“Did you hear the bullfrogs all fall silent for a solid minute?” he asked in a ghastly facetiousness. “I made them do that! I pulled for the coincidence that they’d all shut up at once. And they did! But that’s all I could do! Apparently there’s not a trained man left alive to join us. Not a tool-shop or a store of fuel or a motor or explosives or anything else. I pulled for everything that would make civilization return and the thing stayed cold. They were all impossible. But it warmed up nicely when I tried to control the bullfrogs.”
He swallowed, and it was almost a sob. Frances stared at him. Lucky Connors listened in silence.
“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” said Steve. He grinned at them, and it was more tragic than tears. “Apparently the way the world is, is the way the world is going to stay. Let’s go out and cut our throats!”
CHAPTER V
Fight for Life
Morning came and Lucky was missing. The revolver and cartridge from the abandoned motor-car were set out beside where Steve had finally fallen into bitter slumber. And Frances was gone, too.
Steve got up. He went out of doors. Emptiness. No sign of Lucky or of Frances, either. He went cold all over. Then a surge of such terrible rage as he had never felt before in all his life swept over him. He stood shaking, quivering with a lust for the blood of Lucky Connors.
There was bright sunshine all about. There was the now weed-grown double embankment with its twin lines of rusty railroad track. Day insects stridulated. There were green things on every hand, blandly indifferent to the destruction of all that man had built, and birds flitted here and there in complete obliviousness to mere human tragedy.
Steve stood still for a long time. Then he spoke aloud in a reasonable, a calm, and a totally unconvincing voice.
“Well, she showed sense. While he’s got that crater-stone, she’ll have plenty to eat, anyhow. She’d have married a rich man in the old days, because he could give her a car and a fine house and jewelry. Now she’s sure of a stolen chicken or a snared rabbit every day. That’s riches. He even gave her a trousseau!”
Then, suddenly, he cursed thickly and shoved the revolver and cartridges in his pocket. There were weeds growing on the railroad embankment. They were trampled and bent where two people had walked through them. Lucky Connors and Frances had left Steve and gone along the embankment toward what had once been a city. Steve followed.
His head did not clear at all. For more than seven months he’d clung to an insane hope that the highly theoretic and essentially unlikely facts he had gathered in six child’s copy-books might mean the return of civilization. He’d hoped that they would lead to the discovery and the subjugation of a force which men have always experienced but never suspected, and that the force would bring back safety and hope and decency to the world.
Now he knew that the force existed. He’d handled a crude but sufficient atomic generator and control. And it was utterly useless. It would not bring back a dead world. It would bring stolen chickens, and it would stop bullfrogs from croaking, and with it he had destroyed an aeroplane of the enemies of all he’d ever believed in. But it would do nothing more. And now Steve, raging, abandoned the thought of remaining civilized. He wanted Frances. He hated Lucky. He would kill Lucky, and though she hated him and screamed, Frances would be his.
He passed a place where three houses still stood, unpainted and long abandoned. Presently he passed a two-acre space of mere black ashes, where fire had raged unchecked and weeds now grew luxuriantly. A heap of debris where houses had been pushed violently from one side and had collapsed upon everything within them, and strangely had not caught fire. Then a building of reinforced concrete, now an empty shell.
Then he heard a muted pop! He heard a keening yell. He heard a second pop. It was a pistol—a small pistol, like the one he’d given Frances. At the thought of her, fury swept over him again. He broke into a shambling run.
Then he heard a cracking sound which was no pistol, but at a guess Lucky’s rifle. A chorus of yells followed the explosion. And these were not the voices of Frances and Lucky, but of others. Wanderers, perhaps. Human beings sunk to the level of wolves, like the man he’d first killed in her behalf.
On the instant, his rage evaporated, and the revolver he found out and in his hand was no weapon with which to meet such folk. A pistol was wealth unimaginable, these days, and it carried all the risks of riches. A man with a pistol, having none to punish him for murder, was supreme among his fellows, until one of them managed to kill him for it. One man against twenty or thirty or forty, even though he had a pistol, was not only helpless but doomed. They would take any risk to win it. He might kill half a dozen. The rest would close in because the pistol was a prize worth any danger.
