Scanner's Note: This collection was originally published by Avalon in Hardcover in 1958. I could not find a copy of the book, so I reconstructed it by scanning the three stories that make up this collection from their original sources, Thrilling Wonder Stories April, June and Aug 1947. To the best of my knowledge there was no re-writing of these stories for the published collection, so this should be an accurate copy of the book. If I am mistaken on that point, let me know at gorgon776@hotmail.com.

CONTENTS

The Gregory Circle

The Nameless Something

The Deadly Dust

THE GREGORY CIRCLE

CHAPTER I

Chain Disaster

ON MONDAY Bud Gregory sat in magnificent idleness before the shed which was his automobile repair-shop in the village of Brandon on the edge of the Great Smokies.

That day something impalpable and invisible descended upon Cincinnati and people began to go to hospitals with their blood undergoing changes over which the doctors threw up their hands.

On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing some work on the four automobiles awaiting repair in his shop, but did not feel like working and went fishing instead. . . .

On that day the Geiger counters in the Bureau of Standards in Washington went uniformly crazy, so that it was impossible to standardize the by-products of the atomic piles turning out nuclear explosive for national defense.

On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly put in half an hour's work. Yawning, he took his pay for the job and went home and took a nap.

That day forty head of cattle on a West Virginia hillside lay down and died and a trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full of dead fish. Four cancer-patients in a home for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky, suddenly took a quite impossible turn for the better. They walked out of the hospital three weeks later and went back to work.

On Thursday Bud Gregory—

That was the way of it at the beginning. Bud Gregory seemed to have no connection with any one of the series of unusual events. The events themselves were simply preposterous. As, for example, the fact that all the foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain country in Pennsylvania turned vaguely purplish overnight, and then wilted and turned to unwholesome pulp.

Three days later there was not a green leaf or a living blade of grass in thirty-odd square miles. That did not seem to have any rational connection with Bud Gregory or any other event. But the connection was there.

It was Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards who was the first to add the various items together to a plausible sum. It did not include a backwoods automobile repairman, of course—there was no data for that—but it was a very sound guess just the same.

Murfree was a physicist, not a doctor of medicine and his salary at the Bureau was four thousand two hundred dollars a year with an appropriate Civil Service rating. He added the several odd events together, and they were convincing. But the answer was apparently impossible. He could not get any of his superiors in the Bureau to agree with him on the need for action. He thought the need was very great indeed. So he took a certain amount of accumulated Civil Service leave, drew out five hundred dollars from his bank and drove off in his battered old car to investigate at his own expense.

Tucked in the car were certain items of equipment from the bureau which he had no right to borrow and which would take most of a year's pay to replace if anything should happen to them.

He went to the sere and barren area in Pennsylvania and made certain tests. He drove to Cincinnati and made more tests. He went on to the place in West Virginia where cattle had died and asked questions and did improbable things to other ailing cows and steers. Then he drove back to Washington at the best speed his rattletrap car could make.

He went first to his home and told his wife to pack up. He explained with crisp precision and she looked at him in frightened doubt. He went to the Bureau of Standards—he was still technically on leave—and showed the results of his tests to some of the men who worked with him.

They were still unable to use the Geiger Counters in the bureau, but one of his friends was heading for New York to use apparatus at Columbia which had not gone haywire. Murfree got him to take along his samples.

Then he went to a friend who happened to be a meteorologist—and got confirmatory bad news. The weather-maps of the period covering the unexplained phenomena told him just how likely his surmise was and where a search should be made for the primary cause of the disasters.

THEN Murfree piled his wife and small daughter in the car, drew out all the rest of the money he had in the bank and headed for the Great Smokies.

It was strictly logical action. Epidemic leukemia in Cincinnati, ruined Geiger counters in Washington, dead cattle in West Virginia, dead trout in Georgia, the sudden cure of cancer patients in Frankfort, Kentucky—and a ten-mile patch of dead vegetation in Pennsylvania.

If Murfree could have gotten someone in authority to listen to him the measures to be taken would have been quicker and much more drastic. But nobody would listen. So Murfree had to work it out on his own.

His car was old but he made Lynchburg the first day. He was not at ease. He got started early on the second day and, by nightfall, was well past Charlotte toward the mountains. He and his family stopped at a small country hotel and, during the evening, Murfree got into talk with a power-line man, who told him worriedly that power-line losses over three counties had gone up to seven times normal in two days in a smooth curve and now were headed down again.

There was no explanation. Murfree fidgeted when he heard it. He made his family sleep with closed windows that night in spite of the stuffiness of their rooms, and they started off again near daybreak.

It was about three in the afternoon when he met Bud Gregory.

Bud Gregory sat in splendid somnolence before the shed which was his repair shop. The village of Brandon was a metropolis of three hundred souls, not far within the Great Smokies. There were mountains in every direction. There was blue sky overhead. There was red clay underfoot.

Bud Gregory dozed contentedly. There were three cars awaiting his attention. Each of them had been brought to him solely because he was the best mechanic in seven states. Actually, he was much more than that—so much more that there is no word for what he was.

Each car had been brought reluctantly, because he would repair them only when he felt like it or needed money, and then would do in minutes a job anybody else would need hours or days to do. At the moment he did not feel like working and he did not need money. So he dozed.

Flies buzzed about him. Insects made noises off in the distance. Somewhere chickens cackled feebly and somewhere a wagon with a squeaky wheel moved sedately away from Brandon.

Murfree's car was plainly in trouble when Bud Gregory first heard it. Not many cars came through Brandon. The local highways were traversable by very light vehicles and they could be traveled by tractors, but mules were surest. This car was away off the main track.

It came on, booming, and Bud Gregory awoke. It climbed rather desperately over a red-clay hill and came into Brandon. It was heavily loaded. Murfree drove. There were a woman and a little girl in the back. The rest was luggage—bags and parcels of every possible shape and size and outward appearance.

But Bud Gregory looked at the car. Murfree saw his sign and steered the car toward it. He stopped it—but the motor continued to run. Murfree plainly turned off the ignition. The motor boomed on. Murfree got out and called to Bud above the noise of the engine.

"It won't stop."

Bud rose, slouched to the car and threw up the hood. He reached in. There were thunderous racketing explosions. The motor stopped dead. Then it made frying, cooking noises.

"Y'lucky," Bud drawled. "Didn't burn out no bearin's yet." Then he drawled again. "Pump-shaft broke, huh?"

"Yes," Murfree said bitterly. "I kept going in hope of coming on a repair shop. Can you fix it? Will the motor freeze up?"

Bud spoke negligently, looking at the car and all the parcels.

"Uh-huh. Oil's all burnt up in the cylinders. When she cools she freezes. But if you pour water in 'er now you'll bust the cylinder-block."

Murfree clamped his jaws. His hands clenched.

He wasn't far enough into the Smokies for his needs and that power-line-loss business meant that he had to hurry.

"Any chance of getting another car?" he asked desperately.

BUYING another car would put an impossible dent in his resources but he felt that the matter was urgent enough to justify such a step. He had two possible courses of action—this, and flight to the farthest possible part of the West. He'd chosen this because it meant a fight against the danger he foresaw.

"This here's a pretty good car," Bud Gregory drawled. "Fix 'er up an' she'll be all right."

"But it'll take days!" said Murfree bitterly. "You've got to take the motor practically apart!".

Bud Gregory spat with vast precision at a cluster of flies about a previous splash of tobacco-juice.

"She'll take a coupla hours to cool," he said drily. "That's all. No bearin's burnt. Ain't never yet seen a car I couldn't fix. I got a kinda knack for it."

"But you've got to take off the cylinder-head!" protested Murfree. "And replace the rings and fix the valves and take the pump apart and get a new shaft! No garage in the world would undertake the job in less than four days!"

"I'll do it," said Bud Gregory, "in two hours an' a half. An' two hours'll be waitin' for it to cool."

He grinned. He wasn't boasting. He was showing off a little, perhaps. But he was saying something he knew with absolute knowledge.

Murfree threw up his hands.

"Do that," he said bitterly, "and I'll believe in miracles!"

He got his wife and small daughter out of the car. He led them down to the general store of Brandon, which sold fertilizer, dry-goods, harness, perfumery, canned goods, farm machinery and general supplies. He bought the materials for a picnic lunch and he and his family came back. They sat in the car, with the doors open for coolness, and ate.

But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying sounds of the overheated motor dwindled and ceased.

Presently Murfree got out and paced up and down beside the car, restlessly. After a time he went to the back and took out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and there was a freakish-looking metal-lined glass tube with electrical connections plainly showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of a completely different shape.

Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from somewhere inside the box a "click" sounded. A moment later, there was another. Then two clicks close together, and a pause, and another.

Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked briskly but unrhythmically.

There was no order in the sequence of tiny sounds.

Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade. He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree and the box.

"What good does that do?" Murfree's wife said.

"None at all," Murfree said wretchedly. "It only tells me nothing's happened to us yet."

HE STOOD watching the box, in which nothing moved at all, but from which clickings came at brief intervals.

Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed and stridulated.

The box clicked.

Bud Gregory got up and came over curiously. He regarded the box with an interested intentness. It was not an informed look, as of someone looking at a familiar object. It wasn't even a puzzled look, as of someone trying to solve the meaning of something strange. He wore exactly the absorbed expression of a man who picks up an unfamiliar book and reads it and finds it fascinating.

"What's—uh—what's this here thing do?" asked Bud, drawling.

"It's a Geiger counter," said Murfree. He had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had. Not even Bud. But Murfree said, "It counts cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It's a detector for cosmic rays and radioactivity."

Bud's face remained uncomprehending.

"Don't mean nothing to me," he drawled. "Kinda funny, though, how it works. Some-thin' hits, an' current goes through, an' then it cuts off till somethin' else hits. What you want it for?"

CHAPTER II

Miracle

IT WAS genuine curiosity. But an ordinary man, looking at a Geiger counter, does not understand that a tiny particle at high velocity—so small that it passes through a glass tube and a metal lining without hindrance—makes a Geiger tube temporarily conductive. Murfree stared blankly at Bud Gregory.

"How the heck—" Then he said curiously, "It was invented to detect radiations that come from nobody knows where. And it's used in the plants that make atom bombs, to tell when there's too much radioactivity—too much for safety."

"I heard about atom bombs," Bud Gregory drawled. "Never knew how they worked." Murfree, still curious, spoke in words as near to one syllable as he could. This man had said he could make an impossible repair and had the air of knowing what he was talking about.

He looked at a Geiger counter and he knew how it worked and had not the least idea what it was used for. Murfree gave him a necessarily elementary account of atomic fission. He was appalled at the inadequacy of his explanation even as he finished it. But Bud Gregory drawled:

"Oh, that—mmm—I get it. Them little things that knock that ura—ura—uranium stuff to flinders are the same kinda things that make this dinkus work. They kinda knock a little bit of air apart when they hit it. I bet they change one kinda stuff to another kind, too, if enough of 'em hit. Huh?"

Murfree jumped a foot. This lanky and ignorant backwoods repairman had absorbed highly abstruse theory, put into a form so simplified that it practically ceased to have any meaning at all, and had immediately deduced the fact of ionization of gases by neutron collision. And the transmutation of elements! He not only understood but could use his understanding.

"Right interestin'," said Bud Gregory and yawned. "I reckon your motor's cool enough to work on."

He put his hand on the cylinder-block. It was definitely hot, but not hot enough to scorch his fingers.

"Yeah," he said. "I'll fix the pumpshaft first."

He went languidly to a well beside the repair shed. He drew a bucket of water. He poured it into the radiator. There was a very minor hissing, which ceased immediately. He filled the radiator, reached down and worked at the pumpshaft with his fingers and with a speculative, distant look in his eyes, then straightened up.

He shambled into the shed and came out, trailing a long, flexible cable behind him. Up to the very edge of the Smokies and for a varying distance into them, there is no village so small or so remote that it does not have electric power. He put a round wooden cheesebox on the running-board of the car and drew out two shorter cables with clips on their ends. He adjusted them.

Murfree saw an untidy tangle of wires and crude hand-wound coils in the box. There were three cheap radio tubes. Bud Gregory turned on a switch and leaned against the mud-guard, waiting with infinite leisureliness.

"What's that?" asked Murfree, indicating the cheesebox.

"Ain't got any name," said Bud Gregory. "Somethin' I fixed up to weld stuff with. It's weldin' your shaft." He looked absently into the distance. "It saves a lotta work," he added without interest.

"But—but you can't weld a shaft without taking it out!" protested Murfree. "It'd short!"

Bud Gregory yawned.

"This don't. It's some kinda stuff them tubes make. It don't go through iron. It just kinda bounces around. Where there's a break, it heats up an' welds. When it's all welded it just bounces around."

Murfree swallowed. He walked around the car and looked at the apparatus in the cheesebox. He traced leads with his eyes. His mouth opened and closed.

"But that can't do anything!" he protested. "The current will just go around and around!"

"All right," said Bud Gregory. "Just as y'please."

He waited patiently. Presently there was a faint humming noise. Bud Gregory turned off the switch and reached down. He removed the connecting clamps and meditatively fumbled with the water pump.

"That's okay," he finally said. "Try it if y'like."

HE POKED in the cheesebox, changing connections apparently at random. Murfree reached down and fingered the water-pump. He had made certain of the trouble with his car and he knew exactly how the broken shaft felt. Now it was perfect, exactly as if it had been taken out, welded, smoothed, trued and replaced.

"It feels all right!" said Murfree incredulously.

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "It is. Y'car's froze, now, though. Take the handle an' try it."

Murfree got out the starting-handle from the tool-box. He inserted it and strained. The motor was frozen solid. It could not be stirred. Murfree felt sick.

"Wait a minute," said Bud Gregory, "an' try again."

He put a single one of the clamps on the motor and tucked the other away in the cheesebox. He turned on the switch.

"Heave now," he suggested.

Murfree heaved—and almost fell over. There was no resistance to the movement of the motor except compression which was infinitely springy. There was no friction whatever. It moved with an incredible, fluid ease. It had never moved so effortlessly—though the compression remained as perfect as it had ever been. Murfree stared. Bud Gregory took off the clamp.

"Try again," he said, grinning.

With all his strength, Murfree could not move the motor. Overheated, it was frozen tight with all the oil burned from the inner surface of the cylinders. Yet an instant before—

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory, drily.

He threw on the ignition switch, got into the driver's seat, and stepped on the starter. The motor fairly bounced into life. It ran smoothly. He adjusted it to a comfortable Idling speed and got out.

"We'll run 'er for ten-fifteen minutes," he said casually, "to get fresh oil spread around. Then you' all fixed."

Murfree simply goggled.

"How does that work?" he said blankly. Bud Gregory shrugged.

"Steel is little hunks of stuff stickin' together. These tubes make a kinda stuff that makes the outside ones slide easy on each other. I fixed up this dinkus to help loosen nuts that was too tight an' for workin' on axles an' so on. That'll be five dollars. Okay?"

"Y-yes—my word!" said Murfree. He fumbled out his wallet and turned over a five-dollar bill. "Listen! You eliminated friction! Completely! There wasn't any friction! Where'd you get the idea for that thing?"

Bud Gregory yawned.

"It just come to me. I gotta knack for fixin' things."

"It should be patented!" said Murfree feverishly. "What'll you make one of these for me for?"

Bud Gregory grinned lazily.

"Too much trouble. Took me a day an' a half to put it together an' get it workin'. I don't like that kinda work."

"A hundred dollars? Five hundred? And royalties?"

Bud Gregory shrugged.

"Too much trouble," he said. "I get along. Don't aim to work myself to death. You can go along now. Your car's all right."

He shambled over to his chair. He seated himself with an air of infinite relaxation and leaned back against the corner of the shed. As Murfree drove away he raised one hand in utterly lazy farewell.

But Murfree drove down the red-clay road, marveling. There had been only a two-hour delay instead of the four to seven days that any other garage in the world would have needed. Murfree drove to what he believed would be either the only safe place within a thousand miles—that or the place where he and his family would definitely be killed. But for a while he did not think of that.

He was facing the slowly-realized fact that Bud Gregory was something that there isn't yet a word for. He could not yet realize the full significance of the discovery, but it was startling enough to knock out of his head—for the moment—even the deadly danger implied by leukemia in Cincinnati and dead grass in Pennsylvania and dead trout in Georgia and Geiger counters gone crazy in Washington.

Murfree still didn't connect Bud Gregory with the danger.

CHAPTER III

Hidden Connection

DEATH fell out of a rain cloud in Kansas. A driving summer rainstorm swept across the wheatfields of the plains and where it fell the growing wheat died. The occupants of every farmhouse on which the rainstorm beat died too in a matter of days.

The Mississippi River became a stinking broth of dead and rotting fish above St. Louis and the noisesomeness floated downstream to poison the water all the way to the Gulf—and beyond.

Dead birds fell from the skies over a dozen states and where they fell the earth went barren in little round spaces about them. A patch of the Gulf Stream turned white with dead fish. A game-preserve in Alabama became depopulated.

There were three hundred deaths in one night in Louisville. There were sixty in Chicago. The Tennessee Valley power-generating plant blew out every dynamo in five hectic minutes, during which sheet-lightning hurtled all about the interior of the generator-buildings.

Then death struck Akron, Ohio. Everybody knows about that—twelve thousand people in three days, and a whole section of the city roped off and nobody allowed to enter it, and the dogs and eats and even the sparrows writhing feebly on the streets before they too died.

It was radioactive dust that had done it. And Oak Ridge was blamed as the only possible source of radioactive dust and gas which could kill capriciously at a distance of hundreds of miles.

The newspapers raged. Congressmen—at home between sessions—leaped grandiloquently into print with infuriated demands for a special session of Congress in order that an investigation might be launched to fix responsibility—as if fixing responsibility would end the continuing disasters.

Eminent statesmen announced forthcoming laws which would destroy utterly every trace of atomic science in the United States and make it a capital offense to try to keep the United States in a condition either to defend itself or to keep abreast of the rest of the world.

Oak Ridge was shut down and every uranium pile dismantled—this to appease the public—and every available investigator was dispatched to Oak Ridge to uncover the appalling carelessness which had killed as many victims as a plague.

The only trouble was that all this indignation was baseless. Radioactive dust and gases were the cause of the deaths to be sure. But the Smyth Report had pointed out the danger from such by-products of chain-reaction piles and elaborate precautions had been taken against them.

The material which killed had not come from Oak Ridge. It couldn't have. Murfree had never even suspected it. The amount of dust was wrong. The amount of deadly stuff necessary to produce the observed effects simply couldn't have come from the atom piles in operation.

It was too much—and besides it would have killed anybody in its neighborhood at the point of its release into the air. And nobody had died at Oak Ridge. It came from somewhere else.

Picking his way desperately into the heart of the Smokies, Murfree kept track of events by his car radio. Two hundred miles in—the roads were so bad that a hundred-mile journey was a good ten hour's drive—there was enough data for a rough calculation of the amount of dust and gases that must have been released.

When Murfree made his calculation sweat broke out all over his body. Such a quantity of fissioning material could not result from a man-made atomic pile. The piles that men had made were as large as were readily controllable. This was incomparably larger.

All the piles at Oak Ridge and at Hand-ford in Washington together could not produce a twentieth or a hundredth of the stuff that had been released. Somehow, somewhere, a chain reaction had been started with so monstrous an amount of material to work on that it staggered the imagination. And it was increasing! It seemed to be growing like a cancer!

Whatever had begun a chain reaction outside of Oak Ridge and Handford and however it had become possible, it staggered the imagination. The output of murderous by-products increased day by day. It was building up to an unimaginable climax.

THERE was no danger of an atomic explosion, of course. An atomic pile does not blow up. But by the amount of by-products released, something on the order of a small but increasing volcano was at work somewhere. Instead of giving off relatively harmless gases and smoke, it gave off the most deadly substances known to men.

There could be no protection against such invisible death. Poured into the air at sufficiently high level—doubtless carried up by a column of hot air—finely-divided dust and deadly gas could travel for hundreds of miles before touching earth. Apparently they did. Where they touched earth, nothing could live.

Not only did living things die after breathing in the deadly stuff but the ground itself became murderous. To walk on an area where the ground emitted radioactive radiation was to die. To breathe the air exposed to those rays. . . .

