Lucky seemed to consider his story ended. He puffed on his pipe and grinned at his audience.
“That still accounts for only two sets,” said Steve. “And you’ve got a half dozen.”
“Yeah,” said Lucky. “It was a kinda interestin’ business. And it’s surprisin’ how many decent folks there are around, even yet. Hidin’ out, all of ’em, and half-starved, most of ’em.
“But I set three-four of ’em up in business, and they’re kinda gettin’ a little confidence. They’re even darin’ to get in touch with each other. I told ’em it was ploughed fields that tip off the planes, and the planes tip off the guerillas, so they oughta make out better.
“They’ll plant stuff in little patches. No furrows. No neat fields. That’ll help a lot, all by itself. And they’ll pass on the word. It’s bound to spread, when all the sendin’ sets in this locality get wiped out and the fellas that are huntin’ ’em have to go travelin’ to stay in business.”
There was a deeply satisfied silence all around the room. The men who had suffered so horribly from guerillas had, at last, the satisfaction of knowing that guerillas were being killed. That spies were being hunted. That at least a small dent had been made in the disaster that had befallen civilization.
There was still no safety for them, however. There was still no real reason to hope. Their food depended upon the operation of a device to control chance, which they did not understand and which instinct forbade them fully to believe in. And they were definitely, terribly vulnerable.
This meant not only against guerillas and bandit gangs, armed and directed from the planes which could drop bombs. They could be blasted at any instant of any day or night if the folk who had destroyed civilization heard so much as a whisper, of a suspicion that they clung to anything—those folk who had been doomed to die.
And there was worse, which they did not know. When the house was filled with the minor turmoil of people finding their resting-places for the night in so crowded a menage, Lucky Connors plucked at Steve’s sleeve and beckoned with his head. Steve followed him out of doors.
“Frances looks okay, fella,” said Lucky.
“I think she is,” said Steve. “I hope so, anyhow.”
“Yeah.” Lucky was silent for a moment. “She—uh—understood why I went off?”
“Yes,” said Steve uncomfortably.
There was a pause. Then Lucky shrugged. He said in a different tone:
“Things are comin’ to a head fella. On my way back here I picked off one last fella with a sendin’ set. He and his gang seemed to be headed this way. It worried me. I—uh—made him talk. I guess he figured I was somebody doublecrossin’ the fellas with planes and bombs. Anyhow, he’d been told to hunt up this house and find out what was goin’ on here.”
Steve frowned. “Here, eh? That’s bad. What were his instructions, Lucky?”
“If it was guerillas like his outfit, okay—he’d get paid off in whisky and grub for findin’ it out,” Lucky answered. “If it wasn’t, he was to report that, after wipin’ everybody out if he could. He ain’t goin’ to report anything. I don’t know if his gang will come on here or not. But when he don’t report, somethin’s goin’ to happen! The folks who smashed up this whole country are interested in us. They know that somethin’s wrong somewheres, with all their spies vanishin’ like they been doin’. They’re goin’ to tighten up all around. They’re pickin’ on this place to start. What are we gonna do about it?”
Steve took a deep breath.
“I guess we’ll have to fight,” he said somberly. “There’s nothing else to do. You know, it would be interesting to know who they are or where they are or what the devil we can do about them. I feel like a gnat trying to start a fight with a locomotive.”
CHAPTER XIII
Enemy Bombs
Knowing the extent of the danger which threatened, Steve made no pretense of going to sleep that night. Followed by Lucky Connors, he repaired to the room he’d set aside as a laboratory, and resumed his labors. But this time he had very specific objectives. Lucky Connors couldn’t be of much help; he merely sat on a bench and watched Steve. And Steve’s system of work seemed lunacy, at that.
Steve took one of the six child’s copy-books and wrote in it. Then he took the handles of Bob’s elaborate apparatus of wires and stray objects, and stood frowning for an instant. Nothing happened. He crossed out what he had written and wrote something else. He held the two handles again. The process went on and on. After nearly an hour, two wires in a bottle of clear liquid glowed incandescent, and a bare wire turned white with frost.
“That helps,” said Steve. He surveyed what he had written and did not cross it out. “I’m playing hot-and-cold, Lucky. This thing does the same things the crater-stones do, and I’m trying to find a way to survive, in the possible futures that lie ahead. The crater-stones get hot when they work. This thing makes those two wires glow. It gets its energy from the wire that turns white, changing its contained heat into electricity and dropping away down in temperature in the process.”
“Whatcha tryin’ to do, Steve?” asked Lucky, who obviously was puzzled.
“Right now I’m pulling for a way to make a record of a thought-pattern, so it can keep on pulling for something even when my mind gets tired,” Steve answered. “Nobody can hold a thought more than a second or two without some change. In the old days we had gadgets that did everything but think. I’ve got to make one that will wish!”
Lucky shook his head.
“Too deep for me,” he admitted. “Way over my head.”
“I’m playing hot-and-cold,” explained Steve. “You remember how I found out this house was still standing before I saw it? I’m doing the same thing now. I pulled for it, just now, that I’d find a way to make a thought-record on iron. The gadget didn’t light up. So it wasn’t in a possible future that I could make a thought-record on iron. I went on, pulling for every possible material at hand. It just lighted up on protein.
