CHAPTER V
Killing Fish
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."
Murfree shook his head wearily.
"I'm still trying to think! If there were only some way to make that trick of yours work on any and every unstable element."
"You mean, suh, all the kindsa stuff that busts up by itself?" Bud Gregory asked.
"That's it," said Murfree exhaustedly, "but there's nothing—"
"Shucks!" said Bud Gregory. "That's easy, suh! The middle of the little hunka stuff that breaks down, it ain't solid, suh. There's somethin' holdin' it together, only it ain't satisfied. There's somethin' else pushin' it apart.
"So those two things fightin' each other, they make a kinda—uh—uh...." He knitted his brows. "Like a magnet, suh, an' a coil. A—uh—a field? Yeah! There's a—uh—field about the little hunksa stuff that are the kind that break down. All of 'em. You can pull 'em by that field."
He beamed but rather pityingly, as if explaining something to an infant in fond astonishment at the child's lack of knowledge. He had spoken casually of the factors causing instability in all elements heavier than bismuth and then had gone on from there. Murfree looked at him with lack-lustre eyes, worn out by his hopeless struggle to think.
"That would be a start," he said heavily, "but even then it wouldn't be practical, because if you dragged all radioactive substances to your dinkus you'd start a pile going around it to make more. If you could make it—make it—Wait!"
He stood tense for a moment. Then he spoke hopelessly.
"You couldn't make radioactives clump together where they were, could you? If we could make the dust gather into pellets so it'd be heavy and drop into the sea, the sea might be poisoned but we'd gain time."
"Clump together, suh?" Bud Gregory said. "I'll think about that. It'd mean turnin' the dinkus around. Puttin' the focus out front."
He frowned. Presently he complained, "I'm sure havin' to earn that ten dollars a day! I ain't thought so hard since I fixed a fella's car for him down Los Angeles way an' he paid me two dollars."
Then, suddenly, he snapped his fingers. He stood up and stretched.
"We'll eat us some supper, suh, an' I'll get to tinkerin'. It ain't goin' to be so hard but I got to make a brand-new dinkus."
He led the way happily into the shack.
"What'd you think about a kinda boat? Seems to me I could just buy me a sailboat an' put a hunka metal somewheres inside. Say! I could put a big pipe ouside, an' run that field I used to pull my car uphill into it.
"It'd pull the boat along an' water'd run through it an' keep it from gettin' too cold! Yes, suh! Not have to bother with no gasoline or nothin'! Save money that way an' with ten dollars a day comin' in an' only havin' to throw a fish-line over the side...."
Wind blew across the Pacific through the darkness. Across uncounted leagues it blew, carrying invisible molecules of vapor. And now and again some atom in one of those molecules emitted a fierce, invisible particle, and became another element entirely and the compound of which it was a part became another compound.
It ceased to be vapor and became an ultra-microscopic particle of dust which was deadly poison. Some of those dust-particles fell into the sea. But most of them passed over the dark shoreline, gathering moisture and attracting other particles to themselves. They settled down toward the ground.
But the wind was not cleared of poison by that settling. Other invisible molecules of vapor emitted fierce rays and became other dust-particles. And this happened quintillions of quintillions of quintillions of times in the wind which blew in over the sea.
The tuna-boats were still busy.
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning Bud Gregory grinned exuberantly at Murfree. He had made a new contrivance on a bit of slab casually ripped from the outside of the shanty. There was a larger brass tube in the place of the gas-line of the earlier model. It had once been part of a tire-pump.
There was the same strangely-shaped sequence of wire wrappings, including the logarithmic spiral. Their sequence, however, was reversed. And there was a new device at what had been the focus, which was simply meaningless. Of course an iron wire was there.
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. Which way'll I point it, suh?"
Murfree considered, rather hopelessly.
"We want to clean up the wind that blows to the coast. How far will it range?"
"A long ways, suh! A long ways! It won't go straight off outa the air, neither. It won't travel nowhere there ain't some air. It'll bounce back when the air gets thin enough."
It would not be like a radar-wave, limited by the horizon.
"We'll try southwest," said Murfree. "Maybe a little west of southwest. We want it to spread out and work as far offshore as possible. Are you certain it will work?"
"You got a radium-dial watch?" asked Bud Gregory.
Murfree understood. He stripped off the watch. Bud Gregory hung it to a bush some fifty yards away. He pointed the new device at it, and turned it on. Instantly the faintly luminous numerals on the watch-face seemed to flame a lurid blue. Bud Gregory turned off the device. The watch-dial still glowed brightly—brightly!
"That dust that's been fallin'," said Bud Gregory humorously, "got pulled to the stuff in your watch. You better not wear that watch no more, Mr. Murfree. Not without you wash that dust off."
Murfree swallowed. Bud Gregory's device had endowed every particle of radioactive matter in its beam with the property of attracting and being attracted by all other radioactive matter. The tiny particles of radium in the luminous paint—one part of radium in twelve million of zinc sulfide—had been unable to move.
They were anchored in the paint. But the radioactive dust on the ground could move. It did move, swiftly, to cluster about the watch. And the zinc sulfide glowed as brightly as if it had suddenly been enriched to a thousand times its former radium content.
Murfree drew a deep breath.
"We'll kill a lot of fish," he said grimly. "Maybe we'll do more damage than that. But I'll take the responsibility. There's nothing else to do! Come on, we'll aim it and turn it on again."
They did. They set it on a tree-stump and Murfree oriented himself by the north star and pointed the botched-together device which only Bud Gregory could understand a little to the west of southwest. That was Murfree's best guess of the optimum setting, considering the coastline. He threw over the switch. The iron wire frosted, providing power. He saw it turn white in the starlight.
Aside from that, nothing at all seemed to happen.