The First Reginald Bretnor MEGAPACK ®. Reginald Bretnor
this point, the gnurrs came from the voodvork out.
It isn’t easy to describe a gnurr. Can you imagine a mouse-colored, mouse-sized critter shaped like a wild boar, but sort of shimmery? With thumbs fore and aft, and a pink, naked tail, and yellow eyes several sizes too large? And with three sets of sharp teeth in its face? You can? Well, that’s about it—except that nobody has ever seen a gnurr. They don’t come that way. When the gnurrs come from the voodvork out, they come all over—like lemmings, only more so—millions and millions and millions of them.
And they come eating.
The gnurrs came from the voodvork out just as Papa Schimmelhorn reached “… the church in the vale.” They covered half the floor, and ate up half the carpet, before he finished, “No scene is so dear to my childhood.” Then they advanced on Colonel Pollard.
Mounting his desk, the Colonel started slashing around with his riding crop. Katie Hooper climbed a filing case, hoisted her skirt, and screamed. Lieutenant Hanson, secure in his nether nakedness, held his ground and guffawed insubordinately.
Papa Schimmelhorn stopped tootling to shout, “Don’dt vorry, soldier boy!” He started in again, playing something quite unrecognizable—something that didn’t sound like a tune at all.
Instantly, the gnurrs halted. They looked over their shoulders apprehensively. They swallowed the remains of the Colonel’s chair cushion, shimmered brightly, made a queasy sort of creaking sound, and turning tail, vanished into the wainscoting.
Papa Schimmelhorn stared at the Colonel’s boots, which were surprisingly intact, and muttered, “Hmm-m, zo!” He leered appreciatively at Katie Hooper, who promptly dropped her skirt. He thumped himself on the chest, and announced, “They are vunderful, my gnurrs!” to the world at large.
“Wh—?” The Colonel showed evidences of profound psychic trauma. “Where did they go?”
“Vere they came from,” replied Papa Schimmelhorn.
“Where’s that?”
“It iss yesterday.”
“That—that’s absurd!” The Colonel stumbled down and fell into his chair. “They weren’t here yesterday!”
Papa Schimmelhorn regarded him pityingly. “Of course nodt! They vere nodt here yesterday because yesterday vas then today. They are here yesterday, ven yesterday is yesterday already. It iss different.”
Colonel Pollard wiped his clammy brow, and cast an appealing glance at Lieutenant Hanson.
“Perhaps I can explain, sir,” said the Lieutenant, whose nervous system apparently had benefited by the second visit of the gnurrs. “May I make my report?”
“Yes, yes, certainly.” Colonel Pollard clutched gladly at the straw. “Ah—sit down.”
Lieutenant Hanson pulled up a chair, and—as Papa Schimmelhorn walked over to flirt with Katie—he began to talk in a low and very serious voice.
“It’s absolutely incredible,” he said. “All the routine tests show that he’s at best a high grade moron. He quit school when he was eleven, served his apprenticeship, and worked as a clockmaker till he was in his fifties. After that, he was a janitor in the Geneva Institute of Higher Physics until just a few years ago. Then he came to America and got his present job. But it’s the Geneva business that’s important. They’ve been concentrating on extensions of Einstein’s and Minkowski’s work. He must have overheard a lot of it.”
“But if he is a moron—” The Colonel had heard of Einstein, and knew that he was very deep indeed “—what good would it do him?”
“That’s just the point, sir! He’s a moron on the conscious level, but subconsciously he’s a genius. Somehow, part of his mind absorbed the stuff, integrated it, and came up with this bassoon thing. It’s got a weird little L-shaped crystal in it, impinging on the reed, and when you blow, the crystal vibrates. We don’t know why it works—but it sure does!”
“You mean the—uh—the fourth dimension?”
“Precisely. Though we’ve left yesterday behind, the gnurrs have not. They’re there now. When a day becomes our yesterday, it becomes their today.”
“But—but how does he get rid of them?”
“He says he plays the same tune backwards, and reverses the effect. Damn lucky, if you ask me!”
Papa Schimmelhorn, who had been encouraging Katie Hooper to feel his biceps, turned around. “You vait!” he laughed uproariously. “Soon, vith my gnurr-pfeife I broadcast to the enemy! Ve vin the var!”
The Colonel shied. “The thing’s untried, unproven! It—er—requires further study—field service—acid test.”
“We haven’t time, sir. We’d lose the element of surprise!”
“We will make a regular report through channels,” declared the Colonel. “It’s a damn’ machine, isn’t it? They’re unreliable. Always have been. It would be contrary to the principles of war.”
And then Lieutenant Hanson had an inspiration. “But, sir,” he argued, “we won’t be fighting with the gnurr-pfeife! The gnurrs will be our real weapon, and they’re not machines—they’re animals! The greatest generals used animals in war! The gnurrs aren’t interested in living creatures, but they’ll devour just about anything else—wool, cotton, leather, even plastics—and their numbers are simply astronomical. If I were you, I’d get through to the Secretary right away!”
For an instant, the Colonel hesitated—but only for an instant. “Hanson,” he said decisively, “you’ve got a point there—a very sound point!”
And he reached for the telephone.
* * * *
It took less than twenty-four hours to organize Operation Gnurr. The Secretary of Defense, after conferring with the President and the Chiefs of Staff, personally rushed over to direct preliminary tests of Papa Schimmelhorn’s secret weapon. By nightfall, it was known that the gnurrs could:
a. completely blanket everything within two hundred yards of the gnurr-pfeife in less than twenty seconds;
b. strip an entire company of infantry, supported by chemical weapons, to the skin in one minute and eighteen seconds;
c. ingest the contents of five Quartermaster warehouses in just over two minutes; and,
d. come from the voodvork out when the gnurr-pfeife was played over a carefully shielded shortwave system.
It had also become apparent that there were only three effective ways to kill a gnurrby—shooting him to death, drenching him with liquid fire, or dropping an atomic bomb on him—and that there were entirely too many gnurrs for any of these methods to be worth a hoot.
By morning, Colonel Powhattan Fairfax Pollard—because he was the only senior officer who had ever seen a gnurr, and because animals were known to be right up his alley—had been made a lieutenant-general and given command of the operation. Lieutenant Hanson, as his aide, had suddenly found himself a major. Corporal Colliver had become a master-sergeant, presumably for being there when the manna fell. And Katie Hooper had had a brief but strenuous date with Papa Schimmelhorn.
Nobody was satisfied. Katie complained that Papa Schimmelhorn and the gnurrs had the same idea in mind, only his technique was different. Jerry Colliver, who had been dating Katie regularly, griped that the old buzzard with the muscles had sent his Hooper rating down to zero. Major Hanson had awakened to the possibility of somebody besides the enemy tuning in on the Papa Schimmelhorn Hour. Even General Pollard was distressed—“I could overlook everything, Hanson,” he said sourly, “except his calling me ‘soldier boy.’ I won’t stand for it! The science of war cannot tolerate indiscipline. I spoke to him about it, and all he said was, ‘It iss all right, soldier boy. You can call me Papa.’”