Steve found himself running. In his hand he held one of the slender, needle-sharp foils drawn from his pack. He had the pistol ready for a last resort.
Then, quite suddenly, he reached a place where he could see the crater which occupied most of this city’s site. About it was tumbled wreckage in which human scavengers might still hope to find some booty and even food in rusty cans. The crater was two miles across and chasm-like, save that it sloped down—all barren, glassy stuff—to sheer emptiness at its center.
And at the very edge of the crater, Frances stood at bay. Lucky lay flat on the ground. It was apparently his fall which had brought the triumphant howling which guided Steve. Stones on the ground—half-bricks and bits of rubble told what had felled him. And Frances crouched desperately, her tiny pistol upraised.
She looked clean and trim and desperate, and her immaculacy and the completely feminine look of her caused some of the howling. The creatures who had stoned Lucky to unconsciousness yelled at her. They were horrible things. They hid behind remnants of concrete and rubble which had been left standing in that freakish skip-distance of a few hundred yards beyond a crater’s rim before devastation replaces the annihilation of the crater itself. The ragged figures yelled and darted from one hiding-place to another, edging in for an irresistible surge upon her.
Steve’s arrival was unheralded. His weapon was silent. He ran toward her, and paused to make a savage attack upon a group of four once-human things who seemed planning a simultaneous volley of stones.
His foil licked out and stabbed again and again, like the fang of a striking snake.
He darted forward with a bubbling scream following. He attacked and struck once more, and a shriek arose. He zig-zagged closer, crazy with blood-lust and fear for Frances.
He had struck three times before attention turned from her desirable figure to his deadly one. Then a bearded thing with maniacal eyes leaped at him with a club. His foil darted in and he ran on. Stones fell about him. He darted and dodged, striking when he could, and arrived at Frances’ side as an uproar of animal fury filled the air.
Frances did not look ashamed or conscience-stricken, but uplifted and desperately glad. She smiled at him shakily.
“L-lucky was pulling for you to come, Steve,” she said.
“How the devil did you two get into this mess?” Steve snarled.
A stone crashed close to him.
“We came to—get another crater-stone if we could,” Frances explained unsteadily. “Lucky said it wasn’t likely, but he—pulled for it and his stone warmed up. So we came. We h-had to look at night because the stone glows. We did find—Steve! Behind you!”
Steve whirled. His pistol spoke. They were doomed now in any case. He saw bobbing figures in the distance, called by the shots and yelling and now scrambling over wreckage to be in at the kill. There had been perhaps forty caricatures of humanity in sight at the beginning.
Now twenty or thirty more were on the way. The city had once held half a million people. A hundred or more could exist on what remnants even an atom bomb had left.
Lucky stirred. But he was dazed. Steve took his rifle. He fired three times—once at a nearby figure, twice at distant targets. The fall of the distant men filled their fellows with te
rror. They flopped down and ceased to advance. They would not encourage the nearer besiegers by arriving as reinforcements.
But there were yet other creatures popping out of holes, like rats. Steve saw men creeping toward the bodies of the two he had dropped. Not, of course, to offer aid, but to rob them of what poor loot they might offer.
More stones fell near the three at the crater’s rim. They were not heavy enough to kill, but a lucky blow might stun, as Lucky had been stunned, and Steve saw a stark horror at the back of Frances’ eyes. The girl was picturing herself at the mercy of these utterly brutalized scavengers in the wrecked remains of slums.
“Can’t you use the crater-stone somehow, Steve?” she asked desperately. “Those rocks may hit us, and we can’t keep shooting forever.”
“The crater-stone,” said Steve in bitterness, “will make anything happen that could happen by accident, but not a blamed thing more. It looks as if we’re finished. We may be able to fight our way through, if Lucky comes to, but they’d trail us forever. If not for our guns, then for you.”
