One and Wonder (8 page)

“We've come for the killers,” the lean man informed him gravely. “Since Mr. Cameron has taken the Brotherhood oath, the three of us form a competent court. We're bound to listen to any evidence that Mr. Hudd can offer. He will not be harmed, unless he tries to interfere.”

Outraged, the commander went back. Immediately Mr. Julian Hudd climbed down between the bright fins. He came out of the burned area at a painful, heavy run. Gasping for breath, he waddled up to the dam. “Well, Jim!”

He grinned at Cameron, shook hands with the rawboned man, gave the girl a bow of open admiration. His small, shrewd eyes studied the unfinished dam and the abandoned machine in the gully.

“The incident here was most regrettable.” Hudd's voice was a chesty, confident rumble. “I'll see that adequate compensation is paid. Personally. You people needn't concern yourselves any further.”

His keen bloodshot eyes studied the gaunt man. “Now, I want to take up something more important. I've been trying to get in touch with your government.” His broad, blue-tinged face was still a genial mask, but his loud voice turned imperious. “I demand that your government—” The lank man's voice was very quiet, yet the cold ring of it made Hudd stop to listen.

“We have no government,” said Frank Enlow.

Hudd puffed out his cheeks, slowly turning red with anger.

“That's the surprising fact, Mr. Hudd,” Cameron assured him gravely. “You'll have to get used to it. When the equalizer appeared, nations became extinct.”

Ignoring him, Hudd glared at the lank man.

“You must have some organization.”

“Only the Brotherhood,” Enlow said. “It has no power to surrender anybody to you, because membership is voluntary.”

Hudd's red eyes blinked, skeptical and defiant.

“Get in touch with this Brotherhood.” His voice was rasping, arrogant. “Have them send a responsible agent. Have him here by noon, local time.” He paused, ominously. “Otherwise, the task force and Fort America will open fire, at every likely target we can find.”

Cameron made a startled gesture, as if to catch his arm.

“Please, Mr. Hudd,” he protested sharply. “Wait until you know what you're doing.”

Hudd kept his savage little eyes on Enlow.

“The young lady, I see, has a radiophone.” His voice was loud and ominous. “You had better start calling this Brotherhood—”

“We came here for another purpose.” The lank man met his truculent gaze, unimpressed. “We've come for the killers.”

Hudd's bluish face swelled again with anger.

“Nonsense!” he shouted. “Mr. Lord is my second in command. He was acting under orders. I assume the responsibility. I'll pay for any unjust damage, but I refuse to subject him to humiliation.”

The lean man listened to that, and nodded his rawboned head, and stalked away silently toward the ravine. Cameron hurried after him, visibly alarmed.

“The killers can wait,” he called urgently. “Doyle must be trying. Mr. Hudd doesn't understand the equalizer. Please give me time to tell him about it.”

The lank man turned back, reluctantly.

“If he wants to listen,” he agreed. “We'll wait half an hour.”

With a question on his face, Cameron turned to Hudd.

“All right, Jim,” Hudd gasped, explosively. “I want to know all about this equalizer, anyhow.” His red angry eyes went back to the gaunt man. “But my ships and the fort will open fire at noon.”

IX

Hudd sat down on a hummock of grass, breathing hard with the effort of moving his clumsy bulk. His massive shoulders bunched with bold defiance. Only the quick movements of his eyes betrayed the intense and desperate working of his mind—they were the eyes of a fighting animal, fearful, yet audacious and altogether ruthless.

“Now!” he gasped. “This equalizer?”

Cameron squatted on his heels, facing Hudd. Behind us, as he talked, the sun rose higher. The flat green valley lay motionless under its hot light, and a pungent blue haze settled about us from the green forest burning.

“I heard the story last night. The beginning of the equalizer takes us back nearly twenty years.” Cameron's tired, dark-smudged eyes came for a moment to me. “To your own father, Chad.” His haggard and yet animated eyes went back to Hudd. “I think you remember Dane Barstow?”

“The traitor?” rumbled Hudd. “He died, I believe, in the labor camps.”

“But he didn't,” Cameron said. “Because Tyler learned that he was on the trail of something remarkable, and had him taken from the camps to a solitary cell at Fort America. The SBI went to work on him there, with extreme interrogation.”

