The Deadly Dust

CHAPTER III Dusty Answer

BUD GREGORY puffed expansively. They were seated before that unspeakable shanty Bud Gregory had pre-empted and which was now his home. They had dined on bracken-greens and grouse—out of season—and sea-trout with cornbread and bacon-drippings and wild fennel and a monstrous brew which Bud Gregory fondly considered to be coffee.

Now they looked out over an inlet of Puget Sound, with sunset colorings making the sky to westward a glory of rose and gold.

"Shucks, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory happily. "I ain't no doctor. I just fix cars. An' now I got me ten dollars a day comin' in rain or shine an' I don't have to bother doin' that!"

Murfree smoked.

"It'll pay you a lot more than ten dollars a day."

"What do I want with more'n that?" asked Bud Gregory. He beamed. "My ol' woman don't need more'n five-six dollars a week for corn-meal an' hawgmeat an' I got a shotgun.

"I'll git the boys some twenty-twos so's they can knock over squirrels an' take out for some beer now an' then an' the rest' buy me a new car in no time. I don't need no fancy car. I c'n make most anything run if it's got four wheels."

Murfree blew a smoke-ring. "I'm asking you to save some human lives," he repeated.

"If they got money to pay me," said Bud Gregory comfortably, "they got money to pay doctors that know all about that kinda stuff. You tell 'em to go to a fella that makes a business o' doctorin'."

"Only," said Murfree, "you have to be the doctor. They'll die of radioactivity burns. Know what I mean?"

Bud Gregory shook his head.

"You know the—hunks of stuff that metal is made of," Murfree said carefully, fumbling for words that would describe atoms Bud Gregory—who understood them better than any other man alive. "The atoms that are different for iron and copper and so on."

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. He looked absorbedly at the water before his door. "They different in the middle an' they got different—uh—skins around 'em. Say! There's a school o' fish down there! See 'em jump?"

Murfree felt an impulse to jump himself. Bud Gregory had spoken of atoms as being different in the middle and having different kinds of skins around them. He obviously spoke with precision of atomic nuclei and electron-shells.

But how did he know? Murfree ached with envy of Bud Gregory, who knew so much that Murfree would give anything to know—and who only wanted to sit in the sun.

"Some kinds of metal," said Murfree, as carefully as before, "break down and change into other kinds. Some when stray hunks of stuff hit them"—he referred to free neutrons—"and some all by themselves."

The last was radioactivity. Bud Gregory spoke regretfully.

"If that boy o' mine wasn't in the hospital with frostbit toes he sure would admire to go after some of them fish. Yeah. I know what y'mean. There's some stuff bustin' down everywhere, all the time. Lots more lately."

Murfree stiffened. Increased background radioactivity! How did Bud Gregory know? To say that he perceived the facts of atomic structure and behavior as casually and as effortlessly as a mathematical freak perceives the cube root of 89724387 would be accurate but it wouldn't mean anything.

Murfree wanted desperately to try to find out how Bud. Gregory knew but he foreknew the uselessness of the attempt. He wet his lips.

"Yes," said Murfree. "A lot more's breaking down lately. Thirty times as much as usual. Nobody knows the cause."

BUD GREGORY said off-handedly, "Dust." Then he waved his hand exuberantly.

"Y'know, suh?" he said. "It sure does feel good to know that I got ten dollars a day comin' in without no bother! I don't have to work myself to death no more. I can just set if I want to! You sure are a friend o' mine, Mr. Murfree!"

"What do you mean by dust?" demanded Murfree sharply.

"Just dust," said Bud Gregory. "Settlin'. It's all bustin' down all the time as it drops, sendin' out hunksa stuff. It ain't thick, but it—uh—kinda accumulates." He paused. Then, "Yes, suh! I done a lot o' worryin' in my time but now I aim to stop! You say I'll get that money as long as that dinkus works?"

Murfree stared at him. Dust settling down and breaking down as it settled was radioactive dust. Accumulating. Taking three days to travel from coast to coast. That steady overhead wind from west to east on which the Japs had sent bomb-laden balloons drifting across the Pacific to the United States. . . .

"Wait a minute!" said Murfree sharply. "You say there's radioactive dust settling down? That's not natural! And only on the United States—that's men's doing! It's a sneak attack! And such dust sent in scattered thin would only be noticed by freaks like me! It's an attack with radioactive dust."

Something close to horror came suddenly to him. Radioactive dust has been imagined as a weapon, of course.* (*Note: It is referred to in the Smyth Report on "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes"—the official report on the atom bomb.)

But it has always been imagined as a super-deadly poison gas, a whirlwind weapon killing overnight. There had never been any imagining of its use as an insidious slow poison, killing undetected, murdering a nation by slow, inexorable stages, without warning or provocation or even the alternative of submission or death!

