“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.
“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.