War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

  Lane did not answer. The professor was already in the car. He held the door for Carol, who urged the Monster to climb in. She had practically to lift him. Burke started the motor, and the car moved off.

  “They’ll figure,” Burke said zestfully, “that we’ll head back to get to a hard surface road. I’m goin’ to fool ’em. No runnin’ into an ambush for me! Those critters are smart!” He added: “I bet they’re Martians! They could’ve landed a long while ago and been building up their invasion army and studyin’ us, and now they’re ready to take over. But they don’t know us humans!”

  The professor said querulously: “Dick, you heard news on the telephone. What was it?”

  Lane ground his teeth. He had heard the sort of information which would be sent first to laboratories turning out biologicals. It was news of an outbreak of the plague now believed in, duly credited first to lower animals, and now to men. Lane had heard the official report on an outbreak of sudden death in the village of Serenity, Colorado. And he knew that village.

  Some three months back he’d been on the West Coast in his hunt for the uncanny cause of deaths among wild creatures. He’d stopped overnight in the tiny village of Serenity because there’d been several reports of inexplicable forest tragedies nearby. The village nestled in a valley whose floor was higher than the highest tips of the Virginia mountains, and the peaks about it were crowned with eternal snow. Lane remembered it distinctly. Some few miles from the houses, there’d been a grizzly bear and her two cubs found dead in a half-acre of crushed underbrush and toppled small trees. Lane had gone over the battlefield very painstakingly with a Colorado game commission man. They’d found no solution to the death of the bear.

  Later, they’d dined in the village on mountain trout and listened to local opinions about that killing and other improbable occurrences the inhabitants of Serenity could report. Lane and the game commission man left the village next morning without even a tentative idea of the cause of any of the occurrences, including the death of the grizzly.

  Now, Lane interpreted the news he’d heard in pictures of intolerable detail. He remembered the village: about a hundred houses and three stores. He could see it in his mind’s eye, nestling among the mountains. He could envision it as of the night just past: lights shining in the houses, stars and a slanting moon overhead. There was that tranquil medley of night noises which to all men is assurance of peace and security and calm.

  The lights in the houses had almost all winked out when the first disturbance came. At eleven o’clock Mountain Time there were sudden sounds outside the houses. Pet cats fought and spat and clawed. Dogs barked frenziedly, and snarled and yelped as if in terror. There was an extraordinary clamor, quite enough to wake all the inhabitants of the houses.

  Lights came on. People went outside with lanterns and flashlights to see what caused the uproar. But the sound grew less as lights began to flicker on, and as moving lanterns shone outdoors. By the time all the village was awake and looking for the cause of alarm among their pets, there was no noise. There was only the sound of human voices calling to dogs and cats, and asking fretful questions of other human voices.

  Then someone found his dog. It was dead—unwounded, but with bared teeth and glazed eyes. Someone else found his. Most people did not discover their pets, but all who found a dog or cat found it dead. Every domestic pet left outdoors had died—unnaturally. Nobody thought of the months-past similar death of a grizzly and her cubs.

  There was angry discussion across property lines in the village of Serenity. It looked like poison; the few owners who identified their own animals leaped to that conclusion immediately. The inhabitants of Serenity raged at the unknown person responsible for such happenings. But it was near the middle of the night. Citizens growled furiously over the carelessness of somebody who’d left poison about, or the unthinkable villainy of anybody who’d distributed poison to pet animals. Angrily, they went back to bed. They fumed as they went to sleep.

  These things were known because a rural mail-carrier left the village at a quarter to midnight, himself growling over the loss of a good dog. He drove through the darkness over mountain trails to a mail distribution center for the semiweekly mail. By going at such an hour, he could be back with it near sunrise and be able to join two friends on a fishing trip into the wilds. He didn’t make it.

