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Title: The Giant Atom
Alternate title: Atomic Bomb
Author: Jameson, Malcolm (1891-1945)
Date of first publication: December 1943
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Startling Stories, December 1943
   [vol. 10, no. 2 "Winter Issue"]
   [New York and Chicago: Better Publications, Inc.]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 17 October 2016
Date last updated: 17 October 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1366

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

We acknowledge with pleasure the assistance received during the
creation of this ebook from the Merril Collection of Science
Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library.






_The_ GIANT _Atom_


By MALCOLM JAMESON

_Only Steve Bennion, Inventive Genius, and His Lovely Assistant, Kitty
Pennell, Stand Between the Earth and Destruction When a Flaming Monster
Threatens to Devour and Destroy Civilization!_




Contents

  I.  Ace in the Hole
  II.  Whipsawed
  III.  The House of Dread
  IV.  The Fat Falls into the Fire
  V.  Atomic Fire?
  VI.  The Net Tightens
  VII.  Fresh Hazards
  VIII.  Defeat
  IX.  Thrown to the Wolves
  X.  Jail
  XI.  The Army Tries--and Misses
  XII.  A Changed World
  XIII.  A Weird Proposition
  XIV.  A Fresh Start
  XV.  Sparring for Time
  XVI.  Eureka!
  XVII.  The Affair at the Farmhouse
  XVIII.  Darkest Hour
  XIX.  Taken for a Ride
  XX.  Star of Hope




CHAPTER I

_Ace in the Hole_

The old quarry was an almost circular hole, a pit fully one hundred
feet deep and with hewn walls that rose perpendicularly from the floor
of the man-made crater.  For a secret workshop the place had been
ideally chosen.  It lay high up in barren and sparsely wooded foothills
in a section too poor to support so much as a rabbit.  People rarely
came there any more, now that the quarry was closed.  There was no
inducement--not even for game.

Which made the purring presence of the sleek automobile all the more
inexplicable.  But Steve Bennion knew perfectly well what he was doing.
This old quarry some fifty miles up in the hills from the Bennion
Research Laboratory belonged to him.  He had spent a lot of solitary
time up here, working privately on a project which he was exhibiting
today for the first time.

Parking the car, Bennion assisted his lone companion out of the seat
and led the way to the sheer edge of the cliff.  He pointed downward
toward the center of the abandoned quarry at what looked from here like
a bronzed Easter egg resting on a giant ice-skate, within a stockade.

"There she is, Kitty," he said simply.  "Inside that circle of
dilapidated fencing.  I screwed the last bolt home and made the final
electrical connection yesterday.  I wanted you to see her first."

Bennion's companion, a tall and unusually pretty girl, as deeply
bronzed as he was; stared downward with widening brown eyes.

"Steve!" she exclaimed.  "Not the completed space ship!  You kept it
secret while you worked on it?"

Steve Bennion smiled a trifle ruefully.  "That's right," he admitted.
"Now if we can just keep Bennion Research going for the few months
necessary to perfect an atomic fuel--we'll be rich and famous in spite
of General Atomics, Incorporated.  At long last we can let the wedding
bells ring out."

A shadow crossed the girl's face.  She quickly tried to hide it as she
moved closer, letting her arm rest against him.

"It's--it's wonderful, Steve," she murmured.  "But I'm really afraid.
You shouldn't have taken the entire last week off from your research
work for Magnesium Metals.  The bank has been calling up every day
about that finance note."

"Oh, that," responded Bennion in quick relief.  "They'll renew again.
And as soon as we finish this job for Magnesium Metals we'll pay it
off. Let's go down into the pit, Kitty.  I can't rest until you've seen
the first practical use for Anrad."

"How do we get down?  Fly?" the girl asked, indicating the sheer drop.

Bennion laughed and stepped over to the car.  From the baggage locker
he took a boatswain's chair and a heavy coil of line.  He led the way
along the quarry edge to an old but sturdy derrick.  In former days the
derrick had been used to haul up the products of the quarry.  Of late
Bennion had used it to send down the plates and parts for the
experimental space ship he had designed and built.

At the derrick he quickly rigged the bos'un's chair to the boom and
rove his line through the end sheave.

"Ready," he cried.  "Hop in, Kitty.  Shut your eyes and have faith."

Aided by her employer and fianc Katherine Pennell got into the seat
for her descent into the quarry, but she didn't shut her eyes.  She
wasn't the eye-shutting kind.  Instead, she was smiling like a gleeful
and excited child, as Bennion swung her out over the abyss.



When she got out at the bottom, he made the upper end of the rope
secure and then slid nimbly down it.  A short brisk walk across the
chip-strewn quarry floor brought them to the door of the fence.
Bennion unlocked the padlock and took her inside the enclosure.

"She's a beauty," exclaimed Katherine, gazing up at the gleaming
metallic vessel that had been erected within the frame of a launching
cradle.  The daylight was fading down here, but the fine, graceful
lines of the ship were evident.  The sheen on its special phosphor
bronze hull plates glowed brightly.

"I've named her the _Katherine_, in honor of you," Bennion said,
pleased with her delight over his handiwork, for he had spent all his
spare time for three gruelling years in building the craft.  "Climb
that ladder and I will show you what it is like inside."

The ship rested at an angle, looking much like an airplane bomb, nose
pointed up.  Entry could be made through a port a little over half-way
forward that led into the control room.  Although she gave the
impression of possessing tremendous power and speed, the ship was a
tiny one, hardly exceeding forty feet.  Therefore the climb was an easy
one.  Bennion waited at the foot of the ladder until the girl had
reached the top.  He gave one final proud glance toward the as yet
useless driving tubes clustered about the sharp tail-tip of the
tear-drop-shaped vessel.  Then he climbed the ladder behind Katherine.
He inserted another key and let her go in.

"It's even duckier inside," she remarked, surprised, as he snapped on
the lights for her to see.

The room was circular and switch-boards and instrument panels lined the
walls.  Kitty noticed a cabinet where cooking could be done.  Two
spring-slung hammocks indicated where its two passengers would sleep.
Overhead there were a number of optical instruments for observations of
the stars that would be seen through the many round lucite ports that
faceted the domed ceiling.

"Anrad?" she inquired, pointing at the black curtains neatly folded
back beside each of the viewports.

"Yes.  The first man to hop into space is likely to get a lot of
surprises.  We can't know what fierce radiation is loose up there above
the screen of our atmosphere.  I'm taking no chances.  The material of
those curtains is Anrad."

"Anrad" was their abbreviation of the fuller term Anradiaphane, a
substance not unlike rubber in appearance and texture, though far
different in its qualities.  Its composition was their own well-guarded
secret, for it was one of his more recent inventions of which Steve
Bennion Was most proud.  Anrad possessed the miraculous virtue of being
able to stop the terrible Gamma rays far more effectively than even
lead.  A thin sheet of it, made into a garment, was a safer screen than
clumsy and ponderous armor made of several inches of lead.

Bennion frowned momentarily.  Mention of Anrad reminded him of
unpleasant things.  Given an incorrupt government, he would have
patented this invention long ago.  But sad experience had made him
cagey.  Three times before he had made application for patents on other
important ideas and processes, only to have them rejected with the curt
statement that the identical idea had been patented a day or so before
by the powerful General Atomics Corporation.

Other independent research workers had had similar experiences--much
too often to be explained away as coincidences, even if the great
electronics combine did possess wonderful laboratories of its own and
had many brilliant scientists oh its payroll.  Thus Bennion had come to
the conclusion that something was radically wrong with the Patent
Office.  This had driven him to secrecy and taught him to keep
notebooks in cipher.  For, ironically enough, he was actually paying to
General Atomics exorbitant royalties for the privilege of using some of
his own stolen inventions!

"Have a look below," he said, more soberly, trying to dismiss the
subject from his mind.  He lifted a trapdoor and showed her how to
climb down.



Under the floor of the control room were the recoil cylinders that let
the floor above spring back under sharp acceleration and thereby
cushion the shock of the takeoff.  Below them were storerooms, air and
water recovery machines, and the spare fuel bins.  Lowest of all was
the motor room.  Up into this chamber projected the butts of the
driving tubes.  On top of them was built a compact little cyclotron,
actuated by its own motor.  Its job would be--when suitable fuel was
supplied--to start it into atomic eruption.

"Well, honey, you've seen it all," said Bennion at length.  "Perhaps I
have been too optimistic--building the ship before the final rocket
fuel has been prepared--but I know that is merely a matter of time now."

"I hope you are right, Steve," the girl said earnestly.  "But something
worries me.  I don't know why--or how.  But I do, too!  I've been wrong
not to tell you before.  But you've been acting so much like a kid at
Christmas that I hated to spoil things.  Steve, a car was driven out to
the lab yesterday morning and stopped near the gates.  Four men got out
and studied the building for a long time through glasses.  And they
made a lot of notes."

Bennion frowned down at her troubled face.  Then he smiled.

"So they spied, eh?  And what did it matter?  It will take more
powerful glasses than any I know of to reveal what goes on behind our
lab walls.  Don't let it bother you."

"I wouldn't have--only one of those men was Farquhar," she admitted
reluctantly.

"What?" ejaculated Bennion.  "Come on!  Let's get out of here!"

The name of Farquhar startled the electronic engineer.  And with good
reason.  Farquhar was the vice-president and general manager of the
greedy General Atomics Company.  Whenever he showed a personal interest
in a plant or a man, that plant or man was as good as gone.  He was
ever anxious to acquire brains as well as equipment and completed
inventions--always on the cheapest terms.

Thrice already had Steve Bennion been cheated of the just rewards for
his work.  Now, one of the few surviving independent research
engineers, Bennion thought of that overdue bank note.  One of General
Atomics' favorite tricks was to catch a man in a neat financial trap
and then give him the choice of ruin or going to work for the
monopolistic company that wrecked him.

More deeply concerned than he wanted his secretary and assistant to
know, Bennion hustled her out of the ship and down the ladder.  Hastily
padlocking the heavy fence door behind him, Bennion left the girl to
follow and bounded across the quarry in great leaping strides.  By the
time Katharine reached the waiting sling chair, he was almost at the
end of his feverish overhand climb up the rope to the top of the pit.
Without waiting for a breather, he began hauling her up.

Within two minutes they were careening down the rough mountain trail,
heading back toward the laboratory at a furious and dangerous speed.

"When I came up here with you today," the girl explained breathlessly,
"I left Billy on guard at the gate.  I instructed Mike not to leave the
office until we got back.  They would die for you, Steve.  Please, why
the great hurry?"

Bennion laughed shortly, harshly.

"You don't know that pirate Farquhar like I do, Kitty," he said grimly.
"No, danger of Billy and Mike having to die for me.  Those General
Atomic burglars are too smooth to do things in such a clumsy manner.
Their strong-arm squad is made up of clever lawyers and grasping
bankers.  I thought I was preparing an ace in the hole in building the
_Katherine_, and I may have been asleep on a more important job."

The car was on the paved road now, and the going was smoother.
Bennion's foot was pressed hard against the accelerator, and the car
fairly roared down through the foothills.

"Oh!", exclaimed Katherine faintly.  Then: "If things do get bad,
Steve, could we get together another stake by selling the little space
ship?"

"No!" he shouted fiercely.  "Nobody could use it without proper fuel,
and those leeches have drained my brains long enough.  I'll destroy the
_Katherine_ with my own hands before I'll let those bloodsuckers go
crawling around through her.  We can't afford to let General Atomics
have the _Katherine_.  They must never know, even that she has been
built!  The _Katherine_ is ours alone; I won't even proceed with my
fuel research as long as she is in jeopardy!"

Thirty minutes later they roared around the last curve and came into
view of the research laboratory.  What they saw sent a foreboding chill
through their hearts!




CHAPTER II

_Whipsawed_

Several cars and trucks were parked before the plant gate, and that
stood wide open.  Most of the vehicles displayed the arrogant trademark
of General Atomics, but two of them were police cars.  Several
policemen were guarding the gate, and, overalled strange workmen
swarmed in and out of the building.

Bennion brought his car to a screaming stop and leaped out.  He strode
over to the nearest policeman.

"What is going on here?" he demanded.

The cop shrugged, but pointed to a typewritten notice wired to the
fence.  Bennion gave it only a glance, for its heading told him what it
meant.  The document was entitled, "Notice of Execution Of Foreclosure
and Dispossess."  Bennion stormed past the grinning guards and into his
own front yard.  Four men on ladders were affixing a sign over the door
of the laboratory.  The sign said, GENERAL ATOMIC CORPORATION--BRANCH
PLANT 571-A.  Coming out the door was Mr. Price, the assistant cashier
of the bank.  Price tried to avoid Bennion's angry glance, but could
not, so instead he sheepishly tried to explain.

"You mustn't blame us for this, Mr. Bennion," he whined, "We had no
choice.  After your last renewal the bank examiner ordered us to get
rid of your note.  So we sold it to one of the big city banks.  General
Atomics must have bought it from them.  I swear--"

"Save your breath," interrupted Bennion bitterly, "though you might
have told me sooner."

"It would only have worried you," said the other.  "We knew you didn't
have any money and couldn't do anything about it, anyway--"

Bennion planted a hand against the man's chest and shoved him out of
his way.  He was licked and he knew it, but that did not compel him to
be polite to liars and hypocrites.  Then he was face to face with his
real adversary.

Farquhar, massive and overbearing, was the next to step out the door.

"Ah, Bennion," he declared with an oily smile, "I've been expecting
you.  Although your mortgage was a blanket one, covering as it did
land, buildings, equipment and furnishings, we do not want to make
things hard for you.  I'll give you a few minutes to gather up any
strictly personal belongings you and your most delightful secretary may
have left behind."

Bennion stopped dead in his tracks and looked the man over with boiling
scorn.  He never wanted worse to sock a man, but he restrained himself.
Farquhar was perhaps fishing for it, and he had witnesses and cops
around him by the dozen.  So Bennion took firm hold of himself.

"I'll be out of here in five minutes," he said.  "But get this,
Farquhar.  You haven't seen the last of me."

"Why, of course not, my dear boy," exclaimed Farquhar.  "Naturally you
are excited how, and a little disgruntled.  But I do expect to see you
again.  After you have cooled off we want you to know General's
latchstring is always out.  You can keep on running this laboratory if
you like and without the pain of worrying over expenses.  We take care
of those and pay you a good salary, too."

Bennion did not bother to answer that.  Followed by the girl, he just
walked by the man.  Inside the office they were treated to a still more
disgusting revelation of General Atomic's methods.  A photostat machine
had been set up and a gang of operators were busily photographing the
pages of Bennion's diaries and notebooks.  Not that it made any real
difference, for Bennion had long known of their practice and was
prepared for it.

His file cases--even the locked ones marked "Special and
Confidential"--had been carefully stuffed with harmless and meaningless
records of routine laboratory.  His real records he kept in his head,
or else in the four or five compact notebooks that he and Kitty never
failed to keep on their persons.  And even those were in a cryptic code
of their own devising, and the key to that they carried in their heads.
The only item of real value still in the laboratory was the roll of
blueprints covering the construction of the _Katherine_.



It took Bennion only a moment to dig that out and have it firmly in his
hand.  It had been left on a table in a workroom in full sight all the
time.  But no one had molested it, for the outside was plainly marked,
"Plan for New Heater Unit to be Installed in Watchman's shack at the
Gate."  Farquhar's spies were hunting for bigger game.  Meanwhile Kitty
had packed a brief case with a few things from her own desk.  After a
brief word to their former employees, there was nothing to do but go.

"Where to?" asked Kitty, taking the wheel.  She had refused to let
Bennion drive, knowing his furious mood.  She did not relish road
travel at a hundred and more miles an hour.