* * * *
A stone missed his head by inches. It slithered over the crater’s edge and went bouncing and skittering over the glassy lining toward the center a mile away.
He fired. A man shrieked. Purely animal, utterly unhuman yells arose all about them. The sound from the half-hidden, gesticulating creatures was not like that of any other animal on earth. When men become beasts, some dim remnant of perverted intelligence guides their descent into an abyss of bestiality. No mere beasts would have shouted such things to Frances. And there were some cries which made it terribly clear that sooner or later a rush like a starving wolf-pack would be made upon them, and they knew what their fate would be.
Lucky stirred again. Steve fired once more. Every inequality in the ground sheltered some scarecrow. They were snarling and yapping and regarding the embattled humans and their weapons with almost equally frenzied desire.
“I used the crater-stone, Steve,” Frances spoke, quietly. “It got warm. We can go now. W-will you try to carry Lucky?”
Steve did not relax his grim watch over the howling besiegers. But he suddenly noted that the number of those who exposed themselves to fling stones decreased. Second by second, almost, it seemed to lessen. In a minute, the number of missiles had dropped to half. They continued to grow fewer. The distant scrambling figures no longer advanced.
In three minutes the howling was as great as ever—if anything, it had increased—but there were no more stones at all. And Lucky had turned over and was trying groggily to get to his feet. Steve still watched savagely.
“I—used the crater-stone,” said Frances again. “I think we can go now. L-lucky’s getting up.”
“Yeah!” said Lucky dizzily. “What a conkin’ I got! That ain’t my kinda luck!”
He steadied himself by Steve and rose to wobbling erectness. There was a ululating uproar all about them. But there was no longer a single stone in the air.
“What happened?” Steve asked. “What did you do, Frances?’
“I used—all the crater-stones and—pulled for them not to throw any more stones or come any closer. I—wished they couldn’t. And—they can’t!”
Steve ignored Lucky’s dizzy swaying. He thrust the rifle back into Lucky’s hand. He strode forward, his foil once more in readiness.
A few moments later he stood above a hollow in the ground in which three scarecrows writhed and wriggled. One snarled at him helplessly, working feverishly at his right hand and arm. A second lay doubled up kicking, clutching at his middle. A third wheezed and coughed and blasphemed stranglingly. His eyes upon Steve were terror-filled, but his paroxysm of coughing did not cease.
Steve went back to the others.
“But that ain’t my kind of luck!” Lucky was saying querulously. “I got conked on the head! It’s the first bit of tough luck I’ve had.”
“Sling one arm around my neck, Lucky,” Steve said. “We’ll all get going. Frances hit on the trick that we didn’t know, last night. They won’t follow us.”
Frances put herself on Lucky’s other side.
Bracing him between them, they moved toward the railroad embankment. They climbed it, while the noise of those who had besieged them rose to a new climax of imprecation and hatred.
They moved along the knee-high weeds which grew even in the gravel between the disused rails. Lucky recovered strength, with movement. In half an hour they had passed the toolshed in which they had camped the night before.
“But that ain’t luck!” Lucky protested again, after a long period of painful meditation. “I got a headache! That guy knocked me cold with a half brick. It’s the first bad break I had yet!”
Steve had been silent, too. Not because any trace of his former suspicions of Lucky and Frances remained—they had vanished, somehow, with the discovery of the two of them embattled and about to become prey to the man-pack. He had been putting two and two together in the light of a mentally revised chapter of his treatise on the Paradox of Indeterminacy.
“Listen,” he said drily. “I used the crater-stone last night. I couldn’t do a thing except make frogs stop croaking. Remember?”
“Yeah,” said Lucky. “But I pulled—”
“My guess is that you pulled for us to find out how to make the crater-stones work all the time,” Steve told him. “You had to be knocked on the head for it to happen. So you got knocked on the head.” He grinned with grim amusement. “You want to be careful how you pull for things with your luck, Lucky! Especially when you’re being altruistic. That conk on the head was probably the luckiest thing that’s happened yet. But if you keep on you’ll luck yourself into getting killed!”
