It was so completely revolting that at any other time Lane would have felt sick. But now he thrust out his hands. Something pulsating stirred his fingers through the cloth. He found Carol’s face while she struggled and put his hands together, scooping away the thing that clung to her. It filled a great part of the remains of the sheet. He clenched it tightly until he’d made the cloth into a bag whose neck he held fast. It was like a rubber balloon imprisoned in the sack, but no balloon ever fought against a cloth that held it, nor emitted a shrill bloodcurdling sound.
Lane’s hair felt as if it were standing straight on end, and horror flowed up his wrists from his hands and fingers. But he twisted the cloth, and twisted it again, compressing the captured tiling into a smaller and smaller space.
And suddenly there was nothing imprisoned in the cloth. It collapsed, and there was a reek of carrion in the air.
Professor Warren was pounding on his shoulders.
“Stop it! Stop it!” she cried furiously. Then she swore briefly. “Too late! You’ve killed it!”
Lane said thickly, “I’ll burn it—”
“Oh, Carol’s all right,” said the professor. “And it’s dead. But we learned some interesting items.”
“I’m going to make sure it’s dead!”
Professor Warren shrugged her shoulders. The Monster moaned and whimpered in his hiding place.
“Hush!” said Professor Warren angrily. She listened, with her head cocked on one side. There was a sound outside the trailer, now. It was a thin, high-pitched whine, save that it was made of many voices and was loud. It gave the impression of a frenzied anger shared by many things.
“Hm,” said the professor after a moment. “After all, it was a brilliant idea to insist that we close all the windows. It sounds as if our guest had friends, and they’ve come to help him or her or it to murder Carol.”
“How can I make sure this thing is dead?” demanded Lane. He still held the limp sack of cloth in his grip. But he was looking at Carol, who had buried her face in her hands.
“If,” said Professor Warren, with a fine air of competence, “if you took a jellyfish and put it in a cloth bag and twisted until you’d wrung the jellyfish out through the cloth, I don’t think you’d be worried about whether it was dead or not. That’s what you did with this thing.” She added exuberantly: “It was alive. It had a certain degree of intelligence. Perhaps a considerable degree. It’s amazing! And if you sniff you can’t help knowing something about its metabolism! No wonder the buzzards were temperamental! There were no smells for them to see!”
She stood still a moment, gloating over her discoveries. Then she moved to the other end of the living space and struck a match. She put water on the small, bottled-gas stove.
“For coffee,” she said beaming. “To celebrate. I’m going to make some notes while the water boils. Wildly imaginative, am I? I’ll show them some wild imagination! A dynamic system of gases, unquestionably living because it has undetermined but demonstrable intelligence, emotional reactions, and at least some degree of communication with its fellows! We irritated it and it called the others while it attacked! Let ’em try to classify a Gizmo like that!”
She sat down and pulled out a notebook. She began to write, absorbedly and swiftly. The Monster moaned. There remained a raging, whining noise in the air outside. Lane listened. He’d been trying for a long time to find an unknown killer of game and men. He’d found a something which not only tried to kill him, but the girl. It had been filled with fury toward a human being. Now others of its kind shrilled the same insane anger.
“Don’t worry!” said the professor, without looking up from where she scribbled. “The thing inside here couldn’t lift a sheet. They can’t turn over the trailer.”
Lane glared out a window. He saw the strained shapes of trees as they grew on the rocky ground. He saw blue sky, very bright as compared to the shadowed mountainside. He moved to the other side of the trailer and looked away, down into the valley. He saw the blurred edge of the mountain’s shadow cast on some of the isolated small fields below. Far out he saw a buzzard in leisurely and effortless flight. The tree branches were still, their leaves motionless. It was a moment of late hot afternoon in which the air should have been filled with the triumphant stridulations of insects and the cries of birds. But there was no sound except the venomous shrill whining of things no man had yet seen, yet which were murderers.
Carol stirred, and he turned to her. She was white and shaken.
