War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

  There was a whoosh and an uprush of fire. He had touched off not only the liquid gasoline, but the vapor of that which had evaporated. There was a stirring of air as invisible things fled away, with thin shrieks.

  He opened the station wagon door and made sure of what had happened. He made flashes within, clearing it of Gizmos. He closed the car windows and felt fury as he started heavily back to the car. Halfway there, he heard sounds about him again. He stood still, holding his breath. He felt fumblings all over his body before he sprayed gasoline again and again set it off. There was a flicker of unbearable heat and a dull booming sound, and he stumbled out of the vitiated air and caught a deep breath of something breathable while the high-pitched small screams still sounded.

  He reached the car. Burke stared at him, puffing furiously upon a cigar, his face very pale. Carol said anxiously: “Dick! What was it? Were they—” “Yes,” said Lane thickly. “All dead. I won’t tell you any more.”

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away, his face a mask of fury, his hands trembling.

  “You killed a lot of them,” said the professor, forlorn because she could offer no other comfort. “I should have tried to catch one. But you killed a great many. I saw them flare up.”

  “I didn’t kill enough,” said Lane.

  Within a mile there was another wreck. Before he turned north he had passed four more.

  It was well into the afternoon before he reached Hot Springs. The highway had been a shambles all the way. On the outskirts of Hot Springs there was a barrier across the highway. Men with shotguns and improvised surgeon’s masks waved him to a halt.

  “No traffic!” called one of them from a safe distance. “Quarantine! You can’t come through! We’re keeping the plague out of this town! Go back!”

  Chapter 9

  Reaction of the general public and the authorities was absolutely rational, even when it led to moderate-sized towns blocking themselves off from the rest of the world as defense against a nonexistent contagion. For months it had been known that something was killing game. It was guessed to be a disease. It seemed reasonable that the “disease” might spread to domestic animals: dead pets and cattle suggested that it had. In the past, at least in the case of spotted fever, an animal disease had gone on to attack human beings. So as a matter of routine there had been research on the problem. This was wholly rational, as was the concentration of research upon disease.

  By definition a Gizmo would be in the class of things like an ignis fatuus—a will-o’-the-wisp. The idea of a Gizmo was akin to the idea of a ghost or a devil or any evil spirit. Nobody seriously engaged in research on a supposed disease which might be important in animal husbandry would be apt to suspect that a spook might be more deadly than a germ.

  Especially, such a thought would not occur at the beginning of real apprehension. The tragedy of the village of Serenity was not yet twenty-four hours old. The attack on Murfree was still hopeless confusion in the minds of those who had witnessed it. Migrations of animals from the forests had only recently been reported, and the death of rounded-up furry fugitives in Minnesota had happened this same day. Now the highways were dotted with wrecks: now cattle were found dead in their pastures and on the open range: now cats and dogs were found suffocated. It was perfectly sane and reasonable that newly disturbed authorities should reason as the fish and game officials had reasoned before. They looked for a plague, the more plausibly because Gizmo swarms in different localities made Gizmo-caused deaths occur in patterns strikingly like contagion from sporadic cases of infection. The reaction of people everywhere was absolutely rational.

  Cursing, Lane backed the car and turned it away from the barricade outside Hot Springs. Presently he found a highway to the left, toward the east, and turned into it. He passed hills and hollows and fields and cozy farmhouses. He chose his turnings wisely, and presently he was back on Route Two-twenty on the near side of the tiny Hot Springs settlement. In the long detour he saw no sign of any unusual happening.

  Beyond Hot Springs he turned in at a gas pump in the hamlet of McClurg. He had ideas, born of the barricade and the shotguns, that he should not let his fuel supply get too low.

  Nobody came to attend the pump. He stopped the motor and got out of the car. There was a sign: Hens for Sale. Fresh Eggs. Vegetables. The gas pump stood in front of a dingy small store. Still nobody came to wait on him. He listened. There was a horrendous squawking of chickens somewhere behind the store. Sounds of panic among chickens do not necessarily mean anything at all, but Lane said over his shoulder: “I’m going to see what’s the matter.”

