War with the Gizmos
Murray Leinster
The first battles began in the wilderness. The animals in the forests and glades struggled furiously for life and often fought with splendid courage. But they never won; they were always killed. And now it was man’s turn.
War with the Gizmos
by Murray Leinster
PROLOGUE
The first battles of the war with the Gizmos took place in deep wilderness, and human beings knew nothing about them. Cities were not attacked, in the beginning. The initial skirmishes were fought by bears and wildcats and mountain sheep, and other creatures blood-kin to men. Those battles were often magnificent, but they were usually disastrous, and few of them were ever reported.
There was, though, a bear found dead in the high Sierras, killed after a fight of epic proportions, as was shown by torn-up earth and crushed brushwood and toppled saplings. There was a mountain lion found slain in Colorado after no less desperate a conflict. A slaughtered wildcat’s furious struggle for life was noted in northern Michigan, where the signs of the conflict were clear. And a fisherman on a stream in Pennsylvania saw the death of a four-point buck. It fought with splendid courage. It used horns and hoofs and pure desperation against an invisible antagonist, but it finally sank to the ground and died while the angler looked on, appalled and unbelieving.
These were battles with Gizmos. The signs were unmistakable. The dead creatures had not a wound or a mark upon them. The battlegrounds showed plainly their tracks, but no trace of a thing or things with which they had fought. In one case, as was noted, a man saw the fighting, but he didn’t see the buck’s antagonist. He only saw that the buck deer died. Its murderer could not possibly have been anything but a Gizmo.
There is no point, now, in reviewing the controversy about the Gizmos’ origin. Some still insist that they came from outer space. This is hard to believe, because a spaceship under Gizmo control is almost impossible to imagine. Some authorities consider that Gizmos are native to Earth. They point to primitive fears of evil spirits as proof of their presence on Earth since time beyond remembering. But the objection to this is that primitive man could not have survived had he been attacked by the Gizmos who made war on us. In effect this argument is that since our ancestors were not exterminated by Gizmos, there were no Gizmos in ancient days. Yet the legends of fiends and djinns and efrits and ghuls, and of eerie inhabitants of remote, are singularly convincing when one considers them in connection with Gizmos.
In any case the Gizmos seemed to appear with the suddenness of a thunderclap. They had the enormous advantage of being totally unreasonable. These days we believe only in highly scientific things. Highly scientific opinions change continually, and so do the things we believe in. But Gizmos were not flesh and blood, and therefore not scientific, so we would not notice such signs of their presence as must have existed before the war. However they appeared, they were able to marshall their forces without interference; they established bases in our forests, pickets in our woodlots, and observation posts in the parks of towns and cities. Gizmo patrols moved wherever they pleased without anybody crediting their reality—even when they committed atrocities. They had every possible advantage in their preparations for war.
In military terms they secured almost complete surprise. Apart from atrocity reports there is no evidence that anybody noticed anything the Gizmos did not want noticed. Even the word “Gizmo” was a slang term applied to blips on radar screens for which no cause could be established. We knew that these blips were not caused by solid objects; we also knew that the blips moved independently of the wind. Some radar stations observed many of them, and others very few. There was a flying-saucer scare, once, when six unidentified flying objects were reported over Washington, D.C. Armed forces radar stations admitted reluctantly that they had been detected. But, said the armed forces, they were only Gizmos. It was guessed that they were areas of excessive ionization in the air, of no importance.
This was the error of the century, but a very natural one. A Gizmo had been spotted by radar over a flying field in Texas. It hung stationary over the center of the installation at fifteen hundred feet, as if leisurely surveying the activities below. Nothing was visible where the radar insisted the Gizmo was. A plane took off and, guided by instructions from the ground, dived squarely through the space occupied by the Gizmo. Neither the plane nor its pilot detected anything at the moment of impact. The Gizmo vanished. After that, it seemed reasonable to disregard Gizmos altogether, which was a catastrophic blunder.
Chapter 1
Dick Lane was the first man to be attacked by Gizmos—it was undoubtedly a small patrol of them—and to live to tell about it in intelligible terms. It happened one day when he trudged a dim trail through mixed mountain laurel and oaks and pine trees on the downward slope of a mountain nobody had ever bothered to name. This was in the mountains of western Virginia, some ten miles from Murfree’s courthouse. He’d been in other places on his present errand, and his bafflement had been as great as it was here, which meant that his frustration was complete. He’d been tracking down the stories of inexplicable deaths of game animals, and some suspected deaths of men. He’d learned nothing tangible. He had dark suspicions, but nothing to justify them, and on this hot summer afternoon he was discouraged, uneasy and depressed.