“You’re all right?” asked Lane awkwardly. She nodded. But her hands trembled. “Drink of water?” She shook her head.
He sat down beside her. “We’ve got to find a better way of killing them,” he said grimly, “and then we’ll take you somewhere where you’ll be safe.”
She tried to smile. He felt a certain lifting of the spirit. She was exactly what a girl should be. He found himself marveling at the fact that her cheek curved so exactly as it ought, and her lips were exactly as they should be, and that the line of her throat was absolutely the only perfect way that a throat should curve. He had the sensation of discovery which is pure satisfaction. He was delighted to look; he did not wonder where this delight might lead. She, being a woman, probably did. “We’ll have to try fire,” he said sagely. “And there’ll be odors they can’t take. And there’ll be weapons we can make, especially to destroy the organization of the gas they’re made of. We’ll beat them.”
“Of—of course,” she agreed. She hesitated a moment. “Fire might do. I know what Aunt Ann thought about them. She’s said that they’re probably ghosts—or the origin of ghost stories. She says they’re almost certain kin to will-o’-the-wisps and corpselights and such things that float over swamps, shining faintly in the dark. They exist, but nobody’s ever caught one. They must use energy to keep themselves in existence. Aunt Ann has been guessing that the things she’s discovered may use the gases of decay as will-o’-the-wisps use marsh-gas, to supply the energy that maintains them. As we use food. If she’s right, fire might bother them.”
Lane listened with a sort of urgent respectfulness. But he also listened to the whining noise outside.
“Savages,” added Carol, “cover their faces when they sleep. And it’s rare they’ll sleep without a fire going, Aunt Ann says. They believe that ghosts and devils are afraid of fire, and they cover their faces lest evil spirits bother them. If the—things like those that tried to kill us are the things that savages really fear, their superstitions protect them by what they make them do. And the things, if they learned that humans were always protected, would tend to ignore men and attack only lower animals.”
“Except,” growled Lane, “that now they’ve found we aren’t savages and so aren’t protected. But there’s more than that. They must be much more numerous than they’ve ever been before. Or a new and deadly kind may have appeared…” He listened to the whining outside. “These things could have started the tales of fiends and devils; the old stories told of devils tearing people to bits. These don’t even wound animals, but their victims have been found in the middle of destruction. The effect is of violent murder, but the cause could be the violent death struggles of the victims.”
Professor Warren slapped her notebook shut. “Hah!” she said triumphantly. “I’ll pin their ears back! Imaginative, am I? Wait till I march into the Biological Department with some of these things trapped in jars. A gaseous organism with a gas metabolism! … I’ve got to get bigger jars!”
“I’m trying,” said Lane, “to figure out a way to kill them. They’re waiting outside by the dozens now. Maybe hundreds.” It did not occur to him—not yet—that there might be thousands. Or more.
“We can protect ourselves,” said Professor Warren zestfully, “with sheets over our heads. If they can’t stop our breathing, they can’t do any damage.”
Lane was unconvinced. Angry as he was, he could not but remember that there had been a thing—a gas entity—a Gizmo in the trailer. It had made no whining sound. It act
ed as if guided by cunning, calling no attention to itself until discovered by accident. Perhaps it had meant to wait until the occupants of the trailer were asleep. An attack in darkness and during slumber could be irresistible. In short, the Gizmos might be cleverer than Professor Warren credited. The attempt to kill him had been shrewd, after he escaped the first assault by tumbling into deep dried leaves.
“If you want to try sheets as a protection,” he said shortly, “I’ll try it. I’m responsible for their being here.”
Professor Warren snorted. “Nonsense! Before you got here the buzzards stopped coming to bait because the Gizmos were consuming the gases they looked for. They were here then. And what happened to the gnats and flies and mosquitoes? And the rabbits and the hen quail on their nests? Don’t be absurd! They were here before you came. They didn’t attack us; the one you killed attacked only after it was trapped. But they were around before you got here.”
