The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (55 page)

“I’d have been dead, and very horribly, but for you, Steve,” she said quietly. “I was half-starved when I met you, and it’s only been the past couple of days that we’ve been on rations. And I’d been hiding from looters in sheds and under leaves and—everywhere, and now I live in a house which has electric lights and books, and there are people around me that I’m not afraid of. And sometimes you actually notice me, Steve.” She smiled at him, her eyes crinkled. “Actually, you sometimes notice me! I’ll do.”

He sat up and grabbed at her arm.

“Notice you? What the devil do you think I’m working for? Why do you think I want to have safety and civilization and decency back in the world again?”

“I couldn’t guess,” she said with an air of breathless interest. “Do tell me, Steve! Why?”

He seized her in exasperation, and she smiled at him again, and he kissed her. And they sat on the floor together, with his arm about her shoulders, and she looked perfectly contented. Even when, some ten minutes later, he was saying absorbedly:

“The kid pointed out that extremely short waves won’t go around sharp corners and can’t travel through water. So, we fixed our switches so they give off nothing but extremely short stuff when they are opened and closed, and surrounded them with water. Not too tricky, you notice. I can’t help thinking as I was trained to. The children in this gang will run rings around me as scientists when they’re a bit older, with the new stuff that’s bound to come.”

Frances listened, but she looked most often at Steve’s hand, tightly holding her own. He went on zestfully:

“With the trick of exploring the pattern of possible futures, and finding out what’s possible and what isn’t, it actually took me only two hours to work out a gadget to do everything the crater-stones will do.

“I can put any amount of power into it. But I needed electricity to try it, and the dynamo was a wreck. So the kid came up with an idea. One of the most annoying effects of indeterminacy is the shot effect, the thermal noises you get in high-gain electronic equipment.”

Frances didn’t understand but she didn’t let Steve know it.

“How can the difficulty be overcome?” she asked.

“Free electrons, roaming around in a wire, by pure accident sometimes, pile up at one end,” Steve went on. “When they do, that’s an electric current. The kid said those currents are accidents and could I make them when I wanted to. And that was all I needed. Of course I could! I took a bit of wire and used the crater-stone. All the electrons in it could only move toward one end, as if Clerk Maxwell’s demons were on the job. Of course, that cooled off the wire. And of course it gave a current!”

He looked at her triumphantly.

“Then I wondered if that accidental condition could be made permanent, and it could. After I’ve treated a bit of wire, the electrons can only travel in one direction in it, and so they do. They pile up, new free electrons form where they came from, and we have power, the wire gets cold and absorbs more heat to produce more electricity, and it’s a D.C. generator with no moving parts, that needs no fuel, and that will keep on working till the cows come home. We’ll never worry about fuel any more. We can run machines and automobiles and ships and airplanes on heat we take out of the air. Sunpower, when you think of it. That’s a good first step toward a new civilization.”

Frances smiled warmly at him. He freed her hand to gesticulate.

“I was working then with electrons. I tried it next with molecules. They have random motions because of heat. It’s more pronounced in gases and liquids but it’s always there. When I was able to make all the molecules in a glass of water try to move in the same direction at the same time, I knew I had the next big thing lined up. I was trying to fix some iron the same way when you came in to try to make me eat.”

Then Steve stopped short and looked at her. His expression became one of intense self-disgust.

“Lord! Frances! Here I’m talking rot instead of going after grub for you! Why do you stay here and listen, anyway?”

“I thought,” said Frances ingenuously, “that maybe when you got through you might kiss me again.”

They went out of the laboratory some ten minutes later, with Frances smiling contentedly and patting her hair back into place.

“And we’re both hungry,” Steve said to her, marveling. “It must be love!”

They were laughing when they went in search of Bob, the boy. He had labored magnificently, but his creation looked like nothing that had ever been before on earth, or in the heavens above or the waters under the earth. It was an incredibly intricate arrangement of bits of second-hand wire and salvaged bottles from the former trash-dump. Some of the bottles were filled with liquid and had wires inserted, in them, but others seemed completely empty save for wires which had no apparent purpose.

“These are our jewels, I think,” said Steve. “I’ll check it over and get some of our whiskered allies to work it. Since Bob, here, made it, they may not think I’m a witch if it works. But they’ll keep him busy for the next month or so explaining it to them.”

He verified the meanderings of wires which were definitely not in any circuit which could be classed as electronic. It was something completely new, and it looked insane.

“A good job, Bob. Let’s show it to the others.”

The boy gulped, and ran. In minutes the others came to see. The boy stood back, trembling with excitement.

Steve smiled at the men who still regarded him with a mixture of faith and dark suspicion.

“This is a machine to cause accidental happenings,” he said. “Our young friend Bob made it. He’ll explain to you how it works. There are all sorts of accidents. Some are good ones and some are bad. This is supposed to cause good ones.” He pointed to the bearded man who had been first to say that even if Steve had defeated the late looters with the devil’s aid he was glad of it. “You, there! If you’ll take hold of those two handles and think of what we need to have h appen, I believe you’ll get your wish.”

The bearded man stepped forward. His face contorted with sudden terrific emotion, He held the handles.

Nothing happened.

Steve touched his shoulder and he stepped back.

“I wished,” said the bearded man fiercely, “that every murderer and looter in the world should drop dead, and every man who had anything to do with the bombs!”

“I’m afraid our gadget isn’t up to anything on so large a scale,” said Steve drily. “We’ll have to be a bit more modest. That couldn’t happen by accident. It couldn’t happen by chance.”

The boy whispered to Steve.

“But it works, sir! I tried it. I—pulled for it that someday I’ll know as much as you do, and the wires glowed!”

Steve looked at him, and could make no comment. He turned to the other men.