Murfree went desperately on in his search for the impossible source of the invisible carriers of death. He found the first evidence that he was on the right track a hundred miles from a telephone. He was far beyond powerlines and railroads. He was in that Appalachian Highlands, where life and language is a hundred years behind the rest of America.

He stopped to buy food and ask hopeless questions at a tiny, unbelievably primitive store. He tried the Geiger counter. And it clicked measurably more often than before. Twenty miles farther on its rate of clicking had gone up fifty percent. He spent a day in seemingly aimless wandering, driving the laboring car over roads that had never before known pneumatic tires.

Then he left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly cabin. His wife was not easy about it. She protested.

"But what will happen to us?" she asked desperately. "I want to share whatever happens to you, David!"

Murfree was not a particularly heroic person. He was frankly scared. But he spoke firmly.

"Listen, my dear! Something like a uranium pile has started up somewhere in these hills. It's on a scale that nobody's ever imagined before. It's so big that it's incredible that human beings could have started it. It's pouring out radioactive dust and gases into the air. They're being spread by the winds. Where the stuff lands everything dies.

"And the pile is increasing in size and violence. If it keeps on increasing, it will make at least this continent uninhabitable, and it may destroy all the life in the world. Not only all human life but every bird and beast and even the fish in the ocean deeps. And something's got to be done!"

"But—"

"I brought you so far with me," said Murfree doggedly, "because you were no safer in Washington than anywhere else. So far, death from the thing is a matter of pure chance. Wherever it's happening the ground must be so hot that a column of air rises from it like smoke from a forest fire.

"But the place where there's least smoke from a fire is close to its edge. That's why I brought you this close. You're safer here than farther away and much safer than you'd be closer."

"But you intend to go on!" she protested. "I've got a protective suit," he told her. "I managed to borrow one quite unlawfully from the bureau. I couldn't get more. If I can get close enough to the thing to map it or simply locate it drone planes can complete the exploration. But I've got to know, and I've got to take back some sort of evidence.

"I'm going to be as careful as I can, my dear. The only hope that exists is for me to get back with accurate information. I'll take that to Washington and then I take you and the kid as far away from here as what money we have will carry us."

"And if you don't get back?"

"You'll be safe here longer than anywhere else," he told her. "In the nature of things, if the stuff rises up on a hot-air column, it won't start to drop until it's a long way off.

"We're probably not more than a hundred miles from whatever impossible thing a natural atomic pile is. I'm leaving you what money I have. It will keep you here for years. Unless something can be done, the rest of America will be a desert long before that time!

"I'm guessing," he added gloomily, "but nobody else is even doing that! They blame Oak Ridge. But the weather-maps point clearly to this area as the place from which the dust must have been dispersed."

It was not a sentimental parting. Murfree was an earnest family man who happened also to be a scientist. He had done what he could for his family's safety—and it wasn't much. But now he had to do something which would most probably be quite futile, on the remote chance that it could do some good.

If the source of radioactive dust-clouds now drifting over America were a natural phenomenon like a volcano, it was hardly likely that anything could be done about it. North America would probably become uninhabitable in months or at most a year or two. There might be some areas on the West Coast where prevailing winds could keep away the poison for a time, but it was entirely possible that ultimately the whole earth would become a desert of radioactive sand and its seas empty of even microscopic life.

So Murfree left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly home a hundred and twenty miles from a telephone and two hundred miles from an electric light. He went on to verify the danger that he seemed to be the only living man to evaluate correctly. He still did not connect Bud Gregory with it.

CHAPTER IV

The Horror Hole

MOTORISTS drove shakily to doctors in half a dozen cities, sick and frightened. They had high fevers and all the symptoms of burns, but there was no sign of injury upon their bodies.

Then it was observed that a patch of blight had appeared upon a coastal highway. All the vegetation in a space half a mile long and three hundred yards wide had died overnight. The highway ran through the blighted area. All the motorists had driven through it.

Fish died in a reservoir connected to a great city's water-supply system. The city's water was cut off and a desperate attempt made to bring in drinking-water by tank-car. Power-lines leading from Niagara Falls were shorted by arcs which leaped across the air-gap separating the wires. Then came the deaths in Louisville.

Nobody thought about Murfree, of course. He went on doggedly, unspectacularly, in search of the thing he knew might mean the depopulation of a continent and, of course, his own death if he should succeed in finding it. He went deeper and deeper into that island of the primitive, the back country of the Smokies.

There was no flat land. Mountains were everywhere—spurs and crags and sprawling monsters of store. with blankets of forest to their tips—patches of cornfield at slopes of thirty and forty degrees. There were bearded, ragged mountaineers with suspicion of strangers as an instinct—barefooted broods of tow-headed children—and mountains—and more mountains—and mare. . . .

Murfree's progress was necessarily indirect, because he could get only the vaguest of bearings upon his objective. The Geiger counter clicked ever more rapidly. On the second day after he had left his wife behind, Murfree put on his protective suit.

He looked more strange and aroused more suspicion among the mountaineers. There were no more roads, only trails, now. The car, however, was lighter not only by the absence of his wife and daughter, but by all of their personal possessions.

He wormed his way along impossible paths, fording small streams and climbing prohibitive grades, while the noise of the Geiger counter increased to a steady, minor roar. He came to a mountain-cabin where nothing moved.

A dog lay on the rickety porch, and did not even raise its head to bark at him. Murfree got out of his car and went to the cabin. He had been so intent on the task of making progress in the direction he wished to go, that he had not noticed the fact that the foliage here was dead in patches, that everything which had been green looked sickly. He called, and a feeble voice answered him.

The family in the house was dying. He gave them water and stayed to prepare food for them. There was absolutely nothing else to be done. He knew what had happened, of course. They had been burned—painlessly, like sunburn—by the radiations from that monstrous atomic furnace which somewhere steadily poisoned the air. The burns went deep into their bodies. They had high fevers. They were languid and weak. They looked like ghosts.

He asked questions and put food and water handy for them. Then he went on. There was nothing else to do.

Only four miles farther his car ceased to have any power at all. A Geiger Counter works because it is so designed that a single cosmic ray or neutron, entering it and ionizing the gas within it, breaks down the insulating properties of a partial vacuum and allows a current to pass.

Here the air was so completely ionized that it had become a partial conductor. The spark-plugs spat small sparks. The timer worked erratically. The ignition system went haywire in air which permitted a current to pass.

He got out of his car.

He managed turn it about, ready for retreat. He heaved his portable Geiger counter over his shoulder. He had a thin sheet of cadmium to shield it, so that the source of the neutrons which made it rattle steadily could be detected. The cadmium absorbed part of the neutron-flood. It lessened the counter's rattling when between the tube and the neutron-source.

He went on, on foot. Mountains reared upward on every side, and there were thick forests on every hand, but they were dead or dying. Once in a mile or two he saw small mountaineer cabins. They showed no sign of life. He did not approach them. The people in them were dead, or so near it that nothing on earth could help them. And his protective suit was not perfect.

In any case he was receiving already a possibly dangerous dosage of radiation. Every minute of continued exposure added to his danger. He must get away as soon as he dared. But he struggled onward, over a landscape more desolate than that of the moon, because the moon has never known life, while this knew only death.

He reached a crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him here, and the counter roared. The cadmium plate affected it, but not too much. This must be the place for which he searched. He went on.

Presently he could look downward and see into a valley of dead trees and dead grass and dead underbrush. In its center was a circular area a quarter-mile across which was—which wag somehow unspeakably horrifying.

It was bare, baked, yellowed earth. Not even the corpses of once-growing things remained upon it. It was simply red-clay baked to a tawny orange, almost but not quite at red heat, still baking from some monstrous temperature down below.

Murfree saw dried leaves borne on the wind toward it. They fluttered above it and crisped and carbonized and went skyward, smoldering. There was a steady column of air rising from this hot place as from a chimney.

At the very edge of the round area was the remnant of a log cabin. The side of the cabin nearest the sere space had carbonized and smoldered away to white ash. One wall had collapsed, facing Murfree. Wires ran from the cabin to a fence which precisely surrounded the barren place, upheld on thin metal rods. Sunlight glinted on glazed insulators.

Murfree took field-glasses and looked into the cabin. He saw a heap of ragged, scorched clothing and something within it. He saw an assemblage of improvised, untidy apparatus from which glassy gleams were reflected. He could make out no details.

Then he knew what had happened. It was not reasonable. It was starkly impossible. But it was no more impossible than welding a water-pump shaft in its place or eliminating all friction from a frozen-tight motor so that it could be started again, or, say looking at a Geiger Counter and understanding how it worked without the least idea of what it could be used for.

Murfree had a small camera and dutifully took pictures without attempting to go closer. He had no hope that the pictures would turn out. The plates were surely fogged by the radiation. He bent his cadmium plate into a half-cylinder and did his best to make sure of what he now unreasonably knew.

The results were not clean cut. They did not have that precise clarity that a really convincing test of a physical phenomenon should possess. But the edge of the barren area was sharp. It was distinct. And the neutron-flood came from the air above the bare space only.

Dust swirled up in little sand-devils above the baked earth, and spun out to invisible thinness in the column of air which rose, spiraling to the sky. It rose and rose. The air itself was radioactive, containing radioactive oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen—from water-vapor—and all the elements in a moisture-laden breeze. It was a chimney, a whirlwind of death-laden heated gases rising to the skies. But the radioactivity of the earth—which surely made the heat and the poison—was somehow confined.

Murfree turned very quietly and went away again. He knew that he had accomplished his task as he had first envisioned it. He knew what poured deadly poison into the air. He had seen it. He could tell how to find it again. And so he must hurry.

His protective suit might or might not have preserved his life. He might already be literally a dead man, though he still walked and breathed and thought feverishly. If he could have been sure that he would live to descend into the valley and struggle to that half-burned log cabin, and utterly smash the vaguely-seen heap of wires and tubes and hand-wound coils—and if he could have been sure that it would not increase the menace—he would have done it.

His own life seemed a very small price to pay for the ending of that lifeless, motionless threat to the life of all the world.

But he wasn't sure. And the information he had—especially the fact that he knew what Bud Gregory was—was so much more important than his own life that he could not risk the loss of what he had to tell.

On the way from the place he had found, floundering on in the car that at first hardly ran at all, and then back through the tortuous way past the mountainsides of dying trees and patches of dying cornfields and the small and squalid cabins in which nothing moved, and the spectacle of a world dying about him, Murfree hardly noticed the desolation or thought about his own very probable death.

He thought with a grim concentration of Bud Gregory.

CHAPTER V

He Didn't Know It Was Loaded

THE CAR stopped again before the repair-shed in Brandon. It was close to sunset. Bud Gregory sat in a leaned-back chair against the corner of the shed. There were eight cars waiting for him to feel like working on them.

He opened his eyes and grinned lazily as the car came to a stop. The sunset colorings were magnificent. There was a strange, vast quiet all about. It was the sunset hush. Murfree stopped the motor and got out.

"Car's all right, ain't it?" asked Bud Gregory genially.

"The car's all right," said Murfree. "But I want you to do something for me."

"Not tonight," said Bud Gregory. He yawned. "I was thinkin' about knockin' off an' goin' home to supper."

Murfree pulled out his wallet. He had thought it out carefully. An offer of too much money wouldn't mean a thing to this man.

"I just want you to talk," said Murfree. "Five dollars for half an hour, just for telling me about that outfit you built for somebody—that outfit that stops neutrons cold. Bud Gregory blinked at him.

"Neutrons," Murfree reminded him, "are the little bits of stuff that make the Geiger counter—the funny radio tube—conduct electricity. You made an outfit for somebody that would stop them."

Bud Gregory grinned.

"Now, how in heck did you know that?" he asked, marveling. "That fella wasn't likely to tell nobody, an' I ain't!"

"I know!" said Murfree grimly. "That fellow wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He's dead. That outfit killed him."

Bud Gregory was startled. Then his grin turned rueful.

"Serves 'im right," he said uncomfortably, "but it's his own fault. I told him it was dang'rous, but he done me a dirty trick. He swore he was gonna law me for the way I fixed his car. He said the way I fixed it, he couldn't sell it even if it would run.

"Then he says he'd call it square if I fixed up another kinda gadget for 'im, but I was gonna go to jail or have to pay for his car if I didn't. I told him it was dang'rous, but I didn't have no money to pay for his car. It run good, too! Better'n a new one!"

Murfree waited. He counted out five one-dollar bills.

"If he's dead," repeated Bud Gregory uncomfortably, "it ain't my fault! I told him it was dang'rous but he wanted it, so ruther'n try to pay a hundred an' a quarter or have a pack o' lawin', I done it. It took a time, too!"

Murfree handed over one one-dollar bill. "That's six minutes' talk," he said. "Go on."

Bud Gregory leaned back. He spat expansively.

"Don't mind this kind of work so much," he said appreciatively. "This fella come drivin' in just like you done. He'd skidded off a wet clay patch an' smashed his radiator all to smithereens. He wanted me to fix it. It was too tough a job.

"I told him I didn't aim to work myself to death, but he kept pesterin' me, so I says, `All right. I'll fix 'er so she can run for ten dollars.' I thought that'd scare him off, but he took me up. An' I didn't know how to fix it, but I knew I could figger out a way.

"So I got to thinkin', with him pacin' up an' down waitin' for me to set to work. An' I thought to myself, `Fixin' that radiator is a job of work! It'd be easier to figger out some other way to keep her cool!' An' then it come to me."

"What?"

"All a radiator does," drawled Bud Gregory, "is let the heat get out of the coolin' water. His radiator wasn't no good. If I fixed up some other way to take the heat out of the coolin' water, she'd run just as good an' I could bypass the radiator with a piece o' hose. So I done it. Took me near an hour."

"How'd you take the heat out of the water?" demanded Murfree.

"Shucks!" said Bud Gregory. "I got a knack for that kind of thing. Y'know you can heat a wire by passin' a current through it. I figured you can cool a wire by takin' current out of it.

"I fixed up a wire so the little hunks of stuff that metal's made of got all lined up. Then the heat tries to knock 'em out of line, an' makes 'em pass on them—uh—them little spinnin' things that a electric current is."

MURFREE felt a crawling sensation at the back of his skull. This was uncanny. Bud Gregory was speaking of the polarization of atoms in a metal wire—which cannot be done—so that the random movements imparted by heat—which he could not know anything at all about—would set up strains which could only be relieved by an exchange of electrons, which would in turn, mean a current of electricity.

He had simply reversed the normal process of turning current into heat, and had turned heat into electricity to cool a motor. The direct transformation of heat into electricity has been a scientists' dream for a hundred years, one never accomplished.

But Bud Gregory had done it to save himself the trouble of repairing a shattered radiator.

"So," said Bud Gregory, "I stuck that wire in a hose an' bypassed the radiator. It'd take out the heat an' give current. I strung some ordinary wire under the car to use up the current. That's all.

"The car run good. He went off, but a week later he come back ragin' that he couldn't sell his car. Nobody'd buy it without a regular radiator workin'. How long I been talk—

Murfee silently passed over another dollar bill. Bud Gregory was decidedly something that there is no word for. He knew intuitively the things that trained scientists have as yet only partly found out. Just as some men know by instinct where fish will be found and what bait they will rise to, Bud Gregory knew the behavior of atoms and electrons.

As freak mathematical marvels—some of them half-imbeciles otherwise—perform infinitely complex mathematics problems in their heads with no clear idea of the process, so Bud Gregory performed miracles in physics with no idea how he did it. He simply knew the right answer when a problem was presented.

Murfree felt an envy so acute that it was almost hatred. But back in the hills there was a thing that might make the world uninhabitable. And Bud Gregory had made it. He fondled the dollar bill, folding it.

"He wanted me to fix his car right, he says, an' I got mad. I told him it was righter than when it was made. An' it was! Then he says he's goin' to law me. But then he says, 'Look here! I was makin' a trip lookin' for some minerals.

" 'I got a thing that helps me find 'em, but part of it's got lost. You fix me another an' it'll save me a long trip out an' I'll forget about the car an' pay you ten dollars extra.' " He spat with an air of luxury.

"He had a dinkus like you got, only bigger. An' he'd had a sheet o' metal that was supposed to block off them little hunks of stuff that come down out of the sky. That's what'd got lost. He says if I can fix somethin' to take its place he'll call it square, but he'll law me otherwise."

Murfree interpreted mentally. Someone had been making a trip into the Smokies in search of minerals. He had a Geiger counter. He must have been working on a hunch that uranium could be found. It was not improbable.

When Bud Gregory fixed his car in an utterly improbable fashion—as he'd fixed Murfree's—this unknown other man had understood, like Murfree. But he'd come back in feigned rage and demanded the equivalent of a cadmium shield, knowing that cadmium was unavailable.

He'd realized what Bud Gregory was—a near-illiterate with intuitive knowledge of what subatomic particles could be made to do, a knowledge as unreasoning and as unconscious as the feats of mathematical geniuses. He'd demanded an impossibility because he knew Bud Gregory could achieve it. And Bud Gregory had!

"He made me plenty mad," said the lanky man, resentfully. "He stood there sneerin' at me, sayin' if I was so smart as to fix his car so it would run an' he couldn't sell it, maybe I could fix somethin' that he needed. Either that or else."

Murfree recognized something like genius in the unknown man too. He'd taken the one infallible course to make Bud Gregory work. Threaten his leisure and sneer at his ability. Of course the unknown got what he wanted!

"So?" said Murfree.

"I fixed him up!" said Bud Gregory in amiable spite. "I fixed up a couple of radio tubes—he had 'em—an' made 'em so that they made a kind of horn-shaped—uhblock. Nothin' could go through it. Nothin'! No matter what size you fixed it, the horn 'ud be the same shape, an' you could make it any size.

"Nothin' would get through the walls of that horn. Not even them little hunks of stuff you call—uh—neutrons. I set up the dinkus an' showed him.

"His clickin' dinkus didn't click any more. It stopped them neutrons dead. An' then I says, 'Just for extra, you can run a wire around the place you camp an' set this upside down an' not even bugs can get in to crawl on you. But it's dangerous! It's dangerous!'" He looked at Murfree, grinning.

"I figured it'd make him sick as a dog but I'd warned 'im! It ain't my fault if he stayed in it an' died!"

Murfree saw. He saw much more than Bud Gregory could tell him. He envisioned a quarter-mile circle of wire, built in a remote mountain valley. It made a horn-shaped —cone-shaped—barrier reaching down into the earth. Nothing could pass through that barrier, not even neutrons.

There is some slight radio-activity everywhere. Even rocks possess it. It is the cause of the internal heat of the earth. Perhaps the unknown man had come upon indications of uranium ore underground in that valley, perhaps not. But, surrounded by a shield through which no neutron could escape, any mass of material on earth would become an atomic pile!

A SINGLE molecule of uranium in any mass of rock will sooner or later disintegrate, giving off high-speed neutrons. Normally they travel indefinitely and are harmless. Some go up into the air and may ionize a single molecule. Some may find a fissionable atom and disrupt it.

But by far the greater number are simply lost. Because they can escape. Within a barrier from which they cannot escape, they would bounce backward and forward until, within even a limited mass of matter, they did disrupt another atom. Neutrons from that disrupted atom would then go on and on!

An ordinary atomic pile must be of a certain minimum size because it loses so many neutrons from its outer surface that no chain-reaction can maintain itself. As the size of the pile increases the number that does not escape increases faster than the number that does. There is a size where enough strike fissionable atoms before escaping to maintain the reaction.

When as many are freed as escape the pile, a chain reaction sustains itself. But when none can escape, there is no minimum size. There is no minimum purity of materials. Prevent neutrons from escaping and anything at all, of any size, becomes an atomic pile.

Murfree passed over a third dollar bill. "Now I'm paying you to listen to me," he said evenly. "That man used your outfit and made a circular block for neutrons a quarter-mile across with the horn pointed down. Maybe a million, maybe five million tons of rock were inside it. Maybe there was some uranium in it too. None of the neutrons could escape. Each one bounced back and forth until it broke another atom. That made more neutrons bounce back and forth and break other atoms. You knew that would happen. You knew even a little pile would make him sick. But he made a monstrous one! It didn't make him sick. It killed him.

"Perhaps he intended to run it a while and then shut it off. It would have created enough radioactive isotopes by its normal working to make him a millionaire many times over. But he didn't turn it off in time! Because it killed him! And so the pile kept on working!

