The Deadly Dust

CHAPTER IV Danger Point

THE LITTLE boats went about their business, which was the murder of a nation. Even Nazis never dreamed of the extermination of a nation and every living organism which lived on its soil, down to the last one-celled animalcule living in a mud-puddle.

The crews of the little boats moved competently about their task of towing great containers of a deadly liquid for hundreds of miles from their base and then spreading out that liquid on the water. It evaporated at a known rate. Its vapor was blown eastward at a known rate.

It thinned and attenuated and was mixed with other air so that when it reached the coastline of America it was undetectable except as a minute rise in the background-count of subatomic particles. But as it moved and thinned and thinned it changed—at a known rate.

Presently it was not a vapor but an infinitely diffuse dust-cloud which no instrument on earth could detect as such. It settled to the earth and continued to change and slowly, slowly, slowly, accumulated to a layer which, when less than a molecule thick, would make North America a desert.

The inhabitants of the island and the crews of the little ships were very industrious people. They seemed to love their work.

Murfree had his suitcase on the porch of the hotel when Bud Gregory came shambling into the town. The suitcase was on view for Bud Gregory to see. Murfree saw the most important man in the United States come awkwardly, hesitantly down the street. Murfree went briskly out, picked up his suitcase and started toward the bus-stop.

"Uh—hello, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory unhappily. "You leavin'?"

"Nothing to stay here for," said Murfree. "If I'm going to die I might as well be with my family. No use staying here."

"Uh—y'mean—" Bud Gregory said.

"You can make gadgets," said Murfree crisply. "One happens to be needed to keep me from being killed—with everybody else in the United States. Including you, by the way. You won't make it. So that's that."

Bud Gregory scraped his foot on the ground.

"Uh—I made one this mornin', Mr. Murfree," he said awkwardly. "I got to figurin' an' I figured you was right. That stuff that keeps bustin' up by itself is settlin' down all around. An'—uh—it ain't good for humans if it gets too strong.

"So I—uh—I made a dinkus that can gather it up. I figured I could—uh—have my kids clean it up around the house. Y'want to see it?"

"Cleaning up around your house won't be enough, Murfree said evenly. "For one thing, if there were no crops or any birds or any fish and every tree and bush in the woods was dead—what would you eat?"

Bud Gregory looked miserable.

"Y'want to come look, Mr. Murfree?" he asked. "Maybe it ain't a good dinkus, but—uh—"

"I'll come," said Murfree shortly.

Inside he felt a queer envious turmoil. But Gregory could make anything but he had no idea of the possibilities inherent in his gadgets. He'd made devices of incredible possibilities—and used them to keep from working and to make it possible to win two-dollar bets and to keep from having to buy a new car instead of the wreck he'd owned.

If Murfree'd possessed Bud Gregory's ability—

"I'll get a car to drive us out," said Murfree grimly "so if there's no use staying I needn't miss my bus."

"Uh—I'll get some beer an' some ten-cent seegars," said Bud Gregory hopefully. "If this dinkus ain't right, maybe you can figure out somethin' else."

That was hopeful. Bud Gregory was afraid of losing his pension. Therefore he would try to perform any mere miracle the situation demanded. And he should be able to do-anything that could be imagined.

They drove out. Murfree was very silent. He didn't know how the original radioactive material was put into the air, or where, for its sweep across North America. At a guess, the distribution-point should be somewhere out in the Pacific.

PLANES equipped with Geiger-Miller counters might be able to track back the origin of the deadly dust. But planes hunting the hideout of a nation's would-be murderers would surely be detected far away.

And if they were detected the murderers might simply loose a cloud of dust which nothing could either stop or survive. So that there should be no hunt for the men who wielded the weapon until the weapon itself could be withstood.

They reached the woods-road. They went down it. They reached the water's edge. Bud Gregory spoke uneasily under his breath.