“It is possible, in the future, to make a thought-record on some sort of protein. Now I’ve got to find out what kind and how. When I get close to what I want, I’m hot and this gadget works. When I’m not, I’m cold and nothing happens. It’s a wacky way to do research, but it’s fast. I wish I were cleverer, though. I might be able to make it a game of ten questions and get my answers in a real hurry!”
He wrote in the copy-book and held the handles, frowning. Nothing happened. He crossed out the writing and wrote something else. Nothing happened. He crossed out and wrote, and crossed out and wrote. Lucky watched for a long, long time. Presently he yawned. Ultimately he dozed off.
He woke, cramped, and Steve was still busy with the same absurd routine. It seemed to have no relationship at all to the situation facing him and all the rest of the world. It seemed a dreary and useless rigmarole, while the situation was desperate and apparently irremediable. The whole earth had exploded in a welter of destruction, in which cities vanished in the blue-white glare of atomic explosions.
Nobody knew who had started the destruction. No nation knew what other waged war against it.
In one sense it was not war at all, but a series of international assassinations in which all destruction was done anonymously and every nation cried fiercely that it was attacked and no nation admitted attacking. Now the whole earth was pock-marked with glass-lined craters where cities had been, and if any victorious nation actually survived, it was only after such destruction as no vanquished nation had ever before endured.
But some nation did survive more nearly than the rest. There were some folk who still had planes and bombs. They had arms they could give to guerillas to complete the ruin of a shattered America.
They had microwave communication sets with which to guide those bandit allies in the reduction of America to sheer savagery. They had monster aircraft which flew in the upper stratosphere. And unquestionably they had bases in which the arms and bombs were stored and the aircraft serviced, and from which the
organized production of chaos was controlled. They had spies, who must number in the thousands.
Their bombing and fighter forces must be huge. Their technical facilities and resources must be on a relatively gigantic scale, compared to one small group of people, some thirty in number and with exactly one weary physicist among them, who could marshal only a dozen or so firearms and a single contrivance of salvaged copper wire and reclaimed bottles and clumsily-straightened nails. No self-respecting junk-yard would have given room to the equipment in Steve’s laboratory. But it was all he had, and he worked it grimly. With it he fumbled incalculable possible futures for a path to safety. Now and again two wires glowed in a bottle. They were the markers on the path.
When red dawn came he still worked, and in the same way. Scribble in a book. Hold two handles and think—cross out the scribble and scribble again. Hold two handles.
The strain was monstrous. Such mental effort was much worse than any physical labor could have been. But he went on like an automaton until the sun was clear of the horizon and climbing higher yet. Then, suddenly, the wires in the glass bottle glowed yet again. When they did, he dropped his hands in a gesture of worn-out completion.
But he could not rest, even yet. He had to make sketches of the new circuits, with the materials specified and all connections indicated. And then he had to set to work to make them.
When the sound of stirrings began in the house, he stopped and hunted up the sixteen-year-old Bob. He handed over the sketches for two devices and dully explained such details as the sketches did not show.
The boy scanned them eagerly and set to work at once. And Steve went back to the making of the third gadget—and fell into the numbed sleep of mental exhaustion before it was quite finished.
* * * *
Time passed. Off somewhere a dozen miles away, a band of guerillas woke in quarrelsome mood. Their leader had vanished. Because of his absence they’d drunk up the whisky he occasionally produced as if by magic, and had fought each other blindly.
This morning there were three dead men in camp, and still no leader.
They argued in a desultory fashion while they ate what food remained. They had no plans. They only knew that their leader had intended to examine a house a dozen miles away, a house which might be the headquarters of a rival band, or which might be the hideout of folk who could be robbed.
In either case it was a destination. Rival guerillas could be joined, most likely. Refugees could be killed, quite certainly, and refugees usually had some women with them.
As the morning wore on they quarrelsomely agreed to carry on. At about noon they began a shambling march toward the house, bunched and careless and pettish. They did not take care to stay among trees. Where they came to weed-grown fields they crossed them instead of skirting the edges.
At the house, the boy worked feverishly, and two intricate, lunatic agglomerations of metal scraps and oddments grew to completion under his hands. He went to hunt up Steve. He found Steve just desperately awaking and going on desperately with his part of the task.
Outside, Lucky fretted because there was no sign of Steve. Frances fiercely tried to stop him from going into the laboratory.
“If he fell asleep, let him!” she protested. “He works all the time, Lucky. He never rests.”
“But there’s a lot that’s due to happen today,” Lucky said uneasily. “There’s a gang comin’ this way and all.”
“You’re here,” said Frances. “You’ve got a crater-stone. You’ll do something about it.”
“Shucks!” said Lucky. “You think I’m a friend of yours, don’t you? Well then, let me be a friend of yours! There’s big doin’s on the way. I don’t know how to handle ’em. Your friend Steve does—or he seemed to think so, anyway. I’m goin’ to call him. Things need doin’.”
He knocked vigorously on the door of the laboratory.
