Chub stood there watching him, chewing on his cigar, absent-mindedly diddling with the controls on the arc-welder. He pressed the starter-button, and the six-cylinder motor responded with a purr. He spun the work-selector dials idly, threw the arc generator switch—
A bolt of incredible energy, thin, searing, blue-white, left the rod-holder at his feet, stretched itself fifty feet across to Peebles, whose fingers had just touched the mouldboard of the tractor. Peebles’ head and shoulders were surrounded for a second by a violet nimbus, and then he folded over and dropped. A circuit breaker clacked behind the control board of the welder, but too late. The Seven rolled slowly backwards, without firing, on level ground, until it brought up against a road-roller.
Chub’s cigar was gone, and he didn’t notice it. He had the knuckles of his right hand in his mouth, and his teeth sunk into the pudgy flesh. His eyes protruded; he crouched there and quivered, literally frightened out of his mind. For old Peebles was burned almost in two.
They buried him next to Rivera. There wasn’t much talk afterwards; the old man had been a lot closer to all of them than they had realized until now. Harris, for once in his rum-dumb, lightheaded life, was quiet and serious, and Kelly’s walk seemed to lose some of its litheness. Hour after hour Dennis’ flabby mouth worked, and he bit at his lower lip until it was swollen and tender. Al Knowles seemed more or less unaffected, as was to be expected from a man who had something less than the brains of a chicken. Chub Horton had snapped out of it after a couple of hours and was very nearly himself again. And in Tom Jaeger swirled a black, furious anger at this unknowable curse that had struck the camp.
And they kept working. There was nothing else to do. The shovel kept up its rhythmic swing and dig, swing and dump, and the Dumptors screamed back and forth between it and the little that there was left of the swamp. The upper end of the runway was grassed off; Chub and Tom set grade stakes and Dennis began the long job of cutting and filling the humpy surface with his pan. Harris manned the other and followed him, a cut behind. The shape of the runway emerged from the land, and then that of the paralleling taxiway; and three days went by. The horror of Peebles’ death wore off enough so that they could talk about it, and very little of the talk helped anybody. Tom took his spells at everything, changing over with Kelly to give him a rest from the shovel, making a few rounds with a pan, putting in hours on a Dumptor. His arm was healing slowly but clean, and he worked grimly in spite of it, taking a perverse sort of pleasure from the pain of it. Every man on the job watched his machine with the solicitude of a mother with her first-born; a serious skilled mechanic.
The only concession that Tom allowed himself in regard to Peebles’ death was to corner Kelly one afternoon and ask him about the welding machine. Part of Kelly’s rather patchy past had been spent in a technical college, where he had studied electrical engineering and women. He had learned a little of the former and enough of the latter to get him thrown out on his ear. So, on the off-chance that he might know something about the freak arc, Tom put it to him.
Kelly pulled off his high-gauntlet gloves and batted sand-flies with them. “What sort of an arc was that? Boy, you got me there. Did you ever hear of a welding machine doing like that before?”
“I did not. A welding machine just don’t have that sort o’ push. I saw a man get a full jolt from a 400-amp welder once, an’ although it sat him down it didn’t hurt him any.”
“It’s not amperage that kills people,” said Kelly, “it’s voltage. Voltage is the pressure behind a current, you know. Take an amount of water, call it amperage. If I throw it in your face, it won’t hurt you. If I put it through a small hose you’ll feel it. But if I pump it through them tiny holes on a Diesel injector nozzle at about twelve hundred pounds, it’ll draw blood. But a welding arc generator just is not wound to build up that kind of voltage. I can’t see where any short circuit anywhere through the armature of field windings could do such a thing.”
“From what Chub said, he had been foolin’ around with the work selector. I don’t think anyone touched the dials after it happened. The selector dial was run all the way over to the low current application segment, and the current control was around the halfway mark. That’s not enough juice to get you a good bead with a quarter-inch rod, let alone kill somebody — or roll a tractor back thirty feet on level ground.”
“Or jump fifty feet,” said Kelly. “It would take thousands of volts to generate an arc like that.”
“Is it possible that something in the Seven could have pulled that arc? I mean, suppose the arc wasn’t driven over, but was drawn over? I tell you, she was hot for four hours after that.”
Kelly shook his head. “Never heard of any such thing. Look, just to have something to call them, we call direct current terminals positive and negative, and just because it works in theory we say that current flows from negative to positive. There couldn’t be any more positive attraction in one electrode than there is negative drive in the other; see what I mean?”
“There couldn’t be some freak condition that would cause a sort of oversize positive field? I mean one that would suck out the negative flow all in a heap, make it smash through under a lot of pressure like the water you were talking about through an injector nozzle?”
“No, Tom. It just don’t work that way, far as anyone knows. I dunno, though — there are some things about static electricity that nobody understands. All I can say is that what happened couldn’t happen and if it did it couldn’t have killed Peebles. And you know the answer to that.”
Tom glanced away at the upper end of the runway, where the two graves were. There was bitterness and turbulent anger naked there for a moment, and he turned and walked away without another word. And when he went back to have another look at the welding machine, Daisy Etta was gone.
Al Knowles and Harris squatted together near the water cooler.
“Bad,” said Harris.
“Nevah saw anythin’ like it,” said Al. “Ol’ Tom come back f’m the shop theah jus’ raisin’ Cain. ‘Weah’s ’at Seven gone? Weah’s ‘at Seven?’ I never heered sech cah’ins on.”
“Dennis did take it, huh?”
“Sho’ did.”
Harris said, “He came spoutin’ around to me a while back, Dennis did. Chub’d told him Tom said for everybody to stay off that machine. Dennis was mad as a wet hen. Said Tom was carryin’ that kind o’ business too far. Said there was probably somethin’ about the Seven Tom didn’t want us to find out. Might incriminate him. Dennis is ready to say Tom killed the kid.”
“Reckon he did, Harris?”
Harris shook his head. “I’ve known Tom too long to think that. If he won’t tell us what really happened up on the mesa, he has a reason for it. How’d Dennis come to take the dozer?”
“Blew a front tyre on his pan. Came back heah to git anothah rig — maybe a Dumptor. Saw th’ Seven standin’ theah ready to go. Stood theah lookin’ at it and cussin’ Tom. Said he was tired of bashin’ his kidneys t’pieces on them othah rigs an’ bedamned if he wouldn’t take suthin’ that rode good fo’ a change. I tol’ him ol’ Tom’d raise th’ roof when he found him on it. He had a couple mo’ things t’say ’bout Tom then.”