  He went around to the back of the store. There was a chicken house there, of that modern variety which includes a fowl-run under its roof. This allows electric lights to delude the chickens into getting up in the middle of the night to eat an extra meal and so be inspired to lay more eggs. Behind the coarse wire of its front there was a hysterical tumult. Lane thought he caught the sound of whinings in the uproar.

  He called back to the car:

  “Looks bad! Get set!”

  He moved forward. Chickens fluttered in a snowy confusion inside. The chicken wire bulged where they threw themselves against it. A man shouted angrily at them.

  Lane jerked open the door and went in. A bald-headed man slapped hurtling, squalling chickens aside to get at one of three or four which flapped convulsively on the floor in front of the roosts. He picked up one struggling chicken. To Lane’s experienced eye it was obviously strangling. Lane shouted in his turn, but the man’s face contorted as he found himself unable to breathe,—while the chicken suddenly struggled free and flapped outside.

  Lane waved his cigarette lighter. There was a flame and a horrible stench. The man gasped and stared at Lane.

  “Come on out!” shouted Lane. “Come out!”

  The man blinked, but the din of squawkings continued without a pause. Something bumped against his foot. A white chicken writhed on the floor, suffocating. He bent down.

  Lane forestalled him. When the lighter came near the strangling chicken’s head, something caught and burned momentarily with a pale bluish fire. The chicken was instantly its insane and hysterical self again, and proved it by joining in the panic.

  The man gaped; he was totally unable to accept so irrational a happening. Lane shook him, and he said some bewildered words which were lost in the confusion of noises. There were two more chickens suffocating on the floor. Lane bent to one, picked it up, held the lighter to its head—and there was a momentary flame and a chicken no longer in distress. He picked up the last and rescued it in the same fashion.

  “Now come out!” snapped Lane. “It’s dangerous here! Come on!”

  He pulled the bald-headed man outside.

  “What—what the hell did you do?” demanded the man blankly. “What the hell’s happenin’?”

  “Something’s after your chickens,” said Lane furiously, though his anger was not with the man. “It killed four of them. One of them had you! Come on, now, and let me show you how to protect yourself.”

  He heard many whinings. The death-shrieks of Gizmos were evidently signals other Gizmos could hear despite, louder simultaneous sounds. Lane seized his companion by the arm.

  “Come on!” he snapped. “Run!”

  But the bald-headed man instinctively resisted. And then it was too late. There were awful sounds in the air all about them. Gizmos arrived, and Lane felt them touching all over his body in that dense aggregation which would drown him if it did not suffocate him. A wild fury filled him. As the bald-headed man fought crazily, his face contorted in the struggle for breath, Lane forced his arms through the fluttering resistance of the Gizmos. He put a cigarette in his mouth. When his lighter flared, flames leaped upward palely, causing screams ten feet above his head. He breathed malodors and lighted the cigarette. Then he took it in his left hand and stabbed and stabbed at the empty air.

  It was not sensible. It was only partly effective. The glowing
tip of the cigarette killed Gizmos, to be sure, but not fast enough. But Lane was not acting as a rational human being; he was too enraged to realize his own folly.

  The professor came running.

  “Dick!” she called. “I want to catch one! Let me catch one! I need a specimen for Washington.”

  She waved a pillowslip and an unlit gasoline blowtorch in the sort of insanity which comes of obsessive zeal. She saw Lane as the center of separate, leaping, bluish flames. She hardly noticed the struggling, strangling bald-headed man. She dropped the blowtorch and waded into the viciously whining atmosphere about Lane. The Gizmos were dense enough to blur the sharp edges of treetrunks nearby.

  “Got him!” whooped the professor.

  Then Carol came running with a brazing torch. Lane picked up the gasoline burner, and he felt wrath as, holding his breath or gasping the unbreathable, he sprayed gasoline and Carol fired it, and flames leaped up and shriekings sounded while Professor Warren sturdily twisted a pillowcase in which something throbbed and made shrill noises. In the car on the far side of the store the Monster’s muted howling could be heard.

