Murray Leinster

“ A vapor like gasoline, burning without enough oxygen, turns to solid soot. Radioactive vapor, transforming itself, would become solid particles of dust, which would attract water-vapor and other particles and settle to the earth.
"Somebody's doing it!" said Murfree, grinding his teeth. "Somebody who wants to rule the earth! They know they've got to knock us out first, before they can try to build up their own nation to jingoism again! So they've started to murder us! Every one of us!"
Bud Gregory spoke contentedly. ”

“ Suddenly the movement of the radar-antenna ceased. It remained fixed in one position and one position only. Then, as suddenly, men ran about the boat's deck.
They hastily assembled machine-guns at the stern. There were sharp, tearing noises above the droning hum of the Diesel engine. Tiny puffs of smoke were torn away from the muzzles of the machine-guns by the wind which blew to the east.
Bullets ripped and tore the sheet-steel floats. Great gashes appeared in the plating. Water poured into the supporting pontoons. A protective-suit-clad sailor swung an axe and the tow-rope parted. ”

“ Murfree! I'm goin' to rest!"
"I'm telling you," said Murfree sharply, "that there are men at war against the United States! They're making war on your country!"
"All right, suh," Bud Gregory said amiably. "Maybe so. But it ain't likely they'll draft me for no war. I'm married an' I got children. Let 'em have a war! If I got ten dollars a day comin' in steady I'm satisfied! I ain't goin' to bother nobody an' I don't want nobody to bother me!"
Murfree clenched his fists. He hated Bud Gregory for a moment. But the most important man in America was neither wilful nor unpatriotic. ”

“ The most important man in the United States was acutely unhappy. His son was going to have to pay a fine for reckless driving, the hospital would charge something, his car was wrecked beyond even his ability to repair it—the motor-block had burst, of course, when the water in the circulating-system froze—and he might have to go to work.
Murfree walked up to Bud Gregory and nodded.
"Hello," said Murfree. "I hear you're in trouble."
Bud Gregory looked up.
"Migosh!" he said helplessly. "It's Mr. Murfree, the Gov'ment man!"
"Not a government man any more," said Murfree. ”

“ On that day the background-count in the East was 25-28. On the Pacific Coast it was 32-35.
This meant that in two weeks the radioactivity of the surface-soil of the United States had multiplied itself ten times. If it doubled itself just six times more there wouldn't be any United States. There might not be any world.
But out in the state of Washington, looking out over Puget Sound from his happily somnolent seat before the shack of moldering shakes, Bud Gregory decided that he would like to have some beer. ”

“ Murfree sank back gloomily into his plane-seat. He had to find a new source of income. He had to pay Bud Gregory thirty-six hundred and fifty dollars a year before he bought a loaf of bread for his own family. To live as he'd lived before he'd have to make over eight thousand a year. And the only thing he had now that he hadn't possessed before was the gadget Bud Gregory had made. ”

“ But Murfree knew that he had to hunt for Bud Gregory. He had to!
"Somebody's got to do it," he told his wife defensively. "And after all, I'm the only person he'll work with."
His wife waited.
"It's lunatic," said Murfree, "but what can I do? The whole country is getting more radioactive. The normal count has gone up ten times! It goes up in waves which start on the Pacific Coast and move east. There's no rise in Europe, Asia, South America or anywhere else. It isn't dangerous yet but it's heading that way. ”

“ It was dark. The car had come back for Murfree and he had sent it away again. He paced up and down. He chewed his fingers. To know of certain doom awaiting one's country and to have as one's ally a man who can do anything that can be imagined in the way of physics—and much that cannot be imagined—and not to be able to think of anything either possible or impossible to avert the doom—it was maddening.
Bud Gregory grinned amiably.
"Mr. Murfree, suh, have you thought of anything? If you ain't maybe we'd better set an' eat." ”

“ It could be evaporated and it would spread and diffuse in the air and, as it spread, here an atom and there an atom would break down, emitting radiation and becoming another substance entirely.
"And that would be a new compound which wouldn't stay vapor but would come out as a microscopic particle of dust with an electric charge that would draw moisture or other particles to it! It would grow and grow and ultimately settle down as a dust-mote too small to be seen.
"And that would happen quintillions and quintillions and quintillions of times, and motes of poison would settle—are settling...." ”

“ Murfree's voice was unsteady when he spoke again.
"Listen," he said. "Somebody's turning loose that dust. Somebody's making it. They're spreading it to drift all over the United States and settle, so that everybody in the country will die!"
Bud Gregory spoke obliviously.
"I never did like the idea of workin' myself to death. From now on I can just set, not botherin' nobody an' nobody botherin' me." Then what Murfree had said hit home. He turned his head. "What's that, Mr. Murfree?"
"Somebody," said Murfree shakily, "somewhere out in the Pacific most likely." ”

