The Gregory Circle

CHAPTER III Hidden Connection

DEATH fell out of a rain cloud in Kansas. A driving summer rainstorm swept across the wheatfields of the plains and where it fell the growing wheat died. The occupants of every farmhouse on which the rainstorm beat died too in a matter of days.

The Mississippi River became a stinking broth of dead and rotting fish above St. Louis and the noisesomeness floated downstream to poison the water all the way to the Gulf—and beyond.

Dead birds fell from the skies over a dozen states and where they fell the earth went barren in little round spaces about them. A patch of the Gulf Stream turned white with dead fish. A game-preserve in Alabama became depopulated.

There were three hundred deaths in one night in Louisville. There were sixty in Chicago. The Tennessee Valley power-generating plant blew out every dynamo in five hectic minutes, during which sheet-lightning hurtled all about the interior of the generator-buildings.

Then death struck Akron, Ohio. Everybody knows about that—twelve thousand people in three days, and a whole section of the city roped off and nobody allowed to enter it, and the dogs and eats and even the sparrows writhing feebly on the streets before they too died.

It was radioactive dust that had done it. And Oak Ridge was blamed as the only possible source of radioactive dust and gas which could kill capriciously at a distance of hundreds of miles.

The newspapers raged. Congressmen—at home between sessions—leaped grandiloquently into print with infuriated demands for a special session of Congress in order that an investigation might be launched to fix responsibility—as if fixing responsibility would end the continuing disasters.

Eminent statesmen announced forthcoming laws which would destroy utterly every trace of atomic science in the United States and make it a capital offense to try to keep the United States in a condition either to defend itself or to keep abreast of the rest of the world.

Oak Ridge was shut down and every uranium pile dismantled—this to appease the public—and every available investigator was dispatched to Oak Ridge to uncover the appalling carelessness which had killed as many victims as a plague.

The only trouble was that all this indignation was baseless. Radioactive dust and gases were the cause of the deaths to be sure. But the Smyth Report had pointed out the danger from such by-products of chain-reaction piles and elaborate precautions had been taken against them.

The material which killed had not come from Oak Ridge. It couldn't have. Murfree had never even suspected it. The amount of dust was wrong. The amount of deadly stuff necessary to produce the observed effects simply couldn't have come from the atom piles in operation.

It was too much—and besides it would have killed anybody in its neighborhood at the point of its release into the air. And nobody had died at Oak Ridge. It came from somewhere else.

Picking his way desperately into the heart of the Smokies, Murfree kept track of events by his car radio. Two hundred miles in—the roads were so bad that a hundred-mile journey was a good ten hour's drive—there was enough data for a rough calculation of the amount of dust and gases that must have been released.

When Murfree made his calculation sweat broke out all over his body. Such a quantity of fissioning material could not result from a man-made atomic pile. The piles that men had made were as large as were readily controllable. This was incomparably larger.

All the piles at Oak Ridge and at Hand-ford in Washington together could not produce a twentieth or a hundredth of the stuff that had been released. Somehow, somewhere, a chain reaction had been started with so monstrous an amount of material to work on that it staggered the imagination. And it was increasing! It seemed to be growing like a cancer!

Whatever had begun a chain reaction outside of Oak Ridge and Handford and however it had become possible, it staggered the imagination. The output of murderous by-products increased day by day. It was building up to an unimaginable climax.

THERE was no danger of an atomic explosion, of course. An atomic pile does not blow up. But by the amount of by-products released, something on the order of a small but increasing volcano was at work somewhere. Instead of giving off relatively harmless gases and smoke, it gave off the most deadly substances known to men.

There could be no protection against such invisible death. Poured into the air at sufficiently high level—doubtless carried up by a column of hot air—finely-divided dust and deadly gas could travel for hundreds of miles before touching earth. Apparently they did. Where they touched earth, nothing could live.

Not only did living things die after breathing in the deadly stuff but the ground itself became murderous. To walk on an area where the ground emitted radioactive radiation was to die. To breathe the air exposed to those rays. . . .

Murfree went desperately on in his search for the impossible source of the invisible carriers of death. He found the first evidence that he was on the right track a hundred miles from a telephone. He was far beyond powerlines and railroads. He was in that Appalachian Highlands, where life and language is a hundred years behind the rest of America.

He stopped to buy food and ask hopeless questions at a tiny, unbelievably primitive store. He tried the Geiger counter. And it clicked measurably more often than before. Twenty miles farther on its rate of clicking had gone up fifty percent. He spent a day in seemingly aimless wandering, driving the laboring car over roads that had never before known pneumatic tires.

Then he left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly cabin. His wife was not easy about it. She protested.

"But what will happen to us?" she asked desperately. "I want to share whatever happens to you, David!"

Murfree was not a particularly heroic person. He was frankly scared. But he spoke firmly.

"Listen, my dear! Something like a uranium pile has started up somewhere in these hills. It's on a scale that nobody's ever imagined before. It's so big that it's incredible that human beings could have started it. It's pouring out radioactive dust and gases into the air. They're being spread by the winds. Where the stuff lands everything dies.

"And the pile is increasing in size and violence. If it keeps on increasing, it will make at least this continent uninhabitable, and it may destroy all the life in the world. Not only all human life but every bird and beast and even the fish in the ocean deeps. And something's got to be done!"

"But—"

"I brought you so far with me," said Murfree doggedly, "because you were no safer in Washington than anywhere else. So far, death from the thing is a matter of pure chance. Wherever it's happening the ground must be so hot that a column of air rises from it like smoke from a forest fire.

"But the place where there's least smoke from a fire is close to its edge. That's why I brought you this close. You're safer here than farther away and much safer than you'd be closer."

"But you intend to go on!" she protested. "I've got a protective suit," he told her. "I managed to borrow one quite unlawfully from the bureau. I couldn't get more. If I can get close enough to the thing to map it or simply locate it drone planes can complete the exploration. But I've got to know, and I've got to take back some sort of evidence.

"I'm going to be as careful as I can, my dear. The only hope that exists is for me to get back with accurate information. I'll take that to Washington and then I take you and the kid as far away from here as what money we have will carry us."

"And if you don't get back?"

"You'll be safe here longer than anywhere else," he told her. "In the nature of things, if the stuff rises up on a hot-air column, it won't start to drop until it's a long way off.

"We're probably not more than a hundred miles from whatever impossible thing a natural atomic pile is. I'm leaving you what money I have. It will keep you here for years. Unless something can be done, the rest of America will be a desert long before that time!

"I'm guessing," he added gloomily, "but nobody else is even doing that! They blame Oak Ridge. But the weather-maps point clearly to this area as the place from which the dust must have been dispersed."

It was not a sentimental parting. Murfree was an earnest family man who happened also to be a scientist. He had done what he could for his family's safety—and it wasn't much. But now he had to do something which would most probably be quite futile, on the remote chance that it could do some good.

If the source of radioactive dust-clouds now drifting over America were a natural phenomenon like a volcano, it was hardly likely that anything could be done about it. North America would probably become uninhabitable in months or at most a year or two. There might be some areas on the West Coast where prevailing winds could keep away the poison for a time, but it was entirely possible that ultimately the whole earth would become a desert of radioactive sand and its seas empty of even microscopic life.

So Murfree left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly home a hundred and twenty miles from a telephone and two hundred miles from an electric light. He went on to verify the danger that he seemed to be the only living man to evaluate correctly. He still did not connect Bud Gregory with it.