"To Northburg.  I'm taking you home to your father.  There are also
some matters I want to talk over with him."

It was late at night when the car rolled through the tree-shaded
streets of Northburg, the sleepy town that was the home of Northburg
Tech.  It drew up before the rambling brick house where Dr. Pennell
lived.  He was the director of the Institute of Electronics and had
been Bennion's beloved and respected teacher.  He met them at the door,
for they had stopped long enough to phone him they were coming.

The two men sat until late in the library, talking.

"You are up against a hard proposition, Steve," Dr. Pennell was saying.
"There are some government jobs, but they are poorly paid and the work
is dull routine.  I would gladly give you a professorship here, but you
couldn't stand that, either.  A year ago our trustees accepted a
fifty-million-dollar endowment from General Atomics and since then
we've been their pawns."

"But surely, there must be a few independent labs still operating?"
said Bennion, savagely.  "I simply must find a place where I can work
on the atomic fuel for the rocket."

Pennell stared at the rug.  That was not an easy question to answer.
There were a few, to be sure, but they were run by men of mediocre
caliber and he knew that they would not want to have under them a man
of Bennion's brilliance.

"There is Elihu Ward's workshop," ventured the old man after a long
pause, "but I hesitate to recommend it.  I know little or nothing about
the man or what he is doing, but rumors reach me.  I understand he is
playing with the transmutation of elements.  One report even has it
that he is scheming to construct elements of higher atomic number than
Uranium."

"Pretty ambitious," remarked Bennion.  "Why, a man who would monkey
with elements up in the nineties and hundreds might set the world
afire.  My own belief is that if such elements exist at all, they are
in blue dwarf suns.  Who is this guy?"

"Hallam, one of your classmates, is with him.  And young Carruthers.
They seem contented enough."

It was Bennion's turn to stare at the rug.  The old man's
recommendation was only lukewarm, but Ward might be an out.  Bennion
had to have a job, and quickly, for he must start saving money for the
new stake.

"I'll take a shot at it," he announced abruptly, snapping out of his
reverie.  "Where is his place?"

"It is on a high hill near the Catskills, not far from the town of
Foxboro.  But I had better give you a letter.  They say he is a hard
man to see."

Foxboro was the next stop, the bus conductor told him, many hours
later.  Bennion started.  He had been daydreaming again.  Half his
thoughts were behind him with his loyal Katherine Pennell.  Just before
that last passionate embrace of farewell he had entrusted her with his
secret notes and blueprints.

Now he was clean of anything that would be of value to a competitor
except for the undersuit he carried tightly rolled into a small
package.  That was a union suit of Anrad, complete with head hood.  He
brought it along to ensure his own personal safety.  In this new place
he might bump into radiations too powerful for standard lead suits to
shield.

The bus drew to a stop in the center of the town.  It was a pleasant
town and larger than he expected to find.  But he did not linger around
sightseeing.  He made inquiries at once how to get out to the lab.  The
reactions to his questions were astonishing.  Several men said they
didn't know, and hurriedly walked away.  Another man mumbled something
angrily and turned his back.  After a number of such rebuffs Bennion
found a taxi driver.

"How do you know you can get in?" asked the driver suspiciously, giving
Bennion a hard look.  "I don't want to soak you five dollars and then
have you squawk."

"I can get in," said Bennion, quietly.

"Humph," the driver sniffed.  "A lot of 'em say that, but blamed few
do."

"I've got a letter to Mr. Ward," explained Bennion, and sat back in the
cushions.



The surly driver slipped in his gears and they were off.  After a time
they came to a narrow side lane down which the car turned.  Then the
road began to climb.  In many places it was too narrow for two cars to
pass, so when a descending car was seen just ahead, the driver pulled
over to the side and waited for it.  The other came on slowly, for
there was scant clearance between the two.  It was then that Bennion
got a surprise.  There was a man in that, car of familiar face and
build.  And the man was Farquhar!

Farquhar locked glances with him.  Evidently he thought he had not been
recognized, for he suddenly went into a paroxysm of faked coughing.  He
clapped a handkerchief over his bowed face and kept it there until
after the cars had separated.  Bennion leaned over and asked his driver
what else was up this road besides the Ward plant.

"Not anything," growled the driver.  "When Ward built his castle, he
bought all the land for miles around, evicted the people and tore down
the houses.  That's why Foxboro folks don't like him.  And I tell you,
mister, if it was night now I wouldn't be taking you there at all.  It
ain't safe.  You might get shot at."  He shook his head dubiously.
"Funny fellow that Ward, and a screwy outfit he must have.  Most guys
like you don't get let in, and those that do don't ever come out again.
That heavy set man we just passed is the only one I know that comes
down again after he goes up."

Bennion accepted that information in silence.  He was trying to digest
what he had just heard and explain it to himself.  Ward's desire for
extreme privacy was understandable enough.  Hard radiation is
destructive to life and difficult to shield completely.  Unless he
deliberately made the country a desert about him, he might be ruined by
damage suits.  The reason for strict rules as to entry into the plant
was equally clear.  Experimental work was not only dangerous, but
confidential.  But what of Farquhar?  For Bennion was certain it was no
other.  Was he casing Ward's place as a preliminary to another squeeze
play here, or was there an alliance between the two men?  The answer to
that Bennion could not know, but his curiosity was excited.

They began to pass signs that said "Slow--Danger," and "Stop When Bell
Rings--Blasting Ahead."  Bennion guessed that that was used when the
super cyclotron was in operation, and that approaching cars were to
halt where they were until it stopped.  Then they turned the shoulder
of the hill and he caught his first view of the laboratory.  He gasped,
for there was nothing like it in the world--not even Atomic's giant
plant in Kansas.

The driver had referred to it as a castle.  It did look like one,
though a bare and featureless one.  It resembled a huge near-cube of
lead, perhaps three hundred feet square and half that tall.  There were
no openings in it, but up one face climbed open work iron stairs like a
fire escape.  These terminated about halfway up in a room that jutted
out on brackets from the leaden building proper.  Later Bennion was to
learn a group of bungalows and other buildings consisting of living
quarters, offices, auxiliary laboratories and such, stood farther down
the hill, protected by another leaden wall.

"Phew!" whistled Bennion, trying to gauge the tens of thousands of tons
of lead that had gone into the structure, and of its cost.  How could a
man like Ward get such backing?  And what monstrous super-machine did
such a colossal shell house?

"Shall I wait?" asked the driver, coming to a stop at a sign that
forbade further passage by vehicles.  It was still a good quarter of a
mile up to the gate.

"No," said Bennion.  "Don't wait.  I'm staying."




CHAPTER III

_The House of Dread_

Then Steve Bennion received another jolt.  The closer he drew to the
flood-lighted, high-voltage-guarded, woven barbed wire fence, the more
the place before him looked like a prison or a fortress.  The four
hard-faced guards inside grimly watched his approach with wary
interest.  Two of them carried tommy-guns at the ready.  But when they
called him to halt a few paces outside the gate, and demanded his name
and business, he was amazed by the sensation his name caused.  The guns
were lowered, and one of the men jumped to unlock the gate.  Another
went off at a trot toward the nearest of the brick buildings of the
office group.

"Excuse us, Mr. Bennion," apologized a guard, "we didn't know what you
looked like, that's all.  The boss told us to expect you."

"Yeah?" said Bennion, but he walked on in.  He relinquished his bag to
another guard, but chose to keep his packet in his hand.  Then he let
them take him to Ward's office.

"How are you, Bennion?" greeted Ward, rising and offering a hand.
"Ever since I read in the papers of your hard luck out in Tennessee I
have had a hunch you might show up.  A good many of the men who've been
frozen out by General Atomics come here.  I don't talk to many of them,
though.  Elihu Ward wants only the best.  Your reputation, naturally--"

"Thanks," grunted Bennion.  His brain was racing.  To begin with there
had been no mention of the foreclosure in any newspaper he had seen.
Nor did he care for the man before him.  Ward was a stocky, bald
individual of the high pressure salesman type, and Bennion was not fond
of the glad-hand, back-slapping technique.  And that business of
Farquhar's recent visit--

"I presume you are looking for a new connection," Ward said, going
straight ahead.  "If that is so, you've come to the right place.  I am
proud of my plant--the finest in the world--and the gang of real
experts associated with me.  I say associated, for this is a truly
cooperative venture--share and share alike.  I am sure you will be
happy here.  I am so sure of that I have already prepared a contract.
Here it is.  Sit down and read it.  Take your time, my dear boy."

Bennion took the long legal document and noted that the bulk of it was
in incredibly fine type.  It was a thing that would require an hour to
read and probably deserved a month's scrutiny by a keen lawyer.  The
only salient features of it that stood out in readable type were: that
he was offered a five-year contract with the Elihu Ward Associates
Inc., and that his salary was to be one hundred and twenty thousand a
year plus all expenses.  On his part he was to contribute freely of his
services, and the product of his work was the property of the group.

"All that fine stuff is practically meaningless," said Ward hastily.
"Actually we live here like one big family.  One for all and all for
one."

Bennion's lips narrowed.  For his eyes roving the sheet picked out one
line buried deep in the text.  It was to the effect that he would live
in guarded quarters and have no communication with the outside world
except through the censorship of Ward himself.  An inch below that he
found the startling news that a hundred thousand of his annual salary
was not to be paid until the end of the five-year period.  Then it
would be paid in stock!  Bennion would have accepted a lot less--if it
had been in cash.  This contract was tricky and unfair.

"Before I sign anything," said Bennion, without revealing his thoughts.
"I'd like to see your plant and how you work.  Five years, you know is
a long time."

For a moment Ward did hot look pleased.  Then he forced a grin.

"Of course I can't expect a man as clever as you to sign up without
seeing how you live or what you are to do," he said.  "By all means
look the place over.  When you see the fascinating work laid out for
you, you'll probably be willing to come with us for nothing but your
keep.  Look!"



He pointed to some heavy metal pigs in the corner--cylindrical chunks
about three feet high and nearly that much across.  One was gold,
another silver, and the third a metal that Bennion did not at once
recognize.

"We poured those yesterday.  One is synthetic gold--think of it.  Made
out of an equal weight of common dirt dug from the hill here.  Down in
the vault we have an equal amount of pure metallic radium.  That was
this morning's run-off.  This afternoon we are going to be bold.  We
intend to jump way up in the atomic table and try a really
breath-taking piece of synthesis--Eka-Gold!"

"That ought to be pretty strongly radioactive," remarked Bennion.

"Violently so.  Look, here is what Hallam computes its properties to
be--liquid at ordinary temperatures, like mercury.  Luminous and
orange-colored.  Then follows a long list of rays that are predicted to
come out, and its half-life will be but a matter of a few days.  Why,
radium will be as harmless as putty compared to it."

"I would like to see it made," said Bennion.  He would have felt a lot
easier about being present at this daring attempt if he had Hallam's
figures, for a quick once-over first.  But he knew that that was out of
the question.  He would not be let into any deep secrets until after
his name was on the dotted line.

"Here comes Carruthers," said Ward, glancing out the window.  "I'll
turn you over to him until we put the big show on."

It should have been a good lunch they had in the officers' dining room.
Present also were Hallam, two lieutenants of the guard, an analytical
chemist, and a couple of engineers from the power house.  But though
the food was excellent and well served, everyone wore a strained air.
Hallam became so jittery he got up and stalked out of the room in the
midst of the meal.

There was absolutely no effort made by any present to keep up a
conversation.  It made Bennion think of a bunch of condemned men
waiting for their turn to do the last mile.  But the depressing meal
was soon over.  Bennion, on the pretext of washing up, went to his room
for last-minute preparations.  He wanted to get that Anrad garment on
next to his skin, for he had the growing conviction that there would be
not a few casualties before the day was over.

While he was slipping his clothes off his mind flashed once at the
tight spot he was in.  It was a safe bet that he could not get out the
gate now on any terms.

Bennion shrugged.  A curious blend of scientific interest and plain
curiosity drove him on.  He drew on the tight fitting undersuit, and
then proceeded to cover it with his ordinary clothes.  It was hot and
awkward to wear such a garment, but not so awkward as to be caught in a
beam of fifth order Gamma rays without it.  Bennion had seen more than
one fried remnant of a man dragged out of a heavy lead suit.

"All set?" called Carruthers, through the door.

"Rarin' to go," replied Bennion, and went to meet him.

They ducked through the zig-zag opening that pierced the first barrier
wall.  From there they climbed to the foot of the iron stairway that
lead up the side of the main building.

"How thick are those lead walls?" asked Bennion.

"A hundred feet," replied Carruthers in a matter-of-fact tone.  "Not
all of it is lead, only a foot on the outer face and nine for inside
lining.  The rest is barium concrete.  Figuring barium cement at one
tenth the resistance of lead, it comes out to twenty equivalent feet
altogether.  It stops most everything, though leaks do occur."

Bennion could only blink.  He had worked on some grand conceptions, but
nothing that equaled Ward's project.  Either a madman or a genius had
thought this one up, and Bennion had seen too little to be sure of
which.

The square iron box at the top of the stairs proved to be a large
locker room, subdivided into smaller compartments.  An attendant handed
Bennion a lab suit which bore a prominent number.  He went into one of
the booths, slipped off part of his ordinary clothes and into the lead
armor.  It was thicker and heavier than any he had seen.  There was a
radio-power pickup on the shoulders and a small motor box.



Bennion found that he could move about in the suit quite easily; due to
some magic of inner levers and gears.

The helmet matched the suit.  It was a straight globe, without
eye-panes, and as blank in front as behind, except that two small horns
stuck up out of the crown where the eye-panes would have been.  After
Bennion had it on, he found it a marvel of comfort, barring the feeling
he was on stilts.  For he saw through periscopes that ran up into the
little horns.  He heard and talked through regular helmet circuits.  He
found the air good and plentiful.

He joined the gang of robot-appearing monsters waiting at the yawning
door to the inner passage.  Like himself, each man there was
numbered--for ready identification.  They tested phones and found out
who was who.

"Let's go," said Hallam, but his tone was more that of a man in
desperation than of a man selected to make cosmic history.  Without a
word the metal monsters shambled after.  Again they traversed a zig-zag
tunnel through the mighty wall.  At the end of it they did not come put
into a great central hall, as Bennion expected they would, but to a
"T".  It was a transverse passage--a lateral running around the hall.
Hallam and part of the men went one way, Carruthers and Bennion the
other.

"Along here there are still nine feet of lead between us and _it_,"
said Carruthers in a tense, hushed way.  The way he pronounced that
fateful "it" was enough to make a man's skin crawl.  There was awe and
horror in his voice.

They went on, turned a corner, and started down a long passage.
Halfway down it they came to another offshoot to the right.  Carruthers
slowed down as he approached, and at that point he came to a dead stop.
Bennion looked at him curiously, for he seemed to be swaying on his
feet.  He put out a hand to steady him, but Carruthers brushed it off.

"I'm all right," he muttered thickly.  "Just a little nervous, that's
all.  You get that way after awhile.  Three more steps and we'll be in
the booth, with nothing between us and _it_ but shuttered lead-glass
lookout ports.  You'd better leave the shutters up and stick to the
periscope."

"Okay," said Bennion.  He was plenty nervous himself, but he wouldn't
have admitted it.

Bennion heard Carruthers catch his breath with a quick panicky sob, and
then the click as he shut his transmitter off.  After a moment,
Carruthers started forward again.  Then they were in the booth.
Bennion focused his periscopic eyes on the switchboard that stood
there.  Then he knew exactly what to expect.  For it was his own
design--one he had made several years before when he was younger and
less experienced.  It was a big idea he had had that time, but it
wouldn't stand rechecking.  He abandoned it and laid the papers away.
Later he had missed them, but thought the loss of little importance.
He supposed that General Atomic's spies must have stolen them, but he
didn't care.  This particular invention was more of a hazard than an
asset.

