"... Considered as a strategic move, the Wabbly was a
triumph. Eighteen hours after its landing, the orders
for troops called for half a million men to be
withdrawn from the forces at the front and in reserve,
and munitions-factories were being diverted from the
supply of the front to the manufacture of devices
designed to cope with it. This, in turn, entailed
changes in the front-line activities of the Command....
Altogether, it may be said that the Wabbly, eighteen
hours after its landing, was exerting the military
pressure of an army of not less than half a million men
upon the most vulnerable spot in our defenses--the
rear.... And when its effect upon civilian morale is
considered, the Wabbly, as a force in being,
constituted the most formidable military unit in
history." (_Strategic Lessons of the War of
1941-43._--U. S. War College. P. 93.)
As Sergeant Walpole saw the Wabbly, there was no sign of humanity
anywhere about the thing. It was a monstrous mass of metal,
powder-stained now where shells had burst against it, and it seemed
metallically alive, impersonally living. The armored tube with
vision-slits at its ends must have been the counterpart of a ship's
bridge, but it looked like the eye-ridge of an insect's face. The
bulbous control-rooms at the ends looked like a gigantic insect's
multi-faceted eyes. And the huge treads, so thick as to constitute armor
for their own protection, were so cunningly joined and sprung that they,
too, seemed like part of a living thing.
It came within twenty yards of the staff-car with the 'copter man in it
and Sergeant Walpole smoking outside. It ignored them. It had destroyed
all life at this place. And Sergeant Walpole alone was visible, and he
sat motionless and detached, unemotionally waiting to be killed. The
Wabbly clanked and rumbled and roared obliviously past them. Sergeant
Walpole saw the flexing springs in the tread-joints, and there were
hundreds of them, of a size to support a freight-car. He saw a
refuse-tube casually ejecting a gush of malodorous stuff, in which the
garbage of a mess-table was plainly identifiable. A drop or two of the
stuff splashed on him, and he smelled coffee.
And then the treads lifted, and he saw the monstrous gas-spreading tubes
at the stern, and the exhaust-pipes into which he could have ridden,
monocycle and all. Then he saw a man in the Wabbly. There were
ventilation-ports open at the pointed stern and a man was looking out,
some fifteen feet above the ground, smoking placidly and looking out at
the terrain the Wabbly left behind it. He was wearing an enemy uniform
cap.
* * * * *
The monster went on. The roar of its passing diminished a little. And
the 'copter man came suddenly out of the staff-car, struggling with the
portable vision set.
"I think we can do it," he said shortly. "It's in constant beam
communication with a bomber up aloft, and I think they're worried up
there because they can't see a damned thing. But it's a good team. With
the Wabbly's beam, which takes so much power no bomber could possibly
carry it, the bombers are safe, and the bombers can locate any
motor-driven thing that might attack the Wabbly and blow it to hell. But
right now they can't see it. So I think we can do it. Coming?"
Sergeant Walpole threw away his cigarette and rose stiffly. Even those
few moments of rest had intensified his weariness. He flung a leg over
the monocycle's seat and pointed tiredly to the trail of the Wabbly. It
nearly paralleled, here, a ribbon of concrete road which once had been a
reasonably important feeder-highway.
"Let's go."
They went off through the rain along the road, nearly parallel to the
route the Wabbly was taking. Rain beat at them. Off in the woods to
their right the Wabbly's noise grew louder as they overtook it. They
passed it, and came abruptly out of the wooded area upon cultivated
fields, rolling and beautifully cared-for. There had been a
farm-headquarters off to one side, a huge central-station for all the
agricultural work on what once would have been half a county, but there
were jagged walls where buildings had been, and smoke still rose from
the place.
Then the Wabbly came out of the woods, a dim gray monstrous shape in the
rain.
* * * * *
The helicopter man pulled the ignition-cord and a rocket began to
sputter. He made a single wipe with his knife-blade along the twisted
insulated wires of the Bissel battery, and a wavering blue spark leaped
into being. The rocket shot upward, curved down, and landed with enough
force to bury its head in the muddy ploughed earth and conceal the
signal-flare that must have ignited.
"That ought to do it," said the 'copter man. "Let's send some more."