  Lane saw the later event, in his mind’s eye, as clearly as if he’d been present. Much later in the night, when the village slept again, there were whinings in the air about the houses of Serenity. There were then no lights, so no lights wavered as if units of heated gases passed before them. Stars, though, did shift slightly in their places as faint, shrill whinings moved among the houses. These whinings descended chimneys, and entered open windows, and penetrated screens—as a smoke ring can pass through a screen without destruction—and hovered invisibly in the darkness inside the village homes. Then there was silence, as if by agreement all must wait until an appointed instant.

  That instant came. Abruptly, noises rose everywhere. There were shouts among the houses. There were gaspings. Windows smashed here and there as if blindly fighting human beings tried to get the air they were denied by smashing windows. The noise was not at great as when the pets of the village died. It did not even last as long. Presently there was absolute silence once more.

  But presently there was a glimmer of light inside one of the houses. A tiny night-light had been overturned. After a while there were flames. They rose, and in time they licked through a roof and leaped and roared in the silent human settlement.

  But nobody stirred anywhere, nor called to ask what was the matter. That single house burned to the ground, there among the high mountains, and nobody moved in any of the other silent buildings.

  The rural mail carrier found out what had happened when he came back shortly after sunrise.

  And Dick Lane, riding in the mountains of western Virginia, swallowed hard as he pictured the reality of what he had been told on the telephone. Hatred filled him, as well as indignation. He would have felt anger if he heard of fish caught wantonly and flung ashore to be left to rot. That would have seemed unconscionable. But the village of Serenity had been destroyed so that men and women and children would serve the Gizmos in that revolting fashion. And Lane, two thousand miles from Serenity, Colorado, trembled with disgust and horror.

  Carol looked anxiously at his face.

  “Dick—is there something else you’re worried about?”

  He shook his head, struggling to bring his hatred under control. Presently he heard Professor Warren explaining just what had been found out. Burke asked surprisingly shrewd questions which had a peculiar slant to them. Burke was a leathery-faced individual with incongruously bright blue eyes. He nodded, as Professor Warren explained.

  “First they tried to kill Mr. Lane,” he said with something close to zest, “and when he fooled ’em with dead leaves they followed him. They hadn’t had anybody beat ’em before. And they knew he knew. You see what I’m drivin’ at?”

  “No,” said the professor.

  “Suppose they’re Martians,” said Burke, with enthusiasm. “Or that they come from Jupiter, or Venus, or somewhere. Suppose they landed in a forest. What’d we do if we landed on Mars or Jupiter and found there was forests with animals in ’em.”

  “Let’s not suppose anything of the sort,” snapped the professor. “The facts are preposterous enough!”

  Burke grinned. “You don’t get me,” he said. “If we landed on Mars or Jupiter, we’d be cagey. We’d kinda hide ourselves and do some scoutin’. We wouldn’t go around saying, Take us to your leaders.’ We’d make ourselves a hide-out and study what we were up against. We’d try out our guns on the animals. We’d find out if they were good to eat. If we found there were Martians or Jupiterians that were civilized, we’d send back for more men. We’d build up an army. Bein’ a long way from home, we’d live off the animals in the forest where we landed, to save transportation so we could
bring in more men. When we got pretty strong, we’d put out some outposts to keep an eye on the natives. We’d make a plan of campaign. We’d keep out of sight till we were ready to take over. Ain’t it so?”

  “No,” said the professor indignantly. “If we landed on another planet and found civilized inhabitants there, we’d try to make friends!”

  Burke said ironically: “Yeah? That’s what folks did with the Indians, near four hundred years ago? What they did in Africa? Australia? They had natives in those places. Us civilized folk made friends with them?” “It’s not a parallel,” Professor Warren said shortly. “But it might be, to those critters you call Gizmos,” argued Burke. “Just suppose they came from somewhere off Earth, and they’ve been layin’ low, buildin’ up their strength and living off wild game as much as they could to save supplies bein’ brought in. Suppose they’ve been putting advanced bases in the bigger forests. Outposts on the edges. Observation posts in woodlots. If they got a big army here already, they’d have to send out foragin’ parties. Now and then there’d be sentries and little patrols of Gizmos out, hunting food with orders not to bother humans if they could help it, but not to let any get away that suspected there was such things as them.”

