The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (47 page)

“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?”

“They could all be coincidences,” said Steve doggedly. “The improbable is a part of probability. Things as improbable as these—even a sequence of them—have to happen sometimes.”

“Yeah?” said Lucky. “Do they have to happen to me?”

But the girl was obviously puzzled.

“You said something about a force that would make heads turn up a thousand times in succession if applied that way, Steve,” Frances said quickly. “Maybe this generates that force. Maybe you’d better try it. You’ll let him, Lucky?”

Lucky handed the object back to Steve.

“I pulled for it that he’s a square guy,” he said calmly. “If my luck holds, he’ll play fair and give it back.”

Steve took the thing in his hands. He asked curt questions. You held it in your hand, said Lucky, and wished for something. Mostly it worked. Sometimes—occasionally—it didn’t. That was when you wished for something that was impossible, like a glass of ice-cold beer. If what you wanted could happen by any conceivable accident, the thing would warm up. Sometimes it got fairly hot. If it warmed up, you knew that it had worked.

Steve held it in his hand. He frowned. His expression grew sheepish, but he concentrated doggedly. Then he stared sharply at the jagged thing in his hand. It had warmed perceptibly. It was hot! He dropped it with a sudden exclamation. A dried leaf, where it had fallen, suddenly turned browner, then black, and then sent up a thin, wispy curl of smoke.

“That was a tough one you gave,” said Lucky. “I never knew it to get that hot before!”

“If it works,” said Steve, unbelieving but still staring at the scorched leaf, “I’ll be raving crazy!”

Apparently, however, it didn’t work. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Minutes passed. Frances gazed all about her. She listened and she looked. Steve was tense without knowing why. He had an explanation of how a lump of uranium ore bombarded by an atomic explosion might just possibly arrive at an insane condition in which it could generate the forces he’d imagined. But he didn’t believe it would. He’d put it to a test, and he was enormously wrought up about it, but he assured himself grimly that it was all nonsense.

A quarter of an hour. Nothing. Then Steve could look at the new and quite crazy theory with something like regret. It was impossible, but it was so plausible! It wasn’t scientific, to be sure, in one sense, but when you are dealing with the laws of probability, ordinary reasoning doesn’t apply. All you can do is estimate your answers by statistics. One hundred per cent positive reaction would violate all—

There was a noise overhead. A thin whistling sound. It grew nearer and louder and rose in pitch. It became a scream; a shriek.

Then something flashed down out of the sky nearby. It was not a bomb, but one instantaneous glimpse of it proved it to be bright metal. It hit nearby. It smashed into trees a quarter-mile away, created a monstrous tearing noise and a stupendous crash. Then there was silence.

Steve went deathly white.

“It worked, all right,” he said through stiff lips. “Let’s get away from here! Fast!”

CHAPTER IV

The Crater-Stone

Things looked good. They looked amazingly good. Steve had considered that the most improbable of all possible events would be the crash-landing of a plane—one of those planes which groundlings never saw, but which now and again dropped death out of utterly empty sky wherever traces of surviving or reviving civilization appeared.

Somewhere there was civilization which was intent upon the destruction of all rival civilization. But in seven months Steve knew of only one other plane that had actually been seen, and the place from which it was sighted was now a bomb-crater. So in wishing, or “pulling for,” the crash-landing of a plane which was not to explode and whose radio was to have failed before its fall began, Steve had assuredly put the crater stone to a brutally savage test.

Thrashing away through brush and occasional blessed pine woods where one could move swiftly, he knew that every stipulation of his wish had been met. A plane had fallen. They’d seen it. It had crash-landed. They’d heard it. It had not exploded, because they were still alive. Even its radio must have gone out before its fall, because there were no hovering specks above the scene of the crash even an hour later.

It was, in fact, three full hours before his searching of the sky showed something monstrous and mechanical settling down out of midair to the scene of the plane-wreck. Other flying things soared nearby. But by that time the trio was ten miles away.

“It worked,” he told his two companions. “In every detail. I was a fool to pick that for a test, though. Too dangerous, for us. They’ll be checking over the wreckage now, to see if it was an accident, or if somebody on the ground managed to do something to cause it.”

“They?” said Frances. “Who?”

“I don’t know who,” said Steve savagely. “The people with planes and bombs. Maybe the people who started bombs to falling. Maybe people who wiped out the ones who started it. But people who drop bombs now!”

The large mechanical thing had landed among the trees in which the plane had crashed.

“They’ll pick up the wreck,” he went on grimly. “If they’re sure it was just an accident, they’ll blast the place it occupied so there’ll be nothing to encourage us groundlings with the idea that their planes can have accidents. If they think we used some weapon, they’ll strafe this whole area. But I think they’ll call it an accident. In a sense, it was. A coincidence. An improbable happening. Something like heads coming up a thousand times in succession.”

They were on the slope of a small hill ten miles distant from their late stopping-place. The planes soaring above the wreck began to move in wider circles.

“Into the woods—quick!” snapped Steve.

They dived into undergrowth under trees. They toiled on where leaves were so thick that the sky overhead was blotted out.

