War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

  Lane and Carol exchanged startled glances. Then Lane’s face went expressionless. He could see Professor Warren inside the plate-glass window of the filling station. She put coins into the instrument.

  “When I see ’em,” said Sam, “I’ll think about believin’ in ’em.”

  Professor Warren greeted someone on the telephone. She began to speak, crisply and with authority, into the instrument. She evidently spoke with great precision and with scientific terminology.

  “They’ve been killin’ things,” said Burke sagely. “They’re what’s killed off the game people’ve been talkin’ about. They killed those cows in the courthouse a while back.”

  Sam said humorously: “They ain’t killed me yet.”

  “They’ll get to you,” said Burke firmly. “They’ve been leavin’ us humans alone—so far. I’m not stayin’ around till they start killin’ people. I’m gettin’ out.”

  “Scared?” asked Sam incredulously. “Scared of something you can’t see?”

  “Yep,” said Burke. “I’m scared of anything I can’t fight. And how’re you goin’ to fight somethin’ you can’t see?”

  Inside the station, Professor Warren’s expression turned to one of shock, her face bewildered and crimsoning. Then she bellowed infuriatedly into the transmitter. A sound came through the plate glass. It was the professor’s voice, expressing a violently disparaging opinion of the person at the other end of the line. Then she stopped and jiggled the hook furiously. She slammed down the receiver and came out, raging.

  “Idiot!” she barked. “Lunatic! Fool! Imbecile! He pretends to think I’m joking and says it’s bad taste to get him out of bed to listen to a joke! He hung up on me! He says he’s going to complain to the dean!”

  She stamped her feet, ready to weep from pure frustration. But at this instant the Monster whimpered. Then he yelped. Then he screamed, and tried to burrow beneath one of the seats of the car. He scratched desperately to make a place to hide, while he howled ever more shrilly and horribly.

  By instinct, Lane swept his eyes about as his hand went to the two-gallon gasoline can which so far he had not used at all. Carol gasped and pointed.

  Back along the dirt road on which the car had come to this place, there was a cloudlike stirring of the air. Over the top of the growing corn they saw a great movement of dust. At first glance—but only at first—it looked as if another car were on the way here. But this dust cloud was larger than a car could raise, and it was not stirred up to float and then settle back again. This cloud moved as a unit, and it did not merely sweep along the highway. It rolled. It was a monstrous ball of airborne reddish powder which rolled swiftly and terribly onward, at the height of a six-story building. It was unnatural. It was artificial. It was organized. It was horribly, terribly purposeful.

  It came swiftly toward the filling station.

  Chapter 5

  Lane jumped out of the car, unscrewing the top of the gasoline can as he moved. He began to pour recklessly, making a fifteen-foot circle of wetness on the dry ground.

  “Firepots!” he snapped. “Carol, get ’em, quick! Get inside this circle! Get the others in it!”

  He lighted the gasoline he’d spilled. The flame ran around the ring of oil-soaked ground.

  The gigantic dust ball swept on. It turned in its path, following the roadway, rolling up to and over the filling station. There it ceased to roll. Instead, it hovered. Dust poured down from it in a blinding, choking downpour. There was a shrill sound in the air, like the keening of a storm wind. There were eddies and currents and violent gusts, in which the gasoline flames leaped and gamboled. There was a duststorm of a thickness and intensity to overwhelm anything, but it was strictly localized. A hundred yards from the filling station in any direction, the air was perfectly calm. There was no stirring of dust. There was no disturbance of the early-morning tranquility. But in the center of the dust cloud …

  “In here!” rasped Lane. “Come in here!”

  He dragged at Carol, bringing her into the ring of fire. The professor came, stumbling. Lane plunged out through the flames and brought in Burke. The filling station proprietor was down, fighting madly for breath, flailing his arms crazily, suffocating and half buried in dust. Lane broke out again, holding his breath, and dragged at him. The strangling man fought as if he were drowning. And things tugged at Lane. His garments quivered. Gizmos as individuals were the weakest of creatures, but here they seemed to have formed themselves into a greater dynamic system whose parts were Gizmos. Swirling currents composed of the whining horrors twisted and spun madly in a complex fashion which combined their separate strengths into the power of storm winds close to hurricane force.

