The Deadly Dust

CHAPTER VI Ball of Fire

A TUNA-BOAT was towing a lead torpedo through the darkness. It was, as it happened, heading back toward the island which was its base as it let the volatile liquid pour out on the sea. It had been forced to make a wide circuit to avoid observation by ships below the horizon. But otherwise everything was commonplace.

Then, without drama, the wind seemed to change peculiarly. Not the upper wind above the sea's surface—just the wind at the water's own level, saturated with the vapor of the liquid the torpedo had let out.

It blew toward the island on which the uranium piles worked. Since the tuna-boat lay in its path and offered resistance, the surface-wind piled up near the hull and flowed over and through the little ship.

A bell clanged stridently. Frenziedly. The bell was attached to a very ingenious device which tripped a relay if the background-count of a standard Geiger-Miller tube went above a conservative minimum.

It was necessary on a boat towing tanks of volatile and furiously radioactive liquid. But it was quite dependable. It gave instant warning and the members of the crew hastened to put on their protective suits, which long custom had led them to discard. The only flaw in the whole affair was that the warning-device had not operated fast enough. No device could have been fast enough.

The men who climbed into their protective suits breathed in as they moved a concentration of radioactive vapor intended to provide a day's increment of poison for acres in every breath. The men who locked their suits airtight locked in enough radioactive gas in their lungs to kill them fifty times over.

Of course they did not notice it at the time. Perhaps they never noticed it. The little tuna-boat went on through the night. Presently it strayed off-course. The man at the wheel happened to be dead. So was everybody else on board.

The great leaden float was empty of its poison, which did not happen to be moving toward America. It constituted a cross-wind, blowing toward the home island of the tuna-boat. It was drawn by the force which holds the nuclei of atoms together, which force does not diminish according to the law of inverse squares.* (*Note: The binding-force holding atomic nuclei together is known not to diminish according t the law of inverse squares, as do magnetism gravity, electrostatic force, etc.—W.F. )

At all distances, radioactive particles within the beam were drawn together with a force proportional to their masses, but not in proportion to distance.

There were atomic piles on the island from which the tuna-boat came. There were tons upon tons of uranium in those piles. They drew radioactive particles as the sun draws meteorites. Even radioactive gas-particles given off in the decay of fish killed by the towed tanks—even such gases moved toward the island.

There was nothing spectacular about anything which happened at first. A tuna-boat drove aimlessly through the night with all of its crew dead. A swift low breeze blew toward the island—many swift low breezes. Until they arrived nothing in particular seemed to be in train. But when those winds flowed over the island the situation altered gradually.

Radioactive gases and vapors clustered about the shielding around the atomic piles. More and more vapors and dust-particles arrived momentarily, drawn as by irresistible magnetic attraction. They reached the shielding-walls and clung. More came, and more, and more, and more.

As they flowed and darted across the island the island's population died. They did not notice. For a space they moved and chattered and prepared celebration—before they discovered that their bodies were still-moving corpses which gradually ceased to move.

There were no witnesses to what happened after that but it went on quite rationally. The atomic piles had been limited in their size so that they could be controlled. An atomic pile will never explode. If it runs wild it will simply heat up and to a temperature dependent solely upon its size and material. But the homing radioactive particles raised the temperature-limit of the piles they clustered about and seeped in to join.

PILE-ACTIVITY increased by the activity of the short-life products returned to it. The cooling-water turned to steam and ceased to flow. The piles glowed dull-red and then cherry-red and then blinding white, still without reaching their self-limiting temperature.

There was too much short-life radioactive matter around. Presently the piles vaporized and then they ran together in one monstrous mass of incandescent vapor whose normal self-limited temperature was higher yet.

This took time. It was all of an hour after the beginning of the whole process when a great globe of incandescent gas burned everything upon the island to a ghastly ash. The island was blasted, baked, dead, desolate.

Then the globe of vaporized metal—it was almost a mile in diameter—soared skyward in exactly the manner and for exactly the reason that a balloon would have risen. It was as bright as the sun but it was utterly harmless. The radiations it emitted were absorbed by other elements which became radioactive—and instantly joined the globe.

The globe rose skyward. It made all the sea as bright as day for twenty miles around. It went up and up and up. . . .

When dawn came it had burned out. Its energies had been so trapped that only light and heat could permanently leave its mass. Undoubtedly, if there were observers on the then-favorably-situated planet Mars, they saw the flare.

But it did no harm beyond producing an anomalous warm area over a certain part of the Pacific which ultimately resulted in a local low-pressure area with resultant winds and precipitation—in short, a local thunderstorm. That was all. Only the people on the island would have noticed that. And they were dead. . . .

