“And then I suggested that we go out and cut our throats,” said Steve. “Which still seems as good an idea as any.”
He put leaves on the fire. Smoke filled the shelter, to drive away mosquitos. But Frances smiled at him.
“I want to give you something back,” she said quietly. “I don’t need it now. Here!”
He was fumbling in his pocket, but he looked. She offered him the rusty knife he’d taken from the dead man’s pocket.
“I don’t need it any more,” she repeated. She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.
Steve grunted. He took the knife, but he put something else in her hand. It was the small automatic and the bullets which had been his greatest treasure.
“It’s not enough,” he growled. “Not if there are Wanderers around, and they’re that kind of Wanderers. You keep this handy, but for Heaven’s sake don’t waste the bullets! There simply aren’t any more!” Then he added firmly: “It’s better for you to have it, because in case of trouble we’re both in, they’ll be watching me for surprises like that and you’ll have a better chance to make good use of it.”
She hesitated, and he reached over and dropped it in her coat pocket.
“Now go to sleep!” he commanded. “I want to get to work!”
She obeyed him to the extent of curling up on the bed of leaves. But her eyes stayed open, watching him. He scowled at the tiny bed of coals. This was bad! Existence had been precarious enough with only himself to think of.
It would have been worse with a girl to whom he felt no obligation, and whom he might be able to place with some grimly defensive group of farmers’ families banded together against those who called themselves guerillas, and those who simply looted without excuse. But a girl he knew, whose father had started him off by interesting him in physics…
* * * *
After a long, long time, during which he did not even open a copy-book to write in it, she spoke softly.
“I’ve thought of something, Steve,” she said. “In that bunch of Wanderers there was one man who didn’t seem to be really bad. I think he’d have protected me. But the others frightened me so…”
Steve grunted. He’d take her away from this locality tomorrow. Somewhere. There had to be some plan he could make, but there was nothing to plan with and nothing to plan for. Civilization was smashed.
The world was headed for barbarism unless some nation, somewhere, had improbably succeeded in keeping itself intact while the rest of the world went headlong toward destruction. And if one nation retained its civilization the odds were that it would eventually enslave the survivors of all the rest. No, there was nothing to plan for.
“But mostly I mention him,” said Frances, her eyes very large in the nearly complete darkness, “because maybe he could help you. He says his name is Lucky Connors. He says his luck is fool-proof. He says he’s never missed a meal since the bombs fell, and he’s never had a bad break, and—well—the other wanderers wouldn’t play cards or anything with him, because he always wins. He is phenomenally lucky, Steve! If you could find out what makes him that way—”
“There’s what you call a series,” said Steve ungraciously. “It’s a sequence of unlikely happenings. It may be of any length, even infinite. He may be in such a series. Those things gave me the clue I had.”
The girl was silent, her eyelids drooped. Presently—half-asleep—she woke with a start and looked about her in terror. Then she looked pleadingly at Steve.
“I—started to dream you’d gone away and left me,” she told him apologetically. “Would you—mind holding my hand until I’m asleep? It’s been—pretty terrible, Steve.”
He reached over and took her hand in his. It was small and it had been very soft. There were work-worn places on it now. He held it gently fast. She relaxed. She dozed off, and opened her eyes again and saw him still close by, and smiled sleepily and drew a deep breath. Then she suddenly went off into the slumber of complete security and weariness.
Steve swore under his breath. He sat very still so she could rest.
Half an hour later he heard sounds which did not belong in the night. Thrashing noises. They stopped, and began again. Something was moving about in the darkness. It was close by. It was coming closer.
Steve wriggled out from the shelter he’d contrived. He crouched down in the shadow of the giant tree he’d utilized as a ridgepole. He had one of the sharp-pointed foils ready in his hand. He listened with all his ears.
Something drew closer still. Presently he could see it as a moving bulk amid the lesser shapes of tree-trunks. It was human. It stopped, and sniffed, and he knew how the shelter had been found. By the smell of the leaf-smoke he’d made to drive away insects.
