and bugs again around here,” said Lane.
“And Gizmos,” said Carol quietly.
She pointed. A living partridge flapped and flailed upon the ground. As they watched, it lay still. And Lane, coldly searching, saw grass beyond it quiver slightly, as if there were a bubble of heated gases above the dying bird. He started the motor again.
The death of that particular partridge was an extremely minor episode in the developing state of things. There had been other incidents which were equally indicative of something startlingly unusual.
In a backwoods settlement in Alabama, a colored farmer had secured an herb doctor to put an end to an epidemic among his chickens. Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury. At midnight of the night before, this herb doctor had burned a particularly offensive mess of feathers, roots, gums, dusts, and grisly oddments within the affected chicken house. As it burned, the herb doctor recited mysterious words learned by rote and without individual meaning. Actually they came from the Gulf of Guinea by way of some generations of thaumaturgists, and their original significance was bloodcurdling. A truly horrible reek came out of the musky chicken house. A completely offensive aroma stayed behind. The herb doctor came out of the structure and, coughing, said that thereafter the farmer’s chickens would be completely safe in their shelter.
And they were. The herb doctor had cast a spell to drive away the spirits, the demons, the invisible fiends who caused healthy chickens to be found dead under their roosts each morning. His spells and the fumigation left the living fowl stupefied where they roosted, but his professional assurance was well-founded. Those chickens were now safe against Gizmos. They and their dwelling stank of odors even Gizmos disliked. So the herb doctor had done an efficient and highly professional job of chasing the Gizmos.
There were other irrelevant happenings. There was a sufferer from asthma in Tarzana, California, who waked in the night with a familiar sensation of suffocation, his breath cut off. He felt the wild terror which suffocation produces, but he was more or less accustomed to it. If he heard a thin whining in his ears, he paid no attention. This was a very bad attack. But instead of futile beatings at the air before him, he groped beside his bed as his senses reeled. He had readied a tiny glass capsule placed upon a clean handkerchief. He crushed the capsule and thrust the handkerchief to his face. The pungent smell of amyl nitrate filled the air. Then he could breathe again. There was no gradual improvement in his breathing, as usually happened. One instant he was suffocating, the next instant he was breathing perfectly. The smell of amyl nitrate was objectionably strong. He lay back, wide awake but reassured. His ears rang and his heart pounded from his fright, but he was accustomed to attacks of asthma.
He did not hear a high-pitched whine rise in tone until it was an infinitesimal shriek. It did not occur to him that a Gizmo had shared the fumes of amyl nitrate with him; he had never heard of Gizmos. He probably did not even know that amyl nitrate in the least possible concentration will make an internal-combustion engine backfire itself to destruction. Certainly he did not reason that an entity of gas, with a gas metabolism, would react to the smell of amyl nitrate as a human would react to a bath in nitric acid.
The asthmatic man dozed off presently, very grateful that so severe an asthmatic attack had been so brief.
Such incidents were not numerous. It was typical of the over-all situation, however, that grim occurrences such as the fate of the village of Serenity and slaughterings of domestic animals, were as consistently misunderstood as affairs connected with herb doctors and attacks of “asthma.”
There had been migrations from the forests in Maine and Minnesota and Georgia and Oregon—that is, migrations that had been observed as they took place. Elsewhere, people in innumerable places had seen foxes slinking harriedly through fields of soy beans, and deer warily following each other in places where deer had not been seen in years. There can be no question but that many wild creatures fled from the forests to human-occupied land as if choosing a peril they knew—men—rather than invisible horrors which whined in the wilderness.
And at about the time that Lane drove away from a newly murdered partridge, some thirty miles or so from Murfree, in western Virginia, there was a considerable group of human beings in Minnesota surveying the area the refugee animals occupied.
The news of the exodus had traveled far, long before dawn. There were farmers whose fields had been uninvaded, and there were those whose crops were partly but not wholly ravaged, and some who had found bears in their barnyards that morning. They had come to where county agents were gathering to confer on the problem of what could be done. Valuable crops were endangered by rabbits and woods-mice and deer and groundhogs and hordes of every kind of herbivorous animal. There were fish and game officials, and representatives of the SPCA. There was even a Department of Agriculture man, roused in his hotel room and driven eighty miles to arrive at dawn. He faced a kind of emergency even the Department had never had dumped in its lap before. And of course there were reporters. Most of them were for local newspapers, but there were one or two press association men, come in hope of a news story.