Nixon's thoughts suddenly went blank so that he stood over the dead 'gator with his jaw sagging in amazement. He had jerked off his headband with the light-torch when he jumped overboard from the rowboat, but there was enough starlight here for him to see the tiny upright thing. It was in a silvery patch beside a line of brush back from the water. A thing in the shape of a man. Hardly that; but it was upright, oblong with a head and a width of tiny shoulder. It stood divided at the bottom like two legs and there were two arms. A thing only a few inches high. The starlight showed it to be brown-black. Then suddenly Nixon's gasp of astonishment made him suck in his breath as he blankly stared. The tiny thing seemed to be wearing clothes....
To Nixon in those seconds, there was a blur of his mind when he wasn't thinking, just staring as though this were something not to be explained, something which didn't have to be explained because it wasn't real, just a conjuring of his own imagination, a trick of his vision. His hand went with a puzzled gesture to brush his eyes. He blinked. One tiny, six-inch man-shape?
Abruptly he saw that the brush here seemed alive with them. They were moving now. They emitted tiny squeaks that could have been words; shouted commands to each other. But up here in the starlight of Nixon's six foot height, the sounds were like the voices of excited insects.
Adversaries? There was no such idea in Nixon's mind, those first blank seconds. Then suddenly, with a tiny hissing flash, a thread of violet light stabbed up at him. It struck one of his dangling hands with a hot little flash of tingle like the shock of a weak electric current. Then he saw where it came from—an edge of a patch of wire-grass. Three of the brown-black figures were dragging a tiny wheeled thing. A weapon. It was hardly bigger than Nixon's hand. Its nozzle slanted upward and spat another tiny violet flash. Then at his feet he felt something hit against the bottom of his leather puttee. One of the shapes was trying to climb up his leg. He could feel the weight of it on his shoe. A surprising weight, as though the six-inch thing were made of lead.
Nixon was stooping to reach down when a tiny projectile hit him in the face. It stung, with a scratching little stab of pain. Then others came. It was like a handful of peas being thrown at him. All in a few seconds while Nixon had stood blankly staring with incredulous amazement, what seemed hundreds of the tiny shapes were around him. Attacking him. With anything normal, Nixon could think quickly. A 'gator's jaws closing on his arm, simple enough to know what to do. But now suddenly his emotion at this weird attack was only one of puzzled anger. He stooped swiftly, seized the tiny figure that was at his ankle. It screamed as his hand closed over it, a thin, high-pitched squeaking cry. But it was blood-curdling—so nearly human in its frenzied, agonized sound. As he raised it up, still it was screaming. A heavy little thing, heavy as though it were of metal. And it was solid, so solid that his squeezing fingers could have held a leaden figure.
For an instant Nixon held the screaming little thing up and stared at it; and the starlight showed him the contorted features of its tiny bluish face, its flailing arms. Then he flung it out over the bayou. There was a little splash. The screaming stopped as the figure sank like a stone. Now abruptly, the dazed incredulous astonishment of Nixon dropped from him, and a stab of fear came; fear and a surge of anger as he realized that this attack was reality. He staggered back from the rain of tiny missiles pelting him, and another flash of the tiny wheeled gun. The ground here was black now with the lunging, milling little shapes. His first backward step trod on two or three of them, mashed their solid, heavy little bodies into the soggy ground of the bayou bank.
As he staggered, there must have been a tree root that caught his heel. At the same instant, a pellet struck his eye; and as his arm flung up and he stumbled over the root, suddenly he fell backward to the soggy sand. It was enough for the alert little figures. Their cry of triumph sounded as they pounced upon him, swarming over him. A hundred? It could have been more. Scores of scrambling things. Perhaps, small though they were, each of them weighed a pound. A hundred pounds of treading steps and jabbing arms were in an instant upon the fallen Nixon. He felt himself really frightened now, a fear that he had never felt before, no matter what the antagonist, fear engendered by the strangeness of it, the unknown.
Nixon tried to get up, but the sheer weight of the swarming little adversaries seemed pinning him down. Now they were on his throat, on his face. Tiny things jabbed at his eyes, so that his hands flailed in a frenzy, plucking them away. But then there were others. He found himself rolling, mashing them. But he couldn't mash them, he could only shove them into the ground....