The Nameless Something

CHAPTER V Heavyside Layer

AT THIS, Bud Gregory sweated profusely. His hands shook. There were two radio tubes and a cryptic assortment of coils and condensers and resistors in the gadget he had mounted on a bit of plank.

He'd obviously worked on it for some time before he'd come in to talk to Murfree, but it did not look like anything. Except for the quite improbable coils—and no physicist in the Bureau of Standards had been able to work out what similar coils in Murfree's sample device did, or on what principle they were based. Apparently there was nothing in sight that a ten-year-old boy might not have gimmicked together at random.

"Go get 'im!" rasped the beefy man. "Or else!"

Bud Gregory cringed. He shambled across the courtyard and into the room where Murfree clenched his hands in a fury so great as to override even despair.

"M-my gosh, Mr. Murfree!" said Bud Gregory, tearfully. "They goin' to shoot you. And I just know they goin' to shoot me afterward. They told me to bring you back with me."-

His bony, angular hands worked feverishly and seemingly at random on the lunatic device he was holding.

"I showed 'em this to show I was tryin' to work like they said," said Bud Gregory piteously, "but they want me to bring you out there. They goin' to shoot you, Mr. Murfree!"

Murfree choked in rage, and swallowed a cold lump in his throat. He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak noble final words, but more likely to swear in utter fury.

"I'm—changin' it, Mr. Murfree, so's they can't shoot you," Bud said shakily as he worked. Sweat rolled down his face and panic filled his eyes. "It's a dinkus that makes those little hunksa stuff that metal's made of, all travel the same way. It makes some stuff that bounces around in any metal it comes to. I—I got to make it travel where I want it to through the air." He panted. Almost he sobbed. "All I ever wanted, Mr. Murfree, was not to bother nobody. If those fellas get killed, you got to tell the sheriff it ain't my fault!"

A stray wire, connected to heaven knew what at one end and nothing in particular at the other, took shape as an oddly beautiful curve under his twitching fingers. It was, Murfree saw, almost parabolic. But it was not a parabola. It was some sort of unsystematic curve in which Murfree could begin to see the beginning of a system.

"If I can get it finished, Mr. Murfree," chattered Bud Gregory, "they won't know when it's turned on, and they can shoot at you, and if I got it pointed at them—"

There was a snarl. The beefy man loomed up, a pistol out. Bud Gregory had gone after Murfree, and he, had delayed. Both men, their captors knew, were unarmed, but they might get ideas of resistance. So the squint-eyed man had come to see. And he'd heard.

He roared profanity at Bud Gregory, who had told Murfree he was to be killed. But Bud was still valuable. The beefy man raised his weapon and shot point-blank at Murfree. The muzzle was no more than ten feet from Murfree's body, and it spewed bullets straight for his heart.

And then the beefy man jerked ridiculously, and an expression of incredulous astonishment came over his face. He staggered, and put his hand to his side, and then collapsed very slowly to the ground. Bud Gregory yelped in anguished terror.

"You got to tell the sheriff, Mr. Murfree, that he done it himself," he wailed. "You got to!"

Murfree had thought that Bud Gregory could not surprise him, but he was blankly amazed to be alive. For a second he merely stared. Bud Gregory shook and trembled beside him, the contraption in his hands jiggling as he trembled. A little wire somewhere in it was turning white with frost.

Then Murfree moved with the dazed, desperate calm of a man who has seen a miracle. He picked up the beefy man's pistol.

"Come on," he said thickly. "Let's shoot our way out of here."

He started forward. But as he stepped out into the patio, the two remaining captors swore. They'd heard the shots. They'd looked for the beefy man to return, driving Bud Gregory before him. When they saw Murfree, instead, with the beefy man's pistol in his hand, they gaped at him.

"Hands up!" said Murfree desperately. He added foolishly: "Surrender in the name of the law!"

ONE of the two men fired from his coat-pocket, a burst of shots which emptied the magazine of his automatic pistol. He collapsed, kicking, to the ground. The other man aimed deliberately and Murfree tried to shoot him, but a civilized man's instinctive repugnance to bloodshed made his hand shake so that he couldn't pull the trigger.

The other man fired with a cold precision at Murfree—and dropped dead with a bullet in his brain. His own bullet. Bud Gregory wailed in unholy terror. But he held his little gadget safe, and even remembered to turn it off.

