Title: The seven temporary moons
Author: Fitzgerald, Wm. H. (William Henry Hope)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The seven temporary moons" ***
MOONS ***



                       The SEVEN TEMPORARY MOONS

                         A Bud Gregory Novelet
                         by WILLIAM FITZGERALD

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Thrilling Wonder Stories February 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                               CHAPTER I

                         _Trouble in the Sky_


The U.S. Signal Corps announced the discovery of a new satellite of
Earth in the latter part of July, and newspapers everywhere broke out
in a rash of pseudo-scientific comment. The new satellite had been
picked up by Signal Corps radars, in the course of experiments to
work out a technic for detecting guided missiles at extreme range,
while they were still rising in their high-arched flight beyond
the atmosphere. The radars picked up indications of an object of
appreciable size at a distance of four thousand miles, which--the
moon-echo aside--was a record for radar detection.

Immediately the observation was made it was repeated, and repeated
again and again, for verification. When the confirmatory fixes were
computed, a course and speed for the unseen object proved it to have
exact orbital speed and direction. It was circling the earth between
three and four thousand miles up, and made a complete circuit of the
globe in 2 hours, 15 minutes, 32 seconds.

On the same day this discovery was released to the newspapers, Dr.
David Murfree--formerly of the Bureau of Standards--mailed a check
to Bud Gregory on the shores of Puget Sound. Also on the same day he
received the papers of incorporation of a company to be called Ocean
Products, Inc. He was in the peculiar position of having to get rich on
Bud Gregory's brains because Bud wouldn't, and somebody had to. That
same day, while Murfree was busy on the Atlantic Coast, Bud Gregory
went fishing with two of his tow-headed children on the other side of
the continent.

Two weeks later--in the early part of August--a second new satellite
of Earth was discovered. It was closer to Earth than the first--barely
1500 miles up--and it made a circuit in 40 minutes 14 seconds. The
first and farther new satellite was under continuous radar observation,
now, and the fact that it was a tiny moon of Earth was completely
verified, though it had not been sighted by any telescope. This newer,
second satellite, of course, moved much too fast for any astronomer to
hope to pick it up either visually or on a photographic plate.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the day of the second satellite's announcement, Murfree assigned
half the stock in Ocean Products, Inc., to a trust-fund for Bud Gregory
and his family. That day, Bud Gregory stayed home and dozed beside a
portable radio. It was raining too hard for him to go fishing.

The third and fourth new satellites--periods of 1 hr. 19 min., 12
sec., and 3 hr. 5 min., 42 sec. respectively--were discovered only
two days apart. The fifth was found two days later, and the sixth and
seventh were spotted within an hour of each other, when they were in
conjunction and only five hundred miles apart, 7500 and 8000 miles up.

Murfree was very busy around this time. He had a gadget that Bud
Gregory had made, and it couldn't be patented, and it couldn't be
talked about, but it needed to be used. So he was getting Ocean
Products, Inc., a mail address in New York and a stretch of ocean
frontage on the Maryland coastline. He was having painful conferences
with high-priced lawyers--whose point of view was as remote from that
of a scientist as possible--and with low-priced electrical-installation
men. He was run ragged. But Bud Gregory was sitting in the sun out on
the Pacific coast, in blissful somnolence and doing nothing whatever.

Nobody suspected anything menacing in the existence of seven hitherto
unsuspected and still invisible moons. Popular songs were written
about them, radio programs exhaustively exploited them for gags, they
were worked into three comic strips, and they headed for oblivion. But
they did not reach it. When first danger was traced to them, Murfree
did not hear about it for a time because he was painstakingly setting
up Ocean Products, Inc., as a going concern which would pay taxes and
comply with all laws, and give out no information about its dealings
to anybody. Bud Gregory was living a life of placid, unambitious
uselessness.

The first indication that the moons might be other than merely captured
meteorites came when a graph appeared in an astronomical journal,
tracing their orbits. Their orbits were at very odd angles, not at all
near the plane of the ecliptic. They criss-crossed and overlapped,
and at least one of them passed very nearly overhead above every spot
of the earth's surface every twenty-four hours. The arrangement was
too perfect and too exact to be chance. It was design. The moons were
not meteorites following paths dictated by the circumstances of their
capture. They were artificial objects, doubtless blackened so they
could not be seen against black space, traveling on courses which
allowed them to survey and perhaps to threaten every spot on earth
every day.

The scientific article which pointed out these facts suggested that
they might be guided missiles sent up from earth and expending no power
while they waited for the commands which would send them hurtling down
upon a chosen target. Or they might not be earthly, but space-ships.

They might even be a fleet of exploring vessels from the planet of
some other sun, which did not make contact with humanity but observed
in preparation for purposes which could only be guessed at. Everybody
guessed it to be conquest at the least.

Panic welled up among the people of the earth. If a space-fleet of some
alien race had grim designs upon Earth, the danger was great. But if
men had made the ships and sent them secretly up into the heavens, they
meant more than danger. They meant doom. And whether their crews were
men or monstrous creatures from beyond the abyss of interstellar space,
their existence and silent menace produced terror and panic and--men
being what they are--fury amounting almost to despair.

Murfree was busy. Very busy. But he realized that the danger of the
seven invisible space-things was more important than any of his private
affairs, and he knew the only man on earth who might be able to do
something about that danger. He boarded a plane for the West Coast to
see Bud Gregory.

Two nights later Murfree drove cautiously down a winding narrow road
through fog. His headlights cast a golden glow into the dense white
pall of a Puget Sound fog-bank, and the fog gathered up the light and
threw it back. Murfree drove at the barest of crawls. He could see
the edge of the road on either side, and the mist-wetted trunks of
second-growth trees, but it would be very difficult indeed to pick out
the beginning of that disused logging-road which led to Bud's shack.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bud Gregory was, of course, something so extraordinary that nobody ever
felt the need for a word to describe him, and he lived in a tumbledown
shack somewhere in this cut-over land. It was easy to miss the way at
the best of times. At night, and in such a densely obscuring fog, it
would be difficult indeed to find it. Murfree slowed the car until it
barely moved, straining his eyes for a sign of the turn-off.

His relationship to Bud Gregory was at least peculiar. Murfree had
been a physicist in the Bureau of Standards when a monstrous atom-pile
started up--seemingly of itself--in the Great Smoky Mountains. Murfree
alone had realized the nature of the phenomenon and set out to track it
down. In tracking it, he'd come upon Bud Gregory, who had an incredible
facility for making things that the physicists of the world could not
yet imagine, not without knowledge of physical laws they expected or
hoped to learn in a hundred years or so.

Bud Gregory was unwittingly responsible for the atomic pile, and
Murfree got him to stop it.[1] But Bud fled, afterward, in terror
of sheriffs--and work. He was almost illiterate and utterly without
ambition, but he had an intuitive knowledge of how to make things that
nobody else could understand.

[Footnote 1: See "_The Gregory Circle_," THRILLING WONDER STORIES,
April, 1947.]

