"Can't tell," said Ben. "From what I could make out through the glasses, it didn't look like birds that were handling it."
"But what could it be?"
"Ask me! Delirium tremens, I guess. Nothing in this world is like what it ought to be any more. Where did those birds come from; how did we get this way, all of us; who is it up there in the Catskills that don't like us? Answer me those and I'll tell you who was handling the gun."
"Message, sir," said a sailor, touching his cap, and handing a folded paper. The captain read it, frowning.
"There you are—" he extended the sheet to Ben. "My government is recalling all ships. Our sister-ship, the Melbourne, has been attacked off San Francisco and severely damaged by bomb-dropping dodos, and they have made a mass descent on Sumatra. Gentlemen, this has all the characteristics of a formal war." He strode off to give the necessary orders to hurry the cruiser home, but Walter Beeville, who had joined the group at the bridge, said under his breath:
"If those birds have enough intelligence to plan out anything like that I'll eat my hat."
"If you were not before my eyes," said Sir George Graham Harris, president of the Australian Scientific Commission, "as living proof of what you say, and if our biological and metallurgical experts did not report that your physiology is utterly beyond their comprehension, I do not know but that I would believe you were some cleverly constructed machines, actuated in some way by radio. However, that is not the point ... I have here a series of reports from different quarters on such explorations as have been made since the arrival of the comet and our recovery from its effects. We are, it appears, confronted with a menace of considerable seriousness in the form of these birds.
"In the light of your closer acquaintance with them and with conditions generally in the devastated areas, they may be more suggestive to you than to us." He stopped and ruffled over the papers piled beside him at the big conference table. He was a kindly old gentleman, whose white Van Dyke and pale blue lips contrasted oddly with the almost indigo tint of his visage (before the comet it had been a rich wine-red, the result of a lifelong devotion to brandy and soda). Smiling round the table at his scientific colleagues and at Ben, Murray, Gloria and Beeville, who occupied the position of honor, he went on:
"I give you mainly excerpts.... The first is from the South African government. They have ... hm, hm ... sent an aerial expedition northward, all lines of communication appearing to be broken. At Nairobi, they report for the first time, finding a town entirely unoccupied and its inhabitants turned into cast-metal statues ... Addis Ababa the same ... Wadi Hafa likewise. Twenty miles north of Wadi Hafa they noted the first sign of life—a bird of some kind at a considerable distance to the west of them and flying parallel with them and very rapidly."