Murray Leinster - War with the Gizmos

“How do you do?” said the professor briskly. She extended an object she’d brought from the car. “I have a present for you. A Gizmo, freshly caught in a pillowcase and now confined in a small garbage can. It’s in very good voice…”

It was a near thing, of course. It has since been demonstrated that Gizmos multiplied by an involved sort of gaseous fission, so that when a single Gizmo settled down to a meal of their awful nourishment, two Gizmos rose up at the meal’s end. Their rate of increase was astronomical. When Lane and his party arrived at the laboratories it was literally the last minute when it could be hoped to prevent at least a holocaust of human beings and possibly the complete extermination of animal life.

But it was extraordinarily simple to handle the matter, once it was attacked by technical means—which made it convincing—instead of grimly personal battle with flames and torches. At the laboratory they already had tape recordings of the cries of Gizmos held captive and enraged, and Holden had an open wire to the authorities who’d asked him to stand by. He passed on answers in quick, minute-by-minute succession.

It is a matter of record that Lane arrived at the laboratory a little after eleven p.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time. Much that Lane had reported was already passed on. By midnight, transcriptions of the Gizmo cries were being made at army bases and military installations and air force fields and civil defense headquarters all over the country. By twelve-thirty those hair-raising noises were being played over public-address systems and wherever loudspeakers could be set up. Loudspeaker trucks posted themselves at the edges of cities and played the siren song of rage.

And Gizmos came. And then they were worked upon by flame throwers, torches, and fireworks. Later the speakers were mounted near great fans whose revolving blades cut through the whirling gaseous dynamic systems and chopped them to bits. That they were lethal to Gizmos was demonstrated by the awful reek downwind. On airport tarmacs, loudspeakers called Gizmos from the sky to be shattered by the blades of idling propellers.

Swarms were tolled to destruction in Newark and Poughkeepsie and Yonkers and Hartford and Boston and Pittsburg. There were monstrous stenches—at which wise men rejoiced—in Tallahassee and Laramie and Salt Lake City and Missoula and San Diego and Omaha and Houston and Cincinnati.

Nobody has ever estimated the maximum number of Gizmos. They were very difficult to wipe out. For weeks, helicopters droned above wildernesses giving out the sounds which, because they expressed frenzied rage, brought frenzied invisible monsters to join them—and to die. There was a report of an isolated band of Gizmos in the Dakotas more than three months later, but they were adequately taken care of.

The war with the Gizmos ended in a victory for the humans, of the only kind which amounts to anything in these modern days. One side was exterminated, which ended the matter. There were some very trivial things which turned up later. Burke, for example, proposed honorable matrimony to Carol. Carol declined. The professor wrote a magnificent book on the fourth kingdom of nature—gaseous—which is sometimes criticized for her indignation at any suggestion that she is imaginative…

When the tumult was over, Lane asked Carol where she lived.

“With Aunt Ann,” said Carol, “wherever that may be.” Lane grimaced. “What,” he asked, “would be a good alibi for me to go wherever that might turn out to be? If-”

Carol said carefully: “I’m not engaged. Or anything.”

Lane drew a deep breath. “Swell!” he said. “We’ve only known each other three days, but I’m concerned about the Monster. Somebody ought to make a home for him. I’ll—well—I’ll make some temporary arrangement for him, while I hang around… Er, my intentions are honorable.”

He grinned, suddenly, and she smiled back.