War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

  He looked. There was a tiny, pitiful heap of draggled feathers about a tiny skeleton with a sharp beak. There were eggs, befouled by rain. “A partridge,” he said, “dead on its nest. Yes.” He approved of Professor Warren. She noticed things.

  “There are half a dozen others like that,” she said, still regarding him with a peculiar expression, “within a quarter of a mile. It struck me as strange. In fact—” She looked at his hands.

  Lane realized that he still gripped the clumps of dead leaves he’d held before his face when leaving the clearing of the dead rabbits. He dropped them and said awkwardly: “I had a good reason for that—just now. But I suppose I look like a lunatic.”

  Professor Warren grunted inelegantly. “Not quite,” she said. “Of course, holding bouquets of trash while introducing onesself isn’t normal, but I never heard of a lunatic who thought his actions strange. You do. And if you’re concerned with wild life you may be able to help me in some trouble I’m having with buzzards. This business is part of it,” she added dourly, with a wave of her hand toward the enigmatic arrangement of copper screen wire. “Come down to the trailer and have some coffee. What do you know about the manners and customs of buzzards?”

  “Very little,” admitted Lane. He knew how they nested—hollow stumps, mostly—and how they defended their nests against intruders. The last was hardly a pleasant subject.

  “Come along,” said Professor Warren. She strode briskly downhill, speaking over her shoulder. “I’ve been doing some research on intrasensory substitution. Cases where one sense substitutes for another. Pit-vipers have a heat nerve in their foreheads so they can detect the most trivial of temperature variations, and so find warm-blooded prey in pitch darkness where their eyes can’t work. That’s heat perception instead of light. Bats feel obstacles with their ears. Buzzards have some superior substitute for smell. Put out a dead animal, even covered over with brushwood, or in a pit where it can’t be seen. Buzzards come from everywhere, immediately, even from upwind. They couldn’t possibly smell it upwind. And when they arrive, why then they try to find it with their noses! When the first buzzard comes downwind to bait that’s barely cold, he didn’t smell it! He saw the odor. It’s the only possible explanation. He simply has to be substituting some operation of his optic nerves for the sense of smell. You see?”

  Lane hardly heard. Two miles back, something had tried to kill him, and his mind had not yet recovered its “balance. He’d seen nothing. It was impossible, yet it had happened.

  “I was getting good results,” said Professor Warren vexedly, “but about ten days ago the buzzards went temperamental on me! Now they float up there, looking for food, and I put out bait which ten days ago they’d have flocked to. And they ignore it. It’s ridiculous! I’ve good proof that a good reek of organic decay can be detected optically. But I have to check through buzzards that it’s really done. And there are dead chickens in a barn yonder—” she waved a large hand—“and the buzzards aren’t interested! There’s a dead cow in a pasture, and they pay no attention! Temperament among buzzards? Or is it those damned dynamic systems I only halfway believe I’ve discovered?”

  She turned to scowl at him. He’d stopped. He was staring at a mole—a gopher. It had burrowed up to the open air and died. It looked pathetic, a mere shapeless blob of fur with tiny pinkish claws barely showing. It was untouched by flies or beetles.

  “That’s been there for a week,” she said curtly.

  “The buzzards,” said Lane painfully, “hadn’t been at some dead rabbits I passed. No blowflies have been at this mole. There was no taint in the air where the rabbits were. But there was something else.”

  “What?”

  “I know what happened,” said Lane wryly, “but I can’t believe it. It’s too crazy! But it fits too well into what I asked you.” He stopped. Nobody would believe—

  “Hah!” said Professor Warren. “I don’t mind making a fool of myself! It looks to me as if there are some gaseous dynamic systems operating around here in what ought to be good, healthy smells! Only they act like something more. They act like pseudoliving things. And I’m wondering if they’re what’s keeping my buzzards aloft. Dynamic systems, consuming the smells that buzzards ought to see!”

  Lane swallowed. Then he said: “What’s happened to the flies around here? And the mosquitos?”