A loud speaker on the wall blared.

"All guards have manned their stations in the corridors.  Engineers and
operators please take theirs and make reports.  We pull the switch in
five minutes."

Bennion stepped to the doorway and looked out--by the way they had
come.  Two armed guards were in the long corridor at the turn.

"Well," he thought, as he twiddled with the eyepiece of the booth's
periscope through which he hoped to watch what went on in the great
hall below, "Maybe this is it."

Carruthers' trembling voice came in.  "West wall booth manned, and
ready."

There was a long, tense wait.

"Alert!  Stand by!" came the raucous warning over the loud speaker.




CHAPTER IV

_The Fat Falls into the Fire_

When the signal buzzer sounded, Carruthers began throwing switches and
pushing buttons.  Bennion shifted his attention to the outside.  He
applied his helmet periscopes, and began sweeping the hall.

It was a rectangular room, and he could see into all parts of it.  The
huge machine that sprawled in the middle of the floor, on a circular
disk, he knew at once was a giant hyperspiro--a development of the one
stolen from his files.  Waiting for the warming-up currents to have
effect, Bennion studied it with intense interest, especially the added
features.  The machine resembled a snail laid flat, or rather a
colossal French horn on its side.  It was a coil of tapering tubing,
diminishing inward from a huge bell muzzle until toward the center the
tube was no thicker than ordinary garden hose.  At irregular intervals
on the inspiral were attachments of wires for the reception of booster
current.

Up to that point there had been little alteration of the fundamental
invention.  It was a new-style cyclotron, operating on a different
principle than the earlier models.  A bank of powerful tubes--giant
tubes standing eighteen feet high--fed streams of electrons into the
bell muzzle, where they were caught up by systems of magnets, boosters,
and other expediters and sent whirling inward at ever-increasing speed
and pressure.  The taper of the tube caused the whirling electrical
particles to bunch together densely, and that, combined with the effect
of the continual addition of power, resulted in their being delivered
completely scrambled, formless, and raving with disorganized energy.

"They made no alterations to the disintegrator element," thought
Bennion.

It was the other features of the machine that puzzled Bennion.  Where
the central plate should have been, there rose a complicated system of
bright helices, one coil of silvery wire within another.  Enormous
electromagnets dangled from traveling cranes overhead, and these were
grouped around the rising coils of wire.  Above the last helix a
slender pipe curved up and over in a sort of gooseneck.

Bennion took that to be the delivery pipe, for a smaller crane running
on a lower craneway was poised over it with a pot ladle hanging from
its hook.  From his higher position, Bennion could see that the ladle
was lined with some whitish substance, probably a special fire clay.
Remembering the ingots Ward had shown him at the office, Bennion was
confident that the finished product was expected to pour into this
bucket.

"I see," he concluded, just as he heard the warning signals preparatory
to turning on the main electron stream.  "This big gadget they have
added is the reintegrator.  It takes the scattered particles of the
busted up atoms and rebunches them to fit whatever atomic structure
they want.  I guess they made their gold and silver all right, and
maybe some radium.  But how the heck can they be sure that they really
know how an atom of Eka-Gold is arranged?  Once the curve runs off the
paper, nobody knows which way it will turn."

Bennion took his attention away from the machine outside.  He was
worried about Carruthers' jumpy nerves and the convulsive way he was
operating his switches.  Since the whole dangerous performance was
delicate in the extreme, the slightest slip on the part of any of the
control operators might mean an explosion of indescribable violence.
Once that torrent of pushing, angry electrons got out of control
anything might happen--the demolition of the entire mountain, perhaps
even a raging, unquenchable atomic fire that would spread inexorably to
engulf and destroy the world.

"JK circuits four and five," came the order over the annunciator,
"using billion-volt increments."

"JK four and five in," acknowledged Carruthers shakily, as he cut in
the current.  "One billion--two billion--three--four--"

"Stop at five," directed the voice of Hallam.  "When needle is steady,
throw in the whole Q series in numerical order, voltage according to
plan."

"Check," said Carruthers.  He seemed to be getting a grip on himself.



Bennion turned back to the periscope.  The men who had been working on
the floor were now huddled behind lead barriers in the corners.  The
cranemen overhead had ducked into their own special hiding places.
There was no sign of life except the drone of the great transformers
and the continual flickering of multicolored lightning as leaking
current raged from point to point.  The giant tubes glowed angrily, and
at some points on the incurving spiral the metal was white with the
heat of the fierce rushing atom bits within.  At the center, where the
disintegrator met the reintegrator, the machine was so hot as to be
unbearably incandescent.  Bennion marveled at Ward's having developed
an alloy that would not instantly vaporize under the intolerable heat
that it must be exposed to.

"Attention, men," called the annunciator voice again.  "The first stage
of reintegration is stable.  Stand by to throw in the special circuits.
As soon as that is done, boost all pressures one hundred per cent."

"Now it comes," thought Bennion, as he saw Carruthers cringe, despite
the bulky leaden armor he wore about him.  This was the moment they all
feared.  It was now, if ever, that someone would break.  Bennion never
took his eye off the man at the board.

The signal came, and Carruthers went through most of the operations
correctly, though at times his hand jerked as if uncontrollable.  What
worried Bennion most about the rattled operator was that in his
agitation he had thrown off some of the safety connection.  The
safeties hampered quick operation, but they prevented an accidental or
erroneous combination of circuits.  When untold amperes at billions of
volts meets a like current of opposite polarity, something has to give!

"Start specials!"

"Specials started," whimpered Carruthers, "f-ffour g-gee:--t-ten
AX--eleven AX--now five G--"

He reached across the board to shove in the 5-G button when one of his
fits of spasmodic jerking seized him.  His awkward leaden arm brushed
against a row of open switches that should have been protected by the
safeties.  Bennion's horrified eyes saw them being slammed home to
their connections.  In another tenth second there would be no
laboratory--no hyperspiro--no Ward or Bennion or anybody.  There was
only one thing to do and Bennion did it.  He launched himself across
the room like a thunderbolt and yanked open the master switch that fed
juice to the entire board.

It was a drastic step to take, but there was no other remedy.  The
wailing of tortured circuits and the thunderous crash of the no-current
circuit-breakers popping out was hideous and deafening.  But Bennion
knew that whatever damage had been done could be repaired.  The other
way there would have been nothing left.  He carefully reset the
switches as they should be for picking up the current again, attached
the safety connections, then opened the main switch again.  For an
instant he had some doubts as to what would happen next, but the
instruments and gauges went at once to normal.  The momentary cessation
of current apparently had done no serious harm.

"It's all yours again," he said to the terrified Carruthers, who was
sagging helplessly in his saddle.  "But watch your step, kid.  You
blame near killed us all that time."

Carruthers pulled himself together somehow and went on with his
switch-throwing.  Bennion turned away, to go back to the periscope.  As
he did, he found himself face to face with another man.  The suit of
armor bore the numeral one.

"I saw that, Bennion," came the harsh voice of Ward.  There was a
metallic sarcastic ring to it, as if he were gloating over a personal
triumph.  "I thought an experienced lab man like you would know the
law.  Did you ever read what it says about unauthorized persons
tampering with electronic switchboards?  Don't you know that
interference with a qualified operator may bring life imprisonment?  Or
death?  Think that over, Mr. Stephen Bennion."

"Death?" laughed Steve Bennion, scornfully.  "Execution couldn't make
me any deader than we all would have been if I hadn't interfered."

"That will be your story, of course," aid Ward coldly.  "Let us see
whether you can make it stick.  The law--"

"You are playing with cosmic fire, Ward," broke in Bennion, his voice
full of loathing for the man, "and that is a dangerous game.  Cosmic
fire knows no law but its own.  If you expect to live much longer,
you'd better learn some of those."



Abruptly, Bennion wheeled, stalked to his periscope and looked out
again.  He was angry then, too angry to say more.  But the moment he
looked but he forgot his anger.  Things had changed.  The incandescence
now enveloped the whole machine, and bubbles of purple vapor kept
coming from the downcurved delivery spout of the reintegrator.  Bennion
then thought he saw what every electronics engineer had always
dreaded--the beginnings of collapse of the monster cyclotron.  It was
slow and gradual, but in another moment he saw it was happening.  Parts
of the tubing were sagging, others puffing out in huge blisters.  One
of the vertical helices melted in places, and fell apart with a
blinding shower of sparks.  Before he could see more, his attention was
diverted by the bedlam that was breaking loose over the
inter-communication system.

He listened.  The news was incredibly bad.  Generators were running
away, distribution panels were melting under intolerable overloads.
Units were blowing up, hurling torn men outward with their own
fragments.  Switchmen died of heart failure at their stations, or
fainted.

Circuit after circuit was failing.  All hell was loose.

Carruthers had fallen face down on his panel.  He did not answer when
called to.

Ward had scurried into a corner, where he stood, trembling.  Bennion
did the only thing he could.  He opened the master switch again and
watched the few remaining meters die.  Then he took another look at
what was happening on the main floor.

The hyperspiro was still collapsing.  The towering reintegrator had
fallen, and now lay in a semi-molten mass on top the cyclotron.  Now
that the current was off, that had cooled to a dull red, but at the
center there still existed a spot of intense brilliance.  Slowly that
spot contracted until it was only a few feet across, then but a dozen
inches, then no larger than a dime.  Yet as the incandescent area grew
smaller, it grew more intense.

The tiny spot poured forth an unbearable brilliance that hurt Bennion's
eyes, even though it was filtered through several thick lenses and
underwent several reflections.

It was amazing how such intense light could emanate from a blob of
cooling metal.

The aspect of the thing changed again.  Bennion saw now that it was not
a hot spot on the metal, but a little pellet of intensely luminous
substance that danced about or floated in a small pond of molten metal
in the midst of the wreckage of the hyperspiro.  It reminded him of the
behavior of a particle of sodium cast upon water.  And it seemed to be
consuming the stuff it swam in!  The puddle of melted metal slowly
dwindled and its level sank.

"What do you make of it?" asked an anxious voice behind him.  It was
Ward's voice.

"Ask Hallam," said Bennion curtly.  "This is his show."

"Hallam is dead," said Ward.  "It's your show now.  Write your own
ticket, but extinguish that bright thing down there."  His voice rose
shrilly toward the end, and Bennion knew that the man was scared.
"Look again ... see if it's growing ... no, let me look."

Bennion relinquished the periscope.  Ward had no more than put his
eyepiece to it than he broke down in sheer fright.

"We're lost," he screamed, "the world's lost!  We've set an atomic
fire!"

Then he lumbered blindly from the booth, muttering hysterical gibberish.




CHAPTER V.

_Atomic Fire?_

Now the incessant rattle of the Geiger counters had risen to a roar.
Other special instruments were recording rays of unprecedented
intensity and of strange composition.  Gamma, X, S3, and Z-rays
predominated, but there were others.  Atoms were disintegrating in vast
numbers.  Bennion read the ominous warnings and was thankful for his
protecting undersuit of Anrad.  No wonder the men on the floor had
died.  Which caused him to think of Carruthers.

Carruthers was still slumped across the switchboard, but low mutterings
came through his transmitter--gibberish, drooling sounds.  No doubt his
brain was fried, but he was still alive.  Bennion managed to get him up
and out the door to the better protected inner passage and behind nine
feet of honest lead.  There he let him slide to the floor, thinking
that the guards would take him away.  After which he returned to the
empty booth.

What he saw through the periscope was profoundly disturbing.  The spot
of dazzling light which at first appeared to be hardly bigger than a
pin point was larger and far more intense.  It fluctuated irregularly,
and at times it changed color in its pulsations, though for the most
part it was a blinding, bluish white.  Bennion thought to slip the lead
lens covers over, and to his astonishment he found he could still see
it clearly.

What could the thing be?  He studied it through the lead filter, for he
could actually see it better that way.  Through the lead it could be
seen to be about the size of an ordinary marble.  He hung there
watching it for nearly an hour.  It grew visibly, often by fits and
starts.  He saw also that it lay much deeper in wreckage of the
hyperspiro.  That wreckage continued to melt in the vicinity of the
object, feeding it with its molten juices.  For Bennion was sure that
was part of the explanation.  If it grew, it must grow at the expense
of something else, and there was certainly no more power being fed to
it.

Bennion guessed from the silence on the phones, that everyone else had
fled from the building.  He knew he was risking his life by staying in
the fearful radiance, but he wanted to know the explanation of that
fierce sparkle.  Probably the fate of the building depended on
it--perhaps that of the nation.  Yet he felt reasonably certain that it
was not atomic fire.

He resolved to go closer to it, but when he reached the passage he
found that Carruthers still lay where he had put him.  Bennion ripped a
length of copper cable from the now useless switchboard.  He fashioned
a drag noose and towed him to the dressing room outside the heavy wall.

Thoroughly frightened attendants helped Bennion get the man's helmet
off, but Carruthers was dead.  There was no skin on him--it had been
cooked away, leaving only the raw underflesh.  And the penetrating rays
must have wrecked his inner organs.

"That makes twenty," said the attendant, "and all the rest badly
burned.  You'd better go down to the dispensary, sir, and let them look
you over."

"Oh, I'm all right," said Bennion, though he lied when he said it.
Hard radiation is insidious stuff.  You don't feel it when it hits you.
It is like lying on the beach on a cloudy summer day, only to discover
the next day that you are blistered from head to toe.  Bennion was now
beginning to feel the tell-tale tingle of skin burns, and his throat
and eyeballs felt dangerously dry.  The closefitting Anrad suit was hot
and sticky, too.

"I'll strip and have a shower," said Bennion, "and then take a little
rest.  Please bring me a sandwich and ask Mr. Ward to come up here.  I
want to know more about the layout of this plant."



The attendant moved off promptly.  It seemed odd to Bennion that he, a
stranger, should be the one to hang on and try to think a way out of
the catastrophe that was sure to come.  For there was no doubt that
something terrible was in the making.  But Ward had abdicated, rushed
off screaming that this was Bennion's pigeon now.

It was good to get clean again.  Bennion lay on a cot, resting.  Now
that he had unguents on his burns, he began to realize how great the
strain had been.  Shortly he would go back into the plant.  Indicators
on the wall showed that some radiation was leaking through the hundred
foot barrier and was mounting in intensity all the time.  When Bennion
went in again, his task would be far more dangerous.

At length an engineer came.  Ward, he said, had left the plant.

"What is the situation?" asked Bennion bluntly.

"Bad," said the fellow, hopelessly.  "The cranemen went out like
lights.  Nobody knows what happened.  Some of the men in the booths are
going to die.  The rest will be cripples or idiots.  The men want to
run away, but the boss won't let them."

"Ward went away, didn't he?" asked Bennion with scorn.

"He said he thought it best to report the matter to the home office."

"Home office, eh?" growled Bennion, his suspicions fully confirmed.
"That couldn't be General Atomics in New York by any chance?"

The engineer shrugged.

"At any rate, when he left he said that if you could think of anything
to do, we were to give you all the help you needed."

"Thanks," said Bennion dryly.  "I'm in charge of the plant and a
prisoner in it at the same time, huh?"

"Well," said the engineer, doubtfully, "you are getting off easy at
that.  According to Ward the whole blow-up was your fault.  He said you
got excited and pulled the wrong switch.  He says what he intends to do
about you will all depend on how you pull us out of the mess.  You
can't laugh off twenty or thirty corpses, you know."

"No, you can't," said Bennion thoughtfully, thinking of the three or
four billion prospective dead.  If that gleaming, growing spherelet
inside was really out of control, it might mean the doom of the
race--perhaps even the world.

