The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (54 page)

“There’s just one chance, and it’s a slim one,” Steve said, more cynically than before. “Lucky Connors found something that atom bombs make, which may mean their taming if we can work it out.”

He explained, as simply as he could, what the crater-stones were and what they did. He met blank incomprehension. He tried again, and ran against the same inability to understand.

“They make accidents happen the way we want them to,” he said helplessly. “Look here All of you take pencils, or get some charcoal from the fireplace. Each of you write down a number, without consulting anybody else. Any number. Up in the millions if you like. I’ll use a crater-stone to make you happen, by accident, all to write the same number.”

There was skepticism and impatience. But one man wrote, and another, and another. Then one man showed his number to another. It was 397546872. The second man displayed his. It was the same. A third man. A fourth. A fifth.

But it seemed like a conjuring trick, of no importance.

“Then we’ll go outside,” said Steve, when he saw their impatience, tinged with unease. “Somebody bring a bow and arrow.”

He made a mark a good hundred yards away. Behind a tree. He had the bowman shoot over the tree. It hit the mark. Again and again and again.

“Call it a lucky stone if you like,” said Steve angrily, when cold eyes turned toward him. “Go look around the fire where those looters were last night. Every bolt and arrow fired from the house hit one of them! There’ll be dead men down there, and you’ll be glad they’re dead. And there are other dead men in the brush, here and there.”

Three of the men stayed, watching Steve dubiously while the others went down to see. There were shouts. The men downhill beckoned to those about the house. All went to look. One heavily bearded man stood clenching and unclenching his hands above a body.

When Steve drew near, he turned and spoke in a choked voice.

“This man killed my son in the fightin’ a week ago,” the farmer said. “I saw’t. I don’t know how you got him killed, whether by witchin’ or what, but I don’t care if the devil done it so it’s done! And after all, we’re alive because of you. We’ll listen again and try to understand, even if it’s witchin’.”

There were eight bodies beside the burned-out fire. Three of them had guns. Two had pistols. There was other booty.

“Better go back to the house,” said Steve to Frances in a low tone. She hesitated, then walked to a discreet distance, where she waited.

The slain were stripped. Clothes were precious.

“They fought each other in the dark, too,” Steve observed coldly. “There should be some more bodies. We may pick up more guns. We’d better look.”

They did look. They went back to the ruins of the generator plant and searched, and found nothing except a dagger which Steve picked up. Every additional weapon was valuable. One farmer stayed close to Steve, as he threaded his way through the rubble. Frances followed and stood near a shattered fountain while the hunt was going on. She gave a sigh of relief when the explorations were finished.

Steve returned to the house with the men. They felt doggedly satisfied. Some were asking questions. Clumsy, groping questions. What Steve had to say in the way of explanation went counter to everything that had been their normal way of thought—as it had, in a sense, been unusual to him.

But at least Steve’s methods, however inexplicable, passed the pragmatic test. They worked. There were nine new firearms in their possession. They credited the gain to Steve. And there were two men, in particular, who pressed him with desperate queries such as men only ask when prepared to believe anything if belief will allow them to hope. As they went into the house, Frances heard him say doubtfully:

“We’ll try it and see.”

They ate, mostly of fish. Afterward, Steve and the two men went off alone. Then the two men came back, borrowed extra cartridges, and plunged into the woodland back along the line of their flight. And Steve stood frowning in a harassed way after them.

“What is it, Steve?” Frances asked.

“Two women and a couple of children whom everybody believes dead or worse,” he answered. “They must be hiding out somewhere back yonder. These men wanted to know if I could work a miracle. I said no. They asked if I could help get anybody who might be alive but separated from them, found and brought back here. I said maybe.”

Frances was puzzled. She looked at Steve. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I just tried to find out what’s in the pattern of possible futures,” Steve explained. “I pulled that the two men should find the missing members of their party. The crater-stone warmed. It was possible, and it was sure. I pulled that they’d find them the first day. That wasn’t on the dice. The second day. It was. Then I tried this and that, trying to fumble out how they could find them, by whether the crater-stone warmed up or not. Actually, I was playing hot-and-cold, the kid’s game. They’ve gone off. And they’ll find two women and at least two kids and bring them back, and then they’ll think I’m a spiritualist medium or something! Maybe they’ll want to build a church around me! And doggone it, I don’t like the idea of pulling off miracles and finding lost people and junk like that. It’s—phony!”

“Then why not make an understandable contrivance that will do what the stones do, and explain how it works?”

“If I use electricity, a spy will pick up the radiation,” said Steve bitterly. “If a spy doesn’t, a plane up in the stratosphere will! Electricity means civilization, and civilization means bombs. I’m going out of my head, Frances! Up to now, people have excluded chance from all scientific work. They had to! If your results could have come by accident, they were no good, because you couldn’t repeat them. But now we’ve only to ensure that chance can produce a given result to get it every time. I’ve got to experiment with this stuff, Frances. I’ve got to! But if I try anything at all I’ll bring a bomb.”

The sixteen-year-old Bob came to him, bashfully but with his eyes alight.

“I can fix the dynamo in two days, sir,” he said triumphantly. “Only two or three layers of wire were ruined. Shall I start?”

“No, Bob,” said Steve gloomily. “I’m licked. We daren’t use the dynamo. It’s luck we never tried. But—look here! I feel sort of humble. I’m a trained physicist and my mind runs in a groove. I got out of it once, but apparently I’m back. You aren’t old enough to think in ruts, yet. Let me tell you my troubles. I’ll see if you can suggest something.”

Frances went away and left him talking to Bob, who was sixteen years old and had once made a television set which worked. Steve had diagnosed his difficulty quite clearly. He had been trained to think in a specific fashion, and the crater-stones called for a different sort of thinking altogether.

