The Metallic Muse (28 page)

Then he was completely enveloped, and he screamed with agony as a searing, excruciating pain encircled one knee and then the other. There were several hands fumbling about him, now, pulling shreds of Night Cloak from his struggling body. He raised both arms to protect his face and became aware for the first time of a vile odor. Then the thing flowed, slithered around his arms and found his face, and he lost consciousness.

He awoke gazing at the restful pale gray ceiling of a hospital.

Someone in the next bed chuckled. “Came around, did you? It’s about time.”

He turned. Sergeant Altman sat on the edge of the bed grinning broadly. Both of his wrists were bandaged; otherwise he seemed unhurt. “How do you feel?” he asked.

Walker felt the bandage that covered most of his face. “It hurts like the devil,” he said.

“Sure. You got a good stiff dose of it, too—around your knees and on your face. But the doc says you’ll be as good as new after some skin grafts, and you’re a hell of a lot better off than Lyle. It didn’t get your eyes.”

“What happened?” Walker asked.

“Well, the leather works good. None of us got hurt except where we weren’t protected or where the Cloaks could get underneath the leather. So now they’ll be making those one-piece leather suits with maybe a thick plastic to protect the face. All of us are heroes, especially you.”

“What happened to the Cloaks?”

“Oh, we tore them into about a hundred pieces each.”

Walker nodded his satisfaction.

“And then,” Altman went on, “the pieces flew away.”

Hilks had a scientific headquarters set up near what had been a sleepy little town north of Memphis. It was a deserted town, now, in a deserted countryside where no living thing moved, and the bustling activity around the lab plane seemed strangely inappropriate, like a frolic at a funeral.

John Allen dropped his plane neatly into a vacant spot among the two dozen planes that were parked nearby. He stood looking at the lab plane for a moment before he walked toward it, and when he did move it was with the uncertain step of the outsider who expects at any moment to be ordered away.

At this moment the Night Cloaks were, as a general had put it that very morning, none of his business.

Two weeks previously his assignment had been canceled and his authority transferred to the military high command. It was not to be considered a demotion or a reprimand, his superiors told him. On the contrary, he would receive a citation for his work. His competence, and his years of devotion to duty, had enabled him to quickly recognize the menace for what it was and take the best possible action. He had identified the Night Cloak on the sketchiest of evidence, and no one could suggest anything that he should have done but didn’t.

But control of the investigation was passed to the military because the Night Cloaks had assumed the dimensions of a national catastrophe that threatened to become international. The nation’s top military men could not be placed under the orders of a civilian employee of an extranational organization.

“Can I continue the investigation on my own?” Allen demanded.

‘Take a vacation,” his chief said with a smile. “You’ve earned it.”

So Allen had taken vacation leave and immediately returned to the zone of action. Unfortunately, he was temperamentally unsuited to the role of observer. He made suggestions, he criticized, and he attempted to prod the authorities into various kinds of action, and that morning a general had ordered him out of the Contaminated Zone and threatened to have him shot if he returned.

The lab plane was inside the Contaminated Zone, but word of Allen’s banishment seemed not to have reached it. A few scientists recognized him and greeted him warmly. He went directly to Hilks’s office, and there he found Hilks sitting moodily at his desk and gazing fixedly at a bottle that stood in front of him.

Allen exclaimed, “Where did you get it?”

In the bottle lay a jagged fragment, splotched red an yellow and black, that twisted and curled and uncurled.

“Didn’t you hear about the great leather battle?” Hilks asked.

“I heard,” Allen said.

“Great fight while it lasted. One small infantry patrol managed to convert two Cloaks into about a hundred cloaks, and this thing—” He nodded at the bottle. “This thing got left behind. It was only an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, and it was too small to fly. I think one of the men must have stepped on the edge of a Cloak and pinched it off. Anyway, it was found afterward, so we’ve been studying it. I started feeding it insects, then I gave it a baby mouse, and the thing literally grows while you watch it. Now it’s grown big enough to fly, I’ve stopped feeding it.”

“But this is just what you needed!” Allen exclaimed. “Now you can find a way to wipe the things out!”

