The Gregory Circle

CHAPTER V He Didn't Know It Was Loaded

THE CAR stopped again before the repair-shed in Brandon. It was close to sunset. Bud Gregory sat in a leaned-back chair against the corner of the shed. There were eight cars waiting for him to feel like working on them.

He opened his eyes and grinned lazily as the car came to a stop. The sunset colorings were magnificent. There was a strange, vast quiet all about. It was the sunset hush. Murfree stopped the motor and got out.

"Car's all right, ain't it?" asked Bud Gregory genially.

"The car's all right," said Murfree. "But I want you to do something for me."

"Not tonight," said Bud Gregory. He yawned. "I was thinkin' about knockin' off an' goin' home to supper."

Murfree pulled out his wallet. He had thought it out carefully. An offer of too much money wouldn't mean a thing to this man.

"I just want you to talk," said Murfree. "Five dollars for half an hour, just for telling me about that outfit you built for somebody—that outfit that stops neutrons cold. Bud Gregory blinked at him.

"Neutrons," Murfree reminded him, "are the little bits of stuff that make the Geiger counter—the funny radio tube—conduct electricity. You made an outfit for somebody that would stop them."

Bud Gregory grinned.

"Now, how in heck did you know that?" he asked, marveling. "That fella wasn't likely to tell nobody, an' I ain't!"

"I know!" said Murfree grimly. "That fellow wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He's dead. That outfit killed him."

Bud Gregory was startled. Then his grin turned rueful.

"Serves 'im right," he said uncomfortably, "but it's his own fault. I told him it was dang'rous, but he done me a dirty trick. He swore he was gonna law me for the way I fixed his car. He said the way I fixed it, he couldn't sell it even if it would run.

"Then he says he'd call it square if I fixed up another kinda gadget for 'im, but I was gonna go to jail or have to pay for his car if I didn't. I told him it was dang'rous, but I didn't have no money to pay for his car. It run good, too! Better'n a new one!"

Murfree waited. He counted out five one-dollar bills.

"If he's dead," repeated Bud Gregory uncomfortably, "it ain't my fault! I told him it was dang'rous but he wanted it, so ruther'n try to pay a hundred an' a quarter or have a pack o' lawin', I done it. It took a time, too!"

Murfree handed over one one-dollar bill. "That's six minutes' talk," he said. "Go on."

Bud Gregory leaned back. He spat expansively.

"Don't mind this kind of work so much," he said appreciatively. "This fella come drivin' in just like you done. He'd skidded off a wet clay patch an' smashed his radiator all to smithereens. He wanted me to fix it. It was too tough a job.

"I told him I didn't aim to work myself to death, but he kept pesterin' me, so I says, `All right. I'll fix 'er so she can run for ten dollars.' I thought that'd scare him off, but he took me up. An' I didn't know how to fix it, but I knew I could figger out a way.

"So I got to thinkin', with him pacin' up an' down waitin' for me to set to work. An' I thought to myself, `Fixin' that radiator is a job of work! It'd be easier to figger out some other way to keep her cool!' An' then it come to me."

"What?"

"All a radiator does," drawled Bud Gregory, "is let the heat get out of the coolin' water. His radiator wasn't no good. If I fixed up some other way to take the heat out of the coolin' water, she'd run just as good an' I could bypass the radiator with a piece o' hose. So I done it. Took me near an hour."

"How'd you take the heat out of the water?" demanded Murfree.

"Shucks!" said Bud Gregory. "I got a knack for that kind of thing. Y'know you can heat a wire by passin' a current through it. I figured you can cool a wire by takin' current out of it.

"I fixed up a wire so the little hunks of stuff that metal's made of got all lined up. Then the heat tries to knock 'em out of line, an' makes 'em pass on them—uh—them little spinnin' things that a electric current is."

MURFREE felt a crawling sensation at the back of his skull. This was uncanny. Bud Gregory was speaking of the polarization of atoms in a metal wire—which cannot be done—so that the random movements imparted by heat—which he could not know anything at all about—would set up strains which could only be relieved by an exchange of electrons, which would in turn, mean a current of electricity.

