He had been gone an hour when Frances woke and smiled at Steve. He was puttering about the fireplace, and his expression was grim.
“Good morning!” she said brightly. Her smile vanished. “What’s the matter?”
“Two things,” he told her. “For one, Lucky’s gone off.”
Her face went blank. Carefully and painstakingly, he repeated everything Lucky had said. Frances’ face softened.
“He’s kind of sweet, isn’t he, Steve?”
“He’s probably a better man than I am,” said Steve with some bitterness. “I couldn’t leave you to someone else because you’d be happier with them! I couldn’t give you up even for your own happiness!”
“But Steve!” said Frances convincingly. “I wouldn’t want you to. I wouldn’t want to be happy with anybody else.”
His expression did not lighten:
“There’s something else. After Lucky left, I went poking around. I told you I was here years ago. There’ve been improvements. A dam across a stream half a mile away. There’s an electric generator there, big enough to light this house and heat it too, in winter. And the man who owned this place must have survived the first bombings, because he tried to get set to last things out. He got hold of some supplies. Seeds, and so on. Seeds of various staple crops that could be grown in this neighborhood. He even had machines to clear the land. All looted or spoiled now, of course.”
* * * *
He stopped. Frances watched his face.
“Well?”
“Looters came,” said Steve without expression. “You’ve seen what they did to the house.”
Frances looked about her. She’d known the place was not intact, of course. Broken-in doors. Hangings on the floor. Now she saw books flung contemptuously about. The place had been looted and fouled and smashed. It had not been fired, because it was built of field-stone. It had been ransacked for anything that human beasts had desired, but they wanted little more than food and drink and weapons, these days. They smashed or threw aside everything else.
“What happened, Steve?”
“They smashed his skull in,” said Steve. “I just buried him. Not that one dead man more or less amounts to much these days. It all happened months ago. But there are looters who know about this place. They’ve been here. They’ll probably come back. Staying here means taking a chance.”
“Chance, Steve?” Frances said. “Aren’t you the man who said we can’t do miracles, but that we can do the improbable and the wildly unlikely and the one-in-a-million and one-in-a-billion tricks? You want to stay. I think we’d better. Maybe we can make a garden, for food, and with an electric generator and such things to work with, Steve, couldn’t you set to work to—try to find out how to make the crater-stones start to build back a world fit to live in?”
“Pretty words,” said Steve bitterly. “But right now the people who have planes and bombs have made us no better than beasts. Look here; I love you, and you love me. It ought to be something magnificent, something we could boast of, something to fill us with pride, but how can we get married? Hang it, human beings can’t even marry any more! They can only mate. And that’s not enough for the way I feel about you.”
Frances went a little bit pale. Then she smiled.
“Thanks, Steve. I feel that way, too. But what would you do? Start out on a probably hopeless pilgrimage to find a surviving preacher?”
“Useless,” growled Steve. “And stupid! If you’re not afraid of looters, we’d better stay here. Lucky will look for us here. I’ve got work to do. Somebody’s got to do it. Hang it, the world can’t stay like this!”
He swung on his heel, suddenly, mid stamped out of the house. And Frances looked at the third finger of her left hand. There was no ring on it. She looked at it very queerly.
But presently, while Steve explored the possibilities of the electric generator, she set to work to clean house in a very housewifely fashion.
CHAPTER VIII
Echoes of Battle
While driving a nail that had bent unexpectedly, Steve had mashed his finger and he could not write. So he was dictating, and Frances faithfully put down his words in the fourth of six child’s copy-books which already contained a good part of a treatise on the paradox of indeterminacy.
“Indeterminacy, then,” said Steve, scowling at the wall, “is merely a term for a normal state of balance among particles, caused by an equilibrium among forces. The laws of chance are the laws of this equilibrium. Variations from probability, then, are results of changes in the forces acting at a given spot and time. But as a new equilibrium is arrived at, variations from probability cancel out. Er—have you got that, Frances?”
She nodded.
“But the important thing is the way the crater-stones work, Steve,” she said. “We don’t know that. It still seems like magic.”
“But it isn’t,” he protested indignantly. “It isn’t even new. Rhine, at Duke University, proved that you can pull for things and change the laws of chance. And he had the devil of a time separating tests for extrasensory perception and telepathy from tests for fore-knowledge.
“Rhine even found he could prove occasional fore-knowledge so easily that it messed up the evidence for telepathy. You see what that means? Back in 1944 and even ’43, his test subjects were making seven come too often for chance, on dice, and proving that somehow they could tell in advance what a later check-up would disclose. So what does a crater-stone do that wasn’t normal scientific observation a long time ago? That wasn’t text-book stuff! It’s perfectly natural!”
“I said we don’t know how it works,” protested Frances.
“We’ve got blamed good guesses,” he protested in turn. “Look, Frances—you’ve heard of sympathetic vibration and you’ve heard of resonances. You’ve held a coffeepot when a railroad whistle or some particular note from a radio made it vibrate violently, haven’t you? And you’ve heard of forced vibrations?”