Murfree, now, had a device which was the stock-in-trade of Ocean
Products, Inc. He didn't understand it. He didn't hope to. It was
beyond him--as far beyond him as, say, the mental processes of a
mathematical prodigy who extracts fourth-power roots in his head. But
he did know that despite Bud Gregory's violent aversion to work of any
sort, he was the only man on earth who could cope with the sort of
menace the seven new moons of Earth constituted. So he'd flown across
the continent to beg, persuade, or bully Bud into action.

Bud was drawing ten dollars a day from Murfree for doing nothing, right
now. It was the height of his earthly ambition to sit in the sun, drink
beer, eat hog-meat, not bother anybody and have nobody bother him,
and not have to worry about work. So Murfree had some faint hope of
influencing him.

Right now he thought he saw an opening in the woods to the left.
He could not be sure, but he stopped the car and got out to see.
The radiance of his car's headlights in the mist enabled him to be
certain. It was the beginning of a no-longer-used trail into the
second-growth, not merely a gap in the young trees. There were no
recent automobile-tracks, but Bud no longer had a car.

Bud once had one, bought for twenty-five dollars and which he'd
impossibly caused to bring his family across the continent. His son Tom
had wrecked it some months past. Evidently, he hadn't found another
sufficiently dilapidated to suit him.

Murfree turned to go back to his car. Then he heard a plaintive noise
overhead. Instinctive cold chills ran down his back. A child's voice
came from mid-air over his head.

"Mistuh! We're lost!"

Murfree froze. There was a slight scuffling sound. Straight up in the
air over the treetops. A voice hissed in empty air toward the stars.

"Shut up! You want him to tell Pa?"

There was no sound of a motor up aloft. There was no sound anywhere
except his own motor's murmurous purring and the dripping of condensed
fog from the trees. There could be no flying craft overhead. Not
possibly!

The child's voice wailed, up above the treetops.

"B-but I w-want to go home!"

The other, angry voice, a boy's voice, spoke again. It was halfway but
no nearer to the voice of a man. It was hushed and threatening.

"Air you a-goin' to hush your mouth?"

Then, suddenly, Murfree's heart beat again. Scientist or no, he had
felt unreasoning, superstitious terror at the wailing of a child in the
night and fog above the treetops. But the phrasing of that angry boy's
voice was familiar. It was not local phrasing or accent. It was Smoky
Mountain talk, and Bud Gregory and his tribe of children talked that
way.

       *       *       *       *       *

Murfree raised his own voice, though it shook a little at the sheer
impossibility of the whole affair.

"Up there!" he called. "This is Mr. Murfree! Aren't you Bud Gregory's
children?"

A pause. Then the little girl's voice, startled and glad.

"Yes, suh, Mr. Murfree! We were out fishin' and we went to look at
Seattle and comin' back we got lost."

Murfree swallowed.

"Where are you, in heaven's name!"

"Right over your head, suh, in our fishin' boat." This was the boy,
dubious and uneasy. "We can see your headlights, suh. If you' goin' to
see Pa--"

Murfree swallowed again. This was plainly sheer insanity. Two of Bud
Gregory's children might very well be in a boat, and fishing, even two
hours after sundown. But a boat in which one went fishing should not
be floating some forty or fifty feet above treetops at least two miles
from the nearest water. Murfree would have credited himself with sudden
lunacy, but that he knew Bud Gregory.

"Can you--steer the boat?" he demanded insanely.

"Yes, suh!" That was the boy's voice again.

"I'm right where the road to your house turns off," said Murfree. He
was acutely aware of the absurdity of standing in fog on a lonely
country road, speaking conversationally to the sky. "I'm going to turn
in now. Can you follow my headlights?"

"Yes, suh!"

"Then try it," said Murfree. "I'll stop and call up every so often."

He got back in his car and turned into the woods-road. This was not
common-sense, but things connected with Bud Gregory rarely were. Bud
Gregory could make things. Once he'd made a device which stopped
neutrons cold. Period. That was to get even with somebody who'd
threatened to sue him.

Once he'd made a device which turned heat-energy into kinetic energy,
to make his rickety car pull up the Rockies in his flight from
Murfree's knowledge of his abilities, and Murfree's intention to make
him work. Once he'd made a gadget which stopped bullets--and guided
missiles--and then threw them unerringly back where they started
from.[2] And he'd made a device which was a sort of tractor-beam which
drew to itself selected substances only.

[Footnote 2: See "_The Nameless Something_," THRILLING WONDER
STORIES, June, 1947.]

A bit of iron at one end of a curiously-shaped coil made the device
draw to itself all iron in the direction in which it was pointed. But
a bit of gold in the same place made it draw gold. Lead, or stone or
water or glass, anything placed as a sample at one end of the coil made
even the most minute distant particle of the same substance move toward
it with an irresistible attraction. Murfree was using that device, now,
in Ocean Products, Inc.'s Maryland-coast establishment, and Dr. Murfree
was getting much more than ten dollars a day out of it.

But nothing that had happened previously gave him quite as queer a
sensation as this. He drove into the trail, winding and twisting
through the fog and among growing brush and spindling trees.

From time to time he called upward. Each time a voice answered happily
from the emptiness overhead.

Something hammered at his mind, telling him that this was the answer
to his journey across the continent, but he was a sane man, after all,
and this happening was not sane. He almost drove into Bud's house, in
his agitation. He braked just in time as peeling, curling clapboards
materialized out of the mist ahead. He stopped and sat still, sweating.
He heard somebody stirring heavily inside the house before him.

Then he heard a splashing sound off in the mist. Voices. Bud Gregory
loomed up in the radiance of the headlights.

"Who's that?" he demanded uneasily. "What you want? Who you lookin'
for?"

Murfree got out stiffly. Bud Gregory greeted him with unfeigned warmth
and hospitality--because Murfree was paying him ten dollars a day
to do nothing. But Murfree was hopelessly uneasy until there were
sounds nearby and two children appeared. One was Bud's eight-year-old
daughter, and the other was his fifteen-year-old son. The boy carried
a string of fish. He looked distinctly uneasy. The little girl grinned
shyly at Murfree.

"Thanks, Mistuh Murfree," she said bashfully. "We was gettin' scared."

Then Murfree swallowed a huge lump in his throat and shook hands with
Bud Gregory.



                              CHAPTER II

                        _A Problem of Inertia_


Next morning Murfree drove the four miles to the town nearest Bud
Gregory's shack. Bud had found an abandoned building on a patch of
cut-over land, moved in happily, and thrived while waiting for the
owner to put him out. Murfree had made other arrangements. The shack
was in an impossibly bad condition, but it suited Bud and his family,
and there was only so much that could be done about that. In other
matters, though, things were different.

Murfree went after the newspapers, and found the beginning of what
he had been afraid of. Radars kept constant watch on the seven
newly-discovered satellites of Earth. Some fourteen hours before the
newspapers closed their forms, the nearest of the seven had dived down
from its normal height of 1500 miles to a bare 500, hardly beyond the
thinnest part of the earth's atmosphere.

It went hurtling across the North Atlantic at that height. Then,
simultaneously, a Newfoundland-to-Eire transatlantic plane ceased to
communicate, and the radars reported that some object was rising from
the earth's surface as if to join the nearest satellite. It did not, of
course. To have done so would have required an impossible acceleration
which would have burned up any earthly object. But the rising object
plummeted up beyond the air, wavered, and then rose swiftly again--this
according to the radars.

