Journey for Seven

Chapter IV Hell to Pay

Tom Bellbight was a physically lazy man, lank, languid. A pipe smoker, a congenital bachelor, a hanger of legs over chair arms, a fight fan, a doctor of physics, research chief of Program Ten for Loma.

He came shuffling into Dickinson’s office with a sheaf of newspapers in his hand. Dickinson looked up impatiently. “Well?”

Tom Bellbight knocked the ashes out of his pipe and shoved it into his pocket. He collapsed into a chair like a scarecrow blown over by the wind. “Now beat on your chest like a partridge, Dick. You can spare a couple of minutes.”

Dickinson sighed. “Okay. What goes?”

“Accident yesterday. Old lady hit by a truck.”

“That’s hardly earthshaking, Tom.”

“This old lady walked out in front of a bus. Truck hit her. Did two hundred and eighty-six dollars damage to the front end of the truck. Knocked the old lady thirty feet. Didn’t even bruise her.”

“She sounds like my mother-in-law.”

“The bus was stopped because the driver pushed the brake pedal down through the floor. I stopped down and looked at the bus. Take about eleven hundred pounds to push that pedal down that way.”

“Are you trying to confuse me?”

“After he did that the bus driver pushed his finger through the side of the bus. About a dozen times.”

“Probably the old lady’s son — the old lady you were talking about.”

“Oh, I checked on her in the hospital. They had to use a diamond drill to open a vein in her arm.”

“This isn’t April first, Tom.”

“Just keep listening, Dick. Yesterday afternoon a cop shot a kid in the back. The kid kept running. The kid, about fourteen, had broken the cop’s arm. Cop weighed two ten. That happened at about the same time plainclothes cops tried to pick up one Addison McGoran. They shot him three times in the back, four times in the chest, twice in the back of the head.”

“Thorough job.”

“He ran away.”

Dickinson flushed. “Listen, Dr. Bellbight, if you think that I’m going to stop what I’m doing and—”

“Keep your balance sheet buttoned, Dick. Man found in Bell City last night. Throat so crushed the coroner was ready to swear he’d been strangled by an ape. Lawyer out at the accident got his wrist broken by a blond gal who just grabbed him. She didn’t twist. She grabbed him.”

“What are you—”

“A scientist is supposed to correlate interesting little facts. Today the police in Stockland found a lot of busted pay phone and pinball machines. In each case the metal on the coin box looked as though it had been tinfoil grabbed by a small hand, a kid’s hand. His fingers punched through the metal and the coins were gone.

“A babe, at midnight last night, Civil Service steno, tried to commit suicide. Jumped out of her apartment window. Eighth story. Half dressed. She hit on the asphalt, got up and went back to her room. I went out this afternoon and took a look at the spot. You can see a clear imprint of the side of her face in the asphalt.”

“I am beginning to suspect that this isn’t some idiotic joke. But I can’t guess what your object is.”

“Coming to it. Yesterday evening a guy went into a barbershop just before closing time. Barber tried two razors — couldn’t cut a hair. Then the guy took scissors and tried to cut a lock of his own hair. Here’s the scissors. I got ’em from the cops. The barber reported him. The bus driver went home last night and gave his wife a light love tap. Broke her jaw and knocked two teeth out and gave her a concussion. Swears that he only tapped her with his fingertips.”

“This seems to be an amazing account of durability.”

“Seven people on that bus. The old lady, the driver, the babe who tried to kill herself, the blondie who broke the guy’s wrist, the fellow with a beard too tough to cut, the kid who was shot in the back and the guy who stopped nine slugs.”

“All on the same bus?”

“As near as I can check.”

“For heaven’s sake, Tom. So what?”

Tom smiled mildly. “So that bus went by here at exactly two-eighteen yesterday afternoon.”

Dickinson’s face slowly changed.

He said softly, “Two-eighteen.” He got up from behind the desk and stood by the window. “But that doesn’t—”

“Johnny Hubbard was on the roof. He says that the transmitter sagged and pointed at the highway. The only thing in the line of fire was a blue-and-silver bus.”