Sergeant Walpole got exhaustedly off his monocycle and duplicated the
'copter man's efforts. A second rocket, a third.... A dozen or more
rockets went off, each one bearing a wavering, uncertain blue spark at
its tip. And that spark would continue for half an hour or more. In a
loop aerial, eight miles up, it might sound like a spark-plug, or it
might sound like something else. But it would not sound like the sort of
thing that ought to spring up suddenly in front of the Wabbly, and it
would sound like something that had better be bombed, for safety's sake.
The Wabbly was moving across the ploughed fields with a deceptive
smoothness. It was drawing nearer and nearer to the spot where the
rockets had plunged to earth.
It stopped.
Another rocket left the weary pair of men, its nearly flashless exhaust
invisible in the daytime, anyway. The Wabbly backed slowly from the
irregular line where the first rockets sparked invisibly. It was no more
than a distinct gray shadow in the falling rain, but the queer bulk atop
its body moved suddenly. Like a searchlight, the power-beam swept the
earth before the Wabbly. But nothing happened.
The 'copter man turned on the vision set he had packed from the staff
gyrocar. Voices, crisp and anxious, came out of it. He caressed the set
affectionately.
"Listen to 'em, Sergeant," he said hungrily. "They're worried!"
* * * * *
The voice changed suddenly. There was a sudden musical buzzing in the
set, as of two dozen spitting sparks, in as many tones, all going at
once.
"Letting the guys in the Wabbly hear what they hear," said the 'copter
man grimly. "If God's good to us, now...."
The voices changed again. They stopped.
The Wabbly itself was still, halted in its passage across a clear and
rain-swept field by little sparking sounds which seemed to indicate the
presence of something that had better be bombed for safety's sake.
A thin whining noise came down from aloft. It rose to a piercing shriek,
and there was a gigantic crater a half mile from the Wabbly, from which
smoke rose lazily. The Wabbly remained motionless. Another whining noise
which turned to a shriek.... The explosion was terrific. It was a bit
nearer the Wabbly.
"We'll send 'em some more rockets," said the 'copter man.
They went hissing invisibly through the rain. The Wabbly backed
cautiously away from the spot where they landed, because they were
wholly invisible and they made a sound which those in the Wabbly could
not understand. Always, to a savage, the unexplained is dangerous.
Modern warfare has reached the same high peak of wisdom. The Wabbly drew
off from the sparks because it could not know what made them, and
because it had used its power-beam and the bomber had dropped its bombs
without stopping or destroying them. It was not conceivable to anybody
on either the Wabbly or the bombers aloft that inexplicable things could
be especially contrived to confront the Wabbly, unless they were
contrived to destroy it.
"They don't know what in hell they're up against," said the 'copter man
joyously. "Now lets give 'em fits!"
* * * * *
Rockets went off in swift succession. To the blinded men in the bomber
above the clouds it seemed that unexplained mechanisms were springing
into action by dozens, all about the Wabbly. They were mechanisms. They
were electric mechanisms. They were obviously designed to have some
effect on the Wabbly. And the Wabbly had no defense against the
unguessed-at effects of unknown weapons except....
Bombs began to rain from the sky. The Wabbly crawled toward the last gap
left in the ring of mysterious mechanisms. That closed. Triumphant,
singing sparks sang viciously in the amplifiers. Nothing was visible.
Nothing! Perhaps that was what precipitated panic. The bombers rained
down their deadly missiles. And somebody forgot the exact length of time
it takes a bomb to drop eight miles....
Sergeant Walpole and the 'copter man were flat on the ground with their
hands to their ears. The ground bucked and smote them. The unthinkable
violence of the hexynitrate explosions tore at their nerves, even at
their sanity. And then there was an explosion with a subtle difference
in its sound. Sergeant Walpole looked up, his head throbbing, his eyes
watering, dizzy and dazed, and bleeding at the nose and ears.
Then he bumped into the 'copter man, shuddering on the ground. He did it
deliberately. There was a last crashing sound, and some of the blasted
earth spattered on them. But then the 'copter man looked where Sergeant
Walpole pointed dizzily.
The Wabbly was careened crazily on one side. One of its treads was
uncoiling slowly from its frame. Its stern was blown in. Someone had
forgotten how long it takes a bomb to drop eight miles, and the Wabbly
had crawled under one. More, from the racked-open stern of the Wabbly
there was coming a roaring, spitting cloud of gas. The Wabbly's
storage-tanks of gas had been set off. Inside, it would be a shambles.
Its crew would be dead, killed by the gas the Wabbly itself had
broadcast in its wake....