  The owner of the filling station fought the tumbling dust as if it were water in which he was drowning. He caught Lane by the body and tried to climb. Lane himself was strangling…

  The reek of burning gasoline struck his nostrils. Carol had scooped up gas-soaked dust in a firepot and bent over him with it. His mouth and nostrils were unsealed, while the squealing about him grew more shrill. But what stuff he had to breathe was an intolerable reek of pure foulness.

  He staggered back to the ring of flame, dragging the other man. Carol swung her tin-can torch. They got through to the center of the ring of fire. Dust drifted down in palpable masses. Any other source of flame would have been put out, but the gasoline wetted the dust which fell into it, and flamed even higher as it spread out. The professor, with shaking hands, filled a firepot with burning, gas-soaked dust and whirled it about her head, shouting indistinguishable things above the uproar.

  “It’ll burn out soon!” panted Carol in Lane’s ear.

  “I know!” he gasped. “Come with me! Swing the firepot! I’ll pump gas out on the ground and light it.”

  She caught his hand lest they be separated, and they plunged through the smoky yellow flames. Instantly they were in a monstrous tumult and a storm of blinding, stifling dust. It was partly pure good fortune which made Lane stumble into Burke’s car in the midst of the screaming obscurity about him. Its wheels were already hub-deep in dust. He dragged Carol around the car and fought his way to the gas pumps. He pulled loose a hose and flipped the switch arm so that the pump would start. He lurched away to the limit of the hose’s length-breathing through doubled folds of his coat while Carol swung a firepot—and spurted out a flood of gasoline, letting it pour at full volume on the ground.

  Carol cried in his ear: “The firepot’s burned out!”

  Things tugged at him. He began to suffocate, even with the coat letting him breathe after a fashion, because he was submerged, enclosed in a fiercely clinging mass of Gizmos.

  Then he snapped his lighter. Incredibly, the spilled pool of car fuel caught. There was something like a booming roar, and flames leaped up crazily downwind, and there was a shrieking and a wrenching twist of the massed Gizmos nearby as yellow fire leaped up twenty and thirty feet into the air.

  Lane gasped for breath. Carol staggered, panting. He steadied her, and then took the burned-out firepot from her hand and dribbled gasoline into it and lighted it at the booming pond of fire, and threw the flaming sand to right and left. There were more thin screamings.

  “That’s the trick!” he panted.

  He flung more burning gasoline-soaked dust. Flames went soaring through the close-packed Gizmos of the cloud formation. The greater dynamic system was wounded, as parts of it were ignited and tended to pass their own destruction on to others. Then, still unable to speak for lack of breath, Carol pointed. Lane struggled to drag the gas hose nearer to the ring of fire he’d first made, and made another leaping pool of flame, and a third…

  The squealing cloud began to thin. The globular cluster of Gizmos seemed to evaporate, because it ceased to exist as a unit. The dust the separate creatures had carried now drifted downward. The Gizmos themselves became invisible, as before they made themselves into a jinnlike swirling cloud. Perhaps they fled, or perhaps they continued to hover nearby.
Lane knew only that they no longer whined and whirled about the filling station, and that the towering mass of dust was now settling tranquilly to the ground.

  The scene of the attack had changed remarkably within the past ten minutes. When the car had arrived, there’d been a dusty dirt road leading past a gas-pump platform of concrete. There’d been a very neat, modern filling station, with a workshop and a greasing rack and plate-glass windows all tidy and bright and businesslike. Now there was a great splotch of fallen dust upon the landscape, like a miniature Sahara. From four different spots, four fountains of smoky yellow flame roared upward. Dense black soot rose in columns from the tops of the flames. The filling station was smeared with dust. A dune ran into the workshop. There were rust-red hillocks, one of which almost enclosed the car, and an area a hundred yards across in which no green thing showed: it was pure dry powder, fine as talc.

