Time passed. The three in the courtyard drank from pocket flasks. One of them pulled out a blued-steel weapon and looked at it reflectively. That would kill Murfree. They discussed some plan they meant to carry out when Bud Gregory had given them uncatchable getaway cars. They cheered up as they talked.
Bud Gregory remained absent. Presently one of them snarled into the doorway into which he had vanished. After a moment Bud came out, holding placatingly a square bit of plank on which was a distinctly messy assembly of small radio parts. He expostulated nervously. He couldn't work so fast, and he needed some parts.
"You're a liar!" snarled the beefy man. "Go get that other guy and bring 'im here. We're gonna show you somethin'!"
CHAPTER V
Heavyside Layer
AT THIS, Bud Gregory sweated profusely. His hands shook. There were two radio tubes and a cryptic assortment of coils and condensers and resistors in the gadget he had mounted on a bit of plank.
He'd obviously worked on it for some time before he'd come in to talk to Murfree, but it did not look like anything. Except for the quite improbable coils—and no physicist in the Bureau of Standards had been able to work out what similar coils in Murfree's sample device did, or on what principle they were based. Apparently there was nothing in sight that a ten-year-old boy might not have gimmicked together at random.
"Go get 'im!" rasped the beefy man. "Or else!"
Bud Gregory cringed. He shambled across the courtyard and into the room where Murfree clenched his hands in a fury so great as to override even despair.
"M-my gosh, Mr. Murfree!" said Bud Gregory, tearfully. "They goin' to shoot you. And I just know they goin' to shoot me afterward. They told me to bring you back with me."-
His bony, angular hands worked feverishly and seemingly at random on the lunatic device he was holding.
"I showed 'em this to show I was tryin' to work like they said," said Bud Gregory piteously, "but they want me to bring you out there. They goin' to shoot you, Mr. Murfree!"
Murfree choked in rage, and swallowed a cold lump in his throat. He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak noble final words, but more likely to swear in utter fury.
"I'm—changin' it, Mr. Murfree, so's they can't shoot you," Bud said shakily as he worked. Sweat rolled down his face and panic filled his eyes. "It's a dinkus that makes those little hunksa stuff that metal's made of, all travel the same way. It makes some stuff that bounces around in any metal it comes to. I—I got to make it travel where I want it to through the air." He panted. Almost he sobbed. "All I ever wanted, Mr. Murfree, was not to bother nobody. If those fellas get killed, you got to tell the sheriff it ain't my fault!"
A stray wire, connected to heaven knew what at one end and nothing in particular at the other, took shape as an oddly beautiful curve under his twitching fingers. It was, Murfree saw, almost parabolic. But it was not a parabola. It was some sort of unsystematic curve in which Murfree could begin to see the beginning of a system.
"If I can get it finished, Mr. Murfree," chattered Bud Gregory, "they won't know when it's turned on, and they can shoot at you, and if I got it pointed at them—"
There was a snarl. The beefy man loomed up, a pistol out. Bud Gregory had gone after Murfree, and he, had delayed. Both men, their captors knew, were unarmed, but they might get ideas of resistance. So the squint-eyed man had come to see. And he'd heard.
He roared profanity at Bud Gregory, who had told Murfree he was to be killed. But Bud was still valuable. The beefy man raised his weapon and shot point-blank at Murfree. The muzzle was no more than ten feet from Murfree's body, and it spewed bullets straight for his heart.
And then the beefy man jerked ridiculously, and an expression of incredulous astonishment came over his face. He staggered, and put his hand to his side, and then collapsed very slowly to the ground. Bud Gregory yelped in anguished terror.
"You got to tell the sheriff, Mr. Murfree, that he done it himself," he wailed. "You got to!"
Murfree had thought that Bud Gregory could not surprise him, but he was blankly amazed to be alive. For a second he merely stared. Bud Gregory shook and trembled beside him, the contraption in his hands jiggling as he trembled. A little wire somewhere in it was turning white with frost.
Then Murfree moved with the dazed, desperate calm of a man who has seen a miracle. He picked up the beefy man's pistol.
"Come on," he said thickly. "Let's shoot our way out of here."
He started forward. But as he stepped out into the patio, the two remaining captors swore. They'd heard the shots. They'd looked for the beefy man to return, driving Bud Gregory before him. When they saw Murfree, instead, with the beefy man's pistol in his hand, they gaped at him.
"Hands up!" said Murfree desperately. He added foolishly: "Surrender in the name of the law!"
ONE of the two men fired from his coat-pocket, a burst of shots which emptied the magazine of his automatic pistol. He collapsed, kicking, to the ground. The other man aimed deliberately and Murfree tried to shoot him, but a civilized man's instinctive repugnance to bloodshed made his hand shake so that he couldn't pull the trigger.
The other man fired with a cold precision at Murfree—and dropped dead with a bullet in his brain. His own bullet. Bud Gregory wailed in unholy terror. But he held his little gadget safe, and even remembered to turn it off.
Miles away, a secret short-wave set sent a message from a hillside in the United States. Another set received it far away. It went into code, went over a cable in the guise of a completely innocent message, reached the capitol of a certain European Power, was decoded, and rushed to the ruler of that Power. He read it and cursed.
The United States could not fight according to law, but it was going to fight in defiance of its own acts of Congress. Orders had been given and, though illegal, they were being obeyed. Disarmed aircraft were fueling and loading up with bombs, carriers were putting desperately out to sea, and in a matter of hours the United States would be ready to defend itself.
The ruler of the European Power was angry. He would have preferred to take over the United States as a merely famine-racked, desperate, and babblingly grateful nation of folk whose spirit had been broken by a war of nerves. He had intended to seize its industrial plants intact and its cities undestroyed. But since the fools had belatedly shown dangerous intelligence, and were preparing to fight rather than be destroyed by their traditional reluctance to take the offensive—why, they would have to be smashed before they could get ready to resist.
He gave crisp, ruthless commands. He hadn't really believed they would fight, those democratic fools. Still, in fifteen minutes the first salvo of long-range guided missiles would be on the way, and other salvos would follow at two-minute intervals. And in a matter of an hour or so North America would be like a knacker's stall and the rest of the world would have had an object-lesson!
And in the hideout, Bud Gregory sat with his bones seemingly turned to jelly.
"What the devil happened?" Murfree asked unsteadily. "And we've got to get busy making something that'll stop an atom-bomb bombardment of America. Talk, man! Something may blow us up at any minute!"
"You—you got to tell the sheriff I didn't do nothin'," quavered Bud Gregory. "I didn't kill those three fellas, Mr. Murfree. They done it themselves. You'll tell the sheriff that. I don't want to have no trouble."
"Talk!" commanded Murfree. "We've got to work out something. What've you got there?"