[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced
from Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1947. By
Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins)
writing as William Fitzgerald. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Chain Disaster
On Monday Bud Gregory sat in magnificent idleness before the shed whichwas his automobile repair-shop in the village of Brandon on the edge ofthe Great Smokies.
That day something impalpable and invisible descended upon Cincinnatiand people began to go to hospitals with their blood undergoing changesover which the doctors threw up their hands.
On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing some work on the fourautomobiles awaiting repair in his shop, but did not feel like workingand went fishing instead....
On that day the Geiger counters in the Bureau of Standards inWashington went uniformly crazy, so that it was impossible tostandardize the by-products of the atomic piles turning out nuclearexplosive for national defense.
On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly put in half an hour's work.Yawning, he took his pay for the job and went home and took a nap.
That day forty head of cattle on a West Virginia hillside lay down anddied and a trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full of dead fish.Four cancer patients in a home for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky,suddenly took a quite impossible turn for the better. They walked outof the hospital three weeks later and went back to work.
On Thursday Bud Gregory—
That was the way of it at the beginning. Bud Gregory seemed to have noconnection with any one of the series of unusual events. The eventsthemselves were simply preposterous. As, for example, the fact that allthe foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain country in Pennsylvaniaturned vaguely purplish overnight, and then wilted and turned tounwholesome pulp.
Three days later there was not a green leaf or a living blade of grassin thirty-odd square miles. That did not seem to have any rationalconnection with Bud Gregory or any other event. But the connection wasthere.
It was Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards who was the firstto add the various items together to a plausible sum. It did notinclude a backwoods automobile repairman, of course—there was no datafor that—but it was a very sound guess just the same.
Murfree was a physicist, not a doctor of medicine and his salary at theBureau was four thousand two hundred dollars a year with an appropriateCivil Service rating. He added the several odd events together, andthey were convincing. But the answer was apparently impossible. Hecould not get any of his superiors in the Bureau to agree with him onthe need for action. He thought the need was very great indeed. So hetook a certain amount of accumulated Civil Service leave, drew out fivehundred dollars from his bank and drove off in his battered old car toinvestigate at his own expense.
Tucked in the car were certain items of equipment from the bureau whichhe had no right to borrow and which would take most of a year's pay toreplace if anything should happen to them.
He went to the sere and barren area in Pennsylvania and made certaintests. He drove to Cincinnati and made more tests. He went on to theplace in West Virginia where cattle had died and asked questions anddid improbable things to other ailing cows and steers. Then he droveback to Washington at the best speed his rattletrap car could make.
He went first to his home and told his wife to pack up. He explainedwith crisp precision and she looked at him in fr