"Uh—Mr. Murfree, I wish you'd send this fella back. Tell him to come thisaway presently. I—uh—that dinkus is kinda funny. If it ain't no good I wouldn't want nobody to know about it. They might—uh—think there was witchery in it."

"All right," said Murfree.

In spite of himself, Murfree began to hope. Bud Gregory had been so completely unimpressed by his own achievements before that if he had made something which disturbed him it must be remarkable.

The car went away. Bud Gregory expanded. He went in his house and came out again, bearing an intricate contrivance. It was evident that he was at once proud and apprehensive. The device had no radio tube about it.

There were wires and there were scraps of glass here and there and there was a painstakingly straightened bit of copper gas-line tubing inside an arrangement of wires which was—well—it was not exactly a coil and it was certainly not a helix.

The wires were arranged in several patterns, of which one was certainly a logarithmic spiral. The whole assembly looked insane. And there was a metal plate at one end, nailed to the wooden base. It looked protective, as if it defended the device against something.

"Mr. Murfree, suh," said Bud Gregory anxiously, "I worked right hard on this, tryin' to please you, suh. You' always been a good friend to me an' I want you to know it. So this was the best I could do. If it ain't enough you try to figure out somethin' an' I'll try to make it."

"What does this do?" asked Murfree.

He looked at it and enviously admitted to himself that every single part of it was meaningless. He saw a switch which was a light-switch from Bud's wrecked car. He saw a bare iron wire which he guessed would turn white with frost when the device was turned on to reveal that it was absorbing heat and yielding electricity. But every other part seemed nonsense.

"This here dinkus," said Bud Gregory hopefully, "it—uh—you know, Mr. Murfree, how the hunks of stuff that things are made of stick together, suh. They kinda pull on each other."

Murfree nodded. Bud Gregory referred to interatomic and intermolecular attraction. The force which holds atoms together in molecules and molecules in crystals and ultimately makes planets possible.

"When you—uh—break somethin'," said Bud Gregory, "the parts you break it into stop pullin' at each other. They' too far away from each other."

Here Bud Gregory referred to the inexorable operation of the law of inverse squares Atoms draw each other only at atomic distances. Molecules adhere only at distances comparable to the diameter of molecule Otherwise all objects would fuse together immovably.

"This—uh—kinda changes that," said Bt Gregory, his forehead creased in the effort to explain. "It makes 'em still pull at each other, even far away."

"If you break a nail or a piece of glass an' put one piece in this place here it kinda gets in focus, Mr. Murfree. An' if you point the dinkus at the other piece—uh—no matter how far away the other part is, it—uh—pulls back to the one that's in focus."

Murfree felt incredulous but he suppressed it. In his mind, he knew that if Bud Gregory said it, it was so. Of course it violated all known laws of physics. . . .

"It ain't," said Bud Gregory, "because they used to be one piece of stuff, but because they're the same kinda stuff."

THEN Murfree felt as if he'd been jolted all the way down to his shoe-soles. A steel magnet will draw another steel magnet itself, not because they are steel but because they are magnets.

But Bud Gregory was saying that a bit of iron in the focus of his gadget would draw other bits of iron whether there was magnetism or not. More, he said that glass would draw glass! Murfree knew that Bud Gregory could do anything, but he could not believe that!

"I don't see how—"

"I'll show you, suh," said Bud Gregory anxiously. "I'll put a drop o' water right here where it focuses, suh, an' point it at the inlet yonder. It'll draw water."

He put a drop of water on a plate behind the straightened-out section of gas-line tubing. He pointed the device at the broad waters of this inlet of Puget Sound. He turned the switch.

Water splashed from the protective metal baffle-plate at the end of the gadget's base—quantities of water. It splashed as if a fire-hose played upon the baffle-plate. Murfree, goggling, saw a straight pencil of pure liquid water, impossibly defying gravity, coming toward the gadget from an indefinite distance out in the Sound.

It flowed through emptiness, through space, through the air itself as if it were in an invisible hose. It came in a mathematically straight line from the inlet beyond the shore. It hit the baffle and splashed. And Lurfree knew that, since water was in the focus of the gadget, therefore water had been drawn from wherever the tube pointed.

