Alvah stared at the fantastic growths. Well, why not? Plants that grew into knives or doorknobs or …
“What about alloys?” he asked.
“We got iron, lead and zinc. Carbon from the air. Other metals we got to import in granules. Like we get chrome from the Northwest Federation, mostly. They getting too big for their britches, though. Greedy. I think we going to switch over to you Yukes before long. Not that you fellows is any better, if you ask me, but at least―”
“Rhodium,” said Alvah. “Palladium. What about them?”
“How that?”
“Platinum group.”
“Oh, sure, I know what you mean. We never use them. No call to. We could get you some, I guess―I think the Northwests got them. Take a few months, though.”
“Suppose you wanted to make something out of a rhodopalladium alloy. How long would it take after you got the metals?”
“Well, you have to make a bush that would take and put them together, right proportions, right size, right shape. Depends. I guess if you was in a hurry―”
“Never mind,” said Alvah wearily. “Thanks for the information.” He turned and started back toward the gate.
When he was halfway there, he heard a hullabaloo break out somewhere behind him.
“Waw!” the voices seemed to be shouting. “Waw! Waw!”
HE turned. A dozen paces behind him, Jerry and the bird on his shoulder were in identical neck-straining attitudes. Beyond them, on the near side of a group of low buildings three hundred yards away, three men were waving their arms madly and shoutting, “Waw! Waw!”
“Wawnt to know what it is,” the bird squawked. “I wawnt be a Mahn. Violet: you come along with me, to your own―”
“Shut up,” said Jerry, then cupped his hands and yelled, “Angus, what is it?”
“Chicagos,” the answer drifted back. Just got word! They dusting Red Pits! Come on!”
Jerry darted a glance over his shoulder. “Come on!” he repeated and broke into a loping run toward the buildings.
Alvah hesitated an instant, then followed. With strenuous effort, he managed to catch up to the other man. “Where are we running to?” he panted. “Red Pits?”
“Don’t talk foolish,” Jerry gasped. “We running to shelter.” He glanced back the way they had come. “Red Pits over that way.”
Alvah risked a look and then another. The first time, he wasn’t sure. The second time, the dusting of tiny particles over the horizon had grown to a cluster of visibly swelling black dots.
Other running figures were converging on the buildings as Angus and Jerry approached. The dots were capsule shapes, perceptibly elongated, the size of a fingernail, a thumbnail, a thumb …
And under them on the land was a hurtling streak of goldendun haze, like dust stirred by a huge invisible finger.
Rounding the corner of the nearest building, Jerry popped through an open doorway. Alvah followed—
And was promptly seized from either side, long enough for something heavy and hard to hit him savagely on the nape of the neck.
VII
BITHER was intent over a shallow vessel half full of a viscous clear liquid, with a great rounded veined ― and ― patterned glistening lump immersed in it, transparent in the phosphor-light that glowed from the sides of the container―a single living cell in mitosis, so grossly enlarged that every gene of every paired chromosome was visible. B. J. watched from the other side of the table, silent, breathing carefully, as the man’s thick fingers dipped a hair-thin probe with minuscule precision, again and again, into the yeasty mass, exercising a particle, splitting another, delicately shaving a third.
From time to time, she glanced at a sheet of horn intricately inscribed with numbers and genetic symbols. The chart was there for her benefit, not for Bither’s―he never paused or faltered.
Finally, he sat back and covered the pan. “Turn on the lights and put that in the reduction fluid, will you, Beej? I bushed.” She whistled a clear note, and the dark globes fixed to the ceiling glowed to blue-white life. “You going to grow it right away?”
“Have to, I guess. Dammit, Beej, I hate making weapons.”
“Not our choice. When you think it be?”
He shrugged. “War meeting this afternoon over at Council Flats. They let us know when it be.”
She was silent until she had transferred the living lump from one container to another and put it away. Then, “Hear anything more?”
“They dusting every ore-bed from here to the Illinois, look like. Crystal, Butler’s―”
“Butler’s! That worked out.”
“I know it. We let them land there. They find out. After another pause, Bither said, “No word about Alvah, Beej. I sorry.”
She nodded. “Wouldn’t be, this early.”
He looked at her curiously. “You still think he be back?”
“If the dust ain’t got him. Lay you odds.”
“Well,” said Bither, lifting the cover of another pan to peer into it, “I hope you―”
“Ozark Lake nine-one-two five,” said a reedy voice from the corner. “Ozark Lake nine-”
“Get that, will you, Beej?”
B. J. picked up the ocher spheroid from its shelf and said into its tympanum, “Bither Laboratories.”
“This Angus Littleton at Iron Pits, the thing said. Let me talk to Bither.”
She passed it over, holding a loop of its rubbery cord―the beginning of a miles―long sheathed bundle of cultivated neurons that linked it, via a switchboard” organism, with thousands like it in this area alone, and with millions more across the continent.
“This Doc Bither. What is it, Angus?”
“Something funny for you, Doc. We got a couple prisoners here, one a floater pilot, other a Chicago spy.”
“Well, what you want me to―”
“Wait, can’t you? This spy claim he know you. Doc. Say his name Gustard. Alvah Gustard.”
ALVAH stared out through the window, puzzled and angry. He had been in the room for about half an hour, while things were going on outside. He had tried to break the window. The pane had bent slightly. It was neither glass nor plastic, and it wasn’t breakable.
Outside, the last of the invading floaters was dipping down to ward the horizon, pursued by a small darting black shape. Goldendun haze obscured all the foreground except the first few rows of plants, which were drooping on their stems. The squadron had made one grand circle of the mine area, dusting as they went, before the Muckfeet on their incredibly swift flyers―birds or reptiles, Alvah couldn’t tell which―had risen to engage them. Since then, a light breeze from the north had carried the stuff dropped over the Pits: radioactive dust with a gravitostatic charge to make it rebound and spread―and then, with its polarity reversed, cling like grim death where it fell.
He turned and looked at the other man, sitting blank-faced and inattentive, wearing rumpled sky-blue uniform, on the bench against the inner wall. Most of the squadron had flown off to the west after that first pass, and had either escaped or been forced down somewhere beyond the Pits. This fellow had crash-landed in the fields not five hundred yards from Alvah’s window. Alvah had seen the Muckfeet walking out to the wreck―strolling fantastically through the deadly haze―and turkey ― trotting their prisoner back again. A little later, someone had opened the door and shoved the man in, and there he had sat ever since.