Earth's great telescopes were turned to the position reported, and
they saw the missing air-liner. It was then eight hundred miles up and
twisting its great aluminum wings crazily as it went straining out into
space. A second satellite was almost overhead. That passed on. The
liner wavered again, and a third satellite hurtled into line and the
upward journey recommenced.

The effect was exactly as if it had been snatched off the earth by the
first and flung up for another to catch and draw higher in a ghastly
team-work of murder. The passengers and crew of the plane were dead, of
course. They could not live even for seconds in the absolute vacuum of
space. The plane went wavering up and up, pathetically a tomb for its
occupants, until it vanished abruptly some seven thousand miles from
Earth, exactly where it would have met the fifth of the seven strange
objects in its orbit.

Murfree felt rather sick. He had not expected exactly this, but
something on this order. The newspaper accounts were hysterical, but
they could offer no explanation. There was still no clue to the origin
of the hurtling things in space. They might have come across the void
from some distant sun, or they might be the work of men. A nation on
earth equipped with such weapons as space-ships and atomic bombs might
cherish notions of world conquest. But the fate of Germany and Japan
was warning against too great ambition.

The seven objects might have been sent up as targets, as tests of the
ability of other countries to combat such threats. If the rest of the
world was helpless against them, why, then their makers might unmask
themselves and attempt world rule. If they were vulnerable, their
origin would remain a mystery.

Murfree drove back with the papers. As he reached the house, Bud
Gregory came shambling out, yawning.

"The moons are space-ships, all right," said Murfree grimly.

Bud blinked sleepily. "Moons? What's that you say, suh?"

Murfree held out a glaring headline. "Don't you read the newspapers,
man? This is why I came out here to see you!"

Bud took the paper. He sat down at ease on the porch.

"Mostly," he admitted, "I read the funnies, suh."

He read the news-account without great interest. He was the only man
on earth--it had seemed--who was capable of figuring out such a thing
as a space-ship or a tractor-beam such as had undoubtedly snatched the
air-liner out into space. But he was totally undisturbed by the news.
He handed the paper back and yawned again.

"Right interestin', suh," he observed. "You had breakfast?"

"Listen to me!" commanded Murfree. "About a month ago...."

He told Bud in detail just what had happened up to now--the discovery
of the moons and the significance of their orbits. He finished harshly:

"I came out to ask you if you can make some gadgets that will handle
those things! Did you have a hand in making them?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Bud blinked. "No, suh. You been payin' me ten dollars a day to live on.
Why sh'd I go to the trouble of workin'?"

Murfree said more grimly still: "I thought so. But they're bad
business. This is only the beginning, I suspect. What can you do that
will take care of them? What do you need to work with?"

Bud said placidly, "I don't need nothin', Mistuh Gregory. They ain't
bothered me. Why sh'd I bother them? I don't figure on workin' myself
to death, not when I got ten dollars a day comin' in."

"They came near bothering you!" Murfree told him. "They near got two of
your children shot!"

Bud Gregory stared. "How's that, suh?"

Murfree told him curtly about his incredible experience of the night
before; of being hailed from mid-air and serving as a guide to two of
Bud's children in mid-air in--they said--a fishing-boat. Bud nodded
with vexation.

"Oh, that!" he said. "That was our boat, sure 'nough. That boy o' mine,
he likes fishin', same as me. But the engine in that boat wasn't no
good so I fixed up a drive for it same as I did for my car before it
got wrecked. You know, suh, the dinkus I made to make it pull hills."

This was a device that turned heat-energy into kinetic energy and made
all the molecules of a block of--say--iron try to move in one direction
instead of at random. Bud had made racing-cars on dirt-tracks reach
unbelievable speeds, so that he could make two-dollar bets on them.

"And then," Bud added apologetically, "he drove that boat right fast,
and her bottom was pretty rotten, so I got scared he'd git her stove
in. So I fixed up a--uh--dinkus that kinda lifted her up some. Kinda
like a dinkus I gave you, suh, only this one pushes water away, so's it
lifts up the boat. I done it because it was easier'n puttin' new planks
on. Like to see it, suh?"

"I would," said Murfree, with vast self-control.

Bud called drowsily to his son and gave him orders. The boy reluctantly
went down to the boat, tied to a one-plank wharf before the door. An
arm of Puget Sound ran into this cut-over land and provided Bud and his
family with fishing. The boy climbed into the boat. He pushed off. Then
Murfree tensed.

The ancient, unwieldy, tub-shaped craft literally shot out to the
middle of the estuary before the shack. It traveled like a bullet,
leaving no wake to speak of. What wake there was was only of its keel.
The boat itself simply did not touch the water. It had lifted until
only its keel-board slithered across the tops of the ripples like a
single ice-skate over ice.

Out in the center, the boat turned. Murfree could see clearly. It
just barely touched the surface. It accelerated like a crazy thing.
It hit eighty miles an hour--and boats do not do that. Then the boy
slowed, stopped, and busied himself in the cockpit. Then the launch
rose straight up from the water. It lifted smoothly to a height of
some forty feet, the height of a four-story building, and stayed there
in mid-air. It was unhandy when the boy drove it, aloft. There was no
effective rudder. But after a moment or two the boy lowered it to the
water and drove it back to the wharf.

"Li'l rascal!" said Gregory, fondly. "I had that fixed so's it wouldn't
lift the boat more'n a coupla feet. What's he want to git up that high
for?"

Murfree said unsteadily, "Of course that's worth several million
dollars. It makes all helicopters and most aeroplanes obsolete."

"Shucks!" said Bud, grinning. "You want me to make some more of 'em!
You know me, Mistuh Murfree! I'm settin' pretty right now. I'm drinkin'
beer and eatin' hawgmeat and not botherin' nobody and nobody botherin'
me. I don't aim to work myself to death. I'm perfectly satisfied just
the way I am with just what I got!"

"And I," said Murfree, "am pretty well satisfied with the gadget you've
got in that boat. It's part of what's needed, anyhow. I'm going to
Seattle to buy some stuff for you to work with. And while I'm gone you
might think about this!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He passed over the rest of the papers. But he pointed to one from
Seattle. Alone among the newspapers of the United States, the
_Seattle Intelligencer_ did not feature the carrying-off of an
air-liner to space as its lead story. The _Intelligencer_ featured
a photograph of its down-town section, where above the tall buildings
an elongated object hung in mid-air. Murfree had just seen that same
object in mid-air, so even the fuzziness of the news-photo did not
keep him from recognizing it as Bud Gregory's fishing-boat, floating
serenely over a startled and frightened city. And the headlines told
the rest:

                    SPACE-SHIP HOVERS OVER SEATTLE!

Lesser headlines reported:

              All U.S. Arms Against Invaders From Space!

And there was a third head:

   Anti-Aircraft Guns Arrive Too Late to Open On Invader Over City!
                     Shoot On Sight Is Army Order!

While Bud grew panicky at the danger his children had been in, Murfree
drove out the woods-road. He was going shopping for something Bud
Gregory could turn into a weapon against the seven ships which circled
the earth, in space.

