War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

  Sitting in the car, Lane felt what amounted to truculent uneasiness, although there had been no sign of Gizmos since the ear came over the pass from the next valley to the east. He waited with growing impatience for the professor’s return. He wanted to get out of town, now. He’d gotten equipment with which they could defend themselves more adequately than before. He didn’t want to be attacked—if they were to be attacked—in the middle of a town whose people would not know what was happening, but only that they died.

  A dog trotted across the street, wisely watching the traffic and moving with that matter-of-fact acceptance of the ways of men which is so casual among dogs, and of which no other lower animal seems capable.

  Carol followed his eyes. The dog paused in the middle of the street to let a car go by, and trotted the rest of the way. A man on the sidewalk spoke to the dog. It was one of those trivial incidents which seldom happen in a city where dogs have only their masters, no other human acquaintances, to greet them. The dog politely wagged his tail and trotted on.

  Lane was still uneasy, but it was necessary to wait. He opened his mouth to speak—

  The man on the sidewalk opened his mouth to gasp. He staggered. He beat the air before him. His eyes went panicky; he choked, and fell to his knees. He jerked his head from side to side, his mouth open, fighting crazily against nothingness.

  The Monster howled.

  “Shut the windows,” snapped Lane.

  He was out of the car, rushing for the fallen man. Other people were hurrying to help. Somebody bent over the victim as he collapsed to the street. Lane thrust other figures aside. He snapped his lighter before the face of the semiconscious, panic-crazed man. There was a leaping, momentary, lambent flame. There was a horrible odor. A thin shrill shriek ended before it was well begun. The fallen man could fill his lungs. He did. He gasped for breath which now he could draw in.

  The Monster howled again.

  Lane said sharply. “I’ve seen this before. If it ever happens to you again, or to anybody else, make a flame. Wave it close! You’ll be able to breathe! Pass it on!”

  There was a small crowd of two dozen people, already gathered about the prostrate figure. Others were hastening to see what was the matter. Lane looked about him, and saw blank incomprehension on every face. The group was merely astonished and concerned over what they assumed to be a stroke of some sort, happening to a friend. To them, what Lane had done was completely without rational connection to the emergency it had met.

  Then one of them gagged and struggled to breathe. He flailed his arms crazily. He fought against suffocation with stark terror in his eyes. Lane pushed toward that man and waved a flame before his face and behind him somebody else collapsed and there were startled cries. One of the figures hurrying to this spot stopped short and began to fight for breath. And the Monster screamed in the car, and tried to find a place to hide.

  He found himself cursing at the things which now, very obviously, descended upon Murfree with lethal intentions. Flight was the only possible recourse, leaving these people to the fate the Gizmos would deal out. But it did not occur to him. Someone collapsed two yards away. The crowd was still bewildered, still unable to realize that danger existed for them as well as the two-no, three—no, four—struggling figures on the ground. Lane flung himself to his knees beside the nearest, and waved the lighter flame, and then his own breath stopped and he waved the small blaze before his own face. But there was another person down, a woman this time, and whinings were loud all about him.

  He knew what would come, yet it was impossible not to try to do what he could. He was actually trying to fight a swarm of Gizmos with a pocket lighter. He swept his absurd little flame about and other small flames rose and tiny shrieks sounded.

  Then the professor waded into the extremely small space of crazed confusion. Of all imaginable things, she flourished a pillowcase. By her expression she was holding her breath as she thrust the open end of the pillowslip down upon the contorted face of a fallen fat man, now turning purple. The pillowcase billowed. Something was caught in it, throbbing and fluttering horribly inside the cloth. The professor closed the open end of the bag, squeezing it with an air of intense satisfaction modified by the look of someone trying not to breathe. She held the trapped Gizmo triumphantly aloft. It made a frantic whine.

  Lane freed his own lips and nostrils of a Gizmo, by burning it. His eyebrows were singed by the flare-up, but the stuff he drew into his lungs was unbreathable. His senses reeled, yet he knew such hatred that it seemed he could go on forever, destroying Gizmos one by one, living on hatred only.

  But of course it was not so.