  “There’s not one,” said Professor Warren. She stopped short and stared at him. “That’s queer! There haven’t been, not for ten days or so!” Her expression showed puzzlement. “Queer I didn’t realize it!” She abruptly resumed her march toward the trailer.

  Lane followed her, frowning. A shadow swept across the ground before him. He jumped. The shadow swept on. It was a buzzard. It swooped on in a long, beautiful glide and swung outward where the next spur jutted from the mountainside. He saw it float out over the broad, sunlit valley floor.

  When they were a hundred yards from the trailer, a dog came out from under it and ran toward them. It was not a beautiful dog. It had started out to be a foxhound and apparently had changed its mind on the way. Its tail drooped. It carried its head low, without spirit.

  “That’s the Monster,” said Professor Warren briefly. “He’s not ours. He belongs to a poor white family that fled in terror of their own imaginations last week. The Monster stayed behind when they left, probably because we feed him. I don’t think they did.”

  The dog cringed a greeting. Professor Warren strode on past him.

  “Wait a minute!” said Lane. “They fled from what?” “Nightmares,” boomed the professor. “They said things sat on their chests and took their breaths. They spent their nights with their heads under the bedcovers. Two of their dogs and all their chickens died, and then their cow. Old age, probably, but they ran away whining of magic.”

  “Good God!” said Lane, stunned. “Eh?” demanded the professor. She saw his expression. “What’s the matter?”

  Lane saw much—too much. He put things together. They fitted. The result was impossible, but so were the facts.

  “They—this poor white family,” said Lane, “begin to seem to me very sensible people. I think I can tell you, after all.”

  He told her exactly what had happened to him near the pathetic small heap of dead rabbits. It was his profession to tell what he had seen and done; he made a living at it. He knew better than to add details which might make his story more plausible. He told it baldly, factually, without explanation or theory.

  “Which,” he finished, “is why I carried dead leaves when I spoke to you. It was the equivalent of having a sheet ready to pull over my head.”

  Professor Warren blinked at him. Then she grunted. “Hah! It fits in. Have to be checked, of course. But idiots have called me wildly imaginative before now. I’d enjoy proving something so wild they couldn’t imagine it!” Then she grunted again. “Mr. Lane, I am a desperate woman, just desperate enough to test this absurd story—which I implicitly believe—in the hope of finding out why there has been an outbreak of artistic temperament among the local specimens of Cathartes aura—buzzards to you, sir! You’ll stay to dinner and tell me what you know.” She raised her voice in a bellow. “Carol!” she roared. “Carol! We’ve got company!”

  A door opened at one end of the giant aluminum trailer. A girl appeared carrying a wicker bird cage. Her face was troubled. Lane saw her with a sudden, extraordinary clarity. It was as if, somehow, he saw her and the mountains and the sky and valley with much more than the customary vividness.

  Lane had come a long way across the mountains, reviewing his own bafflement on the way. Then he’d had an experience which still made his flesh crawl; he was disturbed because he couldn’t believe what he remembered. But now this girl Carol looked completely as a girl should look, and remote from terror and bewilderment and unease. He felt a surprised gratitude that she was here to remind him that the world was good to live in. He regarded her with an astonished satisfaction.

  “Aunt Ann,” she said uncomfor
tably, “I put Pogo outside in his cage because it’s stuffy in the trailer. Then I looked out and didn’t see him on his perch. I went to see, and he was lying on the bottom. There are feathers all about as if he’d been beating against the bars! He’s dead!”

  Professor Warren glanced at Lane with startled eyes.

  “Pogo,” she said, “is our canary. Or was.” An instant later she said in a brusque voice: “Too bad! I’ll look him over. Carol, this is Dick Lane. He’s having dinner with us. We’re going to talk biology and dynamic systems and ha’nts and goblins and what the hell happened to the mosquitoes that were so bad when we set up camp here. We may touch on why the old cow died. Mr. Lane, this is my niece, Carol Warren.”

  The girl nodded to Lane.