“Somebody pull for something that’s simply improbable,” he suggested curtly. “I want you people to realize that this is simply machinery but that it does produce a definite result.”

A younger man took the two handles. One of the bottles with wires and liquid suddenly bubbled. The wire seemed to grow incandescent under the liquid. It stayed that way. Another wire, exposed to air, glistened wetly. The wetness clouded. The wire covered with frost. Then, gradually, the incandescence died away. The young man, a little bit frightened, let go of the handles.

“We’re all on short rations,” he explained apologetically. “I wished the snares we’ve got in the woods will get filled up so we’ll all have a good supper.”

“That is what science is for!” said Steve approvingly. “Right now, anyhow. Let’s see what we see.”

An hour later the men began to come back from their round of the snares. They had more than twenty rabbits, two ruffed grouse, and a partridge. Steve nodded in satisfaction.

“I guess we can keep game coming in to feed us,” he told Frances. “But we’ve got to be careful, at that. If there’s a migration of game this way, there’ll be people following it. We’ll have to go in for wild-fowl, instead of ground-game. Say, a dozen or so ducks or geese or whatnot to land on the pond each day.

“Somehow too, we’ve got to get vegetables, and some iron and stuff to work with.” He sighed. “I’m not going to feel comfortable, though, until we’ve got some kind of a defense against atomic bombs and attacks by the guerillas who might be sent to hunt us down.”

“I wish you had more time to be with me, Steve,” Frances said wistfully.

“I wish that those two men who went off to hunt for the women would come back,” said Steve. “And Lucky would be handy to have around. I can cook up gadgets, Frances, but I guess I’m not practical. Everybody’s been hungry because I wasn’t. And we’ve got to be practical.

“The people with planes and bombs do know that something odd happened around here. Their man had reported it before I killed him. And it’s a fact that, if we’re let alone, sooner or later we’ll be dangerous. But right now they could crush us as we step upon ants.”

There were thirty people in the house, of whom Steve and a sixteen-year-old boy alone could make a device which controlled chance, and therefore constituted the whole body of useful science left upon earth.

The rest of the continent of North America was a waste, roamed by ever-more-desperate looting bands who inevitably tore down any traces of civilization they came upon, guided by the spies of people who were resolved that America should become unpeopled save by savages.

But the two men who had set out days before, came back that afternoon. They had two women and three small children with them. The women and the children were nearly half-starved. One of the women had been a prisoner of a small band of looters, a fragment of the bands which had hunted the refugees across country. Her captors were now dead. The two men were filled with bitterest rage. The shorter of the men had four fresh scalps dangling on his belt.

That was disturbing. Civilization could not be based on scalps. But as Steve was thinking it over in his mind, later on, there was a hail from the new-fallen night.

Lucky Connors had come back.

CHAPTER XII

Ominous News

Uttering a cry of delight Frances hugged Lucky and Steve found himself unexpectedly jealous. But Lucky put out his hand and grinned.

“You been goin’ places, fella,” Lucky said. “You really got things done. Whew, electric lights! You got a whole tribe around you. You got plenty of grub?”

“We’ll do,” said Steve. “I’ve been needing you, Lucky. I seem to be the absentminded professor type. But there’s a kid here who used to play with television.”

“Migosh!” said Lucky. “Stop him, fast! Those guys with planes and bombs can track down anything like that. Look!”

He unslung a pack from his back and tumbled out a half dozen small flat objects.

“These here, are some kinda short-wave sets,” he said earnestly. “Spies for the guys with planes carry ’em. They can spot anything that runs by electricity with ’em. They can talk with planes with ’em. And they can find each other and know each other with ’em. If there’s somebody playin’ with television around here he’d better quit right off!”

Steve nodded.

“We’re safe as far as that goes. I got one of these same things from a spy I killed. If you open them the wrong way they blow up, though.”

Lucky grinned again. They were in the big room of the house with electric lights, but as there was a serious shortage of bulbs, a great fire was burning in the fireplace. The farmers, who now gave Steve great respect, had gathered to listen. Lucky seemed to be in fine fettle.

“I got me a spy, early,” he said contentedly. “Remember I told you I was gonna hunt down one of the fellas who report to the guys doin’ the bombin’s? And I said I was gonna make him talk? When I left here, I pulled hard to meet one of those fellas. First day after I left, I struck on south. Then west. I went on three days and never saw a livin’ soul. I didn’t feel agreeable, and maybe it was just as well.

“On the fourth day I found a dead man, new-killed. He looked like he’d been eatin’ regular, so I hunted for a trail an’ went on after the folks who’d killed ’im. ‘Bout nightfall I caught up with ’em, settin’ around a fire. I went in to the fire an’ says, ‘I’m Lucky Connors and I’m a gamblin’ fool. I got a rifle I’ll gamble against grub or what have you, with y’own dice.’ That kinda broke the ice.”

Steve grimaced. With a crater-stone, controlling chance, Lucky Connors could not lose shooting crap unless he wanted to, no matter what dice he rolled.

“Them that woulda killed me for the rifle, figured it’d be more fun to roll me for it,” said Lucky. “But I cleaned up the camp, usin’ their own dice, and some of them was the crookedest dice I ever did see! Then I ate hearty and said, ‘I’m Lucky Connors, fellas, and I can’t carry all this stuff I won. You fellas take it back and let me in on the party, whatever it is.’ And I set back and waited for ’em to call the play. But I was in.”

Lucky paused and grinned.

“They coulda killed me, but every one of ’em wanted to find out how I made their own dice misbehave,” he went on. “So we set around cordial and they told me what they were aimin’ for. They’d heard there was a farm that hadn’t been raided and there was a coupla women and plenty of grub there, so they were goin’ over to see. So I joined ’em for the raid, and I pulled for the folks we were goin’ after to light out before we got there.”