As Cameron glanced at me again, I noticed a strange thing. The story and the memory of my father's misfortunes brought me a bitter resentment, but now I noticed that all the old pain and hatred was gone from Cameron's face. Something had swept away his old saturnine reserve. He seemed oddly friendly even to Hudd.

“Finally,” he said, “Barstow talked. He told what he had done and admitted all he had hoped to do. He even agreed to complete his interrupted work.”

I knelt down to listen.

“Though he was half-blind and crippled from the extreme treatment, and sometimes out of his head, they took pretty drastic precautions. They kept him locked in that steel cell on the moon—one of those we saw there, I imagine, Chad.

Two guards were always with him. He was allowed paper and pencil, but no other equipment. If he wanted calculations made, or any experiments tried, such things were done for him by Atomic Service engineers.”

Cameron briefly smiled, as if he shared my pride.

“Yes, Chad, your old man was all right. Working under such difficult conditions, shattered as he was, he charted a new science and created a new technology. And then—when we had been out at space about two years with the task force—he overturned the Directorate.”

Hudd's bold eyes had drifted back to the sun-browned girl—who was listening, not to Cameron, but anxiously to the little portable radiophone. Now he started ponderously at Cameron's last words, to gasp for his breath and wheeze incredulously:

“How could he do that?”

“Not so hard, with the equalizer.” Cameron grinned at Hudd's blinking, startled stare. “From his cell on the moon, Barstow smashed the Directorate. He didn't need any weapons or equipment. All he had to do was tell his jailors what he had discovered.”

Hudd made a hollow, croaking sound. “How's that?”

“The news of the equalizer spread from one man to another,” Cameron said. “Those same engineers who had been assigned to get the invention from him set up a little illicit transmitter and beamed the details back to earth with equalizer power, on every frequency they could get through the ionosphere.

“That finished the Directorate.”

Hudd picked up a small red pebble and began nervously tapping the sod with it, as he had drummed on his desk with the little gold head of Tyler. His furtive eyes flashed to the lean man's weapon, and back to Cameron's face.

“That's too much!” His voice was harshly unbelieving. “No mere fact
of science could defeat Fort America—much less wreck the Squaredeal Machine.”

“Barstow’s equalizer did,” Cameron said. “Perhaps because the old technology of the Atomic Age had already reached the breaking point of over-complexity and super-centralization. When Barstow created this new technology, there was a natural swing to the opposite extreme—to simplicity, individualism, and complete personal freedom.”

“So?” Hudd thumped the sod with his pebble, scowling at Cameron. “Just how does it work, this equalizer?”

Cameron glanced doubtfully at Frank Enlow.

“Tell him,” the gaunt man said. “Barstow wanted every man to know. Generally it has a good effect.” He glanced at a watch on his brown wrist. “But hurry—your time is running out.”

Hudd's great shoulders lifted with aggression.

“So is yours,” he snapped. “I'm willing to listen, but my men won't hear. I'm not yielding anything. This Brotherhood had better throw the towel in, by noon.”

“Tell him,” Enlow repeated.

Cameron launched into his explanation. His fatigue seemed forgotten, and some inner excitement made his haggard face almost vivacious.

“The old atomic reactor, you know, was an enormously clumsy and wasteful and dangerous way of doing extremely simple things. Pure energy exists in the atom, and that is what we want. But the old atomic plants used intractable and inadequate processes to change kinetic and electrical and binding energy into heat, and then required expensive and inefficient machinery to turn a little of that heat back into electricity.

“Even with all its elaborate complexity, the reactor plants could tap only a little of the binding energy which holds electrons and protons and neutrons together into atoms. The mass energy of the particles themselves—really nearly all the actual energy of the atom—it couldn't even reach.

“Barstow’s dream—like my own—was merely a simple way of doing a simple thing. Material energy exists, as Einstein demonstrated. Barstow dreamed of a simple way to let it flow. The equalizer is his dream, realized.”

I couldn't help the breathless interruption:

“That piece of wire?”

“Just a solenoid.” Cameron nodded. “But wound in a certain way, not helically, so that its field slightly alters the co-ordinates of space and slightly changes the interaction of mass and energy. The atomic particles of the solenoid are equalized, as your father termed the process. The converted energy appears as direct current in the wire.