The figure moved forward again. Steve tensed. There could be no friendly human being, and he had the girl to protect. The figure shifted something it carried, and Steve saw starlight, filtered through the trees, glint upon polished metal. The other man stopped, and stared specifically at the shelter, and moved cautiously toward it. The gun-barrel moved to a readier angle.
Steve lunged, quickly and expertly and silently. The needlepoint of his foil slid smoothly forward.
It stopped. With the impetus of the lunge behind it, the slender foil bent double and the figure whirled with a grunt of pain, and then there was a lurid coruscation of light and the feel of a terrific blow.
Steve knew vaguely that he was falling, before he ceased to know anything at all.
CHAPTER III
“Lucky” Connors
From a vast distance he heard a voice speaking in reassuring tones.
“Hey, quit cryin’, Frances,” it said. “He’s gonna be all right! I ain’t had a bad break yet.”
Then Steve became aware of his body’s existence. He was lying on his back, with a bit of fallen branch sticking into his flesh. Then he knew that his head ached. Horribly. He opened his eyes and saw leafy branches and twinkling stars between them.
“My luck’s holdin’,” repeated the confident voice. “Didn’t that sticker of his bend itself all up on my rib? What’s the odds against that, Frances?”
Steve heard the girl crying quietly.
“After all, I woulda shot him,” the man’s voice went on persuasively. “But instead, when I swung around my gun-barrel slammed him on the head. So that makes it right! He’ll have a headache. And I got a hole in my skin that stings like blazes. All even! I’ve been pullin’ for somebody to explain my luck to me and kinda show me how to use it. I got a hunch he’s the guy who can do it!”
Steve’s brain went round and round in his skull. All this did not make sense. But nothing made sense. Then, abruptly, it fitted together into something like lunacy.
It must be “Lucky” Connors! The man with the wandering band from which Frances had hid, but who would have protected her. The one who always won. Whom Frances had mentioned because if Steve could find out why he was so persistently fortunate, he might use it to solve the paradox of the indeterminate.
“I guess you’re right,” said Steve painfully. “About the headache, anyhow.”
He stirred. Frances made a gasping exclamation and bent over him eagerly. Even in the dim starlight he saw the expression of unbelieving joy upon her face.
“Of course, though, I may simply be crazy,” he said dizzily. “Tell you in a minute or two.”
He managed to sit up. The man he had tried so painstakingly to kill—silently and without warning, as it was necessary to kill, these days—regarded him without animus.
“Me, I’m Lucky Connors,” said the stranger amiably. “That sticker of yours was sharp enough, I figure, and it musta been at just the right angle, to stick a little way into my rib and bend, instead of slidin’ off and goin’ on through me. Lucky, huh?”
“Lucky,” conceded Steve. This was completely insane. The man he had tried to kill, and justly enough, in the current state of things, was completely devoid of either anger or of triumph. In fact, he had leaned a perfectly g
ood rifle against the fallen tree which was the shelter, and seemed to be taking no care of his life at all.
“It’s like this,” said the other man eagerly. “I got luck. Whatever I pull for, seems to happen. When Frances ducked away from the gang I was with, I pulled for luck to go with her. She’s a good kid. And I’ve been pullin’ for somebody to help me figure out what I can do with this luck I got. I don’t understand it, but I figure it’s something that could do a lotta good if it was handled right. You get me?”
“It’s a series,” said Steve. He put his hands to his head. “Gosh, this is crazy! Didn’t we try to kill each other just now?”
“Uh-huh,” said Connors placidly. “But we didn’t. That’s my kinda luck. D’you know anything about that stuff?”
“Yes!” said Frances eagerly. “He knows just what you want to find out, Lucky! And you—I told him not long ago that you could help him! It’s the paradox of indeterminacy! It’s—”
Steve held his head in his hands while it throbbed. He honestly doubted his own sanity. By all the laws of probability either he or this intruder should have been very dead, by now, and failing that, by all the rules of human conduct, they should be at each other’s throats. But, quite impossibly, they were both alive, through a sequence of improbabilities that couldn’t happen once in a million years.
