The Haploids

by Jerry Sohl

  "Once you get a line on it, how easy will it be to track it down?" Captain Tomkins asked.

  "That's the big problem. If it comes in clear and definite and there's only one source, we may be able to pin point it to within a house or two. Otherwise we might have a large area to cover."

  The truck and cars roared on until they came to a spot at the end of the speed limit. They stopped on the side of the road and the radiomen got to work.

  Travis watched the rotating loop shine in the sun as it moved slowly on the rotatable mast. Thorny and Bob listened attentively on the earphones. When the tuning eye closed both men put up their hands.

  "That's it," Thorny said.

  Bill Skelley unfolded a map of the city and crouched on the floor of the truck with it. While Bob read off the direction on a dial, Bill laid a straight edge on the map and drew a line clear across it from one edge to the other. It went right through the heart of the city.

  A few minutes later the three vehicles started again, trailing dust as they left the shoulder and hit the pavement. They went out for a mile farther west of the city, then turned north on another concrete road.

  "So far, so good," Bill said, resuming his post beside Travis and Captain Tomkins at the rear of the truck. "No deviations to speak of, no night effect to worry about, no quadrature effect. In the Navy it was different. You never looked for anything on a sunshiny day. Always the worst weather."

  Travis felt the man was talking more to himself than to him or Captain Tomkins, so he made no comment.

  The truck roared on to another rendezvous with the high voltage interference several miles down the road and the radiomen went through much the same performance. The party cut off on a side road in an easterly direction for the third reading.

  Bill beamed when Bob read the numbers off to him. He drew the third line and then he yelled.

  "I think we've got it!" he yelled.

  Both Captain Tomkins and Travis went down on their knees to get a better look at the map. The other radiomen followed suit.

  "See? All three lines intersect right there," Bill said, pointing to a spot on the map.

  "That's right in the middle of Wright Street between Major and Hennepin—right in the middle of the business district."

  "That's a grocery, isn't it?" Bob asked.

  "I think you're right," Travis answered.

  It was Captain Tomkins who broke it up. "Well," he said, "what are we doing here? Let's get on with it."

  The trip back to town was without sirens. The police cars and truck proceeded to Wright Street, then went slowly down it to Major. The caravan turned off Major to an alley, then turned down the alley. A short way down it the vehicles stopped.

  The six policemen from the two cars converged on the truck. The radiomen and Travis and Captain Tomkins jumped off.

  "Johnson, Barwinkle, and Evans take the front," Tomkins ordered. "The rest of us will take the rear."

  "What are we supposed to look for, Captain?"

  "Some sort of a radio outfit, isn't it, Bill?" Captain Tomkins asked.

  "Well, maybe," Bill replied. "Then again it might fool you. Be on guard for any unusual-looking piece of electrical equipment If you're uncertain about anything, just ask one of us."

  The alley entrance to the building marked on the map Was a cluttered place with ash cans, garbage and debris littering the small area behind the store. A rickety wooden stairway rose from the ground floor near the rear entrance.

  Captain Tomkins sent three policemen around to the front of the store, then the others went into the rear. One man was stationed outside to prevent anyone from entering the store or from using the stairs to the floor above.

  The inside of the rear of the store was orderly enough. There were the usual packing cases, worktables, storage bins and shelves of goods of one kind and another. There was also a meat grinder, an old butcher's block and a table with merchandising display material.

  Travis watched as Bill's eyes took in every detail, but the radioman did not give evidence that anything was out of place.

  Then the policeman named Johnson stuck his head through a doorway to the front of the store.

  "Find anything out front?" Captain Tomkins asked.

  "Not a thing, Captain."

  The group turned and walked out the rear door, climbed the stairs to the second floor. Without hesitation the police captain went through the back door.

  It was the kitchen of an apartment. They surprised a gray-haired woman washing dishes. She slowly put down the dish she had in her hand, wiped her hands on a towel, tucked a lock of hair back of her ear and looked at them with genuine surprise.

  "You'll pardon us, ma'am," Captain Tomkins said. "We're looking for something."

