The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (48 page)

Lucky grunted with disappointment and went to the back. He kicked off the rusted trunkback lock. He fumbled inside. “It’s okay,” he said, beaming. “My luck still holds.”

He brought out one fungus-covered object and then another. They were suitcases. But they were the plastic luggage that had only been on the market a scant two months before the atom bombs began to fall. Metal or leather would have perished long since. When Lucky kicked them open, though, their contents were intact. And there were whipcord slacks and a girl’s corduroy jacket which Frances seized upon with shining eyes, and a pair of shoes she declared would fit her, and other feminine oddments. She darted to one side to don the new finery. The second suitcase yielded a steamer-rug and shirts, a shaving-kit, and a revolver with a box of shells.

“She’s dollin’ up,” said Lucky, jovially. “You shave, guy, and get beautiful, too.”

“Listen!” Steve said fiercely. “I want to use that crater-stone of yours and bring technically trained men together. I want to make it find us books and tools and fuel and the chemicals we’ll need. Then we’ll smash these people—whoever they are—who have planes and bombs and use them! Afterward we’ll start to build up again the civilization that’s been smashed.”

He was trembling with the fury of a man who has seen his whole world torn to bits and who at last feels that he has a chance to strike back.

“Just tell me when you wanna use it,” said Lucky. He tapped his body where he kept the precious object. “It’s all yours. But I better keep it meanwhile. You—uh—you might forget to use it to pull for the kinda breaks we need right along. Like—look at Frances, huh?”

Frances came back to them, radiant. The whipcord slacks and the corduroy jacket fitted her. She looked not only neat but smart. She’d combed her hair, with a comb from the suitcase. She’d used lipstick found in it. She was, for the first time since Steve had met her, filled with the infinitely precious feminine consciousness that she looked well.

But Steve hardly looked at her. A substance existed which had been made by the utterly uncontrollable violence of an atomic bomb. It was so sensitive that its rate of radioactive decay was controlled by thought-waves in its vicinity.

The long known, indirect effect of will upon matter was enormously increased by it. The paradox of indeterminacy had been resolved. Chance itself could be subdued to the purposes of men. He was filled with a grim exultation. He didn’t notice Frances.

But she noticed, that he didn’t notice. Much of the radiance left her face. They went on. Nothing was said of a destination, but they would need food, presently. The way to find food was to keep on the move. At noontime they came upon an abandoned farm, its buildings ashes. But there was an orchard. Steve and Frances gathered fruit, and Lucky slipped away and came back triumphantly with two clucking, protesting chickens.

“It’s a wonder the foxes ain’t got ’em,” he observed. “Or maybe it’s just luck. Huh?”

They ate. They went on. And on. And on. Toward sundown they saw the rusted tracks of a disused railroad. There were other signs that they were near what had been a city. They camped in a small structure which had been a toolshed for a track-maintenance crew.

After darkness had fallen, Steve held out his hand to Lucky. He hadn’t seen Frances’ first enormous satisfaction fade away as he seemed oblivious to her changed appearance. He’d spent most of the day planning, in absorbed, vengeful satisfaction, the use to which he would put the controller of chance.

“I’ll use that crater-stone now, Lucky,” he said.

“Wanna tell me how?” asked Lucky.

“Bring together trained men,” said Steve. “Supply them with the materials, to make and service planes. Smash the places where bombs and planes are based, and then start to build up civilization again. Bring law back. Bring back order and food and safety for everybody.”

* * * *

Quickly Lucky scanned Steve’s face. Then he shrugged.

“Go ahead and try,” he said drily. “If it was luck that’d broke down civilization, maybe luck could build it up again. But I think you’re missin’ somethin’, fella. The bombs smashed the cities, but if folks had wanted to keep law and order and such, they coulda done it.

