Murray Leinster: War with the Gizmos

“If,” said Professor Warren, with a fine air of competence, “if you took a jellyfish and put it in a cloth bag and twisted until you’d wrung the jellyfish out through the cloth, I don’t think you’d be worried about whether it was dead or not. That’s what you did with this thing.” She added exuberantly: “It was alive. It had a certain degree of intelligence. Perhaps a considerable degree. It’s amazing! And if you sniff you can’t help knowing something about its metabolism! No wonder the buzzards were temperamental! There were no smells for them to see!”

She stood still a moment, gloating over her discoveries. Then she moved to the other end of the living space and struck a match. She put water on the small, bottled-gas stove.

“For coffee,” she said beaming. “To celebrate. I’m going to make some notes while the water boils. Wildly imaginative, am I? I’ll show them some wild imagination! A dynamic system of gases, unquestionably living because it has undetermined but demonstrable intelligence, emotional reactions, and at least some degree of communication with its fellows! We irritated it and it called the others while it attacked! Let ’em try to classify a Gizmo like that!”

She sat down and pulled out a notebook. She began to write, absorbedly and swiftly. The Monster moaned. There remained a raging, whining noise in the air outside. Lane listened. He’d been trying for a long time to find an unknown killer of game and men. He’d found a something which not only tried to kill him, but the girl. It had been filled with fury toward a human being. Now others of its kind shrilled the same insane anger.

“Don’t worry!” said the professor, without looking up from where she scribbled. “The thing inside here couldn’t lift a sheet. They can’t turn over the trailer.”

Lane glared out a window. He saw the strained shapes of trees as they grew on the rocky ground. He saw blue sky, very bright as compared to the shadowed mountainside. He moved to the other side of the trailer and looked away, down into the valley. He saw the blurred edge of the mountain’s shadow cast on some of the isolated small fields below. Far out he saw a buzzard in leisurely and effortless flight. The tree branches were still, their leaves motionless. It was a moment of late hot afternoon in which the air should have been filled with the triumphant stridulations of insects and the cries of birds. But there was no sound except the venomous shrill whining of things no man had yet seen, yet which were murderers.

Carol stirred, and he turned to her. She was white and shaken.

“You’re all right?” asked Lane awkwardly. She nodded. But her hands trembled. “Drink of water?” She shook her head.

He sat down beside her. “We’ve got to find a better way of killing them,” he said grimly, “and then we’ll take you somewhere where you’ll be safe.”

She tried to smile. He felt a certain lifting of the spirit. She was exactly what a girl should be. He found himself marveling at the fact that her cheek curved so exactly as it ought, and her lips were exactly as they should be, and that the line of her throat was absolutely the only perfect way that a throat should curve. He had the sensation of discovery which is pure satisfaction. He was delighted to look; he did not wonder where this delight might lead. She, being a woman, probably did. “We’ll have to try fire,” he said sagely. “And there’ll be odors they can’t take. And there’ll be weapons we can make, especially to destroy the organization of the gas they’re made of. We’ll beat them.”

“Of—of course,” she agreed. She hesitated a moment. “Fire might do. I know what Aunt Ann thought about them. She’s said that they’re probably ghosts—or the origin of ghost stories. She says they’re almost certain kin to will-o’-the-wisps and corpselights and such things that float over swamps, shining faintly in the dark. They exist, but nobody’s ever caught one. They must use energy to keep themselves in existence. Aunt Ann has been guessing that the things she’s discovered may use the gases of decay as will-o’-the-wisps use marsh-gas, to supply the energy that maintains them. As we use food. If she’s right, fire might bother them.”

Lane listened with a sort of urgent respectfulness. But he also listened to the whining noise outside.

“Savages,” added Carol, “cover their faces when they sleep. And it’s rare they’ll sleep without a fire going, Aunt Ann says. They believe that ghosts and devils are afraid of fire, and they cover their faces lest evil spirits bother them. If the—things like those that tried to kill us are the things that savages really fear, their superstitions protect them by what they make them do. And the things, if they learned that humans were always protected, would tend to ignore men and attack only lower animals.”

“Except,” growled Lane, “that now they’ve found we aren’t savages and so aren’t protected. But there’s more than that. They must be much more numerous than they’ve ever been before. Or a new and deadly kind may have appeared…” He listened to the whining outside. “These things could have started the tales of fiends and devils; the old stories told of devils tearing people to bits. These don’t even wound animals, but their victims have been found in the middle of destruction. The effect is of violent murder, but the cause could be the violent death struggles of the victims.”

Professor Warren slapped her notebook shut. “Hah!” she said triumphantly. “I’ll pin their ears back! Imaginative, am I? Wait till I march into the Biological Department with some of these things trapped in jars. A gaseous organism with a gas metabolism! … I’ve got to get bigger jars!”

“I’m trying,” said Lane, “to figure out a way to kill them. They’re waiting outside by the dozens now. Maybe hundreds.” It did not occur to him—not yet—that there might be thousands. Or more.

“We can protect ourselves,” said Professor Warren zestfully, “with sheets over our heads. If they can’t stop our breathing, they can’t do any damage.”

Lane was unconvinced. Angry as he was, he could not but remember that there had been a thing—a gas entity—a Gizmo in the trailer. It had made no whining sound. It acted as if guided by cunning, calling no attention to itself until discovered by accident. Perhaps it had meant to wait until the occupants of the trailer were asleep. An attack in darkness and during slumber could be irresistible. In short, the Gizmos might be cleverer than Professor Warren credited. The attempt to kill him had been shrewd, after he escaped the first assault by tumbling into deep dried leaves.

“If you want to try sheets as a protection,” he said shortly, “I’ll try it. I’m responsible for their being here.”

Professor Warren snorted. “Nonsense! Before you got here the buzzards stopped coming to bait because the Gizmos were consuming the gases they looked for. They were here then. And what happened to the gnats and flies and mosquitoes? And the rabbits and the hen quail on their nests? Don’t be absurd! They were here before you came. They didn’t attack us; the one you killed attacked only after it was trapped. But they were around before you got here.”

Lane said grimly: “That’s part of my point. If these things are the foundation for legends of devils, they have the necessities of devils, the first of which is that nobody shall believe he exists. Now that these things know that we know of their existence, they need to kill all of us.”

Professor Warren raised her eyebrows. “I know they’re impossible,” she protested, “even if they’re true. But are you suggesting they’re intelligent?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Lane. “If they were the devils of old legend, they contrived deals by which they were worshiped and supplied with the smells of burned flesh and spilled, rotting blood. The pagan deities—”