All the experiments of physical research had always been designed to exclude, rigidly, the element of chance. Accident was anathema in a well-conducted physics laboratory. Even Steve’s painstaking inquiry into the paradox of the indeterminate had come about because physics, as an exact science, had reached a stage of delicate measurement in which indeterminacy—chance—turned up in spite of all efforts.

Steve’s treatise had been begun, in fact, in the vague hope of finding some way to eliminate chance in the behavior of even small numbers of electrons or other particles.

But the crater-stones did not eliminate chance. They controlled it. And Steve could not reverse his entire professional habit of thought overnight to take full advantage.

So he talked to the boy, Bob, quite humbly, because the boy would understand more than most adults and might be able to do a mental about-face more quickly than Steve himself.

* * * *

Two hours later, Steve walked into the house where Frances helped a mother with a sick baby. He picked Frances up, lifted her off her feet, and kissed her exuberantly.

“We’ve got it!” he told her explosively.

While men and women stared at him blankly, he kissed Frances soundly again, and marched triumphantly out of the house once more. His voice rose out-of-doors, calling for the sixteen-year-old Bob.

CHAPTER XI

New Science

Less than two days later, Steve turned on the electric lights in the house. An hour afterward, he had turned on the electric heating-units in ducts behind the walls, so that the house became warm and dry, and the slight mustiness of the air—as a result of the building having been so long untenanted and unaired—began to lessen.

Before the day was over, he had drawn up plans for beds of humus in the attic upstairs. He would put lights and heating elements in the attic and use it as a hot-house in which to grow food all winter.

There would be roofed-over sheds in the nearby woods, built under cover of the green leaves, which by the time of bare branches would be indistinguishable from the ground around them. They also would be warmed and lighted and would grow food. There would be an underground passage from the house to the wood—dug as a ditch, at night, and roofed over as it was dug before dawn of every day so its construction could not be seen from aloft—which would prevent a trail from being made about the building.

The boy Bob worked with absorption and intense authority, supervising all electrical work. The dynamo would not be used as a generator. An easier method had been found.

Steve, himself, vanished from view. He had taken a small room for his own work, despite the crowding of the building by all the newcomers. In it he labored extravagantly with utterly improbable materials—stray nails from the burned-out dynamo-shed, and salvaged wire from the damaged dynamo, and even bottles from what had been the garbage-disposal area of the house’s former occupants.

Time passed and his labors grew with them. He became bright-eyed and feverish. Sometimes he stopped and held his head in his hands.

Frances heard him talking to Bob when—days later—she went to insist that he eat something.

“Faraday founded a science in three days of experiment,” said Steve, “and Fleming remade a science when he stopped to notice what bread-mould had done before he heaved a tray of agar-agar into the trash-can. You and I, Bob, are trying to found an entire new civilization in a couple of weeks, and it’s just crazy enough to make my head ache from time to time. I could do with about a month’s sleep right now.”

Frances produced a tray of food and insisted that he eat.

“If food will keep me awake, I’ll eat anything,” said Steve dizzily. “By the way, how is the food situation?”

“We’ll do,” said Frances evasively.

He shook his head, as if to clear it, and looked at her sharply.

“My dear, I think you’re lying. When did you eat last, and what was it?”

He stormed when he found out that she had tried to give him all the food she would normally have, herself, in a day. It was inevitable, of course, that nearly thirty people encamped in the house made food supplies short. There were fish in the pond, to be sure. There were some rabbits and small game in the woods. And the women—after due scouting by the men—did gather occasional mushrooms and hickory-nuts and other edible wild things.

But there were not animals enough for the party to support itself by hunting, even if they’d had ammunition to spare, and there were no crops to be gleaned. Nothing had been planted anywhere this year, save in isolated communities like the one these folk had come from.

“The answer is that I am an ass,” said Steve. “I’ve been doing research when I should have been applying what I found out day before yesterday. I’ve been working out schemes instead of keeping the pantry filled. If Bob, here, will put together a few wires…”

He had worked too hard. As long as he kept going, he was all right, but once he stopped and tried to turn to something else, exhaustion overcame him. He tried to sketch what he had in mind, but he yawned uncontrollably in the middle. But the boy Bob leaned over his shoulder.

“I think I get it, sir,” he said anxiously. “Let me try making it?”

“Go ahead, Bob. A-a-ugh! Put it together and I’ll charge the generator-wires with the crater-stone and we’ll have something to eat…”

The last of his words slurred. His eyes closed. He was asleep. In his absorption in the experimental work in hand, he’d gone far beyond the stage of being worn out. He slept like a log, and Frances watched jealously over him, even when the boy came anxiously and would have waked him for additional needed directions.

He slept for eighteen hours straight while Frances guarded his rest. But she had dozed off, herself, when he waked. She felt his eyes upon her, and started up. She smiled at him.

“You want something, Steve?”

He did not seem inclined to stir.

“N-no,” he said slowly. “I’m rested now. I’ve been awake for some time. I’ve been watching you. You’ve had a rotten deal, Frances.”

“I’m doing all right. Everything’s all right. You remember the baby that was sick? It played outdoors yesterday.”

He shook his head.

“I think I’m a nut. I drag you about the country until I find a place for you to stay in relative safety. Then I drag in thirty assorted people to increase your danger, and you go on short rations while I spend all my time puttering and seem to forget you.

“Next you try to make me eat the food you should have yourself, and I raise Cain and go off to sleep in the middle of everything, still without seeing that you’ve enough to eat. And then you sit up by me in case I want something. You have had a rotten deal from me.”