“Yeah? How? We’ve tried every poison we could think of, not to mention a nitric acid solution that Ferguson dreamed up. It seems to like the stuff. We’ve tried poison gases, including some hush-hush things the military flew in. You can see how healthy it looks. Now I have my entire staff trying to think up experiments, and I’m just sitting here hating the thing.”

“Anything new from Venus?”

“Yeah. They found a cousin of Elmer the snail, so they kindly let us know that we could keep ours. Good joke, eh? I sent them my congratulations and told them the Night Cloaks have already eaten Elmer. Since the Cloaks absorb bones, they probably can absorb snail shells, too. Elmer’s kind may be one of their favorite foods.”

“What does Venus have to say about the Night Cloaks?”

“Well, they’re very interested in what we’ve been able to tell them, and they thank us for the information. They’re going to keep their research teams out of the Great Doleman Swamp until we can tell them how to cope with the things. Other than that, nothing.”

“Too bad. I’d hoped they might know something.”

“It’s a lot worse than you realize. Venus has been so damned smug about the whole catastrophe that some of our politicians have decided to resent that. There’s a movement afoot to ban travel to Venus and close down all the Venusian scientific stations. The other planets may be next, and then perhaps even the moon. After triumphantly moving out across the Solar System and hopefully taking aim at the stars, man crawls ignominiously back into his shell. Some of the pessimists think it may take us generations to handle the Cloaks, and in the meantime the Mississippi basin will become uninhabitable as far north as Minnesota and perhaps above the Canadian border in summer. Whatever happens, I’m betting that the well-dressed man will be wearing a lot of leather. The well-dressed woman, too. Do you have any bright ideas for us to work on?”

“I ran out of bright ideas on the third day,” Allen said. “If your mind isn’t occupied with anything else, you might work on this one: Where are all the Night Cloaks?”

“The military seems to be keeping good track of them. That’s one thing it does well.”

“We have a rough tabulation of the minimum number that should be around, and we have records of all the sightings. As far as we can tell, about ninety per cent have disappeared.”

“We figured they had periods of dormancy.”

“Sure. But if they’re going dormant on us, why hasn’t someone found a dormant Night Cloak somewhere? We’re worried because we have no notion of what their range is. If they ever get established in the Central and South American jungles, it will take us generations to root them out.”

“Do you mind if I hang around?” Allen asked. “The last friend I had on the general staff just ordered me out of the Contaminated Zone, but I don’t think he’ll come here looking for me.”

Hilks grinned. “What have you been up to?”

“I keep giving advice even when I’m not supposed to. I raised a ruckus because I didn’t see much sense in picking Night Cloaks apart just to make more smaller Night Cloaks. And then they were designing a new leather uniform to be used in Cloak hunting, and I suggested that instead of wearing such ghastly uncomfortable armor they just give everyone a bath in tannic acid, or whatever the stuff is they use to make leather, and soak their clothing in it at the same time. That was when he threw me out. He said he had ten million scientists telling him what to do, and he had to put up with them, but he didn’t have to put up with me. So—what’s the matter?”

“Tannic acid?” Hilks said.

“Isn’t that the stuff? Probably it’d dry up or evaporate or something and not work anyway, but I thought—”

Hilks was already on his way to the door. “Meyers!” he shouted. “Get your crew in here. We have work to do.”

By coincidence Allen entered the room first. The general, looking up sharply from his desk, flushed an unhealthy crimson and leaped to his feet. “You! I told you—”

Hilks stepped around Allen. “Meet my assistant,” he said. “Name of Allen.”

The general sat down again. “All right I have my orders. Hilks and three assistants. I have the protective clothing ready for you, and I have a place picked out for you and a patrol to take you there.”

“Good,” Hilks said. “Let’s get going.”

“My orders also say that I’m to satisfy myself as to the soundness of whatever it is you propose to do.”

“We’ve developed a spray we’d like to try out on the Cloaks,” Hilks said.

“What’ll it do to them?”

“You know we have a specimen to work on? The spray seems to anesthetize it. Of course there’s a difference between spraying a Cloak sliver in a bottle and spraying a full-sized Cloak in open air.”

“You really don’t know, then.”