The world armed--quite uselessly. And now that there could be no doubt
of the artificial nature of its new satellites, or that they contained
crews of highly intelligent beings--quite possibly men--all the world
struggled to enter into communication with the mysterious craft.

Short waves, long waves, micro-waves, frequency-modulated waves,
amplitude-modulated signals, every conceivable type of radiation
signal, was beamed at the small, invisible, hurtling objects as they
swung madly about the globe. There was no acknowledgment and no reply.
Acres of mirrors were set up, and focussed to make visual signals by
reflected sunlight, following first one, then another of the unseen
fleet. This, too, was ignored.

And Seattle was not the only city to fancy itself examined by something
out of space. Tehran, a village in Shropshire, England, a sizeable city
in Czechoslovakia, and Durham, N.C., all firmly reported that they had
been inspected at close range by space-craft.

Only Seattle could produce photographs, though, and all from Seattle
were fuzzy and indistinct. The reason may have been that certain quite
clear pictures which showed a fishing-boat floating in mid-air, with
two tow-haired children looking interestedly over the gunwale, were
dismissed as obvious fakes.

Then the farthest-out of newly-discovered moons made news. It left its
orbit and approached earth. The next-farthest joined it in descent. The
two of them then set themselves up in a sort of Trojan system with the
fourth of the newcomers to be discovered, all three following the same
orbit and seeming to pursue each other round the earth, one-third of
the complete circuit apart. They were, then, just 3,500 miles away.

This was proof enough that the space-ships had plans for action of some
sort for the future. An impotent and defenseless planet discovered its
impotence and defenselessness and waited with the idiotic curiosity of
the defenseless to see what would happen.

Murfree came back from Seattle. Bud Gregory dozed contentedly in a
chair tilted back against a tree before his door. When Murfree waked
him to discuss what was needed, Bud looked uncomfortable but stubborn.

"Mistuh Murfree," he said doggedly, "you're a good friend of mine. I
reckon you' the best friend a man ever had. You pay me ten dollars a
day, rain or shine, and I'm settin' pretty. I'm satisfied. I don't want
no more money. I don't want nothin' excep' what I got. You been mighty
good to me, Mr. Murfree, but when you get started talkin' about doin'
something about those things up in the sky that nobody ain't even seen
yet, you' askin' me to go to a lot of trouble over somethin' that ain't
none of my business."

He settled back in his chair, useless and completely contented.

"We're going to need a drive like you've got in the boat, only a lot
bigger," said Murfree, "and a lift like you've got in the boat, and
some sort of weapon that I guess you'll have to figure out."

"Mr. Murfree," said Bud, amiably, "I like you, and all that, but I
ain't goin' to work myself to death for nobody!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Murfree regarded him shrewdly. "You sound stake-bound," he said grimly.
"You must have some money ahead out of what I'm paying you."

"Yes, suh," agreed Bud. "My wife's savin', and the children ketch fish
and shoot squirrels an' gather woods-greens. I got almost three hundred
dollars cash-money ahead. I don't see no reason to worry about nothin'."

"Those space-ships that snatched the air-liner--"

"They ain't bothered me!" said Bud doggedly.

"If they come from another solar system they know we're civilized!
They're going to try to find out if we're helpless! Unless they find
out we can defend ourselves they may decide to take us over! If they
come from somewhere on earth, they're surely trying to find out if the
rest of the world can defend itself! And if we don't prove we can,
they'll surely try to take over!"

"Mistuh Murfree, I don't bother nobody."

"Listen to me!" said Murfree. "You remember that gadget you gave me?"

Bud blinked and nodded. It was a device of coils and scraps of glass
and an iron wire that turned white with frost when it was switched on.
A sample of a given substance at one end made it draw similar material
in a straight line through the length of its main coil. That device was
now the basis of the Ocean Products corporation Murfree had just formed.

There was an elaborate installation on the Maryland coast, with dynamos
and electrodes sunk out in the sea offshore, and with much more
complicated, closely-guarded apparatus that Murfree had designed to do
nothing whatever while looking very busy. But every so often he pointed
Bud Gregory's device out to sea and turned it on, in strictest privacy.
A morsel of gold, or platinum, or any rare element needed, fitted in
place at the small end of its coil. And the device pulled molecules of
gold, or platinum, or whatever the controlling sample might be, out of
the sea.

It worked like a quite impossible magnetic beam, though instead of iron
it attracted whatever its operator chose. It even broke down chemical
compounds, as if some sort of electrolysis were at work. And there are
at least traces of every known element in the sea:--gold to the extent
of one-sixth of a cent in every cubic foot of seawater. A hundred
pounds of gold, or thirty of platinum, could be brought to the coffers
of Ocean Products, Inc., in any twenty-four hours of operation. And was
brought.

"I'm using that gadget," said Murfree, "to pull gold out of seawater.
I'm getting rich with it."

Bud Gregory relaxed.

"That's fine, suh! I'm mighty glad!"

"You're getting rich too," Murfree added casually. "I formed a company
and assigned you half of it. I thought your children might like to be
rich when they grow up."

"Maybe they will, suh, maybe they will!" agreed Bud. "That's right nice
of you!"

"You can draw twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars a day if you like,"
Murfree added, "and I've bought this shack and twelve hundred acres of
land around it and it belongs to you now."

Bud looked alarmed.

"But lookee heah, suh!" he protested. "The sheriff's goin' to come
around with a tax-bill--"

"I'm paying the taxes," said Murfree. "Out of your money. I'm handling
your money for you. Of course I'll turn it all over to you any time you
say." Then he said deliberately, "It's a certain amount of trouble,
though, looking after your land taxes and income taxes and state taxes
and investments and trust funds and so on."

"You take some of the money for y'trouble, suh," said Bud generously.
"Take all y'like, suh, long as I got what I want."

"The pay I want," said Murfree grimly, "is some gadgets. A lift and a
drive a lot stronger than the boat has. And some weapons. I want you to
make them for me."

Bud grinned.

"Tryin' to make me work, suh? Then just let the money go hang, suh! I
got ten dollars a day, and if that stops I got near three hundred I
ain't used yet. I don't have to worry!"

       *       *       *       *       *

With a shrug Murfree turned away. "That's what you think," he said
drily. "All right! I'm turning your money over to you. All of it. You
handle it! I'm through!"

He walked toward his car, and paused to add:

"You'll be arrested within a week," he said casually, "for not filing
income-tax forms. There'll be warrants out for you for failing to
report state property. You'll be up against it because you're an
employer and you've got to keep your social-security records straight
and the fees paid. Within two weeks you'll be working night and day
paying fixes and clearing up red tape, and you'll go to jail if you
don't. Good-by!"

Bud Gregory started up in alarm.

"Lookee heah, suh! You cain't go off like that!"

"I'm going," Murfree told him. "I'm practically gone. I've made you
rich and your children too. If you'd rather go to jail than work
yourself to death staying out, it's no business of mine!"

He opened his car-door and stepped inside. But Bud Gregory jumped up
and shambled anxiously after him.

