He pointed. Carol drew in her breath, sharply. The professor looked, and tears of rage and frustration came into her eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Lane,” said Burke, with a complacent and yet uneasy satisfaction. “Everybody’s in plenty of danger. These here Martians or Jupiterians or whatever, are carryin’ out a first-class military plan! That thing on the mountainside is a corps of Gizmos, movin’ to get ready for G-day—Gizmo day. That’s going to be something, when it comes!”
Chapter 8
The Gizmos did not attack. On the morning Lane spotted a mass formation of them in motion down a mountain chain, radar throughout the United States reported an unprecedented number of slow-moving blips which did not represent aircraft. They were then explained as areas of extra-high ionization in the atmosphere. And this explanation was quite accurate so far as it went, but like a deplorable number of scientific explanations it did not go far enough. It described the proximate cause of an observed phenomenon and blandly stopped there. There was something more than a condition of ionization involved.
This morning, areas of ionization were numerous and many were extraordinarily large. For a time, there was some concern lest they interfere with regular radar operation. But the Gizmo masses moved at a maximum speed of a little over thirty miles an hour, plus or minus the pull of the wind where they were. A moment’s inspection could distinguish between such a blip on a radar screen and a spot made by a fast-moving plane.
But there were more than five hundred such blips on screens at one time, counting all radar stations. Nobody can guess how many separate groups were involved, though assuredly the total was high in the thousands. Certainly there were massings of Gizmos all over the nation; rather, there was distribution of masses of Gizmos everywhere. But there was still no association of such radar phenomena with outbreaks of plague among domestic and wild animals, the death of the village of Serenity, the slaughter of pets nearly everywhere, and such oddities as an unusual asthmatic attack experienced by a man in Tarzana, California.
The blips made no sort of sense, even when correlated with each other. Had they been spotted in strategic fashion—concentrated at key railroad junction cities, near industrial centers, even near the larger centers of human population—somebody would have suspected a military purpose. Invasion would have seemed credible, though Gizmos themselves were still unknown. But the massing of Gizmos at it appeared on radar screens, with a pattern changing frequently through the day, did not fit into any specific design, and so was not accorded any serious attention.
Near noon, Lane stopped at a country store and put through a call to the friend who headed the research department of a pharmaceutical house. He put it on record that if men did seek bacteriological specimens or move bulldozers to cover up the multitude of dead animals in Minnesota, some of them would fall victims to a supposed plague. He observed that some of those who wore respirators—biologists seeking tissue specimens—would be victims of the death they tried to interpret. But he prophesied that no one would be attacked by the plague if he held a lighted cigar or cigarette in his mouth.
It was a highly reasonable prophecy, but he did not dare say more. After all, less than twenty-four hours had passed since his own first contact with Gizmos, and the actual history of those hours was too fantastic to be believed.
After the phone call, Lane headed east. They traveled a graveled highway, from which the world looked utterly commonplace and comfortable. They saw birds fly up from the roadside, cattle grazing tranquilly on the rolling fields. There were buzzards soaring lazily and effortlessly against the blue.
He looked at Carol, beside him on the front seat, and she smiled at him without words. He looked in the back-view mirror and saw the professor leaning back in her corner, her eyes closed wearily. He saw that Burke’s lips were pursed together and his expression was one of meditation.
“Do you,” asked Lane of Carol, “do you really believe that all this is true?”
“I was just doubting it,” admitted Carol, “but your eyebrows are singed, and there’s a burned place on your shirt.” She smiled again, wryly.
“Mr. Burke thinks we may be lower animals, compared to Gizmos.”
Lane grimaced. “Burke intends to live out an imaginative novel of which he is to be the hero. Of course the hero of a novel never gets killed. I suspect Burke is casting himself as a sort of dragon slayer who’ll lead devoted, admiring followers to victory against the whole tribe of Gizmos.” He raised his voice: “Burke?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been thinking hard. What’s turned up in your mind?”
Burke said zestfully: “I don’t know where the Gizmos are goin’ to start, but I figure it’ll be all of a sudden. It’ll be a surprise attack, smotherin’ the cities with rollin’ masses of Gizmos that’ll sweep in and scatter and swarm into the houses, and folks won’t know what’s happening till they’re massacred.”
“You suggest,” asked Lane mildly, “that the human race will be wiped out?”
“Mighty near,” said Burke with vast confidence. “Mighty near! But there’ll be some that’ll live, and when the Gizmos come after ’em they’ll have machine guns shooting fire, and they’ll spray ’em with incendiary bombs and flame throwers.” He grinned. “They’ll give fireworks to the kids to kill Gizmos with! They’ll make out all right.”
Lane said to Caroclass="underline" “Fireworks aren’t a bad idea for emergencies. But we need something even better.”
“You don’t think—” Carol hesitated. “You don’t think it will be too bad?”
“It’s already too bad,” said Lane. “For even one human being to be killed by those beasts—for even one good hunting-dog to be killed to make carrion they’ll feed on is intolerable.”
The professor spoke, her eyes still closed. “The problem is to find their former place in an ecological system we never guessed at, and then find out what happened to it. Obviously, they are natives of Earth.”
“Dick thinks they’re the originals of pagan gods,” Carol said.
The professor opened her eyes. “It’s very likely. Remember, Carol, that the myths of Greece and Rome were cleaned up before they were taught you as a dainty cultural subject! The old pagan gods were just as foul as the Gizmos. They’re very likely their ancestors!”
The car rolled on. It was one of forty or fifty-odd million motor vehicles in the United States. This not being a weekend, the majority of them remained at home, but many trucks used the highways, singly or in pairs or in long strings of grumbling might. But where Lane drove there appeared ahead a long trailer-truck backing across the highway to make a turn toward them. Lane slowed. With much effort, the truck managed to make the turn with the aid of a road leading toward a farmhouse. The truck came rumbling back toward Lane. It passed him, the driver waving some cryptic warning.
The meaning of the signal became clear when, just beyond the truck’s turning place, there appeared a barrier in the road. There was a state police officer on guard, and he came to the car as Lane braked to a stop.
“The road’s closed,” he explained. “There’s a bad smashup down in the hollow yonder. A big trailer ran off the road, banged into trees, and blocked the way. Then another one ran into it. You’ll have to go back and take another road. Where are you headed?”
“North,” said Lane. “New Jersey.”
The officer shook his head.
“Sixty’s blocked too. Another big smashup. You’d better go back through Clifton Forge and take Two-twenty. You ought to do all right that way.”
“Thanks,” said Lane. He turned to back into the farm-read to make his turn as the truck had done. Then he culled, “Aren’t there more accidents than usual today?”