  Staggering, nearly knee-deep in the impalpable stuff, the professor and Burke hauled at something so covered with dust that it was unrecognizable until they had it in the clear. It was Sam, the filling-station proprietor. The professor began to apply artificial respiration, unskillfully but with great earnestness. At her command, Burke helped her. There was a tiny stirring somewhere and the station cat broke the surface of the dust. It sneezed and spat and moved daintily away to more solid ground.

  One of the fires began to burn low. The flame ring Lane had made first now went out. They smelled burned gasoline. Lane looked anxiously at Carol. She nodded reassurance. Together, they waded through the yielding dust to where the professor and Burke labored over Sam.

  “This affair,” panted the professor, “is a great deal more serious than I imagined. I’m afraid this poor man is dead!”

  Burke, working beside her, said profoundly: “You folks must’ve worked things out even better than I did. I wouldn’t’ve thought of fighting ghosts with fire. But it sure chased ’em!”

  “And things like this,” the professor panted, “are apt to happen all over the country. I am beginning to feel genuine alarm. We simply have to alert the authorities. We have to set research teams at work to solve the problem these Gizmos present. They—why, they are a menace to everybody! They can do incalculable harm!”

  She worked resolutely at the task of trying to revive the owner of the filling-station, Burke, at her side, working with a precision indicating practice at this task.

  “If you don’t need help just yet,” said Lane, “I’ll try the phone again. May be able to get a doctor.”

  He waded through the dust to the station again. Carol, as if automatically, went with him. He used the telephone, first to try to get a doctor for the owner of the station, and then for long distance. It was incongruous to have so desperately urgent a task to do, and to have the telephone operator break in from time to time, demanding more coins in the phone lest she break off the connection. Toward the end, Carol was handing Lane the coins he needed. Once, he heard the ringing of a cash register bell.

  He hung up, his face dark.

  “It’s not good?”

  “It could hardly be worse,” he said bitterly. “No doctor. There are only two in Murfree. They’re both out on emergency calls. People dead or believed to have died in their sleep. I tried for other doctors nearby. There were a dozen sudden deaths in the county last night, in four families. All the doctors are busy trying to find out what they died of, because it looks contagious.” His voice was ironic. “They’re trying to find out how to protect the other members of the families involved, because they must have been exposed! A sudden disease is a better explanation than mine for the things that happened everywhere last night. It’s easier to believe, anyhow!”

  He started for the door. Carol said: “Dick, I had to take change from the cash register, for the telephone.”

  He handed her a bill, and she put it in the cash drawer, closed it, and followed him out. The professor had ceased her efforts at artificial respiration and stood wringing her hands. Burke had heaved Sam’s limp form over his shoulder and was struggling through the dust toward the station.

  “He’s dead,” said the professor unhappily. “We tried, but—We just thought to look. And he’d breathed in dust. He drowned in dust. He gasped for breath and his lungs filled with it as if it had been water. Nothing can be done—nothing!”

  Burke said, “His number was up, that’s all. Those things came, carryin’ dust, an’ they dropped it. They’d’ve managed to put out any fire we made except a gasoline fire. That’s what they had the dust for.” He added, “Somebody must’ve fought ’em with fire before, and they figured out what to do about it.”

  “We did,” said Lane grimly. He spoke to the professor. “Gizmos aren’t a local product. They’re nation-wide. There were sudden deaths everywhere last night—hundreds of them. What’s happened here has been happening everywhere, with variations. The official reaction is that some new disease has developed among animals, and that now it’s attacking humans. It’s called a plague, which so far has hardly appeared in cities. People are advised to get rid of their pets, to stay away from any place where there’s wild life, and to wait for bacteriologists and epidemologists to track down the germ and develop immunizing shots against it.”

  The professor was appalled. “The idiots!” she raged. “The fools! We’ve got to tell them—”

  “No,” said Lane. “We’ve got to show them.”