"All right," he added, rising from the cot.  "Bring me the plans of
this laboratory at once so I will know how to get around.  Then I'm
going to have another look."

This time he dressed with greater care than ever, taking especial
precautions with the adjustment of his hood and the taping of his face.
He found an extra heavy suit of outer armor and put that on.  Then he
walked boldly along the corridor formerly taken by Hallam.  Beyond the
booth entrance there was a circular staircase.  Bennion walked down to
the main floor.

Here Bennion could see the extent of the wreckage.  The great machine
had melted completely away, and left the abandoned magnets and ladle
dangling foolishly far overhead.  Where it formerly stood there was now
a yawning crater full of bubbling, incandescent metal where the
dazzling object continued to dance.  And to grow.  Now it was the size
of an orange, and emitting a fierce radiance that meant certain death
to anyone less well shielded than Bennion.  In the far corners lay the
bodies of several men.



Bennion stood on the edge of the crater gazing down at the shining
thing through two inches of helmet lead.  Yet it was almost unbearable
to look at.  Yes, it was a fire of a sort, and its fuel was the metal
it bathed in.  Bennion could see it swirling around the fierce sphere
and being sucked into it.  The level of the molten mass was sinking.
He wondered whether the object had a special affinity for metal.

He picked up a heavy sledge and chipped out a hunk of the concrete
floor.  He tossed the piece into the cauldron, and watched the currents
take it to the center in a series of tightening spirals.  But the fiery
mass seemed to reject it.  The bit of concrete was not consumed.
Perhaps if the fiery thing could be fished out and placed on the bare
floor, it might eventually burn out.

Bennion searched the tool rooms and found what he wanted, a pair of
long-handled tongs of thermadont, an alloy with the highest melting
point known.

Then he set himself and fished for the fiery object.  He caught it
finally, in the jaws of his tool, and tried to drag it to him.  Then he
got the surprise of his life.  It came, but with ponderous
sluggishness.  At length he pulled it near his side of the pool, and
prepared to haul it out.

Strain as he might, and he was a powerful man, he could not budge it.
He tried again, until he felt his veins and muscles would burst.  The
result was the same.  And the answer was all too clear.  The thing was
incredibly heavy!

The tongs were beginning to melt.  Bennion retrieved what was left of
them, and sat down to pant.  He glared down, more baffled than ever.
Yet what he had just discovered was not unreasonable.  If the fireball
was feeding on the hyperspiro and incorporating its substance into
itself, it must weigh nearly as much.  Some of the great machine was
still undigested, and a certain amount had been thrown off in the
feverish radiation.  But he knew the stark truth then.  He simply could
not lift those hundreds of tons with his own unaided muscles.

He thought of the cranes, and looked upward.  They still stood with
magnets and ladle dangling.  But there was no longer any juice in the
building, and the crane operators had all died.  He must get power and
men to help him.

Bennion arose and gave a final glance at the fiery ball below.  He saw
his chunk of concrete.  Half of it had been eaten away.  Yet it was
more resistant than metal.  Perhaps there would be other substances
even more so.

"I've simply got to fish that incandescent baby out and isolate it,"
said Bennion, and then made for the stairway.

Outside he found a changed situation.  The dressing room attendants
must have fled.  Bennion slipped off his clothes and did the necessary
things to alleviate his minor burns, then put on a suit of light armor
and descended the stairs.  From this high vantage point he could see
the buildings between the barrier wall and the outer gate.  The
surviving employees of the plant were gathered there in anxious groups:
Along the fence a cordon of guards was strung out.  Beyond it a small
crowd of townspeople--all men.  Their leader was talking with the
captain of the guard.  That man wore the star of a peace officer.  He
probably was the sheriff from Foxboro.

"This is worse," thought Bennion.  "Once the public starts to interfere
we are sunk."




CHAPTER VI

_The Net Tightens_

Realization that it was morning came to Bennion like a blow.  The time
had passed swiftly.  The first breakdown, his long rest, and second
visit had consumed the night.

He passed through the barrier wall but could not find the young
engineer he had spoken to before.  Most of the silent, anxious
employees drew away at his approach.  Blank despair was on all their
faces.  At length he found a man who seemed in charge.  It was Hartley,
a decent chap who had charge of one of the generators.  Hartley had
just come up from the gate where there was still a great hubbub going
on.

"Oh, hello," Hartley said.  "I'm glad to see you got out alive.  The
captain will be glad to see you.  Maybe if you show yourself at the
gate you can help calm that mob outside.  Listen to 'em yell!"

"What's the row?"

"One of the guards on the fence skipped out.  You can't blame him much.
Anyway, he ran down the hill and shot off his mouth in town.  He must
have spilled all he knew, for they're sure buzzing."

"That's bad," muttered Bennion.  The situation called for cool heads
and clear thinking.  "What are they saying?"

"Plenty.  There are ambulances and hearses out there, and police cars.
The sheriff and the county health officer and the coroner want to get
in and find out how many are dead and injured and how they got that
way.  The captain won't let 'em.  They're threatening to use force.
The mayor is yelping for the militia.  But Ward hasn't come back yet
and the captain's sitting tight.  Something ought to break pretty soon.
Look, here is something a newspaper reporter handed through the fence
to show us our secret wasn't so secret."

Bennion took the clipping and read it.  It was from that morning's
edition of a large New York newspaper.


Leakage of the news of a serious explosion and fire at the Ward Plant
near Foxboro threw that town into a furore last night.  Little is known
as to the extent of the damage or the number of lives lost, since the
plant operates under a special charter and is outside the jurisdiction
of local authorities who have been denied entrance.  But in view of the
gravity with which the situation is viewed both in Washington and New
York it is feared that it may be disaster of major proportions.  Some
estimates give the number of dead or badly injured at fifty, and the
property loss is expected to run into millions.

It has been learned that the Ward plant is a subsidiary of General
Atomics, but the officials of that company refused to be interviewed.
Instead they handed put the following prepared statement:

"Late yesterday, during the course of a routine manufacturing operation
an independent engineer who was being shown through the plant, became
excited and knocked open a nearby switch.  This rash action caused a
battery of exciters to blow up, and in the subsequent fire several men
were killed and a number injured.  Prompt action was taken at once to
isolate the fire, and the injured men were evacuated.

"In proper time the company will take appropriate criminal and civil
action against the responsible person, but at present it is more
concerned with getting the plant back into operation.  Mr. Elihu Ward,
its superintendent, is now conferring with the home office on extensive
repairs and alterations.  He is not expected to return to Foxboro for
several weeks.  During that time the plant will remain in an
inoperative status."


"I'll say it is inoperative," growled Bennion, and read on.


When questioned as to the wave of other atomic fires that are said to
have occurred throughout the country, Mr. Farquhar, spokesman for GA,
dismissed the stories as unfounded rumors.  He said that a board of the
company's best engineers would leave shortly for an inspection of the
Ward plant, and that later their findings would be made public.  Mr.
Farquhar further declared that there was absolutely no cause for alarm.

"The term atomic fire is misleading," he said.  "There is no such
thing.  It is the invention of writers of thrilling fantasy.  Fires
occur in all industries, and that of atomics is particularly hazardous.
This is just another one.  It is safe inside concrete walls a hundred
feet in thickness.  Since the current is shut off it will go out of
itself in a few days."



Bennion frowned.  "Nuts," he observed.  Hartley grinned.


It was announced in Washington, however, that Senator Harold MacChaney
was ready to go to Foxboro along with other members of the Committee on
Atomic Control.  Dr. Isherwood Tutweiler, Director of the Bureau of
Electronics, and Elmer Dillwood Futtingham, the noted writer on the
subject, were prepared to go along as advisers in the event a
governmental investigation seemed to be in order.


"Sweet, huh?" asked Hartley.

"Lovely," replied Bennion bitterly.  "A commission of crooks to lay on
the whitewash, and a committee of stuffed shirts to gum up the game.
If we haven't got a national calamity already, we'll have one when
Dopey Tutweiler and the senators take charge."

Bennion spat disgustedly.

"That's not my funeral.  Not yet.  My job is to get a stranglehold on
that fireball.  I need help.  First, tell me what the hyperspiro stood
on."

"The substructure is a heavy cribbing of steel columns, over battery
rooms, cooling system pipes, pump rooms, transformer banks and a lot of
other auxiliaries.  It goes seventy feet down to bedrock."

Bennion groaned.  That made the need for haste imperative.  He had
hoped the object might exhaust the supply of metal about it and come to
the more resistant concrete.  Then it could not grow so fast.  That
would give Bennion time to study it.

"Listen, Hartley," Bennion's tone was urgent, "we've got to get that
baby out now!  I'm beginning to get a line on it.  It isn't a raging
atomic fire, but something a whole lot worse.  That dazzling lump is a
greedy, hungry thing.  It feeds on whatever is nearest to it, tossing
the rest away as fierce radiation.  Maybe there is something it cannot
touch.  If there is such a substance, we might be able to bury it in
the stuff."

"What would it do then?  Die out of its own accord?"

"Who knows?" Bennion shrugged.  "More likely it would start to
disintegrate.  How fast that would be is anybody's guess.  It might
explode and take this end of the state with it.  But it is a cinch that
the smaller it is the less damage it will do.  We've got to keep it
from getting bigger.  If we fail it may sink down into the mountain
where nobody can get at it--maybe clear to the center of the earth.  If
it does that this planet may turn into a blue star."

"Yes, yes," agreed Hartley frowning, "it is easy to say we've got to
get it out.  But how?  Nobody can live in that lab now.  How you do it
is a mystery.  I'll help you all I can, but--"

"Here is how you can help," said Bennion.  "I want the wiring to the
cranes put in order, and juice sent up to the them.  That can be done
without going inside the nine-foot inner wall.  If your men wear heavy
armor and don't stay more than an hour they will be safe enough.  I'll
handle the inside stuff.  But I've got to have a crane to work with,
and a man or two to run it."

Hartley shook his head.  "The crane circuits were not burned out.  All
I need to do is throw a switch.  But there aren't any cranemen left.
They all died."

"Get me two good men and I'll teach 'em," said Bennion grimly.

"I'll try," said Hartley, hopelessly, "but the men are in a blue funk.
They would run away if it wasn't for the guards."

"Try," said Bennion.



Hartley was right.  Not a man inside the plant would volunteer.  The
engineer brought the word back to Bennion.  Whatever was to be done
Bennion would have to do it singlehanded.  Bennion looked up from the
blueprints about the capacities of the cranes and their equipment.
With one resolute helper he could do the trick.  With out an assistant
nothing could be done.  It was no use to ask Hartley to come.  Hartley
must stay in the generator room providing the power.

Bennion said nothing.  Pawing the air and cursing would accomplish
nothing.  He slid off the stool and paced the floor.  He simply must
have a helper Where was such a one to be obtained?

Bennion knew that he had been over-optimistic when he said it would be
safe for a man to operate a crane for short periods.  Only one clad in
a suit of Anrad could be considered reasonably safe.  Even Anrad might
not avail against that dazzling object.  And there was no other Anrad
suit but one--one made especially to fit an individual, Kitty Pennell.

Kitty Pennell!

Bennion knit his brows, fighting a tumult of conflicting desires and
fears.  Dared he induce Kitty to come to this dreadful place?  Why
should he allow her to run such a horrible risk?

Yet he needed her.  She had been his assistant for a long time.  They
worked together as a perfect team.  Each contributed what the other
lacked.  He was analytically minded, her methods were intuitional.
Kitty was his inspiration, while he acted as a brake on her exuberant
nature.  Moreover she knew atomics as few men did, and on top of that,
possessed the only other shield in existence potent against the deadly
radiation of the ball of fire.

It was a hard decision to make.  He thought of Ward and Farquhar and
their cheap, miserable plottings.  Putting the fire out was only a
preliminary job.  After that Bennion saw himself entangled in a mesh of
conspiracy.  Should he drag Kitty into the same net?  The answer was
no.  Yet right or wrong he had to have her.  What were he and she as
weighed against the existence of the entire race?

His jaw was set in grim lines as he wrote out the terse message, fully
understandable to only him and her.

COME AT ONCE.  FLY.  BRING EMERGENCY KIT 43B.  VITAL.  STEVE.


She would come, he knew.  For it told her that atoms were running wild
and that cataclysmic happenings were in the offing.

"Get this off at once," he said crisply, handing the telegram to
Hartley, who had come by.

"Not a chance.  Not without Ward's approval."

"Then ring him up and tell him.  I get my assistant or I quit.  The
rest is up to Ward."

Hartley took it dubiously and went off in search of the captain of the
guard.  He came back with a look of astonishment on his face.

"He okayed it," said Hartley.  "He told me to have the big car waiting
at the airport for her."



Bennion grunted.  Then he looked anxiously at the clock and sat down to
endure the several hours that would pass before she could arrive.  To
ease the tension he figured furiously, drew curves and wrote out
complicated formulas.

By the time the messenger came from the gate to tell him that Kitty had
landed and was on the way up to the plant, he had completed his
preliminary computations as to what the fiery enigma might be.

He hurried to the gate just as the heavy car rolled through and came to
a stop.

An instant later Kitty Pennell leaped out.  Bennion's arms had hardly
enfolded her when another figure stepped out of the car.

He was a large man and carried a brief case.  By now he was an
altogether too familiar figure.

Bennion whirled and glared at him.

"A touching reunion, isn't it?" said Farquhar, with an oily smile.
"The last time we had quite a little misunderstanding."

"He who laughs last, Farquhar, laughs best," said Bennion coldly.  Then
he spoke to the girl.  "We'll have to work fast.  Hell is loose up
there.  Did you bring your Anrad?"

"I'm wearing it," she said, and hurried after him.




CHAPTER VII

_Fresh Hazards_

Even as they hurried along, Steve Bennion glanced apologetically at the
girl.

"I hate myself for dragging you into this," he said.

She did not answer him until they entered the dressing room.

"I would have hated you if you hadn't," she replied.  "What are we up
against?"

"Concerning Farquhar," he said, "I don't know.  Up here we have to deal
with--well, call it inverse disintegration."

"That doesn't make sense."

"No," he said, "it doesn't.  But we have to deal with it just the same.
The fools tried to make Eka gold, number One-hundred-and-one in the
atomic table.  They didn't get it, but they got something up in the
high numbers.  Anything they could synthesize above uranium would
probably behave the same way.  You see, there is an excellent reason
why uranium is the heaviest atom we know."

"And that is?"

"There are a handful of elements at the top of the table which are all
radioactive, gradually breaking down into lower forms of atomic
structure and giving off radiation.  Atoms still heavier would behave
in the same way, only at a greater rate and in a different direction.
That is why I called it inverse disintegration.  This thing we have to
fight is a super-atom--an _integrating_ atom.  It doesn't break down.
It builds up.  At the expense of everything it touches."

"The answer is to keep anything from touching it."

"Yes," he said, with a wry smile, "it is as simple as that.  Suspend it
in mid-air by magnetic force, build a box around it and exhaust the
air.  Then leave it there, hanging from nothing in a vacuum.  If it
responded to magnets that would work.  But we haven't the magnet.  We
have to think of something else."

"You poor boy," was all she said.

He helped her on with the cumbersome outer armor, and told her she
wouldn't need to use the periscope eyes after she was in the presence
of the thing.  It was hard for her to believe that there were visible
rays intense enough to penetrate lead, but his earnestness convinced
her.

"Now come.  I'm going to teach you to handle a crane."

If an uninformed outsider had watched, those two massive leaden
monsters stagger through the crooked passage he would never have
guessed they were human beings.  Bennion led her up the stairs, onto
the crane platform: Then they paused, and both gave a gasp of
astonishment.

