The Gregory Circle by Murray Leinster - HTML preview

CHAPTER VI

... Who Wasn't There

Just three days later, Murfree was back at the high hill-crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him. All about him the world was dead. Nothing lived. Nothing! He didn't carry the counter, now. There was no point in it.

He carried, instead, a clumsy contrivance set up in a wooden box in which canned tomatoes had once reached the village of Brandon.

Bud Gregory walked with him, anxiously holding before him a loop of wire which he said would stop the neutrons for his own protection. Bud Gregory had actually sat up at night to make the outfit for his own protection and the mass of tangled wiring Murfree carried.

They reached a spot where they could look into the valley beyond. It was literally a valley of death. There was nothing alive in it. Not one blade of grass, not one shrub, not one bird or insect, not even a bacterium. Everything was dead.

And a swirling, humming column of heated air rose skyward, snatching up deadly dust from a quarter-mile patch of earth that was quite red-hot, now. Every grain of that dust was the most deadly stuff known to men.

Bud Gregory looked. He was pale. He had come through miles of desolation. He had seen the silent cabins of the mountain-folk and the shriveled crops that they had planted. He knew that he had made the thing which had killed them. But now, looking down at the carbonized half-cabin and the heap of huddled garments in it which had been a man, he muttered defensively.

"That fella played heck! I told him it was dang'rous!"

He propped up his loop of wire so that it still protected him. Murfree silently unloaded himself. Bud Gregory made a final assembly. There were a few—a very few—radio tubes. Murfree had traced every lead in the complicated wiring, and he could not even begin to understand it.

By all modern knowledge of electronics, it would do nothing whatever. The tubes would light and current would flow and nothing would happen—according to modern knowledge of such things. But Bud Gregory had labored over it and risked his life to bring it here.

He was untutored and almost illiterate, while Murfree had spent years in the study of just such science as this should represent. So Murfree helped as a naked savage might help to set up a radio-beam, in absolute ignorance of even its basic principles.

"Like I told you," said Bud Gregory in a troubled voice, "this new outfit is like that there thing that makes that—uh—pile. Only this don't make a hollow horn. This here is solid. It won't only stop them—uh—neutrons from goin' through a place. It'll stop 'em dead in their tracks, right where they are when it hits. It's gonna make a lot of heat."

He set up what could only be a directional antenna, weirdly distorted. Later, much later, Murfree would draw the design from memory and then marvel at the pattern it would project. Now he was simply grim. Bud Gregory checked his connections.

"All I'm worried about is the heat," he said uncomfortably. "I guess we better not look."

He adjusted the weirdly-shaped antenna. He sighted by some instinctive method of his own. Then he turned his head.

"Don't look. It's gonna get hot!"

He threw a clumsy, home-made switch. And the earth rocked.

Gregory threw a clumsy, home-made switch—and the earth rocked!

There were probably some millions of tons of material acting as an atomic pile, filled with all the monstrous energy of speeding neutrons. Then, suddenly, those neutrons stopped. Radioactivity stopped—dead. And all the monstrous power of the reaction in being, was converted into heat. It was not atomic energy at all. It was neutronic energy, which is of a different and vastly lower order. But that was enough!

The sheer expansion of stone, raised thousands of degrees in the fraction of a second, made the ground stagger. Murfree reeled as the very hill shook beneath him. There was a lurid flash of light. The dull-red glowing surface of the quarter-mile circle became instantly molten—white-hot—liquid! There was a monstrous bellowing and rumbling from the very bowels of the earth.

And then the round lake of melted earth spouted upward. Gases underground strove mightily to expand in the mass of melted magma. Lava welled up and spread and engulfed the tiny fence and the half-burned cabin and the incredibly small apparatus which had created the whole cancerous thing. Cabin and everything else disappeared in the spreading white-hot flood.

Then bubbles reached the surface. Gigantic masses of incandescent gas leaped upward. The rock was literally effervescing, boiling, bubbling in a horrible blinding froth which spouted masses of liquid stone into the sky.

Murfree stood his ground for seconds only. Bud Gregory turned and ran and Murfree ran with him. Ahead of them a fiery mass of rock hurtled down and splashed. Fire broke out. There were other fires to right and left.

Just once, as he fled, Murfree turned his eyes backward and saw a meteor-like mass of melted stone fall upon and obliterate the apparatus they had brought and used in the pass. Murfree felt an illogical sense of relief even as he ran on desperately.

The noise died down in half an hour. After all, huge as the thing had been, it was minute by comparison with an actual volcano, however much more deadly. By the time they had reached the car storm-clouds were gathering over the blazing area.

Ten miles away—the car ran perfectly from the first, in proof that there was no longer a neutron-flood to ionize the air—ten miles away they saw rain falling upon smokily flaming hillsides. Lightning flashed among dark clouds. Water poured down. Not even a forest fire could survive such a downpour.

They went back to Brandon. It took them a day and night of steady driving, alternating at the wheel. Bud Gregory had little to say the whole way back. But when Murfree stopped the car before the repair shed and let him out Gregory grinned uncomfortably.

"What you goin' to do now?" He added apologetically: "I didn't mean to make nothin' like that. He made me mad an' then he used that dinkus like it wasn't meant to be used."

Murfree had left his wife and daughter in Brandon while he went back into the hills. Now he spoke tiredly.

"I'll pick up my family and go back to Washington. I'll report as much as they'll believe. Anyhow, when that rock cools off there'll be more radioactive stuff in it than is available in all the rest of the world together. Since your apparatus is cut off it won't act as a pile now, but it's plenty radioactive!"

Bud Gregory swallowed.

"I—uh—I lost time from work, goin' along with you," he said uneasily. "Y'oughta pay me day wages, anyhow. Huh? Say! You kinda liked that thing I fixed your car with. How'd you like to buy it?"

Murfree grimly got out his wallet. He counted what he had left. It was his expenses for getting back home.

"I've got just six hundred dollars," he said. "It's worth more, but I'll give you that for it."

"She's yours!" said Bud Gregory. All his uneasiness vanished. His eyes glistened. He brought out the round cheesebox and put it in the back of Murfree's car.

"Anyhow," he said contentedly, "I can always make another one when I got a mind to. So long."

Murfree drove off and got his wife and little girl. He left Bud Gregory looking speculatively at the eight automobiles awaiting the moment when he felt like working....

Back in Washington Murfree made his report. At first they told him he was crazy. But seismographs did report a minor earthquake centered just where he'd said. A plane flew over and brought back photographs which proved the truth.

And then the Manhattan Project took over and built a splendid concrete road to the mass of highly if artificially radioactive rock and extracted large quantities of practically every known radioactive isotope from it. Everybody was happy.

But they wanted badly to talk to Bud Gregory—and they couldn't.

When FBI men went to urge him imperatively to come to Washington, he had disappeared. He had bought one of the eight cars in his repair shop for twenty-five dollars, repaired it by some magic of his own and gone off with his wife and children.

He was undoubtedly a motor-tramp, roaming the highways contentedly or sitting in magnificent somnolence, waiting until he felt like working or moving on. Incredible riches awaited him if he was ever found and consented to work.

Neither event seemed likely.

But Murfree was in the oddest situation of all. He couldn't be officially praised for what he did on leave. Nor could he be required to give up the gadget he bought from Bud Gregory. And that gadget was useless. It worked, but nobody understood it, and every attempt to duplicate it had failed. Duplicates simply didn't do anything. Murfree is still studying it.

But he did gain something, after all. His wife and small daughter are likely to keep on living and he was promoted a grade in the Civil Service. Now he gets forty-seven hundred a year.

END