Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

“Ten dollars,” said Lane, “to use your telephone. You can hold your gun on me while I do it. I do not want to buy anything. I only want to use your phone.”

There was some argument, and it was Carol who made the conclusive appeal. She did not look like the companion of a suspicious character. The professor was the picture of adamant virtue. No woman traveling with undesirable characters would be gotten up like the professor.

Lane made his call. The storekeeper let him in alone, with his shotgun at full cock, and stayed right there while Lane talked. Lane got the Diebert Laboratories through three separate small-town exchanges, and talked to his friend Dr. Jim Holden over a connection which sang and hummed and was otherwise unsatisfactory, but did let him hear the explosive relief in his friend’s voice when he recognized Lane.

Lane’s prophecies had been borne out. All manufacturers of biologicals had been kept informed of all events, for their information when a break in the situation came. They could ask questions. On the basis of Lane’s prophecies, Holden had.

Lane’s prediction that some men would be stricken while operating bulldozers in Minnesota had been borne out. But men smoking cigars or cigarettes were immune while smoking—but only then. Lane had predicted it. This was so far beyond reason that when proved true that the head of the laboratories feverishly waited for more information from Lane.

Lane talked incisively. Holden was eager to listen, prepared to try out anything Lane might suggest. The phone connection was bad and grew worse. The singing of the wires sounded like Gizmos on the line. But Lane was able to tell much, and to give assurance that he was on the way.

When he went back to the car, a housewife was talking to Professor Warren from the upstairs window. As he settled into the driver’s seat again, the woman said with satisfaction:

“Ja. Garlic. My grossmutter used to say that spirits would run from garlic. I try it. Danke!”

Lane started the motor while the Professor muttered defensively:

“It’s true whether it’s scientific or not. And if she calls up her friends and tells them, it may save some lives.” Carol looked hopefully at Lane.

“Holden said,” he told her, “that there’ve been animal deaths near his plant. He’ll try to catch a Gizmo, with everybody smoking cigars. Once he does that, everything’s in line. But we want to get there. Fast! I’ve warned him that a swarm will come running if one Gizmo’s trapped.” He looked at the sky. “It’s late!”

He sent the car down the road with a cloud of dust following it. It was now close to sunset; the time for Gizmos to hunt food was nearer. Their loathsome appetite was greater today than yesterday, and greater tonight than today. By tomorrow—

The urgency which possessed Lane should have been cured by his having reached someone who could do something with what he’d learned. But he seemed to feel continuously more uneasy. The situation was better in one respect; the public might believe in an animal plague, but it also believed in a deadly entity which reflected radar-waves and destroyed animals and men. Therefore there were not many cars moving in the darkness. Fugitives from cities, blocked on the highways by implacable armed men, were afraid to be alone in their vehicles. They gathered in groups. They broke fences and built fires. Others came to them, and more fires were needed, and made. Along the highways on which men were forbidden to flee, those who had tried to run away clustered about great, leaping flames and took comfort from the light and their own numbers. This was a wise thing; the fires did deter the Gizmos—and the smell of men was not their first choice of prey.

So Lane in the old car went hurtling along back roads, and hummed through silent villages, and flung through the darkness on an absurdly roundabout way to the north of Philadelphia, and into New Jersey by a most unlikely way, and then down into the Trenton area by a deserted truck route that nobody seemed to guard.

And they came to the Diebert Laboratories, thirty miles from Trenton. Burke slept noisily in the back seat. But the Monster suddenly gave tongue to terror. He howled in the closed car.

“Holden must have things stirred up,” said Lane. “It does seem as if we ought to be somewhere near the plant.” He peered into the light cast by the car’s headlights. “That sign says to make a right turn.” He swung the car. “There are the buildings ahead, I’d guess. Only—”

He whistled softly. There were the buildings of the pharmaceutical laboratories ahead, with lights inside. The headlights faintly showed the modernistic main building —but it seemed to be blurred and out of focus. The private industrial roadway led straight to the plant, but nothing was distinct. The buildings looked like drowned things regarded through rippling water. Yet there were lights.

Carol lighted a brazing torch. She turned its flame on the perforated burner of a gasoline blowtorch, brought it up to temperature, and turned on the gasoline. It caught with a roar and a fierce blue flame. She handed it to the professor and then prepared a second.

“I don’t know how much longer the torches will run,” she said absorbedly, “but the gasoline ones will run for two hours.”

“I,” said the professor firmly, “shall get out a pillow easel.”

Lane drew a deep breath and headed for the building structure housing hundreds of people immersed in a Gizmo horde many times greater than even the Chicago swarm. They enclosed the entire structure. The humans inside the building would suffocate.

“I think,” said Lane regretfully, “we’ve got to open the car windows. These torches probably give off carbon dioxide. We’d better not breathe too much of it, if we can help it.”

The car went on. The air seemed thick and viscous. It was the Gizmos, of course, drawn to the building in numbers and in density and in sheer monstrous masses such as even Lane had not imagined before.

Carol cranked down the right-hand front window. She thrust a flame out of it.

It leaped up and forked and spread horribly; it seemed that the very sky took fire. And there was suddenly a screaming, unearthly outcry. The air about the car was convulsed as close-packed Gizmos strove to flee, creating whirlwinds and gusts which shook the car. And always there was a gout of fire coming from the right-hand front window, and that flame rose to the burning sky and masses of flame raced madly in all directions. Above all there was a whining and a keening and a sound of horror through which the Monster’s howlings were hardly able to be heard.

Then there was a horrible reek of dead Gizmos, and there ceased to be an upward spout of flame from the torch Carol kept roaring out of the window.

The car went on to the buildings in an enormous silence. Lane honked the horn. Lights came on, outside a door. The four of them got out of the car.

Doctor Holden appeared when the door opened as the bearers of torches reached it.

“It looks like a trick we didn’t think of,” he said blandly. “We’ve been working on something more technical. We loaded a dead cow on a handler-truck, with all of us smoking cigars, and we left it a while and then brought it into a small laboratory we had ready. There were Gizmos—your term, Lane—feeding on the carcass, and we had them where we could work with them. They protested, and their friends gathered. They’ve been protesting for hours, and their friends are still coming. We hadn’t quite solved the problem of the ones outside when you turned up. Come in! Let’s get this business going all over the country. I like the way you do things, Lane.”

Lane heard Professor Warren snort. Carol pressed his arm, confidently, smiling up at him. He introduced Professor Warren.