To a sportsman, and especially a professional writer about field sports, as Lane was, the matter was important; to the rest of the world it was not. But fishermen and hunters made much of good hunting dogs who’d gone apparently crazy and fought empty air, snapping at it while screaming horribly. Most of them died. And there was a pheasant hunter in New Jersey, last fall, who was found dead beside his dead dog in the center of a patch of brush that had been leveled in some sort of frenzy. Neither man nor dog had a single wound of any sort. There were four fishermen found in the Dakotas, alleged to have died of poisoned mushrooms gathered in the wilds. But at least one of the four loathed mushrooms; he wouldn’t have tasted them. And there were cases of experienced guides, scouting the prospects for next-season hunting, who did not return from territory that was wholly familiar to them. One or two were found dead in their scattered blankets, by the ashes of dead fires; others were not found at all. And there were many tales of game animals found dead with the signs of battle all about them. Something unknown was taking toll of game and men.
It was Lane’s profession to go to places where there was good hunting and fishing, and then write articles about it, mostly for the magazine Forest and Field. Before this recent spate of murders in the wilderness, it had been a pleasant one. But Lane was a sportsman before he was a writer, and he was upset by the wanton killing of game—not killing for food, but scornfully leaving the murdered creatures to rot after they had defended themselves gallantly. Forest and Field had taken note of the matter. It was a sportsman’s magazine only, so it was not moved by reports of a ten-year-old boy’s having been found suffocated in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, and of the death of two children picking blackberries on the outskirts of Englewood, New Jersey, and of an elderly couple’s having been found dead in an open car near Sarasota, Florida. These human deaths seemed accidents. Nobody connected them with a common cause. It was Lane and his fellow sportsman who insisted that what was happening to wild creatures and good hunting dogs needed looking into. As a public service, Forest and Field had commissioned Lane to find out what was going on. He’d been at it for months, now, with no results—not even credible suspicions.
So on this summer afternoon he trudged along a sloping mountain trail without expectation of success. He’d come to Murfree County because here the reports were especially persistent and detailed. There’d been a case only ten days ago. A man’s cattle
had acted as if insane in the middle of the night. They had fought frenziedly in their stalls and broken down the walls of the barn in their struggling, and then had crashed through the barnyard fence and fled through the night. Eight animals had been involved. Next morning six of them had been found unharmed, but two were dead, without a mark on them. There were also local reports of dead foxes and wild turkeys and raccoons and opossums. Something was killing a lot of game in Murfree County. Hunting wouldn’t be so good this fall. If whatever was happening kept up, there wouldn’t be any hunting.
He’d asked questions and searched for clues here as in other places. He found nothing.
This afternoon found him making his way on foot to ask questions at the last place in Murfree County where he could hope to learn anything new. There was a field biological expedition in the county just then, sponsored by Gale University, and the local citizens observed sardonically that it was studying turkey buzzards. The woman professor in charge was not approved of by Lane’s informants. She wore pants all the time and hadn’t the build for it. Undaunted, Lane was on his way to ask if the expedition had made any observations that might bear on his mission.
The day was singularly perfect. All about him the excessively tumbled mountain country seemed to bake quietly under the sun. The mountains themselves were dark green under a totally blue sky. There had been rain the night before and brooks sang merrily, but the sunshine breaking through the leaves was startlingly hot.
Lane scrambled down a steep slope, with pebbles loosened by his feet bouncing and sliding. He saw the deep valley at the foot of this mountainside, and there was a veiling of faintest green above the red clay of ploughed fields down in the valley. Then he saw the glint of metal in the distance. That would be the trailer—the expedition’s trailer—that he was looking for. It vanished behind a spur of stone as he went on, partly downhill and partly at an angle along the mountain. Presently the ground grew level for a small space. He came to a small natural clearing filled with tall grass, and saw a glint of gray fur in the center of it.
The world was very still. There was next to no air movement. No birds sang. He did not consciously note the fact, but there were not even insect noises in the air: no gnats or mosquitoes hummed around him. He could tell that a vast gulf dropped away to his left, and that to the right the ground sloped up. Above him was a dense forest, whose trees were gnarled and crooked because of the rocky ground. In the clearing it was baking hot.
He felt no uneasiness, no premonition, no hint of danger. He moved toward the bit of fur in the vast stillness. Had it been nighttime, it would have been appalling. But Lane heard the rustling of grass about his feet, and it did not occur to him that the general silence was ominous.
Something invisible touched his face. Again, in darkness this would have been horrifying. But the sun was bright. He brushed the air before him. It felt like a thread of gossamer floating in the sunshine. The touch came again. He brushed impatiently, staring down at his feet. The sight, considering what he’d been working on, was almost familiar—but it was far from gratifying.
There were twenty or thirty dead rabbits in an untidy mass, lying on the ground. They had been dead for days, but there were no flies about them. There were no brilliantly colored butterflies fluttering above the small corpses. They had not been touched by buzzards. This was remarkable. Lane raised his head. The thing he mistook for gossamer touched him a third time. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, as he stirred one of the carcasses with his foot.
He heard a faint whining sound he could not identify. The rabbits were dead. That was all. There were no wounds. He stirred another. Discoveries like this had been made before.