"But, Mr. Murfree!" he protested. "Look heah! My gawsh, Mr. Murfree!
You cain't do that to me! Uh--uh--if you want some kinda dinkuses,
o'course I'll try to make 'em, suh. But don't go off and leave me with
all that trouble, suh! Please!"



                              CHAPTER III

                          _Ruthless Enemies_


Either the crews of the space-ships were aliens to humanity with no
knowledge of mankind, or else they were men and conducting a ruthless
war of nerves and an exhaustive test of the ability of the world
outside their nation to defend itself. Four days after the seizure of a
transatlantic plane, four coaches of the Trans-Siberian Railroad went
skyward, accompanied by a tumultuous mass of roadbed and other debris.

Two days later a building in the Georgetown section of Washington,
D.C., went screaming heavenward in a shapeless mass of collapsed timbers.
Two days later still--there was no warning of it otherwise--radars
in the Pacific area noted a rising object. Telescopes caught it some
twelve hundred miles out. It was a tramp-steamer, its bottom a rusty
red, rising forlornly through nothingness toward some unguessable
rendezvous among the stars.

The steamer could not be identified, and it would be weeks before
its name could be guessed at by its non-arrival at any port. But
unquestionably it had had a crew, and every man was now a frozen,
distorted corpse somewhere in its hull. Men, or monsters gratifying
scientific curiosity, the crews of the seven space-ships were ruthless.

Waves of panic went over the globe. The loss of life, of course, had
been relatively small. It would not yet total a hundred persons.
But the blank indifference to human communications and men's total
inability to fight back bred terror. Every human being on earth was at
the mercy of the unseen things in the skies. And there was not only no
way to fight, there was nowhere to flee.

Every spot on earth came under the gaze of at least one of the
space-ships at least once each day. There was no single human being who
could not be snatched away to strangulation in emptiness at the will of
whatever creatures manned the satellite space-ships hurtling round the
earth.

It may be that Murfree, who knew what Bud Gregory could do, and Bud
himself were the only two people on earth who did not feel a raging
and infuriated despair. Murfree made trip after trip to Seattle,
frantically urging the completion of the changes he had ordered in an
object he'd found and bought with funds of Ocean Products, Inc.

Union rules were complicated. There was a threat of a jurisdictional
strike. But he paid time-and-a-half, and double-time, and
double-time-and-a-half, and, nearly three weeks after his arrival
at Bud's shack, a puffing tug towed a squat, flat barge into the
estuary before Bud Gregory's door. Murfree went out in the ultimate of
impatience. He paid lavishly. The flatboat was anchored and the tug
steamed away. Then Bud went dubiously out to look the creation over.

It was not impressive. Murfree had found a huge water-tank in
Seattle, intended to store hot water for an industrial installation.
It was seven feet in diameter and twenty-odd feet long. He'd had it
transformed into a monstrosity.

There was now a one-foot thickness of heat-insulating material covering
the outside. There were six protruding ports, with quartz-glass
windows, allowing a man inside to look out in every direction. There
was a manhole intended to allow the entry of a workman to clean out the
tank. It was now closed by an inconvenient small door. There was a sort
of wooden floor within. There was more insulation inside. That was all.

"My gawsh, Mr. Murfree!" said Bud. "What' you goin' to do with this
thing?"

"You're going to do something with it," Murfree told him. "It's
air-tight, it's insulated, and it's got windows. Give it a space-drive
and a way to steer and some weapons to fight with, and it'll be a
space-ship. That's what I've got to have!"

"You mean, suh," said Bud incredulously, "you'll go up in this thing?"

"I'm scared green," admitted Murfree, "but somebody's got to go up."

"But--uh--why you? And why sh'd I work myself to death--"

"You're a sensible man, Bud," said Murfree. "You attend to your own
business. It's very wise. But it's fools like me, who don't like
monkey-business, who keep things going. I don't want to risk my neck.
But even less do I want to risk that my daughter might grow up in a
world ruled by creatures from outer space with five eyes and eighteen
hands. And less still do I want to risk that other men may turn this
earth into a tyranny!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Bud looked unhappily at the bulging object before his door.

"You crazy!" he said vexedly. "They got some trick stuff to use, those
fellas."

"Tractor-beams, anyhow," Murfree agreed. "That's how they snatch things
out into space. How'll you beat that, Bud? And what'll you whip them
with? Or are they too much for you?"

"Shucks!" said Bud. "It ain't that!" Then he complained: "But it's
goin' to be so doggoned much work! And I figured I wasn't goin' to have
to worry about nothin' any more!"

At just the instant of his complaint, the citizens of Illyria,
Mo., went unwarned about their daily business. They knew about the
space-ships, to be sure. There had been known cases of persons and
things snatched from the surface of the earth and hurled away into the
void.

Any place, at any time, might be the scene of another such tragedy. But
there were so many places! Actually, the citizens of this small town
tended to think of the newspaper and radio accounts of danger as a part
of that pageant of entertaining or boring--and sometimes gruesomely
thrilling--events that world news is to most people.

It was ten o'clock in the morning. A warm sun beat down upon the
tree-shaded streets and trimly clapboarded houses of Illyria. The
three-block business district displayed a normal morning's activity.
Farm trucks and farm wagons lined the curbs. Pleasantly perspiring
citizens moved about. It was a town in which everybody spoke to
everybody else, because everybody was acquainted. Horses switched their
tails at flies; stout farm women fanned themselves as they shopped;
the soda-fountain had its thirsty customers, and two men were loading
bags of chick-starter feed into a farm-truck. It was such a placid,
somnolent morning as ten thousand others had been.

Then there was a ghastly roaring sound and the edge of the town reared
upward toward the sky, exactly as if it had been built upon a gigantic
carpet and somebody had picked up one end. Those in the business
district looked at the roofs and roads of the northern section of the
town, turned up at right angles toward the sky. Then--

Nobody knows, of course, how it felt to the people of Illyria as the
ground at once crumbled and rose beneath their feet. Nobody can guess
the sensations of the doomed people as a square mile of countryside,
including the small and thriving town, went plunging upward as if into
an abyss.

A terrible, confused, chaotic mass of houses and earth and trucks
and horses and humans and trees and sidewalks shot skyward. It
accelerated swiftly. The roaring was drowned out by a shrieking of
air as the hundreds of thousands of tons of matter, including nearly
eleven hundred human beings, seemed to fall toward the zenith. But the
shrieking of wind grew high and far away as the tumbling stuff reached
heights where the air was very thin.

As the air grew more and more attenuated, of course the sound grew ever
fainter. And presently, when what had been a quiet and orderly and
peaceful small town had passed the limits of the atmosphere, when every
living thing that breathed or grew was burst or frozen in the pitiless
cold of space--then there was no sound at all. Not even grinding noises
from the bumping-together of masses of earth and stone, and frozen,
once-living things.

Earth prepared to fight, with empty hands. Elaborate plans of defense
were suggested, of course. It was proposed to manufacture bombs in vast
quantities and so sprinkle the earth with them that any sized objects
would prove fatal to a space-ship which approached them. How the bombs
were to be detonated was not worked out.

The rocket-missile program of every nation on earth was expanded with
convulsive haste. Crank inventors--and impostors--arose and clamored
throughout the land. At least one individual persuaded a group of
patriotic and well-heeled citizens that he had not received a fair
hearing in Washington.