“The fact is simple—even though the tensors of a new geometry are
required to describe the solenoid field. That apparent complexity is more in our awkward description, however, than in the vital fact. The actual specifications of the equalizer can be memorized in five minutes.”

Cameron's intent, elated eyes looked aside at me.

“The safety-feature is what threw us, Chad, with our induction furnace experiments,” he told me. “Our gadget annihilated matter—degenerating iron atoms into sodium—and produced electric current. The increased output intensified the conversion field, and the intensified field increased the output. An excellent arrangement, if you want a matter-bomb—but highly unsafe for a power plant.

“Your father solved that problem, Chad—very simply, too. Just a secondary solenoid, in series with the primary, which develops an opposing voltage as the equalizing field expands. It gives you a safe, guaranteed maximum voltage—the precise value determined by the way it's wound.”

Hudd's deep-sunken eyes blinked skeptically.

“You mean, you can generate electricity?” he rasped. “With just a coil of wire?”

“And a few stray ions to excite it,” Cameron told him. “A pound of copper solenoid would drive the cruiser, yonder, out to the Dark Star. Or iron, or silver—the metal doesn't matter; it's only the exact shape and alignment and spacing of the turns of wire.”

Hudd shook his head, in massive unbelief.

“Perpetual motion!” he scoffed.

“Almost.” Cameron grinned. “Equalized mass is converted into electrical energy, according to the Einstein equation. The solenoid wastes away— but slowly. One pound of solenoid will generate ten billion kilowatt hours of electricity.”

“If it's all that simple,” Hudd objected shrewdly, “somebody would have stumbled on it, by accident.”

“Very likely, men did,” Cameron agreed. “Not many—the shape of the coils is not one you would want for anything else; and the turns must be very exactly formed and aligned, or else the regenerative effect is damped out. The few who did it must have been instantly electrocuted—because they didn't also stumble on Barstow's safety-winding.”

“I'll believe it when I see it,” muttered Hudd. Cameron pointed up the edge of the ravine, to a shattered tree-stump.

“Mr. Lord wanted a demonstration, yesterday,” he said. “I straightened part of the safety-coil on a small power unit from that machine, to step up the voltage, and tossed it into a green tree yonder.”

“A rather reckless thing to do,” commented the lean man. Hudd said nothing. His black-haired, ham-sized hand tossed the red pebble, aimlessly, and caught it again. His troubled eyes peered at the stump, at the
gaunt man's weapon, at the enormous tower of the
Great Director.

“You have ten minutes to give up the killer, Mr. Hudd,” drawled Frank Enlow. “Otherwise you may see a better demonstration.”

Hudd snorted: a blast of defiance. “I'll wait for it,” he gasped. “You can't bluff me.” A shadow came over Cameron's face. When his tired eyes closed for a moment, I saw the blue stains under them. He sat back on his heels, his emaciated body sagging as if from a punishing blow.

“It's no bluff, Mr. Hudd.” He paused as if to gather himself for a weary and yet vehement protest. “You just don't grasp what the equalizer means. It ended the Atomic Age. The Directorate was part of that lost era. You can't hope to restore it, now, any more than you could revive a fossil tyrannosaur. Perhaps you can cause some needless bloodshed and death.”

Hudd's wide mouth hardened with an unconvinced hostility.

“Tyler spilt plenty of blood, building the first Directorate,” he commented coldly. “I may have to pay the same price again, but I expect to win. Perhaps Tyler's garrisons mutinied when they heard about this equalizer. My men won't hear about it.”

“It wasn't mutiny, Mr. Hudd,” Cameron insisted. “There was no fighting. The Directorate wasn't overthrown—it simply ceased to exist. When the equalizer appeared, there was no more reason for Fort America than there is for arrow-makers. The officers recognized that, as well as the men. The garrison just packed up and came home.”

“Home to what?” Hudd challenged him. “The people here were already deserting the cities, leaving nearly everything they owned. There must have been something else wrong—perhaps some biotoxin loose—to cause such panic.”

“You still don't get it.” Cameron shook his head with a tired impatience. “The equalizer freed the city-dwellers, just as it did the garrison. Because most people didn't live in cities by choice. They were huddled into them by the old division of labor—specialized cogs in a social machine grown ruinously complex.