  “I have a firm conviction,” boomed Professor Warren, “that this young man is going to write, and I’m going to make a learned report on, some theories so wild that they’ll make Baron Munchausen’s best effort sound like a Sunday-morning chapel talk by the dean of women.” She rubbed her hands. “I’ll stir ’em up! If they don’t try to have me certified insane, they’ll get me thrown out of the society for—”

  The Monster uttered a sound like a despairing scream. Then he snarled, facing empty air. It was unnatural and horrifying to see him bare his fangs at emptiness while he trembled horribly. He turned slowly, yelping, as if something unseeable moved. Then he snapped and growled furiously. But he was terrified. His yelps were cries of fear. Suddenly he screamed and bolted blindly, snapping at the emptiness about him. He dodged and twisted crazily, making an outcry which was hysteria and fear and the ultimate of panicky ferocity.

  Lane felt all his muscles go rigid. Without any doubt, he knew that the Monster heard faint whining sounds, and perhaps had felt faint touches upon his fur, though there was nothing at all to be seen.

  “It followed me!” Lane said savagely. Then he snapped to the girl: “Get inside! Fast! Get in the trailer!”

  He pushed at the professor while the Monster rolled over, snapping, and then plunged crazily into a tangled mass of briars. There he continued to yelp. Seconds later he scuttled out the far side of the briars and bolted desperately for the trailer. He flung himself through the opened door, almost upsetting Carol as she stood there.

  “Inside!” raged Lane. “Get in! Quick! Before it follows!”

  His hair stood on end. He thought he heard a faint, shrill, venomous whine. He had the feeling of horror he’d felt back by the dead rabbits, but now he thought of wild things fighting hopelessly in the wilderness, and of the corpses he’d seen. The sound of whining increased, as if it came from more than one source.

  He thrust Professor Warren frantically before him as he ripped off his coat and flailed the air with it. Invisible or not, he would know of anything his coat might touch.

  “Quick!” he panted. “Hurry! Get inside!”

  Chapter 2

  Inside the trailer, nothing happened. Lane went grimly through it, making sure there was no opening to the outer air. The ventilator above the small cook-stove was open. He closed it. The result of these precautions was stifling heat, but Lane felt cold chills down his spine simply by thinking of invisible stranglers trying to worm their way in to where the three humans were. There were times, too, when a deep and bitter rage took possession of him.

  “Be still!” said Professor Warren irritably, as she paced up and down the confined space of the trailer’s living section. “You make me hot to look at you! I have to think things out. Either we are all quite insane, or the people who used to own the Monster were much more sensible than we’ve been!”

  Carol sat quietly, looking from one to the other—her buxom aunt in khaki riding breeches, and Lane seething in citified tweeds. Outside the trailer there was a rocky shelf which loomed over a valley to the east.

  “They said that things sat on their chests and stopped their breaths,” Professor Warren went on, “so they ducked under the covers and the ha’nts went away. I was scornful! But now I think that they may have been right!”

  Lane forced himself to sit down. He lighted a cigarette. “There was something that tried to strangle me,” he said savagely, “and it whined while it did so. I heard the same sound just outside, and the dog saw something. But whatever attacked me and the Monster was invisible! And that’s impossible! Real things can’t be invisible!”

  “Not quite invisible,” the professor said calmly. “What do you think I was trying to do with screen wire set up on the two sides of a bit of buzzard bait? I was trying to see what kept it from reeking to high heaven! Didn’t you ever hold a match six inches from your nose, and look at the world through the hot gases above the flame? Things wobble and waver when you do. How do you think I made up my mind there were gaseous dynamic systems around here? When you look through one of them, things waver and wobble! The things you’re talking about are just as invisible as the column of hot air above a match, which means they’re not easy to see—you have to know what to look for—but they can be seen!” “Then what tried to kill me?”

  “Certainly a dynamic system,” the professor insisted. “It had to be. A dynamic system is a parcel of matter using energy in a patterned way. A whirlwind’s a dynamic system. So’s a gasoline engine. Or a rabbit, or a man. Whatever attacked you and the Monster had to be a dynamic system because it used energy in a patterned fashion. Look here! Blow a smoke ring.”