The picture had changed, surprisingly.  Where the hyperspiro had been
was a lake of dancing fire.  The molten remains of the huge cyclotron
were burning in the same lazy way that alcohol burns.  In the midst of
the lake of fire still lay the great atom, dazzling with even greater
brilliance.  It was larger, too, as big as a basketball.  Its weight
must have been tremendous.

They climbed to the highest craneway where the big five-thousand-ton
colossus lay.  That crane was used to lift the cyclotron when repairs
were needed on its underside.  It was much too heavy for ordinary use.
Its hooks were massive and the cables thick, running in heavy sheaves.
Bennion took the controls and ran the crane to a spot already selected.
Underneath was a giant ladle used for heavy mass metal production.

"You take over now," he said, climbing over the edge of the cab.  "I'm
going down on the big hook.  I'll get hold of that ladle down there,
and when it is on the main hook, send down that number two hook.  Watch
my signals."



A moment later he was astride the hook and descending.  He caught the
bail of the giant ladle--had her take up the slack.  Then he dropped to
the floor and waited for the smaller hook to come down.  That one he
secured to a ring on the bottom of the ladle.

"Hoist away,".  he called through his transmitter, "evenly on both.
Then run us down over the burning pool."

She handled the controls as if she were a veteran.  The heavy ladle
rose high enough to clear obstacles and began moving down the long
hall.  When it stopped Bennion was clinging to the outside of the
bucket and poised above the pool of fire.  Then he gave her crisp
instructions.  She hoisted the smaller hook until the ladle tilted
sharply.  Bennion crawled up to its highest point.

"Lower away now, and scoop that thing up.  Take as little of the soup
as you can.  Never mind me.  If you're quick I'll be all right."

She acknowledged, but with something like a sob.  It looked terrible
down there amongst those lurid flames.

The bucket lowered.  Bennion could not feel the heat through his heavy
armor but he was fearful that it might catch on fire.  He sank into the
flames, seeing nothing now except the dazzling brilliance of the thing
he was after.  He threw out a word now and then to guide Kitty's hand.
Presently the lip of the bucket dipped into the flaming liquid and
swept closer to the bobbing ball of fire.  She let it sink a little
deeper and inched it forward.  The dancing ball of furious energy
floated into the ladle.

"Straighten up and hoist away," shouted Bennion.  "You've trapped it."

The straightening up was easy.  The lesser cable went slack.  The ladle
lost its tilt and hung upright.  In its bottom were several feet of
flaming liquid metal, and swimming in it was the giant atom.  She threw
the controller over to full hoist, but nothing happened except a groan
from the overloaded motors.

"It won't pull," she reported, her voice hard and brittle.

"Throw in the emergency," he directed.  She did.  The ladle began
rising at a pitifully slow rate.

"Skip it," called Bennion.  "If I hang here any longer I'll cook.  Run
me down to the end of the hall over concrete."

A minute later Kitty eased the bucket down to the pavement.  Bennion
looked down into the interior.  As he had expected, the molten metal
was being rapidly lapped up.  Shortly it would be all gone.  Then they
would see.  How would the giant atom behave when it had only air and
the refractory lining of the crucible to feed upon?  Could it survive?

That would take a little time to discover.  In the meanwhile it was
best that he and Kitty get behind heavier armor.  He asked her to send
down another hook and, shortly after, joined her in the cab.

"It will be a half hour before there is anything worthwhile to see.
The metal is nearly gone now and the thing is gnawing slowly at the
ladle.  We can come back."

There was a crash.  The roof sagged, broke, and whole panels of it fell
in.  The roof, unlike the massive walls, was the ordinary factory roof.
Slender steel trusses held up glazed skylights.  It was the skylights
that had collapsed.

"Good Heavens!" cried Kitty.  "What has gone wrong now?"

Bennion looked down at the flaming pool.  The flames were higher and
more vigorous.  That meant a more abundant supply of oxygen.

"I think," he said grimly, "our little friend now craves nitrogen.
Take nitrogen from the air and there is not much left but inflammable
oxygen.  We had better get out of here and broadcast a warning.  The
interior of this place will burn out shortly, and then there will be an
excess to feed into the general atmosphere.  If the oxygen settles to
the valleys the Foxboro fire department is going to have its work cut
out."



The girl became worried.

"Have we improved things any?" asked Kitty.  "If it shows the same
appetite for nitrogen that it has for metal, pound for pound, how long
before all the air will be gone?  We can't breathe pure oxygen.  The
race would burn itself up."

"Right," he said, and peered down at the monster atom.  There was not
another drop of molten metal left there.  But the thing was growing
still.  Then he saw that it was only partly at the expense of the air.
It was sinking through the bottom of the ladle.  The lining, while not
preferred fodder for the ravenous atom, was acceptable, it appeared.

Bennion's hand went to the control lever.  He put a strain on the lift.
The bucket now came up with ease.  The giant atom had eaten a hole
through its bottom!  Bennion ran the crane and ruined bucket out of the
way.

"We made a good try," he said, soberly, as he looked down at the fiery
lump on the concrete floor, "but it still is not good enough."

They climbed out of the crane and made their way to the stairs.

"We have to do something about this air business, though," he added.

They went to a nearby storeroom, carried a big bag of barium sulfate to
where the giant atom lay and dumped the contents on it.  The heavy
powder did not stop the fierce rays, but it did cut off its air supply.

"That's all just now," said Bennion, much discouraged.  "Let's get out.
We don't dare stay here any longer."




CHAPTER VIII

_Defeat_

For three days and nights Bennion and Kitty worked and rested in short
spells.  Hartley brought them sandwiches and news from the outside.
Since no one else would come near them, he made a handy messenger.  He
reported anxiety throughout the nation was growing.

Some leaders feared panic might break out at any moment.  Though the
administration kept on issuing reassuring statements, members of the
opposition were yelling for positive action.  Fantastic and conflicting
prophecies put out by rival scientific groups, added to the excitement.
And the yellow section of the press did its utmost to fan the flames.
Every silly rumor was aired under bold headlines.

Bennion ignored all this.  He had troubles of his own.  The burial of
the giant atom in barium sulfate had not proved to be the answer.  The
atom consumed that, too.  The stuff only retarded its growth.

He rigged scaffolding above the cone of powder that hid the dazzling
sphere, then with a long iron rod made a hole down to the atom.  The
ruddy cone then resembled a model of a volcano.  Into that tiny crater
Bennion dropped measured quantities of various substances.  He and
Kitty timed their rate of disappearance and entered the results in a
book.  They fed in many things, all sorts of compounds.  Ultimately
they almost exhausted the list of elements.

"Nothing works," said Bennion dejectedly.  "Barium salts are the best,
but they aren't good enough."

"Perhaps we ought to try gases," suggested Kitty.

"You may have something there, Kitty.  First we had better see if there
is a gas that is inert to it."

They spent some time prowling about the lab, looking for a suitable
hood to use for their gas trials.  Bennion took a middle-sized ladle,
drilled two holes, screwed a pressure gauge into one and fitted a
check-valve to the other, and then welded a carrying ring to the top.
Next he fitted a heavy rubber gasket to the bottom.

"Sort of a cross between a diving bell and a candle snuffer," said
Bennion as he viewed his handiwork.  "Let's cover up our bright friend
and see what happens."

By the time they finished bringing steel bottles of compressed gases,
the giant atom had burned away all the barium sulfate.  Now it was
eating at the floor.  Bennion hurriedly hooked up his first cylinder
and let the oxygen discharge into the bell.  He watched the gauge.  It
climbed.  The gasket was holding.  Now the atom was bathed in pure
oxygen.

The gauge began to drop.  He fed in more gas, but still the gauge kept
dropping.  They made notes.  So many pounds of oxygen per minute.  That
was the rate of consumption.  Oxygen was not the answer either.

Next they tried nitrogen.  It was absorbed about three times faster.
This would not do.  If the atom was to be brought under control it must
be surrounded by an inert substance.

They tried hydrogen and helium.  These behaved like nitrogen.  Argon
was a trifle slower than oxygen, but in the end it went.  The same was
true of neon and krypton.  Acetylene and ammonia went rapidly.  There
was no gas that was any good.  They ruled out radon at the outset.  It
would break down into polonium and go the way of the other metals.



Steve Bennion scanned the lists they had made.

"Looks like a choice between bad and worse," he remarked grimly.  "Like
putting out a fire with kerosene and naphtha."

They ate their lunch in moody silence.  Hartley joined them.  Bennion
told him how things stood.  Hartley looked troubled.

"I'm afraid that tears it," he said, gloomily.  "If you could have
licked the thing it might have saved you.  As it is, you're sunk."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you are in bad.  The Foxboro people are all worked up.  They'd
lynch you if they could."

"More of Farquhar's dirty work," remarked Bennion, indifferently.  He
had been so fully occupied with trying to smother the giant atom that
he had given no thought to his own plight.  He had not yet realized the
extent of his difficulties.  Hartley refrained from telling him he was
being called a traitor, mass murderer, and worse things.

"That's not all," continued Hartley.  "A lot of big bugs are on the
way.  A Congressional investigating committee and a commission of
experts.  Boswell, chief engineer for Atomics, is already here.  He
wants you to talk to him.  He wants to build a bigger cyclotron and
bombard it with electrons.  He thinks it will start disintegrating and
then the trouble will be over."

Bennion and Kitty Pennell looked at him in amazement.  Kitty giggled,
Bennion gulped.

"Is it a gag?" he asked, incredulous.  "Doesn't the fellow know
anything about atoms?  If it took a machine the size of this hyperspiro
to knock ordinary atoms to smithereens, how big a gadget would he build
to hammer at this one?"

"Not any sillier than most of the projects they are talking about,"
said Hartley.  "You ought to see the mail and telegrams that are
pouring in."

"Aw, skip it," said Bennion.  "Come on, Kitty, let's go back and dope
out what to try next."

They removed the snuffer from the blazing atom and resmothered it with
barium sulfate.  Then they stood looking at it and trying to make up
their minds what new tack to try.  Except by means of the phones, they
could hear little through their helmets.  Consequently a sudden inrush
of men took Bennion and Kitty by surprise.

"Great Scott!" yelled Bennion, as he saw what was happening.  "Get out
of here, you fools.  You'll all be dead in five minutes."

Incredible as it seemed, the Foxboro fire department, in full regalia,
had taken over!  Dressed only in their customary oilskins and fire
helmets, a dozen of them swarmed into the room dragging fire hoses.
The chief was bellowing orders through a speaking trumpet.  They
ignored Bennion.  It was doubtful whether they recognized the twin lead
monsters as human beings.  Some one raised a hand and the water came
on, tearing away the piled-up barium powder and slamming against the
fiery atom itself.

Then the invisible, impalpable radiations began having effect.  The men
faltered, placed their hands across dazed eyes, staggered, and fell.
Bennion and Kitty Pennell stood aghast.  For by then every fireman was
dead.  Their optic nerves were blasted, their brains addled, their
vital organs ripped through and through by hard radiations.

"We've got to stop this massacre," yelled Bennion, and sprang for the
nearest doorway.  Steam and purple gases were welling up from the spray
of water on the atom.  Bennion knew in the presence of water the giant
atom emanated a heavy radioactive cloud.  Should it flow down the
hillsides, it would make a desert of the valleys.

"Back, back; you fools," he shouted to the firemen in the wing
passages, guarding the long lines of hose.  "Cut off that water."

"The chief said--" began one of the men.

"The chief is dead, fried to a crisp.  So is everyone else who went in
there.  So will you be if you stay here.  Get out quick."



Angrily Bennion strode to a wall phone where he plugged in an extension
jack.  He dialed the office.

"Tell whatever jackass is in charge out there," he shouted angrily,
"that he is committing wholesale murder.  Unarmored men can't live in
this place.  Half the firemen are dead already.  Call the others off,
and shut off that water!"

"I don't like your tone," came a petulant voice from the other end of
the wire; "Are you Bennion?  If so, report to me at once.  We are tired
of your bungling.  The time has come for men of action to take charge."

Bennion groaned.  If this was action, the less of it the better.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"I have the honor to be Major Wilbur Wilberforce of the Foxboro Home
Guard, temporarily in command of this emergency."

"Good gosh," said Bennion weakly, and hung up.




CHAPTER IX

_Thrown to the Wolves_

On emerging from the lab, Bennion and Kitty Pennell found the dressing
room filled with young soldiers.  A lieutenant asked Bennion to
accompany him at once to his commanding officer.

"Nonsense," said Bennion curtly, removing the heavy helmet.  "I have to
take a bath and put salve on my burns.  I'll see your commander then,
and not before.  Better not hang around here either.  There is more
radiation leaking through that wall than out of any X-ray machine you
ever saw."

The lieutenant bridled, but just then he saw the procession of burned
firemen stumbling out of the entrance passage.  The skin was peeling
from their faces and hanging down in gory tatters.  Their hair was
gone.  Most of them were nearly blind.  These were the survivors.  Half
their number lay inside.

Bennion shucked off his lead, had a shower, and annointed himself.
Then he made a tight package of his Anrad and took it to the door of
Kitty Pennell's dressing-room.

"Take care of this," he called.  "I don't know what is coming up but
you'd better keep my stuff until I come back."

She opened the door on a crack and took the Anrad suit in.  She
understood.  This stupid interference made intelligent search for the
solution of the problem impossible.

Kitty Pennell joined Bennion shortly and they made their way down the
stairs and out of the laboratory.  Here they paused to survey the
remarkable scene laid out below them.

A long train of heavy army tanks was lumbering up the hill and  through
the gate.  The tanks were plated on the outside with lead, prepared
especially for this duty.  Columns of infantry marched beside them.
The soldiers were a curious sight, for they also were especially
outfitted for the occasion.  Their uniforms were covered with sheets of
heavy lead foil, and the rifles they carried appeared curiously
anachronistic when seen together with the glittering, flimsy mail.
Below, among the buildings, other soldiers were swarming, while at the
flagstaff streamed the Stars and Stripes.  Over the administration
building flew the flag of a major general.

"The regular army has come," said Bennion.  "That lets me out of having
to deal with the Wilberforce sap."

He could see no civilians below.  The Home Guard also was gone.
Ambulances were being loaded with the injured firemen and the now
useless fire equipment was following.

"If it is the right kind of general," said Bennion, "I get a break.  If
he's not, I don't.  Come on, Kit.  Let's face the music."

The music was not melodious.  It was no general that Bennion had to
face but a formal Court of Inquiry, convened at the special order of
the President.  The composition of the court was not cheering.  When
Bennion was ushered in and took his seat in the witness chair he looked
the members over carefully.  Except for two army officers and the man
from the Justice department--who were unknown quantities--they were as
choice a collection of fatheads and stuffed shirts as could be found.
Senator MacChaney, a blatant mountebank, presided.  On either side of
him sat Dr. Tutweiler and Elmer Dillwood Futtingham, self-styled
experts on atomics.

Tutweiler was reputed to be a good appropriation getter for the Bureau
of Electronics, but it was doubtful whether he had spent an hour in a
laboratory in the last twenty years.

Futtingham's many books had done much to popularize--and also
misinform--the public on what was what in atomics, but it was doubtful
if he knew one end of a cyclo from the other.  Then there was Crosby,
chief of the legal department of General Atomics, who seemed to be
directing the inquiry.  Several others Bennion recognized as professors
in jerkwater colleges.  The outlook for an intelligent hearing was not
bright.



It started out badly.  There was a flurry of flashing as press
cameramen took flashlights of Bennion.  Reporters spread out their
notebooks and poised their pencils ready to record the first words.
Tutweiler started the ball rolling.

