Chapter 3

One of the rescued men was a licensed radio engineer who worked part time at the University radio station. He suggested that they use the radio station to broadcast for anybody who wanted to join them to show up at the dining hall. The station was still operable because he could hear the carrier. He said that they could make a tape which would loop back on itself and send a repeating message up to about one minute long. Bill agreed to make such a tape and he and the engineer left for the station the next morning. While he was about it, he made copies of the tape to run on other stations in the area.

It took nearly 3 hours to get all four radio stations set up to broadcast the message on a continuous basis. One of the stations was located off a back road between Auburn and Opelika, and that was the last one they visited. The engineer, Sam Heston, was driving, and Bill was riding shotgun, since he was the better shot. They were headed back toward Auburn when they saw five Wasps flying around a small hill. Bill decided that they were armed well enough that they could afford to investigate.

The Wasps were circling around what turned out to be a small nest. When they got close enough that Bill could be sure of his shots, Sam parked and they both got out of the panel truck. Bill was to take the long shots and Sam was to provide close support.

Bill leaned against the truck to steady himself and took his first shot. The targeted Wasp was coming in for a landing when she was hit. She spasmed and crashed into the wall of the nest. This attracted the attention of several Wasps inside the nest, and there were suddenly 11 Wasps flying around apparently looking for the source of the attack. Bill shot two more which were circling, and they appeared to shudder and then drift off in a random direction, not falling to the ground as the humans expected.

The Wasps still had not located the source of the attack—could it be that they could not hear the minimal report of the .22 as it fired? If so, that would be a break for the humans.

Bill stopped shooting long enough to reload, since he didn't want to get caught short. He had taken five shots and hit three Wasps. Bill considered that a barely acceptable ratio; he wondered if he could find a telescopic sight, about 3 power, with a wide field of view so that he could acquire his target quickly. He figured that would be nearly ideal, since anything more powerful was pushing too hard on his or the rifle's capabilities. And it certainly should beat the open iron sights that he was currently using.

While Bill was concentrating on shooting, Sam had used his radio to notify Jimmy that they were currently engaged with some Wasps and would be delayed in getting back to base. Jimmy asked if they needed support, but Sam declined any help; Bill seemed to have the situation in hand, and they had plenty of ammunition.

Bill had managed to kill two more Wasps, leaving seven that they knew about. There might be more still in the nest, but seven were enough to worry about right now. The situation was a little confused because of the dead Wasps still hanging in the air as a result of their antigravity belts. At least once, Bill had shot at one of them by mistake.

The Wasps finally identified the location of their attackers and began a mass charge in the humans' direction. No more carefully aimed shots, now. Both Bill and Sam had to resort to shooting as fast as they could get a sight-picture. In this kind of shooting with the adrenaline flowing like water, most shots went wild, but the poison was virulent enough that a scratch was sufficient to kill a Wasp. Nevertheless, the last Wasp was killed by Bill with a shot from his pistol.

Both men were so excited by the fight that they had to sit in the truck and rest for about 15 minutes so that they could calm down and regain control of their frazzled nerves. When they were back to as normal as one could expect, they decided to investigate the nest.

Sam drove to the nest entrance, they apprehensively dismounted from the truck and cautiously approached the nest. There did not appear to be any live humans inside the nest simply because they heard no sounds of pain, but there sure as hell was something in there, because they could hear it.

Because of the close quarters, they had left their rifles in the truck and were depending on their pistols. They looked in and saw a writhing mass of infant Wasps crawling around and eating any shreds of flesh that they could find. There were no adult Wasps in sight so Sam and Bill backed out of the nest and set it afire. Since the fire was started at the entrance, there was no way for the Wasps to escape, so they were all killed by the fire. Once the fire died down, Bill and Sam went through the shell of the nest to make sure that every Wasp had been killed.

With some relief, the two humans returned to the Auburn campus with four more of the antigravity belts that they had been able to take from downed Wasps.

John had been able to puzzle out some of the secrets of the antigravity belts, though he was still a long way from duplicating the action of the belts. He now knew why dead Wasps floated at random in the air after they were killed—the belt had an up and down switch as its only obvious control. If you pushed the handle up, the belt rose, and if you pushed the handle down, the belt sank to the ground. Neutral left the belt hanging in the air.

If the switch was left too long in one position, the belt turned off, but it reactivated as soon as the lever was moved. There was no lateral control, that had to come from somewhere else.

For some yet unknown reason, the belt only acted on the items that were inside the belt; anything outside the belt was unaffected. John had not yet found the limit to the lifting capacity of the belt, but it was obviously very high since it could lift a Wasp without difficulty.

John had managed to fit the belt around a large vat that he had found in the Chemical Engineering lab. He stood in the vat and operated the switch to lift it and him off the ground. Elated with his discovery, he had used his radio to broadcast his success.

John discovered that leaning over the edge of the vat to manipulate the switch did not cause the vat to tip or wobble. The belt was rock solid in holding its position until the control switch was moved. When he heard this, Jimmy was immediately presented with the notion that the belt could provide a steady shooting platform.

The major worry that John had was that he could not find a power supply. He had no idea what powered the belt, so he had no idea how long the power would last. He feared that somebody would be flying around and have a sudden power failure that dropped him hundreds of feet to the ground. Maybe Sam, with his electronics experience, could spot the power source.

Unfortunately, there was only one of these vats in the lab, so they needed to find a source for similar items before they could make much use of the antigravity belts. Bill dispatched several teams to search the campus to try to find more suitable containers.

Bill and Jimmy realized that they needed more skills available if they were going to defeat the Wasps in their lifetime. Bill wanted more chemists to continue making his Wasp poison while he went on to other activities, and Jimmy wanted welders and machinists and other skilled tradesmen. They also needed somebody with some solid military training to lead the actual fight against the Wasps.

Several other colleges and universities were close to Auburn, so that was where Bill wanted to look for chemists, since he was more familiar with the academic landscape; however, he was not adverse to industrial chemists, he just didn't know where to look for them. Wait a minute—the radio stations! He could put out a request for what was needed and advise the people to travel at night when they would be safe from the Wasps. It also dawned on him to list his cell phone number so that people could call him with specific questions. Sam, the radio engineer, helped him to make the new tape, and it was installed on every operating radio station that they could find.