The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (58 page)

Steve’s tensed body went lax with relief.

“That did it, all right!” he said shakily. “That was an atom bomb going off beyond the atmosphere. They must have learned what happened to their bombers and started a rocket for us as soon as they could aim it.”

Then something made a shrill whistling noise overhead, and it rose in pitch and rose in pitch, and hit heavily into a hillside two miles off. It did not explode. Nothing at all happened.

“That would be a bombing plane, I guess,” said Steve as shakily as before. “It took all that time to fall.”

Other shrill whistlings came to the ears, two and three at the same instant. They sounded from every side, but every one of them ended in dull impacts. Some were far, far away. There must have been a dozen in all.

Frances’ eyes were frightened.

“There was a fleet of planes overhead—to bomb us! And—and—” She stared at Steve.

“And they ain’t there any more,” said Lucky. He swallowed. “I never been so scared since I got my luck. That was a atom bomb, fella?”

Another lurid monstrous flare blossomed on the horizon. Lucky flinched.

“Yeah,” Lucky continued, answering his own question. “And there was another one. And another!”

A third instantaneous, weirdly silent flare came as bright as the sun itself and many times larger. Three atom bombs had exploded in empty space as they rose curving from below the horizon to fall upon people who dared to resist chaos.

Steve sat down suddenly and put his head in his hands.

But Bob, the sixteen-year-old, spoke raptly.

“I got it!” he cried. “Golly, I got it! He hooked on a generator-maker circuit, so the probe threw a beam that made generators outa every piece of metal it hit. Every one! The bombs that were fallin’ were turned into generators. The different pieces arced where they were close together. They heated up thin places in the fuse. They burned into the detonator and they set it off. And they exploded, every one!

“Next, the planes—they got to be thousands of generators all hooked together, every piece spittin’ blue-white fire. Every wire to every instrument and every control became charged and started pourin’ juice into everything, all at once! Every control burned out! Every motor jammed!

“Where the ends of every bit of metal wasn’t spittin’ electric arcs, it was gettin’ cold as liquid air, and brittle, with no strength to it. It’d break, then—Oh-h-h! I got it! I got it!”

Steve looked up. Frances gazed at him, wide-eyed. He lifted himself rather heavily to his feet. He put his arm around her. He opened his mouth, and closed it.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said at last. “We’re safe now for a while, but we can’t stop with being safe! We’ve got to fix these people so they can’t do any more damage, and then I guess we can start getting civilized once more.”

He kissed her almost absent-mindedly as he walked toward the house with his arm around her waist.

The refugees were shaken and scared, but also they were savagely triumphant. Food for Steve was handed to Frances to serve him, but most of the people who now relied on him were too much in awe to ask questions. They clustered around the boy, who was one of their number. He made voluble explanations, his eyes shining. There was the probe, which was simply a variation on the apparatus which acted as an artificial crater-stone.

To get information from that apparatus or from the crater-stone, one used it to explore possible futures, automatically causing a change in the probability of future events. But the probe explored the factual present, with no effect upon probability in itself. It worked like an infinitely superior radar. It could be adjusted to hunt for anything. Anything at all. The generator-maker was actually a more effective weapon than the atomic bomb, for defense.

If every separate bit of metal in a complicated bit of apparatus—such as a bomb-fuse or a bombing plane—became separately charged with high-voltage electricity with plenty of amperage behind it, that apparatus would be destroyed.

The generator-making field created just such a condition when it was in action. It was rather as if a beam of magnetism could be projected, to make temporary tiny magnets of every sheet and rivet and wire in an aircraft, with all the north and south poles emitting electric arcs. And where the poles were far apart, the middle dropping to the temperature of liquid helium, when no metal has either strength or elasticity.

The third piece of apparatus simply controlled the other two, but no atom bomb could penetrate such a defense, nor could an atom bomb provide a defense against it.

And the three devices were startlingly simple, when the functions of which they were capable were considered. A civilization based upon controlled chance would not merely be one in which good luck was universal. It would be one in which there could never be danger from atomic bombs.

Steve called a council of war that afternoon. The deliberations were interrupted, once, by a drum-fire of distant detonations. A sentry, outside, gave the clue. When the first boomings sounded, he’d whirled to look. And he saw smoke-puffs just over the edge of far-distant hills. As he stared, infinitely tiny specks darted over those same hills and instantly exploded.

“Ground-level planes,” said Lucky, wisely. “Tryin’ to sneak up at treetop level. In the last war, the early radars wouldn’t work except on high-level stuff. But these fellas can come up behind hills, and when they come over ’em, the dinkuses mess ’em up.”

* * * *

A thought had occurred to Steve. His eyes narrowed.

“They might try ground troops, too, but I can change the thought-record to take care of that, too,” he said. “The thing is that they’re going to keep on trying to get us. Yet I doubt that they’ll anticipate an attack from us very soon. They couldn’t possibly detect the stuff we’re using, so they probably think we’ve got radar and power-beams with a couple of hundred thousand horsepower in them. That sort of stuff wouldn’t be portable. They’ll expect us to stay on the defensive and try to build up what they think we’ve got. So we’ll attack them before they have a chance to figure things out.”

Frances looked anxious.

“What do you mean to do?” she asked.

“We’ll duplicate these gadgets,” Steve said. “We’ll carry the extra ones with us. We might make an extra set, for safety, here, too. I think—hm—four or five of us should be enough to make the attack with. But I’ll have to use the probe and locate their nearest base.”

“It’s a coupla hundred miles south,” said Lucky. “I found that out. There’s some territory there that folks go into and never come back. A place about fifty miles across.”

“Then that’s it. Who’ll come with Lucky and me?”