  It lasted for a long, long time. It was intoxication to kill the things that had no substance until a flame touched them.

  But presently the throbbing thing in the pillowcase squealed alone. The outline of trees and leaves and branches was quite unblurred. Carol took her finger off the trigger of the brazing torch, looked at Lane and swallowed audibly. Wind came from somewhere and blew away the odor of dead Gizmos. The Monster howled on. Lane took a deep breath; then he looked at the bald-headed man, who stirred only feebly.

  “I’ve been pretty much of a fool,” said Lane.

  He bent over the semiconscious owner of the chickens, which in their house had now regained a composure as insane as their former panic.

  “We wiped out a whole swarm, Dick,” said the professor, beaming. “Not a big swarm, maybe, but we wiped them out! They can’t help coming to one of their number who’s screaming bloody murder instead of practising it! And I’ve still got my specimen!”

  The bald-headed man panted and opened his eyes. They filled with fright.

  “You’re all right now,” Lane told him. “When you get your breath I’ll explain what’s happened and how to keep it from happening again.”

  “I had a heart attack!” gasped the man on the ground. “Get me to a doctor! I had a heart attack! Get me to a doctor!”

  Lane growled. The owner of the chickens remained fanatically still, panting his own diagnosis of his condition. He couldn’t believe what he remembered, and anyhow most diseases had their publicity men in all popular advertising media: in case of a heart attack, the patient must be kept still and a doctor summoned immediately. The bald-headed man desperately demanded the approved and publicized treatment for his imagined ill.

  “We’ll take him to a doctor, then,” grunted Lane after a moment. “No sense leaving him alone! This could happen again! I’ll get the car.”

  He went to the front of the store. Burke was in the driver’s seat of the car, ashen with fear, racing the motor, his hands frozen on the steering wheel, and puffing agonizedly on a cigar. Every window in the car was shut tightly. On the floor of the car, the Monster howled despair past even defiance.

  Burke looked at Lane with panic-filled eyes. It took long seconds to get him out of his paralysis of fear. Lane knew that if he’d really been able to move, Burke would have driven crazily away the instant he knew a multitude of Gizmos was nearby. He’d have left them, and he’d never have stopped the car until the gas gave out.

  Now, Lane filled the tank with gasoline. He pushed Burke into a back seat. He drove the car painstakingly near to the bald-headed man, still flat on the ground. It occurred to him that here was a possible chance to prove the existence and characteristics of Gizmos so the facts would get on the news wires. They had a Gizmo, captive. They could call others at will. There could be a public demonstration for police and newspapermen and public health authorities somewhere. It would end with just such an attack on their audience as had taken place in Murfree. And they could end that attack as they’d ended the one on this man.

  They loaded him into the car, because he pathetically insisted that he must remain absolutely quiet lest another heart attack strike him dead. In a consciously feeble voice he gave directions for finding a doctor.

  Burke whimpered as the car sped along the highway and the conversation among Lane and Carol and the professor—raised above the Monster’s continuing howls—made it clear that they intended deliberately to call such an aggregation of Gizmos as had attacked Murfree and made dust clouds and murdered people in the wrecked cars they’d passed this day.

  “But Mr. Lane!” Burke protested, practically wailing. “This here Gizmo in this pillowcase—right now it’s calling its friends to come help it!”

  “True,” said the professor briskly. “And if they come, it will be a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

  “But they could be dust storms,” wailed Burke. “God, Mr. Lane! You’re telling ’em to come after us!”

  “Exactly,” said Lane, “Just as the men in that small town you’re going to organize will tell them to come-to be killed.”

  He heard a chattering between the Monster’s doleful, hopeless howls. It was Burke’s teeth. But Lane entered into a professional discussion of the methods to be used when they staged a demonstration of the calling of Gizmos for destruction. Suddenly Professor Warren said apologetically: “I’m ashamed to admit it, Dick, but I want to make a hopelessly unscientific experiment. Insofar as I’m a typical scientist, I writhe. But let me make it, eh?”