"Start at the beginning, Mr. Bennion," he said.  "Tell us why you came
here and why you did what you did."

"I recently suffered the loss of my own laboratory through
foreclosure," answered Bennion.  "I had to find a job.  Ward offered to
hire me and was showing me the plant when the accident occurred.
Afterwards I hung on, doing what I could do to minimize the effect of
the explosion.  That is all."

Tutweiler waited until the clerks had scribbled that down.

"All right," he said, "but too sketchy.  Describe how the accident
occurred, what happened, and what state of affairs exists now."

Bennion told his story, omitting nothing of importance.  He outlined
his theories as to the nature of the giant atom and tried to
demonstrate how inverse disintegration would work.  All the time he
talked he kept his eye on the F.B.I. man who seemed to be the only one
at the table who was trying to follow his reasoning.  At length he
concluded.

There was a rustle of papers.  Bennion saw that they were consulting
the records of other testimony taken at previous sessions.

Bennion did not like it.  Ward and Farquhar had already been heard, and
he could imagine what a pack of lies they swore to.

"You say there is no atomic fire, only a giant growing atom," asked
Futtingham with his exasperating superior smirk.  "If it consumes
everything it touches, gives off fierce heat, light and other
radiation, what is that but fire?"

"I won't quibble over definitions," said Bennion.  "Call it an atomic
fire if it suits you better.  It does not behave as we expected an
atomic fire to behave, that's all.  An atomic fire would be
uncontrollable from the outset.  I have kept this one under reasonable
control for several days."

"You say you tried everything on it.  Everything?"

"Everything in reason.  I didn't try buttering it."

There was a rustle of agitated whispering.  Crosby spoke out.

"Make a note of the flippant response."

A dozen pencils jotted that down.

"Did you say that the fire is inextinguishable?" asked the Senator.

"No.  I said that so far I had found no way to extinguish it."

That went down in silence.  Then they went back to the original
accident.

"You were a stranger to the plant," asked an army colonel, "and
confronted with equipment that I am told has no duplicate elsewhere.
Why did you interfere with the deceased operator Carruthers when you
couldn't have known what he was doing?"

Bennion turned the question over in his mind before answering it.  It
was packed with dynamite.

"I believe myself to be more familiar with that equipment than Ward or
any of his men," he answered slowly.  "I invented it."

Several present gasped at the effrontery of this explanation.  Ward had
sworn it was his own invention, and a secret one.  But Crosby took it
serenely.

"Perhaps Mr. Bennion would like to tell us how his invention came to be
installed where it was.  I am sure it will be illuminating."

Bennion shot him a look of contempt.  He saw the bait and the hook, but
he did not intend to sidestep.  The world might as well know the truth.

"I invented the spiral cyclotron a number of years ago.  Early tests
revealed its dangerous weaknesses.  Later the plans were stolen from my
files.  Since other of my inventions had been similarly stolen by
General Atomics I presumed this one went the same way.  Since it was
valueless I didn't care.  I also knew it was highly dangerous.  I
thought Atomics would discard it for the same reason."



A deep murmur ran through the court.

"Ah," breathed Crosby, relaxing and sitting back.  "I've made my point,
I think.  But ask him one other question.  Whom does he blame for the
loss of his plant?"

Senator MacChaney looked at Bennion inquiringly.

"General Atomics," answered Bennion calmly.  "They bought my mortgage
from the bank and never gave me a chance to renew it.  That is standard
practice with them.  That is the way they acquired most of their
plants."

Crosby was positively gleeful.

"You see, gentlemen?" he said, addressing the members of the court.
"Here you have a man with a persecution complex.  He blames his own
financial incompetence on my company.  What does a man like that care
whether he sets the world on fire if he can only carry out his petty
little revenge for imaginary wrongs?  He convicts himself with his own
words."

"This is a court of inquiry, not a trial, Mr. Crosby," reminded the
member from the Justice department.  MacChaney rapped on the table.

"Any other questions?"

There were none.

"Very well.  We adjourn.  Ask the sheriff to step in."

"Now what?" thought Bennion.  He did not wait long for the answer.  The
sheriff stepped up and extended a pair of handcuffs.

"What are these for?"

"You.  You have been indicted in Foxboro for the murder of John Hallam,
George Carruthers and others.  Come along.  We're going downtown."

Bennion looked swiftly around the room.  Most of the faces turned
toward him were cold or savagely vindictive, Only the army, colonel and
the F.B.I. representative showed human understanding.  General Atomics'
lying propagandists had done their work well.




CHAPTER X

_Jail_

Kitty Pennell sprang to her feet as she saw Bennion coming out,
handcuffed to the sheriff.  Her eyes were blazing.  She started
forward, but the army officers restrained her.

"Take it easy," one said.  "You will be allowed to see him.  Just now
the court wants to hear your version of the catastrophe."

A file of soldiers interposed themselves before Bennion could make a
move.  Meantime the sheriff tightened his grip on his arm.

"Keep your shirt on, bud," growled the sheriff.  "Starting something
now won't buy you anything.  I'm taking you out of here for your own
good.  You don't know yet all that this bunch of snakes has cooked up
for you.  So play the game.  It'll pay you in the long run."

By that time they were out of the anteroom.  The door of an armored car
was snatched open and Bennion pushed in.  The sheriff and a soldier sat
down beside him on the back seat.  Two other soldiers with tommy-guns
at ready climbed onto the running-board.  A sergeant beside the driver
fingered a light machine-gun.

The car rolled away.  Bennion saw that it was preceded by three others,
similarly ready for hostilities.  Upon looking back he saw that they
were followed by more guards.  A half-dozen motorcycles with soldiers
in each, hovered on the flanks.  It was an imposing cavalcade.

"They must think I'm a hard guy to hold," remarked Bennion scornfully
after tallying up his guards.  Even the Dillingers and Capones never
were so plentifully surrounded.

"You still don't get the idea," said the sheriff, grimly, "but you
will."

On the road they passed numerous outposts and lines of sentries.  It
was hot until they crossed a small bridge that marked the boundary
between the Ward domain and the township of Foxboro that they had to
halt.  At that point Bennion began to understand.  A double skirmish
line of soldiers lay across the road and hastily erected pillboxes
stood in the fields on either side.  Ahead of the skirmish line stood
the front ranks of an immense crowd of silent, sullen men--and
determined looking women.  Many carried shotguns or rifles.  A few blue
uniformed state troopers and deputies were trying to keep the mob in
line.

"Gangway!" called an officer in the leading car.  "We're coming
through."

The answer was a hoarse and blood-curdling roar.  The mob charged,
screaming shrilly.  It did not get far.  The well trained soldiers knew
what to do.  Gas bombs were thrown.  The mob leaders turned and tried
to get away, but the unhurt rear ranks pressed them back.  Then the
armored cars charged--slowly but inexorably.  The weeping, howling
throng gave way despite themselves.  Dismounted soldiers were flailing
about them with clubbed rifles.  A lane was quickly made.  Bennion's
car was tooled swiftly through it.

Beyond the mob were more escort cars.  These formed a new cordon.  The
sheriff said nothing, but Bennion guessed why.  The crowd behind was
the advance reception committee.  Uptown there was probably another!

Field telephones must have been at work, for when the reformed
motorcade reached the center of the town it found the streets cleared.
The little square before the jail was literally lined with soldiers
holding back another mob that booed and hooted as Bennion was brought
past.  A few rowdies managed to hurl stones before the watchful patrols
could slap them down.

"You'll be all right now," said the sheriff as the car drew up before
the jail.  He waved his hand at the sandbagged lower windows from which
the muzzles of machine-guns protruded.  It was a dazed Steve Bennion
who entered the grim doorway of that jail.  He knew what it was to have
enemies--such as Farquhar and a few others--but it amazed him to
encounter blind, unreasoning cruel hatred such as this.  And from so
many.  He asked about the last.

"They've been pouring in here as fast as the trains and roads could
bring 'em," answered the sheriff.  "They are camped for miles around.
You better be glad, mister, that you're in my hands."



All night the yelling and catcalling kept up and once there was a burst
of firing.  Bennion heard it dimly from the hard bunk in his narrow
cell.  But after the first shock wore off he disregarded it.  His
thoughts kept turning to Kitty Pennell and what had happened to her,
and again to the giant atom now burning itself unchecked into the
hill-top.

He felt sure, however, his turn would come again.  He was equally sure
that, given time and help enough, he could solve the problems.  So he
threw off his worries and fell into a troubled sleep.

His breakfast was brought by a surly turnkey.  Later the same man gave
him a watery stew for lunch.  It was not until mid-afternoon that
Bennion had any news from the outside.  The one who brought it was the
prison doctor.  He seated himself on a stool and began asking questions.

"I have some more patients," he began.  "They are in a bad way.  This
stuff is new to me.  What do you do for ray-burns?"

"What do you do for an amputated foot?" asked Bennion, with a hard
laugh.  "You make yourself as comfortable as you can.  The treatment is
to avoid them in the first place by not staying exposed to them too
long."

"Oh," said the doctor.  "That explains how you and your helper stuck it
out when everyone else was bowled over."

"Yes, we have worked with dangerous stuff for years.  We know how to
handle ourselves around it."  Bennion chopped his words off short.
What about his helper?  He asked the doctor for news of Kitty Pennell.

"They spirited her away in a plane last night.  Her father came for
her.  She will have to go in hiding for awhile.  The mob is as hot
after her as it is for you.  That isn't what I came about.  Now, as to
these burned men--".

"Give 'em hypodermics and make it as easy as possible.  They probably
won't live the day through."

"I see," said the doctor, rising.  "I guess you told the truth about
the fire still raging.  It's a humdinger.  Here are some newspapers for
you."

Bennion took the roll and waited until the door clanged shut behind the
departing medico.  Then he flipped off the rubber band and began
scanning the headlines.  It was incredible reading.  They ran like this:


VENGEFUL MANIAC SETS WORLD AFIRE

GRUDGE-FIGHT SETS ATOMIC FIRE

BENNION'S MOLL DEFIES COURT

Helped Her Boy-Friend Fan Blaze But Won't Talk


Bennion gritted his teeth until they ached.  His hands itched to wring
the neck of the reporter that composed that gem.  He went on.

END OF WORLD IN THREE MONTHS

So Says Famous German Atomicist

PROMPT EXECUTION SEEN FOR FIRE-FIEND


There were others, all on this same line.  Now Bennion understood why
the mob was so thirsty for his blood.  He also understood fully, for
the first time, the deep villainy of the men behind General Atomics.
There was nothing personal--or at least was not in the beginning--in
Farquhar's persecution or subsequent vindictiveness.  Now there was
something far more sinister behind it.

General Atomics had been playing with fire for a long time--and knew
it.  They were smart enough to realize sooner or later, there would be
a slip.  When that fatal day came they wanted a man on their payroll
either to pull them out of the hole, or be the goat.

That was it.  They were hopeful he would fall into the snare, go to
work and iron out the bugs in the hyperspiro.  He had to admit grimly
that if Ward's approach had been more subtle he might have fallen for
it.  He never had the chance.  The blowup took place at once.  Ward
promptly turned tail and ran, leaving him to hold the bag.  All that
followed was according to plan.  One smear after another.  Now it was
all Bennion's fault.  Atomics' skirts were clean.  They had passed the
buck and made it stick.

"Ow-w," moaned Bennion, staring at the hard floorplate, "what a fool
I've been not to see it before.  Now where do I get off?"




CHAPTER XI

_The Army Tries--and Misses_

Monotonously five days went by like the first.  No one came to see
about Bennion except a local lawyer, hoping to be chosen as defense
counsel.  Bennion did not like his looks and turned him away.  Other
than that visit he had none.  Each afternoon the turnkey brought him
fresh newspapers, but in them he found scant comfort.  The vicious
attacks on himself and Kitty Pennell were becoming more bitter.  No
news was released by the military as to how things were going inside
the Ward plant.

Then Bennion discovered that the howlings of the mob were becoming less
frequent and less loud.  One day he woke up to the fact that there was
silence outside.  He missed the cadence of marching soldier feet as
well.  He asked his jailer about it.

"They have evacuated most of the town and the country for miles
around," said the attendant.  "They are setting up another defense line
at a safer distance."

Bennion could think of no truly safe place within the orbit of Jupiter,
but refrained from saying so.  Until the appetite of the ravenous giant
atom was checked, there was no assurance that its growth would be
stopped short of the consumption of every other atom that went to make
up the earth.

On the following morning a great bustling in the corridors told Bennion
other inmates of the jail were being moved out of it.  By the time his
own cell was flung open he found himself to be the last.  Sheriff,
jailer, turnkeys and all had gone.  There was only a captain and two
privates.

"The army is in full charge now," said the captain, "which includes the
custody of you.  The general wants to see you.  He would like your
opinion about something."

"It is about time," thought Bennion.

They did not offer to put irons on him, so he walked along with the
captain.  Outside there was a jeep waiting.  The town was a ghost town.
Many windows were boarded up.  Stores appeared emptied of their stocks.
Not an inhabitant was left.

A string of ambulances rushed by, southbound.

"Casualties," explained the captain.  "We had to evacuate the Ward
plant altogether.  Too many men burned up.  Even the aviators on sky
patrol got burns.  They have lead-lined cockpits now."

"They have given up trying to control the--uh, giant atom altogether?"
asked Bennion, somewhat startled.  He did not expect it to grow as fast
as that.  It certainly would not if they had kept it buried in barium
compounds.

"Not quite.  But you'll see."

The jeep lurched around the corner and set out for the country.  It was
not the same road that Bennion followed to get to the Ward lab.  This
one went more to the northwest.  It was also a hill road, winding and
climbing steadily.  They passed a number of sentries, a barbed-wire
obstruction, and a little way beyond it, came to their destination.

It was a roomy pit, lined with thick slabs of lead and with a leaden
parapet above which a number of periscopes were sticking.  Lined up
along the parapet, but unshielded by it were a number of
radiation-recording devices.  The general and his staff occupied the
pit.

As he entered it Bennion glanced at the radiographs.  They showed a
tremendous volume of strange rays, not dissimilar to cosmic rays, in
addition to the ones the giant atom formerly, threw off.  From that
Bennion knew that the object had entered a new phase.

"Ah, Bennion," grunted the general, looking around, "I wanted you to
see this.  You started it.  I'm finishing it.  Scientists say nothing
can be done.  They don't know the Army.  Watch!"

An aide motioned to Bennion to take a periscope.  Bennion did.  He saw
that the post he was in was located on top of another hill some two
miles distant from the Ward lab.  That appeared to be entirely deserted
and he noticed the rest of the roof was caved in and gone.  Where the
outer buildings had been were now only gaunt, fire-blackened walls and
heaps of ashes.  Bennion did not need to be told what had happened to
make the place untenable.  The giant atom must have loosed clouds of
heavy oxygen while exposed to air.  In an atmosphere where a castoff
cigarette butt would blaze like oil-soaked cotton it was small wonder
the army had been burned out.



He was puzzling over what it was the general wanted him to watch when
he heard the drone of coming aircraft.  He looked up and saw them.  A
large number of bombers was directly overhead going toward the ruined
laboratory on the neighboring hill.  They flew in a succession of V
formations.

Around the hill a number of cannon had been set up.

"Surely, general, you aren't going to--" cried out Bennion, but the
general cut him short.

"Silence!" the officer cried.

It was too late to protest.  Immense eggs--at least five-ton
bombs--were already falling from the leading V.  Before they hit
another flock was on its way down.  Bennion held his breath wondering
what would happen as the result, though on second thought he was
doubtful if much of anything would happen.  Then came the heavy
concussions, geysers of fire and smoke and debris.  Then more and more
of them, and it was over.  The planes had done their work and gone.