“Some places they wanted to, and they did—for a while. But this thing, it won’t change people. The way people are ain’t a accident, and no accident or any luck will make ’em somethin’ else. I tried to make the gang Frances seen me with act different; but it didn’t work. But you go ahead and try.”

“I’ll manage!” said Steve.

He took the small object and went confidently outside. In the outer dark it shone brightly with a greenish-purplish light. It seemed alive. He stood in a warm and star-lighted summer night. There were the innumerable noises of night things in full voice; insects whirring and clicking, and the occasional cry of a nightbird, and somewhere close and very loud the croaking chorus of bullfrogs in a swampy place. They were loudest of all.

The other sounds could only be heard through the frog tumult. He was absolutely confident that he had in his hands all the power that was needed to remake the world. He had control of chance! He could control the accidental and the irrelevant!

The power of a single human will to control other forces had been proven long before, of course. The most careful scrutiny of Rhine’s results, and their duplication elsewhere, had made it certain that dice and coils do not fall quite at random when the human will intervenes, though the amount of energy applied as thought had always been too minute to be measured or even detected save in the statistics of its results.

But Steve had brought down an aeroplane from the stratosphere with the crater-stone in his hand. He’d seen it grow unbearably hot from the mere waste energy of its action. He had the power of millions of wills in his hand—perhaps billions.

He thought, in grim carefulness, of the things he wished to have happen that civilization might return. He had no doubt at all. Not even of his own wisdom. He pictured what he wished to occur, and knew that as his wish became certain to occur, the thing in his hand would grow warmer and warmer and warmer. He thought vengefully, and waited for the heat which would tell him that his thought would come to pass.

An hour after he had begun, he stumbled back inside the little shed. Frances had been dozing wearily She started awake and looked anxiously at his face. He was white and stricken and despairing.

“Did you hear the bullfrogs all fall silent for a solid minute?” he asked in a ghastly facetiousness. “I made them do that! I pulled for the coincidence that they’d all shut up at once. And they did! But that’s all I could do! Apparently there’s not a trained man left alive to join us. Not a tool-shop or a store of fuel or a motor or explosives or anything else. I pulled for everything that would make civilization return and the thing stayed cold. They were all impossible. But it warmed up nicely when I tried to control the bullfrogs.”

He swallowed, and it was almost a sob. Frances stared at him. Lucky Connors listened in silence.

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” said Steve. He grinned at them, and it was more tragic than tears. “Apparently the way the world is, is the way the world is going to stay. Let’s go out and cut our throats!”

CHAPTER V

Fight for Life

Morning came and Lucky was missing. The revolver and cartridge from the abandoned motor-car were set out beside where Steve had finally fallen into bitter slumber. And Frances was gone, too.

Steve got up. He went out of doors. Emptiness. No sign of Lucky or of Frances, either. He went cold all over. Then a surge of such terrible rage as he had never felt before in all his life swept over him. He stood shaking, quivering with a lust for the blood of Lucky Connors.

There was bright sunshine all about. There was the now weed-grown double embankment with its twin lines of rusty railroad track. Day insects stridulated. There were green things on every hand, blandly indifferent to the destruction of all that man had built, and birds flitted here and there in complete obliviousness to mere human tragedy.

Steve stood still for a long time. Then he spoke aloud in a reasonable, a calm, and a totally unconvincing voice.

“Well, she showed sense. While he’s got that crater-stone, she’ll have plenty to eat, anyhow. She’d have married a rich man in the old days, because he could give her a car and a fine house and jewelry. Now she’s sure of a stolen chicken or a snared rabbit every day. That’s riches. He even gave her a trousseau!”

Then, suddenly, he cursed thickly and shoved the revolver and cartridges in his pocket. There were weeds growing on the railroad embankment. They were trampled and bent where two people had walked through them. Lucky Connors and Frances had left Steve and gone along the embankment toward what had once been a city. Steve followed.