  Chapter 7

  Blue-white flame flashed before Lane’s face. There were small shriekings, and Carol gasped, “Back to the car! Aunt Ann has a prisoner! They’ll follow—maybe—if we drag him out of town!”

  She tugged at Lane’s shoulder; again there was a flashing of bluish flame. She’d turned on a brazing torch and worked its spark igniter, and extended the flame to the limit. She cleared space before Lane’s nostrils and lips. A brazing torch was supposed to burn for two hours on a tank of compressed gas, so she used it lavishly. Lane took it from her hands. There were human screams in the street now. A few people ran in panic, with no idea of what they fled from. Some few beat at emptiness, struggling to breathe. There were some already on the ground, strangling. And above there was now a loud whining sound, louder than the human voices. It was overhead, as loud as a storm wind, and of a quality that made the flesh crawl.

  Lane fought his way to the car, leaning against violent wind-gusts. The Gizmos were forming themselves into that overwhelming whirling formation, that globular organization which they’d used before to carry dust as a weapon. Against it, Lane played the long flame like a scythe. Once, apparently, the blade of fire penetrated to one of the currents which had been visible in the dust clouds. Fire leaped along that flow.

  This swarm was no dust cloud, but it was not quite invisible because the appearance of minor waverings produced by a single Gizmo was multiplied by their number. The tops of nearby houses became blurred. Into that squealing organization of spinning Gizmos, Lane probed fiercely, as whalers in ancient days probed with lances for the vital parts of whales. Once he hit what in a roll-tag dust cloud looked like a surface vein; then the dying Gizmos carried the pale thin flame for forty feet. Suddenly now he struck an artery, and the thinnest and palest of conflagrations leaped along that whining wind and flared up beyond where he could see it. But the swarm broke up.

  A horse tied to a farm wagon reared and kicked and fell to the ground. Somebody ran crazily, whipping the air before his face. Someone else, on his knees, battled nothingness and toppled to the sidewalk.

  “Open!” cried Carol fiercely. “Open the door!”

  The professor was gasping for breath, an expression of complete revulsion on her face. The odor of burned Gizmos was awful. She still had the improbable, inflated, frantically throbbing pillowcase.

  Carol beat upon the door of the car. Burke, inside it, tried with shaking hands to fill the gas cup of a blowtorch. He heard nothing, he had closed and locked the car doors in terror. Lane struck the door with the tank of the brazing torch, and the glass cracked, held together only by its shatterproof constitution.

  “Open up!” raged Lane, “Or I’ll bum a way in!”

  Burke jerked his head up and reached over, his fingers all thumbs. It was seconds before he could pull up the tiny knob which worked the door locks. Carol snatched the door wide.

  “Down with the window, Carol,” commanded the professor. “Dick, you’re taking the wheel again. This idiot has cost lives!”

  Lane crowded Burke out of the way and started the motor. The professor seated herself stolidly beside the other front door, holding the shrilling, fluttering pillowslip outside.

  “Use the flame, Carol,” she snapped. “The monsters are trying to tug my fingers loose. And—”

  Her voice cut off. Carol care
fully swung the flame that Lane had surrendered to her. She speared the place before her aunt’s face. The professor breathed, squeamishly.

  The car moved. It pulled out into the street as the Monster howled and howled.

  “Now,” called the professor over the dog’s outcry, “now we make this creature squawk. Keep them from suffocating me, Carol.”

  She caught the neck of the pillowslip with her other hand. She twisted it, confining her prisoner more tightly still. And it uttered a frantic buzzing, whining sound which rose in pitch, and rose again.

  “Hal” said the professor with confidence. “Now we can make time! I think they’ll follow us!”

  Lane swerved to avoid a stopped car. The traffic in the town had been considerable, but the tumult had lasted only minutes. There was a strong tendency for cars to stop to see what was the matter, rather than to flee the spot where other humans might be in trouble. But Lane was leading that trouble away—he hoped. Once, where double-parking blocked the road, he jolted up on a sidewalk and went around the jammed place. The car lurched down again to the pavement of the street.

  “Look behind,” Lane ordered, “and see if people are still being attacked.”