There was almost an uproar. Eleven men among the refugees now considered Steve their chief. They had regarded him at first with suspicion and then with unease. But after witnessing what had happened today they trusted him implicitly, and they looked forward to slaughter of the folk who used planes and bombs to wreck a world. Their eyes burning, to a man they demanded to go.

But Steve chose only three. Then he hesitated.

“Lucky, how about you staying back here to run things? You know how to pull for what’s needed and have it happen.”

In his mind was the thought of Frances. But Lucky rejected the suggestion.

“No dice, fella,” he said. “I ain’t talked much, but I’ve seen plenty. If there’s any killin’ of those fellas to be done, I’m goin’ to be in on it!”

There was another distant drum-fire of explosions. They listened, and that was all. It was merely more planes trying to come and bomb them, the only thing they had feared most for weeks. But Lucky fidgeted.

“I want to go out and watch ’em blow up,” he said. “We start hikin’ about daybreak, Steve? Okay! All set!”

The council of war broke up. Bob, the boy, began the duplication of the devices that had been made that morning. Steve explained to him gravely that it was more important to have many such devices available than to perform any other service. It was important, too, to train other men to make them.

And the men were desperately anxious to learn. Clumsy farmers’ fingers copied, painstakingly, every incomprehensible detail of the models the boy set up for them. There were four sets complete within three hours. Steve, checking them, rearranged one to an even greater compactness. It still worked.

By nightfall the model had been refined still farther, into a rifle-like projector with a blunderbuss-like coil where the barrel should have been. And five men sat up all night to make extra ones for the expedition to carry in the morning.

But before that—much before that—Steve and Frances went out-of-doors alone. There was a moon again. They talked quietly beneath a spreading tree. Insects made romantic noises. Night-birds called mournfully in the darkness.

“We’ll make out,” Steve said awkwardly, when Frances had protested vehemently that she wanted to go too. “But it’s going to be a tough hike. We could construct some sort of traveling device, but they’d be looking out for that. They’d never think, though, that people who could blast their planes out of the sky would be content to travel on foot. So that’s the way we’ll go and we’re going to travel fast. Meanwhile you’re going to stay here.”

He kissed her, and her protests were stifled. Then there was an isolated explosion, far away. Frances started.

“Just another try by a sneak-plane,” he told her. “They’ll keep that up indefinitely.” His expression grew pensive. “Er, I’m going’ to bring something back. I used the old crater-stone, for sure, and pulled for something. And it warmed up. So I know I’ll come back with what I want.”

There was no reason whatever for secrecy, but he whispered. And she put her arms about his neck.

Then, suddenly, over at the horizon to the south, there was a lurid flare of light as brilliant as the sun and vastly larger. For the fraction of an instant the world was illuminated more brightly than by day. It was another atom bomb. Then came the blessed dark again.

And Bob, aged sixteen, who had come out to ask Steve a professional question about a proposed change in a circuit, blinked in the re-fallen darkness.

“Gosh!” he said.

He went back into the house without disturbing them.

CHAPTER XV

Invasion

By easy stages, it took them only four days to make the two hundred miles, because early on the second day they came to a broad river. They made a raft and floated down it day and night, with only one needing to stay awake on watch.

They used the probe to check their progress, and disembarked on the fourth afternoon. Then they went on.

At nightfall there was absolutely no sign that this part of the world—all weed-grown fields and desolation—was any different from any of the rest. But they knew.

Lucky had become fascinated by the probes. There was a switch which, when thrown, allowed the object sought for to be varied.

Lucky grinned cheerfully.

“This is about where the first line of watch-dinkuses will be,” he said.

He’d used the probe on a thought-record which made it seek out devices which would betray their presence to enemy watchers in the center of the foe’s dead area. He knew that there were three lines of photo-cells and induction balances which, without alarming anyone who ventured in, made their capture or killing a certainty at the option of the inhabitants.

Lucky swung the probe right and left, and chuckled.

“Pullin’ for a place we can go through without settin’ anything off.”

They went through. They went on. An hour later they reached the second line. They went through that. The third. Lucky used the probe continually.

“Hold it!” he said presently. “Somethin’ funny up ahead.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I don’t get it,” he murmured to Steve finally. “I’ve found something to stay away from. Not a trap. Not a warner. Not a big bunch of those folks. Not bombs. You try, Steve.”

Steve put the switch of his own probe to brain-control and tried. After a little, he smiled grimly.

“Prison-camp,” he said. “A lot of people in it. Our kind.
Hmmmm.”

“There’ll be guards, but they’ll be watchin’ in, not out,” one of the other three said hungrily. “We could kill ’em and—test our stuff.”

“Why not?” said Steve. “I guess we owe them quite a bit.”

They advanced. They came upon a long line of electric lights—more of civilization than was believed to exist anywhere—and a stockade, with hovels inside it. They saw a guard pacing up and down, a rifle carried negligently over his arm. Lucky squirmed away. The others waited. A long time later Lucky’s voice came faintly:

“Hey, fella!”

The guard whirled, grasping his gun with both hands at the ready. Then, in the dim light of the electric bulbs, those in the darkness saw what happened. The barrel of his gun turned white with frost. Sparks—arcs—played about his fingers. He could not let go. He toppled. He moved spasmodically. He rolled over and over. He was still. Then his dead body flexed horribly and relaxed again.

Lucky came back, humming snatches of a little song to himself.

“They’d be right curious what killed him, if they’d have a chance to look,” he said amiably. “Electrocution is handy. It’s permanent and it’s quiet, and any fella with a gun carries his own generator providin’ he touches his gun in two places and we turn a beam on him.”