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!”
“Burke?” said Lane sharply. “You okay?”
Carol swung the torch about. She used it, stabbing emptiness before Burke’s contorted, fear-crazed face. His breath stopped. There was a flicker of light, then, and he collapsed into shuddering limpness.
“That,” said Lane, “is how people in cars on the highway get killed—not in hollows, but anywhere. It disposes of the idea that Gizmos are intelligent and purposeful, but it doesn’t make things look any brighter.”
It didn’t. It only made them more understandable. Now that Gizmos had acquired the instinct to hunt instead of scavenging only, their pattern of action was clear. They were social creatures in the sense that they moved and fed in groups or flocks. As is usual among all social creatures, at any moment there were individuals separated from their fellows, and they would commit individual atrocities. Some, on the other hand, would be surfeited, not interested in hunting. But they all would tend to hunt by night and feed by day. In their native forests they drifted in grisly, faintly whining masses, flowing invisibly between the trees and through the underbrush. In a sense they grazed, in that they sought their subsistence on a broad, deep front, on which they murdered every bird, every animal, every insect. When they found running animals in any number, it was their custom to round them up into terrified groups whose frenzy made them mutually prevent each other’s escape. Then the Gizmos killed them.
It was an admirable device for food gathering. Lane pictured the over-all situation as one in which such masses of invisible horrors flowed slowly and terribly everywhere. They would be attracted from many miles by the scent of the stockyards. They would go blindly to that scent of prey. They had attacked this car because it had disturbed them, but, mindless as they now appeared to be, they killed human beings. They were capable of rage. They furiously attacked any place where one of them was held captive. They acted as if they were capable of enormous vindictiveness.