CHAPTER II
Miracles Without Work
LIKE everybody else in the United States, Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards, in Washington, felt rather sick at the prospect of war under any circumstances, and especially under the conditions obtaining. The point was that the United States literally could not make a sneak atomic attack on anybody. Its prospective enemy could. Nobody in America had authority to issue an order for the beginning of war.
In the European Power's government there was one man who could simply nod his head and have guided missiles go keening up into the stratosphere to fall thousands of miles away upon the cities of the United States.
If Congress took his note as it deserved to be taken—as a threat of war—he would nod his head and possibly half of the population in America would be dead within hours. The United States was as well-armed as any other Power in the world, perhaps better-armed.
But the United States could not shoot first. It simply, literally, could not. And in atomic war, the one who shoots first wins. So the situation was that the enemy had made a threat which struck at the very roots of American civilization, and if the United States took measures to meet it, it would be destroyed.
Most of the people who really understood the danger went into hidden panic. There was a sudden quiet movement of well-informed people out of the larger cities. The movement spread. It ceased to be quiet. It became a mass exodus—more or less orderly, to be sure, but a movement of whole populations.
Terror lived in the cities, but not in the open country so the cities became practically abandoned and the European Power watched with sardonic amusement as the greatest nation on earth seemed to go into a blue funk at the very notion of the European Power's displeasure.
Two-thirds of Congress found excuses to leave Washington, which would certainly be bombed in case of war. It was impossible to secure a quorum in the Capital either to enact laws to resist the threat or to yield to it. The government of the United States was paralyzed by a mere verbal menace.
But Doctor David Murfree stayed at his post. He kept his head. The menace held, but for nearly a week nothing happened. The State Department replied to the note it had received. It asked the European Power for the agenda of the discussion it proposed and for an outline of the reasons why the European Power feared aggression from the United States. It used all the normal tricks to stall and gain time. Which was exactly in line with the desires of the head of the threatening nation.
So long as there was a crisis in being, there would be terror and confusion in America. Large numbers of the population would be uprooted, the cities would be nearly or quite deserted, commerce would stop and generally such a state of affairs would exist that —so a European would reason—presently the American public would be willing to accept any possible surrender of principle just to get things going again. It would be willing even to surrender democracy.
There were times when it seemed likely in America, too. Some people stayed on at their posts. Some sent their families to safety and carried on. But very many fled. Still there was a skeleton semblance of city life still going on.
Many factories closed, but some florists stayed in business. Police and newspapers here and there and radio stations and delicatessen stores and a few taxicabs, and generally a small percentage of every sort of activity continued to function. But it was a very small percentage.
Murfree, however, grimly made the most of what was left. He stayed at his desk in the Bureau of Standards and urgently and persistently hounded the moribund clipping-bureaus for newspaper accounts of odd events. That paradoxic activity, he felt, was the only hope that the United States could have to avoid either complete social and economic collapse, or else bombardment by atomic bombs which would reduce its cities to ruins.
He'd been collecting such clippings for months. It was a good deal of a strain on his finances too, because he had only a forty-seven-hundred-dollar Civil Service job, and living in Washington is expensive. He paid ten cents for every clipping sent him by four bureaus, which dutifully searched newspaper columns all over the country.
IF SOMEBODY announced an atomic engine, a clipping came to Murfree. If an automobile had a freak accident, he saw the news account. If a souped-up motor made history at an outboard-motor racing meet, or an inventor made extravagant claims for some new device, or there was an explosion without plain cause, or somebody reported having seen something impossible—the last especially—Murfree was sure to be poring over the news account as soon as it reached print.
It was the way by which he hoped eventually to locate Bud Gregory. He'd only seen the man twice (see THE GREGORY CIRCLE, THRILLING WONDER STORIES April, 1947) but he knew what Bud Gregory was, and there was no word for it. Musical prodigies are well-known enough. Mathematical marvels extract fourth-power roots correctly by mental arithmetic, and are completely unable to tell how they do it.
But Bud Gregory was something else. He knew intuitively the answer to any problem a physicist could propound, and he hated work. He had run a one-man auto-repair shop in a village in the Great Smoky Mountains, and worked only when he couldn't help it. But when he did work, he casually devised short-cuts—to avoid work—that were breathtaking.
Murfree now owned one gadget Bud Gregory had made. It completely eliminated friction from any mechanical device it was hooked to. Murfree had studied it exhaustively, but he couldn't understand it and couldn't even duplicate it. But Bud Gregory's genius once had brought about results he didn't anticipate.
To get even with someone who'd offended him, Bud had made a certain device and turned it over to his tormenter, who used it otherwise than as Bud expected. Common, ordinary rock became a monstrous atomic pile where it was turned on. Radioactive dust and gases wrought havoc before Murfree found the source and Bud Gregory improvised a way to stop it. And then Bud Gregory, in a panic, had disappeared lest he be held to account for the damage his device had caused.
Now Murfree hoped to locate him by further—and it was to be hoped harmless—results of his combined genius and laziness. He'd vanished in a rattle-trap with his wife and dogs and children. He would unquestionably support himself by roadside automobile repairs. So sooner or later Murfree hoped to receive a newspaper clipping of some preposterous event which he, and only he, would know meant Bud Gregory was at work. But it came to be grim work, waiting, and endlessly hoping.
A second sharp note arrived from the European Power, declaring that there was reason to believe the United States had secretly prepared for war. If the Atlantic carrier fleet remained invisible, it would have to be assumed that the ships had set out on a mission to loose plane-carried atomic bombs on the complaining nation. So the carrier fleet returned to port.
Then a third note arrived. A fleet of long-range U.S. bombers waited at its home base, fueled and armed and ready to take off. Was this fleet ready for a flight across the North Pole to make an atomic attack? If not, it would be disarmed.
Then another note still. The atomic-bomb plants of the United States still functioned, turning out atomic explosives. Against whom did the United States prepare, if not against the complaining nation?
Congress could not be convened because too many of its members were in a funk. The United States could not make war without Congressional action unless attacked. So it could not make war until attacked, and an attack with atomic bombs by two-thousand-mile guided missiles—
The country almost disintegrated, so far as the larger cities were concerned. The little towns, though, which were not important enough to be bombed, throve in their impunity. Farm-houses and boarding-houses accustomed to take in summer boarders fairly bulged at their seams. Beaches and camps and cottage towns, trailer-camps and mountain hotels and lakeside resorts, all hummed and boomed with refugees from the cities, while the cities themselves were like cities of death.