He felt eerie, delicate fumblings at his face. He wiped it again with his handkerchief. He stared down at the small dead creatures. It is not natural for rabbits to gather in so close an assembly, especially to die. There is no natural enemy of rabbits which rounds them up to murder them. But he suddenly realized fact that these little furry bodies had received no attention from flies and such things whose function it is to keep the wilderness sweet-smelling and tidy. Nothing had touched these small corpses at all. Then it occurred to Lane, startlingly, that there was no taint in the air. He puzzled over that. The gossamer touches stopped.
Something closed smotheringly over his face, sealing his nostrils and his lips. His forehead was touched by something which pressed against it gently. The contact was all over his face and throat, as if he were enmeshed in invisible cobwebs.
The whining sound he’d heard was sharply distinct—and he couldn’t breathe.
He gasped, or tried to. He could not gasp. Blind panic yammered at him. But one cannot be wholly panicked when blankly amazed. Lane stood still for an instant, trying to fill his lungs with air. He could breathe out. He did. But he could not breathe in. Air would not enter his nostrils and something invisible blanketed his face. He could feel it, though it was neither warm nor cold. He could not breathe through it. He was suffocating.
He staggered, dazed, and beat the air before him. He went stumbling and lurching, his whole conscious purpose that of inhaling, which was impossible. He crashed into brushwood and tripped and fell headlong. His face buried itself in fallen leaves—and here he could breathe! He gasped a deep lungful of air, scented with acrid woods-mould and the odor of dry foliage. Then he struggled up on hands and knees, and his breath shut off. Something blanketed his face once more. It sealed his lips and nose. He fought, and toppled again—and he could breathe.
He lay still, panting, with his face buried in the fallen stuff. An incredible surmise began to form. He felt more fumblings on his neck and ears, delicate touches which made his spine crawl. There was something which wanted him to lift his face so that it could stop his breath.
But he was alone!
Despite the shock of near strangulation, he was filled with a sort of blank astonishment. He lay still, and something fumbled at him; he knew that it wanted him to look up, to rise. It whined impatiently for him to stir. He knew that it intended to kill him, and that he frustrated it by keeping his face buried in dead leaves. It was an invisible thing, and it did not bite or claw or sting, but it fretted because he did not stand up to be suffocated.
Sweat poured out all over him. This was the killer of the wilderness.
The touches stopped.
He lay still and tense. Now, for the first time, he realized the unnatural stillness of the world about him. It was horrifying, this quietude. He strained his ears for sounds of movement by the thing which a moment before had been whining beside his ear. He heard nothing at all. No—very, very faintly he heard the bubbling of a brook nearby. That was all…
A long time later he moved cautiously. There was still no bird call or insect hum. There was no sound at all but the small rustlings his own body made as he moved in the brushwood.
He sat up and stared about with hunted eyes. He was ashen-white. He stared in every direction, slowly and furtively, his eyes assuring him that there was nothing near but tree trunks and brushwood stalks. He got to his feet and began to creep away.
His breath cut off.
There was no warning. There were no fumbling touches, this time. Something clung to his face, whining shrilly, and he could see through it but he could not draw breath, and horror filled him. He staggered back to where dried leaves lay thick upon the ground. He flung himself down and buried his face in them again, and breathed deeply of the leaves.
Presently, his eyes strained, he stood up once more. He held double handfuls of dried leaves before his nostrils and lips. He breathed through them. The smell of woods-mould was strong. He waited, in a sort of desperation. Whatever meant to kill him knew him to be afoot and moving. He could not slip away unperceived. But nothing happened. After a time he dared to move onward down the hillside.
There was no other attempt upon him by anything visible or otherwise. He heard no more high-pitched whines, but the unnatural stillness remained…
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br /> A mile away, he was still pale. Two miles away, he was still shaken. He hadn’t fully recovered his normal color when he came out upon a shelving slope and saw the aluminum trailer less than half a mile away. It glittered in the bright sunshine, and beyond it the valley spread out, its trees minute so far below, and all the world very beautiful and serene.
He moved on, and saw something else. There was a curious, foot-high construction of wire screening on the ground. An ample female form in riding breeches lay at full length, squinting through one surface of screening to the other. As Lane drew near, he heard a contralto voice saying disgusted things in pseudoprofane terms.
He coughed, and she raised her head to stare at him. He recognized her. “My name’s Lane,” he said shakily. “Dick Lane. I think you’re Professor Warren. Over in Murfree they told me I’d find you here and you might know something I need to find out.”
“It’s not likely,” said Professor Warren irritably. “But what is it?”
She looked at him peculiarly as he hesitated. Happening upon the dead rabbits had confirmed his darkest suspicions—even those he would not fully admit to himself. He had no explanation yet, but he had a clue which was completely incredible. If he told anybody what he’d experienced, he’d be thought insane.
He named his profession and his connection with Forest and Field, and explained that he was trying to track down something important to sportsmen. Game animals were being killed in a strange manner. Something new and deadly was responsible. He had an extremely improbable idea about the matter, and he hoped that as a biologist and a scientific observer she might have noticed something.
She regarded him oddly. Then she pointed.
“Is that the sort of thing you mean?”
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