The Nameless Something by Murray Leinster
THE NAMELESS SOMETHING
By WILLIAM FITZGERALD
A Bud Gregory Novelet
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
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.
With
bulging eyes the truck-driver saw the rattletrap vehicle swerve out
over space, until only its inner wheels were on the road.
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
motor-bike 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 tow-headed 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[1] 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
rattletrap 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 fire-cracker 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.
Murfree
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 days 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
motorcyclist 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 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 pick-up—"
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 re-action, 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 red-heads 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 of his three
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
Heaviside 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.