Lane said grimly: “That’s part of my point. If these things are the foundation for legends of devils, they have the necessities of devils, the first of which is that nobody shall believe he exists. Now that these things know that we know of their existence, they need to kill all of us.”
Professor Warren raised her eyebrows. “I know they’re impossible,” she protested, “even if they’re true. But are you suggesting they’re intelligent?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Lane. “If they were the devils of old legend, they contrived deals by which they were worshiped and supplied with the smells of burned flesh and spilled, rotting blood. The pagan deities—”
Professor Warren grimaced. “Don’t tell me I’ve discovered a pantheon! If they’re intelligent, where’s the evidence?”
“I’ve got an idea how to get it,” said Lane, “if they haven’t the information to keep them from revealing themselves.”
He gathered up the sheet which had been the means of capture and execution of one of the creatures the professor called Gizmos, among other things. He spread the sheet over one of the closed trailer windows. Carol saw what he was about, and came to help. They draped the window so that it was completely covered by the closely woven cloth. Lane knotted it at the corners so that it was tight, yet there was a fullness in the center of the window opening. He made use of that fullness to slide aside the window and open it slightly.
Nothing happened. The distinctly audible whining sound died as soon as he began to fumble at the window. There was no sound at all—no birdcall or chirrup of insects. There was not even the whisper of wind among the trees of the mountainside. In bright sunshine, the unnatural stillness was horrible.
They waited, staring at the curiously draped window. Nothing happened at all. Lane shrugged.
“I thought I’d provoke a mass attack by opening the window. If they were stupid, I thought one might try to poke inside. But if they were intelligent, I thought they’d try to storm the trailer in a rush we couldn’t possibly handle. I was wrong.”
Then the Monster yelped in terror. His hackles rising, he backed into the farthest corner of the trailer, snarling at the open window.
“You were right,” said the professor.
Things hit the draped cloth, which billowed out tautly. It almost seemed to stretch with the violence of massed Gizmos pushing against it. They tore and tugged at it, their whining filling the interior of the vehicle. It was unspeakably horrible that they should rave so terribly at so flimsy a barrier, and not be able to rend it.
Lane leaped toward the window. The sheet could not be torn. But the tuggings and throbbings of the individually weak murderers were loosening the cloth from the corners of the window frame. One edge billowed momentarily, and a vicious whine of triumph flashed past Lane. He heard Carol cry out.
He thrust back the barrier. He beat at the cloth with his fists, as if to destroy the yielding things by blows. Carol cried out again: “Aunt Ann! Here! Come here!”
There were strugglings. The Monster screamed and snapped. It fought madly against unseeable nothingness. Another part of the cloth barrier bulged to its very edge.
Chapter 3
Professor Warren was chalk-white when the window was safely shut again and the two Gizmos which had got inside were destroyed. Carol herself had killed one by the exact method Lane had used earlier—plucking it from its victim by forming a sack of cloth about it, and then wringing that cloth until there was nothing left inside it to struggle. The professor had been the one attacked. The second Gizmo she’d located by its raging whine and the Monster’s snarls in its direction. She drove it by a lucky stroke of a whipping cloth into the flame of the stove. It died in that flame, itself a pale and lambent flicker of fire as its complex hydrocarbon gases burned.
Now there was darkness outside, and silence again. The inside lights were on and Professor Warren sat weakly still. Carol had recovered much more quickly from the similar attempt to suffocate her. But a younger girl is always more resilient than an older woman; Professor Warren had had security and prestige and authority for so long that she was dazed at the idea of an attempt upon her life. That it had been made by what she considered a biological specimen stunned her. Carol had been able to realize her danger more promptly, and more quickly accept the fact of safety regained.
“It was—stupid of me,” said Professor Warren in a trembling voice. “I couldn’t really believe there was real danger. Even when Carol was—attacked, you got the thing off her so swiftly that I did not truly realize … I am a very stupid old woman. I thought of these horrors as things to be studied, and nothing more.”
