Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

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.