“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.
Chapter V
Folk of Iron
Stan Weaver sat on the cell bunk and said, “I always wondered how it would feel to go nuts.”
“Suppose you’re not crazy,” Bellbight said.
Weaver stood up. “Of course I’m crazy! Look here.” He went over to the cell door, grasped the bars, spread them wide and easily bent them back. He said. “I’ve read enough magazine articles and seen enough movies about people with broken wagons, bud. I just thought I bent those bars.”
“Look, Weaver. Something happened to you. You’re not crazy. At this moment you’re probably the strongest man in the world. Bullets would bounce off you. This is so strange to you that you’ve jumped on what you think is a reasonable explanation. I’ve interviewed your wife in the hospital. I assure you that you didn’t imagine what happened to her when you gave her that love tap.”
Stan Weaver sat down heavily. He said, “I hated driving those crates full of sourpuss people. Now I wish I was on the route again and I wish I couldn’t even remember what happened. I wish Madge was okay.”
He looked up and gave Tom Bellbight a weak smile. “This time I just tapped her, real light like, across the cheek. If I’d hit where I usually do I’d have busted her back.”
“I’ve been talking to your wife as I said. I explained a few things. She’s withdrawing the complaint. You can walk out of here with me.”
“Maybe it isn’t safe for me to be around. Maybe I’m better off here.”
“Now you’re beginning to think straight, Mr. Weaver. I’ve got a car outside. The sergeant has the stuff on his desk that he took out of your pockets. Come on along and just remember every minute that you can smash anything you touch too quickly, up to and including the human species.”
“Where do we go? I don’t want to go home. Madge’s sister is looking after the kids. She’s got a tongue like a rusty razor.”
“No. We’ll go to my lab. It’s at the Loma plant.”
“I know the place. Go by there six times a day.”
After using up the whole box of blades, McGoran gave up trying to shave. He was almost devoid of imagination. There was a logical explanation for everything. If a fact could not be explained it could be utilized. There was no capacity for awe in him. In the hotel room he carefully tested his new characteristics, cannily avoiding any destruction that would be overly noticeable.