Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

Lane braked and stopped the car.

“Watch the landscape behind,” he said briefly to Carol. “I’ll watch ahead.” As he heard the professor cranking down her window he reflected that Burke, who owned this car, was reduced to the status of a passenger without voice in the conduct of affairs. He said: “Burke?”

“Y-yes, Mr. Lane,” said Burke, still shakily.

“Haven’t heard from you in some time,” said Lane. “What’s your opinion of the state of things now? Still believe in a military organization of the Gizmos?”

“It looks mighty like it to me, sir,” said Burke unsteadily. “They—wouldn’t want a prisoner carried off that we could learn things from. It’d make ’em stop an attack to try to keep us from carryin’ away a prisoner.”

Professor Warren broke into lamentations. The pillowslip was soaked by rain; the only dry spots were the places where it had been clamped by the window. Now, inside the car, the pillowslip was limp. It was not totally empty; the wet cloth still contained bubbles. None of them, however, was big enough to be a Gizmo.

“It’s dead!” lamented the professor. “And it could have solved everything! We’ll have to catch another!”

She opened the neck of the sack. An intolerable odor of carrion came out. She hastily threw the pillowcase out of the window and panted for clean air. Lane put the car into gear and went on.

For almost an hour there was no tangible evidence that Gizmos existed anywhere but in the area they had left, though Lane knew better. Then they came to a place where they saw four dead cattle on a hillside. The animals were definitely dead, not peacefully reclining and chewing the cud. But that was no positive sign of Gizmos. Lane stopped the car and cut off the motor. He listened. The universe was without sound. No insects. No bird songs. He started the motor once more.

“Not proven,” he said wryly, “but I’d bet that they’re either here or they have been. And it ought to take a lot of Gizmos to kill all the things that chirp and twitter.”

Professor Warren stared at him as if appalled at the idea. And it was a startling thing, once one considered it. Any insect-eating bird captures bugs by hundreds or thousands every day, and there is no acre of open ground without its numerous feathered foragers. Woodlands shelter many more. Swifts and swallows carry on their hunting until late in the twilight, and bats carry on through the dark. It’s hard to realize the number of insects devoured in one acre in one day, and yet the number of insects is not diminished. To depopulate a field of its insect inhabitants is incredible destruction. To destroy also its birds, its field mice, its rabbits, its moles…

“I didn’t realize, Dick,” said the professor querulously, “how many Gizmos there must have been to destroy even the gnats where we had our trailer. Those dust spheres must have had hundreds of thousands of Gizmos in them. Altogether there must be—it is inconceivable how many there must be! And any one of them can kill a human being. Dick, this is a serious business.”

“I’ve been suspecting it for some time,” said Lane dryly, “even if I don’t agree that they are Martians.”

Burke spoke with a sudden return to his former manner of complete confidence and zest.

“Yes, sir! Those Gizmos are Martians, or Jupiterians, or something from space. It stands to reason they don’t belong on Earth! And they’re smart as men. Maybe there was gas-creatures on Earth before they came, like there’d be meat-creatures in the woods on Jupiter or Mars if we went there. But these Gizmos come from off of Earth. They’re smart. They’ve got a civilization, they’ve got military tactics, they’ve got over-all strategy. They got a general plan for conquerin’ Earth, and it looks bad.”

“I’ll agree that it looks bad,” said Lane. “How bad I don’t know. But if they can appear in swarms everywhere, it certainly doesn’t look good!”

The car now moved in a generally northeast direction between lines of green-clad mountains. It had left the thunderstorm far behind. It went along a gravel-surfaced road between strong, tight fences with here and there a farmhouse. Several times they saw cattle alive. Once more Lane stopped the car and the motor, to listen. The sounds of the countryside were perfectly commonplace. Birds flew up from the top strands of the wire fences as the car came near.

“There are birds and bugs again around here,” said Lane.

“And Gizmos,” said Carol quietly.

She pointed. A living partridge flapped and flailed upon the ground. As they watched, it lay still. And Lane, coldly searching, saw grass beyond it quiver slightly, as if there were a bubble of heated gases above the dying bird. He started the motor again.

The death of that particular partridge was an extremely minor episode in the developing state of things. There had been other incidents which were equally indicative of something startlingly unusual.

In a backwoods settlement in Alabama, a colored farmer had secured an herb doctor to put an end to an epidemic among his chickens. Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury. At midnight of the night before, this herb doctor had burned a particularly offensive mess of feathers, roots, gums, dusts, and grisly oddments within the affected chicken house. As it burned, the herb doctor recited mysterious words learned by rote and without individual meaning. Actually they came from the Gulf of Guinea by way of some generations of thaumaturgists, and their original significance was bloodcurdling. A truly horrible reek came out of the musky chicken house. A completely offensive aroma stayed behind. The herb doctor came out of the structure and, coughing, said that thereafter the farmer’s chickens would be completely safe in their shelter.

And they were. The herb doctor had cast a spell to drive away the spirits, the demons, the invisible fiends who caused healthy chickens to be found dead under their roosts each morning. His spells and the fumigation left the living fowl stupefied where they roosted, but his professional assurance was well-founded. Those chickens were now safe against Gizmos. They and their dwelling stank of odors even Gizmos disliked. So the herb doctor had done an efficient and highly professional job of chasing the Gizmos.

There were other irrelevant happenings. There was a sufferer from asthma in Tarzana, California, who waked in the night with a familiar sensation of suffocation, his breath cut off. He felt the wild terror which suffocation produces, but he was more or less accustomed to it. If he heard a thin whining in his ears, he paid no attention. This was a very bad attack. But instead of futile beatings at the air before him, he groped beside his bed as his senses reeled. He had readied a tiny glass capsule placed upon a clean handkerchief. He crushed the capsule and thrust the handkerchief to his face. The pungent smell of amyl nitrate filled the air. Then he could breathe again. There was no gradual improvement in his breathing, as usually happened. One instant he was suffocating, the next instant he was breathing perfectly. The smell of amyl nitrate was objectionably strong. He lay back, wide awake but reassured. His ears rang and his heart pounded from his fright, but he was accustomed to attacks of asthma.

He did not hear a high-pitched whine rise in tone until it was an infinitesimal shriek. It did not occur to him that a Gizmo had shared the fumes of amyl nitrate with him; he had never heard of Gizmos. He probably did not even know that amyl nitrate in the least possible concentration will make an internal-combustion engine backfire itself to destruction. Certainly he did not reason that an entity of gas, with a gas metabolism, would react to the smell of amyl nitrate as a human would react to a bath in nitric acid.