  "Something?" The woman's voice quavered. "What's Roscoe went and done?"

  "Nothing's wrong with Roscoe," the captain said. "Is he your husband?"

  "Yes. I was afraid . . . What you want?"

  "We just want to look around. Who lives here?"

  "Us and a girl, that's all."

  "Who's 'us'?"

  "Roscoe and me. Mr. and Mrs. Tredding."

  "And the girl?"

  "Her name's Alice. Alice Gilburton. She's a sweet young thing. She wouldn't be in no trouble."

  "Mind if we look around?"

  "Sure. What are you looking for?"

  "If we find it, we'll, let you know."

  The men went through the apartment on a cursory inspection, entered the front room to meet officers coming up the front way. Then the group worked individually inspecting the light fixtures, the sofa, the radio, the cabinets in the dining room.

  Travis felt a little silly. It was quite an average home and it seemed ridiculous that something which was doomed to set a city on its ear could be found in a place as small as a china cabinet.

  Eventually the group worked back toward the kitchen, poking around in bedrooms, closet shelves, in dresser drawers. Mrs. Tredding followed them around, wringing her hands nervously, sometimes helping but more often hindering the search as she kept up a steady stream of talk, giving histories of various items of her household.

  "You won't find anything in that highboy," she said. "That's a gift from my Aunt Martha. We wouldn't keep nothing in there that the police would want."

  "Whose room is that?" Captain Tomkins asked, indicating a closed door.

  "That's Alice's room. You can't go in there."

  "No? Why?"

  "Alice wouldn't like it. She don't allow no one in there. She always locks the door."

  "Is that so?"

  "She's such a bashful girl, she is. She would just be awful embarrassed if she thought anyone had gone in there —especially Roscoe. She and Roscoe don't get along."

  "Let's have a key. We'll have to open it."

  The woman shook her head. "No, you can't do that. You couldn't go in, anyway. Alice has both keys. She made me give her all the keys when she took the room a year ago."

  "I'm afraid I'll have to break it down, then, Mrs. Tredding," the captain said.

  "I can't let you do that!" Mrs. Tredding's hands worked one over the other and her eyes filled with fear. She mumbled something excitedly that nobody could understand, but while she stood there two of the policemen put their shoulders to the door and it pushed open to the accompaniment of wood splintering. Mrs. Tredding buried her face in her hands.

  The room was a disappointment. It was spic and span with not a speck of dust anywhere. A neat green spread was on the bed, a brown runner on the-dresser. The curtains were fresh and dainty. For the second time since he had been in the apartment Travis felt embarrassed. The others must have, too, as they were reluctant to enter the room.

  It was Bill who walked into it, opened drawers in the dresser, then went to the closet. As soon as he opened the door he said simply, "Here it is." He bent to the floor.

  On the floor of the closet was a black box that looked like a suitcase except that it was made of metal and had louvers on the
sides. Through these openings could be seen a small light glowing. The others crowded around now. Bill's fingers worked around it, moved it, exposed two wires that ran from the bottom of it through a hole in the floor.

  With a tug Bill pulled the wires loose from under the floor. The glow in the box winked out. Then, lifting the box by its handle, he walked to the bed with it.

  "What the devil is it?" Captain Tomkins asked.

  Bill did not answer. Instead he fiddled with the top of it and in a moment the lid opened on a hinge. He whistled.

  "Alice wouldn't hurt nobody," Mrs. Tredding was saying.

  "Do you have a radio, Mrs. Tredding?" Bill asked.

  "It ain't working. Ain't worked since yesterday morning. Nobody'll come and fix it."

  One of the policemen brought in a tiny radio. Bill plugged it in.

  "You won't get nothing," Mrs. Tredding said. "All it does is buzz."

  In a few minutes the radio warmed up. Nothing could be heard. Bill reached over and twirled the dial. A few distant stations could be heard faintly.

  "That's it," Bill said. "We've got the little job that's been doing it."