  “Go ahead,” said Lane. Then he saw a wreck beside the road ahead. He said, “Carol, will you help your aunt?”

  The professor dived down among the wildly assorted parcels in the back of the car. She came up with the paper bag she’d filled in a grocery store in Murfree, minutes before the Gizmo attack.

  “I want to try a—a ghost-repellent,” said the professor abashedly. “It might work on Gizmos.”

  “Science is wonderful!” said Lane. He drove past the wreck, which Carol did not see. “Apparently it concocts things to repel even the ghosts it doesn’t believe in!”

  “Nonsense!” said the professor. “This is not science; it’s superstition. But old wives among the Boers were putting bread-mould on wounds for generations before penicillin was thought of! This is a superstitious practice against ghosts and devils. I—”

  She brought out a clove of garlic. Clothed as it was in its pearly skin, it was wholly inoffensive. “Ghosts,” she said defensively, “were always said to hate the smell of asafetida and garlic. People used to wear asafetida in bags around their necks, probably because it smelled even worse than garlic. I’ve got some garlic. I’m going to see if it stirs up our discontented prisoner.”

  With Carol holding the neck of the pillowcase, she thrust in her hand. The captive thing throbbed and whipped about inside its prison of percale, but its whining did not change pitch.

  The professor withdrew her hand, while Carol kept the prisoner fast. The professor broke the clove of garlic and rubbed it over her skin. Then she inserted the garlic-smeared hand into the bag again.

  There was something like a Gizmo convulsion. The thing in the pillowslip made a noise so shrill that it was almost a whistle. It beat back and forth inside the confining cloth. It raged. It fluttered. The professor withdrew her hand and it continued to bulge and beat the cloth wall about it.

  “Garlic was said to drive away devils,” observed Professor Warren with satisfaction, “because it actually drove away Gizmos. We have an item of evidence that ghosts and devils and Gizmos are alike. Do you realize, Dick, how conclusive our research becomes almost minute by minute? Now we have a complete defense against Gizmos! There’s wild garlic everywhere! If people simply smear it on themselves it will be a perfect protection! Asafetida should do as well or better! Dick, this is a great moment!”

 
; “The revival of the use of the asafetida bag should be a great scientific triumph,” agreed Lane mildly.

  The Monster screamed horror of the new noises the imprisoned, garlic-wounded Gizmo made. Carol carefully knotted the neck of the pillowcase and passed it to Burke over her shoulder. She bent down to try to comfort the dog, but he would not be comforted. The thing in the bag made noises like shrieks of rage which scared the Monster terribly.

  Burke whimpered. The car rolled on. The bald-headed man moaned feebly, “Get me to a doctor. I had a heart attack…”

  Then Lane looked attentively in the rear-view mirror and said: “Docs the way behind look a little bit blurry, Carol?”

  Carol turned about to stare. She nodded gravely. “Yes. A swarm of them is following,” she said composedly. “They were called by our little friend, no doubt. But we can outrun them.”

  Burke jerked the cigar from his mouth. Frantically, he pressed its burning end upon the pillowcase prison of the Gizmo. The cloth scorched and gave way. There was a flame and a small shriek and a vile smell.

  “I—I killed it!” panted Burke. “You can’t call Gizmos into my car!”

  Lane said nothing. The thing was done. There was nothing to say. He drove on. The professor compressed her lips and looked volumes at the terror-stricken Burke. Carol cranked down a window until the air inside the car was clean again. Then Lane said coldly:

  “Still following?”

  “Not now,” said Carol. “I can see the blurring, but it’s stopped. It isn’t coming after us any more.”

  “Then that’s that,” said Lane levelly. A little later he said: “I think this will be the doctor’s house.”

  It was very near to sunset, now. Following the bald-headed man’s directions, he turned into the driveway of a doctor’s neat home set well back from the road, just where the outskirts of a small village began. The world was filled with an odd, beautiful carmine light which sometimes shows at sundown.