CHAPTER II
"What's in It for Me?"
Murfree had a very bad conscience. Now, when his wife had set her heart upon a vacation at the seashore with their little daughter—Washington is an oven in the summer—he had joined the ranks of the unemployed. But Murfree knew that he had to hunt for Bud Gregory. He had to!
"Somebody's got to do it," he told his wife defensively. "And after all, I'm the only person he'll work with."
His wife waited.
"It's lunatic," said Murfree, "but what can I do? The whole country is getting more radioactive. The normal count has gone up ten times! It goes up in waves which start on the Pacific Coast and move east. There's no rise in Europe, Asia, South America or anywhere else. It isn't dangerous yet but it's heading that way. Somebody's got to find out about it!"
"Why must it be you?" asked his wife.
"Because nobody else will!" he told her vexedly. "There is a certain amount of radiation which is normal. There is a certain amount which is safe. The amount all over the United States is away above normal. It's still safe but it's heading for the point where it won't be!"
"Well?" his wife said.
"A certain amount more," said Murfree, "and there'll be a terrific increase in the number of abnormal babies. Freaks, mutations, monsters. A little beyond that, there'll be no babies! The rest of the living world would follow.
"A little more and plants will begin to throw sports. More yet and plants will become sterile. Seeds will cease to grow. A little more radiation than that and we'll all tend to develop cancer, and still more and we'll begin to run fevers and die of radiation-burns."
"And you're the only person who sees it," said his wife bitterly. "So you have to spend your money trying to find this Gregory and bribe him to do something!"
"But," said Murfree again, "nobody else will!"
Which was true. Twice before he'd spent his own savings for the safety of his family while all other families got their safety free. His conscience bothered him. But there wasn't anything else to do. Rather guiltily he called a friend who made microchemical analyses for the F.B.I.
He asked if he could be notified if any events took place of the sort—he described it specifically—which would mean Bud Gregory was involved. Then he doggedly made ready to take his family to the seashore. Employed or not, his daughter needed fresh air and sunshine and the sea after a year in Washington.
Two days later he had them settled at the beach. He'd packed up the one personally-owned souvenir of his encounters with Bud Gregory. He went to the largest privately-owned power-generating station in the United States. He demonstrated the gadget. He left it installed. Then he called back to Washington on long distance.
He had a certain amount of money by this time—a fee for the experimental use of Bud Gregory's gadget—and within limits he could travel. There was news. His friend in the F.B.I. told him of a happening which sounded as if Bud Gregory was involved. So Murfree headed for the Pacific Coast by air.
A very decrepit vessel cast anchor off the small island of the tuna-boats. It made cryptic signals and the population of the island came rejoicing to the dock to greet its crew. Of course the people of the island did not use radios for communication. Radio messages can be intercepted and, if sent in code, arouse curiosity.
The decrepit vessel, therefore, brought news. It was good. The news consisted of background-count measurements made in different cities of the United States over some weeks past. The men who had made the measurements were passengers on the ship which brought them.
They were highly elated. They were taken to see the atomic piles which had produced the measurements. They bowed profoundly before the atomic engines which silently produced death for a nation.
And that night there was celebration on the island. But the tuna-boat due to leave went out on schedule despite the festivities. It towed a torpedo-shaped lead object behind it....
On the 29th of August the background-count of standard Geiger-Miller tubes on the West Coast was 56-58 and still going up. The radioactivity-constant of the United States had risen to something like twenty-five times normal. It showed no tendency to stop.
Bud Gregory's boy was in trouble. The event itself was not important but it enabled Murfree to find Bud Gregory. The happening occurred within half an hour after Bud sent his son to town for some beer.
The fourteen-year old boy chuffed away from the shack into which his family had moved. The car in which Bud Gregory had taken his tribe across the continent was an ancient and dilapidated rattletrap. By any normal standard it should have wheezed its last mile years before.
It had a cloth top, a cracked windshield and, when it was running exclusively on its motor, it made noises like a broken-down coffee grinder working on a protesting cat. It should have groaned at any grade and balked at any really perceptible incline. Its absolute maximum of speed should have been twenty miles an hour downhill.
