The cop said harassedly: “It’s the worst day I ever heard of! There’ve been six bad ones in this county! Worse still, deeper in the mountains. It’s as if everybody driving is drunk!”
The professor put her head out of a back window. “Anybody killed yonder?”
The cop spread out his hands. “Everybody,” he said. Then he added, “And somebody came by and got out of his car to try to help. And he had a heart attack and died, too.”
Lane looked wryly at the professor. Then he shrugged.
“Look!” he said curtly. “We were in Murfree this morning when a funny thing happened. A man dropped down on the street, strangling. It looked like a heart attack, but it wasn’t. Somebody rushed over and waved a burning cigarette lighter before his face. Instantly the choking man could breathe. While that was happening, three or four other people began to choke. The man, whoever it was, cured them the same way. He said that any time such a thing happened, flames would stop the choking, and it did, in Murfree. Something strange is causing what looks like heart attacks. Flames near your face stop them. Try it. The man said nobody ever gets an attack like that if he’s smoking, either. He said to pass the word along.”
The state cop looked unbelieving, but he nodded. Lane gunned the motor. When he was headed back down the road along which he had come, the professor said bitterly: “He didn’t believe a word! And I’m guessing at something more ridiculous still!”
Lane said, “Burke, it looks like you read it wrong. The Gizmos aren’t attacking cities. Not yet. They’re wrecking trucks and cars, and killing people who get out to help.”
Burke’s expression was at once scared and triumphant.
“They’re smashing communications,” he said, “just as I told you. They’ll block all the roads with wrecks so the people in the cities can’t take to their cars. They’ll have to stay right where they’re helpless.”
Lane nodded gravely, but he didn’t believe it. In some ways the Gizmos acted with remarkable intelligence. To round up small animals like rabbits, for example, and kill them only when a considerable number were gathered in a small place, was intelligent behavior. It brought a large store of food to a small area, where many gas-creatures could feed to repletion. More, the area swept clean of game would not remain empty. Other animals would move in, to be rounded up and slaughtered in their turn. Lane began to entertain a suspicion that the Gizmos’ touches upon the three of them outside the trailer might not have been deliberate study. It could have been merely an attempt to round them up, according to Gizmo custom.
But any way you looked at it, such practices were intelligent in their own frame of reference. If Gizmos were free to choose less effective stratagems for their purposes, then to choose the best was intellect, and men had rivals—or superiors—in the Gizmo race. But if Gizmos knew these devices only by instinct, they could not act otherwise.
But in any case there is a vast difference between a beast and a man, and Lane had a stubborn streak. He did not want to admit that anything not human could be his equal as a human. The appalling thing about a ghost or devil, after all, is revolt against the notion that something which is not a man can think. So Lane bogged down on Burke’s basic assumption that Gizmos were thinking beings.
“I tell you, Mr. Lane,” said Burke, with profound gravity and shining eyes, “we better make some better plans than you’ve got! You don’t want to go to New Jersey! Pennsylvania’s the place for us! Find us a little town with some coal mines we can prepare for the women and children to stay safe in, and you and I can teach the men how to fight Gizmos. We can hold out forever!”
Lane grunted. “I believe it’s military theory that a strong offensive is the best defense. If you want to go to Pennsylvania, I’ll find an airport or a railroad station and we’ll say good-by.”
Burke squirmed. “But I need you to help train the men to fight Gizmos! And I need Professor Warren and Miss Carol, too! You got to help me train the folks to stay alive through what’s coming! You and me and the ladies can fix up a town so it can defend itself!”
Lane felt amusement. To Burke, the most dramatic and therefore the most fascinating thing imaginable would be a small town filled with embattled heroes, defying a continent of Gizmos, imagining himself as the leader of the valiant fighting men; Burke was fascinated by such superb drama. He would try ineptly to realize it without ever suspecting that anything could be more important.
“I’m afraid,” said Lane with polite regret, “that we can’t join you. We have the answers to some questions nobody is ready to ask yet. We have to carry on until somebody is desperate enough to accept what we want to give them.”
“But-”
“Stay with us,” said Lane, “and we’ll give you all the information we have and get. But we’ll leave you whenever you say.”
Near Tacoma, Washington, a diesel trailer-truck with a total weight of thirty-odd tons was passed by another truck going in the opposite direction. The driver of the thirty-ton truck was madly fighting nothingness in his cab, ignoring the wheel. The other truck barely got by him before the undirected thirty-tonner crashed across a sidewalk and through a plank fence and hurtled into an excavation for the foundation of a building. No one was hurt—not even the driver. At least, there was not a scratch on him. But he was dead.
Outside of Detroit, a convoy of fourteen new cars, each with its own driver, moved sedately along. The driver of the lead car in the convoy died, and his car went off the road. Ten of the thirteen other drivers lost control of their slowly-moving cars, too. They crashed. At so conservative a speed, none of the cars was badly damaged, but all the drivers perished seemingly from heart attacks or shock at sight of their dead friends.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a freak windstorm was credited with a dust heap across a heavily traveled road, in which cars could be seen with their tops barely breaking the surface. The cars were empty of humans, who had struggled out of the windows when the cars stopped. But none of them escaped. They were found in the dust pile, suffocated.
An inter-city bus pulled into its terminal in Atlanta, Georgia, with a load of hysterical living passengers and three apparently dead men in the back. The three had collapsed, one after another, following a stop by the bus driver to survey a three-car wreck. Passengers had opened windows to look out. Within minutes, one passenger flailed his arms wildly, his face grew purple, and he fell, unconscious. Other passengers tried to be helpful, but it was evident a doctor was needed. The bus driver pushed his vehicle to its topmost speed, to get his stricken passenger to medical care. But before he reached help, two other passengers went into comas after passing through the same symptoms. The rest of the bus occupants were nearly out of control when the bus reached its terminal, where doctors were available.
By midday the reported number of traffic deaths in the United States was put at six hundred, which was par for a long holiday weekend, but not for a midweek forenoon. It was considered very probable that the tally was far from complete. When Lane drove into Clifton Forge for the second time and stopped the car at a restaurant, there was a considerable amount of speculation on the increasing traffic accidents on the radio news broadcasts.
Lane listened grimly, at the restaurant table. There was a phone booth in the restaurant, and while the others ordered their meals, he called again to New Jersey, to the Diebert Pharmaceutical Company, Inc. His friend, the research director, was not available.
“I want to leave a message,” said Lane. “This is important. Write it down word for word, please. This is the message. ‘No excess single-car accidents happened while the driver was smoking.’ It’s from Dick Lane. Can you read it back?” He listened. “Right. It’s important!”