DeCrabbe turned. "Am armed, young man," he retorted severely.
"Yeah, but those whirlybirds don't pay any attention to guns."
"Soon will," DeCrabbe replied, unruffled.
Slowly he drove down the center of the empty street, receiving more cheers from heads thrust out of windows. He arrived at the city park and turned in. He unloaded most of his equipment under the roof of the bandstand.
A few minutes later one of his robot mannequins moved slowly around the clearing before the bandstand, its control set for slow walking to conserve its atomic battery. The predator hunter unlimbered all his guns as he sat under the bandstand roof waiting.
It was an hour before the first whirlybird attacked.
His first warning was the rising wind. His gaze moved around the sky until he found the rapidly growing black spot. A few seconds later it became a universe-engulfing blackness as it spotted the mannequin and came down for it. As soon as the wind-screaming blackness reached the mannequin, the needle guns in his hands emptied their hundreds of anesthetizing needles into the turbulence. But it was as the mayor had said. Where did the bird's body end and the feathers begin? When the needle pistols were empty he dropped them and snatched up the rocket powered stun-gas weapon; its immense flare poured into the blackness without visible result. He dropped it and grabbed the N-ray flashburn gun. The forty-foot ball of fury was beginning to rise high with its prey now, as the gun stuttered fifty bolts of burning lethal radiation into it. He smelled feathers that time. Finally as the giant bird, without faltering, rose above the range of the N-ray gun, he took to the explosive pellet rifle. It had only ten shots; all of these went into the center of the blackness well before the whirlybird had flown beyond range. And as it neared the horizon with its mannequin prey, he heard its sweet song:
"Coo! Coo!"
"How dare it coo after all I did to it?" muttered DeCrabbe grimly. "Shall not coo next time!"