"All right," said Bud Gregory. "Just as y'please."
He waited patiently. Presently there was a faint humming noise. Bud Gregory turned off the switch and reached down. He removed the connecting clamps and meditatively fumbled with the water pump.
"That's okay," he finally said. "Try it if y'like."
HE POKED in the cheesebox, changing connections apparently at random. Murfree reached down and fingered the water-pump. He had made certain of the trouble with his car and he knew exactly how the broken shaft felt. Now it was perfect, exactly as if it had been taken out, welded, smoothed, trued and replaced.
"It feels all right!" said Murfree incredulously.
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "It is. Y'car's froze, now, though. Take the handle an' try it."
Murfree got out the starting-handle from the tool-box. He inserted it and strained. The motor was frozen solid. It could not be stirred. Murfree felt sick.
"Wait a minute," said Bud Gregory, "an' try again."
He put a single one of the clamps on the motor and tucked the other away in the cheesebox. He turned on the switch.
"Heave now," he suggested.
Murfree heaved—and almost fell over. There was no resistance to the movement of the motor except compression which was infinitely springy. There was no friction whatever. It moved with an incredible, fluid ease. It had never moved so effortlessly—though the compression remained as perfect as it had ever been. Murfree stared. Bud Gregory took off the clamp.
"Try again," he said, grinning.
With all his strength, Murfree could not move the motor. Overheated, it was frozen tight with all the oil burned from the inner surface of the cylinders. Yet an instant before—
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory, drily.
He threw on the ignition switch, got into the driver's seat, and stepped on the starter. The motor fairly bounced into life. It ran smoothly. He adjusted it to a comfortable Idling speed and got out.
"We'll run 'er for ten-fifteen minutes," he said casually, "to get fresh oil spread around. Then you' all fixed."
Murfree simply goggled.
"How does that work?" he said blankly. Bud Gregory shrugged.
"Steel is little hunks of stuff stickin' together. These tubes make a kinda stuff that makes the outside ones slide easy on each other. I fixed up this dinkus to help loosen nuts that was too tight an' for workin' on axles an' so on. That'll be five dollars. Okay?"
"Y-yes—my word!" said Murfree. He fumbled out his wallet and turned over a five-dollar bill. "Listen! You eliminated friction! Completely! There wasn't any friction! Where'd you get the idea for that thing?"
Bud Gregory yawned.
"It just come to me. I gotta knack for fixin' things."
"It should be patented!" said Murfree feverishly. "What'll you make one of these for me for?"
Bud Gregory grinned lazily.
"Too much trouble. Took me a day an' a half to put it together an' get it workin'. I don't like that kinda work."
"A hundred dollars? Five hundred? And royalties?"
Bud Gregory shrugged.
"Too much trouble," he said. "I get along. Don't aim to work myself to death. You can go along now. Your car's all right."
He shambled over to his chair. He seated himself with an air of infinite relaxation and leaned back against the corner of the shed. As Murfree drove away he raised one hand in utterly lazy farewell.
But Murfree drove down the red-clay road, marveling. There had been only a two-hour delay instead of the four to seven days that any other garage in the world would have needed. Murfree drove to what he believed would be either the only safe place within a thousand miles—that or the place where he and his family would definitely be killed. But for a while he did not think of that.
He was facing the slowly-realized fact that Bud Gregory was something that there isn't yet a word for. He could not yet realize the full significance of the discovery, but it was startling enough to knock out of his head—for the moment—even the deadly danger implied by leukemia in Cincinnati and dead grass in Pennsylvania and dead trout in Georgia and Geiger counters gone crazy in Washington.
Murfree still didn't connect Bud Gregory with the danger.
CHAPTER III
Hidden Connection
DEATH fell out of a rain cloud in Kansas. A driving summer rainstorm swept across the wheatfields of the plains and where it fell the growing wheat died. The occupants of every farmhouse on which the rainstorm beat died too in a matter of days.
The Mississippi River became a stinking broth of dead and rotting fish above St. Louis and the noisesomeness floated downstream to poison the water all the way to the Gulf—and beyond.
Dead birds fell from the skies over a dozen states and where they fell the earth went barren in little round spaces about them. A patch of the Gulf Stream turned white with dead fish. A game-preserve in Alabama became depopulated.
There were three hundred deaths in one night in Louisville. There were sixty in Chicago. The Tennessee Valley power-generating plant blew out every dynamo in five hectic minutes, during which sheet-lightning hurtled all about the interior of the generator-buildings.
Then death struck Akron, Ohio. Everybody knows about that—twelve thousand people in three days, and a whole section of the city roped off and nobody allowed to enter it, and the dogs and eats and even the sparrows writhing feebly on the streets before they too died.
It was radioactive dust that had done it. And Oak Ridge was blamed as the only possible source of radioactive dust and gas which could kill capriciously at a distance of hundreds of miles.
The newspapers raged. Congressmen—at home between sessions—leaped grandiloquently into print with infuriated demands for a special session of Congress in order that an investigation might be launched to fix responsibility—as if fixing responsibility would end the continuing disasters.
Eminent statesmen announced forthcoming laws which would destroy utterly every trace of atomic science in the United States and make it a capital offense to try to keep the United States in a condition either to defend itself or to keep abreast of the rest of the world.
Oak Ridge was shut down and every uranium pile dismantled—this to appease the public—and every available investigator was dispatched to Oak Ridge to uncover the appalling carelessness which had killed as many victims as a plague.
The only trouble was that all this indignation was baseless. Radioactive dust and gases were the cause of the deaths to be sure. But the Smyth Report had pointed out the danger from such by-products of chain-reaction piles and elaborate precautions had been taken against them.
The material which killed had not come from Oak Ridge. It couldn't have. Murfree had never even suspected it. The amount of dust was wrong. The amount of deadly stuff necessary to produce the observed effects simply couldn't have come from the atom piles in operation.
It was too much—and besides it would have killed anybody in its neighborhood at the point of its release into the air. And nobody had died at Oak Ridge. It came from somewhere else.
Picking his way desperately into the heart of the Smokies, Murfree kept track of events by his car radio. Two hundred miles in—the roads were so bad that a hundred-mile journey was a good ten hour's drive—there was enough data for a rough calculation of the amount of dust and gases that must have been released.
When Murfree made his calculation sweat broke out all over his body. Such a quantity of fissioning material could not result from a man-made atomic pile. The piles that men had made were as large as were readily controllable. This was incomparably larger.
All the piles at Oak Ridge and at Hand-ford in Washington together could not produce a twentieth or a hundredth of the stuff that had been released. Somehow, somewhere, a chain reaction had been started with so monstrous an amount of material to work on that it staggered the imagination. And it was increasing! It seemed to be growing like a cancer!