Miles away, a secret short-wave set sent a message from a hillside in the United States. Another set received it far away. It went into code, went over a cable in the guise of a completely innocent message, reached the capitol of a certain European Power, was decoded, and rushed to the ruler of that Power. He read it and cursed.

The United States could not fight according to law, but it was going to fight in defiance of its own acts of Congress. Orders had been given and, though illegal, they were being obeyed. Disarmed aircraft were fueling and loading up with bombs, carriers were putting desperately out to sea, and in a matter of hours the United States would be ready to defend itself.

The ruler of the European Power was angry. He would have preferred to take over the United States as a merely famine-racked, desperate, and babblingly grateful nation of folk whose spirit had been broken by a war of nerves. He had intended to seize its industrial plants intact and its cities undestroyed. But since the fools had belatedly shown dangerous intelligence, and were preparing to fight rather than be destroyed by their traditional reluctance to take the offensive—why, they would have to be smashed before they could get ready to resist.

He gave crisp, ruthless commands. He hadn't really believed they would fight, those democratic fools. Still, in fifteen minutes the first salvo of long-range guided missiles would be on the way, and other salvos would follow at two-minute intervals. And in a matter of an hour or so North America would be like a knacker's stall and the rest of the world would have had an object-lesson!

And in the hideout, Bud Gregory sat with his bones seemingly turned to jelly.

"What the devil happened?" Murfree asked unsteadily. "And we've got to get busy making something that'll stop an atom-bomb bombardment of America. Talk, man! Something may blow us up at any minute!"

"You—you got to tell the sheriff I didn't do nothin'," quavered Bud Gregory. "I didn't kill those three fellas, Mr. Murfree. They done it themselves. You'll tell the sheriff that. I don't want to have no trouble."

"Talk!" commanded Murfree. "We've got to work out something. What've you got there?"

Bud Gregory swallowed. He trembled uncontrollably.

"I told you I made a dinkus, to make my car pull up hills," he whispered. "It's some stuff that—uh—bounces around in stuff that conduc's electricity, Mr. Murfree. I told you about it. All the little hunks in metal that stuff gets in, have to move the same way. I made it make my car climb hills, and then I fixed it so I could make them little hunksa stuff act as brakes, too. They could even push the car backwards, if I wanted 'em to. And I—been makin' a livin' bettin' on a fella I fixed the dinkus on his racin'-car. That—that fella—I had his car fixed so it couldn't turn over, either."

Murfree listened in an unnatural calm. He knew all this, of course. Bud Gregory was not a genius. He was something so far beyond mere genius that there is no word for it.

He simply knew, instinctively, all the things the physicists of the world hope to find out in a hundred years or so. He was able to scramble together absurd-looking devices that turned heat into electricity, and made common dirt form an atomic pile, and the random molecular movements due to heat convert themselves into kinetic energy.

BUD GREGORY could make a spaceship that would travel among the stars, or he could make devices which would turn Earth into a paradise. Also, he could make dirt-track racing automobiles run faster!

"When I realized they were goin' to kill both of us," he said abjectly, "I got scared. So I took the dinkus. I had 'most finished and changed it a little bit, and then, instead of makin' things move faster, it turned 'em back. Somethin' that didn't move fast didn't get changed, but anything like a—uh—bullet, when I turned my dinkus on it, the faster it was goin', the faster it got flung back. And—uh—of course it got flung back straight to where it come from."

Murfree was strangely calm, as any man would be who had seen his would-be assassins drop dead from their own bullets fired at him and bounced back in a straight line. When miracles happen, one is stunned to calmness. Now he nodded his head slowly.

"I—see," he said. "When bullets ran into the field you projected, it was like hitting an elastic spring. Your field absorbed their energy, and stopped them, and then fed their energy right back and made them return to where they came from, in the same line and at the same speed they'd started with. That's it?"

"Yeah, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory pallidly. "That's it. You'll tell the sheriff I didn't kill those fellas."

"Oh, yes," said Murfree, slowly. "I'll tell him that. I take it you didn't project a field to make racing-cars run faster, though?"

"No, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory, shivering. "I run it through a wire to the motor. But I can throw it, and when it hits somethin' that carries 'lectricity, it bounces all around and stays there. It don't bother rocks or glass, none."

"I see," Murfree said in numb tones. "Most interesting. Now we've got to stop an atomic attack on America." Then he stood absolutely still for a long moment. "Look here," he said. "Will it bounce around in a gaseous conductor? Gas that has ions bouncing around so it will carry a current?"

"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "Of course, Mr. Murfree."

