Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

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—”

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.

It loomed ahead, so close that Lane could not see its top through the windshield. To his left an even greater and more revolting monstrosity rolled down the mountainside. To the right and behind yet other giant ghastlinesses closed in. It seemed that their bulging middles were about to close over the car, to roof it in—and then solid masses of dust would come plummeting down, to bury the car in powder.

But Lane stepped on the accelerator. As the car plunged forward he pressed down harder, and as it still gathered speed he pushed the gas pedal down to the floor board. The car leaped to forty-five, to fifty, to sixty miles an hour. It passed the point toward which the four spheres tended—what should have been a meeting place of the car with all the rolling monstrosities. It swept past that spot into the dust-streaming base of the globe which blocked the highway. But it was swallowed up by one, not overwhelmed by four.

Inside the sphere, there was howling wind and the shrieking whine of Gizmos in uncountable number. The car shuddered. Its windows showed only earth outside, as if it had instantly been buried deep underground. Its throbbing clamor was muted, muffled, dulled. Its wheels rolled over softness. Its windshield wipers flicked back and forth, but their clicking was inaudible in the tumult of squealing of gas horrors and the roaring of many winds—and now, also, the frantic howling of the Monster, who heard Gizmos on every hand and tried to scream and snap and bite in all directions at once.

The car reeled. There was a hissing of dust grains against glass seen in a brownish obscurity, which deepened to pure pitch-black and then became brown again; and then the car came out into the open air, streaming dust on every hand. Lane sent it hurtling down the highway past the mountain.

Those in the car did not see the simultaneous collision of four dust-laden monstrosities because the back window was almost opaque. But they did crash together, and in crashing fused into one, and a sort of writhing chaos rose and wavered and spread out in continuing contortions. It was the height of a ten-story building at its least, and at its greatest it was twice as tall, and as it subsided it covered a space a quarter of a mile square—and the highway was closed by a mass of dust whose dunes rose to thirty feet in height.

On the road beyond, however, the car’s windshield wipers clicked and clacked, making a streaky transparency by which Lane could steer. Here, in the path of the monster he’d bored through, there was dust all over the highway. Everywhere the road was slippery with the fine stuff. But Lane drove like a madman. He could not look behind. He swung around a curve in the road, and the backtrail of the monster ended, and he knew that the car hurtled onward with no longer a betraying plume of dust behind it. Even the Monster’s howling ended. He lay limply, exhausted, on the floor of the car.

Lane said over his shoulder: “Burke, crank down the window and see what you can see behind.”

He drove across a bridge spanning a shallow stream some forty feet in width. The road slanted upward along the side of the mountain, leaving the valley below it.

Burke, his teeth chattering audibly, lowered the window and squinted to the rear.

“There’s what looks like smoke back yonder,” he reported in a trembling voice. “It ain’t stirring much. Looks like it’s settling.”

Lane observed, “That may mean that the Gizmos are confused, or it may simply mean that they’re coming after us without bothering to bring dust with them. They can always pick that up where and when they need it.”

“The Monster doesn’t agree,” the professor said. “He’s quiet. Ergo, no Gizmos—at least not angry ones. And after all, Dick, there must be a limit to the speed the creatures can make. They assuredly aren’t streamlined, and there is a limit to the effort they can make.”