It was all impossible. Too impossible. But his head ached. He crawled back to the shelter and held his head over the heat of the few remaining coals. The heat stung the once raw place where the rifle-barrel had hit, but somehow it soothed the headache. He grew sleepy. He lay down. Suddenly he slept.
Frances talked quickly. He heard his own explanation of indeterminacy rephrased much more simply than he had put it. And then Frances went on to explain urgently that Steve had figured out some forces that would cause luck to be what one wanted it to be, only he didn’t yet know how to generate those forces or to detect them.
* * * *
It was stark lunacy, there in a second-growth thicket by the site of a bombed-out town, with no law and no civilization and no hope for anything in the future, within a few minutes of a mutually attempted assassination. An abstract discussion of probability at such a time and place was simply not one of the things that happen! And Steve’s head throbbed horribly and he was somehow ashamed of his failure to defend Frances, even though she couldn’t have needed defense or it would have been far too late by now.
“I got it!” said Lucky Connors’ voice contentedly in the darkness. “He’s the guy I’ve been lookin’ for, all right! Listen, fella! We’ll talk in the mornin’. You gotta headache. So you go get some shut-eye. My rib aches where you stuck it, and I ain’t sleepy anyhow. I’ll poke around an’ set some rabbit-snares and we’ll talk things over while we eat breakfast. Right?”
Steve expostulated in one last protest for the normal.
“How’ll you see to set snares? This is awful! I’m crazy or dead or something!”
“It ain’t you that’s cracked,” said Lucky Connors comfortably. “It’s the facts. Listen! I got enough string for three snares. If I got three rabbits in the mornin’ you’ll know I’m right, huh?” He did not wait for an answer. He stood up briskly. “Okay. You go get some sleep. I’ll be around in case of trouble. But I’m pullin’ that there won’t be any.”
He moved away, and Steve stared dizzily after him. Frances took his hand and urged him to rest. She seemed extraordinarily encouraged. Which, Steve found himself thinking absurdly, would be luck for Lucky Connors, for Frances to feel safer and happier when he was around.
He woke to the sound of movement outside, and instinctively reached for weapons. Then Frances disentangled her fingers from his and smiled at him.
“That’s Lucky,” she said confidently.
Steve went out. A bearded, stocky figure was cleaning the last of three rabbits. He nodded to Steve.
“’Mornin’,” he said cordially. “I got three, like I said.”
He held up the rabbits.
They ate breakfast, a rabbit apiece, cooked over Steve’s revived small fire. As they ate, they talked—or Lucky did.
“Y’see, I been pullin’ for somebody to explain this business, and I been thinkin’,” he said earnestly. “What Frances said checks up. You claim there’s some kinda force, like electricity, maybe, that decides what things happen, like chemistry decides whether things will burn or not. Rock won’t burn. Wood will. That’s chemistry. You can’t throw a seven every time shootin’ crap. That’s kinda like what you’re talkin’ about. Seven come up sometimes, you could make it show every time. Right?”
Steve nodded wearily. All this sequence of improbabilities seemed to him to hint at the verification of the theories in his treatise on the paradox of indeterminacy. For that exact reason, he suddenly felt a hopeless doubt of their validity. Theories like that shouldn’t be proved by eccentrics like Lucky Connors. It wasn’t the scientific method! One should know what one was about!
“Okay,” said Lucky Connors. He drew a deep breath. “I got something that works that way. This is it.”
He fumbled inside his shirt, and Steve noticed the bloodstain where his foil had punctured it and—it was still impossible—stuck fast on Lucky’s rib instead of killing him. Lucky brought out a curious lump of some glassy substance, covered with minute crackles. He handled it with what was patently assumed carelessness.
“A talisman, eh?” said Steve.
“I dunno what it is,” admitted Lucky. “I come on a place where a bomb went off, an atomic bomb. It was a whale of a big crater, a coupla miles across. And it had a funny kinda smell to it. You know?”
“I know,” agreed Steve grimly. “They’re good places to stay away from. When they smell, that’s ozone, and the place is plenty radioactive.”
