The Gregory Circle

CHAPTER IV The Horror Hole

MOTORISTS drove shakily to doctors in half a dozen cities, sick and frightened. They had high fevers and all the symptoms of burns, but there was no sign of injury upon their bodies.

Then it was observed that a patch of blight had appeared upon a coastal highway. All the vegetation in a space half a mile long and three hundred yards wide had died overnight. The highway ran through the blighted area. All the motorists had driven through it.

Fish died in a reservoir connected to a great city's water-supply system. The city's water was cut off and a desperate attempt made to bring in drinking-water by tank-car. Power-lines leading from Niagara Falls were shorted by arcs which leaped across the air-gap separating the wires. Then came the deaths in Louisville.

Nobody thought about Murfree, of course. He went on doggedly, unspectacularly, in search of the thing he knew might mean the depopulation of a continent and, of course, his own death if he should succeed in finding it. He went deeper and deeper into that island of the primitive, the back country of the Smokies.

There was no flat land. Mountains were everywhere—spurs and crags and sprawling monsters of store. with blankets of forest to their tips—patches of cornfield at slopes of thirty and forty degrees. There were bearded, ragged mountaineers with suspicion of strangers as an instinct—barefooted broods of tow-headed children—and mountains—and more mountains—and mare. . . .

Murfree's progress was necessarily indirect, because he could get only the vaguest of bearings upon his objective. The Geiger counter clicked ever more rapidly. On the second day after he had left his wife behind, Murfree put on his protective suit.

He looked more strange and aroused more suspicion among the mountaineers. There were no more roads, only trails, now. The car, however, was lighter not only by the absence of his wife and daughter, but by all of their personal possessions.

He wormed his way along impossible paths, fording small streams and climbing prohibitive grades, while the noise of the Geiger counter increased to a steady, minor roar. He came to a mountain-cabin where nothing moved.

A dog lay on the rickety porch, and did not even raise its head to bark at him. Murfree got out of his car and went to the cabin. He had been so intent on the task of making progress in the direction he wished to go, that he had not noticed the fact that the foliage here was dead in patches, that everything which had been green looked sickly. He called, and a feeble voice answered him.

The family in the house was dying. He gave them water and stayed to prepare food for them. There was absolutely nothing else to be done. He knew what had happened, of course. They had been burned—painlessly, like sunburn—by the radiations from that monstrous atomic furnace which somewhere steadily poisoned the air. The burns went deep into their bodies. They had high fevers. They were languid and weak. They looked like ghosts.

He asked questions and put food and water handy for them. Then he went on. There was nothing else to do.

Only four miles farther his car ceased to have any power at all. A Geiger Counter works because it is so designed that a single cosmic ray or neutron, entering it and ionizing the gas within it, breaks down the insulating properties of a partial vacuum and allows a current to pass.

Here the air was so completely ionized that it had become a partial conductor. The spark-plugs spat small sparks. The timer worked erratically. The ignition system went haywire in air which permitted a current to pass.

He got out of his car.

He managed turn it about, ready for retreat. He heaved his portable Geiger counter over his shoulder. He had a thin sheet of cadmium to shield it, so that the source of the neutrons which made it rattle steadily could be detected. The cadmium absorbed part of the neutron-flood. It lessened the counter's rattling when between the tube and the neutron-source.

He went on, on foot. Mountains reared upward on every side, and there were thick forests on every hand, but they were dead or dying. Once in a mile or two he saw small mountaineer cabins. They showed no sign of life. He did not approach them. The people in them were dead, or so near it that nothing on earth could help them. And his protective suit was not perfect.

In any case he was receiving already a possibly dangerous dosage of radiation. Every minute of continued exposure added to his danger. He must get away as soon as he dared. But he struggled onward, over a landscape more desolate than that of the moon, because the moon has never known life, while this knew only death.

He reached a crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him here, and the counter roared. The cadmium plate affected it, but not too much. This must be the place for which he searched. He went on.

Presently he could look downward and see into a valley of dead trees and dead grass and dead underbrush. In its center was a circular area a quarter-mile across which was—which wag somehow unspeakably horrifying.

It was bare, baked, yellowed earth. Not even the corpses of once-growing things remained upon it. It was simply red-clay baked to a tawny orange, almost but not quite at red heat, still baking from some monstrous temperature down below.

Murfree saw dried leaves borne on the wind toward it. They fluttered above it and crisped and carbonized and went skyward, smoldering. There was a steady column of air rising from this hot place as from a chimney.

At the very edge of the round area was the remnant of a log cabin. The side of the cabin nearest the sere space had carbonized and smoldered away to white ash. One wall had collapsed, facing Murfree. Wires ran from the cabin to a fence which precisely surrounded the barren place, upheld on thin metal rods. Sunlight glinted on glazed insulators.

Murfree took field-glasses and looked into the cabin. He saw a heap of ragged, scorched clothing and something within it. He saw an assemblage of improvised, untidy apparatus from which glassy gleams were reflected. He could make out no details.

Then he knew what had happened. It was not reasonable. It was starkly impossible. But it was no more impossible than welding a water-pump shaft in its place or eliminating all friction from a frozen-tight motor so that it could be started again, or, say looking at a Geiger Counter and understanding how it worked without the least idea of what it could be used for.

Murfree had a small camera and dutifully took pictures without attempting to go closer. He had no hope that the pictures would turn out. The plates were surely fogged by the radiation. He bent his cadmium plate into a half-cylinder and did his best to make sure of what he now unreasonably knew.

The results were not clean cut. They did not have that precise clarity that a really convincing test of a physical phenomenon should possess. But the edge of the barren area was sharp. It was distinct. And the neutron-flood came from the air above the bare space only.

Dust swirled up in little sand-devils above the baked earth, and spun out to invisible thinness in the column of air which rose, spiraling to the sky. It rose and rose. The air itself was radioactive, containing radioactive oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen—from water-vapor—and all the elements in a moisture-laden breeze. It was a chimney, a whirlwind of death-laden heated gases rising to the skies. But the radioactivity of the earth—which surely made the heat and the poison—was somehow confined.

Murfree turned very quietly and went away again. He knew that he had accomplished his task as he had first envisioned it. He knew what poured deadly poison into the air. He had seen it. He could tell how to find it again. And so he must hurry.

His protective suit might or might not have preserved his life. He might already be literally a dead man, though he still walked and breathed and thought feverishly. If he could have been sure that he would live to descend into the valley and struggle to that half-burned log cabin, and utterly smash the vaguely-seen heap of wires and tubes and hand-wound coils—and if he could have been sure that it would not increase the menace—he would have done it.

His own life seemed a very small price to pay for the ending of that lifeless, motionless threat to the life of all the world.

But he wasn't sure. And the information he had—especially the fact that he knew what Bud Gregory was—was so much more important than his own life that he could not risk the loss of what he had to tell.

On the way from the place he had found, floundering on in the car that at first hardly ran at all, and then back through the tortuous way past the mountainsides of dying trees and patches of dying cornfields and the small and squalid cabins in which nothing moved, and the spectacle of a world dying about him, Murfree hardly noticed the desolation or thought about his own very probable death.

He thought with a grim concentration of Bud Gregory.