"What you're going to do now," said Murfree with really monstrous tranquility, "is to make a big version of that dinkus in your hand. A really big one. So we can turn it straight up and shoot that field into the Heaviside Layer. Do you know what that is? It's a layer of ionized air that covers the whole earth about fifteen miles up. You're going to make a dinkus that will fix the whole Heaviside Layer so that anything that's shot into it will be bounced right back where it came from, just like those bullets did. If you don't I'll either kill you or tell the sheriff on you."

Bud Gregory blinked at him.

"I don't have to make a big one, Mr. Murfree," he said plaintively. "This here one will fix anything. It don't take no power. The power comes from the things that get flung back. All I got to do is this, Mr. Murfree!"

He put his preposterous, untidy device on the ground, and bent the curiously curved wire so that the flatter part of its unsystematic curve was parallel to the ground. He threw a small switch. The two radio tubes glowed. A small wire turned white with frost.

"Nothin' can get through that layer now, Mr. Murfree," he said anxiously. "Now about this sheriff business. . . ."

In the sprawling, far-flung territories of a certain European Power columns of vapor suddenly screamed skyward at breathtaking accelerations. There were hundreds of them. They were the guided missiles which were to destroy America. They carried atomic bombs. They should make the better part of the continent into blasted, radioactive craters.

From the nations which were satellites of the European Power other columns of vapor streaked skyward. More bombs. They should surge furiously through the air to the chill emptiness beyond it, and they should circle a good part of the earth and then drive furiously down and spout ravening atomic flames!

YET they didn't. They went skyward, to be sure. They vanished in emptiness. And men on the ground prepared to send others after them. But they didn't do that, either.

The guided missiles roared into the thin, invisible Heaviside Layer of the earth's atmosphere, whose peculiarity is that it has been ionized by the sun's rays and therefore has a specific electrical conductivity. The rocket-projectiles were made of metal. They went raging into the ionized gas in which "stuff" which only Bud Gregory could understand was—in his words—"bouncing around."

And there they stopped. They exhausted their fuel in a furious, terrible duel with implacable and quite incomprehensible forces. The energy they possessed was somehow absorbed, and then their fuel cut off and all the energy they had parted with was restored to them and they went hurtling back toward the earth—toward the exact spot from which they had been discharged.

They were equipped with very sensitive fuses. Even the terrific velocity with which they struck their own launching-sites did not keep the fuses from working. The atomic bombs they carried exploded. They blew up their own launching-sites. More, they blew up the other bombs on the other guided missiles waiting to form the second and third and twentieth salvos.

Very many large areas of a certain European Power became monstrous craters. Unparalleled craters. Chasms going down to the molten rock below the earth's crust. There were similar craters in the satellite nations. But there were no craters in America. Not even little ones. No atom bombs fell on the United States.

When the President of the United States barked a grim and defiant message to the European Power, he knew nothing of the craters. They had been made only five minutes earlier. He simply barked defiantly that the United States wasn't going to change its government or its way or living for anybody, and it would fight anybody that wanted a fight.

But nobody did. In fact, neither the European Power nor its satellites were apt to fight anybody for a very, very long time.

And, of course, Murfree went back home. He was quite broke when he got there, and he could have been fired from his Civil Service job for taking leave without permission. But since almost everybody else had done the same thing, his offense was graciously pardoned. He was, however, deprived of pay for all the time he had been absent.

The thing that makes him mad, though—No, there are two things that make him mad!

When it was clear that there was no further danger to America, he turned off Bud Gregory's device and packed it in a car, the same car in which he'd been taken to the hideout. And he drove Bud Gregory down to Los Angeles, where he intended to try to get passage back to Washington. People were flocking back to the cities everywhere, then, and police were regulating the flow of returning refugees.

Murfree's captured car was stopped, and three policemen advanced to give him instructions about the route he should take. And Bud Gregory couldn't face three cops. He jumped out of the car and ran away into the thick of the mob of cars and pedestrians streaming back into the city.

Murfree couldn't have caught him. He didn't try, because he was trying so hard to rescue Bud Gregory's gadget, which Bud had used as a stepping-stone when he scrambled out of the car. Those are the two things that make Murfree mad. Bud Gregory fled and could not possibly be found. And his device was smashed so it wouldn't work any more.

Murfree still has it, of course, but he's lost all hope of understanding it. In fact, whenever he thinks about Bud Gregory he begins to swear. He envies Bud Gregory. Because Bud Gregory is something there isn't any word for.