"Back in the mountains it's working now. There's hot air rising from it, and every breath of it is deadly poison! It goes up high and the winds spread it and presently it comes down to the ground again and kills. He didn't turn it off!"

Bud Gregory gaped at him. It was clear that he had never thought of such a thing. So much more than a genius that there is no word for it, he was like a child or a savage in that he could not think ahead. But he understood now. The unnameable intuition which had carried him to the achievement of a miracle had not told him the consequences of the miracle. But as Murfree pointed them out he saw.

"M-my gosh!" said Bud Gregory. He looked enormously concerned.

"Nobody can live to get to it to turn it off," said Murfree, grimly. "Maybe a plane can drop a bomb that will blast it. But it'll be weeks before I can make myself believed.

Meanwhile there's poison being poured into the air. People are dying right now.

"For five miles around that thing you made, there's not even a blade of grass alive. The people in the cabins for ten miles around are dying and don't know why. And that horn-shaped mass of ore and earth inside your field is full of more flying neutrons than any atom pile ever was.

"Suppose we turn that shield off with a bomb and all those free neutrons are turned loose at once! How far away will they kill every living thing? Fifty miles? A hundred miles?"

Bud Gregory swallowed. He undoubtedly understood more clearly than Murfree himself, now that it was pointed out to him.

"M-my gosh!" he said again. "I—uh—I didn't meant nothin' like that!"

Murfree handed him a fourth dollar bill with an indescribable sensation of irony. "Now tell me how to turn it off without killing everybody all the way to here!" he commanded evenly. "If it kills me to do it that's all right. But if you don't tell me how to stop the thing I'm going to kill you, you know. Here and now."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't realize that he was threatening. It simply seemed necessary. If Bud Gregory could doom a continent or a world and not be able to stop what he had created, he was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

But Bud Gregory spoke unhappily.

"I didn't mean nothin' like that! I just meant to make that fella sick as a dog. I figured he might make a little horn an' sleep in it when he camped. He'd be plenty sick by mornin'. But the dumb fool—" Then he knitted his brows. "I'll figure out something. I gotta knack for that kinda thing."

CHAPTER V

... Who Wasn't There

JUST three days later, Murfree was back at the high hill-crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him. All about him the world was dead. Nothing lived. Nothing! He didn't carry the counter, now. There was no point in it.

He carried, instead, a clumsy contrivance set up in a wooden box in which canned tomatoes had once reached the village of Brandon.

Bud Gregory walked with him, anxiously holding before him a loop of wire which he said would stop the neutrons for his own protection. Bud Gregory had actually sat up at night to make the outfit for his own protection and the mass of tangled wiring Murfree carried.

They reached a spot where they could look into the valley beyond. It was literally a valley of death. There was nothing alive in it. Not one blade of grass, not one shrub, not one bird or insect, not even a bacterium. Everything was dead.

And a swirling, humming column of heated air rose skyward, snatching up deadly dust from a quarter-mile patch of earth that was quite red-hot, now. Every grain of that dust was the most deadly stuff known to men.

Bud Gregory looked. He was pale. He had come through miles of desolation. He had seen the silent cabins of the mountain-folk and the shriveled crops that they had planted. He knew that he had made the thing which had killed them. But now, looking down at the carbonized half-cabin and the heap of huddled garments in it which had been a man, he muttered defensively.

"That fella played heck! I told him it was dang'rous!"

He propped up his loop of wire so that it still protected him. Murfree silently unloaded himself. Bud Gregory made a final assembly. There were a few—a very few—radio tubes. Murfree had traced every lead in the complicated wiring, and he could not even begin to understand it.

By all modern knowledge of electronics, it would do nothing whatever. The tubes would light and current would flow and nothing would happen—according to modern knowledge of such things. But Bud Gregory had labored over it and risked his life to bring it here.

He was untutored and almost illiterate, while Murfree had spent years in the study of just such science as this should represent. So Murfree helped as a naked savage might help to set up a radio-beam, in absolute ignorance of even its basic principles.

"Like I told you," said Bud Gregory in a troubled voice, "this new outfit is like that there thing that makes that—uh—pile. Only this don't make a hollow horn. This here is solid. It won't only stop them—uh—neutrons from goin' through a place. It'll stop 'em dead in their tracks, right where they are when it hits. It's gonna make a lot of heat."

He set up what could only be a directional antenna, weirdly distorted. Later, much later, Murfree would draw the design from memory and then marvel at the pattern it would project. Now he was simply grim. Bud Gregory checked his connections.

"All I'm worried about is the heat," he said uncomfortably. "I guess we better not look."

He adjusted the weirdly-shaped antenna. He sighted by some instinctive method of his own. Then he turned his head.

"Don't look. It's gonna get hot!"

He threw a clumsy, home-made switch. And the earth rocked.

There were probably some millions of tons of material acting as an atomic pile, filled with all the monstrous energy of speeding neutrons. Then, suddenly, those neutrons stopped. Radioactivity stopped—dead. And all the monstrous power of the reaction in being, was converted into heat. It was not atomic energy at all. It was neutronic energy, which is of a different and vastly lower order. But that was enough!

The sheer expansion of stone, raised thousands of degrees in the fraction of a second, made the ground stagger. Murfree reeled as the very hill shook beneath him. There was a lurid flash of light. The dull-red glowing surface of the quarter-mile circle became instantly molten—white-hot—liquid! There was a monstrous bellowing and rumbling from the very bowels of the earth.

And then the round lake of melted earth spouted upward. Gases underground strove mightily to expand in the mass of melted magma. Lava welled up and spread and engulfed the tiny fence and the half-burned cabin and the incredibly small apparatus which had created the whole cancerous thing. Cabin and everything else disappeared in the spreading white-hot flood.

Then bubbles reached the surface. Gigantic masses of incandescent gas leaped upward. The rock was literally effervescing, boiling, bubbling in a horrible blinding froth which spouted masses of liquid stone into the sky.

MURFREE stood his ground for seconds only. Bud Gregory turned and ran and Murfree ran with him. Ahead of them a fiery mass of rock hurtled down and splashed. Fire broke out. There were other fires to right and left.

Just once, as he fled, Murfree turned his eyes backward and saw a meteor-like mass of melted stone fall upon and obliterate the apparatus they had brought and used in the pass. Murfree felt an illogical sense of relief even as he ran on desperately.

The noise died down in half an hour. After all, huge as the thing had been, it was minute by comparison with an actual volcano, however much more deadly. By the time they had reached the car storm-clouds were gathering over the blazing area.

Ten miles away—the car ran perfectly from the first, in proof that there was no longer a neutron-flood to ionize the air—ten miles away they saw rain falling upon smokily flaming hillsides. Lightning flashed among dark clouds. Water poured down. Not even a forest fire could survive such a downpour.

They went back to Brandon. It took them a day and night of steady driving, alternating at the wheel. Bud Gregory had little to say the whole way back. But when Murfree stopped the car before the repair shed and let him out Gregory grinned uncomfortably.

"What you goin' to do now?" He added apologetically: "I didn't mean to make nothin' like that. He made me mad an' then he used that dinkus like it wasn't meant to be used."

Murfree had left his wife and daughter in Brandon while he went back into the hills. Now he spoke tiredly.

"I'll pick up my family and go back to Washington. I'll report as much as they'll believe. Anyhow, when that rock cools off there'll be more radioactive stuff in it than is available in all the rest of the world together. Since your apparatus is cut off it won't act as a pile now, but it's plenty radioactive!"

Bud Gregory swallowed.

"I—uh—I lost time from work, goin' along with you," he said uneasily. "Y'oughta pay me day wages, anyhow. Huh? Say! You kinda liked that thing I fixed your car with. How'd you like to buy it?"

Murfree grimly got out his wallet. He counted what he had left. It was his expenses for getting back home.

"I've got just six hundred dollars," he said. "It's worth more, but I'll give you that for it." "She's yours!" said Bud Gregory. All his uneasiness vanished. His eyes glistened. He brought out the round cheesebox and put it in the back of Murfree's car.

"Anyhow," he said contentedly," I can always make another one when I got a mind to. So long."

Murfree drove off and got his wife and little girl. He left Bud Gregory looking speculatively at the eight automobiles awaiting the moment when he felt like working. . . . Back in Washington Murfree made his report. At first they told him he was crazy. But seismographs did report a minor earthquake centered just where he'd said. A plane flew over and brought back photographs which proved the truth.

And then the Manhattan Project took over and built a splendid concrete road to the mass of highly if artificially radioactive rock and extracted large quantities of practically every known radioactive isotope from It. Everybody was happy.

But they wanted badly to talk to Bud Gregory—and they couldn't.

When FBI men went to urge him imperatively to come to Washington, he had disappeared. He had bought one of the eight cars in his repair shop for twenty-five dollars, repaired it by some magic of his own and gone off with his wife and children.

He was undoubtedly a motor-tramp, roaming the highways contentedly or sitting in magnificent somnolence, waiting until he felt like working or moving on. Incredible riches awaited him if he was ever found and consented to work.

Neither event seemed likely.

But Murfree was in the oddest situation of all. He couldn't be officially praised for what he did on leave. Nor could he be required to give up the gadget he bought from Bud Gregory. And that gadget was useless. It worked, but nobody understood it, and every attempt to duplicate it had failed. Duplicates simply didn't do anything. Murfee is still studying it.

But he did gain something, after all. His wife and small daughter are likely to keep on living and he was promoted a grade in the Civil Service. Now he gets forty-seven hundred a year.

THE NAMELESS SOMETHING

CHAPTER I

Jalopy With Wings

BUD GREGORY was something there isn't any word for. He bet on a dirt-track automobile race in the State of Colorado, and won twelve dollars. Simultaneously, a certain European Power made a very polite apology to the Icelandic Government for the falling of a rocket-projectile near Reykjavik. In so doing, it advertised publicly that it had long-range guided missiles capable of flights of over two thousand miles.

Next day, Bud Gregory bet on a second dirt-track race and won six dollars more. At very nearly the same instant, Izvestia published a bellicose article which practically called for war on the United States—UNO or no UNO—and a middle European nation offered a calculated, uncalled-for insult to its United States ambassador. The day after, Bud Gregory sat in the bar of a motor-tourist camp and drank beer contentedly all day long.

Two days later still, on a mountain highway in the Rockies, the driver of a sixteen-wheel Diesel truck came booming to a sharp curve which had a cliff on one side and a four-hundred-foot drop on the other.

The truck thundered around that curve—and ran slap into a rattletrap car with a flapping fabric top and an incredible load of children and household goods. Ran slap into it, that is, to the extent that a collision was inevitable. The jalopy was on the wrong side of the road.

The truck could not turn out, nor the jalopy turn in, in time. So the truck-driver froze, and saw the rattletrap vehicle swerve out still farther on the wrong side of the road—ride out until only its inner wheels were on the highway and its outer wheels spun merrily over vacancy.

It should have toppled instantly and horribly, only it didn't. It rode exactly as if there were an invisible highway surface over emptiness. The Diesel driver saw it swerve placidly back into the road behind him, and go on. And he braked his monster truck to a stop and had a perfectly good fit of the shakes. He made up his mind to take a week off to be spent in rest and quiet. He did.

On that day, it was said in Washington that a grave international crisis threatened, and eminent statesmen went about in spectacular silence, refusing to speak for publication but privately tipping off their favorite newspapermen to monstrous events due to occur.

ON YET another day Bud Gregory arrived at yet another place where further dirt-track automobile racing was in progress, and attempted negotiations with a dejected driver who had not been in the money for weeks. The driver laughed at him, bitterly, and Bud Gregory was indignant. He bet on the races and lost two dollars.

On the same day, four satellite nations of a certain European Power revealed that for several months they had been running atomic piles, and now had a sufficient stock of atomic bombs for their own defense. The rest of the United Nations erupted into frenzied protests—which cut off short when they realized it was too late to object.

And after three more days, Bud Gregory drove into Los Angeles in a car which was in the last stages of dilapidation. It contained himself, his wife, and an indeterminate number of tow-haired children. Also it contained two hound-dogs, several mattresses, many packages, innumerable parcels, had strapped-on cots fastened to its running-boards, and was further festooned with gunnysacks containing stocks of vegetables and canned foods.

It was flagged down by a motorcycle cop beside the highway. But Bud Gregory did not stop. The decrepit car plunged ahead. The motorcycle cop mounted his steed and pursued. The decrepit car moved more swiftly. It looked as if an asthmatic twenty miles an hour would be its limit. But it hit forty within seconds of the cop's attempt to halt it. It was making eighty when it ran into Los Angeles traffic. And still it did not stop.

The motorcycle cop sweated blood, envisioning catastrophe. He gave his motorbike everything it would take, blaring his siren continuously and shrilling his whistle when he passed policemen on foot in the hope that they would telephone on ahead.

The next fifteen minutes gave a dozen members of the traffic police—who joined in the chase—gray hairs and a tendency to babble quietly to themselves. The dilapidated car left all pursuit behind. It ran into traffic in which it should have smashed up fifty times over. It left behind it a stream of crashes and collisions and nerve-racked pedestrians, but it did not even touch another vehicle or a single individual.

The collisions came from other cars swerving frantically to avoid it as it rocketed through Los Angeles' swarming streets. Half the time it rode on the wrong side of the highway, cutting in and out, speeding up with an incredible acceleration, slowing down with completely impossible abruptness, and turning corners at a rate which even those who saw it did not believe.

On Wilshire Boulevard it reached a climax of preposterous performance. It came streaking through traffic at something like ninety-two miles an hour. It left a mounting uproar behind it. And it came to a crossing where a red light had halted everything, came eeling down the wrong side of the street, swerved so that it should have turned somersaults, but observers said that it ran as if its wheels were glued to the ground, and—there in front of it, in the only space by which it could move on—was a monstrously fat woman in the act of crossing the street as the light permitted.

Women fainted on the sidewalk after it was all over. There was no time to faint before. The dilapidated car headed for the fat woman at ninety-eight miles an hour. Then, when it could not possibly stop in time, it began to slow.

Some witnesses said that it stopped in fifteen feet. Certainly it stopped so suddenly that the gunnysacks dangling from its top-supports swung and stood out stiffly before it, and one of them burst and potatoes shot out before the stopped car like bullets. A small one—a cull—smacked the fat woman smartly, in a highly, indecorous manner. She shrieked and leaped, and the rattletrap shot through the space she had vacated.

IN TWENTY feet it was traveling sixty miles an hour. In forty, it was going better than ninety again, and it went on out of town like a bat out of a belfry. No motorcycle cop came anywhere near it. Not even the two policemen on the farther side of town who took up the chase on a clear highway. One of them pushed his bike—so he claimed—up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

The decrepit jalopy, which should have collapsed far below the speed limit, left him behind as if he were standing still, and a towheaded child poked its head through the flapping back-curtain and stuck out its tongue at him as it went on.

On that same day the Government of the United States received a very blunt note from the European Power whose satellites had revealed their possession of atomic bombs and which had itself sent apology to Iceland for landing a guided missile near Reykjavik.

The note was not an ultimatum in form, of course. But it expressed the desire of the European Power to negotiate with the United States regarding changes in the American form of government, which changes were necessary to make the European Government feel that the United States was sincerely desirous of peace.

In other words, the European Power had decided that democracies were dangerous to it, and amiably offered America the choice of surrendering to a small, fanatical party within its borders, or of facing an atomic war.

And that night Bud Gregory drove into a tin-can-tourist camp and he and his family settled down for a comfortable stay, as soon as he made sure that the dirt-track races nearby were still going on.

CHAPTER II

Miracles Without Work

LIKE everybody else in the United States, Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards, in Washington, felt rather sick at the prospect of war under any circumstances, and especially under the conditions obtaining. The point was that the United States literally could not make a sneak atomic attack on anybody. Its prospective enemy could. Nobody in America had authority to issue an order for the beginning of war.

In the European Power's government there was one man who could simply nod his head and have guided missiles go keening up into the stratosphere to fall thousands of miles away upon the cities of the United States.

If Congress took his note as it deserved to be taken—as a threat of war—he would nod his head and possibly half of the population in America would be dead within hours. The United States was as well-armed as any other Power in the world, perhaps better-armed.

But the United States could not shoot first. It simply, literally, could not. And in atomic war, the one who shoots first wins. So the situation was that the enemy had made a threat which struck at the very roots of American civilization, and if the United States took measures to meet it, it would be destroyed.

Most of the people who really understood the danger went into hidden panic. There was a sudden quiet movement of well-informed people out of the larger cities. The movement spread. It ceased to be quiet. It became a mass exodus—more or less orderly, to be sure, but a movement of whole populations.

Terror lived in the cities, but not in the open country so the cities became practically abandoned and the European Power watched with sardonic amusement as the greatest nation on earth seemed to go into a blue funk at the very notion of the European Power's displeasure.

Two-thirds of Congress found excuses to leave Washington, which would certainly be bombed in case of war. It was impossible to secure a quorum in the Capital either to enact laws to resist the threat or to yield to it. The government of the United States was paralyzed by a mere verbal menace.

But Doctor David Murfree stayed at his post. He kept his head. The menace held, but for nearly a week nothing happened. The State Department replied to the note it had received. It asked the European Power for the agenda of the discussion it proposed and for an outline of the reasons why the European Power feared aggression from the United States. It used all the normal tricks to stall and gain time. Which was exactly in line with the desires of the head of the threatening nation.

So long as there was a crisis in being, there would be terror and confusion in America. Large numbers of the population would be uprooted, the cities would be nearly or quite deserted, commerce would stop and generally such a state of affairs would exist that —so a European would reason—presently the American public would be willing to accept any possible surrender of principle just to get things going again. It would be willing even to surrender democracy.

There were times when it seemed likely in America, too. Some people stayed on at their posts. Some sent their families to safety and carried on. But very many fled. Still there was a skeleton semblance of city life still going on.

Many factories closed, but some florists stayed in business. Police and newspapers here and there and radio stations and delicatessen stores and a few taxicabs, and generally a small percentage of every sort of activity continued to function. But it was a very small percentage.

Murfree, however, grimly made the most of what was left. He stayed at his desk in the Bureau of Standards and urgently and persistently hounded the moribund clipping-bureaus for newspaper accounts of odd events. That paradoxic activity, he felt, was the only hope that the United States could have to avoid either complete social and economic collapse, or else bombardment by atomic bombs which would reduce its cities to ruins.

He'd been collecting such clippings for months. It was a good deal of a strain on his finances too, because he had only a forty-seven-hundred-dollar Civil Service job, and living in Washington is expensive. He paid ten cents for every clipping sent him by four bureaus, which dutifully searched newspaper columns all over the country.

IF SOMEBODY announced an atomic engine, a clipping came to Murfree. If an automobile had a freak accident, he saw the news account. If a souped-up motor made history at an outboard-motor racing meet, or an inventor made extravagant claims for some new device, or there was an explosion without plain cause, or somebody reported having seen something impossible—the last especially—Murfree was sure to be poring over the news account as soon as it reached print.

It was the way by which he hoped eventually to locate Bud Gregory. He'd only seen the man twice (see THE GREGORY CIRCLE, THRILLING WONDER STORIES April, 1947) but he knew what Bud Gregory was, and there was no word for it. Musical prodigies are well-known enough. Mathematical marvels extract fourth-power roots correctly by mental arithmetic, and are completely unable to tell how they do it.

But Bud Gregory was something else. He knew intuitively the answer to any problem a physicist could propound, and he hated work. He had run a one-man auto-repair shop in a village in the Great Smoky Mountains, and worked only when he couldn't help it. But when he did work, he casually devised short-cuts—to avoid work—that were breathtaking.

Murfree now owned one gadget Bud Gregory had made. It completely eliminated friction from any mechanical device it was hooked to. Murfree had studied it exhaustively, but he couldn't understand it and couldn't even duplicate it. But Bud Gregory's genius once had brought about results he didn't anticipate.

To get even with someone who'd offended him, Bud had made a certain device and turned it over to his tormenter, who used it otherwise than as Bud expected. Common, ordinary rock became a monstrous atomic pile where it was turned on. Radioactive dust and gases wrought havoc before Murfree found the source and Bud Gregory improvised a way to stop it. And then Bud Gregory, in a panic, had disappeared lest he be held to account for the damage his device had caused.

