CHAPTER I
Chain Disaster
On Monday Bud Gregory sat in magnificent idleness before the shed which was his automobile repair-shop in the village of Brandon on the edge of the Great Smokies.
That day something impalpable and invisible descended upon Cincinnati and people began to go to hospitals with their blood undergoing changes over which the doctors threw up their hands.
On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing some work on the four automobiles awaiting repair in his shop, but did not feel like working and went fishing instead....
On that day the Geiger counters in the Bureau of Standards in Washington went uniformly crazy, so that it was impossible to standardize the by-products of the atomic piles turning out nuclear explosive for national defense.
On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly put in half an hour's work. Yawning, he took his pay for the job and went home and took a nap.
That day forty head of cattle on a West Virginia hillside lay down and died and a trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full of dead fish. Four cancer patients in a home for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky, suddenly took a quite impossible turn for the better. They walked out of the hospital three weeks later and went back to work.
On Thursday Bud Gregory—
That was the way of it at the beginning. Bud Gregory seemed to have no connection with any one of the series of unusual events. The events themselves were simply preposterous. As, for example, the fact that all the foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain country in Pennsylvania turned vaguely purplish overnight, and then wilted and turned to unwholesome pulp.
Three days later there was not a green leaf or a living blade of grass in thirty-odd square miles. That did not seem to have any rational connection with Bud Gregory or any other event. But the connection was there.
It was Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards who was the first to add the various items together to a plausible sum. It did not include a backwoods automobile repairman, of course—there was no data for that—but it was a very sound guess just the same.
Murfree was a physicist, not a doctor of medicine and his salary at the Bureau was four thousand two hundred dollars a year with an appropriate Civil Service rating. He added the several odd events together, and they were convincing. But the answer was apparently impossible. He could not get any of his superiors in the Bureau to agree with him on the need for action. He thought the need was very great indeed. So he took a certain amount of accumulated Civil Service leave, drew out five hundred dollars from his bank and drove off in his battered old car to investigate at his own expense.
Tucked in the car were certain items of equipment from the bureau which he had no right to borrow and which would take most of a year's pay to replace if anything should happen to them.
He went to the sere and barren area in Pennsylvania and made certain tests. He drove to Cincinnati and made more tests. He went on to the place in West Virginia where cattle had died and asked questions and did improbable things to other ailing cows and steers. Then he drove back to Washington at the best speed his rattletrap car could make.
He went first to his home and told his wife to pack up. He explained with crisp precision and she looked at him in frightened doubt. He went to the Bureau of Standards—he was still technically on leave—and showed the results of his tests to some of the men who worked with him.
They were still unable to use the Geiger counters in the bureau, but one of his friends was heading for New York to use apparatus at Columbia which had not gone haywire. Murfree got him to take along his samples.
Then he went to a friend who happened to be a meteorologist—and got confirmatory bad news. The weather-maps of the period covering the unexplained phenomena told him just how likely his surmise was and where a search should be made for the primary cause of the disasters.
Then Murfree piled his wife and small daughter in the car, drew out all the rest of the money he had in the bank and headed for the Great Smokies.
It was strictly logical action. Epidemic leukemia in Cincinnati, ruined Geiger counters in Washington, dead cattle in West Virginia, dead trout in Georgia, the sudden cure of cancer patients in Frankfort, Kentucky—and a ten-mile patch of dead vegetation in Pennsylvania.
If Murfree could have gotten someone in authority to listen to him the measures to be taken would have been quicker and much more drastic. But nobody would listen. So Murfree had to work it out on his own.
His car was old but he made Lynchburg the first day. He was not at ease. He got started early on the second day and, by night-fall, was well past Charlotte toward the mountains. He and his family stopped at a small country hotel and, during the evening, Murfree got into talk with a power-line man, who told him worriedly that power-line losses over three counties had gone up to seven times normal in two days in a smooth curve and now were headed down again.
There was no explanation. Murfree fidgeted when he heard it. He made his family sleep with closed windows that night in spite of the stuffiness of their rooms, and they started off again near daybreak.
It was about three in the afternoon when he met Bud Gregory.
Bud Gregory sat in splendid somnolence before the shed which was his repair shop. The village of Brandon was a metropolis of three hundred souls, not far within the Great Smokies. There were mountains in every direction. There was blue sky overhead. There was red clay underfoot.
Bud Gregory dozed contentedly. There were three cars awaiting his attention. Each of them had been brought to him solely because he was the best mechanic in seven states. Actually, he was much more than that—so much more that there is no word for what he was.
Each car had been brought reluctantly, because he would repair them only when he felt like it or needed money, and then would do in minutes a job anybody else would need hours or days to do. At the moment he did not feel like working and he did not need money. So he dozed.