He had simply reversed the normal process of turning current into heat, and had turned heat into electricity to cool a motor. The direct transformation of heat into electricity has been a scientists' dream for a hundred years, one never accomplished.

But Bud Gregory had done it to save himself the trouble of repairing a shattered radiator.

"So," said Bud Gregory, "I stuck that wire in a hose an' bypassed the radiator. It'd take out the heat an' give current. I strung some ordinary wire under the car to use up the current. That's all.

"The car run good. He went off, but a week later he come back ragin' that he couldn't sell his car. Nobody'd buy it without a regular radiator workin'. How long I been talk—

Murfee silently passed over another dollar bill. Bud Gregory was decidedly something that there is no word for. He knew intuitively the things that trained scientists have as yet only partly found out. Just as some men know by instinct where fish will be found and what bait they will rise to, Bud Gregory knew the behavior of atoms and electrons.

As freak mathematical marvels—some of them half-imbeciles otherwise—perform infinitely complex mathematics problems in their heads with no clear idea of the process, so Bud Gregory performed miracles in physics with no idea how he did it. He simply knew the right answer when a problem was presented.

Murfree felt an envy so acute that it was almost hatred. But back in the hills there was a thing that might make the world uninhabitable. And Bud Gregory had made it. He fondled the dollar bill, folding it.

"He wanted me to fix his car right, he says, an' I got mad. I told him it was righter than when it was made. An' it was! Then he says he's goin' to law me. But then he says, 'Look here! I was makin' a trip lookin' for some minerals.

" 'I got a thing that helps me find 'em, but part of it's got lost. You fix me another an' it'll save me a long trip out an' I'll forget about the car an' pay you ten dollars extra.' " He spat with an air of luxury.

"He had a dinkus like you got, only bigger. An' he'd had a sheet o' metal that was supposed to block off them little hunks of stuff that come down out of the sky. That's what'd got lost. He says if I can fix somethin' to take its place he'll call it square, but he'll law me otherwise."

Murfree interpreted mentally. Someone had been making a trip into the Smokies in search of minerals. He had a Geiger counter. He must have been working on a hunch that uranium could be found. It was not improbable.

When Bud Gregory fixed his car in an utterly improbable fashion—as he'd fixed Murfree's—this unknown other man had understood, like Murfree. But he'd come back in feigned rage and demanded the equivalent of a cadmium shield, knowing that cadmium was unavailable.

He'd realized what Bud Gregory was—a near-illiterate with intuitive knowledge of what subatomic particles could be made to do, a knowledge as unreasoning and as unconscious as the feats of mathematical geniuses. He'd demanded an impossibility because he knew Bud Gregory could achieve it. And Bud Gregory had!

"He made me plenty mad," said the lanky man, resentfully. "He stood there sneerin' at me, sayin' if I was so smart as to fix his car so it would run an' he couldn't sell it, maybe I could fix somethin' that he needed. Either that or else."

Murfree recognized something like genius in the unknown man too. He'd taken the one infallible course to make Bud Gregory work. Threaten his leisure and sneer at his ability. Of course the unknown got what he wanted!

"So?" said Murfree.

"I fixed him up!" said Bud Gregory in amiable spite. "I fixed up a couple of radio tubes—he had 'em—an' made 'em so that they made a kind of horn-shaped—uhblock. Nothin' could go through it. Nothin'! No matter what size you fixed it, the horn 'ud be the same shape, an' you could make it any size.

"Nothin' would get through the walls of that horn. Not even them little hunks of stuff you call—uh—neutrons. I set up the dinkus an' showed him.

"His clickin' dinkus didn't click any more. It stopped them neutrons dead. An' then I says, 'Just for extra, you can run a wire around the place you camp an' set this upside down an' not even bugs can get in to crawl on you. But it's dangerous! It's dangerous!'" He looked at Murfree, grinning.

"I figured it'd make him sick as a dog but I'd warned 'im! It ain't my fault if he stayed in it an' died!"

Murfree saw. He saw much more than Bud Gregory could tell him. He envisioned a quarter-mile circle of wire, built in a remote mountain valley. It made a horn-shaped —cone-shaped—barrier reaching down into the earth. Nothing could pass through that barrier, not even neutrons.