“But what we’re trying to do doesn’t mean that—”

“We know very little about what we’re trying to do, Dick. I’ve got my own hunches about it.”

“What do you think?”

“In strictly non-technical language, Dick, I think the beam gave those people a sea-change. Take soft wood — pine. Type of molecular activity and surface density not too hard to disturb. Dent it with your thumbnail. Make a change in molecular activity — say freeze it to absolute zero. Have a hard time denting it with a cold chisel and a sledge.

“Or the reverse. Suppose you speed up the electron activity. Each electron a tiny electrical charge zooming around at a great rate. Forty thousand miles a second roughly. Suppose you push that up to a hundred thousand miles a second. My guess is that the pine would react the same as though it had been frozen to absolute zero.

“I have a hunch that the beam had no effect on inanimate substances but that through some freak of luck, or bad luck, it speeded the whirl of electrons in all animate substances within range. So it’s not too hard to figure the effects. It would affect function and muscle tone. Enormously powerful people with a structure like the finest tool steel. Teeth like diamonds.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

Bellbight smiled. “Then Dick, old man, you think up an answer for indestructible old ladies, men who can shove a finger through sheet steel and a man you can shoot in the back of the head without stopping him.”

Dickinson turned from the window, his face worried. “I’ll have to contact the lawyers. There’ll be damage suits from this. There’ll be hell to pay — if you’re right. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go see the little girl who jumped out the window. And then I’m going down to the jail in Bell City and see the bus driver. When his wife came out of the fog she signed a complaint.”

The third time he knocked on the door, more impatiently than before he heard her say, “Go away!” There was a tiny metallic quality to her voice, the half-echo of the sound a musical saw might make.

He called to her. “I’m not a reporter, Miss Caswell.”

Her voice was closer to the other side of the door. “Who are you?”

“You need me, Miss Caswell.”

Her laugh was metal hysteria. “Oh, a psychiatrist.”

“No, a physicist.”

After a long silence the door opened abruptly. The hair was no longer in a neat dark bun. It flowed in wild disorder, giving her a fey look. She wore blue jeans and a heavy flannel shirt.

“I can wear these clothes,” she said, “if I’m very careful.”

He walked across the room and sat down, stared curiously at a fireplace poker that had been tied neatly into a lover’s knot.

In a flat unemotional clinical tone he told her in layman’s language what he thought was wrong with her. He didn’t tell her how or why it had happened.

She sat opposite him.

“Why did you try to kill yourself, Miss Caswell?” he asked gently.

She ran a shaking hand through her hair. “Everything was — orderly. I wanted a normal life more than anything. I had everything planned. And then this. I can’t go to work. Everything I touch—”

“That’s because all of this is new to you. Suppose you took a child and put him to work juggling glassware. Impossible at first, yes. But slowly he would learn the requisite manual dexterity. He would form a sensory, nervous and muscular adjustment to the task.”

“But I can’t even comb my hair. Food has no substance to it.”

“We can have a comb made of tool steel. The problem is akin to combing hard wire. It is possible to buy tough cuts of meat and overbroil them. I think I can understand how you feel. You touch your own arm. It feels the way it always did. It seems to you as though everything in the world has turned fragile. There is no solid substance to anything. Right?”

She nodded. He was pleased to see that his calm tone had quieted her.

“What do you want of me?”

“I want to help you. In return, I want something on which to make laboratory tests. Bite off a fragment of fingernail and pull a few hairs from your head. Also I want to see how your skin feels to the touch.”

The hairs were like steel wire. The halfmoon of fingernail felt like a chip from the cutting edge of a machine tool.

Quite suddenly she began to weep. He put his hands on her shoulders. Gently at first, then exerting all his strength, he tried to dig his fingers into her. Her head was bent. She lifted her face and looked at him from streaming eyes. He saw the tiny scratches at the base of her throat.

“How did that happen?”

“I tried — a knife. It bent.”

On impulse he kissed her lightly. Her lips were warm and tasted of salt but they were formed of a strange marble.

“Everything will be fine,” he said.