Flies buzzed about him. Insects made noises off in the distance. Somewhere chickens cackled feebly and somewhere a wagon with a squeaky wheel moved sedately away from Brandon.
Murfree's car was plainly in trouble when Bud Gregory first heard it. Not many cars came through Brandon. The local highways were traversable by very light vehicles and they could be traveled by tractors, but mules were surest. This car was away off the main track.
It came on, booming, and Bud Gregory awoke. It climbed rather desperately over a red-clay hill and came into Brandon. It was heavily loaded. Murfree drove. There were a woman and a little girl in the back. The rest was luggage—bags and parcels of every possible shape and size and outward appearance.
But Bud Gregory looked at the car. Murfree saw his sign and steered the car toward it. He stopped it—but the motor continued to run. Murfree plainly turned off the ignition. The motor boomed on. Murfree got out and called to Bud above the noise of the engine.
"It won't stop."
Bud rose, slouched to the car and threw up the hood. He reached in. There were thunderous racketing explosions. The motor stopped dead. Then it made frying, cooking noises.
"Y'lucky," Bud drawled. "Didn't burn out no bearin's yet." Then he drawled again. "Pump-shaft broke, huh?"
"Yes," Murfree said bitterly. "I kept going in hope of coming on a repair shop. Can you fix it? Will the motor freeze up?"
Bud spoke negligently, looking at the car and all the parcels.
"Uh-huh. Oil's all burnt up in the cylinders. When she cools she freezes. But if you pour water in 'er now you'll bust the cylinder-block."
Murfree clamped his jaws. His hands clenched.
He wasn't far enough into the Smokies for his needs and that power-line-loss business meant that he had to hurry.
"Any chance of getting another car?" he asked desperately.
Buying another car would put an impossible dent in his resources but he felt that the matter was urgent enough to justify such a step. He had two possible courses of action—this, and flight to the farthest possible part of the West. He'd chosen this because it meant a fight against the danger he foresaw.
"This here's a pretty good car," Bud Gregory drawled. "Fix 'er up an' she'll be all right."
"But it'll take days!" said Murfree bitterly. "You've got to take the motor practically apart!"
Bud Gregory spat with vast precision at a cluster of flies about a previous splash of tobacco-juice.
"She'll take a coupla hours to cool," he said drily. "That's all. No bearin's burnt. Ain't never yet seen a car I couldn't fix. I got a kinda knack for it."
"But you've got to take off the cylinder-head!" protested Murfree. "And replace the rings and fix the valves and take the pump apart and get a new shaft! No garage in the world would undertake the job in less than four days!"
"I'll do it," said Bud Gregory, "in two hours an' a half. An' two hours'll be waitin' for it to cool."
He grinned. He wasn't boasting. He was showing off a little, perhaps. But he was saying something he knew with absolute knowledge.
Murfree threw up his hands.
"Do that," he said bitterly, "and I'll believe in miracles!"
He got his wife and small daughter out of the car. He led them down to the general store of Brandon, which sold fertilizer, dry-goods, harness, perfumery, canned goods, farm machinery and general supplies. He bought the materials for a picnic lunch and he and his family came back. They sat in the car, with the doors open for coolness, and ate.
But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying sounds of the overheated motor dwindled and ceased.
Presently Murfree got out and paced up and down beside the car, restlessly.
After a time he went to the back and took out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and there was a freakish-looking metal-lined glass tube with electrical connections plainly showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of a completely different shape.
Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from somewhere inside the box a "click" sounded. A moment later, there was another. Then two clicks close together, and a pause, and another.
Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked briskly but unrhythmically.
There was no order in the sequence of tiny sounds.
Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade. He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree and the box.
"What good does that do?" Murfree's wife said.
"None at all," Murfree said wretchedly. "It only tells me nothing's happened to us yet."
He stood watching the box, in which nothing moved at all, but from which clickings came at brief intervals.
Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed and stridulated.
The box clicked.
Bud Gregory got up and came over curiously. He regarded the box with an interested intentness. It was not an informed look, as of someone looking at a familiar object. It wasn't even a puzzled look, as of someone trying to solve the meaning of something strange. He wore exactly the absorbed expression of a man who picks up an unfamiliar book and reads it and finds it fascinating.
"What's—uh—what's this here thing do?" asked Bud, drawling.
"It's a Geiger counter," said Murfree. He had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had. Not even Bud. But Murfree said, "It counts cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It's a detector for cosmic rays and radioactivity."
Bud's face remained uncomprehending.
"Don't mean nothing to me," he drawled. "Kinda funny, though, how it works. Somethin' hits, an' current goes through, an' then it cuts off till somethin' else hits. What you want it for?”