Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

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!”

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.