But Bud Gregory was something very much more than a genius. He had made a gadget for his car. It was a radio tube and a coil or two, the windings being made in a fashion nobody else could understand and Bud Gregory could not explain. When the gadget was turned on and attached to any bit of metal things happened.
Normally the molecules of—say—the metal of any automobile-engine block move in all directions in a strictly random fashion. When Bud Gregory's gadget operated, the molecules of the same automobile-block moved in the same direction—ahead.
If the motor wasn't running the metal cooled down as the heat-energy it contained was turned into kinetic energy. If it was kept running the burning fuel in its cylinders kept it from going so far below zero that it would condense liquid air upon itself.
The gadget was still attached to the motor of the ancient car. It had helped pull the car across the continent and was solely responsible for the fact that it had pulled the Rockies. Now it was turned off. The small boy turned it on. The car began to ride smoothly and easily with seemingly infinite power.
It came out of the narrow woods-road upon a main highway. The fourteen-year-old boy turned up the gadget. The ancient jalopy breezed up to sixty miles an hour—seventy—eighty....
A horn blared its astonishment as a motorcycle-cop flashed past, going in the opposite direction. Bud Gregory's son heard the cop's brakes squeal. He was going to turn around and come in pursuit.
The flapping, squeaking, preposterous flivver hit one hundred and twenty miles an hour as the scared boy lit out. He rounded a curve. The small town lay before him. In panicky haste, he turned the knob to reverse the molecular drive of the four-wheeled wreck he drove.
In fifty yards it dropped from a hundred and twenty miles to ten. He snapped off the drive and limped into town on three cylinders. He parked the car in an inconspicuous place and went and got the beer.
He lingered uneasily, afraid to go back until the motor-cop should have vanished. The motor-cop came into town, swearing. The boy saw him ask questions. He moved out of sight. The boy got into the car and stowed the beer. Then he saw the cop heading for his car where it was parked. The cop looked purposeful.
The small boy cringed. He shared his father's terror of the Law. When the motor-cop was ten yards away, Bud Gregory's son reacted in panic. He flipped over the molecular-drive switch and the car plunged forward.
It dented the fender of the car ahead of it, side-swiped a farm-truck, upset a "Keep Right" sign and flashed for the open road, with no sound of any running engine.
The motor-cop lunged for his motorcycle and roared in pursuit. A fourteen-year-old boy is not a startlingly conservative driver at any time. Bud Gregory's son was filled with stark terror. On the two-mile stretch of straight road just around the first curve he gave the car all the speed that molecular heat-energy would yield.
It wasn't the same as atomic power but it was plenty. The motor-cop reached the curve just in time to see the jalopy stop almost as abruptly as if it had run into a brick wall—but unharmed—and go careening into the woods-road. The cop roared in pursuit.
He didn't catch up but in the winding woods-road he ran into patches of below-zero frigidity that almost scared him into giving up the chase. The boy had forgotten to start the engine and when you extract from a motor-block the heat-energy required to drive a flivver four miles at top speed, with acceleration and deceleration thrown in, it gets cold! It left a trail of almost-condensed air behind it.
The wreck happened just fifty yards from the shack in which Bud Gregory's family had settled down. The car slid off the road at the last curve, ploughed through fifty yards of underbrush and spindling saplings, came at last to an immovable stump—and had reached the end of its journeying.
The boy was completely unhurt. But his toes were frostbitten on the twenty-ninth of August, on a bright sunshiny day with all the woods rioting in lush green growth.
The motor-cop got no adequate explanation. Bud Gregory was shaken but firm in his resolution to play dumb. He couldn't explain anything but the boy's toes were frostbitten. In the end the cop took the boy back to the hospital to have his toes treated, resolving to return to examine the wreck.
But of course, when he got back, there was no gadget to discover and absolutely nothing to explain the car's speed, the boy's frostbitten toes or a patch of frost-killed vegetation—in August—where the wreck still lay crumpled.
It was this obstinately inexplicable situation that had been reported to Murfree by his friend of the F. B. I. So he reached that small town as fast as planes would take him, and found Bud Gregory sitting miserably on the steps of the small town's hospital.
The most important man in the United States was acutely unhappy. His son was going to have to pay a fine for reckless driving, the hospital would charge something, his car was wrecked beyond even his ability to repair it—the motor-block had burst, of course, when the water in the circulating-system froze—and he might have to go to work.