  “One man’s getting up,” Carol reported, “with people running to him to ask why he fell. There’s another man being helped up.”

  “How badly are things blurred?” demanded Lane. “If the whole swarm’s following us…”

  There was a pause. He drove at twenty miles an hour. Trees appeared ahead now; the business district was behind them.

  “They’re following,” said Carol, composedly. “They aren’t thick at the ground level. I can see clearly there. Most of them are higher. Housetops are fuzzy to look at. Probably most of them are higher still.”

  Trees closed over their heads. The car rolled on.

  The professor asked, “Do you think I’d better squeeze this thing tighter, Dick? They seem to be with us. I can feel them touching my hands and wrists. And Carol’s keeping a flame playing out the window that seems to be popping them off at a good rate. But they keep after the squalling thing in the pillowcase.”

  “Maybe I can speed up a trifle,” said Lane. He did so. It did not occur to him to be astonished at his or the professor’s composure. When one is busy, though, panic is rare. To be doing something about any situation is an excellent tranquilizer.

  “Twenty-five miles an hour,” said Lane a moment later. “We’ll time their maximum flight-speed. When they stop fumbling at your hands, we’ll have hit their speed limit.”

  The car left the green-shaded streets of Murfree. The cloudless sky and brilliant sunshine on the open fields was an almost dramatic change. Rolling valley and towering mountains made an amazing difference in the feel of the world. There were, now, small buff tings of breeze in the opened front windows of the car, which continued to gather speed.

  “They’re barely able to keep up, now,” said the professor briskly. “How fast?”

  “Thirty-two, no, thirty-three miles an hour.”

  The dusty car rattled less loudly and roared at a lessened tempo. The professor grunted: “Hm. They’re back in force now. I don’t like the feel of their fumbling at my hands. They are nasty creatures, Dick! Carol, is the main swarm still following?”

  “They’re still following,” said Carol.

  “Find out from Burke,” Lane told her, “where we can stop their chasing us, without being near any town they can vent their spite on.”

  Burke had not spoken once since the others forced him to open the car door. He still trembled. Now he said, dry-throated: “I’m—sorry, Mr. Lane, that I didn’t help much back yonder. But I didn’t understand what you were plannin’ to do.”

  “That’s all right,” said Lane, with politeness. “The Gizmos attacked Murfree. Professor Warren caught one, and we’re making the others follow us because of its squealing. While they follow us, they can’t kill people we’ve left behind. Now we want to know when to make them stop following us. Somewhere as far as we can get from a village, and, if possible, even a dwelling.”

  “Y-yes,” said Burke. But he sat still, frozen. The Monster howled.

  “Slap the Monster,” said Lane irritably. “Make him shut up! And tell me where to dump our whining friends.”

  “I’ll—try to think, Mr. Lane,” said Burke.

  Lane drove on. Clouds banked up ahead. There were flickerings of lightning.

  “Looks like a thunderstorm,” said Lane. “I might manage to drive through it. What do Gizmos do in thunderstorms?”

  The professor chortled. “It should be a beautiful thing, Dick! A gas metabolism means ionized gases. But when you want to de-ionize a gas you bubble it through water! Rain ought to cut them down to size!”

  Lane saw the gray front of falling water appear through a lower place in the westward rampart of the mountains. It advanced over other crests, presenting a long, drapery-like curtain of rain that moved into the valley. The highway forked, and Lane chose the turning that would take the car nearer to the rain.

  “Maybe,” said the professor hopefully, “if the rain lets us lose the others, we can keep this one.”

  “For a pet, no doubt,” said Lane. “Is it in extra good voice just now, or are the ones behind us getting nearer?”

  “Some,” Carol told him, “are going on ahead.”

  “Which we can’t allow,” said Lane. “I don’t know how smart they are, but if they’re smart enough they might blind me with dust and get me ditched.” He increased the car’s speed a trifle and headed for the center of the storm area.

  Presently there was a rush of wind, bearing dust in curling masses before it; then a gray curtain marched across the land. The car rumbled and rattled between ranks of pine trees which hid everything but the dark clouds overhead and the way ahead.