“ The gadget was still attached to the motor of the ancient car. It had helped pull the car across the continent and was solely responsible for the fact that it had pulled the Rockies. Now it was turned off. The small boy turned it on. The car began to ride smoothly and easily with seemingly infinite power.
It came out of the narrow woods-road upon a main highway. The fourteen-year-old boy turned up the gadget. The ancient jalopy breezed up to sixty miles an hour—seventy—eighty....
A horn blared its astonishment as a motorcycle-cop flashed past, going in the opposite direction. ”

“ It hit the baffle and splashed. And Murfree knew that, since water was in the focus of the gadget, therefore water had been drawn from wherever the tube pointed.
Bud Gregory flipped off the switch. Water ceased to splash. A half-mile-long cable of water, stretched taut in mid-air, abruptly dropped. There was a wet streak across the ground toward the inlet. There was a long, long path of pock-markings where a straight line of water had fallen back into the inlet.
"M-my gracious!" said Murfree, dazed even though he knew Bud Gregory's gifts. "You've got a sort of artificial gravity! ”

“ Normally the molecules of—say—the metal of any automobile-engine block move in all directions in a strictly random fashion. When Bud Gregory's gadget operated, the molecules of the same automobile-block moved in the same direction—ahead.
If the motor wasn't running the metal cooled down as the heat-energy it contained was turned into kinetic energy. If it was kept running the burning fuel in its cylinders kept it from going so far below zero that it would condense liquid air upon itself. ”

“ Murfree nodded. Bud Gregory referred to interatomic and intermolecular attraction. The force which holds atoms together in molecules and molecules in crystals and ultimately makes planets possible.
"When you—uh—break somethin'," said Bud Gregory, "the parts you break it into stop pullin' at each other. They' too far away from each other."
Here Bud Gregory referred to the inexorable operation of the law of inverse squares. Atoms draw each other only at atomic distances. Molecules adhere only at distances comparable to the diameter of molecules. ”

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

“ Murfree sat with a glass of beer in his hands. He racked his brains vainly. Bud Gregory sat beside him, drinking beer. Presently he spoke dreamily.
"Y'know, suh, I'm thinkin' that maybe instead o' buyin' a car outa that ten dollars a day I got comin' to me, maybe I'll get me a boat. You can set a lot more comfortable in a boat than in a car you got to be drivin' all the time. Yes, suh, I'm goin' to think about buyin' me a boat!" ...
The tuna-boats worked valorously for the murder of a nation. ”

“ The odd thing about the boat was that something remarkably like a radar antenna was fitted atop its pilot-house. The oddity about its crew was that every man wore heavy protective clothing of a sort usually found only among workers about atomic piles.
The oddity about the object it towed was that aside from the supporting pontoons that kept it afloat it was made of lead. It was a torpedo-shaped object some forty feet long and no more than eight or ten feet in diameter, kept from sinking by sheet-metal floats on either side. ”

“ Bud Gregory said.
"You can make gadgets," said Murfree crisply. "One happens to be needed to keep me from being killed—with everybody else in the United States. Including you, by the way. You won't make it. So that's that."
Bud Gregory scraped his foot on the ground.
"Uh—I made one this mornin', Mr. Murfree," he said awkwardly. "I got to figurin' an' I figured you was right. That stuff that keeps bustin' up by itself is settlin' down all around. An'—uh—it ain't good for humans if it gets too strong.
"So I—uh—I made a dinkus that can gather it up. ”

“ There was too much short-life radioactive matter around. Presently the piles vaporized and then they ran together in one monstrous mass of incandescent vapor whose normal self-limited temperature was higher yet.
This took time. It was all of an hour after the beginning of the whole process when a great globe of incandescent gas burned everything upon the island to a ghastly ash. The island was blasted, baked, dead, desolate.
Then the globe of vaporized metal—it was almost a mile in diameter—soared skyward in exactly the manner and for exactly the reason that a balloon would have risen. ”

“ Murfree knew it would turn white with frost when the device began to operate. It absorbed heat and made electricity. Perhaps primarily it made something else, with electricity only as a by-product. In any case it provided the power.
"This here ought to take care of it, suh!" said Bud Gregory. "We set it up an' aim it an' turn it on. Any kinda stuff that's in the wind that could bust up of itself, gets like the water I put in the focus this mornin'. It pulls to itself all the other kindsa stuff that busts down. ”

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

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

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

“ Instead of forty or fifty fish per mile there were hundreds. In one place, where a school of some finny sort had swum beneath the temporary layer of oil, the ocean was almost carpeted with scaly, belly-up corpses.... ”

“ Could—hm—would you like to have this here dinkus I made first, suh? I'll just give it to the children to play with if y'don't want it. If you'll take it to remember me by—"
"Thanks," said Murfree.
He got on the bus that would take him to the nearest town with an airport. After the bus pulled out, he idly opened the telegram. It was from the generating station that had been using Bud Gregory's gadget.
FRICTION ELIMINATION DEVICE SMASHED TODAY STOP. WORKMAN DROPPED TOOL FROM OVERHEAD STOP. CAN YOU SUPPLY OTHERS WIRE IMMEDIATELY.
Murfree felt a little sick. ”