Now Murfree hoped to locate him by further—and it was to be hoped harmless—results of his combined genius and laziness. He'd vanished in a rattle-trap with his wife and dogs and children. He would unquestionably support himself by roadside automobile repairs. So sooner or later Murfree hoped to receive a newspaper clipping of some preposterous event which he, and only he, would know meant Bud Gregory was at work. But it came to be grim work, waiting, and endlessly hoping.

A second sharp note arrived from the European Power, declaring that there was reason to believe the United States had secretly prepared for war. If the Atlantic carrier fleet remained invisible, it would have to be assumed that the ships had set out on a mission to loose plane-carried atomic bombs on the complaining nation. So the carrier fleet returned to port.

Then a third note arrived. A fleet of long-range U.S. bombers waited at its home base, fueled and armed and ready to take off. Was this fleet ready for a flight across the North Pole to make an atomic attack? If not, it would be disarmed.

Then another note still. The atomic-bomb plants of the United States still functioned, turning out atomic explosives. Against whom did the United States prepare, if not against the complaining nation?

Congress could not be convened because too many of its members were in a funk. The United States could not make war without Congressional action unless attacked. So it could not make war until attacked, and an attack with atomic bombs by two-thousand-mile guided missiles—

The country almost disintegrated, so far as the larger cities were concerned. The little towns, though, which were not important enough to be bombed, throve in their impunity. Farm-houses and boarding-houses accustomed to take in summer boarders fairly bulged at their seams. Beaches and camps and cottage towns, trailer-camps and mountain hotels and lakeside resorts, all hummed and boomed with refugees from the cities, while the cities themselves were like cities of death.

Whole industries shut down for lack of workers and executives. There was privation and unemployment because death was in the air. There had not been so much as a firecracker set off, but the United States faltered in its stride and its life came almost to a standstill because of the imminence of atomic war.

BUT the owners of roadside taverns grew rich, and county fairs flourished, and roller-coaster proprietors bought new diamonds, and—dirt-track auto races in small towns were thronged with patrons. And Bud Gregory followed the dirt-track races. He had a trick that brought in plenty of money, nowadays. Plenty! Ten, fifteen, sometimes even twenty dollars in a single day, and without his doing a tap of work. He sat in blissful somnolence beside his antique car. His children brought him beer. Now and again he sent one of them to make a small bet.

Bud Gregory, who was the only hope of the survival of the American way of life, loafed blissfully, dozed contentedly, idled magnificently, and drank beer comfortably. He did not lift a finger unnecessarily from one day's end to another.

It was purest accident that, as civilization toppled in America, newspaper clippings reached Murfree which told him where Bud Gregory was.

He got a plane-ride to California by a combination of luck and desperation. On the way West he read and re-read the three newspaper clippings on which he believed the fate of the United States depended. One was an account of the impossible ride of an ancient jalopy through Los Angeles traffic at ninety miles an hour. The reporter who wrote it didn't believe it himself.

One was a digest of tall tales current among motor tourists, of a mysterious mechanic roaming the highways and performing miraculous repairs for ridiculously low prices. It was a feature-story, suggesting that motor-tramps were devising a legendary figure who would some day rival Paul Bunyan.

But the third was the important one. That told of a dirt-track automobile race in which the winner made absolutely unparalleled time, averaging three laps to the field's two, and achieving turns that even those who saw them didn't believe.

Murfee knew better than the eyewitnesses what had happened in all three cases. Bud Gregory had made his way across the continent in a car which should have fallen apart in the first ten miles. He was using that outrageous gift of his to keep from working. And no more than four clays before Murfree boarded a plane in Washington, he'd been somewhere near the dirt race-track at Palo Bajo, in California.

Murfree made for that place as fast as wangled passage on an Army plane could take him. He was lucky. There was a major-general on board, with a date with a blonde at Laguna Beach. The plane made only two stops between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

But Los Angeles, which had been thriving a week before, was nine-tenths deserted when Murfree arrived. Trains ran irregularly and buses practically not at all, and those which did run were scenes of riot as they loaded up.

Murfree spent seventy-five dollars of very hard-saved cash for a ride behind a motor-cyclist to a town ten miles from Palo Bajo. He trudged the rest of the way.

The open country was thickly populated and every roadside tree shaded a group of campers from the cities. But there was an extraordinary holiday air everywhere. Murfree was acutely conscious of it as he trudged along the highways with his single hand-bag for luggage.

Since bombs were apt to fall on the cities at any time there were camps and bivouacs of city people everywhere. But since none had fallen so far—and would not fall except on cities—there was a general effect of slightly apprehensive vacationing.

When Murfree trudged wearily into Palo Bajo his feet burned, his shoulders ached, and the muscles of his arms were sore from the unaccustomed labor of carrying a burden. He was worn out and dispirited but he went doggedly to the fairgrounds where the dirt-track races went on.

He went to the pits where the small, souped-up cars were serviced. He felt that there was no time to rest, and anyhow his appearance in an exhausted condition was in line with his plan for locating Bud Gregory. He went to the first pit, where a particularly greasy and especially dilapidated small racing-car was being worked on by two besmeared individuals.

"Look!" said Murfree heavily, "I've got to find a good mechanic. My car's stalled ten miles back. It ran dry and heated up and froze. I can't get a garage to touch it. They're jammed!"

THE last was true. With every car in California on the road and out of the cities, rural garagemen rubbed their hands in fiendish glee. It was so everywhere. One of these two men looked up gloomily;

"We're busy!"

"But I've got to get my car fixed," .said Murfree desperately. "Five bucks if you just tell me where to find a mechanic who'll do the job!"

One of the two got up and pointed.

"Try Mose," he said sourly. "That beefy-looking guy over there. He's bound to be some mechanic because the car he's got ain't any better than this one, and it goes faster and makes turns no car has a right to make. He watches it night and day—blast him—and you won't get nowhere, but you can talk to him."

Murfree handed over five dollars. He limped toward the shed that had been pointed out. A bulky man with squint eyes reared up as he approached. A grease-monkey I looked at him suspiciously.

"No visitors!" the big man snarled. "Clear out!"

"I've got a car in a ditch," said Murfree, "and the motor's frozen. I'll pay a hundred bucks for a mechanic to fix it."

"Beat it!" repeated the beefy man, formidably.

"I'll pay you ten bucks if you'll name a mechanic," said Murfree. "I can pay a hundred for fixing it."

He had barely two hundred dollars in the world, and this man was not Bud Gregory. But Murfree was sure he was on the right track. A car that went impossibly fast and made impossible turns. His own car, of course, was imaginary, but he looked worn-out and dusty and very convincing.

The grease-monkey said, drawling: "That fella could do it, Mose, and ten bucks'd come in handy."

"He'll do it for fifty," the squint-eyed man said shrewdly. "I get fifty or he don't do nothing. Take it or leave it." He turned to the grease-monkey. "You know where to find 'im."

Murfree handed over fifty dollars. He felt weak at the knees. It was enormously important to find Bud Gregory. Nobody else in the world would do!

The grease-monkey came back with Bud Gregory, who looked at Murfree.

"Howdy," Gregory said in an unhappy voice, and looked uneasily around for policemen. Murfree swallowed.

"Hello, Bud. I want to talk to you. Anywhere you say. How about some beer?"

CHAPTER III

Three Racketeers

INSTANTLY Bud Gregory brightened. He was tall and gangling and drooping. He was typically poor-white—Appalachian Highland version—bony and listless. He had worn an air of complacency until he saw Murfree, but that was gone now because he'd made a device which was a neutron-shield and set a monstrous atomic pile to work back in the Smoky Mountains.

Murfree was the man who had found out his responsibility for the devastation which resulted. But on the other hand, Murfree had paid him six hundred dollars for a device which absolutely abolished friction, and with that as capital he had set out to tour the United States without being bothered by detectives, and practically without working.

"Why—uh—sure, Mr. Murfree," said the man who knew by instinct all the things that the scientists of the world struggled to learn. "Beer? Sure! There's a place right close, Mr. Murfree. But I cain't go fur. There's some fellas comin' to see me today. They told me if I'd fix a dinkus for 'em, they'd pay me wages for as long as it works, without me doin' a tap of work more."

Murfree looked at him in envy so great that it was almost hatred. Bud Gregory knew, without knowing how he knew, how to make absolutely anything he chose. He'd made a wire that absorbed heat and turned it into electricity, but he'd done it to save the trouble of mending an automobile radiator in the normal manner, and he had charged just ten dollars for the job.

Bud Gregory had made a shield through which nothing could pass, not even a neutron —and he'd done it to save himself the trouble of replacing that miraculous wire with a tedious job of sheet-metal soldering on the same radiator. He'd made another device, at Murfree's demand, which stopped even neutrons cold—after the shield had started an unshielded atomic pile to work. Gregory could weld broken parts of a motor without taking them out, and could free a frozen motor without so much as loosening a bolt, and lots of other things. But all he wanted was to sit in absolute somnolence and inactivity.

"Come on and get the beer," said Murfree. "I came all the way across the continent to find you. Something's happened that you can fix, and it'll square everything about that business back in the Smokies." He added, "There aren't any detectives with me."

Bud Gregory shambled beside him, frowning.

"Listen, Mr. Murfree," he said uneasily, "I don't want no truck with sheriffs and policemen. I don't even want to square nothin' with 'em. I just want to get along without workin' myself to death, not botherin' nobody and nobody botherin' me."

Murfree ushered him into a tavern opposite the race-track where the souped-up racers ran. "The point is that somebody is bothering you," said Murfree. "And me. And everybody else. We'll get our beer and I'll tell you about it."

They found a table in the crowded room. Palo Bajo was too small a town to rate an atomic bomb, so in the tavern were clerks and business men and laborers—fathers of families and loudly shirted young men and men who were trying to forget the menace that hung over the country, and men who did not even try to think about it.

Murfree explained as Bud Gregory drank his beer. He explained in words of one syllable that a certain European Power had proved it had rockets which could travel two thousand miles, and atom bombs for them to carry. And, with those up its sleeve, it demanded that the United States give up its way of life and adopt an entirely new social system.

It was ready to blast every city in North America on a moment's notice. If the United States—unready as usual—started to get ready to fight, it would be destroyed. Every big city in the nation would be blown to atoms before preparations for defense could be even halfway completed.

Bud Gregory listened uncomprehendingly. He drank his beer and squirmed in his seat. "But I don't aim to have no truck with sheriffs and policemen and such!" he protested. "I ain't botherin' nobody."

Murfree explained further. Bud Gregory could devise some defense. He could probably make the defense. If he did, he, Murfree, would guarantee that he would have money enough to live on for all the rest of his life.

"But you're a gov'ment man," said Bud Gregory unhappily. "You're a good fella but I don't want no truck with the gov'ment."

MURFREE sweated. Promises of a fortune meant nothing to Bud Gregory. But Murfree had a hundred and fifty dollars left. He offered that for a device that would protect America against atomic bombardment. Millions had no meaning to Bud Gregory. A hundred and fifty dollars was concrete. He wavered.

"Listen here, Mr. Murfree," Gregory said plaintively. "I got some fellas comin' to see me today. They told me they'd pay me a hundred dollars down and ten dollars a day if I just fitted a car up with the dinkus I got on a friend's car over at the track. I don't even have to make it! All I got to do is take it off that racin'-car and put it on their car, and I don't aim to work myself to death for nobody. If I got ten dollars a day coming' in, I'm all set. I can just set and not bother nobody.

Murfree felt sheer desperation. Talk of war and devastation had no meaning to Bud Gregory. He just wanted to sit somnolently in the sunshine. If he could get a hundred dollars without working, he would not work for millions—or even for a more comprehensible hundred and fifty. He was simply impervious.

Then the beefy, squint-eyed man loomed up beside the table. He looked definitely unpleasant now. With him were two other men who looked more unpleasant still. They approached the table.

"How's your car?" asked the squint-eyed man, snarling. "Got it fixed yet?" To the others he said, "He told me his motor was froze!"

Bud Gregory looked up.

"Howdy, gentlemen!" he said cordially. "Mr. Murfree, here, he's a old friend of mine. He's a gov'ment man from the East. I done some work for him back there and he hunted me up. Set down and have some beer!"

The two newcomers' faces went expressionless. The squinty-eyed man looked murderous. Then the three of them glanced at each other. One leaned close to Murfree.

"Don't start anything, Mr. Government man," he said softly. "Me and my friend got guns on you. Buttin' into our affairs, huh?"

He moved suddenly. Murfree felt a horrible impact. Then he felt nothing whatever. . . .

The European Power sent a very pained note to the Government of the United States. The American Government had told its people of previous diplomatic correspondence, thus causing hostility toward the European Power among Americans. And the European Power was devoutly desirous of peace, yet it could not but be alarmed at the increasing belligerency of American public opinion.

Then there was the evacuation of American cities. That suggested nationwide preparation for war. Would the American Government give some convincing guarantee that it did not plan an unwarned attack? Such as the grounding and dismantling of all aircraft, and the decommissioning of its navy?

The European Power was waging a war of nerves. Its purpose was the harassment of the American public—from disorganization, unemployment, and ultimate famine—to the point where it would welcome any possible change. Its plan was to make the American people themselves demand the changes in its social system that the European Power desired.

In Washington, it began to look as if that end might be achieved. Hunger was beginning to show up. Privation was appearing. Looting in the cities had begun. So far a certain amount of holiday spirit still existed, to be sure, but the future looked black.

And Murfree woke up in the back of a speeding car. He had a splitting headache. Bud Gregory sat uneasily beside him. There were three men in the front seat—of whom one was the squint-eyed man—and when Murfree moved one of them turned around. "Don't try nothin'," he said amiably. "We ain't got any use for you government guys."

HE DISPLAYED a blued-metal weapon and turned back. Murfree's head throbbed agonizedly. He felt nauseated and ill. Bud Gregory rolled unhappy eyes at him. "Honest, Mr. Murfree, I didn't know they was goin' to act like this," he said miserably. "They offered me a hundred dollars and ten dollars a day to soup up their sedan."

The car sped along the incredibly populated roadside. There were people everywhere. When cities empty, people have to go somewhere. Small towns swarmed. Villages overflowed. Even the highways were lined with groups of people with picnic-blankets and blanket shelters. Murfree rubbed his head to clear it, and closed his eyes at the anguish which came of the movement

"What happened?" he asked thickly. "Why didn't they kill me?"

The man in front turned around again.

"We wouldn't think of it, fella," he said, grinning. "It was tricky enough crashin' you in a crowded room and draggin' you out as a drunk, without nobody gettin' wise. If we'd shot you we mighta had some trouble gettin' away ourselves."

"What's the idea?" asked Murfree drearily. "Are you spies, or just plain traitors?"

"Huh!" scoffed the man in front. "You talk like the movies! We're just honest guys pickin' up a livin' how we can. Your friend there, has got a little trick that'll be useful to us. He can fix up a car to go faster, stop shorter, turn sharper and have more pickup—"

The beefy man, at the wheel, growled at him. He shut up. The pattern wasn't right for spies or agents of a foreign, European Power. Agents of that particular Power, in any case, were packed too full of ideology to talk as this fellow did. These men sounded like yeggs or crooks who'd seen a chance to acquire getaway cars that no cop could overtake. Murfree looked dizzily at Bud Gregory, who grinned uneasily.

"Yeah. That's it, Mr. Murfree. Y'see, I was travelin' across-country, and my car didn't have much power. Motor'd lost a lotta compression. So I put on a" dinkus that made her pull up hills. And that's what these fellas want."

"What'd you do?" asked Murfree. His throat was dry and his voice was hoarse. And his head ached and ached and ached.

"Uh." Bud Gregory looked uncomfortable. "You know them little hunksa stuff that metal's made of. They wiggle all around. They wiggle faster when they get hot."

Murfree reflected dully that Bud Gregory, who was practically illiterate, was speaking with precision of the random motion of molecules which is caused by heat.

"I got a kinda idea," said Bud Gregory, "that if I could make all those hunksa stuff move one way instead of all ways, it would push the car ahead. So I fixed up a dinkus that made 'em all move one way. It give my car a lot more power."

Murfree was not astonished. Bud Gregory could not astonish him now. Of course if all the molecules of a substance move in the same direction the substance itself moves in that direction. Using the molecular motion generated by heat, you should get practically limitless acceleration, quite independent of traction.

It should start a car off at any imaginable speed, it should climb any hill, it should stop a car with unbelievable suddenness, and if the motion could be controlled—and hence the thrust—it could keep a car from turning over, and from skidding.

Yes. Also it would be action without a reaction, and it would serve equally to power an ancient jalopy or an aeroplane. Only, an aeroplane wouldn't need wings because the same molecular thrust could lift it, and that meant that it could furnish a drive for a spaceship and provide the direct means for the conquest of the stars.

And Bud Gregory had devised it to make his ancient car climb hills! "Then one day I seen some dirt-track races," explained Bud Gregory. "I seen fellas bettin' on 'em, so I made a deal with a driver and put my dinkus on his car. He could go faster, so he won, and I'd bet on him, and won some, too. It was pretty easy money, Mr. Murfree, and I don't never figure on workin' myself to death."

"Whatever you use with that drive gets cold," Murfree said dully.

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory nodding. "I use the motor to pull the car, and it gets cold. That's why I run the motor, so's it won't get too cold to push. I been followin' the dirt-track races ever since," he added, "rentin' out my dinkus to drivers an' bettin' on 'em."

AT THIS, Murfree, kidnaped and with his head one monstrous ache, felt again that helpless, irritated envy with which Bud Gregory always inspired him.

Bud had made a heat transformer which turned heat directly into kinetic energy! He'd made a device which could replace every motor on earth by a simpler element, and raise the amount of power available by an astronomical figure! He'd created an invention which could go far toward making Earth a paradise and mistress of far-flung planets —and he used it to win dirt-track races so he could bet two or four or five dollars at a time and so live without working!

Now that same device—which could mean the survival of humanity in those distant ages when the sun begins to cool—that same device would now be applied to provide thieves and holdup men with getaway cars the police could not overtake!

Murfree did not believe his captors were spies or aliens. They were simply criminals. And presently they would very probably kill him, because they'd want the secret of their success to remain a secret and Bud Gregory would doubtless be kept a prisoner as long as he was useful.

And meanwhile that European Power would pile one sardonic demand upon another—making sure that America did not prepare defense—until either the United States adopted the alien social system out of sheer necessity, or was wiped out in blasts of atomic flames.

But there was no use talking about it. Bud Gregory could not grasp the emergency, and these criminals would look upon it shrewdly as simply an opportunity for large-scale activity of their own variety. Murfree felt the motion of the car more and more violently in his throbbing head. Vibration was agonizing. The after-effects of the crack on his head manifested themselves, too. Suddenly, from a combination of weakness and pain and exhaustion and a form of surgical shock, he fell into a heavy, unnatural sleep.

And just at the moment that Murfree lapsed into something like a coma-like slumber, the President of the United States took a momentous and quite illegal decision. By law he could comply with the request of the European Power for the grounding and dismantling of all United States aircraft, and for the decommissioning of the battle fleet. By law he could not take any particular action in the situation as it stood. But he did do something. His jaw set, he wrote formal and quite improper orders in his own handwriting. He gave those orders personally to certain high-ranking officers.

"Perhaps this is treason," said the President bitterly. "But I won't see this country go down without a fight! The laws seem to require it, but for once to the devil with the laws! If those rascals over there want a fight, they'll get it. But they won't get an inch more of concession from us without a fight."

And after that, of course, it was simply a question of whether the President's orders could be carried out before the European Power learned that they had been issued. One way, America would be ready to give back as good as it got. The other way meant ruin!

CHAPTER IV

Tough Tactics

NEXT morning Bud Gregory shambled into the room in which Murfree had been placed, his craggy features woebegone. "Well?" Murfree said sourly.

"Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory miserably. "Those fellas certainly fooled me. That squinty-eyed fella, he told me they was good fellas. I been makin' out right good, bettin' on him in the dirt-track races. I ain't had to mend a car in a coupla weeks. I been eatin' hawg-meat and drinkin' beer and not botherin' nobody. But he fooled me!"

"Evidently," said Murfree. His head was horribly sore where it had been hit. He was sick with impotent fury.

He knew, now, that his guess in the car had been right. His captors were simply criminals. They could not see beyond that personal benefit any more than Bud Gregory could see beyond his personal aversion to sheriffs, policemen, and regularly scheduled work.

