The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (57 page)

He woke, cramped, and Steve was still busy with the same absurd routine. It seemed to have no relationship at all to the situation facing him and all the rest of the world. It seemed a dreary and useless rigmarole, while the situation was desperate and apparently irremediable. The whole earth had exploded in a welter of destruction, in which cities vanished in the blue-white glare of atomic explosions.

Nobody knew who had started the destruction. No nation knew what other waged war against it.

In one sense it was not war at all, but a series of international assassinations in which all destruction was done anonymously and every nation cried fiercely that it was attacked and no nation admitted attacking. Now the whole earth was pock-marked with glass-lined craters where cities had been, and if any victorious nation actually survived, it was only after such destruction as no vanquished nation had ever before endured.

But some nation did survive more nearly than the rest. There were some folk who still had planes and bombs. They had arms they could give to guerillas to complete the ruin of a shattered America.

They had microwave communication sets with which to guide those bandit allies in the reduction of America to sheer savagery. They had monster aircraft which flew in the upper stratosphere. And unquestionably they had bases in which the arms and bombs were stored and the aircraft serviced, and from which the organized production of chaos was controlled. They had spies, who must number in the thousands.

Their bombing and fighter forces must be huge. Their technical facilities and resources must be on a relatively gigantic scale, compared to one small group of people, some thirty in number and with exactly one weary physicist among them, who could marshal only a dozen or so firearms and a single contrivance of salvaged copper wire and reclaimed bottles and clumsily-straightened nails. No self-respecting junk-yard would have given room to the equipment in Steve’s laboratory. But it was all he had, and he worked it grimly. With it he fumbled incalculable possible futures for a path to safety. Now and again two wires glowed in a bottle. They were the markers on the path.

When red dawn came he still worked, and in the same way. Scribble in a book. Hold two handles and think—cross out the scribble and scribble again. Hold two handles.

The strain was monstrous. Such mental effort was much worse than any physical labor could have been. But he went on like an automaton until the sun was clear of the horizon and climbing higher yet. Then, suddenly, the wires in the glass bottle glowed yet again. When they did, he dropped his hands in a gesture of worn-out completion.

But he could not rest, even yet. He had to make sketches of the new circuits, with the materials specified and all connections indicated. And then he had to set to work to make them.

When the sound of stirrings began in the house, he stopped and hunted up the sixteen-year-old Bob. He handed over the sketches for two devices and dully explained such details as the sketches did not show.

The boy scanned them eagerly and set to work at once. And Steve went back to the making of the third gadget—and fell into the numbed sleep of mental exhaustion before it was quite finished.

* * * *

Time passed. Off somewhere a dozen miles away, a band of guerillas woke in quarrelsome mood. Their leader had vanished. Because of his absence they’d drunk up the whisky he occasionally produced as if by magic, and had fought each other blindly.

This morning there were three dead men in camp, and still no leader.

They argued in a desultory fashion while they ate what food remained. They had no plans. They only knew that their leader had intended to examine a house a dozen miles away, a house which might be the headquarters of a rival band, or which might be the hideout of folk who could be robbed.

In either case it was a destination. Rival guerillas could be joined, most likely. Refugees could be killed, quite certainly, and refugees usually had some women with them.

As the morning wore on they quarrelsomely agreed to carry on. At about noon they began a shambling march toward the house, bunched and careless and pettish. They did not take care to stay among trees. Where they came to weed-grown fields they crossed them instead of skirting the edges.

At the house, the boy worked feverishly, and two intricate, lunatic agglomerations of metal scraps and oddments grew to completion under his hands. He went to hunt up Steve. He found Steve just desperately awaking and going on desperately with his part of the task.

Outside, Lucky fretted because there was no sign of Steve. Frances fiercely tried to stop him from going into the laboratory.

“If he fell asleep, let him!” she protested. “He works all the time, Lucky. He never rests.”

“But there’s a lot that’s due to happen today,” Lucky said uneasily. “There’s a gang comin’ this way and all.”

“You’re here,” said Frances. “You’ve got a crater-stone. You’ll do something about it.”

“Shucks!” said Lucky. “You think I’m a friend of yours, don’t you? Well then, let me be a friend of yours! There’s big doin’s on the way. I don’t know how to handle ’em. Your friend Steve does—or he seemed to think so, anyway. I’m goin’ to call him. Things need doin’.”

He knocked vigorously on the door of the laboratory.

“Rise and shine, fella!” he called. “What do we do?”

Steve came out of the laboratory, carrying the most improbable of freakish creations under his arm, while the boy Bob went on anxiously ahead to where he had assembled two more.

“Come along,” said Steve. “We’ve got to mount this stuff outdoors.”

He led the way up the hillside behind the house, where the boy was at work bracing an absurdity upright. One of the two things he had made was merely meaningless tangles of wire and bottles on a bit of charred board. The one he braced so carefully had been built around a section of three-inch sapling, which rested in a forked stick on two scorched, approximately straightened nails. It could be aimed like a gun.

“These are finished, sir, like I told you,” the boy told Steve worshipfully. “I don’t get what they’ll do, though.”

Steve put his own device down. He began to check the ones the boy had made.

“They’ll all hook together,” he said. “The one I just finished is a thought-record dinkus. It’ll hold a wish or a thought or a condition to be hooked into the others. It has to work, because I pulled that it would and it was in the pattern of possible events. That one—” he pointed to the section of sapling in the forked stick. “That’s a hypothetical probe. It’s like radar, in a way, but it can handle the output of the other, which is a generator-maker. You know how we make our electricity, Lucky?”

Lucky shook his head.