But if Bud Gregory were right, that was the case now. The rise in radioactivity could only be the work of men, who had set out to murder a nation in a cold hatred surpassing even the hatred of the Nazis for Jewry. It would be the work of men who knew that the United States could never be subdued by any possible weapon and, since it stood in their way, must be destroyed.

Other scientists had observed the rise in radioactivity and had extrapolated its curve. They inferred that if the rise continued much longer there would be danger. If it continued far enough the danger would become fatality. But the danger had seemed only a possibility.

If Bud Gregory was right it was a certainty! The United States was not the scene of an anomalous rise in the background-count of stray subatomic particles. Not at all—the United States was the victim of an attack which would end, if not somehow countered, with the death of every living organism on its surface, down to the smallest quasi-cellular virus on a rotting leaf!

And there was no defense against such a weapon as this—unless Bud Gregory could contrive it. Murfree's voice was unsteady when he spoke again.

"Listen," he said. "Somebody's turning loose that dust. Somebody's making it. They're spreading it to drift all over the United States and settle, so that everybody in the country will die!"

Bud Gregory spoke obliviously.

"I never did like the idea of workin' myself to death. From now on I can just set, not botherin' nobody an' nobody botherin' me." Then what Murfree had said hit home. He turned his head. "What's that, Mr. Murfree?"

"Somebody," said Murfree shakily, "somewhere out in the Pacific most likely."

Then his brain worked swiftly and surely. In matters that he knew and that his training had fitted him to handle his brain was probably better than Bud Gregory's. He simply had not the intuitive knowledge of facts beyond science which Bud Gregory possessed.

"I see how it's done," said Murfree in a sudden deadly hatred. "You take an atomic pile. If you want radioactive iron, you put a rod of iron in it. When it comes out, it's radioactive. If you want carbon or copper or anything else all you need to do is put it in the right part of a pile, where neutrons of the proper speed will hit."

GREGORY blinked at him. Perhaps Murfree's statements seemed so elementary as to be nonsense to Bud, or perhaps they were far beyond his comprehension.

"They'd make a pile and run a coiled pipe through it," said Murfree, savagely. "Then they'd run a liquid through that pipe. Any liquid! Gasoline! Kerosene! It would come out radioactive! It could be evaporated and it would spread and diffuse in the air and, as it spread, here an atom and there an atom would break down, emitting radiation and becoming another substance entirely.

"And that would be a new compound which wouldn't stay vapor but would come out as a microscopic particle of dust with an electric charge that would draw moisture or other particles to it! It would grow and grow and ultimately settle down as a dust-mote too small to be seen.

"And that would happen quintillions and quintillions and quintillions of times, and motes of poison would settle—are settling. . . ."

"Mmmmmm," said Bud Gregory. "Yeah. The dust ain't, an' then all of a sudden it is. Like—uh—soot formin'."

The parallel was exact. A vapor like gasoline, burning without enough oxygen, turns to solid soot. Radioactive vapor, transforming itself, would become solid particles of dust, which would attract water-vapor and other particles and settle to the earth.

"Somebody's doing it!" said Murfree, grinding his teeth. "Somebody who wants to rule the earth! They know they've got to knock us out first, before they can try to build up their own nation to jingoism again! So they've started to murder us! Every one of us!"

Bud Gregory spoke contentedly.

"They ain't got nothin' against me! I don't bother nobody!"

He beamed at the sunset. He was gangling and slope-shouldered and untidy. He was utterly without ambition and practically without desires. And he looked at all possible situations only as they affected his desire not to do anything at all. But he was the most important man in the United States. He could have earned any conceivable sum if he had wanted it. But he didn't. He only wanted to sit in the sun.

"You've got to figure out how to beat this trick!" said Murfree, very pale. "In two weeks the babies that are conceived will begin to be freaks. In a month there won't be any babies conceived. In two months people will begin to die!"

"You' a good friend o' mine, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory amiably. "You just brought me the best news I ever had in my life. You told me I don't have to worry no more. I ain't goin' to, Mr. Murfree! I'm goin' to rest!"

"I'm telling you," said Murfree sharply, "that there are men at war against the United States! They're making war on your country!"

"All right, suh," Bud Gregory said amiably. "Maybe so. But it ain't likely they'll draft me for no war. I'm married an' I got children. Let 'em have a war! If I got ten dollars a day comin' in steady I'm satisfied! I ain't goin' to bother nobody an' I don't want nobody to bother me!"

Murfree clenched his fists. He hated Bud Gregory for a moment. But the most important man in America was neither wilful nor unpatriotic. He was simply impervious to abstractions such as riches or the love of country. The problem had not yet been stated so it had meaning to him.

Murfree compressed his lips. After a long time he stood up.

"All right. Figure this out! If you don't figure some way to take care of that radioactive dust, in three months at the outside I'll be dead. And if I'm dead, who's going to collect that ten dollars a day and send it to you?"

He strode away into the darkness for the four-mile hike back to town. It was the only argument that could possibly make Bud Gregory exert himself.