He demonstrated a disintegration-ray model most convincingly and
received fifty thousand dollars in cash to pay for a full-powered
ray-generator which would explode the space-ships even as far away
as Luna. Then he vanished overnight to South America with the funds,
and his demonstration equipment proved to have caused the alleged
explosions by quite normal detonation of small charges of T.N.T. by
electric wires.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were organizations formed to overwhelm the space-ships with
heat-waves. There were proposals to erect gigantic sun-mirrors ten
miles on a side, and frizzle the space-ships in their focuses.

More immediately practical, if equally dubious, were proposals of
certain politicians and newspaper owners. They shouted as an act of
faith that the space-ships were of human origin, which was quite
probable, and that their seizures of unrelated objects and now the
destruction of a small town were acts of war, though intended only to
terrify the nations later to be subjugated.

When Earth was convinced of its helplessness, the nation responsible
would reveal itself as the master of the planet. And the way to defeat
this plan was to bomb, now, the nation responsible. Blast it with
atomic bombs from one end to the other. Destroy it utterly. Unless,
on warning of the world's intention, it surrendered its arsenals and
recalled and gave over the secret of its ships. Unfortunately, there
was no convincing proof that any particular nation was the guilty one.

Murfree heard these several proposals on the portable radio that Bud
Gregory would not allow his son to carry too far away from him. Bud
had a placid interest in soap operas. When he began to work on the
apparatus for Murfree, the radio was sure to be blaring somewhere in
the background. And he worked reluctantly. Murfree watched restlessly.

"If there's anything I can do without understanding it, I'll be glad
to!"

Bud turned over the work with alacrity.

"Why, yes, suh! I need another coil just like this heah one. You do the
best you can, suh, and if it needs fixin' after, I'll fix it."

He settled back happily while Murfree went urgently to work,
duplicating as well as he could the unreasonable curves whose
variations from regularity seemed to have a pattern he could not ever
quite grasp.

"This here's for the drive, suh," said Bud in deep contentment, tilted
back in his chair. "It's right simple, suh. When you put somethin' at
the small end of that coil, the dinkus draws other stuff of the same
kind along the line that goes out the big end. If you put somethin'
at the big end, the dinkus pushes that kinda stuff. Put water at the
little end, the dinkus pulls water, put it at the big end, the dinkus
pushes against it."

"Like that thing I've got!" Murfree said abruptly. "I make it draw gold
and platinum. It's a tractor beam! Like the space-ships!"

"Yeah," said Bud. He yawned. "O'course y'can't make a beam that'll
pull anything and everything. You got to push or pull a special kinda
somethin'."

Murfree waited, working.

"Suppose," he said after a moment, "suppose you put two different
things on the same coil, one at each end. Would it pull one and push
the other?"

Bud nodded and yawned again.

"O'course, suh. You're doin' that coil right good, suh."

"Listen!" said Murfree sharply. "Suppose I mounted a lot of different
things on a disk, and mounted it so I could swing them one at a time
into place--would it work?"

He spoke eagerly, urgently. Bud listened, blinking drowsily.

"Sure, suh," he conceded. "That'd work. You go ahead and do it if yuh
want to. It'll be all right."

He dozed as Murfree worked more swiftly still. He had the frustrated
feeling that comes of doing work one does not understand. He wound
these coils, with their scraps of glass here, and their arbitrary
other wires at odd angles and with improbable curvatures there. They
meant nothing to him. By all he knew of physics the coils would not do
anything at all. But he had seen such coils and their working before,
and he made them. Because Bud Gregory understood them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Murfree worked twelve hours straight for three days in succession
before he came to assign more or less arbitrary values to the different
parts. He could not see how those values came into being at all,
any more than a savage who learned to wind an electro-magnet could
comprehend lines of force or the meaning of ampere-turns. On the fourth
day, a town in Southern Spain was obliterated.

Murfree did not stop at twelve hours' work, then. He kept on, his lips
tense, mounting the crude apparatus in place inside the water-tank he'd
had so absurdly prepared. Bud Gregory yawned and went to bed. Murfree
worked all through the night, grim-faced and growing momently more
exhausted.

When Bud came out next morning and saw him working stiffly with a
welding-torch, he blinked at his guest.

Then he said, "You sure in a hurry to get this dinkus done, suh! Heah!
I'll do some for a while. You take a li'l nap."

From Bud, the generosity was extreme. Murfree flung himself down and
was instantly asleep, dreaming vague nightmares of continuing to put
together devices he did not understand with the constant fear that he
was doing them wrongly.

Bud Gregory woke him, shaking him roughly, and Bud's face was scared
and drawn.

"Mistuh Murfree, suh!" he panted. "Wake up! The radio says big
trouble's loose! Those space-ships, suh, they're killin' folks by
thousan's! And they' a-comin' this way, suh! We got to git started!"

A tinny voice came in the manhole of the absurd tank in which Murfree
had worked himself into a stupor of fatigue. Bud Gregory's son Tom held
the radio close by the opening so that its blaring was audible within.

"--space-ship has been playing tractor-beams slantingly on the
countryside as it sweeps on its way. Columns of earth and stone leap
upward, miles high, then fall back to earth as the beam is cut off.
They're crushing everything they fall on. This ship has already
practically wiped out Phoenix, Arizona, and Denver has been hard hit!
Every inhabited place is being blasted, either by being jerked skyward
to crash down again, or buried under thousands of tons of falling
stuff...."

There was a harsh click.

Another voice broke in, "A second space-ship has begun destruction! Its
orbit crosses the United States just south of Chicago and passes close
to Seattle on the Pacific Coast. It's smashing everything! It will
reach the coast in--"

Murfree was dazed, fresh-wakened from sleep to hear of coming disaster.
He was stunned, too, by the picture of unlimited destruction turning
all the earth into a chaos of tumbled earth and uprooted cities,
mankind wiped out save for a few horror-numbed survivors!

The noise of the radio cut off abruptly. The manhole door was closed.
Instantly thereafter the unwieldy tank lurched violently. Murfree felt
a sensation like that in a swiftly ascending elevator. And, still dazed
from his heavy slumber, he saw through a port that the earth dropped
swiftly away below.



                              CHAPTER IV

                          _Struggle in Space_


In the wildest imagination never was such a space-ship pictured as
went wabbling up from before Bud Gregory's shack by Puget Sound. It
was shapeless and ungainly. It bulged with its layers of exterior
insulation. It had no bow and no stern. It had no streamlined
rocket-tubes, no gyros, no neat and efficient instrument-board.

The ship had no control-room or air-lock, there was no space-suit
on board and there was literally nothing of the commonly envisioned
precision about its design. There was nothing to help in navigation. It
was, quite literally, a hot-water tank tumbling and wallowing up toward
the sky.

Features on the ground dwindled and were wiped out by increasing
distance. The sea seemed to flow beneath, and the mountains to come
sliding over the horizon to huddle below. Clouds raced to positions
under the wabbling creation. The sky turned darker. It became purple.
Then it was black, with savagely gleaming stars, and white-hot
crescents of unshielded sunlight smote in the ports and played upon the
interior insulation of the space-going water-tank.