“Of course not. That’s why we’re making the experiment”

“You’re asking me to risk the lives of my men—” “Nope. All we want them to do is show us where the Night Cloaks are and get out of the way. I’m not even risking the lives of my own men. Allen and I will do the testing.”

The general stood up. “Tell me. I’m not asking for a prediction, damn it. Do you think this stuff might work?”

“We’ve had a lot of disappointments, General,” Hilks said. “We’re fresh out of predictions. But yes, we think it just might work.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“The scientific staff will have a couple of openings. That’s not much of a risk for a general to take, is it?”

The general grinned. “You’re brave men. Anything you want, take it. And—good luck!”

As Allen dropped the plane into the small clearing, the pine forest took on an unexpectedly gloomy aspect. “Cover us while we’re dressing,” Allen said. He and Hilks climbed out and quickly slipped into the leather suits.

Meyers and another young scientist named Wilcox watched them anxiously. “Wasn’t there a better place than this?” Meyers asked.

Allen shook his head. “All the other locations are swampy. Night Cloaks seem to be attracted to swamps, but I’m not. Also, they only saw two of them in this area. Two are enough for beginners like Hilks and me.”

“Sure you don’t want us to come along?” Meyers asked, as they donned their spray tanks.

Hilks shook his head. “One of the problems has been the total absence of witnesses. If we’d known exactly what happened with each victim, maybe we’d have solved this long ago. You’re our witnesses. You’re to record everything we say, and we’ll try to describe it so you can understand what’s happening. If we don’t come back, you’ll know what went wrong.”

Meyers nodded unhappily. They fastened their plastic face guards, picked up the spray guns, and waved a cheerful farewell.

“No undergrowth,” Allen observed as they entered the trees.

“It’s a Co-op Forest,” Hilks said. “That means we’re trespassing.” “So are the Night Cloaks.”

They walked briskly for a couple of miles, turned, and started to circle back. “Better check in with Meyers,” Allen said. “He’ll be turning somersaults.”

Hilks switched on his radio. “Haven’t seen a thing,” he announced.

“Man, you must be blind!” Meyers blurted at them. “There was one right overhead when you started out. It followed you.”

They turned quickly and stared upward. For a moment they saw only the cloudless sky through the treetops, and then a blur of color flashed past.

“Okay,” Hilks said. “It’s flying above the trees—waiting for reinforcements, maybe. We’ll keep moving toward the plane. When they attack we’ll put a couple of nice big trees at our backs so they won’t be able to get at us from behind. If I can find a tree as big around as I am, that is.”

“Keep your radios on,” Meyers said.

“Right.”

They moved at a steady pace, keeping close together and taking turns looking upward.

“Two of them, now,” Hilks announced. “They’re circling. They look like small ones.”

Two minutes later it was Allen’s turn. “I just counted three,” he said. “No, four. They’re coming down—get ready?’

The Cloaks dropped through the trees with amazing speed. They plummeted, and Allen, backing up to a tree, had no time for more than the split-second observation that they were unusually small, one being no more than a yard across. All four of them curved toward him. He gave the first one the spray at ten feet and then cut it off. The Cloaks were gone.

Hilks was chuckling as he talked with Meyers. “They got one whiff of the stuff and beat it.”

“Now we won’t know what’ll happen to the one I sprayed,” Allen said.

Hilks swore. “I didn’t think about that. The most we can claim is that they don’t particularly like the stuff.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Allen said. “Here they come again.”

They were wary. They dipped down slowly, circled, sailed in and out among the trees. Only the small one ventured close, and it shot upward when Allen gave it a blast of spray.

“For what it’s worth,” Allen said, “the small ones are hungrier than the big ones.” “It figures,” Hilks said.

Meyers, sitting far away in the plane, made unintelligible noises.

The Cloaks did not return immediately. Allen and Hilks peered upward searchingly, and finally Allen asked, “What do we do now?”

“Add the score and go home, I suppose. The stuff doesn’t have the punch we hoped for, none of them dropped unconscious at our feet, but at the same time we can claim a limited success. It drives them off, which is more than anything else was able to accomplish. We can develop pressurized containers for self-defense and put the chemists to work making the stuff more potent. Shall we go back?”