  With a sudden rush the rain arrived. It pattered loudly on the car roof, and washed reddish streaks of wet dust down the back window, and the windshield wipers swept it from one side to the other. The professor cranked up the window beside her, cramping the open end of the pillowcase tightly into place. The inflated bag of cloth flapped and wobbled outside, becoming spotted by the rain. Carol turned off the brazing torch with which she’d been protecting her aunt against attack.

  The sound of all the world changed as the car was closed. Rain fell in seeming streaks. The highway surface turned dark and glistening, and a two-inch mist seemed to carpet it. The woodland on either side became almost black. Thunder roared and lightning flashed, and the tires sang and the windshield wipers clicked and the air inside the car became dank and somehow fragrant with odors brought in by the wetness.

  “We ought to bring our prisoner in,” said the professor uncomfortably. “We can probably get it into the little garbage can you’ve provided. I’ve decided. Dick, that if I can take this to Washington and show it to some government biologists, there’ll be no difficulty in having this affair taken care of.”

  “Perhaps,” said Lane. “But I’m not worried too much about the Gizmos’ health. Let’s let it stay outside.”

  He went on. The road curved to the right and went steeply down, returning toward the broader bottom of the valley. There was rain in solid masses, falling on pastureland which now appeared.

  They had ridden for a good two miles beyond the last patch of pine trees before, abruptly, they ran out of the rain. Then there was wet red earth on either hand. Ahead, the storm marched toward the north and east. They followed it. The world appeared exactly as usual. But the pillowcase, bouncing and flapping outside the front right-hand window, did not look as resilient as it had some time before.

  “I wish you’d stop,” said the professor uneasily, “and let me see what’s happened to my specimen. It doesn’t look as lively as it did. I do want to get this to Washington!”

  Lane braked and stopped the car.

  “Watch the landscape behind,” he said briefly to Carol. “I’ll watch ahead.” As he heard the professor cranking down
her window he reflected that Burke, who owned this car, was reduced to the status of a passenger without voice in the conduct of affairs. He said: “Burke?”

  “Y-yes, Mr. Lane,” said Burke, still shakily.

  “Haven’t heard from you in some time,” said Lane. “What’s your opinion of the state of things now? Still believe in a military organization of the Gizmos?”

  “It looks mighty like it to me, sir,” said Burke unsteadily. “They—wouldn’t want a prisoner carried off that we could learn things from. It’d make ’em stop an attack to try to keep us from carryin’ away a prisoner.”

  Professor Warren broke into lamentations. The pillowslip was soaked by rain; the only dry spots were the places where it had been clamped by the window. Now, inside the car, the pillowslip was limp. It was not totally empty; the wet cloth still contained bubbles. None of them, however, was big enough to be a Gizmo.

  “It’s dead!” lamented the professor. “And it could have solved everything! We’ll have to catch another!”

  She opened the neck of the sack. An intolerable odor of carrion came out. She hastily threw the pillowcase out of the window and panted for clean air. Lane put the car into gear and went on.

  For almost an hour there was no tangible evidence that Gizmos existed anywhere but in the area they had left, though Lane knew better. Then they came to a place where they saw four dead cattle on a hillside. The animals were definitely dead, not peacefully reclining and chewing the cud. But that was no positive sign of Gizmos. Lane stopped the car and cut off the motor. He listened. The universe was without sound. No insects. No bird songs. He started the motor once more.

  “Not proven,” he said wryly, “but I’d bet that they’re either here or they have been. And it ought to take a lot of Gizmos to kill all the things that chirp and twitter.”

  Professor Warren stared at him as if appalled at the idea. And it was a startling thing, once one considered it. Any insect-eating bird captures bugs by hundreds or thousands every day, and there is no acre of open ground without its numerous feathered foragers. Woodlands shelter many more. Swifts and swallows carry on their hunting until late in the twilight, and bats carry on through the dark. It’s hard to realize the number of insects devoured in one acre in one day, and yet the number of insects is not diminished. To depopulate a field of its insect inhabitants is incredible destruction. To destroy also its birds, its field mice, its rabbits, its moles…