  “That,” said Professor Warren with asperity, “assumes that the Gizmos are not only intelligent like lower animals on Earth, but intellectual, like men, and that they can reason.”

  “Right!” said Burke. He went on with the same peculiar relish: “They’d have to be smart to get here from another world. And you check what’s happened against that idea! Mr. Lane beat off an attack by a foragin’ party with dry leaves. He went off and the patrol followed him. But some of ’em sent off for orders what to do about a man who found out they couldn’t strangle him if he kept dried leaves before his face. They got orders to wait a good chance and kill him when he wasn’t expecting it. They sneaked a spy into the trailer. But you caught and killed that one. Then they tried to break in an’ kill you regardless, but they’d got reinforcements by that time. After a while they did manage to break in. They got all three of you alive. They made up their minds to study you, findin’ out how fast you learned and so on, and keepin’ you alive till they found out all they could. And you turned that trick on them, with fire.”

  Carol shuddered; the Monster, lying at her feet, whimpered to himself. “You got away,” pursued Burke, with an odd air of enjoyment. “You waved fire around your heads and they couldn’t face it. Then I came along. And what were the Gizmos doin’? They were sendin’ back to headquarters sayin’ you were even smarter than they’d expected. And they hadn’t a big enough force to handle you, anyway. Maybe Mr. Lane hit on a squad of Gizmos, first. Maybe a battalion was sent to the trailer. But they must’ve sent a division to make a dust storm that’d put out the kind of fires you’d made, and to kill us all because we knew too much.”

  He paused. The car went thumping along a long straight stretch of mountain highway. This was a valley among the mountains, and there were pastures and occasional cornfields in view. The sky overhead was very bright and shining.

  “The question,” said Burke zestfully, “is how many divisions have they got? How good is their communication system? Have they got a beachhead just here in Murfree County, or are they ready for a general offensive?” He rolled out the technical military terms with satisfaction.

  “I’ve read a lot about wars and fightin’. I’m guessing we’ve got a war coming with the Gizmos. It’s goin’ to be a tough fight. There’s going to be a lot of people killed before it’s over. We could even lose! But there’s going to be a lot of advantage to them that know from the start what the Gizmos are and what they can do and what they can’t. I want to be one of those that know. Somebody’s got to lead guerrilla fightin’ against them, wherever they’ve occupied the country. I’m aimin’ to be qualified to do just that!”

  He preened himself at the wheel of the clanking car. Lane understood. Burke was one of that considerable part of humanity which enthusiastically believes in anything that’s sufficiently dramatic. In Burke, however, his imagination did not exaggerate the drama he believed in. His assumption of an extraterrestrial origin for the Gizmos was based on pure guess, and an unlikely one at that. His description of a military organization among the Gizmos was pure, exciting fantasy. But, however wrong his assumptions, his estimate of the danger was correct.

  “Where’s the proof?” Professor Warren demanded. “Reason requires a nervous system. What kind of nervous system could a Gizmo have? They’ve got something —they find prey, they use cunning. But is it a nervous system?”

  Carol stirred. She looked steadily ahead, far down the sunlit valley. Suddenly she gasped. She pointed with an unsteady hand.

  Lane ground his teeth. There was a dust cloud moving out from behind a mountainside ahead. It grew thicker as it went rolling across cultivated fields. It moved as an entity, as a dynamic system with every appearance of volition and purpose.

  Burke braked, his eyes wide and frightened. He brought the car to a stop. A second dust cloud began to form itself to the left. It began to roll down the mountainside.

  It was even larger than the one that had overwhelmed the filling station.

  Burke frantically put the car in reverse, to back around and flee in the opposite direction.

