"What's the idea?" asked Murfree drearily. "Are you spies, or just plain traitors?"
"Huh!" scoffed the man in front. "You talk like the movies! We're just honest guys pickin' up a livin' how we can. Your friend there, has got a little trick that'll be useful to us. He can fix up a car to go faster, stop shorter, turn sharper and have more pickup—"
The beefy man, at the wheel, growled at him. He shut up. The pattern wasn't right for spies or agents of a foreign, European Power. Agents of that particular Power, in any case, were packed too full of ideology to talk as this fellow did. These men sounded like yeggs or crooks who'd seen a chance to acquire getaway cars that no cop could overtake. Murfree looked dizzily at Bud Gregory, who grinned uneasily.
"Yeah. That's it, Mr. Murfree. Y'see, I was travelin' across-country, and my car didn't have much power. Motor'd lost a lotta compression. So I put on a" dinkus that made her pull up hills. And that's what these fellas want."
"What'd you do?" asked Murfree. His throat was dry and his voice was hoarse. And his head ached and ached and ached.
"Uh." Bud Gregory looked uncomfortable. "You know them little hunksa stuff that metal's made of. They wiggle all around. They wiggle faster when they get hot."
Murfree reflected dully that Bud Gregory, who was practically illiterate, was speaking with precision of the random motion of molecules which is caused by heat.
"I got a kinda idea," said Bud Gregory, "that if I could make all those hunksa stuff move one way instead of all ways, it would push the car ahead. So I fixed up a dinkus that made 'em all move one way. It give my car a lot more power."
Murfree was not astonished. Bud Gregory could not astonish him now. Of course if all the molecules of a substance move in the same direction the substance itself moves in that direction. Using the molecular motion generated by heat, you should get practically limitless acceleration, quite independent of traction.
It should start a car off at any imaginable speed, it should climb any hill, it should stop a car with unbelievable suddenness, and if the motion could be controlled—and hence the thrust—it could keep a car from turning over, and from skidding.
Yes. Also it would be action without a reaction, and it would serve equally to power an ancient jalopy or an aeroplane. Only, an aeroplane wouldn't need wings because the same molecular thrust could lift it, and that meant that it could furnish a drive for a spaceship and provide the direct means for the conquest of the stars.
And Bud Gregory had devised it to make his ancient car climb hills! "Then one day I seen some dirt-track races," explained Bud Gregory. "I seen fellas bettin' on 'em, so I made a deal with a driver and put my dinkus on his car. He could go faster, so he won, and I'd bet on him, and won some, too. It was pretty easy money, Mr. Murfree, and I don't never figure on workin' myself to death."
"Whatever you use with that drive gets cold," Murfree said dully.
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory nodding. "I use the motor to pull the car, and it gets cold. That's why I run the motor, so's it won't get too cold to push. I been followin' the dirt-track races ever since," he added, "rentin' out my dinkus to drivers an' bettin' on 'em."
AT THIS, Murfree, kidnaped and with his head one monstrous ache, felt again that helpless, irritated envy with which Bud Gregory always inspired him.
Bud had made a heat transformer which turned heat directly into kinetic energy! He'd made a device which could replace every motor on earth by a simpler element, and raise the amount of power available by an astronomical figure! He'd created an invention which could go far toward making Earth a paradise and mistress of far-flung planets —and he used it to win dirt-track races so he could bet two or four or five dollars at a time and so live without working!
Now that same device—which could mean the survival of humanity in those distant ages when the sun begins to cool—that same device would now be applied to provide thieves and holdup men with getaway cars the police could not overtake!
Murfree did not believe his captors were spies or aliens. They were simply criminals. And presently they would very probably kill him, because they'd want the secret of their success to remain a secret and Bud Gregory would doubtless be kept a prisoner as long as he was useful.
And meanwhile that European Power would pile one sardonic demand upon another—making sure that America did not prepare defense—until either the United States adopted the alien social system out of sheer necessity, or was wiped out in blasts of atomic flames.
But there was no use talking about it. Bud Gregory could not grasp the emergency, and these criminals would look upon it shrewdly as simply an opportunity for large-scale activity of their own variety. Murfree felt the motion of the car more and more violently in his throbbing head. Vibration was agonizing. The after-effects of the crack on his head manifested themselves, too. Suddenly, from a combination of weakness and pain and exhaustion and a form of surgical shock, he fell into a heavy, unnatural sleep.
And just at the moment that Murfree lapsed into something like a coma-like slumber, the President of the United States took a momentous and quite illegal decision. By law he could comply with the request of the European Power for the grounding and dismantling of all United States aircraft, and for the decommissioning of the battle fleet. By law he could not take any particular action in the situation as it stood. But he did do something. His jaw set, he wrote formal and quite improper orders in his own handwriting. He gave those orders personally to certain high-ranking officers.
"Perhaps this is treason," said the President bitterly. "But I won't see this country go down without a fight! The laws seem to require it, but for once to the devil with the laws! If those rascals over there want a fight, they'll get it. But they won't get an inch more of concession from us without a fight."
And after that, of course, it was simply a question of whether the President's orders could be carried out before the European Power learned that they had been issued. One way, America would be ready to give back as good as it got. The other way meant ruin!
CHAPTER IV
Tough Tactics
NEXT morning Bud Gregory shambled into the room in which Murfree had been placed, his craggy features woebegone. "Well?" Murfree said sourly.
"Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory miserably. "Those fellas certainly fooled me. That squinty-eyed fella, he told me they was good fellas. I been makin' out right good, bettin' on him in the dirt-track races. I ain't had to mend a car in a coupla weeks. I been eatin' hawg-meat and drinkin' beer and not botherin' nobody. But he fooled me!"
"Evidently," said Murfree. His head was horribly sore where it had been hit. He was sick with impotent fury.
He knew, now, that his guess in the car had been right. His captors were simply criminals. They could not see beyond that personal benefit any more than Bud Gregory could see beyond his personal aversion to sheriffs, policemen, and regularly scheduled work.
"He told me," mourned Bud Gregory, "that if I'd take that dinkus off his racin' car an' put it on another one, so's it'd work the same, that his frien's'd pay me a hundred dollars an' ten dollars a day for the use of it. But now they brought me up here 'and they say I got to fix cars thataway for all three of 'em, and if I don't, they'll fill me full of lead!"
He looked at Murfree as if for sympathy. But Murfree had none for him. When he'd waked from his unwholesome sleep, the night before, it was because the car had stopped. It had stopped here, and even in the darkness Murfree had known it was high in the mountains.