Bud Gregory turned his head. He was deathly pale, and sweat stood out
on his forehead.

"Mistuh Murfree, suh!" he panted. "You take over! I'm scared!"

He was. Murfree took the controls. He had put together almost all of
the weird assemblages of wire and bus-bar and improvised sections of
glass. He knew how to work the ship, if it was a ship, even if he did
not know how the ship worked.

There was the pressor-apparatus acting on water, pushing on all the
moisture not only of the sea but held in suspension in the surface
earth, and the underground waters also. That would hold the thing away
from Earth. It was well beyond atmosphere, now.

Murfree, with a fine determination to be calm, swung another beam
into action. Like the pressor-apparatus it worked on water, and
also like it, it fanned out. At its striking-point it would pull on
water-particles, but it would be so attenuated by its fanning-out that
gravity could safely hold all liquid down. The pull would not stir
water, but the ship itself. It would pull the craft in the direction of
the beam--as long as the beam pointed toward moisture.

The ungainly craft, in fact, could rise to almost any height above
earth, and could pull itself around the earth's curvature, but the
higher it rose, the less efficient its drive would be. There were,
though, other beams that could be used.

There were patched-together assemblages of wires and glass with disks
of cardboard at both ends. Turned on, with iron glued to the cardboard
disks at the small ends of the coils, they would draw iron and be drawn
to it. With the iron at the large end of the coils, they would thrust
against iron and be thrust from it.

Rotation of the cardboard disks enabled any of twenty-odd different
substances either to draw and be drawn, or to repel and be repelled,
and any combination of repulsions and attractions was possible. And
at least one beam could be changed from the widest of wide-angle
pressor-tractor-action beams to the narrowest of pencil-rays.

"I'm heading east," said Murfree. His voice sounded queer even
to himself. He was not prepared for space-navigation save as the
constructor of this ship. He could not think grandiosely of a
moon-flight, or even of a jaunt to Moon, which was sure and entirely
practical. The wallowing water-tank he skippered was now no more than
four hundred miles from earth.

"We've got to watch the ground," he said hoarsely. "If that space-ship
is still smashing things, there'll be gouts of earth leaping skyward,
where its tractor-beams play. Watch out of the ports, but keep out of
the sunlight. It'll fry you!"

Bare sunlight would be deadly, yet he headed eastward by the sun. He
drove on. There was no vast reach of empty space about him. There was,
rather, the monstrous spread of the earth below. It was visibly curved,
at this height, but still it was the hugest of imaginable objects.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was silence. Utter stillness. The bright and savage stars above.
The misty, slightly curved and soft-seeming earth below. The horizon
was a dim haze, a thousand miles and more away.

There was no meaning to distance. The Pacific still seemed almost
below, and yet they could see far beyond the Rockies to the Dakota
plains. Clouds overlay the earth here and there. A tiny discoloration
was a city. A winding string was a river. Anthills were the Rockies
themselves.

Then Murfree saw a tiny, tiny, threadlike projection from the earth.
It leaned to northward, and it looked like a speck of yellowish lint.
Actually, it was a roaring column of earth and stone, leaping ten miles
skyward as a space-ship's tractor-beam jerked it toward outer space.
Then the beam cut off. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the monstrous column
ceased to look like a thread of lint and dissolved into a brownish mist.

[Illustration: A roaring column of earth leaped skyward.]

It drifted groundward in slow, slow motion--hundreds of thousands of
tons of sheer destruction plunging from the sky. It would destroy all
that it struck, as well as being itself the destruction of all of which
it was composed. But all its motion seemed infinitely deliberate. It
would take long minutes for the upflung column to fall upon and destroy
the small city it was destined to obliterate. Murfree had to look twice
to see.

Then he sighted the line of the column's rise. He swung a
tractor-repeller beam to bear.

"There's a space-ship somewhere yonder," he told Bud shakily. "You know
these gadgets! See if you can do anything. It's in the beam!"

The device of Bud Gregory's designing quivered suddenly. It was set to
attract iron on a wide angle. Somewhere in its range was iron--aloft.
Bud Gregory crawled to it, whimpering a little to himself. He was
horribly frightened.

"I'd ha' got my fam'ly in this," he said despairingly, "only my wife
was over to town."

He worked the tractor-pressor beam with trembling fingers.

"Yeah, it's caught onto somethin'," he said between chattering teeth.
"I got it pullin' iron and pushin' brass at the same time, now. That'd
have to be a space-ship. It wouldn't be no shootin' star, anyways.
Now...."

He pushed a control over all the way with his stubby, mechanic's
fingers. The beam seemed to strain impossibly.

"It ain't pullin' apart!" said Bud anxiously. "I'm goin' to spin those
disks, suh."

He spun the disks which governed what substances were pulled and which
were pushed upon by the device. The tractor-beam end of the coil pulled
at different metals and assorted other materials, changing the subject
of its attractive force a hundred times a second as the disk spun.
The pressor-beam end of the device as violently thrust away as many
different substances, and changed them as often.

Nothing could stand that! No device ever made by men could take the
racking strains created by all its separate parts vibrating wildly,
trying fiercely to tear themselves apart. No control-board could work,
no relay operate, no system of wire connections remain intact. And--no
detonating device could possibly remain unexploded.

There was a sudden, violent, soundless flame. It was not in mid-air but
in mid-space, perhaps a hundred miles higher than the wabbling thing
in which Murfree and Bud Gregory rode the skies. Something huge and
speeding madly blew itself apart with a terrible violence suggesting
atomic explosive going off.

"There's one," said Murfree unsteadily. "How'd you do it?"

"I dunno," said Bud as shakily. "I just give it the works."

"There's another ship using a tractor-beam further south," said
Murfree, swallowing. "While we're here we'd better--"

"Ow!" Bud Gregory snatched his hand out of a ray of sunlight.
Unfiltered by air, it was like the glare of a blast-furnace, only
hotter. "Golly! I burnt myself!"

The flying water-tank wabbled crazily, and Murfree looked in a new
direction. He could see for an incredible distance. But for the haze
which blotted out details at the horizon, he felt that he might
have seen all of America at once. But there, thrusting upward like
needle-points pushed up from below, he saw the spouts which were
columns of earth and stone and houses, and human beings.

"Somewhere yonder," said Murfree, rather sick. "Try it, Bud."

       *       *       *       *       *

Bud Gregory swung his contraption. He worked it to and fro and up and
down.

"_Mmmm_--this heah's got a feel to it," he said pleasedly. "You
can tell when somethin's in the beam, suh. I think I got that fella!"

Twin cardboard disks spun on their bearings. Something detonated in
space, a thousand miles away. When every separate particle of brass
in a complicated mechanism was violently attracted and then violently
repelled, and then every particle of aluminum, and iron, and carbon and
every other commonly used material was separately subjected to the same
process in very fast succession, why something had to happen.

Any fuse would go. Any explosive would be detonated. Any delicately
adjusted mechanism would be twisted and bent and jammed and anything
which could fire would fire at random. Everything that could happen
wrong would do so. And any machine which was loaded with potentialities
for the destruction of others would be loaded for itself as well.