Frances smiled at him. While she wrote at his dictation, she could not look at him. Now they were in the big living room of the house they had appropriated for their own. Steve had made stout wooden shutters—he’d torn down an out-building for material—which closed all window openings at night and not let a particle of light escape. But this was daytime, and light streamed in.
The books that had been flung about in a frenzy of destructiveness were back in place, though with great gaps where looters had burned some for fuel. There were obvious emptinesses where furniture had been, and the pieces which remained were mostly slashed or scarred in sheer wantonness.
What could be done to retrieve a feeling of normal life had been done. Quite possibly, Steve and Frances were better housed than any other two people in North America—outside of the places where people had planes and bombs.
“It works like this,” said Steve firmly. “Suppose I have a violin-string tuned to the note A. I pluck or bow it. It gives off an A. Then suppose I leave it alone, but sound the same note with a pitch-pipe or another string? The first string will vibrate by sympathy, won’t it? By resonance?”
“Oh, yes—and so will the octaves,” said Frances. “If you push down the loud pedal of a piano and strike an A, all the A octaves up and down will vibrate too. You can feel them with your fingers, if the piano’s in tune.”
“Only there probably aren’t any pianos left, so we can’t verify that,” said Steve drily. “What I’m getting at is that if I have a violin-string tuned to A and I sound a D note with something else, then if the D note is loud enough—but it has to be very loud—the string will vibrate a D. But not all of it—the length that tunes to D—the length that would vibrate if I fingered the violin to make it sound a D instead of A.”
Frances considered, and then nodded and shrugged her shoulders. “Well?”
“Something that happens makes a mental impression just as a plucked violin-string makes a sound,” said Steve. “Seeing a thing happen is like hearing a note. Remembering or imagining a thing happening i
s like sounding a note. When—without the crater-stone—I pull for a seven to come up on dice, it’s as if I were sounding an A-note for a violin-string to respond to. My brain, unassisted, can’t sound that note very strongly, but it can sound it strongly enough to make a seven come up more often than it would otherwise.”
Steve paused for a moment, to find the right words so she would understand.
“But the crater-stone echoes my piping little note and amplifies it,” he went on. “It’s like humming into a microphone hooked to a monstrous public-address system. The same hum comes out a hundred thousand or a hundred million times amplified. What I get is a note that’s strong enough to force a vibration.
“With my voice I can’t make a violin A-string sound a D. But with a speech-amplifier I can. With my mind I can only make things more likely. With a crater-stone, using the energy of breaking-down matter to amplify what my mind does, I can make happenings if they’re possible.”
“And sometimes,” said Frances, “sometimes the trick doesn’t work because—”
“Sometimes,” said Steve, “I can’t make an A-string sound D because it’s broken. Or maybe it’s tuned to E, and none of it is long enough to vibrate a D. Sometimes a happening—well—isn’t on the dice. All clear now?”
“If you’d dictate something like that,” admitted Frances, “it wouldn’t sound quite as much like gibberish as your technical manner. But Steve—”
“What?”
“We haven’t anything for dinner.”
“We’ll go look in the fish-trap,” he told her.
Two or three minutes later they emerged from the house together. Neither of them ever left the building alone, or unarmed. Their arms consisted solely of the tiny automatic Steve had given Frances within an hour of their first meeting, and the revolver from the plastic suit-case. Both were very short of shells.
Of course, both Steve and Frances carried a crater-stone each. Steve had fashioned holders for them out of a bit of lead drainpipe, but he could not discover that the crater-stones had a normal rate of disintegration capable of producing burns.
Apparently the enormous bombardment of uranium by the radiation of an atomic bomb produced a substance completely new in all its qualities. In all likelihood, for example, it was capable of resisting even the temperatures of an atomic explosion.
“If my father hadn’t been killed,” said Frances presently, “and if I knew him, by this time he’d be trying to make an artificial device to do what the crater-stones do.”
“Do you think I’m not working my head off at that?” demanded Steve. He added bitterly, “But I’m working practically at random. I’ve got to try ten thousand or a hundred thousand things until I hit on it practically by chance—”
Then he stopped and swore disgustedly.
“I’m a half-wit! By chance! And the crater-stones control chance! If I could find out that this house was intact, without seeing it, I ought to be able to find out if a given line of experiment will turn up what I want, without trying it. All I have to do is pull for it to work, and if the crater-stone warms up—”
They came to the place where the fish-trap was. A dam a hundred feet wide held back a small brisk mountain stream and made a pond all of half a mile-long. Steve had put a distinctly unethical fish-trap in it, which every day produced perch and trout sufficient for their needs.
In odd spots, too, he had tiny crops growing. The looters had taken everything they could use, and doubtless intended to spoil the rest, but spilled corn-grains remained for Steve to plant in little clumps of no more than half a dozen stalks at any one place.
In the looted pantry, too, there had been some rotted vegetables. Tomato-seeds were salvageable from a dried-up mess on the floor. With electric power for warmth, and a snug house, Steve planned to move some plants indoors and have food during the cold weather by hot-house cultivation.
He fumbled in the fish-trap and hauled out a good-sized trout by the gills. He reached in again, trying to corner another of the wildly darting, imprisoned creatures.