Murfree walked up to Bud Gregory and nodded.
"Hello," said Murfree. "I hear you're in trouble."
Bud Gregory looked up.
"Migosh!" he said helplessly. "It's Mr. Murfree, the Gov'ment man!"
"Not a government man any more," said Murfree. "I've got some money for you."
"Uh—you don't owe me no money, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory unhappily. He peered around Murfree with gloomy suspicion and asked, "You got some detectives with you?"
"Not a soul," said Murfree. "But I have got some money for you. You sold me a gadget once. You'd used it to fix my car."
Bud Gregory spread out his hands.
"You paid me for that, Mr. Murfree. You paid me six hundred dollars. I lived on that for a long time. I et hawg-meat an' drunk beer an' me an' my family came clear across the United States on that money, Mr. Murfree. But you don't owe me no more."
"We'll go and get some beer," said Murfree. "It may take explaining."
Bud Gregory cheered. He looked uneasily about but Murfree had always played fair with him. Their meeting had been in a tiny village in the Smokies when Murfree's car overheated and froze and Bud Gregory produced a gadget which was made of stray radio parts. He plugged it in a light-socket and attached it to Murfree's car.
Immediately the car wasn't stuck fast. It ran. When fresh oil was spread about it was as good as new. Bud Gregory explained casually that the gadget made some sort of stuff—perhaps electronic—which made pieces of metal slide easily on each other.
Later, in an emergency, he sold the gadget to Murfree for six hundred dollars, and Murfree could make it work, but he had never been able to understand it. Neither had the most eminent scientists of the United States. Nor could any of them duplicate it so the duplicate would work. It demonstrably eliminated all friction—all—from any device to which it was attached, but it remained an enigma.
With beer before them, Murfree passed five ten-dollar bills across the table. He did not dare offer more, knowing Gregory.
"You sold me that dinkus which stops all friction," said Murfree casually. "I can't understand it nor can anybody else. But it still works. So, since it belonged to me, when I got out of Government service, I took it to a big power-generating station. I explained what it would do.
"We hooked it on the big turbine. And it not only stopped all friction in the bearings but it ended steam-friction against the rotor-blades and baffles. The efficiency of the whole set-up rose by something over eight per cent."
Bud Gregory looked longingly at the fifty dollars.
"But you don't owe me no money," he said unhappily.
"You've got ten dollars a day coming to you as long as that dinkus keeps on working," said Murfree casually. "If you ever want more money just make another one or show me how to do it and I'll take care of the situation."
Bud Gregory blinked. Then he grew expansive as realization came.
"Mr. Murfree, you' a gentleman!" he said expansively. "Soon's my boy's toes get well an' I got me a new car I won't have to worry about nothin'! You come on out to the house with me! My old woman, when she hears this news, is goin' to cook you a dinner that'll sure say thank-you! An' I'll get some beer an' some ten-cent seegars!"
Murfree nodded. He had a telegram in his pocket. The background-count of Geiger-Miller tubes was up to sixty on the Coast here. The soil of the United States was just thirty times as radioactive as it should be. When it reached a certain point, now not so far away....
Back and forth, back and forth, day after day, the little tuna-boats worked busily. They were equipped with bait-tanks and refrigeration units for such tuna as they might catch but they made no attempt to catch them.
Their only purposeful activity seemed to be towing torpedo-shaped containers of lead to points some hundreds of miles from their base island and then allowing the volatile liquid in the containers to flow out on the surface of the ocean and be carried away eastward as vapor.
They took great pains not to be sighted by any other vessel as they went out, tow loaded with its enigmatic liquid, or returned with it empty. They had been fortunate. Only one such tow had had to be scuttled when a transpacific clipper soared overhead, early in their traffic.
Whatever they were trying to do, they seemed to meet with no obstacles as they carried out their purpose.
Murfree still hadn't the faintest idea what could be the cause of the excess radioactivity of American soil alone. The newspapers hadn't found out about it. They probably wouldn't realize the potential danger if they did.
But the lives of a hundred and forty million people were at the mercy of a completely unexplained phenomenon—unless Bud Gregory somehow solved the problem.
Murfree's problem was to get him to work on it.
"I want you," said Murfree, "to work out a gadget to save some lives.”