  "Mrs. Tredding," Captain Tomkins said, advancing on the puzzled woman. "Where does this Alice Gilburton work?"

  "At the Acme Furnace Company. She's a secretary."

  "Johnson," the captain said, turning to the policeman, "take three men with you and bring this girl in for questioning. Barwinkle, Jones, you two stay here and keep Mrs. Tredding company. The girl may turn up. Don't let her use the phone or anything."

  Although it was midafternoon the repair room of the Union City Radio Repair Shop was dark, illuminated only by a single shaded electric light above a worktable, light from a single window far in the rear of the shop and daylight from under a door that separated the back shop from the front office.

  The electric light illuminated a circle of faces: Captain Tomkins, Gibson Travis, Bill Skelley, Thorny Rhoades, Bob Donn and Dr. Leaf, who had been summoned from the hospital. They were all staring fascinatedly as Bill unscrewed part of the equipment in the metal box on the bench.

  "As I've said," Bill was saying, "this looks like a toy Van de Graaff generator. That hiss you heard when I first started to unscrew this part was escaping gas—gas under pressure." He lifted off a section, smiled. "Yes, look here. See? It has an endless belt of insulating material inside. Electrons are sprayed to give it a charge. It's fastened to this metal sphere at the other end and as the belt moves—it must move at a tremendous speed—the charges are carried inside."

  Travis thought the whole contraption looked like a Fuller ball in a closet bowl, but he did not say so.

  "It's a little wonder, this whole thing is," Bill continued. "The gas under pressure here allowed a tremendous charge to be quickly built up inside the shell to provide the ion source for the X-ray tube."

  "It's incredible," Dr. Leaf breathed. "Utterly incredible. How can such a thing work? I've seen machines like that in hospitals and research laboratories and I've worked around some myself, but this X-ray tube is only a foot long. The ones I've seen are fifteen feet long."

  "Remember the first radio tubes and sets?" Bill asked. "Look at them now. Oh, I agree this is sure something special. I can't even tell what some of the parts are made of. I think the belt, which is usually silk, is something better than that. It's a peculiar brown and there are more little fingers to pick off the charge here. I'll bet this one is really souped up, judging from the effects it has had on radios for the past twenty-four hours."

  "I've been trying to figure out what its voltage is, Bill," Bob said. "What's your guess?"

  "To be as powerful as that it must be up in the millions!"

  "From that little tube!" Thorny exclaimed.

  "Look at that compact little outfit on the end of the tube," Bill commented. "That's about the cutest little induction motor I've ever seen. It probably turns that tungsten insert in the anode plenty fast—hut no, it wouldn't be tungsten, it must be something else many times more resistant, for even tungsten wouldn't stand that power from all the collisions of electrons. The little motor turns it for the splattering effect necessary to distribute the radiation. And speaking of radiation, it's probably not even measurable with the voltage it must have."

  "What are those discs all up and down the tube?" Travis asked.

  "Voltage equalizers, aren't they, Bill?" Bob asked.

  "I think so. They prevent arcing and spread the voltage equally all along the tube. They, too, are made of something different, I see."

  "All right, Bill," Captain Tomkins said, straightening. "We've all looked at it, now what does it mean?"

  "It's a pure guessing game, Captain," Bill said, "but if we're going to play it, I'll say this little outfit is sending out gamma rays shorter than any have been sent out before. I'd say it runs beyond the known X-ray field—considerably beyond it, in fact—into the quadrillion megacycles, something so short it's not even measurable, say around .03 to .015 Angstrom Units in the electromagnetic spectrum, up near cosmic rays. You know there's talk that when you get up there far enough you can create matter. Well, I think this is getting awfully close to that point."

  "Unless my ignorance is showing," Travis said to the group, "I'd like to know what an Angstrom Unit is."

  "It's a measurement—about a hundred millionth of a centimeter. The bigger the value of the unit, the longer the wave length. For example, we see from about 3,800 to 7,600 Angstrom Units. Those longer than that adjoin the red rays, those shorter the ultra-violet."

