Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

The confusion might have been instructive, Lane considered sardonically, if it didn’t make for inconvenience to people on important business like himself and his party. They spent the night at the only motel in Monterey, with the Monster in the room occupied by Carol and the professor, and Burke snoring heavily between nightmares in the room with Lane. When morning came, it developed that there had been so many traffic accidents in Virginia that the governor of West Virginia had ordered the border between the two states closed to traffic. It was illegal, but it was enforced.

Lane abandoned Route Two-twenty and headed east for the Shenandoah Valley. He was stopped by a barrier and guards at Staunton, and navigated narrow country roads around it to be stopped again at Harrisonburg, where a trigger-happy guard put a bullet through the top of the car’s windshield. Burke fainted.

They made a tedious, time-consuming detour around Harrisonburg, and lost three hours trying to get up on the Skyline Drive, which did not pass through any towns and might give them a clear run for a reasonable distance. They didn’t make it. They plodded through more back-country lanes, instead. New Market was tranquil. There were dogs and children in plain sight, and people moved naturally about; there was no sign of anything inconsistent with a perfectly commonplace small town on a commonplace summer day. But Luray was blocked to traffic. Again they wandered interminably along trails with tire-tracks on them, but which had never seen a bulldozer. More than once they forded small brooks and followed meandering signs, only to arrive at a farmhouse beyond which that trail did not go. Then they had to backtrack and try another fork. They had been traveling fourteen exhausting hours when they found Strasburg. It was untouched by the alarm that filled so many other places. They slept there, but at four next morning they were on their way. The only news they heard was from the car radio, which pictured public confusion many times confounded. It developed now that Chicago had not been the only target of a radar-reflecting cloud—Gizmos. The Kansas City stockyards were a shambles. Shipping pens in Texas had been visited by whinings heard in the midst of the bellowing of maddened steers. In the corn belt, cattle fattening for market died in the center of patches of torn-up ground. The St. Louis hog market posed a problem at once in the disposal of dead swine and the defense of the city’s population, should the plague return.

They’d planned to head for Winchester and so to Washington. Professor Warren’s professional reputation was sound. She should have only to explain and offer to demonstrate her discoveries, and everything would be taken care of. But Lane still held his own contact in reserve.

As they pulled out of the sleeping town of Strasburg at four o’clock in the morning, however, an all-night radio reported that the Rock Creek Park Zoo, in Washington, had been visited by a radar-reflecting cloud which came upwind along the Potomac and wiped out the entire display of animals. There were also no pets left in an entire quarter of Washington. The news broadcast said that inhabitants of the city were already streaming out on every highway. They seemed to be especially worried by the fact that planes had tried to break up the cloud with explosives before it reached Washington, and had failed. Bridges and highways were already filled with traffic. Measures were being taken to check the exodus.

When the news report ended, Lane said grimly: “That changes our plans. We don’t go into Washington.”

“But,” said the professor, “I need to go to Washington, Dick. Let me have half an hour’s talk with a competent biologist in the Department of Agriculture and I guarantee—”

“You didn’t hear why Dick doesn’t want to go into Washington,” Carol said.

“There’ll be martial law by daybreak,” Lane said dryly. “They’ll call it a Civil Defense emergency. But they’re going to have to stop people running out of the city. Probably all cities.”

“Day before yesterday,” said Lane, “there were well over a thousand victims of traffic accidents which we know were caused by Gizmos. Yesterday was certainly no better. Did you hear any reference to traffic accidents in that broadcast?”

“No.” The professor was appalled. “Do you think it was so bad they’re censoring the news? They’re afraid to let people leave the cities, and afraid to tell them why?”

“I think,” Lane told her, “that I don’t envy anybody in authority the decisions he has to make. It’s going to occur—it’s already occurred to a lot of people that the radar-reflecting clouds which kill beasts in stockyards and zoos can also kill human beings. People have been killed in cities, so they’ll want to get out. If Gizmos arc killing people on the highways, they should be made to stay at home, but if you tell them the reason, they’ll feel that they’re doomed either way.”

Carol said, “Aunt Ann might call in and have someone come out to meet her and get her information and see what proof we can find.”

Professor Warren said, fuming, “I didn’t think! Of course I can’t take Carol into Washington if the people there are going crazy with fear!”

Lane said carefully, “Not all of them will react that way. There’s a part of the population which will react in an acceptable way to a situation which distresses them. Unfortunately, some of them may have to make decisions and they’ll want to be calm when they make them.”

The car rumbled on for a moment. Carol said unhappily: “Tranquilizers?”

“Exactly,” said Lane. “Precisely like the old tales of seamen breaking into the whisky stores in time of shipwreck. Very helpful, at a time when brains are needed!”

He stopped short. This was half-past four in the morning. There were hours yet to sunrise. The headlight beams bored on ahead. This was Route Eleven, not notable for heavy traffic. They were perhaps ten miles out of Strasburg, and they had not yet met more than two pairs of headlights all the way. Here the highway dipped down, to rise again two hundred yards farther on, a brook and a bridge across it at the bottom of the depression. It was a commonplace spot on an ordinary highway; this was very early morning and a predawn chill was everywhere. There was actually a vague mistiness down in the hollow.

But Lane noticed that the mistiness was not still. It writhed and stirred in a boiling motion. His eyes glanced sharply at the rising part of the road beyond. In the headlight rays it was blurred and wavery. The headlight beams from the car passed through something that distorted the light, like small columns of heated gas. They were doubly disturbed when reflected back.

“Torches!” snapped Lane.

He pressed down on the accelerator, and the car went downhill, gathering speed. It went through the beginning of the mist and the fuzziness. Instantly angry whinings sounded all about. But the car gathered speed on the level bottom place, while the whinings grew shriller and more angry. But sparks flashed inside the car from a brazing torch.

Carol waved it and something flickered into blue flame. There was a stench, and the whinings grew to a keening howl. Something clapped itself over Lane’s nose and lips. He held his breath and drove on furiously, and the car breasted the rise beyond the hollow and roared away on the level highway. Its speed went up and up. It was fifty miles an hour when Carol speared the place before his face, and something screamed and flared.

“Thanks,” said Lane, gasping, as wind whipped away the reek of carrion. “They may follow for a little way, but we’re all right. See how things are in the back.”

The professor wailed: “I could have caught another specimen! But I didn’t have a pillowcase ready!”