When the background-count was down to 45-47 on the Pacific Coast, Murfree agreed that the device could be turned off. It was nearly a week before that happened and in the meanwhile he had calculated very nearly what must have happened far out at sea.

He knew that nobody who had planned to murder America could still be alive and it was very unlikely that anything remained of the apparatus they had worked with. He did wait until the radioactive dust that had spread over America had definitely entered the second half of its life.

Then he got ready to go back to his wife and daughter.

"Yes, suh!" said Bud Gregory warmly, "you sure are a friend o' mine! You' goin' to send me that money regular, suh?"

"I'll send it," said Murfree. "Every week."

A boy came with a telegram for him. He put it in his pocket. It would be a background-count report, he considered, and it didn't matter.

"I'd like to give you a—uh—present," said Bud Gregory warmly. "Somethin' to show my appreciation, suh. Could—hm—would you like to have this here dinkus I made first, suh? I'll just give it to the children to play with if y'don't want it. If you'll take it to remember me by—"

"Thanks," said Murfree.

He got on the bus that would take him to the nearest town with an airport. After the bus pulled out, he idly opened the telegram. It was from the generating-station that had been using Bud Gregory's gadget.

FRICTION ELIMINATION DEVICE SMASHED TODAY STOP. WORKMAN DROPPED TOOL FROM OVERHEAD STOP. CAN YOU SUPPLY OTHERS WIRE IMMEDIATELY.

Murfree felt a little sick. He had to keep Bud Gregory's confidence for dealings in the future should Bud Gregory be needed. He had strained that confidence to the limit now. If he asked for more, on a second threat to stop the ten dollars a day Bud Gregory counted on, it would be an end to everything. With that money Bud Gregory would sit in the sun and, when needed, he'd be on hand. If he didn't get that ten dollars. . . .

At the airport Murfree sent a telegram to his former superiors in the Civil Service. He asked for his job back. He didn't know how he could make out, having to pay Bud Gregory ten dollars a day out of a forty-seven-hundred-a-year income but he felt desperately that it simply had to be done. At the Cleveland airport he got an answer.

YOU WERE WARNED YOUR RESIGNATION WOULD BE CONSIDERED FINAL STOP. IT IS FINAL.

It was signed by the administrative officer who had objected to the disarrangement of vacation-schedules in order that Murfree might stop—as it had developed—a radioactive-dust attack upon the United States.

MURFREE sank back gloomily into his plane-seat. He had to find a new source of income. He had to pay Bud Gregory thirty-six hundred and fifty dollars a year before he bought a loaf of bread for his own family. To live as he'd lived before he'd have to make over eight thousand a year. And the only thing he had now that he hadn't possessed before was the gadget Bud Gregory had made.

Suddenly his face went blank. He whistled softly to himself. He stared out the plane-window for a long time. Then he went composedly to sleep.

When he joined his family at the seashore his wife was worried. She knew he'd left the Civil Service and had no immediate prospects. She asked him what his plans were. He grinned at her.

He unpacked the untidy parcel Bud Gregory had made for him—the device that had drawn water from a half-mile away. This was in the boarding-house where his wife and daughter had stayed while he was on the West Coast.

"I think I'll go in business for myself," he said comfortably. "Lend me your wedding-ring for capital, my dear."

Her expression was bewildered as she gave him the plain gold band. He put it in the focus of the device where Bud Gregory had put a drop of water. He sighted the gadget out of the window at the ocean. He turned it on. It would draw to itself any particles in its beam which happened to be of the same material as that in the focus of the device.

There was a metal plate to catch the drawn particles. His wife's golden wedding-ring was in the focus—and the sea contains gold. Only about a grain of gold to a ton of seawater, to be sure, but still—

A deposit of tiny, impalpable particles built up on the baffle-plate. Each infinitesimal grain, perhaps, came from a ton of seawater. But there were some thousands of billions of tons of seawater in view from the boardinghouse window, and it would change, more or less, with each tide. Gold-dust came to the baffle-plate with respectable speed. Murfree turned it off presently.

"This is useless stuff, though," he said. "I'll go out and buy you something made of platinum. That's useful—and it's worth more than gold besides. I'd rather go into the platinum-producing business, any day!"

His wife gaped at him. He explained.

"I have to pay Bud Gregory a pension," he explained, "and this is the answer. I'm going to build myself a laboratory and see if I can get an inkling of what he knows offhand.

"I'll be able to give him all the money he can use now and I've always wanted to do some research on my own. I know just about exactly—what sort of a laboratory I want!"

Then he added: "Somewhere on the seashore."