"That's the way to smash atoms," remarked an aide, gleefully.
Bennion's answer was to point to the raymeters.  They were clicking
away as vigorously as ever--perhaps more so.

"That is to soften it up," said another.

"Stick around and see what happens when the army decides really to get
tough."

Meantime another group of planes flew by.  They dropped no bombs, but
in a moment a message was coming through on the radiophone.

"Observation squadron ten reporting.  Damage to heavy walls slight.
Brilliant object apparently unaffected, though has shifted position
slightly."

The phone clicked off.  The general frowned.

"What kind of thing is it that two hundred tons of TNT won't budge?" he
demanded irritably.

"Anything that is as small as four or five feet in diameter and weighs
five or ten thousand tons is pretty dense, general," replied Bennion
dryly.  "Its cohesive strength must be incalculable.  I doubt if all
the TNT on earth would have any appreciable effect."

"We'll see about that," snapped the general.  Savage determination was
written all over his face.  He turned to his Chief of Staff.

"If the air is all clear now, shoot!"

The colonel's finger reached for a switch and heavy field guns began to
thunder, hurling high explosive shells at the atom.  The Ward plant was
instantly blanketed in clouds of smoke.  An aide spoke hurriedly to
Bennion.

"We also drove a gallery deep underneath the thing.  Trainloads of high
explosives are packed in there.  Look!"

That time the hill they stood on rocked like a small boat in a gale.
For one dizzy instant Bennion thought a mistake had been made and a
mine set off beneath their feet.  Then he steadied and looked at the
other hilltop.  At the moment it was crowned with a dense cloud of dust
interspersed with flying boulders and hunks of Ward's massive walls.
He saw that there was no brilliant object in it--the giant atom was far
too heavy to lift.  It would roll into the hole blasted out and the
ejected matter would fall back on top of it.  It would be buried deep,
too deep to get at again.  The disintegration of the hill would then
proceed unchecked.

The dust settled.  There was no trace of the Ward structures.  The
entire contour of the hilltop was altered beyond recognition.  Gone
were the ray-filtering walls of lead and barium concrete.  The
radiation was now worse than ever, for though it came through hundreds
of feet of earth and jumbled rock, there was no thick lead to soften
its impact.  A medical officer, wearing the insignia of the radiologist
corps, called attention to the meters.  The general scowled.

"Complete the evacuation according to plan.  Report to Washington that
all steps have been taken without avail.  Mysterious fire beyond
control.  Declare a general emergency."

He stalked out of the pit and climbed into the big staff car.  As an
afterthought he shouted back:

"Put Bennion in a bomber and fly him to Washington.  They will know
what to do with him there."

The captain touched Bennion's sleeve.

"It's tough, fellow," he said, "but duty is duty."

"Yes," said Bennion dully.  He had a duty to perform, too.  He meant to
do it, but this was not the time and place to begin.  He walked to the
jeep and took his seat.



The captain strapped on his parachute.  He did not offer Bennion one.
He motioned for him to climb into the plane.  Once inside he was told
to go on aft into the bomb bay.  The pilot and his assistant were
already seated in the cockpit.  The captain who had charge of him
followed to the rear compartment.  The motor roared to a higher pitch
as it revved up.  They were off, lifting easily into the air.

The captain, an infantry officer, was obviously interested in his new
surroundings.  He wandered about the bomb bay examining this gadget and
that.  Since his prisoner had no parachute, he evidently saw no reason
to be extra vigilant.

"I hate to do this," thought Bennion.  He braced himself, waiting for
the split-second chance he would have the next time the captain brushed
past him.  The opportunity came within a minute.  Bennion uncoiled his
husky right and felt it land exactly where it was aimed, the point of
the jaw.  He caught the unconscious captain before he hit the deck.
Then he eased him down.

It was but the work of a moment to appropriate the parachute and strap
it on.  Next Bennion opened the bomb doors and looked down on moving
hill-tops thousands of feet below.

He jumped, but delayed pulling the ripcord.  It was still a long way
down and there was lots of time.  He glanced up at the fleet plane.  It
was going serenely on its way.  Evidently he had not been missed.  He
must be out of sight before he opened up the telltale chute.  But the
ground was rising to meet him fast.  He dared not wait longer.  Bennion
yanked the ring.

He had luck.  He barely missed the edge of a thick grove of high trees,
was dragged a number of yards across a field, then came to rest.  He
sat up and looked around.




CHAPTER XII

_A Changed World_

Desolation reigned.  There was not a living soul to be found in the
territory.  A quarter of a mile away lay a deserted village.  They must
have taken their livestock with them, for Bennion saw neither cow nor
dog nor chicken.  He extricated himself from the parachute, burned it
and buried its ashes.  Then he cautiously approached the village.

It had been an artists' colony.  Half the cottages were studios filled
with a disordered array of overturned easels, scattered paint tubes,
and abandoned sketches.  At the far edge of the hamlet he came upon a
barn which still bore a banner announcing it to be a summer theater.
Upon inspection Bennion observed that it had been abandoned in great
haste, the actors apparently leaving in the midst of their act, without
taking time to change their costumes.

"What a break," he exclaimed, as he prowled through the dressing rooms.
There were five suits of men's clothes to choose from, two of which
fit.  In the pockets of one he found cigarettes, matches, and a wallet
containing enough money to last him for days.  Best of all were the
make-up kits, which he knew how to use, together with wigs and toupees,
false mustaches and beards.  He got busy at once.

At last Bennion backed away from the mirror well satisfied with his
disguise.  He wore a straggly, sandy beard, and a pair of glasses that
appeared to be thick-lensed, but in reality were as easy to look
through as ordinary plain glass.  When he was finished he was the
perfect counterfeit of an eccentric inventor.

He smiled at that.  Already he had conceived a means to save the world
from the menace that overhung it.  Yet the idea was vague and nebulous.

Bennion took the road.  He must get out of these hills before he was
missed and multitudes of soldiers came beating the bush for him.  He
also wanted to find out Kitty Pennell's whereabouts and communicate
with her if he could.  Aside from his human craving to have her at his
side again, he needed her to help him in his daring plan.

It was the next day, after he had trudged over thirty miles and camped
for the night in a vacated farmhouse, before he came across the first
man.  The fellow was pulling out of a farmyard with a loaded truck.  He
offered a lift.  Bennion thanked him and got in.

"I thought they was all out except me," said the man.  "How come you
didn't run with the rest?"

"I was out in the hills doing research work--" began Bennion.
Surprisingly the man cut his engine and slammed on the brakes.

"Oh, you're one of those blasted scientist fellows that started all
this trouble?  Well, you can get out and walk."

Bennion laughed, sizing up his man.

"Wait a minute," he said.  "I'm not that kind of a scientist.  I'm an
entomologist, a bug hunter--Japanese beetles and that sort of thing."

"Oh," said the man, mollified, and started up his truck again.  It
taught Bennion to beware.  The state of the public mind made it open
season for atomicists, he judged.

By the time they reached northern New Jersey they were passing numbers
of houses still inhabited, though in many places people were preparing
to move.  Few soldiers were to be seen.

"I heard the army had this area shut off," remarked Bennion.

"They did for awhile, but not any more.  You couldn't hire anybody to
go up near Foxboro nowadays.  They say the army engineers are driving a
tunnel deep under Fox Mountain.  Going to explode a bigger mine,
somebody said."

Bennion considered that bit of news for awhile.  In one way it was bad.
It fitted his still foggy plans.  He had to get at that big atom again
if he was going to do anything with it.  A horizontal tunnel would
serve the purpose, provided the army did not explode another charge.

Near the Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge the man of the
truck turned west.  Bennion dropped off, saying he was going to New
York.



There was no possibility of crossing the bridge.  It couldn't even be
approached.  The torrent of frightened refugees struggling to get west
was too strong to be breasted.  They were the poor of the Bronx and
nearby New England hunting safety elsewhere.  Some were on foot, others
in cars and trucks, but all carried what they could of their
possessions.  A weary policeman suggested to Bennion that he try the
river.  There were plenty of boats, he said.

Bennion thought that odd until he finished his climb down the Palisades
and saw the explanation.  People were coming over from Manhattan in all
sorts of boats and rafts.  Once, on the western side they would abandon
their means of transport and light out for the interior.  Bennion
selected a handy skiff, sat down, picked up the oars and began to row.

It took him some time to row across, but longer to land.  The Drive was
lined with people clamoring for the boat.  Men pushed through to the
water's edge, dragging their women with them, shouting bids and waving
handfuls of money.  Bennion disliked cashing in on their frenzy, but he
might need money and they thought they needed a boat.  So, after rowing
up and down awhile, he accepted an offer of five hundred dollars and
handed over the skiff to its buyer.

New York had altered strangely.  It was a sickening spectacle of what
panic could do.  Once inside the inevitable queues that Bennion later
found were at every exit from the city, the scene changed.  Physically,
the town looked much the worse for wear.  Many of the windows had been
knocked out, doors battered in, and there were signs of looting
everywhere.

He walked far enough to get a picture of the city as a whole.  Then he
boarded a subway train and went downtown to the financial district.  It
presented strange contrasts.  Legitimate business was dying fast.
Banks were closing.  The stock market was hit hard.  Long time bonds
were not worth the paper they were printed on.  Good stocks were to be
had for a song.

It was the quack promotion racket that was booming.  Fortunes were to
be made overnight in backing fake rayburn ointments, or manufacturing
cheap ray-resistant armor.  The choicest racket was a new one to
Bennion, and it was a startling find.  "Arks" was the catchword of the
day!  Yes, arks--spaceships of impossible and fantastic design supposed
to move the earth's population to other planets.  Or at least remove
those far-sighted enough to subscribe early to the stock.

He left the neighborhood still at a loss as to how to finance his
project.  He could not appeal to the government for money as he was
being hunted on criminal charges.  He could not go there.  He took
another subway uptown and got out in the Fifties.

Bennion had not proceeded more than a block or so when he had the queer
sensation of being followed.  He set several traps for his tail and
eventually spotted him.  There was something vaguely familiar about the
man, but he could not place him.  A General Atomics spy, or an FBI
operator?  Not that it made much difference.  Being spotted by either
would result the same way.  Bennion hurriedly sought for some method to
shake the shadow.  Then he thought he had it.




CHAPTER XIII

_A Weird Proposition_

Bennion had seen a church across the street into which the crowd was
thronging.  It was a big, reputable midtown church of a staid
denomination, but like others of the hectic times, carried a broad
banner across its front, PREPARE FOR THE EVIL DAY THAT COMETH.

Bennion squirmed into the crowd, ducked behind a group of pillars, and
then found himself in the vestibule, being pushed forward by the
enthusiastic worshippers.  A corps of ushers were handling the crowd.
Before Bennion could protest he was hustled down the main aisle.  The
seat given him was directly in front of the pulpit and in the first row.

Presently the services began.  Finally the pastor began his sermon.
Bennion recognized him as an old pal and classmate, Buck Turner, once a
fledgling atomic engineer who had dropped the course and gone into
theology instead.  Bennion relaxed.  He still had confidence in his
disguise, despite the possible recognition of the man who had followed
him.

The sermon was probably typical of the times.  It dwelt at length on
the shortness and uncertainty of life.  It wound up with an urgent
exhortation to avoid the fleshpots and wastrel life of the
panic-maddened city.  The preacher said it would be more profitable to
give over their wealth to the church.

The collection was huge.  As the plate was passed Bennion saw that it
was heaped with bills of high denomination, deeds to real property, and
loose jewelry.  When the ushers laid the plates before the altar, one
whispered something to Turner.  Turner nodded and whispered something
back, at the same time glancing significantly down at Bennion.
Bennion's skin began to crawl.  Was he being betrayed?

As the organ pealed out the recessional-march and the congregation
stood up to leave, the same usher blocked Bennion's way.

"The Reverend Turner would like to see you in his study," he said,
politely indicating the way.  Bennion looked at the backs of the crowd
jamming the entrance.  There was no quick way out in that direction.
Well, if it was a trap it was already sprung.  Bennion went to the
study.

"Come out from behind those phony whiskers, Steve, you big fraud," said
Buck Turner the moment the door was closed on them.  "I knew you the
first time I looked at you."  Then more soberly.  "I heard you were in
trouble...."

"Who hasn't?" said Steve Bennion, bitterly.  Buck didn't answer that
one.

"My usher tells me," he said, "he noticed several plainclothesmen among
the crowd in the vestibule.  I presume you ducked in here to lose them.
Well, Steve, I have no intention of letting them have you until I've
heard your side of the story."

Bennion felt relieved.  Buck hadn't changed despite his clerical garb.
Bennion told his story from the beginning, briefly, but in enough
detail to make his points.

"So I suspected," said Turner, thoughtfully, drumming his fingers on
the desk.  "Rumors reach me that the FBI is giving General Atomics a
thorough going over.  It is too bad that nobody in the government has
the brains to turn you loose and let you work the thing out.  It is the
only chance we have.  I'm not an electronics shark, but I learned
enough to know that if there is an answer, you're the lad to find it."

Bennion flushed slightly.  It was good to hear praise after such an
avalanche of condemnation.  Until this moment he had felt, that all the
world but Kitty Pennell was against him.

"Thanks," he said, brightening.  "You've asked a flock of questions.
Now let me ask some.  How come you're pushing this 'gimme' game just
like the phony evangelists on the street corners?  I thought you turned
preacher because you wanted to preach--not for the dough that was in
it."

Turner's face clouded.  For a moment he looked embarrassed.

"It's true I'm reaching out for their money," he admitted.  "I have a
good reason.  Did you have time to look around?  All right.  You know
what is happening to the others.  These would behave the same way if
they didn't have faith.  I am taking this money for safe-keeping.  It
is a trust.  If and when the day of security returns I intend to return
every cent of it, for I do not believe the world is lost."



The disguised inventor nodded.

"I do believe you," said Bennion, staring at the wall.  Yes, old Buck
Turner would be just that sort of a preacher.  A squareshooter!  It
made Bennion hesitant about springing the fantastic proposition he had
conceived.

"Well?" asked Turner impatiently.  "What's on your mind?"

"I have half a hunch," said Bennion, picking his words, "that, given a
few breaks, I may knock that dazzling giant atom into a cocked hat yet.
It's half hunch, half hope."

"Steve Bennion's hunches are worth a lot any day," remarked Turner.

"This hunch calls for backing," said Bennion seriously.  "I need
money--scads of it, perhaps millions.  More than that I need an
organization above suspicion that I can manipulate without my identity
being known."

"All that can be arranged," said Turner.  "Let's have the details,
please."

"It--it sounds preposterous," fumbled Bennion.  When it came to putting
his idea plainly, the words came hard.  "I am afraid I can't reveal the
details.  You'll have to take me on faith.  I can't promise results.
What I have in mind is such a gamble that it will even be necessary to
fool your own people--"

"What in thunder are you driving at?"

"I want you to finance and be the spokesman for an outfit that is phony
from the start.  We can't do any of the things we promise to do, and we
won't try.  Have you heard of the Ark racket?  Well, my idea is like
that."

Turner sat up straighter and a shrewd hardness came into his face.

"Yes, I know the Ark set-up.  It's crooked.  Unless you can assure me
that the vessel you have in mind will--"

"Fly?  No, I cannot.  The Ark idea is absolutely screwy.  We can build
ships of course, but there is no known fuel that will lift a ship free
of the earth's gravitational attraction and carry it to any other
planet.  No one can know what conditions are in space--what kind and
intensity of radiations or what temperatures will be like.  To set off
for Mars with an entire community aboard would be taking a worse chance
than going over Niagara in a barrel.  We all might be burned up or
frozen within an hour.  Lastly, we know nothing about living conditions
on Mars or any other planet."