“They’re a lot more,” Lane told her. “They’ve been cagey, but I’m sure they’ve killed people before.”
“Appalling!” said the professor. She shuddered. “The only parallel I know to such a clanger appearing suddenly, is the appearance of rabies among bats in the Southern states. That’s been taken care of. The public has been warned. But here—”
Carol said quietly: “That’s not too good a parallel, Aunt Ann. Bats were known, and rabies was known. It had only to be proved that the two had gotten together. This is more difficult. You have to prove that these—things exist. And people who’ve never encountered them are going to find it hard to believe in them.”
“I’ll take care of that!” said the professor. “Let me get to a telephone.”
“I’m afraid,” said Lane, “that that’s a problem. How do we get to a telephone?”
The professor gaped at him. “What do you mean?” Then she said angrily. “Do you mean that these—these creatures—these Gizmos—” She stopped short. She seemed to shrivel a little.
“If they’re not too intelligent,” said Lane, “we will probably be all right. They’ll get tired of hanging around outside. But if they’re really smart, I don’t like the prospects.”
He moved to a window. There was only night outside the trailer, now. He screened his eyes with his hand to peer out into the moonlight. There was the dark mountain against a star-studded sky. To the east and below there was a filmy, glamorous mist which obscured the valley. The darkness was a very picture of tranquility. But it was deathly quiet—until he strained his ears and heard a faint whining, fainter than the humming of a mosquito. But it came from many sources. The Gizmos were waiting. He turned away. Carol searched his face. “You say they’ve killed animals all over the country. Maybe someone else has found out what they are. It might be on a radio news broadcast.”
Lane turned on the trailer’s radio. There was a hum and then the last notes of a hillbilly ballad. An announcer drawled:
“…And that ends the Gourdvine Boys program for today and this is—” a burst of static—“your friendly station in Danville. News follows in a moment, but first—”
Lane breathed, and was astonished at his relief that the situation here was not typical of that of all the world. He sat down. He listened to a commercial for a brand of fertilizer, delivered with immense enthusiasm. Then the news.
He felt better when the news bullet
ins began with international events. The news was reassuring because it was given first place, and disturbing because such pettinesses were capable of destroying the peace of the world. Political news. Then the day’s assortment of freak items. Radar stations all over the United States were reporting an extraordinary number of “Gizmos.” They were believed to be the basis of many flying-saucer stories. It had been guessed that they were actually areas of extra-high ionization in the air.
Professor Warren said shakily: “Gizmos. That’s what I called these creatures. But—but—if there’s metabolism in gas, there has to be ionization! They can be talking about these horrors!”
She listened tensely, but the subject of Gizmos was dropped. There was local news. A truck driver had been found dead in his truck, ten miles out of Danville. Apparently he’d pulled off the road for a nap, and had never wakened. But the windshield and side windows of the truck’s cab were broken.
The professor wrung her hands. Outside Pittsburg the bodies of two children, missing for a week, had been found. Apparently they had died of exposure shortly after their disappearance, though the weather had been warm and there had been no rain.
Professor Warren wrung her hands. “Gizmos!” she said bitterly.
There was an extraordinary movement of game out of certain forests in Aroostook County, Maine. Wild creatures were found on the highways in flight from their natural habitat. A commercial jet-liner, equipped with radar, had arrived in Kansas City with its pilot and copilot in a cold sweat. Its radar had repeatedly reported flying objects in its path, and the pilot had had to dodge all over the sky to avoid collisions—but he’d seen nothing. This seemed to check with ground radar reports of Gizmos in much greater than their usual number…
“Gizmos,” said Professor Warren, as Lane turned off the radio. “They’re ionization in the air. But they are so much morel The—horrors are alive and they feed on the gases of decay. To use such gases for energy at less than flame temperature, there has to be ionization. I wonder what they’d say if I told them that their radio Gizmos are living dynamic systems in gas? Probably what doctors said when it was suggested that diseases could be caused by germs!”
War with the Gizmos Page 3