  “That’s no good,” said Lane. “Ahead’s the best bet. Look back there!”

  Two more of the impossibly dense dust clouds were already visible behind the car. One came rolling terribly along the way the car had come; another was gathering substance from a dirt road as it swept across the valley bottom.

  The four dust clouds moved to converge upon the stopped car.

  Chapter 6

  The Monster uttered a howling sound which was at once so despairing and so frantic that Lane felt an urge to kick him. But instead he said to Burke: “Give me the wheel. I know how to handle this!”

  Burke yielded with alacrity. He fairly popped out the door on the driver’s side and agilely exchanged seats with Lane. His teeth chattered as he cranked the front window tightly shut. Lane put the car in gear ahead and moved toward the giant dust spheres, of which one was already astride the highway a mile ahead as the other rolled horribly downhill to meet it.

  “What you going to do?” demanded Burke agitatedly. Lane sent the car ahead at a speed far below its maximum. “I’m going to bet that these Gizmos never drove a car in traffic.”

  He was moving more slowly than the pair of globular whirlwinds behind. One of them was already opaque with its burden of dust, while the other rapidly gathered substance as it billowed and whirled across the valley along a twisting dirt road. They seemed to be overtaking the car steadily.

  “They’re catching up!” protested Burke shrilly. “They think so—if they think,” said Lane. The sphere ahead and to the left on the mountainside seemed to pause in its rolling, while dust swirled up to thicken it. The one ahead advanced, still blocking the way.

  “God!” insisted Burke, “they’re all four goin’ to hit us at the same time!”

  Lane grunted. He held down the car to twenty-five miles an hour, while the four globes of destruction accommodated themselves to its pace, maintaining an inexorable rate of closing upon it. Each rolling dust cloud was a full hundred feet in diameter. There were veinings of greater or lesser dust content, where madly moving streams of Gizmos, forming the spheres, were more or less closely packed in their spiraling. The spheres themselves were dynamic systems, as a charging herd of beasts can be. They were organizations capable of greater deadlines than the sum of the deadlinesses of their parts. They were, apparently, even capable of acts of coordination when acting as groups, comparable to the cooperation of individual wolves when running down a deer.

  Professor Warren said crisply, “I begin to see the structure of these things. I wish we had a movie camera.”

  “If you’ going to let ’em bury us all in dust,” chattered Burke, “you let me outa here! You let me—”
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br />   Carol reached past his shoulder and locked the car door.

  “Dick knows what he’s doing,” she said. “Be quiet, or he will let you out.”

  Burke’s mouth dropped open. Then he realized. A man on foot might not be pursued by a dust cloud composed of a hundred thousand Gizmos. But there were filmy tendrils of lesser denseness clustered about the greater ones. They would be smaller swarms of Gizmos speeding to incorporate themselves in the larger ones. Any of those could separate itself to trail and suffocate a single fugitive. Burke subsided.

  “If that thing ahead,” said Lane, “should stop stock-still and drop its load of dust, it would block the highway with a drift we couldn’t possibly get through. That’s why I’m driving slowly,—to keep it coming toward us.”

  He sounded calm enough, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He turned his head to estimate the looming red monstrosity on the mountain above. He glanced in the back-view mirror to gauge the speed of the one in pursuit. The fourth, rolling across the lateral dirt road, abandoned the road at a curve and came sweeping across partly green, partly red-clay pasture land.

  “I hope,” Lane added, “that this car has a good pick-up, Burke. Our lives depend on it.”

  Burke said, “It’s okay,” in a strained voice.

  The situation was as nightmarish as any that had gone before. Ahead there was a rolling, writhing rust-red globe the height of half a dozen houses piled one atop the other. It was not a solid thing, but a cloud, and one could see into it a little way. There were veins and cords of circulation; what looked like nerves and sinews and a circulatory system, branching and rebranching and re-combining again. They were, though, merely thicker and denser swirlings of the powdered soil that made the whole thing visible.