Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

Carol followed his eyes. The dog paused in the middle of the street to let a car go by, and trotted the rest of the way. A man on the sidewalk spoke to the dog. It was one of those trivial incidents which seldom happen in a city where dogs have only their masters, no other human acquaintances, to greet them. The dog politely wagged his tail and trotted on.

Lane was still uneasy, but it was necessary to wait. He opened his mouth to speak—

The man on the sidewalk opened his mouth to gasp. He staggered. He beat the air before him. His eyes went panicky; he choked, and fell to his knees. He jerked his head from side to side, his mouth open, fighting crazily against nothingness.

The Monster howled.

“Shut the windows,” snapped Lane.

He was out of the car, rushing for the fallen man. Other people were hurrying to help. Somebody bent over the victim as he collapsed to the street. Lane thrust other figures aside. He snapped his lighter before the face of the semiconscious, panic-crazed man. There was a leaping, momentary, lambent flame. There was a horrible odor. A thin shrill shriek ended before it was well begun. The fallen man could fill his lungs. He did. He gasped for breath which now he could draw in.

The Monster howled again.

Lane said sharply. “I’ve seen this before. If it ever happens to you again, or to anybody else, make a flame. Wave it close! You’ll be able to breathe! Pass it on!”

There was a small crowd of two dozen people, already gathered about the prostrate figure. Others were hastening to see what was the matter. Lane looked about him, and saw blank incomprehension on every face. The group was merely astonished and concerned over what they assumed to be a stroke of some sort, happening to a friend. To them, what Lane had done was completely without rational connection to the emergency it had met.

Then one of them gagged and struggled to breathe. He flailed his arms crazily. He fought against suffocation with stark terror in his eyes. Lane pushed toward that man and waved a flame before his face and behind him somebody else collapsed and there were startled cries. One of the figures hurrying to this spot stopped short and began to fight for breath. And the Monster screamed in the car, and tried to find a place to hide.

He found himself cursing at the things which now, very obviously, descended upon Murfree with lethal intentions. Flight was the only possible recourse, leaving these people to the fate the Gizmos would deal out. But it did not occur to him. Someone collapsed two yards away. The crowd was still bewildered, still unable to realize that danger existed for them as well as the two-no, three—no, four—struggling figures on the ground. Lane flung himself to his knees beside the nearest, and waved the lighter flame, and then his own breath stopped and he waved the small blaze before his own face. But there was another person down, a woman this time, and whinings were loud all about him.

He knew what would come, yet it was impossible not to try to do what he could. He was actually trying to fight a swarm of Gizmos with a pocket lighter. He swept his absurd little flame about and other small flames rose and tiny shrieks sounded.

Then the professor waded into the extremely small space of crazed confusion. Of all imaginable things, she flourished a pillowcase. By her expression she was holding her breath as she thrust the open end of the pillowslip down upon the contorted face of a fallen fat man, now turning purple. The pillowcase billowed. Something was caught in it, throbbing and fluttering horribly inside the cloth. The professor closed the open end of the bag, squeezing it with an air of intense satisfaction modified by the look of someone trying not to breathe. She held the trapped Gizmo triumphantly aloft. It made a frantic whine.

Lane freed his own lips and nostrils of a Gizmo, by burning it. His eyebrows were singed by the flare-up, but the stuff he drew into his lungs was unbreathable. His senses reeled, yet he knew such hatred that it seemed he could go on forever, destroying Gizmos one by one, living on hatred only.

But of course it was not so.

Blue-white flame flashed before Lane’s face. There were small shriekings, and Carol gasped, “Back to the car! Aunt Ann has a prisoner! They’ll follow—maybe—if we drag him out of town!”

She tugged at Lane’s shoulder; again there was a flashing of bluish flame. She’d turned on a brazing torch and worked its spark igniter, and extended the flame to the limit. She cleared space before Lane’s nostrils and lips. A brazing torch was supposed to burn for two hours on a tank of compressed gas, so she used it lavishly. Lane took it from her hands. There were human screams in the street now. A few people ran in panic, with no idea of what they fled from. Some few beat at emptiness, struggling to breathe. There were some already on the ground, strangling. And above there was now a loud whining sound, louder than the human voices. It was overhead, as loud as a storm wind, and of a quality that made the flesh crawl.

Lane fought his way to the car, leaning against violent wind-gusts. The Gizmos were forming themselves into that overwhelming whirling formation, that globular organization which they’d used before to carry dust as a weapon. Against it, Lane played the long flame like a scythe. Once, apparently, the blade of fire penetrated to one of the currents which had been visible in the dust clouds. Fire leaped along that flow.

This swarm was no dust cloud, but it was not quite invisible because the appearance of minor waverings produced by a single Gizmo was multiplied by their number. The tops of nearby houses became blurred. Into that squealing organization of spinning Gizmos, Lane probed fiercely, as whalers in ancient days probed with lances for the vital parts of whales. Once he hit what in a roll-tag dust cloud looked like a surface vein; then the dying Gizmos carried the pale thin flame for forty feet. Suddenly now he struck an artery, and the thinnest and palest of conflagrations leaped along that whining wind and flared up beyond where he could see it. But the swarm broke up.

A horse tied to a farm wagon reared and kicked and fell to the ground. Somebody ran crazily, whipping the air before his face. Someone else, on his knees, battled nothingness and toppled to the sidewalk.

“Open!” cried Carol fiercely. “Open the door!”

The professor was gasping for breath, an expression of complete revulsion on her face. The odor of burned Gizmos was awful. She still had the improbable, inflated, frantically throbbing pillowcase.

Carol beat upon the door of the car. Burke, inside it, tried with shaking hands to fill the gas cup of a blowtorch. He heard nothing, he had closed and locked the car doors in terror. Lane struck the door with the tank of the brazing torch, and the glass cracked, held together only by its shatterproof constitution.

“Open up!” raged Lane, “Or I’ll bum a way in!”

Burke jerked his head up and reached over, his fingers all thumbs. It was seconds before he could pull up the tiny knob which worked the door locks. Carol snatched the door wide.

“Down with the window, Carol,” commanded the professor. “Dick, you’re taking the wheel again. This idiot has cost lives!”

Lane crowded Burke out of the way and started the motor. The professor seated herself stolidly beside the other front door, holding the shrilling, fluttering pillowslip outside.

“Use the flame, Carol,” she snapped. “The monsters are trying to tug my fingers loose. And—”

Her voice cut off. Carol carefully swung the flame that Lane had surrendered to her. She speared the place before her aunt’s face. The professor breathed, squeamishly.

The car moved. It pulled out into the street as the Monster howled and howled.