Bud Gregory flipped off the switch. Water used to splash. A half-mile-long cable of water, stretched taut in mid-air, abruptly dropped. There was a wet streak across the ground toward the inlet. There was a long path of pock-markings where a straight line of water had fallen back into the inlet.

"M-my gracious!" said Murfree, dazed even though he knew Bud Gregory's gifts. "You've got a sort of artificial gravity! Only—only it's selective! You can pull any element toward you."

"Yes, suh," said Bud Gregory. He sweated. Looking uncertainly at Murfree. "I—uh—I figured, suh, that if we could get up a liddle bit of that dust, we could kinda put it in this focus place, suh, an' we could sweep this dinkus all around an' all the dust that was the same kind as that in the focus would get pulled up an' stop against this plate that stopped the water.

"I put that plate on last," he added ruefully. "First time I turned on this thing I tried water an' I got soakin' wet. I hadda put somethin' on to catch the stuff that was bein' pulled."

Murfree stared, stunned, at the completely impossible device. No wonder Bud Gregory hadn't wanted it seen lest it make him liable to a charge of witchcraft! Such a charge was more likely in his native Appalachians, but even here—

"You think that'll do what you want, Mr. Murfree?" asked Bud Gregory hopefully.

Murfree opened his mouth to speak exultantly. Then he realized—he became tormented by the ruthless reasoning which told him of the present uselessness of this device, even while he was filled with envy of the man who had been able to make it and with admiration for the achievement itself.

"No-o-o-o," said Murfree reluctantly. "It won't do because there'd be the job of getting a sample of the dust. It would take weeks to gather up a carload of top-soil and separate the radioactive dust from it. We couldn't allow impurities such as humus or sand, or it would pull humus and sand with the dust.

"And if it took weeks we wouldn't have the dust itself but the stuff the dust had turned into. And even besides that—what would happen if you pulled into that gadget all the radioactive matter intended for a day's dose of poison for a continent!"

Bud Gregory's shoulders drooped.

"I reckon," he admitted, "that it would sure kill anybody who was workin' the dinkus."

"Definitely," said Murfree. "So far, no good."

There was a pause.

"Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory anxiously, "let's drink a little beer an' just set a while, suh. Maybe you'll think of somethin'."

Murfree followed him grimly back to the shack. He was in the completely maddening position now of having Bud Gregory's complete cooperation and having no idea how it could possibly be used.

Bud would make anything Murfree asked but Murfree could not imagine a device which would defeat the weapon in use against the United States. And the weapon had to be defeated before any search could be made for those who wielded it!

Murfree sat with a glass of beer in his hands. He racked his brains vainly. Bud Gregory sat beside him, drinking beer. Presently he spoke dreamily.

"Y'know, suh, I'm thinkin' that maybe instead o' buyin' a car outa that ten dollars' a day I got comin' to me, maybe I'll get me a boat. You can set a lot more comfortable in a boat than in a car you got to be drivin' all the time. Yes, suh, I'm gain' to think about buyin' me a boat!" ...

The tuna-boats worked valorously for the murder of a nation. Their crews knew joyfully that the last of their fellows who had remained in the United States—to test the results of their campaign—had left that country. The intensity of radioactivity which should result in mutations and monsters had almost been reached.

Sterility would follow, then death. And of course those who worked to murder America would cheerfully sacrifice their lives to accomplish it if necessary. Hatred is a stronger force than patriotism.

But there was no need and every man wanted to survive for the hellish satisfaction of knowing that all North America was a place of corpses—not even rotting because even the bacteria of putrefaction were dead too.

The tuna-boats towed their lead torpedoes away from the island where atom-piles made poison for them to scatter on the wind. They scattered that poison and returned for more. Enthusiasm mounted and mounted. Plans began for such a celebration as would befit the destruction of the greatest nation upon earth.