"He told me," mourned Bud Gregory, "that if I'd take that dinkus off his racin' car an' put it on another one, so's it'd work the same, that his frien's'd pay me a hundred dollars an' ten dollars a day for the use of it. But now they brought me up here 'and they say I got to fix cars thataway for all three of 'em, and if I don't, they'll fill me full of lead!"

He looked at Murfree as if for sympathy. But Murfree had none for him. When he'd waked from his unwholesome sleep, the night before, it was because the car had stopped. It had stopped here, and even in the darkness Murfree had known it was high in the mountains.

The air here was thin and cold. There was the feel of mountains all about. There was a stone wall and a locked doorway, and he'd insisted upon an interview and the results were unsatisfying.

This was a hideout, much more elaborately fitted out than was to be expected of a party of bandits, but their equipment did not mean greater intelligence. His desperate argument for the release of Bud Gregory and himself that they might tackle the menace facing all America, had been laughed at. It wasn't believable. He couldn't even tell them what sort of device he wanted Bud Gregory to make for the defense of America. He didn't know.

So his arguments were dismissed as amusingly phony. His captors wanted the getaway cars Bud Gregory could fix up for them. They couldn't imagine Bud Gregory as usually employed on anything else. They laughed at Murfree, dizzy and sick from having been knocked out, and put off until morning the question of what they should do with so ridiculously implausible a government man —or to them—detective.

Murfree glared at Bud Gregory.

"Just what do you think they're going to do to me?" Murfree asked bitterly.

Bud Gregory blinked. He had been so absorbed in his own troubles—actual forced labor under threat of death—that he had not thought about Murfree.

"I dunno," answered Gregory.

"Holdup men!" said Murfree savagely, "Robbers! Thieves! They'll stick up a bank. shoot down anybody who interferes, and streak it away in the cars you'll fix up for them—cars that can dodge through traffic the cops can't follow through, and flee faster than the cops can follow. That's the idea, isn't it?"

Bud Gregory blinked again.

"But sooner or later the cops will track them down! And you don't like sheriffs and policemen? You'll be in a nice fix when the cops arrive and find you working for them!" Bud Gregory squirmed.

"Besides all that, there'll be my murder to account for!" Murfree went on angrily. "I know them now! Do you think they'll turn me loose to tell of their plans and methods? No! They're going to kill me, and you'll be in a jam on that account! I told you I didn't have any detectives with me. I didn't. But plenty of detectives knew where I was going and who I was looking for!

"If you'd played ball with me, everything would have been all square for you. But—I went to look for you. I've vanished. They'll find me murdered, and you in the gang who murdered me. They'll credit you with murdering me, and they'll hang you!"

PART of this was nonsense, and the rest of it was bluff. Murfree was furiously certain that he'd be killed, and he knew that no police work was going on anywhere in the United States, beyond an attempt to prevent looting in the cities and some efforts to preserve order among the hordes of refugees. But Bud Gregory would not realize that.

"And if the law doesn't hang you," Murfree finished, in fine wrath, "your friends will kill you sooner or later. When you're no more use to them, do you think they'll turn you loose to talk, either? Do you think they'll pay you ten dollars a day for what you've done, when a three-cent cartridge will settle the account? Oh, no! You're a dead man the same as I am—unless you do something!"

"But Mr. Murfree!" said Bud Gregory plaintively. "What can I do? All I want is not to bother nobody and not have nobody bother me."

"You might work out some sort of weapon, hang it!" Murfree snarled. Then he said savagely, "Have you had breakfast?"

Bud Gregory brightened.

"Yes, suh! After they ate, they told me to fix somethin' for myself. I opened up a couple of cans of beans. Sure! I made out all right."

"I didn't!" snapped Murfree.

He was acutely aware that he was not being dignified. But he was filled with the particularly corrosive and horrible fury of a man who is impotent to act in an all-important emergency because of an absurdity. The United States was in the most deadly danger in its history, in fact, perhaps in the only deadly danger in all its history. Its only hope lay in a semi-illiterate mountaineer, whose only desire was to sit in utter uselessness.

Murfree's own prospective murder did not cause him one-tenth of the raging revolt he felt for the idiocy that seemed to rule the cosmos. He was, in fact, half crazy with rebellion at mankind and his own maddening sensation of futility. .

"Get me something to eat," he snapped. "Coffee, anyhow. They'll shoot me this morning to save the trouble. of feeding me. If you had the brains of a goldfish, you'd end this situation in seconds! But you won't do a thing! You'll stand by and watch them kill me, then you'll meekly do whatever they tell you to do, and if the police don't catch you first and hang you, these thugs will murder you offhand when they're through with you. Get out and bring me some coffee!"

Bud Gregory shambled unhappily out of the room. It was seemingly a very casual kind of confinement that restrained Murfree, but when he gazed out of the windows of his room, he grew dizzy. There was a drop of several hundred feet from the window-sill.

This hideout was a small house within a high stone wall above sheer wilderness. It was somewhere on the side of a mountain, apparently on a bold spur jutting out from a precipitous cliff.

As a matter of fact, Murfree learned later that it had been built by a motion-picture director with a wife for respectability and redheads for a hobby, and that it had been acquired for a hideout by his present hosts after the director had been extensively shot up by them, for hire.

There was certainly no escape on this side. Bud Gregory had come in by a seemingly unlocked door, but Murfree was cagey. He peered cautiously out of his door, and then ventured into the next room. He saw why his door did not need to be barred.

The rooms of the house opened on a patio, a courtyard, and a rising mountainside showed on only one side. With what he'd seen from his window, everything was clear. The house was built on a spur sticking out of a precipice, and there was empty space on three sides. It could only be left toward the mountain, and that way was undoubtedly barred. And of course, it could only be approached from the mountain, which made for privacy for a man with a hobby, or security for men with bad consciences.

MORE immediately daunting, though, was the fact that two out of three of his captors were out in that patio. They looked as if they had hangovers and were in a particularly foul mood. As Murfree watched, the beefy racing-driver strolled out and joined them, and the three of them snarled at Bud Gregory, who apologetically shambled out of sight, while the three continued to snap at each other. It was obvious that all was not sweetness and light in this place. The thugs argued profanely. After a moment Murfree caught words.

"He's lyin'! He says he's got to have some parts. Let 'im take a radio to pieces and get 'em. If he don't fix our cars the way we want 'em, let's beat him up!"

The racing driver began to rage.

"Since he don't think we mean it, we could haul his friend out and let Gregory see what'll happen to him if he gets stubborn," he said. "Mebbe that'll make him work!"

Murfree felt a little cold chill and a monstrous rage. They were going to shoot him in cold blood to scare Bud Gregory. And there was absolutely nothing to be done about it.

Then he saw Bud Gregory's head. He'd stopped inside the house on the farther side of the courtyard. He'd listened to them. And his jaw had dropped open. He looked abysmally scared. He vanished.

Maybe he'd duck out. Maybe he'd improvise some incredible device that would open doors, and flee, leaving Murfree to be killed out of hand because he was known to be a government man and was believed to be a detective. If Bud did escape, he would hide again with a passionate earnestness, avoiding police and sheriffs and saying nothing whatever of what he knew.

In that case, the United States was finished. Or if it survived, it would be only as the mutilated remnant of itself. Murfree's own death was the most trivial of incidents in the holocaust certain to occur.

Time passed. The three in the courtyard drank from pocket flasks. One of them pulled out a blued-steel weapon and looked at it reflectively. That would kill Murfree. They discussed some plan they meant to carry out when Bud Gregory had given them uncatchable getaway cars. They cheered up as they talked.

Bud Gregory remained absent. Presently one of them snarled into the doorway into which he had vanished. After a moment Bud came out, holding placatingly a square bit of plank on which was a distinctly messy assembly of small radio parts. He expostulated nervously. He couldn't work so fast, and he needed some parts.

"You're a liar!" snarled the beefy man. "Go get that other guy and bring 'im here. We're gonna show you somethin'!"

CHAPTER V

Heavyside Layer

AT THIS, Bud Gregory sweated profusely. His hands shook. There were two radio tubes and a cryptic assortment of coils and condensers and resistors in the gadget he had mounted on a bit of plank.

He'd obviously worked on it for some time before he'd come in to talk to Murfree, but it did not look like anything. Except for the quite improbable coils—and no physicist in the Bureau of Standards had been able to work out what similar coils in Murfree's sample device did, or on what principle they were based. Apparently there was nothing in sight that a ten-year-old boy might not have gimmicked together at random.

"Go get 'im!" rasped the beefy man. "Or else!"

Bud Gregory cringed. He shambled across the courtyard and into the room where Murfree clenched his hands in a fury so great as to override even despair.

"M-my gosh, Mr. Murfree!" said Bud Gregory, tearfully. "They goin' to shoot you. And I just know they goin' to shoot me afterward. They told me to bring you back with me."-

His bony, angular hands worked feverishly and seemingly at random on the lunatic device he was holding.

"I showed 'em this to show I was tryin' to work like they said," said Bud Gregory piteously, "but they want me to bring you out there. They goin' to shoot you, Mr. Murfree!"

Murfree choked in rage, and swallowed a cold lump in his throat. He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak noble final words, but more likely to swear in utter fury.

"I'm—changin' it, Mr. Murfree, so's they can't shoot you," Bud said shakily as he worked. Sweat rolled down his face and panic filled his eyes. "It's a dinkus that makes those little hunksa stuff that metal's made of, all travel the same way. It makes some stuff that bounces around in any metal it comes to. I—I got to make it travel where I want it to through the air." He panted. Almost he sobbed. "All I ever wanted, Mr. Murfree, was not to bother nobody. If those fellas get killed, you got to tell the sheriff it ain't my fault!"

A stray wire, connected to heaven knew what at one end and nothing in particular at the other, took shape as an oddly beautiful curve under his twitching fingers. It was, Murfree saw, almost parabolic. But it was not a parabola. It was some sort of unsystematic curve in which Murfree could begin to see the beginning of a system.

"If I can get it finished, Mr. Murfree," chattered Bud Gregory, "they won't know when it's turned on, and they can shoot at you, and if I got it pointed at them—"

There was a snarl. The beefy man loomed up, a pistol out. Bud Gregory had gone after Murfree, and he, had delayed. Both men, their captors knew, were unarmed, but they might get ideas of resistance. So the squint-eyed man had come to see. And he'd heard.

He roared profanity at Bud Gregory, who had told Murfree he was to be killed. But Bud was still valuable. The beefy man raised his weapon and shot point-blank at Murfree. The muzzle was no more than ten feet from Murfree's body, and it spewed bullets straight for his heart.

And then the beefy man jerked ridiculously, and an expression of incredulous astonishment came over his face. He staggered, and put his hand to his side, and then collapsed very slowly to the ground. Bud Gregory yelped in anguished terror.

"You got to tell the sheriff, Mr. Murfree, that he done it himself," he wailed. "You got to!"

Murfree had thought that Bud Gregory could not surprise him, but he was blankly amazed to be alive. For a second he merely stared. Bud Gregory shook and trembled beside him, the contraption in his hands jiggling as he trembled. A little wire somewhere in it was turning white with frost.

Then Murfree moved with the dazed, desperate calm of a man who has seen a miracle. He picked up the beefy man's pistol.

"Come on," he said thickly. "Let's shoot our way out of here."

He started forward. But as he stepped out into the patio, the two remaining captors swore. They'd heard the shots. They'd looked for the beefy man to return, driving Bud Gregory before him. When they saw Murfree, instead, with the beefy man's pistol in his hand, they gaped at him.

"Hands up!" said Murfree desperately. He added foolishly: "Surrender in the name of the law!"

ONE of the two men fired from his coat-pocket, a burst of shots which emptied the magazine of his automatic pistol. He collapsed, kicking, to the ground. The other man aimed deliberately and Murfree tried to shoot him, but a civilized man's instinctive repugnance to bloodshed made his hand shake so that he couldn't pull the trigger.

The other man fired with a cold precision at Murfree—and dropped dead with a bullet in his brain. His own bullet. Bud Gregory wailed in unholy terror. But he held his little gadget safe, and even remembered to turn it off.

Miles away, a secret short-wave set sent a message from a hillside in the United States. Another set received it far away. It went into code, went over a cable in the guise of a completely innocent message, reached the capitol of a certain European Power, was decoded, and rushed to the ruler of that Power. He read it and cursed.

The United States could not fight according to law, but it was going to fight in defiance of its own acts of Congress. Orders had been given and, though illegal, they were being obeyed. Disarmed aircraft were fueling and loading up with bombs, carriers were putting desperately out to sea, and in a matter of hours the United States would be ready to defend itself.

The ruler of the European Power was angry. He would have preferred to take over the United States as a merely famine-racked, desperate, and babblingly grateful nation of folk whose spirit had been broken by a war of nerves. He had intended to seize its industrial plants intact and its cities undestroyed. But since the fools had belatedly shown dangerous intelligence, and were preparing to fight rather than be destroyed by their traditional reluctance to take the offensive—why, they would have to be smashed before they could get ready to resist.

He gave crisp, ruthless commands. He hadn't really believed they would fight, those democratic fools. Still, in fifteen minutes the first salvo of long-range guided missiles would be on the way, and other salvos would follow at two-minute intervals. And in a matter of an hour or so North America would be like a knacker's stall and the rest of the world would have had an object-lesson!

And in the hideout, Bud Gregory sat with his bones seemingly turned to jelly.

"What the devil happened?" Murfree asked unsteadily. "And we've got to get busy making something that'll stop an atom-bomb bombardment of America. Talk, man! Something may blow us up at any minute!"

"You—you got to tell the sheriff I didn't do nothin'," quavered Bud Gregory. "I didn't kill those three fellas, Mr. Murfree. They done it themselves. You'll tell the sheriff that. I don't want to have no trouble."

"Talk!" commanded Murfree. "We've got to work out something. What've you got there?"

Bud Gregory swallowed. He trembled uncontrollably.

"I told you I made a dinkus, to make my car pull up hills," he whispered. "It's some stuff that—uh—bounces around in stuff that conduc's electricity, Mr. Murfree. I told you about it. All the little hunks in metal that stuff gets in, have to move the same way. I made it make my car climb hills, and then I fixed it so I could make them little hunksa stuff act as brakes, too. They could even push the car backwards, if I wanted 'em to. And I—been makin' a livin' bettin' on a fella I fixed the dinkus on his racin'-car. That—that fella—I had his car fixed so it couldn't turn over, either."

Murfree listened in an unnatural calm. He knew all this, of course. Bud Gregory was not a genius. He was something so far beyond mere genius that there is no word for it.

He simply knew, instinctively, all the things the physicists of the world hope to find out in a hundred years or so. He was able to scramble together absurd-looking devices that turned heat into electricity, and made common dirt form an atomic pile, and the random molecular movements due to heat convert themselves into kinetic energy.

BUD GREGORY could make a spaceship that would travel among the stars, or he could make devices which would turn Earth into a paradise. Also, he could make dirt-track racing automobiles run faster!

"When I realized they were goin' to kill both of us," he said abjectly, "I got scared. So I took the dinkus. I had 'most finished and changed it a little bit, and then, instead of makin' things move faster, it turned 'em back. Somethin' that didn't move fast didn't get changed, but anything like a—uh—bullet, when I turned my dinkus on it, the faster it was goin', the faster it got flung back. And—uh—of course it got flung back straight to where it come from."

Murfree was strangely calm, as any man would be who had seen his would-be assassins drop dead from their own bullets fired at him and bounced back in a straight line. When miracles happen, one is stunned to calmness. Now he nodded his head slowly.

"I—see," he said. "When bullets ran into the field you projected, it was like hitting an elastic spring. Your field absorbed their energy, and stopped them, and then fed their energy right back and made them return to where they came from, in the same line and at the same speed they'd started with. That's it?"

"Yeah, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory pallidly. "That's it. You'll tell the sheriff I didn't kill those fellas."

"Oh, yes," said Murfree, slowly. "I'll tell him that. I take it you didn't project a field to make racing-cars run faster, though?"

"No, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory, shivering. "I run it through a wire to the motor. But I can throw it, and when it hits somethin' that carries 'lectricity, it bounces all around and stays there. It don't bother rocks or glass, none."

"I see," Murfree said in numb tones. "Most interesting. Now we've got to stop an atomic attack on America." Then he stood absolutely still for a long moment. "Look here," he said. "Will it bounce around in a gaseous conductor? Gas that has ions bouncing around so it will carry a current?"

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "Of course, Mr. Murfree."

"What you're going to do now," said Murfree with really monstrous tranquility, "is to make a big version of that dinkus in your hand. A really big one. So we can turn it straight up and shoot that field into the Heaviside Layer. Do you know what that is? It's a layer of ionized air that covers the whole earth about fifteen miles up. You're going to make a dinkus that will fix the whole Heaviside Layer so that anything that's shot into it will be bounced right back where it came from, just like those bullets did. If you don't I'll either kill you or tell the sheriff on you."

Bud Gregory blinked at him.

"I don't have to make a big one, Mr. Murfree," he said plaintively. "This here one will fix anything. It don't take no power. The power comes from the things that get flung back. All I got to do is this, Mr. Murfree!"

He put his preposterous, untidy device on the ground, and bent the curiously curved wire so that the flatter part of its unsystematic curve was parallel to the ground. He threw a small switch. The two radio tubes glowed. A small wire turned white with frost.

"Nothin' can get through that layer now, Mr. Murfree," he said anxiously. "Now about this sheriff business. . . ."

In the sprawling, far-flung territories of a certain European Power columns of vapor suddenly screamed skyward at breathtaking accelerations. There were hundreds of them. They were the guided missiles which were to destroy America. They carried atomic bombs. They should make the better part of the continent into blasted, radioactive craters.

From the nations which were satellites of the European Power other columns of vapor streaked skyward. More bombs. They should surge furiously through the air to the chill emptiness beyond it, and they should circle a good part of the earth and then drive furiously down and spout ravening atomic flames!

YET they didn't. They went skyward, to be sure. They vanished in emptiness. And men on the ground prepared to send others after them. But they didn't do that, either.

The guided missiles roared into the thin, invisible Heaviside Layer of the earth's atmosphere, whose peculiarity is that it has been ionized by the sun's rays and therefore has a specific electrical conductivity. The rocket-projectiles were made of metal. They went raging into the ionized gas in which "stuff" which only Bud Gregory could understand was—in his words—"bouncing around."

And there they stopped. They exhausted their fuel in a furious, terrible duel with implacable and quite incomprehensible forces. The energy they possessed was somehow absorbed, and then their fuel cut off and all the energy they had parted with was restored to them and they went hurtling back toward the earth—toward the exact spot from which they had been discharged.

They were equipped with very sensitive fuses. Even the terrific velocity with which they struck their own launching-sites did not keep the fuses from working. The atomic bombs they carried exploded. They blew up their own launching-sites. More, they blew up the other bombs on the other guided missiles waiting to form the second and third and twentieth salvos.

Very many large areas of a certain European Power became monstrous craters. Unparalleled craters. Chasms going down to the molten rock below the earth's crust. There were similar craters in the satellite nations. But there were no craters in America. Not even little ones. No atom bombs fell on the United States.

When the President of the United States barked a grim and defiant message to the European Power, he knew nothing of the craters. They had been made only five minutes earlier. He simply barked defiantly that the United States wasn't going to change its government or its way or living for anybody, and it would fight anybody that wanted a fight.

But nobody did. In fact, neither the European Power nor its satellites were apt to fight anybody for a very, very long time.

And, of course, Murfree went back home. He was quite broke when he got there, and he could have been fired from his Civil Service job for taking leave without permission. But since almost everybody else had done the same thing, his offense was graciously pardoned. He was, however, deprived of pay for all the time he had been absent.

The thing that makes him mad, though—No, there are two things that make him mad!

When it was clear that there was no further danger to America, he turned off Bud Gregory's device and packed it in a car, the same car in which he'd been taken to the hideout. And he drove Bud Gregory down to Los Angeles, where he intended to try to get passage back to Washington. People were flocking back to the cities everywhere, then, and police were regulating the flow of returning refugees.

Murfree's captured car was stopped, and three policemen advanced to give him instructions about the route he should take. And Bud Gregory couldn't face three cops. He jumped out of the car and ran away into the thick of the mob of cars and pedestrians streaming back into the city.