There is some slight radio-activity everywhere. Even rocks possess it. It is the cause of the internal heat of the earth. Perhaps the unknown man had come upon indications of uranium ore underground in that valley, perhaps not. But, surrounded by a shield through which no neutron could escape, any mass of material on earth would become an atomic pile!

A SINGLE molecule of uranium in any mass of rock will sooner or later disintegrate, giving off high-speed neutrons. Normally they travel indefinitely and are harmless. Some go up into the air and may ionize a single molecule. Some may find a fissionable atom and disrupt it.

But by far the greater number are simply lost. Because they can escape. Within a barrier from which they cannot escape, they would bounce backward and forward until, within even a limited mass of matter, they did disrupt another atom. Neutrons from that disrupted atom would then go on and on!

An ordinary atomic pile must be of a certain minimum size because it loses so many neutrons from its outer surface that no chain-reaction can maintain itself. As the size of the pile increases the number that does not escape increases faster than the number that does. There is a size where enough strike fissionable atoms before escaping to maintain the reaction.

When as many are freed as escape the pile, a chain reaction sustains itself. But when none can escape, there is no minimum size. There is no minimum purity of materials. Prevent neutrons from escaping and anything at all, of any size, becomes an atomic pile.

Murfree passed over a third dollar bill. "Now I'm paying you to listen to me," he said evenly. "That man used your outfit and made a circular block for neutrons a quarter-mile across with the horn pointed down. Maybe a million, maybe five million tons of rock were inside it. Maybe there was some uranium in it too. None of the neutrons could escape. Each one bounced back and forth until it broke another atom. That made more neutrons bounce back and forth and break other atoms. You knew that would happen. You knew even a little pile would make him sick. But he made a monstrous one! It didn't make him sick. It killed him.

"Perhaps he intended to run it a while and then shut it off. It would have created enough radioactive isotopes by its normal working to make him a millionaire many times over. But he didn't turn it off in time! Because it killed him! And so the pile kept on working!

"Back in the mountains it's working now. There's hot air rising from it, and every breath of it is deadly poison! It goes up high and the winds spread it and presently it comes down to the ground again and kills. He didn't turn it off!"

Bud Gregory gaped at him. It was clear that he had never thought of such a thing. So much more than a genius that there is no word for it, he was like a child or a savage in that he could not think ahead. But he understood now. The unnameable intuition which had carried him to the achievement of a miracle had not told him the consequences of the miracle. But as Murfree pointed them out he saw.

"M-my gosh!" said Bud Gregory. He looked enormously concerned.

"Nobody can live to get to it to turn it off," said Murfree, grimly. "Maybe a plane can drop a bomb that will blast it. But it'll be weeks before I can make myself believed.

Meanwhile there's poison being poured into the air. People are dying right now.

"For five miles around that thing you made, there's not even a blade of grass alive. The people in the cabins for ten miles around are dying and don't know why. And that horn-shaped mass of ore and earth inside your field is full of more flying neutrons than any atom pile ever was.

"Suppose we turn that shield off with a bomb and all those free neutrons are turned loose at once! How far away will they kill every living thing? Fifty miles? A hundred miles?"

Bud Gregory swallowed. He undoubtedly understood more clearly than Murfree himself, now that it was pointed out to him.

"M-my gosh!" he said again. "I—uh—I didn't meant nothin' like that!"

Murfree handed him a fourth dollar bill with an indescribable sensation of irony. "Now tell me how to turn it off without killing everybody all the way to here!" he commanded evenly. "If it kills me to do it that's all right. But if you don't tell me how to stop the thing I'm going to kill you, you know. Here and now."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't realize that he was threatening. It simply seemed necessary. If Bud Gregory could doom a continent or a world and not be able to stop what he had created, he was too dangerous to be allowed to live.

But Bud Gregory spoke unhappily.

"I didn't mean nothin' like that! I just meant to make that fella sick as a dog. I figured he might make a little horn an' sleep in it when he camped. He'd be plenty sick by mornin'. But the dumb fool—" Then he knitted his brows. "I'll figure out something. I gotta knack for that kinda thing."