Whatever had begun a chain reaction outside of Oak Ridge and Handford and however it had become possible, it staggered the imagination. The output of murderous by-products increased day by day. It was building up to an unimaginable climax.
THERE was no danger of an atomic explosion, of course. An atomic pile does not blow up. But by the amount of by-products released, something on the order of a small but increasing volcano was at work somewhere. Instead of giving off relatively harmless gases and smoke, it gave off the most deadly substances known to men.
There could be no protection against such invisible death. Poured into the air at sufficiently high level—doubtless carried up by a column of hot air—finely-divided dust and deadly gas could travel for hundreds of miles before touching earth. Apparently they did. Where they touched earth, nothing could live.
Not only did living things die after breathing in the deadly stuff but the ground itself became murderous. To walk on an area where the ground emitted radioactive radiation was to die. To breathe the air exposed to those rays. . . .
Murfree went desperately on in his search for the impossible source of the invisible carriers of death. He found the first evidence that he was on the right track a hundred miles from a telephone. He was far beyond powerlines and railroads. He was in that Appalachian Highlands, where life and language is a hundred years behind the rest of America.
He stopped to buy food and ask hopeless questions at a tiny, unbelievably primitive store. He tried the Geiger counter. And it clicked measurably more often than before. Twenty miles farther on its rate of clicking had gone up fifty percent. He spent a day in seemingly aimless wandering, driving the laboring car over roads that had never before known pneumatic tires.
Then he left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly cabin. His wife was not easy about it. She protested.
"But what will happen to us?" she asked desperately. "I want to share whatever happens to you, David!"
Murfree was not a particularly heroic person. He was frankly scared. But he spoke firmly.
"Listen, my dear! Something like a uranium pile has started up somewhere in these hills. It's on a scale that nobody's ever imagined before. It's so big that it's incredible that human beings could have started it. It's pouring out radioactive dust and gases into the air. They're being spread by the winds. Where the stuff lands everything dies.
"And the pile is increasing in size and violence. If it keeps on increasing, it will make at least this continent uninhabitable, and it may destroy all the life in the world. Not only all human life but every bird and beast and even the fish in the ocean deeps. And something's got to be done!"
"But—"
"I brought you so far with me," said Murfree doggedly, "because you were no safer in Washington than anywhere else. So far, death from the thing is a matter of pure chance. Wherever it's happening the ground must be so hot that a column of air rises from it like smoke from a forest fire.
"But the place where there's least smoke from a fire is close to its edge. That's why I brought you this close. You're safer here than farther away and much safer than you'd be closer."
"But you intend to go on!" she protested. "I've got a protective suit," he told her. "I managed to borrow one quite unlawfully from the bureau. I couldn't get more. If I can get close enough to the thing to map it or simply locate it drone planes can complete the exploration. But I've got to know, and I've got to take back some sort of evidence.
"I'm going to be as careful as I can, my dear. The only hope that exists is for me to get back with accurate information. I'll take that to Washington and then I take you and the kid as far away from here as what money we have will carry us."
"And if you don't get back?"
"You'll be safe here longer than anywhere else," he told her. "In the nature of things, if the stuff rises up on a hot-air column, it won't start to drop until it's a long way off.
"We're probably not more than a hundred miles from whatever impossible thing a natural atomic pile is. I'm leaving you what money I have. It will keep you here for years. Unless something can be done, the rest of America will be a desert long before that time!
"I'm guessing," he added gloomily, "but nobody else is even doing that! They blame Oak Ridge. But the weather-maps point clearly to this area as the place from which the dust must have been dispersed."
It was not a sentimental parting. Murfree was an earnest family man who happened also to be a scientist. He had done what he could for his family's safety—and it wasn't much. But now he had to do something which would most probably be quite futile, on the remote chance that it could do some good.
If the source of radioactive dust-clouds now drifting over America were a natural phenomenon like a volcano, it was hardly likely that anything could be done about it. North America would probably become uninhabitable in months or at most a year or two. There might be some areas on the West Coast where prevailing winds could keep away the poison for a time, but it was entirely possible that ultimately the whole earth would become a desert of radioactive sand and its seas empty of even microscopic life.
So Murfree left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly home a hundred and twenty miles from a telephone and two hundred miles from an electric light. He went on to verify the danger that he seemed to be the only living man to evaluate correctly. He still did not connect Bud Gregory with it.
CHAPTER IV
The Horror Hole
MOTORISTS drove shakily to doctors in half a dozen cities, sick and frightened. They had high fevers and all the symptoms of burns, but there was no sign of injury upon their bodies.
Then it was observed that a patch of blight had appeared upon a coastal highway. All the vegetation in a space half a mile long and three hundred yards wide had died overnight. The highway ran through the blighted area. All the motorists had driven through it.
Fish died in a reservoir connected to a great city's water-supply system. The city's water was cut off and a desperate attempt made to bring in drinking-water by tank-car. Power-lines leading from Niagara Falls were shorted by arcs which leaped across the air-gap separating the wires. Then came the deaths in Louisville.
Nobody thought about Murfree, of course. He went on doggedly, unspectacularly, in search of the thing he knew might mean the depopulation of a continent and, of course, his own death if he should succeed in finding it. He went deeper and deeper into that island of the primitive, the back country of the Smokies.
There was no flat land. Mountains were everywhere—spurs and crags and sprawling monsters of store. with blankets of forest to their tips—patches of cornfield at slopes of thirty and forty degrees. There were bearded, ragged mountaineers with suspicion of strangers as an instinct—barefooted broods of tow-headed children—and mountains—and more mountains—and mare. . . .
Murfree's progress was necessarily indirect, because he could get only the vaguest of bearings upon his objective. The Geiger counter clicked ever more rapidly. On the second day after he had left his wife behind, Murfree put on his protective suit.
He looked more strange and aroused more suspicion among the mountaineers. There were no more roads, only trails, now. The car, however, was lighter not only by the absence of his wife and daughter, but by all of their personal possessions.
He wormed his way along impossible paths, fording small streams and climbing prohibitive grades, while the noise of the Geiger counter increased to a steady, minor roar. He came to a mountain-cabin where nothing moved.