Title: The Gregory circle
Author: Fitzgerald, Wm. H. (William Henry Hope)
Language: English
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                          The GREGORY CIRCLE

                         By WILLIAM FITZGERALD

             [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced
             from Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1947. By
             Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins)
               writing as William Fitzgerald. Extensive
            research did not uncover any evidence that the
           U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                               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 night-fall, 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. Somethin' 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 down-stream 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 cats 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 Handford 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 stone, 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 more....

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.

He managed to 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 was 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 talkin'?"

Murfree 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--uh--block. 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 radioactivity 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 VI

                        ... _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.

[Illustration: Gregory 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. Murfree
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.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Gregory circle" ***

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