Murfree couldn't have caught him. He didn't try, because he was trying so hard to rescue Bud Gregory's gadget, which Bud had used as a stepping-stone when he scrambled out of the car. Those are the two things that make Murfree mad. Bud Gregory fled and could not possibly be found. And his device was smashed so it wouldn't work any more.

Murfree still has it, of course, but he's lost all hope of understanding it. In fact, whenever he thinks about Bud Gregory he begins to swear. He envies Bud Gregory. Because Bud Gregory is something there isn't any word for.

THE DEADLY DUST

CHAPTER I

Where Is Bud Gregory?

A STURDY, small fishing-boat wallowed and rolled and heaved and pitched in the huge slow swells of mid-Pacific. It looked very much like any other fishing-boat and remarkably like those tuna-boats that put out from the West Coast of the United States and pursue their prey for as many thousands of miles as may be necessary.

It was just a little over a hundred feet long and was powered obviously by a Diesel engine. There was just one thing odd about the boat and one oddity about its crew and one about the object it towed and one about its wake.

The odd thing about the boat was that something remarkably like a radar antenna was fitted atop its pilot-house. The oddity about its crew was that every man wore heavy protective clothing of a sort usually found only among workers about atomic piles.

The oddity about the object it towed was that aside from the supporting pontoons that kept it afloat it was made of lead. It was a torpedo-shaped object some forty feet long and no more than eight or ten feet in diameter, kept from sinking by sheet-metal floats on either side.

The oddity of the wake was that it was quite clear for a few miles and then—miles and miles behind—dead fish lay on the water. It was possible to back-track the tuna-boat for a long, long way by dead fish lying on the surface. Of course, perhaps fifty miles astern the dead fish had been scattered by the waves and the trail had been thinned out and was not so clear.

But the fishy corpses made a trail for a hundred miles beyond that if you looked for them. Curiously, the trail was equally dense along its whole length, as if a certain poisonousness only had been towed through the water and did not spread afterward.

There was an oddity in the behavior, too, of the small craft after a while. The radar-antenna turned and flickered here and there, restlessly. It searched the horizon exhaustively. Then, suddenly, an oily liquid came out of the torpedo-shaped leaden object. It bubbled to the surface and spread out. It evaporated very quickly, though. The vapor was blown to the eastward by the wind.

The seeming tuna-boat forged ahead sturdily, towing that odd object, which now gushed out a volatile liquid which evaporated quickly and whose fumes were blown away. It went on for miles and miles and miles, its radar-antenna flickering nervously about the horizon while the transient film of oily stuff trailed behind it.

And there was another peculiarity. The trail of dead fish grew much thicker after the liquid spread out to dry up and blow away to eastward. Instead of forty or fifty fish per mile there were hundreds. In one place, where a school of some finny sort had swum beneath the temporary layer of oil, the ocean was almost carpeted with scaly, belly-up corpses... .

On August 8th the background count of all the standard Geiger-Miller tubes on the Pacific Coast, from Oregon to Southern California, went up from 1-3 to 3-5 per minute per square centimeter of tube surface.

On the same day Bud Gregory found a new home for his family. And Bud Gregory was—though the fact made him extremely unhappy—the most important man in the United States, perhaps the most important man in the world. He was in hiding because of it.

He was so much more than a mere genius that there is no possible way to describe him, and therefore he drove furtively by back roads up through Northern California and across Oregon and finally found a home for his family fronting on one of the minor inlets opening off Puget Sound.

The house was an abandoned shack, built of shakes—slabs cut off logs to square them for a sawmill—and it was in the last stages of dilapidation. But Bud Gregory viewed it with vast satisfaction.

SO DID his family. His tow-headed children regarded the brush that went back to the hills with lively anticipation. It was cut-over land with only a seed-tree standing here and there. The older boys inspected the water in view with enthusiasm.

Bud Gregory's wife noted that the stove, left behind when the shack was abandoned, could be patched with flattened tin cans or sheet-iron to serve admirably, and that there was a spring only a hundred yards from the house. She learned that there was a very small town only four or five miles away. She was content.

So Bud Gregory's family unloaded pots, pans, bedding, two hound dogs, certain folding cots and assorted gunnysacks of provisions and canned goods from the car. They moved in. There were berries and woods-greens for the girls to pick nearby, there were rabbits to snare and fish to catch for the boys and nobody was likely to try to make anybody go to school. Bud Gregory's family was happy.

As the sun went down, with the ancient and decrepit jalopy standing forlornly beside the really quite unspeakable shack, Bud Gregory sat comfortably on the sagging doorstep and leaned back against the rotting side-wall. He reflected complacently that nobody was likely to bother him here for a long time to come. He could sit in the sun and not be bothered.

In a very real sense he was the greatest physicist yet known on earth. He had the greatest command over subatomic particles of any human being so far born. His profession was the repair of hopelessly disarranged automobiles but his occupation, his avocation and his only desire was simply to sit and do nothing. Sometimes, though, he liked to drink a little beer.

On August 9th, the background-count of standard Geiger-Miller tubes was up to 3-5 per minute per square centimeter as far east as St. Louis. On the Coast it was up to 5-7. On August 10th, the count was 3-5 in the Atlantic States, 5-7 in the center of the country and 7-9 on the Pacific Coast. . . .

There was another small fishing-boat ploughing its way through the long slow mid-Pacific swells, towing an odd object which was supported by floats. There had been another one before it and another before that.

Like its fellows which had made these strange patrols, towing lead-sheathed torpedo-shaped objects, this fishing-boat also never seemed to fish— Not even when there were very plain evidences of tuna in profitable quantities all about.

The boat forged ahead, its radar flickering about the horizon. Suddenly the movement of the radar-antenna ceased. It remained fixed in one position and one position only. Then, as suddenly, men ran about the boat's deck.

They hastily assembled machine-guns at the stern. There were sharp, tearing noises above the droning hum of the Diesel engine. Tiny puffs of smoke were torn away from the muzzles of the machine-guns by the wind which blew to the east.

Bullets ripped and tore the sheet-steel floats. Great gashes appeared in the plating. Water poured into the supporting pontoons. A protective-suit-clad sailor swung an axe and the tow-rope parted. The lead object settled and sank swiftly.

Seconds after it was out of sight the only crew-members who appeared on deck wore commonplace working clothes. When a four-motored transpacific flying clipper droned out of the mistiness of the horizon there was nothing out of the ordinary in view. The radar-antenna was invisible. It had been unshipped. And of course the thing that had been towed was far, far below the surface....

The Geiger-Miller tube background-count did not rise on August 11th or 12th but on the 13th—when it was 7-9 in the Eastern and Central states—it made another jump. It went up to 8-10 on the Coast. The matter began to look serious.

Bud Gregory and his family, however, paid no heed. The older boys had explored their immediate surroundings very happily. The family dined on woodcock—out of season—rabbits, fish and corn bread. The oldest boy of all, aged fourteen, trudged all the way to the nearby small town and reported that there was a movie theatre there which showed films twice a week.

Beer was to be had. There were two stores and a post office and a consolidated school, a small bowling-alley, a sawmill and a hospital out of all proportion to the town itself. He was not impressed. He went fishing.

ON AUGUST 14th the background-count on the West Coast was 9-11. On the 15th it was 10-12 and on the 16th it was 12-15. In the rest of the country the count climbed steadily. In Washington, D. C., standard counters clicked at the 10-12 rate and Doctor David Murfree became convinced that something was very, very wrong.

The background count for standardized Geiger-Miller tubes is a measure of the normal everyday radioactivity of the earth as a whole. When a tube of given dimensions, with given pressure and given voltage applied, indicates that stray subatomic particles have passed through it at the rate of from one to three per minute for each square centimeter of its surface, the cosmos is normal.

But when the rate goes up over the entire United States, so that one has to assume that the radioactivity of the whole nation's surface has multiplied itself at least four times, it is upsetting.

Doctor David Murfree's title was a science doctorate. Because of the raised background count he went to his superiors in Washington and asked for leave. He had a hunch that he had better find Bud Gregory and ask some questions about the matter.

It was not a pleasant interview. For a Civil Service employee to ask some special concession from his superiors is always unpleasant and Murfree was not in the good graces of his bosses. By his rating he drew a salary of forty-seven hundred dollars a year and by his seniority he could not be fired without formal charges and a hearing. But his superiors disapproved of him.

When an atomic pile started up of itself in the Great Smokies, Murfree to be sure, had managed to get it stopped on his own initiative and had presented to the United States the greatest known store of artificial radioactive material on earth. But Bud Gregory, who was responsible for that gigantic pile, had got away into the anonymity of tramp motordom. * (*See "THE GREGORY CIRCLE.," Thrilling Wonder Stories, April, 1947.)

And again when there was good prospect of an atomic war, with the United States on the receiving end of a well-organized attack, Murfree had managed to find Bud Gregory and, according to his own report, had prevented that attack, too. But again Bud Gregory had slipped away and Murfree could bring back nothing but a smashed and inoperative device he declared was responsible for the safety of the United States.** (**See "THE BOOMERANG FIELD," Thrilling Wonder Stories, June. 1947.)

True, three dead men were found where Murfree had said they would be and they had been killed by bullets from guns they held in their hands and the bullets had gone in backward. Which made Murfree's otherwise improbable story rather plausible.

But his immediate superior did not approve of him because he had brought back neither Bud Gregory nor a painstaking report with math and diagrams which could be issued as essentially the product of the organizing genius of the administrative officers of the Bureau.

So, on August 17th, while Bud Gregory sat peacefully in the sunshine and his children picked berries, Dr. David Murfree sat in the office of his section's administrative officer and argued.

"But there's nothing else to do! I have to take some leave!"

The administrative officer was displeased. "I don't think Gregory's responsible," explained Murfree patiently. "He knows better, now. All he wants is to be left alone to loaf and drink beer. He won't do anything to draw attention to himself—more's the shame and pity—and anything that would increase basic radioactivity would decidedly be on the show-off side. But he's the only man who could possibly solve the problem!"

The administrative officer scowled darkly. "It isn't the whole earth, remember," said Murfree as patiently as before. "Only the United States. That means something quite preposterous. It's not dangerous yet but it isn't right! I've got to take some leave to see if I can find Gregory and get an explanation!"

The administrative officer was no scientist. He pointed out that Murfree was asking for leave when everyone else in the Bureau wanted his vacation. If Murfree left his duty it would be considered that he had resigned. Murfree clamped his jaw.

"Oh, the deuce!" he said angrily. "In that case I've resigned. I'm going! I've got to!"

THE small fleet of seeming tuna-boats had developed a regular routine. One or more lay at a dock where a shed jutted out over the water and could easily hide two or three lead-sheathed objects to be towed. At least one ploughed sturdily across the ocean, its radar flickering incessantly in every direction, to detect and warn of any other ship or any aircraft which might presently come into sight.

If the radar reported another ship—however far away—the tuna-boat and its tow changed course to avoid a meeting. If a meeting could not be avoided the tow could be sunk and of course on the tuna-boat there wasn't anything peculiar which couldn't be thrown overboard if it became necessary to prove its utter innocence.

The island which was the small fleet's base was small itself and very seldom visited. If anybody did come its entire population of perhaps seventy souls was united. Personnel had been chosen and trained to distract the attention of any possible visitor from the things that were the real background of the ships' activities.

It should not be difficult. After all, atomic piles are not so large and they can be built and hidden underground and the necessary shielding can be made to look like perfectly natural parts of an island landscape.

The fishing-boats went about their routine. They were very busy. But they didn't catch any fish. They didn't try. . . .

On August 22nd the acceptance of Murfree's unwritten resignation came through. He scowled at the slip and then cleaned out his desk and went home. On that day the background-count in the East was 25-28. On the Pacific Coast it was 32-35.

This meant that in two weeks the radioactivity of the surface-soil of the United States had multiplied itself ten times. If it doubled itself just six times more there wouldn't be any United States. There might not be any world.

But out in the state of Washington, looking out over Puget Sound from his happily somnolent seat before the shack of moldering shakes, Bud Gregory decided that he would like to have some beer.

He counted up his money and sent his oldest boy to the town four miles away to bring back half a dozen bottles. For speed he let the fourteen-year-old boy use the antique automobile in which the family had wandered across the continent.

The boy cranked up the jalopy and drove away. It was very fortunate that he did so. Murfree heard about it and therefore was able to locate Bud Gregory.

CHAPTER II

"What's in It for Me?"

MURFREE had a very bad conscience. Now, when his wife had set her heart upon a vacation at the seashore with their little daugher—Washington is an oven in the summer—he had joined the ranks of the unemployed. But Murfree knew that he had to hunt for Bud Gregory. He had to!

"Somebody's got to do it," he told his wife defensively. "And after all, I'm the only person he'll work with."

His wife waited.

"It's lunatic," said Murfree, "but what can I do? The whole country is getting more radioactive. The normal count has gone up ten times! It goes up in waves which start on the Pacific Coast and move east. There's no rise in Europe, Asia, South America or anywhere else. It isn't dangerous yet but it's heading that way. Somebody's got to find out about it!"

"Why must it be you?" asked his wife.

"Because nobody else will!" he told her vexedly. "There is a certain amount of radiation which is normal. There is a certain amount which is safe. The amount all over the United States is away above normal. It's still safe but it's heading for the point where it won't be!"

"Well?" his wife said.

"A certain amount more," said Murfree, "and there'll be a terrific increase in the number of abnormal babies. Freaks, mutations, monsters. A little beyond that, there'll be no babies! The rest of the living world would follow.

"A little more and plants will begin to throw sports. More yet and plants will become sterile. Seeds will cease to grow. A little more radiation than that and we'll all tend to develop cancer, and still more and we'll begin to run fevers and die of radiation-burns."

"And you're the only person who sees it," said his wife bitterly. "So you have to spend your money trying to find this Gregory and bribe him to do something!"

"But," said Murfree again, "nobody else will!"

Which was true. Twice before he'd spent his own savings for the safety of his family while all other families got their safety free. His conscience bothered him. But there wasn't anything else to do. Rather guiltily he called a friend who made microchemical analyses for the F.B.I.

He asked if he could be notified if any events took place of the sort—he described it specifically—which would mean Bud Gregory was involved. Then he doggedly made ready to take his family to the seashore. Employed or not, his daughter needed fresh air and sunshine and the sea after a year in Washington.

Two days later he had them settled at the beach. He'd packed up the one personally-owned souvenir of his encounters with Bud Gregory. He went to the largest privately-owned power-generating station in the United States. He demonstrated the gadget. He left it installed. Then he called back to Washington on long distance.

He had a certain amount of money by this time—a fee for the experimental use of Bud Gregory's gadget—and within limits he could travel. There was news. His friend in the F.B.I. told him of a happening which sounded as if Bud Gregory was involved. So Murfree headed for the Pacific Coast by air.

A VERY decrepit vessel cast anchor off the small island of the tuna-boats. It made cryptic signals and the population of the island came rejoicing to the dock to greet its crew. Of course the people of the island did not use radios for communication. Radio messages can be intercepted and, if sent in code, arouse curiosity.

The decrepit vessel, therefore, brought news. It was good. The news consisted of background-count measurements made in different cities of the United States over some weeks past. The men who had made the measurements were passengers on the ship which brought them.

They were highly elated. They were taken to see the atomic piles which had produced the measurements. They bowed profoundly before the atomic engines which silently produced death for a nation.

And that night there was celebration on the island. But the tuna-boat due to leave went out on schedule despite the festivities. It towed a torpedo-shaped lead object behind it. . . .

On the 29th of August the background-count of standard Geiger-Miller tubes on the West Coast was 56-58 and still going up. The radioactivity-constant of the United States had risen to something like twenty-five times normal. It showed no tendency to stop.

Bud Gregory's boy was in trouble. The event itself was not important but it enabled Murfree to find Bud Gregory. The happening occurred within half an hour after Bud sent his son to town for some beer.

The fourteen-year old boy chuffed away from the shack into which his family had moved. The car in which Bud Gregory had taken his tribe across the continent was an ancient and dilapidated and rattletrap. By any normal standard it should have wheezed its last mile years before.

It had a cloth top, a cracked windshield and, when it was running exclusively on its motor, it made noises like a broken-down coffee grinder working on a protesting cat. It should have groaned at any grade and balked at any really perceptible incline. Its absolute maximum of speed should have been twenty miles an hour downhill.

But Bud Gregory was something very much more than a genius. He had made a gadget for his car. It was a radio tube and a coil or two, the windings being made in a fashion nobody else could understand and Bud Gregory could not explain. When the gadget was turned on and attached to any bit of metal things happened.

Normally the molecules of—say—the metal of any automobile-engine block move in all directions in a strictly random fashion. When Bud Gregory's gadget operated, the molecules of the same automobile-block moved in the same direction—ahead.

If the motor wasn't running the metal cooled down as the heat-energy it contained was turned into kinetic energy. If it was kept running the burning fuel in its cylinders kept it from going so far below zero that it would condense liquid air upon itself.

The gadget was still attached to the motor of the ancient car. It had helped pull the car across the continent and was solely responsible for the fact that it had pulled the Rockies. Now it was turned off. The small boy turned it on. The car began to ride smoothly and easily with seemingly infinite power.

It came out of the narrow woods-road upon a main highway. The fourteen-year-old boy turned up the gadget. The ancient jalopy breezed up to sixty miles an hour—seventy—eighty. . . .

A horn blared its astonishment as a motorcycle-cop flashed past, going in the opposite direction. Bud Gregory's son heard the cop's brakes squeal. He was going to turn around and come in pursuit.

The flapping, squeaking, preposterous flivver hit one hundred and twenty miles an hour as the scared boy lit out. He rounded a curve. The small town lay before him. In panicky haste, he turned the knob to reverse the molecular drive of the four-wheeled wreck he drove.

In fifty yards it dropped from a hundred and twenty miles to ten. He snapped off the drive and limped into town on three cylinders. He parked the car in an inconspicuous place and went and got the beer.

He lingered uneasily, afraid to go back until the motor-cop should have vanished. The motor-cop came into town, swearing. The boy saw him ask questions. He moved out of sight. The boy got into the car and stowed the beer. Then he saw the cop heading for his car where it was parked. The cop looked purposeful.

The small boy cringed. He shared his father's terror of the Law. When the motor-cop was ten yards away, Bud Gregory's son reacted in panic. He flipped over the molecular-drive switch and the car plunged forward.

It dented the fender of the car ahead of it, side-swiped a farm-truck, upset a "Keep Right" sign and flashed for the open road, with no sound of any running engine.

THE MOTOR-COP lunged for his motorcycle and roared in pursuit. A fourteen-year-old boy is not a startlingly conservative driver at any time. Bud Gregory's son was filled with stark terror. On the two-mile stretch of straight road just around the first curve he gave the car all the speed that molecular heat-energy would yield.

It wasn't the same as atomic power but it was plenty. The motor-cop reached the curve just in time to see the jalopy stop almost as abruptly as if it had run into a brick wall—but unharmed—and go careening into the woods-road. The cop roared in pursuit.

He didn't catch up but in the winding woods-road he ran into patches of below-zero frigidity that almost scared him into giving up the chase. The boy had forgotten to start the engine and when you extract from a motor-block the heat-energy required to drive a flivver four miles at top speed, with acceleration and deceleration thrown in, it gets cold! It left a trail of almost-condensed air behind it.

The wreck happened just fifty yards from the shack in which Bud Gregory's family had settled down. The car slid off the road at the last curve, ploughed through fifty yards of underbrush and spindling saplings, came at last to an immovable stump—and had reached the end of its journeying.

The boy was completely unhurt. But his toes were frostbitten on the twenty-ninth of August, on a bright sunshiny day with all the woods rioting in lush green growth.

The motor-cop got no adequate explanation. Bud Gregory was shaken but firm in his resolution to play dumb. He couldn't explain anything but the boy's toes were frostbitten. In the end the cop took the boy back to the hospital to have his toes treated, resolving to return to examine the wreck.

But of course, when he got back, there was no gadget to discover and absolutely nothing to explain the car's speed, the boy's frostbitten toes or a patch of frost-killed vegetation—in August—where the wreck still lay crumpled.

It was this obstinately inexplicable situation that had been reported to Murfree by his friend of the F. B. I. So he reached that small town as fast as planes would take him, and found Bud Gregory sitting miserably on the steps of the small town's hospital.