“We enhance thermal noises,” said Steve, still checking the Goldbergian assemblages of odd parts. “Shot effects, you know. They’re natural, spasmodic currents in all bits of metal. They’re accidental. So since we can control accidents, we can make them happen constantly and much stronger than in nature.

“We make all the free electrons travel one way and that cools off the metal and produces current, and the cooling absorbs more heat to make more current. We can make that action permanent, and it gives up all the power we need. This gadget will make it happen at a distance, but the effect will be only temporary.”

“You, said this was a hypo—hypo—” Bob said unhappily.

Steve untwisted one connection the boy had made, and twisted it in another place.

“You did good work, Bob. A hypothetical probe ought to be a variation on the way we’ve been finding out things. Up to now we’ve been pulling for something to happen, and if the crater-stone or the thing you made for me worked, we’d know it would happen. But this is a probe. It doesn’t say, ‘I wish this to happen when I do so-and-so.’ It says, ‘If I did so and so, would this happen?’

“Here! It looks all right. I’ll try it. I hook in the thought-record—so, to ask the question, ‘If I went along the line the probe points, would I see a plane?’ We can’t go straight up, you know, so it has to be hypothetical.

“With a crater-stone, Lucky, we’d get no answer. Finding a plane by going straight up wouldn’t be in the pattern of possible events because we can’t go straight up. But it’s in the pattern of ascertainable facts, so this thing ought to work.”

He swung the block of wood skyward. Wires glowed suddenly. He stopped moving the device.

“There’s a plane up there,” he said quietly. “The thing works like radar. Yes, there’s a plane up there!”

Lucky heard a distant screaming sound. Far away, black smoke mushroomed upward in a swift-moving, billowing mass. There was a second distant eruption. A third and fourth and fifth. Then the concussion-wave and the sound of the first explosion arrived simultaneously.

Leaves overhead jerked spasmodically.

The sound of the first explosion was a crushing roar. The second sound came, and the third and fourth and fifth. Each was louder than-the one-before. Each was nearer.

“Hey!” said Lucky in a queer voice. “They’re comin’ closer!”

Steve’s hands moved swiftly, with incredible speed. He was making connections with his fingers. Bits of wire tore the flesh and blood spurted, but he paid no heed.

“We’re going to be bombed,” he said with savage brevity.

Smoke spurted from twin explosions two miles away, then from three more, a mile and a half off. A bombing pattern was being established. Everything within an area, four miles long and two miles wide would be obliterated. But it had been extended a little because a band of moving figures had been sighted from above.

They were, of course, the quarrelling, leaderless guerillas whose leader had vanished the day before. They moved toward a spot where mysterious events had been reported. The guerillas made no reply to microwave signals sent down to them. Therefore they seemed a part of the mystery, perhaps the occupants of the house, and they were bombed.

Then the pattern of bombs moved toward the house, faster than any human being could flee. A bomb went off a mile away, and then two others flanking it. The concussion-wave staggered Steve. But he said harshly:

“Got it!”

He twitched the last two wires together. Other wires, bare wires, frosted suddenly as their internal heat became a surge of electricity and they drew more heat from the air around them.’ Two little wires in a bottle glowed brightly.

Then the sky cracked open. Wide!

CHAPTER XIV

War by Science

Concealing leaves were blown from the trees by the violence of the explosion. A bare half-dozen panes of glass, left in the house, splintered into fragments. Men reeled from the shock of the blast overhead. The world was filled with thunderous bellowing tumult which was the sound-wave of detonations overhead.

Its echoes and reechoes rolled and reverberated among the hills.

The noise died away, grumbling in the distance. Birds—at first paralyzed by fright—flapped and squeaked among the branches, and then took to wing in panic-stricken flight.

Almost directly above the house, some four thousand feet up, there was a monstrous, globular mass of black smoke. It writhed within itself. But a wind shifted it away, leaving streamers of sooty vapor behind.

And then, very high indeed, there could be seen another globe of black the size of a football. That was probably fifteen thousand feet up. Beyond it there was another at a likely twenty-five thousand feet, the size of a pea, and possibly others higher still. They were bombs which had detonated as they fell.

There was silence for a brief time only. Women began to call shrilly to their children, as if a mother’s arms could protect the children from bombs. One woman sobbed throatily. Lucky Connors stared up, his face gone white and drawn. The boy Bob also gazed upward with awe-struck, shining eyes. And Frances looked at Steve with the luminous expression of infinite pride a woman displays when her man has done something remarkable.

Steve set his lips.

“I guess that’s that. They’ll send over an atomic bomb next. Here! Where’s some extra wire? We’ve got to put a wide-angle extension on that probe! It’s got to work like a fish-eye lens!”

He snatched up scraps of extra wire. He began to form a reflector—radar-fashion—for the end of the apparatus made in the sapling-trunk.

“I can do that, sir,” the boy said quickly. “Like a one-eighty beam reflector, two ways?”

Steve nodded. He turned feverishly to the other maze-like masses of wiring.

“Got to cancel that thought-record and make another,” he muttered. “There’s not much time.”

His fingers bled. He shook them impatiently. He worked—he nodded to the boy. He fitted the newly-formed shape of wire to the end of the thing he had called a probe.

He fastened it in place and aimed the sapling trunk skyward.

“Now we’ll see what turns up. They should guess what’s happened.”

It was broad daylight, just past noon. But at that instant there was a flare of light at the very horizon which was brighter than the sun itself. It was monstrous in size. It was as if, for the fraction of a second, the sun had been brought terribly close to earth and had poured out a monstrous, radiant heat. Then the light winked out. The heat ceased. There was nothing where the light had been.