CHAPTER VI
Hiding Their Trail
Oddly enough Frances and Lucky had found no less than three lumps of brightly shining glassy stuff in the crater. They were upon the line the railroad must have taken before it had ceased to be, together with nine-tenths of the city. At a guess, a shipment of uranium ore might have been in the area of annihilation when the bomb dropped. Perhaps it had been on its way to one of the atom-bomb plants the United States kept in operation. Or perhaps the fragments had been in a collection of mineral specimens in some school or museum.
The odds were incalculable against Lucky—having found the first one—finding more of the things Steve believed the result of the bombardment of uranium by the blast of an atomic bomb. But that finding had not been impossible, and he had pulled for it, and the first crater-stone had grown warm as he did so.
Now the three of them had breakfast and lunch in one, at a spot some ten miles from the ruined town. A small wild piglet poked an inquisitive snout at them from a canebrake and Lucky shot it. There were wild grapes nearby.
Lucky scooped out a hole in the ground, built a roaring fire of fallen branches, rolled the piglet in clay, and covered it in embers. The piglet cooked comfortably while Steve wrote feverishly in his copy-books. When the meal was ready he had organized his notions.
“It fits into a pattern,” he said exultantly, his mouth full of tender roast pork. “Probability is anything that can happen. If you know how many different things can happen, you can figure out the odds against every one. When you throw two dice, just so many combinations can turn up. They can’t make more than thirty-six combinations, because there aren’t but that many combinations possible.
“A seven can be made in six different ways, so the odds are six in thirty-six you’ll make it on any given roll. A two or a twelve can be made only one way each, so the odds are one in thirty-six you’ll roll them. But with Lucky’s crater-stone he can pull for a twelve, and the stone will warm up and he’ll get a twelve every time. Because it supplies energy in a pattern so that nothing else can turn up! That is, nothing else will turn up by chance, because the crater-stone controls chance. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Lucky gloomily. “But I just got conked on the head, and that ain’t luck any way you look at it
.”
“Wait a while!” said Steve. “When you roll dice, there are thirty-six combinations possible somewhere in the future. Your crater-stone picks out one and blocks all the rest. But suppose you pulled for your dice to roll a thirteen! There’s no thirteen in the future to be picked out. The crater-stone can’t pick it out, and it simply doesn’t work, eh?”
Lucky grunted. “Wrong, fella! I tried that once and it scared me to death.”
“One of the dice was cracked, eh?” asked Steve “And when you rolled, it hit something and split into two parts? And read thirteen?”
“Y-yeah! How’d you know?”
“That was the only way it could happen,” Steve told him. “There was a thirteen in the future of that particular pair of dice. So you got it. But on an uncracked pair you couldn’t.”
“But this conk on the head?”
“You pulled for us to find out how to make the crater-stone work all the time,” Steve reminded him. “When you did, there were any number of things that could happen in the future. Instead of thirty-six combinations, there were hundreds of thousands. But only one set of events would show us how to use the crater-stones. So that was the one that had to happen.”
“I don’t get you,” answered Lucky, looking puzzled.
“If you hadn’t been conked you’d have been trying to use the stone,” Steve explained. “If I hadn’t been there, Frances would have been too busy defending herself to try. But when the one possible set of things happened, she used the crater-stone in the way that only she would have thought of using it, and those creatures couldn’t attack us!”
“What happened to them, Steve?” asked Frances uneasily. “Did I—kill them with it?”
Steve grinned, without too much amusement, and cut himself another bit of roast pig.
“You did better than that,” he told her. “You found the trick we needed. Last night, I tried to make some detonators explode. I tried to make some physicists come to where they’d meet us. I tried to pull for tool-shops, and aeroplane parts, and fuel-stores, and the like. I knew too much about what I wanted. I made what were practically blueprints of what I intended to have happen.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 36