The most important man in the United States was acutely unhappy. His son was going to have to pay a fine for reckless driving, the hospital would charge something, his car was wrecked beyond even his ability to repair it—the motor-block had burst, of course, when the water in the circulating-system froze—and he might have to go to work.

Murfree walked up to Bud Gregory and nodded.

"Hello," said Murfree. "I hear you're in trouble."

Bud Gregory looked up.

"Migosh!" he said helplessly. "It's Mr. Murfree, the Gov'ment man!"

"Not a government man any more," said Murfree. "I've got some money for you."

"Uh—you don't owe me no money, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory unhappily. He peered around Murfree with gloomy suspicion and asked, "You got some detectives with you?"

"Not a soul," said Murfree. "But I have got some money for you. You sold me a gadget once. You'd used it to fix my car." Bud Gregory spread out his hands.

"You paid me for that, Mr. Murfree. You paid me six hundred dollars. I lived on that for a long time. I et hawg-meat an' drunk beer an' me an' my family came clear across the United States on that money, Mr. Murfree. But you don't owe me no more."

"We'll go and get some beer," said Murfree. "It may take explaining."

Bud Gregory cheered. He looked uneasily about but Murfree had always played fair with him. Their meeting had been in a tiny village in the Smokies when Murfree's car overheated and froze and Bud Gregory produced a gadget which was made of stray radio parts. He plugged it in a light-socket and attached it to Murfree's car.

Immediately the car wasn't stuck fast. It ran. When fresh oil was spread about it was as good as new. Bud Gregory explained casually that the gadget made some sort of stuff — perhaps electronic — which made pieces of metal slide easily on each other.

Later, in an emergency, he sold the gadget to Murfree for six hundred dollars, and Murfree could make it work, but he had never been able to understand it. Neither had the most eminent scientists of the United States. Nor could any of them duplicate it so the duplicate would work. It demonstrably eliminated all friction—all—from any device to which it was attached, but it remained an enigma.

WITH beer before them, Murfree passed five ten-dollar bills across the table. He did not dare offer more, knowing Gregory.

"You sold me that dinkus which stops all friction," said Murfree casually. "I can't understand it nor can anybody else. But it still works. So, since it belonged to me, when I got out of Government service, I took it to a big power-generating station. I explained what it would do.

"We hooked it on the big turbine. And it not only stopped all friction in the bearings but it ended steam-friction against the rotor-blades and baffles. The efficiency of the whole set-up rose by something over eight per cent."

Bud Gregory looked longingly at the fifty dollars.

"But you don't owe me no money," he said unhappily.

"You've got ten dollars a day coming to you as long as that dinkus keeps on working," said Murfree casually. "If you ever want more money just make another one or show me how to do it and I'll take care of the situation."

Bud Gregory blinked. Then he grew expansive as realization came.

"Mr. Murfree, you' a gentleman!" he said expansively. "Soon's my boy's toes get well an' I got me a new car I won't have to worry about nothin'! You come on out to the house with me! My old woman, when she hears this news, is goin' to cook you a dinner that'll sure say thank-you! An' get some beer an' some ten-cent seegars!"

Murfree nodded. He had a telegram in his pocket. The background-count of Geiger-Miller tubes was up to sixty on the Coast here. The soil of the United States was just thirty times as radioactive as it should be. When it reached a certain point, now not so far away. . . .

Back and forth, back and forth, day after day, the little tuna-boats worked busily. They were equipped with bait-tanks and refrigeration units for such tuna as they might catch but they made no attempt to catch them.

Their only purposeful activity seemed to be towing torpedo-shaped containers of lead to points some hundreds of miles from their base island arid then allowing the volatile liquid in the containers to flow out on the surface of the ocean and be carried away eastward as vapor.

They took great pains not to be sighted by any other vessel as they went out, tow loaded with its enigmatic liquid, or returned with it empty. They had been fortunate. Only one such tow had had to be scuttled when a transpacific clipper soared overhead, early in their traffic.

Whatever they were trying to do, they seemed to meet with no obstacles as they carried out their purpose.

Murfree still hadn't the faintest idea what could be the cause of the excess radioactivity of American soil alone. The newspapers hadn't found out about it. They probably wouldn't realize the potential danger if they did.

But the lives of a hundred and forty million people were at the mercy of a completely unexplained phenomenon—unless Bud Gregory somehow solved the problem.

Murfree's problem was to get him to work on it.

"I want you," said Murfree," to work out a gadget to save some lives."

CHAPTER III

Dusty Answer

BUD GREGORY puffed expansively. They were seated before that unspeakable shanty Bud Gregory had pre-empted and which was now his home. They had dined on bracken-greens and grouse—out of season—and sea-trout with cornbread and bacon-drippings and wild fennel and a monstrous brew which Bud Gregory fondly considered to be coffee.

Now they looked out over an inlet of Puget Sound, with sunset colorings making the sky to westward a glory of rose and gold.

"Shucks, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory happily. "I ain't no doctor. I just fix cars. An' now I got me ten dollars a day comin' in rain or shine an' I don't have to bother doin' that!"

Murfree smoked.

"It'll pay you a lot more than ten dollars a day."

"What do I want with more'n that?" asked Bud Gregory. He beamed. "My ol' woman don't need more'n five-six dollars a week for corn-meal an' hawgmeat an' I got a shotgun.

"I'll git the boys some twenty-twos so's they can knock over squirrels an' take out for some beer now an' then an' the rest' buy me a new car in no time. I don't need no fancy car. I c'n make most anything run if it's got four wheels."

Murfree blew a smoke-ring. "I'm asking you to save some human lives," he repeated.

"If they got money to pay me," said Bud Gregory comfortably, "they got money to pay doctors that know all about that kinda stuff. You tell 'em to go to a fella that makes a business o' doctorin'."

"Only," said Murfree, "you have to be the doctor. They'll die of radioactivity burns. Know what I mean?"

Bud Gregory shook his head.

"You know the—hunks of stuff that metal is made of," Murfree said carefully, fumbling for words that would describe atoms Bud Gregory—who understood them better than any other man alive. "The atoms that are different for iron and copper and so on."

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. He looked absorbedly at the water before his door. "They different in the middle an' they got different—uh—skins around 'em. Say! There's a school o' fish down there! See 'em jump?"

Murfree felt an impulse to jump himself. Bud Gregory had spoken of atoms as being different in the middle and having different kinds of skins around them. He obviously spoke with precision of atomic nuclei and electron-shells.

But how did he know? Murfree ached with envy of Bud Gregory, who knew so much that Murfree would give anything to know—and who only wanted to sit in the sun.

"Some kinds of metal," said Murfree, as carefully as before, "break down and change into other kinds. Some when stray hunks of stuff hit them"—he referred to free neutrons—"and some all by themselves."

The last was radioactivity. Bud Gregory spoke regretfully.

"If that boy o' mine wasn't in the hospital with frostbit toes he sure would admire to go after some of them fish. Yeah. I know what y'mean. There's some stuff bustin' down everywhere, all the time. Lots more lately."

Murfree stiffened. Increased background radioactivity! How did Bud Gregory know? To say that he perceived the facts of atomic structure and behavior as casually and as effortlessly as a mathematical freak perceives the cube root of 89724387 would be accurate but it wouldn't mean anything.

Murfree wanted desperately to try to find out how Bud. Gregory knew but he foreknew the uselessness of the attempt. He wet his lips.

"Yes," said Murfree. "A lot more's breaking down lately. Thirty times as much as usual. Nobody knows the cause."

BUD GREGORY said off-handedly, "Dust." Then he waved his hand exuberantly.

"Y'know, suh?" he said. "It sure does feel good to know that I got ten dollars a day comin' in without no bother! I don't have to work myself to death no more. I can just set if I want to! You sure are a friend o' mine, Mr. Murfree!"

"What do you mean by dust?" demanded Murfree sharply.

"Just dust," said Bud Gregory. "Settlin'. It's all bustin' down all the time as it drops, sendin' out hunksa stuff. It ain't thick, but it—uh—kinda accumulates." He paused. Then, "Yes, suh! I done a lot o' worryin' in my time but now I aim to stop! You say I'll get that money as long as that dinkus works?"

Murfree stared at him. Dust settling down and breaking down as it settled was radioactive dust. Accumulating. Taking three days to travel from coast to coast. That steady overhead wind from west to east on which the Japs had sent bomb-laden balloons drifting across the Pacific to the United States. . . .

"Wait a minute!" said Murfree sharply. "You say there's radioactive dust settling down? That's not natural! And only on the United States—that's men's doing! It's a sneak attack! And such dust sent in scattered thin would only be noticed by freaks like me! It's an attack with radioactive dust."

Something close to horror came suddenly to him. Radioactive dust has been imagined as a weapon, of course.* (*Note: It is referred to in the Smyth Report on "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes"—the official report on the atom bomb.)

But it has always been imagined as a super-deadly poison gas, a whirlwind weapon killing overnight. There had never been any imagining of its use as an insidious slow poison, killing undetected, murdering a nation by slow, inexorable stages, without warning or provocation or even the alternative of submission or death!

But if Bud Gregory were right, that was the case now. The rise in radioactivity could only be the work of men, who had set out to murder a nation in a cold hatred surpassing even the hatred of the Nazis for Jewry. It would be the work of men who knew that the United States could never be subdued by any possible weapon and, since it stood in their way, must be destroyed.

Other scientists had observed the rise in radioactivity and had extrapolated its curve. They inferred that if the rise continued much longer there would be danger. If it continued far enough the danger would become fatality. But the danger had seemed only a possibility.

If Bud Gregory was right it was a certainty! The United States was not the scene of an anomalous rise in the background-count of stray subatomic particles. Not at all—the United States was the victim of an attack which would end, if not somehow countered, with the death of every living organism on its surface, down to the smallest quasi-cellular virus on a rotting leaf!

And there was no defense against such a weapon as this—unless Bud Gregory could contrive it. Murfree's voice was unsteady when he spoke again.

"Listen," he said. "Somebody's turning loose that dust. Somebody's making it. They're spreading it to drift all over the United States and settle, so that everybody in the country will die!"

Bud Gregory spoke obliviously.

"I never did like the idea of workin' myself to death. From now on I can just set, not botherin' nobody an' nobody botherin' me." Then what Murfree had said hit home. He turned his head. "What's that, Mr. Murfree?"

"Somebody," said Murfree shakily, "somewhere out in the Pacific most likely."

Then his brain worked swiftly and surely. In matters that he knew and that his training had fitted him to handle his brain was probably better than Bud Gregory's. He simply had not the intuitive knowledge of facts beyond science which Bud Gregory possessed.

"I see how it's done," said Murfree in a sudden deadly hatred. "You take an atomic pile. If you want radioactive iron, you put a rod of iron in it. When it comes out, it's radioactive. If you want carbon or copper or anything else all you need to do is put it in the right part of a pile, where neutrons of the proper speed will hit."

GREGORY blinked at him. Perhaps Murfree's statements seemed so elementary as to be nonsense to Bud, or perhaps they were far beyond his comprehension.

"They'd make a pile and run a coiled pipe through it," said Murfree, savagely. "Then they'd run a liquid through that pipe. Any liquid! Gasoline! Kerosene! It would come out radioactive! It could be evaporated and it would spread and diffuse in the air and, as it spread, here an atom and there an atom would break down, emitting radiation and becoming another substance entirely.

"And that would be a new compound which wouldn't stay vapor but would come out as a microscopic particle of dust with an electric charge that would draw moisture or other particles to it! It would grow and grow and ultimately settle down as a dust-mote too small to be seen.

"And that would happen quintillions and quintillions and quintillions of times, and motes of poison would settle—are settling. . . ."

"Mmmmmm," said Bud Gregory. "Yeah. The dust ain't, an' then all of a sudden it is. Like—uh—soot formin'."

The parallel was exact. A vapor like gasoline, burning without enough oxygen, turns to solid soot. Radioactive vapor, transforming itself, would become solid particles of dust, which would attract water-vapor and other particles and settle to the earth.

"Somebody's doing it!" said Murfree, grinding his teeth. "Somebody who wants to rule the earth! They know they've got to knock us out first, before they can try to build up their own nation to jingoism again! So they've started to murder us! Every one of us!"

Bud Gregory spoke contentedly.

"They ain't got nothin' against me! I don't bother nobody!"

He beamed at the sunset. He was gangling and slope-shouldered and untidy. He was utterly without ambition and practically without desires. And he looked at all possible situations only as they affected his desire not to do anything at all. But he was the most important man in the United States. He could have earned any conceivable sum if he had wanted it. But he didn't. He only wanted to sit in the sun.

"You've got to figure out how to beat this trick!" said Murfree, very pale. "In two weeks the babies that are conceived will begin to be freaks. In a month there won't be any babies conceived. In two months people will begin to die!"

"You' a good friend o' mine, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory amiably. "You just brought me the best news I ever had in my life. You told me I don't have to worry no more. I ain't goin' to, Mr. Murfree! I'm goin' to rest!"

"I'm telling you," said Murfree sharply, "that there are men at war against the United States! They're making war on your country!"

"All right, suh," Bud Gregory said amiably. "Maybe so. But it ain't likely they'll draft me for no war. I'm married an' I got children. Let 'em have a war! If I got ten dollars a day comin' in steady I'm satisfied! I ain't goin' to bother nobody an' I don't want nobody to bother me!"

Murfree clenched his fists. He hated Bud Gregory for a moment. But the most important man in America was neither wilful nor unpatriotic. He was simply impervious to abstractions such as riches or the love of country. The problem had not yet been stated so it had meaning to him.

Murfree compressed his lips. After a long time he stood up.

"All right. Figure this out! If you don't figure some way to take care of that radioactive dust, in three months at the outside I'll be dead. And if I'm dead, who's going to collect that ten dollars a day and send it to you?"

He strode away into the darkness for the four-mile hike back to town. It was the only argument that could possibly make Bud Gregory exert himself.

CHAPTER IV

Danger Point

THE LITTLE boats went about their business, which was the murder of a nation. Even Nazis never dreamed of the extermination of a nation and every living organism which lived on its soil, down to the last one-celled animalcule living in a mud-puddle.

The crews of the little boats moved competently about their task of towing great containers of a deadly liquid for hundreds of miles from their base and then spreading out that liquid on the water. It evaporated at a known rate. Its vapor was blown eastward at a known rate.

It thinned and attenuated and was mixed with other air so that when it reached the coastline of America it was undetectable except as a minute rise in the background-count of subatomic particles. But as it moved and thinned and thinned it changed—at a known rate.

Presently it was not a vapor but an infinitely diffuse dust-cloud which no instrument on earth could detect as such. It settled to the earth and continued to change and slowly, slowly, slowly, accumulated to a layer which, when less than a molecule thick, would make North America a desert.

The inhabitants of the island and the crews of the little ships were very industrious people. They seemed to love their work.

Murfree had his suitcase on the porch of the hotel when Bud Gregory came shambling into the town. The suitcase was on view for Bud Gregory to see. Murfree saw the most important man in the United States come awkwardly, hesitantly down the street. Murfree went briskly out, picked up his suitcase and started toward the bus-stop.

"Uh—hello, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory unhappily. "You leavin'?"

"Nothing to stay here for," said Murfree. "If I'm going to die I might as well be with my family. No use staying here."

"Uh—y'mean—" Bud Gregory said.

"You can make gadgets," said Murfree crisply. "One happens to be needed to keep me from being killed—with everybody else in the United States. Including you, by the way. You won't make it. So that's that."

Bud Gregory scraped his foot on the ground.

"Uh—I made one this mornin', Mr. Murfree," he said awkwardly. "I got to figurin' an' I figured you was right. That stuff that keeps bustin' up by itself is settlin' down all around. An'—uh—it ain't good for humans if it gets too strong.

"So I—uh—I made a dinkus that can gather it up. I figured I could—uh—have my kids clean it up around the house. Y'want to see it?"

"Cleaning up around your house won't be enough, Murfree said evenly. "For one thing, if there were no crops or any birds or any fish and every tree and bush in the woods was dead—what would you eat?"

Bud Gregory looked miserable.

"Y'want to come look, Mr. Murfree?" he asked. "Maybe it ain't a good dinkus, but—uh—"

"I'll come," said Murfree shortly.

Inside he felt a queer envious turmoil. But Gregory could make anything but he had no idea of the possibilities inherent in his gadgets. He'd made devices of incredible possibilities—and used them to keep from working and to make it possible to win two-dollar bets and to keep from having to buy a new car instead of the wreck he'd owned.

If Murfree'd possessed Bud Gregory's ability—

"I'll get a car to drive us out," said Murfree grimly "so if there's no use staying I needn't miss my bus."

"Uh—I'll get some beer an' some ten-cent seegars," said Bud Gregory hopefully. "If this dinkus ain't right, maybe you can figure out somethin' else."

That was hopeful. Bud Gregory was afraid of losing his pension. Therefore he would try to perform any mere miracle the situation demanded. And he should be able to do-anything that could be imagined.

They drove out. Murfree was very silent. He didn't know how the original radioactive material was put into the air, or where, for its sweep across North America. At a guess, the distribution-point should be somewhere out in the Pacific.

PLANES equipped with Geiger-Miller counters might be able to track back the origin of the deadly dust. But planes hunting the hideout of a nation's would-be murderers would surely be detected far away.

And if they were detected the murderers might simply loose a cloud of dust which nothing could either stop or survive. So that there should be no hunt for the men who wielded the weapon until the weapon itself could be withstood.

They reached the woods-road. They went down it. They reached the water's edge. Bud Gregory spoke uneasily under his breath.

"Uh—Mr. Murfree, I wish you'd send this fella back. Tell him to come thisaway presently. I—uh—that dinkus is kinda funny. If it ain't no good I wouldn't want nobody to know about it. They might—uh—think there was witchery in it."

"All right," said Murfree.

In spite of himself, Murfree began to hope. Bud Gregory had been so completely unimpressed by his own achievements before that if he had made something which disturbed him it must be remarkable.

The car went away. Bud Gregory expanded. He went in his house and came out again, bearing an intricate contrivance. It was evident that he was at once proud and apprehensive. The device had no radio tube about it.

There were wires and there were scraps of glass here and there and there was a painstakingly straightened bit of copper gas-line tubing inside an arrangement of wires which was—well—it was not exactly a coil and it was certainly not a helix.

The wires were arranged in several patterns, of which one was certainly a logarithmic spiral. The whole assembly looked insane. And there was a metal plate at one end, nailed to the wooden base. It looked protective, as if it defended the device against something.

"Mr. Murfree, suh," said Bud Gregory anxiously, "I worked right hard on this, tryin' to please you, suh. You' always been a good friend to me an' I want you to know it. So this was the best I could do. If it ain't enough you try to figure out somethin' an' I'll try to make it."

"What does this do?" asked Murfree.

He looked at it and enviously admitted to himself that every single part of it was meaningless. He saw a switch which was a light-switch from Bud's wrecked car. He saw a bare iron wire which he guessed would turn white with frost when the device was turned on to reveal that it was absorbing heat and yielding electricity. But every other part seemed nonsense.

"This here dinkus," said Bud Gregory hopefully, "it—uh—you know, Mr. Murfree, how the hunks of stuff that things are made of stick together, suh. They kinda pull on each other."

Murfree nodded. Bud Gregory referred to interatomic and intermolecular attraction. The force which holds atoms together in molecules and molecules in crystals and ultimately makes planets possible.

"When you—uh—break somethin'," said Bud Gregory, "the parts you break it into stop pullin' at each other. They' too far away from each other."

Here Bud Gregory referred to the inexorable operation of the law of inverse squares Atoms draw each other only at atomic distances. Molecules adhere only at distances comparable to the diameter of molecule Otherwise all objects would fuse together immovably.

"This—uh—kinda changes that," said Bt Gregory, his forehead creased in the effort to explain. "It makes 'em still pull at each other, even far away."

"If you break a nail or a piece of glass an' put one piece in this place here it kinda gets in focus, Mr. Murfree. An' if you point the dinkus at the other piece—uh—no matter how far away the other part is, it—uh—pulls back to the one that's in focus."

Murfree felt incredulous but he suppressed it. In his mind, he knew that if Bud Gregory said it, it was so. Of course it violated all known laws of physics. . . .

"It ain't," said Bud Gregory, "because they used to be one piece of stuff, but because they're the same kinda stuff."

THEN Murfree felt as if he'd been jolted all the way down to his shoe-soles. A steel magnet will draw another steel magnet itself, not because they are steel but because they are magnets.