“Rise and shine, fella!” he called. “What do we do?”
Steve came out of the laboratory, carrying the most improbable of freakish creations under his arm, while the boy Bob went on anxiously ahead to where he had assembled two more.
“Come along,” said Steve. “We’ve got to mount this stuff outdoors.”
He led the way up the hillside behind the house, where the boy was at work bracing an absurdity upright. One of the two things he had made was merely meaningless tangles of wire and bottles on a bit of charred board. The one he braced so carefully had been built around a section of three-inch sapling, which rested in a forked stick on two scorched, approximately straightened nails. It could be aimed like a gun.
“These are finished, sir, like I told you,” the boy told Steve worshipfully. “I don’t get what they’ll do, though.”
Steve put his own device down. He began to check the ones the boy had made.
“They’ll all hook together,” he said. “The one I just finished is a thought-record dinkus. It’ll hold a wish or a thought or a condition to be hooked into the others. It has to work, because I pulled that it would and it was in the pattern of possible events. That one—” he pointed to the section of sapling in the forked stick. “That’s a hypothetical probe. It’s like radar, in a way, but it can handle the output of the other, which is a generator-maker. You know how we make our electricity, Lucky?”
Lucky shook his head.
“We enhance thermal noises,” said Steve, still checking the Goldbergian assemblages of odd parts. “Shot effects, you know. They’re natural, spasmodic currents in all bits of metal. They’re accidental. So since we can control accidents, we can make them happen constantly and much stronger than in nature.
“We make all the free electrons travel one way and that cools off the metal and produces current, and the cooling absorbs more heat to make more current. We can make that action permanent, and it gives up all the power we need. This gadget will make it happen at a distance, but the effect will be only temporary.”
“You, said this was a hypo—hypo—” Bob said unhappily.
Steve untwisted one connection the boy had made, and twisted it in another place.
“You did good work, Bob. A hypothetical probe ought to be a variation on the way we’ve been finding out things. Up to now we’ve been pulling for something to happen, and if the crater-stone or the thing you made for me worked, we’d know it would happen. But this is a probe. It doesn’t say, ‘I wish this to happen when I do so-and-so.’ It says, ‘If I did so and so, would this happen?’
“Here! It looks all right. I’ll try it. I hook in the thought-record—so, to ask the question, ‘If I went along the line the probe points, would I see a plane?’ We can’t go straight up, you know, so it has to be hypothetical.
“With a crater-stone, Lucky, we’d get no answer. Finding a plane by going straight up wouldn’t be in the pattern of possible events because we can’t go straight up. But it’s in the pattern of ascertainable facts, so this thing ought to work.”
He swung the block of wood skyward. Wires glowed suddenly. He stopped moving the device.
“There’s a plane up there,” he said quietly. “The thing works like radar. Yes, there’s a plane up there!”
Lucky heard a distant screaming sound. Far away, black smoke mushroomed upward in a swift-moving, billowing mass. There was a second distant eruption. A third and fourth and fifth. Then the concussion-wave and the sound of the first explosion arrived simultaneously.
Leaves overhead jerked spasmodically.
The sound of the first explosion was a crushing roar. The second sound came, and the third and fourth and fifth. Each was louder than-the one-before. Each was nearer.
“Hey!” said Lucky in a queer voice. “They’re comin’ closer!”
Steve’s hands moved swiftly, with incredible speed. He was making connections with his fingers. Bits of wire tore the flesh and blood spurted, but he paid no heed.
“We’re going to be bombed,” he said with savage brevity.
Smoke spurted from twin explosions two
miles away, then from three more, a mile and a half off. A bombing pattern was being established. Everything within an area, four miles long and two miles wide would be obliterated. But it had been extended a little because a band of moving figures had been sighted from above.
They were, of course, the quarrelling, leaderless guerillas whose leader had vanished the day before. They moved toward a spot where mysterious events had been reported. The guerillas made no reply to microwave signals sent down to them. Therefore they seemed a part of the mystery, perhaps the occupants of the house, and they were bombed.
Then the pattern of bombs moved toward the house, faster than any human being could flee. A bomb went off a mile away, and then two others flanking it. The concussion-wave staggered Steve. But he said harshly:
“Got it!”
He twitched the last two wires together. Other wires, bare wires, frosted suddenly as their internal heat became a surge of electricity and they drew more heat from the air around them.’ Two little wires in a bottle glowed brightly.
Then the sky cracked open. Wide!
CHAPTER XIV
War by Science
Concealing leaves were blown from the trees by the violence of the explosion. A bare half-dozen panes of glass, left in the house, splintered into fragments. Men reeled from the shock of the blast overhead. The world was filled with thunderous bellowing tumult which was the sound-wave of detonations overhead.
Its echoes and reechoes rolled and reverberated among the hills.
The noise died away, grumbling in the distance. Birds—at first paralyzed by fright—flapped and squeaked among the branches, and then took to wing in panic-stricken flight.
Almost directly above the house, some four thousand feet up, there was a monstrous, globular mass of black smoke. It writhed within itself. But a wind shifted it away, leaving streamers of sooty vapor behind.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 42