Lucky made a gesture, indicating his indifference.
“Yeah? I didn’t know that. This was where there’d been a city, and right close to the edge of the crater there was some lumps in the ground under that glassy stuff the bombs make. It was like there’d been a concrete foundation to whatever’d been there, and it wasn’t quite smashed or melted.
“I camped by the edge of the big hole, lookin’ over the place and kinda thinkin’ about the people that’d been in the city when the bombs struck. When it got dark there was little misty lights down in the bomb-crater. It looked spooky. But down behind those lumps that mighta been concrete foundations, there was a bright spot that didn’t look like the rest.
“It was a spot of kinda purplish-greenish light. Real bright. And I went over to it—it wasn’t far in the crater—and it stayed put. Then I dug it out. It still shines in the dark. I keep it covered up so’s people won’t notice.”
He put the stone from the crater into Steve’s hand. And Steve stared at it and held it up to the light, and then examined it minutely.
“Well?” said Steve at last.
“It was interestin’,” said Lucky Connors. “I looked at it. But I was hungry. I sat there holdin’ this thing in my hand and I says to myself, ‘This is pretty, but I wish I had somethin’ to eat.’ An’ the thing felt kinda warm all of a sudden. It warmed up considerable. I got interested wonderin’ how come it turned warm like that, an’ then, plop! I heard somethin’ fall on the ground a little ways away.”
Lucky Connors paused, and looked defiant.
“You ain’t goin’ to believe this, but when I went over there, there was a big barn-owl flappin’ around like he was lookin’ for somethin’ he’d dropped,” Connors went on. “He’d tried to make off with a rabbit that was practically full-grown, and the rabbit had got loose somewheres up aloft and come plop down on the ground. With the fall and the owl, he was barely kickin’ when I found him. It was creepy! Me wishin’ I had somethin’ to eat, an’ this thing gettin’ warm in my hands, an’ then ‘Plop!’ that rabbit fallin’ outa the sky. It scared me to blazes and gone. But the rabbit sure tasted good! So—I figured the thing was like a lucky stone and I kept it and I had luck e
ver since.”
“What you’ve got there—hm!” Steve said slowly. “It was a bit of yellow ore, once. Uranium ore, I’m guessing.” He looked up suddenly. “The town was Chicago, eh?”
“Sure!” said Lucky. “How’d you know?”
“Uranium ore doesn’t hang around everywhere,” said Steve. “The south side of the ruins?”
“There ain’t any ruins,” Lucky told him. “But it was on the south side of where there’d be ruins if there was any.”
“University of Chicago,” said Steve. “Nuclear Research Laboratory. That’s it!”
He felt Frances’ eyes intent upon him. Lucky Connors grinned and nodded.
“I was pullin’ for somebody to explain it. What have I got?”
“Heaven knows!” said Steve grimly. “When you bombard uranium with a cyclotron, you get neptunium and plutonium. That happens in a laboratory. But this is uranium that was bombarded by an atom bomb, something a lot more powerful than a cyclotron!
“It’s not neptunium or plutonium, obviously. It’s something else that’s probably beyond either in atomic weight. It’s something quite new, I suspect. Something that couldn’t be anticipated, and I’m fairly sure it couldn’t be duplicated. But it’s probably dangerous.”
He handed back the odd bit of matter.
“I wouldn’t carry it on my body if I were you,” he said detachedly. “Sheathe it in lead, anyhow. Nobody can guess what it’s like or what it will do. It couldn’t be made in a laboratory because you can’t bombard anything with an atom bomb and have anything left. But it happened here. I suspect pretty strongly that it’s at least as active as radium, though probably in some different way. Better not carry it. A radio-burn is bad business!”
“Not carry it?” Lucky Connors regarded the object, and then shrugged. “I ain’t missed a meal or had a bad break since I had it. I pull for good luck for Frances and she gets it. I pull for a guy to explain it to me, and I meet you. I pull for three rabbits in three snares this mornin’, and I get ’em! And you tell me to throw it away?”
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 34