But Bud Gregory was saying that a bit of iron in the focus of his gadget would draw other bits of iron whether there was magnetism or not. More, he said that glass would draw glass! Murfree knew that Bud Gregory could do anything, but he could not believe that!

"I don't see how—"

"I'll show you, suh," said Bud Gregory anxiously. "I'll put a drop o' water right here where it focuses, suh, an' point it at the inlet yonder. It'll draw water."

He put a drop of water on a plate behind the straightened-out section of gas-line tubing. He pointed the device at the broad waters of this inlet of Puget Sound. He turned the switch.

Water splashed from the protective metal baffle-plate at the end of the gadget's base—quantities of water. It splashed as if a fire-hose played upon the baffle-plate. Murfree, goggling, saw a straight pencil of pure liquid water, impossibly defying gravity, coming toward the gadget from an indefinite distance out in the Sound.

It flowed through emptiness, through space, through the air itself as if it were in an invisible hose. It came in a mathematically straight line from the inlet beyond the shore. It hit the baffle and splashed. And Lurfree knew that, since water was in the focus of the gadget, therefore water had been drawn from wherever the tube pointed.

Bud Gregory flipped off the switch. Water used to splash. A half-mile-long cable of water, stretched taut in mid-air, abruptly dropped. There was a wet streak across the ground toward the inlet. There was a long path of pock-markings where a straight line of water had fallen back into the inlet.

"M-my gracious!" said Murfree, dazed even though he knew Bud Gregory's gifts. "You've got a sort of artificial gravity! Only—only it's selective! You can pull any element toward you."

"Yes, suh," said Bud Gregory. He sweated. Looking uncertainly at Murfree. "I—uh—I figured, suh, that if we could get up a liddle bit of that dust, we could kinda put it in this focus place, suh, an' we could sweep this dinkus all around an' all the dust that was the same kind as that in the focus would get pulled up an' stop against this plate that stopped the water.

"I put that plate on last," he added ruefully. "First time I turned on this thing I tried water an' I got soakin' wet. I hadda put somethin' on to catch the stuff that was bein' pulled."

Murfree stared, stunned, at the completely impossible device. No wonder Bud Gregory hadn't wanted it seen lest it make him liable to a charge of witchcraft! Such a charge was more likely in his native Appalachians, but even here—

"You think that'll do what you want, Mr. Murfree?" asked Bud Gregory hopefully.

Murfree opened his mouth to speak exultantly. Then he realized—he became tormented by the ruthless reasoning which told him of the present uselessness of this device, even while he was filled with envy of the man who had been able to make it and with admiration for the achievement itself.

"No-o-o-o," said Murfree reluctantly. "It won't do because there'd be the job of getting a sample of the dust. It would take weeks to gather up a carload of top-soil and separate the radioactive dust from it. We couldn't allow impurities such as humus or sand, or it would pull humus and sand with the dust.

"And if it took weeks we wouldn't have the dust itself but the stuff the dust had turned into. And even besides that—what would happen if you pulled into that gadget all the radioactive matter intended for a day's dose of poison for a continent!"

Bud Gregory's shoulders drooped.

"I reckon," he admitted, "that it would sure kill anybody who was workin' the dinkus."

"Definitely," said Murfree. "So far, no good."

There was a pause.

"Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory anxiously, "let's drink a little beer an' just set a while, suh. Maybe you'll think of somethin'."

Murfree followed him grimly back to the shack. He was in the completely maddening position now of having Bud Gregory's complete cooperation and having no idea how it could possibly be used.

Bud would make anything Murfree asked but Murfree could not imagine a device which would defeat the weapon in use against the United States. And the weapon had to be defeated before any search could be made for those who wielded it!

Murfree sat with a glass of beer in his hands. He racked his brains vainly. Bud Gregory sat beside him, drinking beer. Presently he spoke dreamily.

"Y'know, suh, I'm thinkin' that maybe instead o' buyin' a car outa that ten dollars' a day I got comin' to me, maybe I'll get me a boat. You can set a lot more comfortable in a boat than in a car you got to be drivin' all the time. Yes, suh, I'm gain' to think about buyin' me a boat!" ...

The tuna-boats worked valorously for the murder of a nation. Their crews knew joyfully that the last of their fellows who had remained in the United States—to test the results of their campaign—had left that country. The intensity of radioactivity which should result in mutations and monsters had almost been reached.

Sterility would follow, then death. And of course those who worked to murder America would cheerfully sacrifice their lives to accomplish it if necessary. Hatred is a stronger force than patriotism.

But there was no need and every man wanted to survive for the hellish satisfaction of knowing that all North America was a place of corpses—not even rotting because even the bacteria of putrefaction were dead too.

The tuna-boats towed their lead torpedoes away from the island where atom-piles made poison for them to scatter on the wind. They scattered that poison and returned for more. Enthusiasm mounted and mounted. Plans began for such a celebration as would befit the destruction of the greatest nation upon earth.

CHAPTER V

Killing Fish

IT WAS dark. The car had come back for Murfree and he had sent it away again. He paced up and down. He chewed his fingers. To know of certain doom awaiting one's country and to have as one's ally a man who can do anything that can be imagined in the way of physics—and much that cannot be imagined—and not to be able to think of anything either possible or impossible to avert the doom—it was maddening.

Bud Gregory grinned amiably.

"Mr. Murfree, suh, have you thought of anything? If you ain't maybe we'd better set an' eat."

Murfree shook his head wearily.

"I'm still frying to think! If there were only so way to make that trick of yours work with any and every unstable element."

"You mean, suh, all the kindsa stuff that busts by itself?" Bud Gregory asked.

"Tha's it," said Murfree exhaustedly, "but there's nothing—"

"Shucks!" said Bud Gregory. "That's easy, suh! The middle of the little hunka stuff that breaks down, it ain't solid, suh. There's somethin' holdin' it together, only it ain't satisfied. There's somethin' else pushin' it apart.

"So those two things fightin' each other, they make a kinda—uh—uh. . . ." He knitted his brows. "Like a magnet, suh, an' a coil. A—uh—a field? Yeah! There's a—uh—field about the little hunksa stuff that are the kind that break down. All of 'em. You can pull 'em by that field."

He beamed but rather pityingly, as if explaining' something to an infant in fond astonishment at the child's lack of knowledge. He had spoken casually of the factors causing instability in all elements heavier than bismuth and then had gone on from there. Murfree looked at him with lacklustre eyes, worn out by his hopeless struggle to think.

"That would be a start," he said heavily, "but even then it wouldn't be practical, because if you dragged all radioactive substances to your dinkus you'd start a pile going around it to make more. If you could make it—make it— Wait!"

He stood tense for a moment. Then he spoke hopelessly.

"You couldn't make radioactives clump together where they were, could you? If we could make the dust gather into pellets so it'd be heavy and drop into the sea, the sea might be poisoned but we'd gain time."

"Clump together, suh?" Bud Gregory said. "I'll think about that. It'd mean turnin' the dinkus around. Puttin' the focus out front." He frowned. Presently he complained,' "I'm sure havin' to earn that ten dollars a day! I ain't thought so hard since I fixed a fella's car for him down Los Angeles way an' he paid me two dollars."

Then, suddenly, he snapped his fingers.' He stood up and stretched.

"We'll eat us some supper, suh, an' I'll get to tinkerin'. It ain't goin' to be so hard but I got to make a brand-new dinkus."

He led the way happily into the shack.

"What'd you think about a kinda boat? Seems to me I could just buy me a sailboat an' put a hunka metal somewheres inside. Say! I could put a big pipe ouside, an' run that field I used to pull my car uphill into it.

"It'd pull the boat along an' water'd run through it an' keep it from gettin' too cold! Yes, suh! Not have to bother with no gasoline or nothin'! Save money that way an' with ten dollars a day comin' in an' only havin' to throw a fish-line over the side ..."

Wind blew across the Pacific through the darkness. Across uncounted leagues it blew, carrying invisible molecules of vapor. And now and again some atom in one of those molecules emitted a fierce, invisible particle, and became another element entirely and the compound of which it was a part became another compound.

It ceased to be vapor and became an ultramicroscopic particle of dust which was deadly poison. Some of those dust-particles fell into the sea. But most of them passed over the dark shoreline, gathering moisture and attracting other particles to themselves. They settled down toward the ground.

But the wind was not cleared of poison by that settling. Other invisible molecules of vapor emitted fierce rays and became other dust-particles. And this happened quintillions of quintillions of quintillions of times in the wind which blew in over the sea.

The tuna-boats were still busy.

SHORTLY after one o'clock in the morning Bud Gregory grinned exuberantly at Murfree. He had made a new contrivance on a bit of slab casually ripped from the outside of the shanty. There was a larger brass tube in the place of the gas-line of the earlier model. It had once been part of a tire-pump.

There was the same strangely-shaped sequence of wire wrappings, including the logarithmic spiral. Their sequence, however, was reversed. And there was a new device at what had been the focus, which was simply meaningless. Of course an iron wire was there.

Murfree knew it would turn white with frost when the device began to operate. It absorbed heat and made electricity. Perhaps primarily it made something else, with electricity only as a by-product. In any case it provided the power,

"This here ought to take care of it, suh!" said Bud Gregory. "We set it up an' aim it an' turn it on. Any kinda stuff that's in the wind that could bust up of itself, gets like the water I put in the focus this mornin'. It pulls to itself all the other kindsa stuff that busts down. Which way'll I point it, suh?"

Murfree considered, rather hopelessly. "We want to clean up the wind that blows to the coast. How far will it range?" "A long ways, suh! A long ways! It won't go straight off outa the air, neither. It won't travel nowhere there ain't some air. It'll bounce back when the air gets thin enough." It would not be like a radar-wave, limited by the horizon.

"We'll try southwest," said Murfree. "Maybe a little west of southwest. We want it to spread out and work as far offshore as possible. Are you certain it will work?"

"You got a radium-dial watch?" asked Bud Gregory.

Murfree understood. He stripped off the watch. Bud Gregory hung it to a bush some fifty yards away. He pointed the new device at it, and turned it on. Instantly the faintly luminous numerals on the watch-face seemed to flame a lurid blue. Bud Gregory turned off the device. The watch-dial still glowed brightly—brightly!

"That dust that's been fallin," said Bud Gregory humorously, "got pulled to the stuff in your watch. You better not wear that watch no more, Mr. Murfree. Not without you wash that dust off."

Murfree swallowed. Bud Gregory's device had endowed every particle of radioactive matter in its beam with the property of attracting and being attracted by all other radioactive matter. The tiny particles of radium in the luminous paint—one part of radium in twelve million of zinc sulfide—had been unable to move.

They were anchored in the paint. But the radioactive dust on the ground could move. It did move, swiftly, to cluster about the watch. And the zinc sulfide glowed as brightly as if it had suddenly been enriched to a thousand times its former radium content.

Murfree drew a deep breath.

"We'll kill a lot of fish," he said grimly. "Maybe we'll do more damage than that. But I'll take the responsibility. There's nothing else to do! Come on, we'll aim it and turn it on again."

They did. They set it on a tree-stump and Murfree oriented himself by the north star and pointed the botched-together device which only Bud Gregory could understand a little to the west of southwest. That was Murfree's best guess of the optimum setting, considering the coastline. He threw over the switch. The iron wire frosted, providing power. He saw it turn white in the starlight.

Aside from that, nothing at all seemed to happen.

CHAPTER VI

Ball of Fire

A TUNA-BOAT was towing a lead torpedo through the darkness. It was, as it happened, heading back toward the island which was its base as it let the volatile liquid pour out on the sea. It had been forced to make a wide circuit to avoid observation by ships below the horizon. But otherwise everything was commonplace.

Then, without drama, the wind seemed to change peculiarly. Not the upper wind above the sea's surface—just the wind at the water's own level, saturated with the vapor of the liquid the torpedo had let out.

It blew toward the island on which the uranium piles worked. Since the tuna-boat lay in its path and offered resistance, the surface-wind piled up near the hull and flowed over and through the little ship.

A bell clanged stridently. Frenziedly. The bell was attached to a very ingenious device which tripped a relay if the background-count of a standard Geiger-Miller tube went above a conservative minimum.

It was necessary on a boat towing tanks of volatile and furiously radioactive liquid. But it was quite dependable. It gave instant warning and the members of the crew hastened to put on their protective suits, which long custom had led them to discard. The only flaw in the whole affair was that the warning-device had not operated fast enough. No device could have been fast enough.

The men who climbed into their protective suits breathed in as they moved a concentration of radioactive vapor intended to provide a day's increment of poison for acres in every breath. The men who locked their suits airtight locked in enough radioactive gas in their lungs to kill them fifty times over.

Of course they did not notice it at the time. Perhaps they never noticed it. The little tuna-boat went on through the night. Presently it strayed off-course. The man at the wheel happened to be dead. So was everybody else on board.

The great leaden float was empty of its poison, which did not happen to be moving toward America. It constituted a cross-wind, blowing toward the home island of the tuna-boat. It was drawn by the force which holds the nuclei of atoms together, which force does not diminish according to the law of inverse squares.* (*Note: The binding-force holding atomic nuclei together is known not to diminish according t the law of inverse squares, as do magnetism gravity, electrostatic force, etc.—W.F. )

At all distances, radioactive particles within the beam were drawn together with a force proportional to their masses, but not in proportion to distance.

There were atomic piles on the island from which the tuna-boat came. There were tons upon tons of uranium in those piles. They drew radioactive particles as the sun draws meteorites. Even radioactive gas-particles given off in the decay of fish killed by the towed tanks—even such gases moved toward the island.

There was nothing spectacular about anything which happened at first. A tuna-boat drove aimlessly through the night with all of its crew dead. A swift low breeze blew toward the island—many swift low breezes. Until they arrived nothing in particular seemed to be in train. But when those winds flowed over the island the situation altered gradually.

Radioactive gases and vapors clustered about the shielding around the atomic piles. More and more vapors and dust-particles arrived momentarily, drawn as by irresistible magnetic attraction. They reached the shielding-walls and clung. More came, and more, and more, and more.

As they flowed and darted across the island the island's population died. They did not notice. For a space they moved and chattered and prepared celebration—before they discovered that their bodies were still-moving corpses which gradually ceased to move.

There were no witnesses to what happened after that but it went on quite rationally. The atomic piles had been limited in their size so that they could be controlled. An atomic pile will never explode. If it runs wild it will simply heat up and to a temperature dependent solely upon its size and material. But the homing radioactive particles raised the temperature-limit of the piles they clustered about and seeped in to join.

PILE-ACTIVITY increased by the activity of the short-life products returned to it. The cooling-water turned to steam and ceased to flow. The piles glowed dull-red and then cherry-red and then blinding white, still without reaching their self-limiting temperature.

There was too much short-life radioactive matter around. Presently the piles vaporized and then they ran together in one monstrous mass of incandescent vapor whose normal self-limited temperature was higher yet.

This took time. It was all of an hour after the beginning of the whole process when a great globe of incandescent gas burned everything upon the island to a ghastly ash. The island was blasted, baked, dead, desolate.

Then the globe of vaporized metal—it was almost a mile in diameter—soared skyward in exactly the manner and for exactly the reason that a balloon would have risen. It was as bright as the sun but it was utterly harmless. The radiations it emitted were absorbed by other elements which became radioactive—and instantly joined the globe.

The globe rose skyward. It made all the sea as bright as day for twenty miles around. It went up and up and up. . . .

When dawn came it had burned out. Its energies had been so trapped that only light and heat could permanently leave its mass. Undoubtedly, if there were observers on the then-favorably-situated planet Mars, they saw the flare.

But it did no harm beyond producing an anomalous warm area over a certain part of the Pacific which ultimately resulted in a local low-pressure area with resultant winds and precipitation—in short, a local thunderstorm. That was all. Only the people on the island would have noticed that. And they were dead. . . .

When the background-count was down to 45-47 on the Pacific Coast, Murfree agreed that the device could be turned off. It was nearly a week before that happened and in the meanwhile he had calculated very nearly what must have happened far out at sea.

He knew that nobody who had planned to murder America could still be alive and it was very unlikely that anything remained of the apparatus they had worked with. He did wait until the radioactive dust that had spread over America had definitely entered the second half of its life.

Then he got ready to go back to his wife and daughter.

"Yes, suh!" said Bud Gregory warmly, "you sure are a friend o' mine! You' goin' to send me that money regular, suh?"

"I'll send it," said Murfree. "Every week."

A boy came with a telegram for him. He put it in his pocket. It would be a background-count report, he considered, and it didn't matter.

"I'd like to give you a—uh—present," said Bud Gregory warmly. "Somethin' to show my appreciation, suh. Could—hm—would you like to have this here dinkus I made first, suh? I'll just give it to the children to play with if y'don't want it. If you'll take it to remember me by—"

"Thanks," said Murfree.

He got on the bus that would take him to the nearest town with an airport. After the bus pulled out, he idly opened the telegram. It was from the generating-station that had been using Bud Gregory's gadget.

FRICTION ELIMINATION DEVICE SMASHED TODAY STOP. WORKMAN DROPPED TOOL FROM OVERHEAD STOP. CAN YOU SUPPLY OTHERS WIRE IMMEDIATELY.

Murfree felt a little sick. He had to keep Bud Gregory's confidence for dealings in the future should Bud Gregory be needed. He had strained that confidence to the limit now. If he asked for more, on a second threat to stop the ten dollars a day Bud Gregory counted on, it would be an end to everything. With that money Bud Gregory would sit in the sun and, when needed, he'd be on hand. If he didn't get that ten dollars. . . .

At the airport Murfree sent a telegram to his former superiors in the Civil Service. He asked for his job back. He didn't know how he could make out, having to pay Bud Gregory ten dollars a day out of a forty-seven-hundred-a-year income but he felt desperately that it simply had to be done. At the Cleveland airport he got an answer.

YOU WERE WARNED YOUR RESIGNATION WOULD BE CONSIDERED FINAL STOP. IT IS FINAL.

It was signed by the administrative officer who had objected to the disarrangement of vacation-schedules in order that Murfree might stop—as it had developed—a radioactive-dust attack upon the United States.

MURFREE sank back gloomily into his plane-seat. He had to find a new source of income. He had to pay Bud Gregory thirty-six hundred and fifty dollars a year before he bought a loaf of bread for his own family. To live as he'd lived before he'd have to make over eight thousand a year. And the only thing he had now that he hadn't possessed before was the gadget Bud Gregory had made.

Suddenly his face went blank. He whistled softly to himself. He stared out the plane-window for a long time. Then he went composedly to sleep.

When he joined his family at the seashore his wife was worried. She knew he'd left the Civil Service and had no immediate prospects. She asked him what his plans were. He grinned at her.

He unpacked the untidy parcel Bud Gregory had made for him—the device that had drawn water from a half-mile away. This was in the boarding-house where his wife and daughter had stayed while he was on the West Coast.

"I think I'll go in business for myself," he said comfortably. "Lend me your wedding-ring for capital, my dear."

Her expression was bewildered as she gave him the plain gold band. He put it in the focus of the device where Bud Gregory had put a drop of water. He sighted the gadget out of the window at the ocean. He turned it on. It would draw to itself any particles in its beam which happened to be of the same material as that in the focus of the device.

There was a metal plate to catch the drawn particles. His wife's golden wedding-ring was in the focus—and the sea contains gold. Only about a grain of gold to a ton of seawater, to be sure, but still—

A deposit of tiny, impalpable particles built up on the baffle-plate. Each infinitesimal grain, perhaps, came from a ton of seawater. But there were some thousands of billions of tons of seawater in view from the boardinghouse window, and it would change, more or less, with each tide. Gold-dust came to the baffle-plate with respectable speed. Murfree turned it off presently.

"This is useless stuff, though," he said. "I'll go out and buy you something made of platinum. That's useful—and it's worth more than gold besides. I'd rather go into the platinum-producing business, any day!"

His wife gaped at him. He explained.

"I have to pay Bud Gregory a pension," he explained, "and this is the answer. I'm going to build myself a laboratory and see if I can get an inkling of what he knows offhand.

"I'll be able to give him all the money he can use now and I've always wanted to do some research on my own. I know just about exactly—what sort of a laboratory I want!"

Then he added: "Somewhere on the seashore."

Table of Contents

The Gregory Circle

The Nameless Something

The Deadly Dust