Murfree clamped his jaws. His hands clenched.
He wasn't far enough into the Smokies for his needs and that power-line-loss business meant that he had to hurry.
"Any chance of getting another car?" he asked desperately.
BUYING another car would put an impossible dent in his resources but he felt that the matter was urgent enough to justify such a step. He had two possible courses of action—this, and flight to the farthest possible part of the West. He'd chosen this because it meant a fight against the danger he foresaw.
"This here's a pretty good car," Bud Gregory drawled. "Fix 'er up an' she'll be all right."
"But it'll take days!" said Murfree bitterly. "You've got to take the motor practically apart!".
Bud Gregory spat with vast precision at a cluster of flies about a previous splash of tobacco-juice.
"She'll take a coupla hours to cool," he said drily. "That's all. No bearin's burnt. Ain't never yet seen a car I couldn't fix. I got a kinda knack for it."
"But you've got to take off the cylinder-head!" protested Murfree. "And replace the rings and fix the valves and take the pump apart and get a new shaft! No garage in the world would undertake the job in less than four days!"
"I'll do it," said Bud Gregory, "in two hours an' a half. An' two hours'll be waitin' for it to cool."
He grinned. He wasn't boasting. He was showing off a little, perhaps. But he was saying something he knew with absolute knowledge.
Murfree threw up his hands.
"Do that," he said bitterly, "and I'll believe in miracles!"
He got his wife and small daughter out of the car. He led them down to the general store of Brandon, which sold fertilizer, dry-goods, harness, perfumery, canned goods, farm machinery and general supplies. He bought the materials for a picnic lunch and he and his family came back. They sat in the car, with the doors open for coolness, and ate.
But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying sounds of the overheated motor dwindled and ceased.
Presently Murfree got out and paced up and down beside the car, restlessly. After a time he went to the back and took out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and there was a freakish-looking metal-lined glass tube with electrical connections plainly showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of a completely different shape.
Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from somewhere inside the box a "click" sounded. A moment later, there was another. Then two clicks close together, and a pause, and another.
Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked briskly but unrhythmically.
There was no order in the sequence of tiny sounds.
Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade. He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree and the box.
"What good does that do?" Murfree's wife said.
"None at all," Murfree said wretchedly. "It only tells me nothing's happened to us yet."
HE STOOD watching the box, in which nothing moved at all, but from which clickings came at brief intervals.
Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed and stridulated.
The box clicked.
Bud Gregory got up and came over curiously. He regarded the box with an interested intentness. It was not an informed look, as of someone looking at a familiar object. It wasn't even a puzzled look, as of someone trying to solve the meaning of something strange. He wore exactly the absorbed expression of a man who picks up an unfamiliar book and reads it and finds it fascinating.
"What's—uh—what's this here thing do?" asked Bud, drawling.
"It's a Geiger counter," said Murfree. He had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had. Not even Bud. But Murfree said, "It counts cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It's a detector for cosmic rays and radioactivity."
Bud's face remained uncomprehending.
"Don't mean nothing to me," he drawled. "Kinda funny, though, how it works. Some-thin' hits, an' current goes through, an' then it cuts off till somethin' else hits. What you want it for?"
CHAPTER II
Miracle
IT WAS genuine curiosity. But an ordinary man, looking at a Geiger counter, does not understand that a tiny particle at high velocity—so small that it passes through a glass tube and a metal lining without hindrance—makes a Geiger tube temporarily conductive. Murfree stared blankly at Bud Gregory.
"How the heck—" Then he said curiously, "It was invented to detect radiations that come from nobody knows where. And it's used in the plants that make atom bombs, to tell when there's too much radioactivity—too much for safety."
"I heard about atom bombs," Bud Gregory drawled. "Never knew how they worked." Murfree, still curious, spoke in words as near to one syllable as he could. This man had said he could make an impossible repair and had the air of knowing what he was talking about.
He looked at a Geiger counter and he knew how it worked and had not the least idea what it was used for. Murfree gave him a necessarily elementary account of atomic fission. He was appalled at the inadequacy of his explanation even as he finished it. But Bud Gregory drawled:
"Oh, that—mmm—I get it. Them little things that knock that ura—ura—uranium stuff to flinders are the same kinda things that make this dinkus work. They kinda knock a little bit of air apart when they hit it. I bet they change one kinda stuff to another kind, too, if enough of 'em hit. Huh?"
Murfree jumped a foot. This lanky and ignorant backwoods repairman had absorbed highly abstruse theory, put into a form so simplified that it practically ceased to have any meaning at all, and had immediately deduced the fact of ionization of gases by neutron collision. And the transmutation of elements! He not only understood but could use his understanding.
"Right interestin'," said Bud Gregory and yawned. "I reckon your motor's cool enough to work on."
He put his hand on the cylinder-block. It was definitely hot, but not hot enough to scorch his fingers.
"Yeah," he said. "I'll fix the pumpshaft first."
He went languidly to a well beside the repair shed. He drew a bucket of water. He poured it into the radiator. There was a very minor hissing, which ceased immediately. He filled the radiator, reached down and worked at the pumpshaft with his fingers and with a speculative, distant look in his eyes, then straightened up.
He shambled into the shed and came out, trailing a long, flexible cable behind him. Up to the very edge of the Smokies and for a varying distance into them, there is no village so small or so remote that it does not have electric power. He put a round wooden cheesebox on the running-board of the car and drew out two shorter cables with clips on their ends. He adjusted them.
Murfree saw an untidy tangle of wires and crude hand-wound coils in the box. There were three cheap radio tubes. Bud Gregory turned on a switch and leaned against the mud-guard, waiting with infinite leisureliness.
"What's that?" asked Murfree, indicating the cheesebox.
"Ain't got any name," said Bud Gregory. "Somethin' I fixed up to weld stuff with. It's weldin' your shaft." He looked absently into the distance. "It saves a lotta work," he added without interest.
"But—but you can't weld a shaft without taking it out!" protested Murfree. "It'd short!"
Bud Gregory yawned.
"This don't. It's some kinda stuff them tubes make. It don't go through iron. It just kinda bounces around. Where there's a break, it heats up an' welds. When it's all welded it just bounces around."
Murfree swallowed. He walked around the car and looked at the apparatus in the cheesebox. He traced leads with his eyes. His mouth opened and closed.
"But that can't do anything!" he protested. "The current will just go around and around!"