Murray Leinster: War with the Gizmos

When they were a hundred yards from the trailer, a dog came out from under it and ran toward them. It was not a beautiful dog. It had started out to be a foxhound and apparently had changed its mind on the way. Its tail drooped. It carried its head low, without spirit.

“That’s the Monster,” said Professor Warren briefly. “He’s not ours. He belongs to a poor white family that fled in terror of their own imaginations last week. The Monster stayed behind when they left, probably because we feed him. I don’t think they did.”

The dog cringed a greeting. Professor Warren strode on past him.

“Wait a minute!” said Lane. “They fled from what?” “Nightmares,” boomed the professor. “They said things sat on their chests and took their breaths. They spent their nights with their heads under the bedcovers. Two of their dogs and all their chickens died, and then their cow. Old age, probably, but they ran away whining of magic.”

“Good God!” said Lane, stunned. “Eh?” demanded the professor. She saw his expression. “What’s the matter?”

Lane saw much—too much. He put things together. They fitted. The result was impossible, but so were the facts.

“They—this poor white family,” said Lane, “begin to seem to me very sensible people. I think I can tell you, after all.”

He told her exactly what had happened to him near the pathetic small heap of dead rabbits. It was his profession to tell what he had seen and done; he made a living at it. He knew better than to add details which might make his story more plausible. He told it baldly, factually, without explanation or theory.

“Which,” he finished, “is why I carried dead leaves when I spoke to you. It was the equivalent of having a sheet ready to pull over my head.”

Professor Warren blinked at him. Then she grunted. “Hah! It fits in. Have to be checked, of course. But idiots have called me wildly imaginative before now. I’d enjoy proving something so wild they couldn’t imagine it!” Then she grunted again. “Mr. Lane, I am a desperate woman, just desperate enough to test this absurd story—which I implicitly believe—in the hope of finding out why there has been an outbreak of artistic temperament among the local specimens of Cathartes aura—buzzards to you, sir! You’ll stay to dinner and tell me what you know.” She raised her voice in a bellow. “Carol!” she roared. “Carol! We’ve got company!”

A door opened at one end of the giant aluminum trailer. A girl appeared carrying a wicker bird cage. Her face was troubled. Lane saw her with a sudden, extraordinary clarity. It was as if, somehow, he saw her and the mountains and the sky and valley with much more than the customary vividness.

Lane had come a long way across the mountains, reviewing his own bafflement on the way. Then he’d had an experience which still made his flesh crawl; he was disturbed because he couldn’t believe what he remembered. But now this girl Carol looked completely as a girl should look, and remote from terror and bewilderment and unease. He felt a surprised gratitude that she was here to remind him that the world was good to live in. He regarded her with an astonished satisfaction.

“Aunt Ann,” she said uncomfortably, “I put Pogo outside in his cage because it’s stuffy in the trailer. Then I looked out and didn’t see him on his perch. I went to see, and he was lying on the bottom. There are feathers all about as if he’d been beating against the bars! He’s dead!”

Professor Warren glanced at Lane with startled eyes.

“Pogo,” she said, “is our canary. Or was.” An instant later she said in a brusque voice: “Too bad! I’ll look him over. Carol, this is Dick Lane. He’s having dinner with us. We’re going to talk biology and dynamic systems and ha’nts and goblins and what the hell happened to the mosquitoes that were so bad when we set up camp here. We may touch on why the old cow died. Mr. Lane, this is my niece, Carol Warren.”

The girl nodded to Lane.

“I have a firm conviction,” boomed Professor Warren, “that this young man is going to write, and I’m going to make a learned report on, some theories so wild that they’ll make Baron Munchausen’s best effort sound like a Sunday-morning chapel talk by the dean of women.” She rubbed her hands. “I’ll stir ’em up! If they don’t try to have me certified insane, they’ll get me thrown out of the society for—”

The Monster uttered a sound like a despairing scream. Then he snarled, facing empty air. It was unnatural and horrifying to see him bare his fangs at emptiness while he trembled horribly. He turned slowly, yelping, as if something unseeable moved. Then he snapped and growled furiously. But he was terrified. His yelps were cries of fear. Suddenly he screamed and bolted blindly, snapping at the emptiness about him. He dodged and twisted crazily, making an outcry which was hysteria and fear and the ultimate of panicky ferocity.

Lane felt all his muscles go rigid. Without any doubt, he knew that the Monster heard faint whining sounds, and perhaps had felt faint touches upon his fur, though there was nothing at all to be seen.

“It followed me!” Lane said savagely. Then he snapped to the girl: “Get inside! Fast! Get in the trailer!”

He pushed at the professor while the Monster rolled over, snapping, and then plunged crazily into a tangled mass of briars. There he continued to yelp. Seconds later he scuttled out the far side of the briars and bolted desperately for the trailer. He flung himself through the opened door, almost upsetting Carol as she stood there.

“Inside!” raged Lane. “Get in! Quick! Before it follows!”

His hair stood on end. He thought he heard a faint, shrill, venomous whine. He had the feeling of horror he’d felt back by the dead rabbits, but now he thought of wild things fighting hopelessly in the wilderness, and of the corpses he’d seen. The sound of whining increased, as if it came from more than one source.

He thrust Professor Warren frantically before him as he ripped off his coat and flailed the air with it. Invisible or not, he would know of anything his coat might touch.

“Quick!” he panted. “Hurry! Get inside!”

Inside the trailer, nothing happened. Lane went grimly through it, making sure there was no opening to the outer air. The ventilator above the small cook-stove was open. He closed it. The result of these precautions was stifling heat, but Lane felt cold chills down his spine simply by thinking of invisible stranglers trying to worm their way in to where the three humans were. There were times, too, when a deep and bitter rage took possession of him.

“Be still!” said Professor Warren irritably, as she paced up and down the confined space of the trailer’s living section. “You make me hot to look at you! I have to think things out. Either we are all quite insane, or the people who used to own the Monster were much more sensible than we’ve been!”

Carol sat quietly, looking from one to the other—her buxom aunt in khaki riding breeches, and Lane seething in citified tweeds. Outside the trailer there was a rocky shelf which loomed over a valley to the east.

“They said that things sat on their chests and stopped their breaths,” Professor Warren went on, “so they ducked under the covers and the ha’nts went away. I was scornful! But now I think that they may have been right!”

Lane forced himself to sit down. He lighted a cigarette. “There was something that tried to strangle me,” he said savagely, “and it whined while it did so. I heard the same sound just outside, and the dog saw something. But whatever attacked me and the Monster was invisible! And that’s impossible! Real things can’t be invisible!”