Two of earth's seven artificial moons were still-expanding masses of
vapor.

Bud Gregory said, "We--uh--we got them, suh! Le's go back!"

Murfree said evenly, "Better not, Bud. It occurs to me that the gadgets
they've got are pretty much like yours. Maybe there's another man who
thinks like you do--who can make things like your dinkuses. Only he's
working for men who want to kill people. You, for instance. Especially
you. Maybe he'll be in one of the other five space-ships. Better hunt
for them, Bud. We'd both feel safer!"

Bud Gregory searched space beyond the padded walls of the space-going
water-tank. It was six feet by twenty, inside, and crammed with utterly
unlikely, spidery contraptions of copper wire and glass and oddments.

Everything in it was improvised and everything was inconvenient.
Murfree had to bend his shoulders to stand beside the apparatus which
kept the tank aloft and relatively stable with regard to earth. Bud
Gregory sat cross-legged, fumbling with one of his devices.

It took him twenty minutes to find an object which was repelled and
attracted alike when the tractor-pressor beam applied to iron and brass
and aluminum. It was a space-ship. Bud spun the cardboard disks and its
every internal part jerked violently and unpredictably. Murfree saw a
tiny pearl of expanding vapor among the stars.

It was half an hour before Bud found another. He spun the cardboard
disks. He found two more very readily--and they blew up--but he had to
search for over an hour before he located the last. They did not see
the last explode, but Bud was sure.

"When the beam's pullin' and pushin' somethin' big and solid," he
explained, "it's got a different feel. You can tell when they blow,
suh. We go home now, suh?"

Then Murfree agreed to descend. But it had taken a long time to attend
to the duties incumbent upon the two-man crew of a flying hot-water
tank. The air inside the cramped and crowded space was foul. Murfree
knew that his head was heavy, and he found himself panting. He saw Bud
Gregory working on something, but he fought to keep his own alertness
while he sent the tank down at a slanting glide toward the Pacific
coastline. It had never gone much over a thousand miles into space.

"I'm fixin' the air now," said Bud. "You be careful, suh, about
landin'. This heah's kinda scary!"

The air grew fresher. Markedly fresher, though earth was still far away.

"That's right nice," said Bud, well pleased. "The stuff we breathe,
suh, it's made outa two kinds of stuff." He referred, of course, to
oxygen and nitrogen. "When we breathe, part of the air joins up with
somethin' else. Don't it, suh?"

"It does," said Murfree drily.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bud knew no chemistry. He just knew facts, without knowing how he knew.
Oxygen does combine with carbon to form carbon dioxide, which fouls the
air.

"I--uh--fixed one o' these dinkuses to pull on the good stuff," said
Bud pleasedly, "and push on the--uh--carbon, and it breaks that bad
stuff apart. We get the good-breathin' stuff back and the rest is soot,
suh. Funny, ain't it?"

"Very," said Murfree.

He was past amazement at anything that Bud Gregory might do. He
could make out the outline of Puget Sound and he sent the lumbering
space-vehicle toward it in its descent. Suddenly he felt a sudden
ironic frustration. Bud Gregory's tractor-pressor beam would extract
gold from seawater. That could not be revealed, because it would smash
all the world's economy and lead to disaster and starvation as a result
of the enrichment of the world's resources.

It would be found that the same tractor-pressor beam would make a
space-ship practical. It had made this one, and interplanetary flight
would be ludicrously easy. Right now, for instance, a beam sent up to
earth's ancient and legitimate moon, could be made to draw even this
inconvenient space-craft there, and cushion its landing, and keep the
air within it breathable indefinitely. But--

"Bud," said Murfree quietly, "what would happen if you made that gadget
draw--say--human flesh or human blood?"

"It'd draw it, suh. Why?"

"And suppose," said Murfree as quietly as before, "at the same time you
made it push away--say--human bone?"

"It'd push--" Then Bud Gregory paled. "Migawsh, suh! Anybody you turned
it on would come apart!"

"It'd be a death-ray," said Murfree savagely. "And it's very
possible--it's extremely possible--that the space-ships we just smashed
were made by men, and that they got the necessary tricks from somebody
whose brain works like yours does, who can make dinkuses that will do
anything that's wanted. If so, I hope he was in one of those ships!"

"Yes, suh," said Bud, uneasily.

"Meanwhile, we can't tell anybody," said Murfree grimly. "We humans are
able--with your gadgets--to make ships that can travel to the planets
or maybe to other stars. With your gadgets we could make the world
over, I suspect. But we daren't. Because in giving the world the power
to roam among the stars, we'd have to give them the power to slaughter
each other by millions. We can't make a space-ship without making a
death-ray, Bud. So we can't have space-ships. It's too bad!"

"Yes, suh," agreed Bud, uncomprehending. "It sure is. Uh--ain't that
the river that goes in past my shack?"

Murfree nodded. He let the space-going tank settle down to earth. It
had been aloft for nearly four hours. Sunset was near. The wallowing,
clumsy object landed on the weedy grass before the shack in which Bud
Gregory lived. Bud crawled out of the manhole-turned-into-exit-port.
Murfree, very pale and looking very sick, stayed inside. He backed out
of the opening as Bud returned from the house with the portable radio
in his arms.

"The radio's goin' crazy, suh," he said amiably. "All seven of those
space-ships blew theirselves to pieces and folks are rejoicin'! But
there was a lotta damage done today!"

Murfree completed his exit. He was paying out a length of string behind
him.

"Do you want this thing?" he demanded, gesturing toward the swaddled,
bulky monstrosity.

"No, suh. What'd I want with it?"

Then Bud Gregory gasped. Murfree jerked the string in his hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Instantly the tank heaved itself free of the ground. There was a sudden
violent surge of wind, and the cumbersome thing was hurtling skyward.
It seemed to fall away from the earth. It vanished into the darkening
night sky with a thin shrill whistling of wind about itself.

"I adjusted every pusher-beam to repel everything I could," said
Murfree grimly. "It'll push away from water and air and iron and brass
and aluminum and rock, and every sample of every material we had.
It'll run away from the sun. It'll flee from every planet and every
meteorite, and if there's any space-ship anywhere it will push away
from that. It'll hunt for the farthest place in all the universe from
any other particle of matter! It will isolate itself forever."

Bud blinked. "Yes, suh," he faltered.

Then Murfree said wearily, "Those space-ships are destroyed, and if men
made them, maybe the man who devised them. Whoever or whatever made
them, won't dare that trick again!"

"No, suh," agreed Bud.

"So I'm going back East to my family," Murfree told him, "and try to
forget all this. All the ambitions men ever had, we can realize, but we
daren't, because men have the ambition to kill and enslave other men,
too."

"Yes, suh, that's right," said Bud. He added hopefully. "You won't want
me to make no more dinkuses, suh?"

"Never again!" said Murfree. "But you're rich, and your children,
whenever they want to be. I won't bother you, though."

"Shucks!" said Bud cordially. "You ain't bothered me none, suh. You pay
me ten dollars a day, and I can set and drink beer and eat hawgmeat and
not worry about nothin'. Why don't you stay over a day or so and try
it, suh?"



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The seven temporary moons" ***


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