But the objection to this is that primitive man could not have survived had he been attacked by the Gizmos who made war on us. In effect this argument is that since our ancestors were not exterminated by Gizmos, there were no Gizmos in ancient days. Yet the legends of fiends and djinns and efrits and ghuls, and of eerie inhabitants of remote, are singularly convincing when one considers them in connection with Gizmos.

In any case the Gizmos seemed to appear with the suddenness of a thunderclap. They had the enormous advantage of being totally unreasonable. These days we believe only in highly scientific things. Highly scientific opinions change continually, and so do the things we believe in. But Gizmos were not flesh and blood, and therefore not scientific, so we would not notice such signs of their presence as must have existed before the war. However they appeared, they were able to marshall their forces without interference; they established bases in our forests, pickets in our woodlots, and observation posts in the parks of towns and cities. Gizmo patrols moved wherever they pleased without anybody crediting their reality—even when they committed atrocities. They had every possible advantage in their preparations for war.

In military terms they secured almost complete surprise. Apart from atrocity reports there is no evidence that anybody noticed anything the Gizmos did not want noticed. Even the word “Gizmo” was a slang term applied to blips on radar screens for which no cause could be established. We knew that these blips were not caused by solid objects; we also knew that the blips moved independently of the wind. Some radar stations observed many of them, and others very few. There was a flying-saucer scare, once, when six unidentified flying objects were reported over Washington, D.C. Armed forces radar stations admitted reluctantly that they had been detected. But, said the armed forces, they were only Gizmos. It was guessed that they were areas of excessive ionization in the air, of no importance.