Bud Gregory swallowed. He trembled uncontrollably.
"I told you I made a dinkus, to make my car pull up hills," he whispered. "It's some stuff that—uh—bounces around in stuff that conduc's electricity, Mr. Murfree. I told you about it. All the little hunks in metal that stuff gets in, have to move the same way. I made it make my car climb hills, and then I fixed it so I could make them little hunksa stuff act as brakes, too. They could even push the car backwards, if I wanted 'em to. And I—been makin' a livin' bettin' on a fella I fixed the dinkus on his racin'-car. That—that fella—I had his car fixed so it couldn't turn over, either."
Murfree listened in an unnatural calm. He knew all this, of course. Bud Gregory was not a genius. He was something so far beyond mere genius that there is no word for it.
He simply knew, instinctively, all the things the physicists of the world hope to find out in a hundred years or so. He was able to scramble together absurd-looking devices that turned heat into electricity, and made common dirt form an atomic pile, and the random molecular movements due to heat convert themselves into kinetic energy.
BUD GREGORY could make a spaceship that would travel among the stars, or he could make devices which would turn Earth into a paradise. Also, he could make dirt-track racing automobiles run faster!
"When I realized they were goin' to kill both of us," he said abjectly, "I got scared. So I took the dinkus. I had 'most finished and changed it a little bit, and then, instead of makin' things move faster, it turned 'em back. Somethin' that didn't move fast didn't get changed, but anything like a—uh—bullet, when I turned my dinkus on it, the faster it was goin', the faster it got flung back. And—uh—of course it got flung back straight to where it come from."
Murfree was strangely calm, as any man would be who had seen his would-be assassins drop dead from their own bullets fired at him and bounced back in a straight line. When miracles happen, one is stunned to calmness. Now he nodded his head slowly.
"I—see," he said. "When bullets ran into the field you projected, it was like hitting an elastic spring. Your field absorbed their energy, and stopped them, and then fed their energy right back and made them return to where they came from, in the same line and at the same speed they'd started with. That's it?"
"Yeah, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory pallidly. "That's it. You'll tell the sheriff I didn't kill those fellas."
"Oh, yes," said Murfree, slowly. "I'll tell him that. I take it you didn't project a field to make racing-cars run faster, though?"
"No, Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory, shivering. "I run it through a wire to the motor. But I can throw it, and when it hits somethin' that carries 'lectricity, it bounces all around and stays there. It don't bother rocks or glass, none."
"I see," Murfree said in numb tones. "Most interesting. Now we've got to stop an atomic attack on America." Then he stood absolutely still for a long moment. "Look here," he said. "Will it bounce around in a gaseous conductor? Gas that has ions bouncing around so it will carry a current?"
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "Of course, Mr. Murfree."
"What you're going to do now," said Murfree with really monstrous tranquility, "is to make a big version of that dinkus in your hand. A really big one. So we can turn it straight up and shoot that field into the Heaviside Layer. Do you know what that is? It's a layer of ionized air that covers the whole earth about fifteen miles up. You're going to make a dinkus that will fix the whole Heaviside Layer so that anything that's shot into it will be bounced right back where it came from, just like those bullets did. If you don't I'll either kill you or tell the sheriff on you."
Bud Gregory blinked at him.
"I don't have to make a big one, Mr. Murfree," he said plaintively. "This here one will fix anything. It don't take no power. The power comes from the things that get flung back. All I got to do is this, Mr. Murfree!"
He put his preposterous, untidy device on the ground, and bent the curiously curved wire so that the flatter part of its unsystematic curve was parallel to the ground. He threw a small switch. The two radio tubes glowed. A small wire turned white with frost.
"Nothin' can get through that layer now, Mr. Murfree," he said anxiously. "Now about this sheriff business. . . ."
In the sprawling, far-flung territories of a certain European Power columns of vapor suddenly screamed skyward at breathtaking accelerations. There were hundreds of them. They were the guided missiles which were to destroy America. They carried atomic bombs. They should make the better part of the continent into blasted, radioactive craters.
From the nations which were satellites of the European Power other columns of vapor streaked skyward. More bombs. They should surge furiously through the air to the chill emptiness beyond it, and they should circle a good part of the earth and then drive furiously down and spout ravening atomic flames!
YET they didn't. They went skyward, to be sure. They vanished in emptiness. And men on the ground prepared to send others after them. But they didn't do that, either.
The guided missiles roared into the thin, invisible Heaviside Layer of the earth's atmosphere, whose peculiarity is that it has been ionized by the sun's rays and therefore has a specific electrical conductivity. The rocket-projectiles were made of metal. They went raging into the ionized gas in which "stuff" which only Bud Gregory could understand was—in his words—"bouncing around."
And there they stopped. They exhausted their fuel in a furious, terrible duel with implacable and quite incomprehensible forces. The energy they possessed was somehow absorbed, and then their fuel cut off and all the energy they had parted with was restored to them and they went hurtling back toward the earth—toward the exact spot from which they had been discharged.
They were equipped with very sensitive fuses. Even the terrific velocity with which they struck their own launching-sites did not keep the fuses from working. The atomic bombs they carried exploded. They blew up their own launching-sites. More, they blew up the other bombs on the other guided missiles waiting to form the second and third and twentieth salvos.
Very many large areas of a certain European Power became monstrous craters. Unparalleled craters. Chasms going down to the molten rock below the earth's crust. There were similar craters in the satellite nations. But there were no craters in America. Not even little ones. No atom bombs fell on the United States.
When the President of the United States barked a grim and defiant message to the European Power, he knew nothing of the craters. They had been made only five minutes earlier. He simply barked defiantly that the United States wasn't going to change its government or its way or living for anybody, and it would fight anybody that wanted a fight.
But nobody did. In fact, neither the European Power nor its satellites were apt to fight anybody for a very, very long time.
And, of course, Murfree went back home. He was quite broke when he got there, and he could have been fired from his Civil Service job for taking leave without permission. But since almost everybody else had done the same thing, his offense was graciously pardoned. He was, however, deprived of pay for all the time he had been absent.
The thing that makes him mad, though—No, there are two things that make him mad!
When it was clear that there was no further danger to America, he turned off Bud Gregory's device and packed it in a car, the same car in which he'd been taken to the hideout. And he drove Bud Gregory down to Los Angeles, where he intended to try to get passage back to Washington. People were flocking back to the cities everywhere, then, and police were regulating the flow of returning refugees.
Murfree's captured car was stopped, and three policemen advanced to give him instructions about the route he should take. And Bud Gregory couldn't face three cops. He jumped out of the car and ran away into the thick of the mob of cars and pedestrians streaming back into the city.