She relapsed into silence. Carol said quietly: “If they can’t pass through sheeting…”
Outside the trailer the Gizmos waited, ghostly in their tenuousness. They were very frail, in a way. A thousand of them, weighed in air, would hardly move the pointer of a scale. But they were cunning and very deadly. They were also in very many places where their existence was unsuspected.
In New York, for example, there was a pigeon fancier with a small building for nests and a screened exercise pen for his flock of two hundred homing pigeons. Tonight, as Lane and Carol consulted together in western Virginia, there was a small tumult on the roof of the New York apartment house where the pigeon fancier lived. The roof, of course, was deserted at this hour. Nobody noticed the disturbance. It began with very faint whining sounds which the traffic noises of the city drowned out. Presently there were scufflings and frantic flappings. A pigeon fought madly against suffocation. It fluttered desperately against the screen of the enclosure. Presently it was still. A little later another pigeon fought as crazily in the same confined space. The whining sounds grew louder. Other unseeable horrors—Gizmos—floated through the air toward the spot where the struggles went on. They drifted over the rooftops and above the streets which, like canyons, divided the city. They came from nearby parks and shrubbery-filled squares. They clustered about the pen in which pigeons fluttered helplessly and died. Undoubtedly the Gizmos took a certain pleasure in their murders. Dogs enjoy hunting; so do men. But Gizmos had to kill for a relatively long time before they could feed on what they killed. Therefore they secured a delectable pleasure out of the act of murder, which only later would provide them with food. It was a necessary provision of their nature.
There were two hundred pigeons in this particular enclosure. Nobody heard what took place there. Nobody came to investigate. After a certain interval there was a carpet of strangled birds on the floor of the exercise pen. Feathers from their wings, beaten off in their struggles, lay all about. But there was no longer any motion on the rooftop except that whining things which could not be seen drifted away again through the darkness above the buildings and the brightly lighted streets…
Within minutes of the finish of the pigeon massacre, a man turned into his own driveway in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. There was much shrubbery on the lawn, and the driveway was bordered by many bushes. The smell of growing things and honeysuckle was in the still air.
There was a movement at the end of the drive. The man’s small white dog had recognized the sound of his master’s car. He came joyously to meet the man. He was clearly visible in the headlights as he trotted, tail wagging, to meet the car. Halfway down the drive, the dog stopped short. He faced the thick brushwood on one side. He bristled. As the car drew near, he snarled. The man braked and opened the car door. Snarling over his shoulder, the dog jumped in. He hopped up on the front seat beside the man. Whining anxiously, he licked his face and then growled ferociously at something in the brushwood.
The man drove on. There were lights in his house. A lamp outside the door winked to brightness. His wife, also, had seen the coming car. As he drove into the garage she appeared in the doorway, smiling. Lights shone upon her, and on the steps, and on the smoothly cropped lawn nearby. It showed the vague shapes of blossoms on the nearer blooming shrubs. She waited for her husband as he and the dog moved toward her.
Then the man felt something like gossamer touch his face. He brushed it away. He heard a thin whine he attributed to a mosquito—and the dog leaped up upon him, snarling and barking and yelping all at once.
The man gasped. His wife cried out. The dog leaped and snapped furiously at the air before his master’s face. Then he turned from the man and made crazy rushes, snapping at empty air. Something seemed to be offering battle. It could not be seen. The dog screamed at it between his growlings. But he fought.
The man’s wife cried to him to come into the house: that the dog had gone mad. He did go into the house, but he looked out at the dog. He almost believed that it had something to fight—but not quite, because the lawn was lighted and there was absolutely nothing to be seen but the frantic, snapping dog.
Then the dog died…
Hundreds of miles from New York and from Tennessee, a young farmer drove his sweetheart homeward after a country dance. He had a reasonably new car whose motor purred satisfactorily. The highway ran near a patch of woodland. Behind this forest there was more and more; for thirty miles northward there was wilderness. But the road itself ran between fields of half-grown corn which stirred and rustled in the moonlight as the car purred on.
The man saw rabbits first, hopping on the road’s hard surface. One often sees a single rabbit when driving at night, but here were many. Then a woodchuck appeared in the headlight beams, waddling across the road. A hundred yards on there was a fox, which turned luminous eyes upon the car and hurried away into the corn. There were more rabbits, squirrels mixed in with them. He saw a second fox, paying no attention to its natural prey. He saw a doe, which the headlights bewildered so that it stood as if fascinated until the car had passed. He saw a skunk. Two fawns, shivering and afraid, fled ahead of the car along the highway. They disturbed a weasel before they rushed out of the light into the brush. There were a brown bear, and a buck deer, gazing about him with a hunted air. He snorted and vanished. He saw more rabbits, by hundreds, hopping across the Toad.
In a mile the speed of the car was reduced to a crawl, and the farmer and his sweetheart were in a state of purest bewilderment. Before them on the concrete—even beyond the headlight rays—there were what seemed to be thousands of shining jewels. They were the eyes of creatures who should have been deep in the woodland. They stared at the car’s lights and flowed across the highway. For nearly ten miles the young farmer and his sweetheart drove at a snail’s pace along this strangely crowded highway. It seemed at times as if the road were carpeted with the animals, large and small, which had lived in the forest to the north. They would have covered square miles if gathered into a single mass, but moving without plan as they did, sometimes half a mile of highway showed only a few of them, while other parts were black with moving, furry bodies.
The young farmer caught his breath as a consequence of this migration struck him. “They’ll eat up all the crops!” he said anxiously. “All these things feeding will be worse than locusts! They’ll eat up everything!” But somehow he could not bring himself to speed up the car and so diminish the number of wild creatures who migrated into the province of men.
This matter was, of course, one to which official attention would be given. An invasion of fields on which crops grew would not be dismissed as unimportant. But there were innumerable other matters which would be ignored: the deaths of cats in towns and cities; the finding of many dead rats upon city dumps, unwounded, yet stiff and cold with bared fangs; and there would be some disturbance over race horses found dead in their stalls…
Lane and Carol discussed possible weapons and possible protection against the Gizmos who definitely had not gone away from the trailer. Professor Warren slept a troubled sleep on a couch which opened into a double bed. There was no thought of relaxation in the ordinary sense. The trailer was beleaguered by things which could not be seen at all unless one knew where to look and understood the significance of a very slight wavering and wobbling of the background behind them.
Presently Lane spoke coldly of the grisly possibilities if there were enough of them, and if they were as cunning and as persistent as they seemed to be. The air in the trailer seemed to grow stale. He felt an angry uneasiness for Carol. He felt that there was something he had neglected which amounted to a near and present danger.