His head did not clear at all. For more than seven months he’d clung to an insane hope that the highly theoretic and essentially unlikely facts he had gathered in six child’s copy-books might mean the return of civilization. He’d hoped that they would lead to the discovery and the subjugation of a force which men have always experienced but never suspected, and that the force would bring back safety and hope and decency to the world.

Now he knew that the force existed. He’d handled a crude but sufficient atomic generator and control. And it was utterly useless. It would not bring back a dead world. It would bring stolen chickens, and it would stop bullfrogs from croaking, and with it he had destroyed an aeroplane of the enemies of all he’d ever believed in. But it would do nothing more. And now Steve, raging, abandoned the thought of remaining civilized. He wanted Frances. He hated Lucky. He would kill Lucky, and though she hated him and screamed, Frances would be his.

He passed a place where three houses still stood, unpainted and long abandoned. Presently he passed a two-acre space of mere black ashes, where fire had raged unchecked and weeds now grew luxuriantly. A heap of debris where houses had been pushed violently from one side and had collapsed upon everything within them, and strangely had not caught fire. Then a building of reinforced concrete, now an empty shell.

Then he heard a muted pop! He heard a keening yell. He heard a second pop. It was a pistol—a small pistol, like the one he’d given Frances. At the thought of her, fury swept over him again. He broke into a shambling run.

Then he heard a cracking sound which was no pistol, but at a guess Lucky’s rifle. A chorus of yells followed the explosion. And these were not the voices of Frances and Lucky, but of others. Wanderers, perhaps. Human beings sunk to the level of wolves, like the man he’d first killed in her behalf.

On the instant, his rage evaporated, and the revolver he found out and in his hand was no weapon with which to meet such folk. A pistol was wealth unimaginable, these days, and it carried all the risks of riches. A man with a pistol, having none to punish him for murder, was supreme among his fellows, until one of them managed to kill him for it. One man against twenty or thirty or forty, even though he had a pistol, was not only helpless but doomed. They would take any risk to win it. He might kill half a dozen. The rest would close in because the pistol was a prize worth any danger.

Steve found himself running. In his hand he held one of the slender, needle-sharp foils drawn from his pack. He had the pistol ready for a last resort.

Then, quite suddenly, he reached a place where he could see the crater which occupied most of this city’s site. About it was tumbled wreckage in which human scavengers might still hope to find some booty and even food in rusty cans. The crater was two miles across and chasm-like, save that it sloped down—all barren, glassy stuff—to sheer emptiness at its center.

And at the very edge of the crater, Frances stood at bay. Lucky lay flat on the ground. It was apparently his fall which had brought the triumphant howling which guided Steve. Stones on the ground—half-bricks and bits of rubble told what had felled him. And Frances crouched desperately, her tiny pistol upraised.

She looked clean and trim and desperate, and her immaculacy and the completely feminine look of her caused some of the howling. The creatures who had stoned Lucky to unconsciousness yelled at her. They were horrible things. They hid behind remnants of concrete and rubble which had been left standing in that freakish skip-distance of a few hundred yards beyond a crater’s rim before devastation replaces the annihilation of the crater itself. The ragged figures yelled and darted from one hiding-place to another, edging in for an irresistible surge upon her.

Steve’s arrival was unheralded. His weapon was silent. He ran toward her, and paused to make a savage attack upon a group of four once-human things who seemed planning a simultaneous volley of stones.

His foil licked out and stabbed again and again, like the fang of a striking snake.

He darted forward with a bubbling scream following. He attacked and struck once more, and a shriek arose. He zig-zagged closer, crazy with blood-lust and fear for Frances.

He had struck three times before attention turned from her desirable figure to his deadly one. Then a bearded thing with maniacal eyes leaped at him with a club. His foil darted in and he ran on. Stones fell about him. He darted and dodged, striking when he could, and arrived at Frances’ side as an uproar of animal fury filled the air.

Frances did not look ashamed or conscience-stricken, but uplifted and desperately glad. She smiled at him shakily.