Half an hour later they heard a drum-fire of explosions—of boomings which sounded like the deepest possible bass thunder. And Steve drew a breath of relief.

“They called it an accident and blew up the woods where it happened. They probably looked for tracks leading to it and didn’t find any. That’s luck, all right! But I wasn’t too bright, bringing down a plane. We could all have gotten killed.”

“No,” said Lucky Connors comfortably. “I been pullin’ we won’t.”

Steve stared at him. Then he said soberly:

“Sense! I didn’t think of that! If you ever lend me that crater-stone again, Lucky, I’ll tell you what I have in mind before I try it. I agree that the thing works. There’s nothing else to believe, and I think I know how.”

“I’m waitin’ to hear,” said Lucky. “The thing bothers me! It seems kinds spooky, like that guy had a lamp and he rubbed it and a spook come and asked him what he wanted done and then went and done it.”

“It’s no Aladdin’s lamp,” insisted Steve. “It’s perfectly rational. It’s inevitable! But it’s devilish hard to believe.”

* * * *

They continued to move away from the scene of Steve’s test of the enigmatic object. Frances toiled valiantly to keep up with them.

“Every normal happening in physics and chemistry,” said Steve, “is a case of things seeking a lower energy-level, like water running down-hill or two highly active chemicals combining to make an almost inactive compound. Cause and effect everywhere must be the same—happenings taking place to arrive at a lower energy-level. If I chop through a tree, though, I don’t knock it down. It falls of itself. All I do is cut away the stuff that keeps it from falling. In the same way, when a ship is launched, one man with an axe can knock away the prop that holds a ten-thousand-ton ship from sliding overboard.”

“You sure knocked somethin’ down outa the sky,” said Lucky with a grin.

“I don’t think so,” said Steve. “I think I just greased the skids for it to fall. Wherever there’s a possibility of a thing happening, there’s a force acting to make it. Back in 1944 or ’45, Professor Rhine at Duke University proved that some people shooting crap can make dice come seven oftener than chance would allow. They just pull for it.”

“Not thought energy, Steve!” protested Frances. “It isn’t enough to do anything!”

“It built cities and civilization,” Steve reminded her. “And then it smashed them. My guess is that it’s a sort of energy which does not affect matter directly, but only other energy. It controls other energy. And Lucky, here, has a step-up amplifier which increases its power to control. The stuff he’s got is undoubtedly radioactive in one fashion or another. I think, though, that it’s unstable in a fashion which is affected only by thought energy. Thought waves—call ’em that for lack of a better term—increase its activity. And it greases the skids for what you want to happen.”

“Radioactive, huh?” Lucky asked as he grunted. “That’s why it gets hot? Like radium?”

“Like an atom bomb,” said Steve grimly. “Luckily, it’s self-limiting. In effect, it amplifies your wishing, which makes what you want more likely. Suppose you’re shooting crap and you pull for a seven. Your brain sets up a pattern which makes sevens come easier. But this stuff, affected by your thought, amplifies that pattern and pulls for sevens too. And it pulls harder than you can, and harder and harder—getting hot the while—until nothing but sevens can happen. And it’s limited—”

“Steve, it only warms up if it’s going to work,” Frances said mildly, panting a little in her effort to keep up with him. “It doesn’t stay warm.”

“It warms while it’s pulling. You can’t pull for a seven after it’s come. You can’t will it to be daylight now. It
is
daylight. That thing can’t pull for a seven after the seven is bound to happen—after it’s sure to happen. After, in the space-time continuum, it
is
. And apparently it can’t pull for an impossibility, either.

“Lucky can’t wish for ice-cold beer because there simply isn’t any. That stuff is an amplifier which works only when it’s tuned to a possibility. When the possibility becomes a certainty, the tuning cuts off. But anything Lucky pulls for while he’s got it is going to happen if it conceivably can.”

“I’m pullin’ for somethin’ now,” said Lucky blandly.

They had been climbing steadily for several minutes. They came to open space again. They stopped short, but looked out beyond the brushwood to where ground fell steeply away to one side. They were able to look far back and see a thinning, dark-brown dust-cloud where the flying things had circled. The last of those soaring motes seemed to aim itself at the sky. It went up and up and up, increasing its speed as it climbed. It vanished.

“Blast ’em!” snarled Steve suddenly. “They smashed us! We’ll get ’em now! We’ll get ’em! Their own bombs made the stuff that’ll bring ’em down.”

“I’m gonna look yonder,” Lucky Connor said comfortably. “I been pullin’ for something.”

Here had been a winding mountain road. No wheeled vehicle had passed along it in months, now, and what had been a highway was a meandering trail of weeds and grasses. But Lucky was wading through those weeds toward a curious green mound where the woodland started up again. There was a curious glassy reflection from one place within it. He yanked at the vines which covered it.

It was a car, parked off the highway when its gasoline gave out. Its owner had never come back for it, but creeping green things had crawled over it and moulds infested it. When Lucky wrenched open a door, there was only mildew and decay within. The sheet-metal body was rusted and leprous. The upholstery was furry with mould.