  Lane blinked. The professor gestured impatiently. He blew a smoke ring. It went slowly across the stifling hot interior of the trailer, expanding as it went.

  “That,” said the professor, “is a very simple dynamic system. It’s a quantity of air which happens to have a toroidal motion. It isn’t alive. It’s only a vortex ring. You can see it because the air of which it’s composed happens to contain smoke. But a vortex ring can exist in plain air just as—”

  “Aunt Ann! Look at the smoke ring!” It was Carol, her voice strained.

  The professor blinked. Then she looked at the thin, drifting ring of smoke. It was deformed. It was bent on one side exactly as if it had struck something solid.

  The professor said, “That’s it! There’s one now! You can see the ceiling waver through it.”

  There was a sudden motion of the air. The unseeable something which had deflected the smoke ring moved. The tendrils of smoke wavered and curled through the space from which they had previously been barred.

  “It’s one of them!” exulted the professor. “Right in here! But why doesn’t the Monster react? Fetch him out.”

  Lane dragged the dog, cowering, from underneath a stool. He held the dog up. The brute panted and wriggled. He gave no sign of fright. His tongue lolled.

  “If there is something here,” said Lane, “he doesn’t smell it. And it can’t be seen or he’d see it. It—”

  There were now flat layers of tobacco smoke in the air, made visible by sunlight striking into the room through closed glass windows. There was no air movement except the extremely slow general turnover of air in a closed room, but something passed swiftly through those tranquil layers of vapor, disturbing them. It was startling. It was appalling. Lane did not see any wavering of the background behind it.

  “Item!” said the professor with satisfaction. “We have a good observation indicating that there are sometimes dynamic systems in air which can move through smoke layers and disturb them. Perhaps we should provide ourselves with sheets to pull over our heads.”

  She beamed at Lane, who looked warily at Carol.

  “It got in, probably when the dog did,” he said grimly.

  The professor rubbed her hands. “Of course!” she said zestfully. “But we know how to keep it from harming any of us! I’m going to catch this specimen and find out a few things about it!”

  Lane’s eyes went back to Carol. She was watching all the interior of the trailer with steady, intent eyes—beautiful eyes, Lane thought, but troubled now.

  “If it’s what we think, it’s dangerous,” Lane pointed out. “T
he first thing should be to get her away from this place. I feel responsible. I let the thing in here.”

  “Pooh!” said the professor.

  She went to a cupboard built into the wall of the trailer, and took out some folded sheets. She shook one open, lengthwise, and tossed it to her niece. It spread out in the air.

  The Monster snarled. He cried out at the sheet, barking and snarling and yelping all at once, his voice rising in pitch. The professor’s mouth dropped open. The sheet fell almost upon Carol, but it didn’t reach the floor everywhere. One edge was caught up upon a stool. Besides, there was a spot where something writhed and squirmed and whined shrilly beneath it. That something was roughly rounded and somewhat more than a foot in diameter. It was caught under the cloth, and apparently could not lift it.

  The Monster went mad with terror. He made a tumult of fear and ferocity together. He screamed at the somehow horrible shapelessness beneath the white cloth. Yet he cringed away from it as he made his high-pitched din.

  But one edge of the sheet was caught on a stool. The throbbing thing seemed to fight its way toward that upraised edge. Suddenly the sheet sagged. Whatever had been trapped was trapped no longer. It seemed to Lane that its whining became a sound of maniacal fury. The Monster dived out of sight and moaned in terror.

  Carol made a convulsive movement. Lane jerked his eyes to her. Her eyes were wide and terrified. Her mouth was open. She tried to gasp. She choked, suffocating, beating the air before her with her hands.

  Lane plunged toward her, snatching up the cloth, which ripped because one of his feet was on it. He did not notice the resistance. He flung it over Carol’s head in instinctive use of the professor’s dictum that a sheet over one’s head would be sound sense at such a moment.

  Then horror filled him. The sheet did not fall naturally about her. It draped over her head, but it enclosed something else. Something huge and invisible clung to her, whining and throbbing.