  Burke waded past him with his burden. He put the proprietor inside his filling station. Then he went out to the car and examined it carefully and brushed a six-inch mass of dust from the top of the hood. He brushed at the radiator, then climbed in and started the motor, listening with a critical ear. He nodded, and put it in gear. The car moved slowly through the dust, which flowed almost like a liquid. Its exhaust left a trail on the surface. There were monstrous frozen dust waves made by its wheels. The dunelike coating on its roof slipped and slid and poured downward.

  Once clear of the thicker dust deposit, Burke stopped the car again. He got out and came back to the filling station. He came out with a brush and cloths. He began to clean the car, and then wipe the windows to transparency once more. When he had finished, he beat at his own clothing to rid it of dust.

  “I’m known to sportsmen as a reasonably truthful writer about hunting,” said Lane, “but that’s not a quick channel to acceptance of our information. This is too serious to waste time persuading people about. Have you better contacts than that?”

  The professor wrung her hands. “If they’ve got the idea that it’s a plague,” she said bitterly, “it’ll be ten times harder to make them see sense! There’s nobody as hidebound as a researcher! They talk about teamwork, but it means that nobody dares think anything the rest of the team won’t accept! And I’ve got a reputation for imagination, which is the one thing that scares a scientific mind! They’ll believe anybody but me—anybody with a doctorate, at least!”

  Burke approached, still brushing at his clothing. He had an odd air of combined apprehension and zest.

  “Me,” he said, “I’m leaving. I figure you people kept me from getting what he got—” he gestured toward the filling station—“and you know plenty that I’d like to know. You knew what to do when they came in a cloud. I’ve got to figure things out, and I want all the information I can get. Want to come along with me?”

  “We certainly don’t want to stay here,” Lane said. He turned to the professor again. “Your best bet, of course, is to get back to the University with your facts.”

  “Facts? What good are facts? I’ve got to show Gizmos—alive, dead, stuffed and made into microscopic slides for histological examination before anybody with a scientific reputation will agree that a thing can be alive without being flesh and blood. But I’ve had ’em try to strangle me! Those things are dangerous!”

  “Look,” said Lane. “I’ve got some friends—a mixed bunch. Some will believe me, but as mere businessmen who hunt and fish, nobody will listen to them any more than to me. But there
’s one man—he’s head of a pharmaceutical laboratory in New Jersey. They make antibiotics and such things. We’ve hunted and fished together. It’s not likely he’ll accept all we’ve learned without some proof, but he’ll let me show him the proof—if I can get it to him.” The professor shrugged.

  “One more phone call, then,” said Lane, “and we’ll start.” To Burke he said: “We’ll ride with you and tell you what we know. When you want to split off, you’ll let us out at the nearest airfield or railroad station. Does that suit you?”

  “You made a bargain,” said Burke expansively. “I’ll fill up the car.”

  Lane went back into the filling station, Carol following. He heard a curious scratching sound. Instantly tense, he went to see. It came from an overturned oil drum. He dragged at it and the Monster crawled out: cringing: moaning: trembling in every muscle. He had fled to the darkest, remotest place his terror-stricken instincts could suggest. He had not been killed. The Gizmos this time had concentrated upon the humans.

  Lane fumbled for more money for the phone. Matter-of-factly, Carol pressed the “No Sale” button on the cash register. She handed him coins.

  “It looks,” said Lane wryly, “as if you agree with Burke that property rights may soon seem ridiculous.”

  He dropped a coin into the phone.

  Outside, Burke filled the tank of the car. He hunted in the stockroom and found half a dozen of the one-gallon emergency tanks designed to be carried in case one runs out of gas. He filled each one, carefully, and also carried out an armful of cans of motor oil. “I’ve got ideas,” he said. “I’m gettin’ ready for ’em!” Lane heard him in the workshed as the phone connection through Richmond and Washington and Philadelphia went through to New Jersey. The connection was completed. It was twenty minutes before Lane hung up. His jaw was grimly set and his eyes burned. Burke was sitting at the wheel of the car. When Lane came out he said with relief: “I was scared they were comin’ back with a new trick. If they had, I’d’ve had to go off and leave you.”