“I’m a half-wit!” he repeated bitterly. “Of course I can duplicate what the crater-stones do. I can practically make them tell me how. I can work out a line of research and see if the answer’s there by pulling for it to turn up. If it can, the crater-stone will warm up and make it sure I’ll find it. Oh, I’m an imbecile!”
He straightened up, and Frances raised one hand. She had turned her head and was listening with a desperate concentration. She was a little bit pale.
Steve froze. He listened, too. Then he quietly put down the still-flapping fish and drew his revolver. Both of them, then, waited very tensely.
Two hundred yards away, a head appeared. There was a blood-stained bandage about it. It was unshaven and haggard. A second head. A third. They stared at the house. They conferred. Three men broke cover and ran stealthily toward it, but dragging their feet as if at the last gasp of exhaustion.
One of the men carried a shotgun. Another carried a six-foot bow. The third had an unwieldy contrivance which, at a guess, was a cross-bow made with automobile-spring leaves to hurl its bolt. All three men were ragged. Each had been wounded and bandaged and wounded again. They ran heavily toward the house, dodging exhaustedly behind trees to cover their advance.
“Hello, there!” Steve called sharply.
Frances started a little and unconsciously moved closer to him. The three stopped as if shot. They wheeled. Then they came toward Steve. The man with the shotgun held it ominously ready. The man with the bow had an arrow to the string. The cross-bowman had the wire cord of his contrivance drawn back, and doubtless a bolt ready in the groove. But as they came closer to Steve, they bunched as for mutual support. They moved with the air not so much of menace as of desperation.
“The devil!” said Steve, looking from one to another of them. “You’re honest men. Wonders will never cease.”
“Sure we’re honest men,” one of the three said in a choked voice. “How many cutthroats have you got hidden, you that stand there and laugh at us!”
“No cutthroats,” said Steve. His eyes narrowed suddenly. “You’re scouts, eh? Going on ahead to try to find—”
Very, very, thin and far away, a high-pitched yell came through the bright morning sunshine. After it came the muted, distant sound of a shot. The three men turned their heads from Steve to that sound. One of them sobbed.
“Blast ’em! Oh, blast ’em! Come on, let’s get killed!”
He whirled.
“What’s that?” Steve snapped. “Your rear-guard? How many of you?”
“Fifteen men and the women and kids,” the bearded man with the shotgun said heavily. “There’s a gang of guerillas been chasin’ us four days. They got near half of us. Now they’ll get the rest.”
He turned drearily to go where a thin, shrill, triumphant howling rose. There were two more shots. The bearded man’s face worked.
“Get the women in the house,” said Steve fiercely. “It’s stone. They can’t burn you out. We’ll hold ’em off there.”
“What with?” panted the crossbowman, despairingly. “Might as well get killed right off.”
“Come along, Frances!” said Steve angrily. “We’ll find the women, whoever they are. You lead ’em to the house and barricade the doors and windows. I’ll take the men and we’ll see what the crater-stones can do.”
He was already running with her, hand in hand, in the wake of the three weirdly assorted individuals who now toiled exhaustedly toward a confused and intermittent sound of battle.
Where they ran all was quietude and peace—a bright summer sun drenched trees and grass and weeds with shimmering golden light. The small valley below the house, and the forests which covered the hillsides, were empty of any sign of life save the green things themselves. Insects sounded everywhere in the bland and warmth-intoxicated shrilling of midsummer. Somewhere a bob-white quail called tranquilly.
But a man’s death-shriek came faintly from far away. Th
ere was another shot in the distance. Steve and Frances dived into the trees after the drearily running trio they had intercepted.
“What can you do with the crater-stones?” asked Frances, between panting breaths.
“I don’t know,” grunted Steve, pounding on. “But they’re honest folk, those three. They bunched when they came close to us instead of spreading out. If they’ve got women with them, they’re what the guerillas are after. The worst of it is, there’ll be somebody with a pocket radio among the guerillas, most likely. There was in the gang I met, once upon a time.”
Yells—far ahead, but nearer than they had been. They saw a scared, flurried movement in the underbrush. Women.
“You mean—if we help beat off—the guerillas,” panted Frances, “the—people with planes and bombs will—bomb us?”
“That’s the idea,” Steve growled. “Take the women to the house and barricade it! I’ll be back.”
“Be careful!” she called desperately after him. “Please be careful!”
But he was gone, diving through brushwood, jumping fallen tree-trunks, running through thick woods toward an inchoate, spasmodic tumult in which men fought like beasts and some died quite otherwise. There were two sides in that battle. Steve was known to neither. Each was likely to think he belonged to the other side.
CHAPTER IX
Besieged
Nightfall descended and the battered, oak-beamed living room of the house was very dark. Children slept in the abandon of absolute exhaustion close by it. There were other figures lying on the floor. Women tended some of those figures. There were three women with babies, which they held tightly in their arms. Some men squatted against the wall, crude weapons at hand, drooping in utter weariness.
Frances found Steve peering from an upper window. There was a great fire burning a hundred and fifty yards down hill. There were figures about it. There was yapping talk coming from the fireside.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 38