  Dr. Leaf shifted uneasily. "I am not completely baffled by this thing," he said, "but it fills me with horror just the same. It's just as if somebody took an X-ray machine and turned it on people passing in the street. Only this is worse. This is a radiation about which we know nothing—except the effects we've seen."

  "Would you explain that?" Captain Tomkins asked.

  "Well, medical use is made of rays which extend from one to .15 Angstrom Units, going from long to short. The gamma rays emitted by radium and other radioactive bodies extend between the limits of 0.04 to 0.07 Angstrom Units, overlapping the short wave length X-rays.

  "This thing here," he said, indicating the black box, "goes in the other direction so far that it is just beyond comprehension what happens—although I dare say we saw plenty of evidence of it earlier this week."

  "If I may add to that," Bill said, "the quantum theory established a correspondence between each radiation of given wave lengths and a certain number of volts. Visible and ultra-violet radiations correspond to just a few volts while X-rays demand hundreds to millions of volts.

  "To excite the gamma rays it is necessary to employ a potential of millions of volts. Now the thing we were detecting out there with the RDF was not the gamma rays, but the interference caused by such high voltage."

  He picked the box up and let it fall and the metal of it sounded tinny. "You see? They didn't even try to shield the high voltage. It would have been impossible to completely do so, so they had to chance it like this. The ideal, of course, would have been to completely shield it somehow and allow only the gamma rays of whatever they are to come through. This way we were able to track it down."

  "I don't like the looks of it," Dr. Leaf said. "If they, whoever they are, have one of these they're bound to have more."

  "The thing I don't understand is the moving force behind all this," Travis said. "Why would a 'sweet young thing,' as Mrs. Tredding calls Alice Gilburton, have such a thing hidden away in her room?"

  Captain Tomkins lit his pipe. "There's more to this than meets the eye, that's for sure. Six thousand for six months' rental of a building. Setting this thing off in that room. It's perfectly obvious women aren't affected. That's what makes me wonder about the international aspects."

  "I'm puzzled about the action of the radiation," Dr. Leaf put in. "Usually radiation is selective, hitting certain areas hard, letting other areas go. X-rays hit cells that grow rapidly, like cancer cells, d
estroy them while they let the rest go. The whole foundation of X-ray therapy rests on that one factor. But this attacks everything at once. Or at least it seems to. I'm going on the assumption this is the same device that was used to a limited extent on Winthrop Street."

  There was a knock on the door. Captain Tomkins opened it and a patrolman stepped into the room.

  "They've got that Alice Gilburton, Captain," he said. "She's been locked up in the girls' room."

  "Good." The captain, Travis, and Dr. Leaf hurried out of the radio shop.

  When they entered the police station Captain Tomkins asked to have the girl brought to his office and the three of them entered it to wait for her.

  A few minutes later Desk Sergeant Webster entered the office, his face white.

  "I think she's dead, Captain," he said.

  In the cell room reserved for girl inmates Dr. Leaf examined the young girl on the cot. She was a young thing, black haired, rather plain featured. Her eyes were looking at nothing.

  "No pulse," he said. He opened her mouth, withdrew something which he held in his hand. He brought it over to Captain Tomkins and Travis. In his palm were shreds of a flesh-colored plastic capsule.

  He smelled of it. "Nothing I know," Dr. Leaf said. "Could be anything, though." He took a blanket from a shelf, covered the girl with it.

  "Whatever it is," he said, "she believed enough in it to die rather than reveal it."

  Coming out in the main area of the police station again, Sergeant Webster approached the captain again.

  "More bad news," he said. "Just had a call from Union City Hospital. They have a new patient. A man turning gray, Captain. His name is Roscoe Tredding."

  At that moment Bill Skelley ran into the station. His face showed how agitated he was.

  "Captain Tomkins," he cried, out of breath, "Thorny— you know Thorny. He got sick a little while ago and started to leave the shop and couldn't get any farther than the door. He's just lying there and—and he's gray."

  The bottom dropped out of Travis's stomach. This was it. This was the real thing.

  It had begun.