Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

“We just heard a news broadcast,” he said dryly, when she came out to the car after the seventh attempt. “Now there’s no reference to the trouble in St. Louis or Kansas City. Maybe they think people will forget if they ignore it. And the business in Chicago is played down. It’s said that bacteriologists think they’ve isolated a suspicious germ. Last night it was thought to be a Russian trick! There’s still no mention of any unusual number of traffic deaths. Two-thirds of the broadcast dealt with foreign news.”

“And I can’t get a line to Washington,” said the professor bitterly. “I don’t think we’d be allowed to enter the city anyhow. Drive on, Dick. I give up on trying to attend to this affair reasonably. But we have to do something!”

“We will do something,” promised Lane. “We’ll stay out of cities.”

The professor’s latest failure happened a few miles out of Winchester. She tried yet again in Martinsburg, where there appeared to be no inclination to keep anyone from driving through. They got a meal there which was a very belated breakfast, but no telephone line to Washington.

This was the third day of their attempt to complete what should have been one day’s long drive. It was almost a repetition of the first. They could not go through Hagerstown. They lost hours finding a way on unmarked roads to circle it. Chambersburg was blocked, too, and they had again to make a long detour. Lane was tempted to try the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but he bought gas in a crossroads group of houses called Green Village, and was informed that the Turnpike was closed. “Quarantine or something,” said the man who worked the gas pump.

Lane asked questions. Dairy farms in Chippensburg had lost all their cattle during the night past. Two men had lost their lives with the animals. It occurred to Lane that the relatively small loss of human life was due to the exact fact that the Gizmos were mindless. As scavengers, they’d found food in the carcasses of dead wild creatures. As hunters, they still associated food with fur or feathers or the chitinous shells of insects. They would attack men, but their first instinct and preference was for lesser creatures.

Lane turned east, avoiding main highways. When a good highway appeared, Lane doggedly turned aside or else crossed it quickly and dived into obscure lanes again. Three times he passed through areas in which no bird called or insect sang. Once he passed the still-smoking embers of a farmhouse which had burned without any attempt by anybody to salvage anything. There was a dead horse in the pasture to its left.

In late afternoon squadrons of planes appeared overhead. Once Lane heard a faraway droning, and presently discovered a helicopter hovering in the air. A little later the car reached a hillcrest, from which he saw a billowing puff of smoke spouting up from a highway which was black with cars beyond it.

“Stopping traffic,” observed Lane, “probably from Harrisburg. They would pick a four-lane highway! They’re being stopped so they won’t be killed on the roads. Of course, if a feeding horde of Gizmos came on them stopped as they are—”

He searched out a way and then drove on. Presently he scuttled across the empty part of the blocked road and dived into a dirt lane on the other side. This was between Harrisburg and York, Pennsylvania. The highways nearer Lancaster were practically empty. Either the police had acted more quickly, or there were fewer exit highways to block.

He got northward of the Turnpike by pushing through a minor underpass, and headed east again. It was not sensible to try to pass through Philadelphia or to try to get into New Jersey to the south of it. Near Reading he came upon solid masses of cars crawling away from Philadelphia.

“I’ve got a hunch,” said Lane. “Counting what the news reports have told—and what they haven’t—I have a hunch that my prophecies to Jim Holden have him pretty well convinced that I know what I’m talking about.”

“Holden?” Carol said.

“Friend of mine,” explained Lane. “We’ve hunted together more than once. He’s head of research at Diebert Laboratories. He’s the one we’re headed to see.”

“Jim Holden?” Professor Warren said excitedly. “Is that Dr. James Holden? The one who made the report on adaptation of living tissues for transplanting? Good heavens, Dick! Do you know him?”

“I suppose it’s the same man. Why?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded the professor. “We’ve wasted time. If I can talk to him for half an hour—knowing my work as he must—he’ll put his laboratory and his staff at my disposal. And with such a team we’ll have a definitive, documented report on Gizmos ready within days, and the whole business will be ended!”

Lane turned in his seat to stare at her. He was honestly amazed. Professor Warren had shared every experience with Gizmos that he had. She’d seen all the horrors he had seen, yet it was suddenly and startlingly clear that as a biologist her concept of Gizmos was totally unlike his. She probably knew more about their metabolism than he could guess, and undoubtedly had a clearer idea of the pattern of motion which kept their gaseous dynamic systems in being. It would be a highly complex system, vastly more complicated than a smoke ring. It could vary for locomotion, for hunting, and in response to stimuli from without. When she thought of Gizmos, she thought of them like that. Lane was a hunter and a fisherman; he thought of the way creatures acted. In consequence, while the professor looked forward to a completed examination of Gizmos, Lane was guessing what they would probably do next.

And it seemed to him the most obvious thing in the world. From the facts that deaths among game animals had been rare in the beginning, and more and more frequent later, Lane had formed an opinion. That really alarming phenomena attributable to Gizmos had turned up within the past week confirmed it. He made a grim evaluation of the fact that until three days ago only people interested in game conservation and animal husbandry were concerned with Gizmo affairs; now there was censorship of news concerning them, restriction of civilian movements, and frantic scurrying for promising courses of conduct, and all the phenomena of war.

The state of affairs made it look as if the Gizmos would be forced to attack cities and human lives everywhere within hours.

The reasoning was absolutely simple. Living creatures with ample food and no enemies increase in number by geometrical progression. If there had been only a hundred Gizmos in the forests of America six months ago, then five months ago there might have been ten thousand, four months ago a million, and three months ago a hundred million. Two months ago ten thousand million Gizmos might have gone totally unseen in the wildernesses of North America. Now a hundred times as many could not stay in the wilds. There wasn’t enough food for them. They had to come out. Domesticated animals would stay their hunger only so long, because it was very highly probable that as they fed they multiplied. All the animals of ploughed ground and pasture would feed them only briefly. Not months. Not weeks. Days. And two days—three—were already gone.

“I was thinking,” said Lane in a careful tone, “that I might possibly be able to reach him before I can get to his place. People might not be allowed to telephone into the cities to tell of tenor outside, but it is conceivable that one can telephone from one small town to another. I’m going to try.”

He stopped at a closed-up country store. Its windows were barred. Its doors were padlocked. A dog growled from under its porch, and a window opened on the floor above. A shotgun barrel peered out. The dog barked angrily.

“Store’s closed,” snapped a Pennsylvania Dutch voice. “Everything is all. Go away or I shoot!”