“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.’”
Major Hanson disciplined his face, and said, “Well, why not call him Papa, sir? After all, it’s just such human touches as these that make history.”
“Ah, yes—History.” The General paused reflectively. “Hmm, perhaps so, perhaps so. They always called Napoleon ‘the little Corporal.’”
“The thing that really bothers me, General, is how we’re going to get through without our own people listening in. I guess they must’ve worked out something on it, or they wouldn’t have scheduled the—the offensive for five o’clock. That’s only four hours off.”
“Now that you mention it,” said General Pollard, coming out of his reverie, “a memorandum did come through—Oh, Miss Hooper, bring me that memo from G-I, will you?—Thank you. Here it is. It seems that they have decided to—er—scramble the broadcast.”
“Scramble it, sir?”
“Yes, yes. And I’ve issued operational orders accordingly. You see, Intelligence reported several weeks ago that the enemy knows how to unscramble anything we transmit that way. When Mr. Schimmelhorn goes on the air, we will scramble him, but we will not transmit the code key to our own people. It is assumed that from five to fifteen enemy monitors will hear him. His playing of the tune will constitute Phase One. When it is over, the microphones will be switched off, and he will play it backwards. That will be Phase Two, to dispose of such gnurrs as appear locally.”
“Seems sound enough.” Major Hanson frowned. “And it’s pretty smart, if everything goes right. But what if it doesn’t? Hadn’t we better have an ace up our sleeve?”
He frowned again. Then, as the General didn’t seem to have any ideas on the subject, he went about his duties. He made a final inspection of the special sound-proof room in which Papa Schimmelhorn would tootle. He allocated its observation windows—one to the President, the Secretary, and General Pollard; one to the Chiefs of Staff; another to Intelligence liaison; and the last to the functioning staff of Operation Gnurr, himself included. At ten minutes to five, when everything was ready, he was still worrying.
“Look here,” he whispered to Papa Schimmelhorn, as he escorted him to the fateful door. “What are we going to do if your gnurrs really get loose here? You couldn’t play them back into the voodvork in a month of Sundays!”
“Don’dt vorry, soldier boy!” Papa Schimmelhorn gave him a resounding slap on the back. “I haff yet vun trick I do nodt tell you!”
And with that vague assurance, he closed the door behind him.
“Ready!” called General Pollard tensely, at one minute to five.
“Ready!” echoed Sergeant Colliver.
In front of Papa Schimmelhorn, a red light flashed on. The tension mounted. The seconds ticked away. The General’s hand reached for a sabre-hilt that wasn’t there. At five exactly—
“CHARGE!” the General cried.
And Papa Schimmelhorn started tootling Come to the Church in the Wildwood.
The gnurrs, of course, came from the voodvork out.
The gnurrs came from the voodvork out, and a hungry gleam was in their yellow eyes. They carpeted the floor. They started piling up. They surged against the massive legs of Papa Schimmelhorn, their tiny electric-razor sets of teeth going like all get out. His trousers vanished underneath the flood—his checkered coat, his tie, his collar, the fringes of his beard. And Papa Schimmelhorn, all undismayed, lifted his big bassoon out of gnurrs’ way and tootled on. “Come, come, come, come. Come to the church in the vildvood…”
Of course, Major Hanson couldn’t hear the gnurr-pfeife—but he had sung the song in Sunday school, and now the words resounded in his brain. Verse after verse, chorus after chorus—The awful thought struck him that Papa Schimmelhorn would be overwhelmed, sucked under, drowned in gnurrs…
And then he heard the voice of General Pollard, no longer steady—
“R-ready, Phase Two?”
“R-ready!” replied Sergeant Colliver.
A green light flashed in front of Papa Schimmelhorn.
For a moment, nothing changed. Then the gnurrs hesitated. Apprehensively, they glanced over their hairy shoulders. They shimmered. They started to recede. Back, back, back they flowed, leaving Papa Schimmelhorn alone, triumphant, and naked as a jaybird.
The door was opened, and he emerged—to be congratulated and reclothed, and (much to Sergeant