Bennion talked on vehemently.  Turner listened gravely as he unfolded
the main thread of his plan.  It was audacious.  It was skating on thin
ice.  Any weak link in the chain would nullify everything.  Worst of
all, the whole idea did not make sense.

"Stop!" said Turner, after ten minutes.  "Let me get this straight.
You are to pose as Professor Sven Lundstrom, an eccentric inventor.
You've sold me on an Ark proposition.  The ship is to be constructed by
you.  It is to be big enough to contain my entire congregation, plus
their relatives, plus supplies for a trip to Mars and a surplus for a
start on the new world.  My people are to foot the bills, and also do
labor on construction.  Then, when it is finished, they are to be told
it is a flop!  Do you really expect me to lend my aid to a proposal
like that?"

"I do,", said Bennion earnestly.  "What I am secretly shooting at is
the development of a rocket fuel that will work.  That fuel has to be
atomic fire--real atomic fire, but under strict control.  You know how
the world feels today about atomic fire.  It would be worth a man's
life to mention experimenting with it.  But we have to have it if the
Arks are to work.  Since I can't get money in a straightforward way,
I'll pretend to build an Ark, though all the while I am skimping on
construction and diverting money to develop the fuel.  Can't you see?"

Turner shook his head.  That was the screwy part of it.  If you had a
ship and no fuel for it, it was no good.  What use, then, was such a
fuel?

"Here is what I am driving at," Bennion went on, insistently, "if I can
develop a good rocket fuel we won't need the ships!"

"Huh?  Say that slow."

"That's right.  With genuine atomic fire, but under control, I can
knock the spots out of that baby blue star being generated in the
bowels of Fox Mountain.  Nobody will want to use their Arks then.  They
can be scrapped."



The preacher stared at Bennion.

"But, Steve, what if you fail?"

Bennion shrugged.  "If I get my fuel, the earth is saved.  If I don't
get my fuel, we'll only be back where we started."

"I don't like the deception.  It is hypocritical."

"Yes?  What about your 'trust fund'?  Are you strictly honest about
that?"

Turner shook his head.  Bennion had him there.  But Bennion had more to
say.  "I'll go you one better.  If I succeed, not one investor will
lose a cent.  That sounds wacky, but it's a promise."

Turner rose and paced his study.  There was too much mystery to suit
him.  But he believed in Steve Bennion.  Furthermore there was nothing
to lose by trying, everything to gain by venturing.  At last he stuck
out his hand, and grinned.

"Let's go," he said.

"There is one more detail," added Bennion.  "I must get word through
underground to Kitty Pennell where I am.  Can do?"

"Yep.  But the first thing I am going to do is fix you up so nobody
will know you--not even your Kitty."

"Please," pleaded Steve Bennion, "not that good!"




CHAPTER XIV

_A Fresh Start_

Yet a full month slid by before Bennion had anything tangible to show.
In that period--with the assistance of several discreet members of
Turner's flock--his new character as an eccentric Swedish scientist had
been put across.  At the same time Turner was busy whipping up the
enthusiasm of his congregation for the new project.  He used the same
line that was in vogue elsewhere--picturing the coming earth doom as
another deluge.  It worked.  Turner was swamped with contributions.

Meanwhile, Bennion had been in communication with Kitty Pennell.  He
sent her huge sums with which she and her father were to equip a secret
laboratory and take up the work on the atomic fuel where he and Kitty
had left off.  In return she sent him the blueprints of their model
ship that still reposed undiscovered in the old quarry.  After thus
dividing the task, each went to work in his own way.

Professor Lundstrom's New York office swarmed with structural draftsmen
who worked night and day getting out the plans for the magnificent
super Ark.  They worked largely with pantographs, for Bennion was
content with his earlier design and saw no need of taking time out to
design another.  The hull and tubes of the larger ship were the same as
those of the smaller model except that the dimensions were colossal.
The control room was a replica of the earlier vessel.  What changes
were to be made would be in the subdivision of the main body of the
ship.  The ship was gigantic--much larger than the largest ocean liner
afloat.

Bennion let the contracts early.  As fast as tracings could be made, he
sent the plans to the steel and fabricating companies so that
production on the parts could start.  At the same time he was buying
equipment so that the Turner congregation, under his direction, could
assemble the ship themselves.  In a little while the office work was
completed.  A committee of the faithful came with Turner, thumbed
through the plans and pronounced them good.  One foundation stone had
been laid.

Progress on another was reported.  Kitty's letter carrying the good
news came just as Bennion was preparing to close his office.  She wrote:


Dad and I have been getting very encouraging results.  We are up to the
last stage.  We have developed a stable compound that will break down
continuously at any rate desired, but it has the defect of requiring
constant bombardment by a cyclotron.  The cyclotron uses too much
power, and is also cumbersome and heavy.  The net power available is
still not enough to lift the ship and motors.

I have a hunch, and Dad's theories confirm it, that once we got out
into space we could soften up the fuel by exposing it to concentrated
cosmic rays.  The catch in it is that we have to get outside the
earth's atmosphere before we can utilize those.  If we could only
generate enough cosmic rays here at the surface to free the same
energy, the rest would be easy.  We could cut the size of the cyclo to
a tenth.

If we could do that, don't you think we could alter the _Katherine_ to
make room for a few more people?  Dad of course would be one of them.


Bennion smiled gently at that last line.  He had no intention whatever
of converting the little _Katherine_ into an Ark.

The good news lay in the first section of the letter.  If it was cosmic
rays she wanted, he knew where plenty of them were going to waste.  Fox
Mountain was exuding them at every pore.  It would be an easy matter to
test her hunch.  He decided to take a day off and look over the
ground....

The back of the car contained tins of extra gasoline and cans of food.
Buck Turner and Bennion took turns at driving.  They sped on until they
came to the desolate town that had been Foxboro.  Then Bennion veered
to the right and made a circuit of the fatal mountain.  The concrete
road rose to cross a small divide, then gently descended a long,
winding valley.  When they arrived abreast of where Ward's laboratory
had been, Bennion could see what was happening to the mountain.



It had taken on the appearance of a volcanic cone.  A vast number of
cubic yards of rock must have been consumed by the blazing starlet.
Bennion glanced at the raymeter he had brought along.  The radiation
was as fierce as ever.

He did not drive off, however, until he studied the abandoned military
work.  A branch road led off to the foot of Fox Mountain, and there it
entered as a tunnel.  Judging from the great mounds of excavated earth
spilled out below its mouth, the army must have gone well inside before
giving up their efforts.  The heavy pavement and width of the tunnel
indicated that they used the mightiest of excavating machinery.

Bennion let the car start down the hill.  He kept one eye on the road,
the other on the raymeter.

"This is a wonderful site for our Ark," he remarked to Turner.  "No one
will molest us here.  As soon as we are a safe distance from the
mountain we'll choose a likely spot.  After that we can move your
people out here and begin construction."

The grade flattened out and Bennion drove on at a faster rate.  At
length they came to a place where the road left the valley and climbed
through a low notch to a town on the other side of the hills.

"Right here, I would say," pronounced Bennion, looking about him, "is
the ideal place.  We can occupy the village.  There will already be
water and other conveniences."

"Yes," agreed Turner.  "This is a good place."

The next day he worked feverishly at a new set of plans.  By nightfall
the sketches were on the way.  They contemplated a caravan of six
trucks, each especially equipped and all heavily shielded with lead
plates.  The letter to Kitty-Pennell that accompanied them, after
telling of the existence of the tunnel, said:


Transfer your lab and the proof equipment to trucks such as these, and
come on to Foxboro.  Bring your own staff with you, but you and the
Doctor will have to do the heavy work.  Let him have my Anrad--it will
fit him, I'm sure.  In that tunnel you will find all the cosmic rays
you want, and then some.  I'll attend to the rest of the things.


After that chore was done, Bennion and Turner undertook the transfer of
the congregation to the site where the Ark was to be built.  In
addition they took along a number of skilled workers whom they had
induced to go by the offer of fabulous wages.  For the rest of the week
the roads to the north rumbled with the wheels of the loaded trucks.
Other trucks joined them carrying the frames and plates for the giant
ship.  The name picked for the new Ark was a symbolic one.  It was to
be christened _Star of Hope_.

Turner assumed the government of the village.  Jobs were delegated, and
certain trucks assigned to them.  An ex-produce merchant from the city
was given the task of keeping the community fed.  A former contractor
undertook to keep the ship parts flowing in.  A hospital was set up,
using the doctors and nurses of the church.  A group of singers and
entertainers took over the entertainment field.  Life in New Eden,
as they renamed the village, became idyllic.  It was an oasis in
a mad world.

Bennion and Turner had more reasons than one for establishing the
community as they did.  The news from outside grew more disturbing
every day.  The first wild wave of panic had subsided, but its
disastrous effects continued to grow and spread.  The people fleeing
from what they regarded as the dangerous zone infected others in
remoter parts of the country.  The lawlessness to be witnessed in New
York were repeated elsewhere.  The leaders of the New Eden project
formed a conspiracy to prevent still more disturbing news from reaching
the ears of their charges.  Many of the ill-conceived Arks had already
hopped off.  As Bennion had predicted, all of them were heart-rending
failures.



Some blew up in their cradles killing or maiming everyone in the
vicinity.  Others caught fire and turned into furnaces that consumed
their pilots and passengers.  Those that left the ground did so only to
fall back from terrible heights, in one instance into the heart of a
great western city.

There were other evil aspects of the Ark idea.  Foreign countries too
far away to be much concerned, were beginning to turn back the flood of
immigrants.  Where they were admitted freely, as in Mexico, it became
impossible to feed them.  Those who did not die of starvation pushed on
to Central America only to find more miserable deaths, in the
insect-infested tropical jungles.

The times were chaotic.  New Eden was a good place to be.

Bennion also discovered the animosity against him was dying down.  In
place of it a strong sentiment against General Atomics was growing.
Parts of the court of inquiry's findings had been released, and what
was said did the trust no good.  For reasons of its own the Government
had not seen fit yet to announce Bennion's escape.  Bennion breathed a
little easier.  It would break his heart to be interrupted.  Already
the construction scaffolding for the _Star of Hope_ was rising.
Tomorrow Kitty and Dr. Pennell would arrive.

Buck Turner came into the shack from which he was supervising the
ship's building.

"There is a man outside who claims to be a government inspector of Ark
ships.  He insists on looking over the plans and talking with you."

Bennion strode to the window and looked out.  A motorcycle was parked
in front.  The man who came on it was the FBI member of the court of
inquiry!




CHAPTER XV

_Sparring for Time_

Quickly the inspector went straight at the business in hand.  For half
an hour he scrutinized the blueprints and asked pointed questions.  It
was evident he knew his subject, for the questions went right to the
heart of the weakest spots.  Suddenly he wheeled from the table and
confronted Bennion eye to eye.

"What makes you think this absurd design will work?" he snapped.

"I don't," said Bennion calmly.  He realized that the man knew who he
was.  There was nothing to be gained by stalling.

"Why do you build it then?"

"To keep a lot of frenzied people employed and happy," said Bennion,
indifferently.  "They could do worse things with their time and money."

"Ah.  On the other hand, Mister--er--Professor Lundstrom, couldn't you
be doing better things?"

"It is not always permitted to do the best thing," answered Bennion,
meeting the piercing gaze with an unfaltering eye.

The inspector jammed on his hat.

"I'll check you over again.  Say, in about--?"

"Two or three months," supplied Bennion, smiling.  "I'll be here all
the time."

"Good," said the visitor.  He went out, mounted his motorcycle and
drove away.

When the government agent had left, Bennion went out and cranked his
trusty car.  A little later he stopped before the entrance of the Fox
Mountain tunnel.  At that point he put on one of the armored suits he
had brought along.  Then he switched on his headlights and drove in.

It was a deep tunnel, sloping upward at an easy grade into the middle
of the base of the little mountain.  At all places it was wide enough
for two trucks to pass and there were other slightly larger turning
spaces.  A half mile in he was forced to turn around and come back, for
the radiation was too fierce to be endured unless encased in Anrad as
well.  But he was jubilant over what he did manage to see.

He scouted the outside more particularly.  There he found a large
deserted farmhouse with barns that would make an excellent headquarters
for the transferred Pennell labs.



Kitty Pennell was driving the leading truck.  Bennion met them on the
outskirts of Foxboro and guided the caravan to its new headquarters.
Kitty was delighted with the reunion, the surroundings, and the work
ahead, but Bennion cut her joyful utterances short.

"Save it," he said, "we're not out of the woods yet.  Slip into your
Anrad and armor and I'll show you where to start."

When both were ready, he selected one of the shielded trucks and drove
to the end of the tunnel.  As he expected, its terminus was directly
under the giant atom.  They could see its glow through the many feet of
rock ceiling that still supported it.  The half-finished explosion
chamber was cluttered with excavating machinery the army left behind.

"This is your workshop.  Above you is your source of cosmic rays.  Go
ahead with your own show, but there is also something I want you to do
for me.  Take X-ray pictures of that giant atom every day at the same
time--its own radiation gives light enough.  Set up other cameras on
the mountain side outside and get shots from those angles.  By
triangulation we can gauge its present diameter, and by shooting it
every day you can determine the rate it is eating its way downward.
You don't want to be in here the day it comes through the roof."

They turned the truck around and went back to the farm.  Bennion shed
his Anrad and handed it to Dr. Pennell.

"I'll come over every night and look it your graphs," he promised.
Then he gave Kitty a warm kiss and hurried back to the _Star of Hope_.

A long motorcade had just arrived, heavy drays laden with the bulky
stern parts of the Ark.  Cranes were already dropping down to lift the
massive pieces off.  By nightfall two of the giant tubes were in place.
The next day the other four were set to and work was begun on tying
them together with the heavy hoop that formed the base of the structure
to rise above.  Like the _Katherine_, Bennion was building it
vertically, nose up.  The solid parts--which gave and took the powerful
thrust of the rockets--served as the best foundation.  The forward
frame and skin of the ship was light and thin until it tapered at the
nose.  There, surrounding the control cabin, it would have to be
reinforced again to cope with air resistance and meteoric dust.

Day after day the structure rose.  In the end it would stand higher
than the now empty Empire State Building--a long, silvery cigarshaped
vessel somewhat more slender than the little _Katherine_.  Week after
week additional parts came--the huge cyclotron and the tanks for fuel.
These were installed as promptly as they arrived.

The fuel problem still bothered him.  Kitty Pennell and the good doctor
were making progress, but the fuels they had produced so far were not
as simple or efficient as desired.  Unless it was improved, he would
have to rip out the cyclo from the Ark and install a much larger one.
That night he pored over the curves provided by the Pennells.

"Hmm," he murmured, studying the indicator cards.  "Almost, but not
quite.  How many more tries do you estimate it will take?"

"How can we tell?" said Kitty.  "You know as well as I do how
unpredictable experimental work is.  If you want to know, though, I can
tell you the date we'll stop trying.  That will be September second,
between noon and three o'clock."

"The afternoon of September second, huh?  Let's see the other graphs."

Dr. Pennell handed over the curves plotted from the X-ray data.  They
showed the downward progress of the giant atom.  All Bennion had to do
was look at the scale and see how many feet and inches it sank every
day.  Every day it sank a little faster and farther.  An acceleration
curve showed that rate also.  The prediction was an easy one.  On
September second, the giant atom would break through to the rock
ceiling.

Bennion drew a pad toward him and did some fast figuring.  At last he
pushed the pad away.

"I've got to run down to New York for a few days.  By the time I get
back you have to have that fuel.  No fooling.  Try mixing common salt
with it.  That is cheap and plentiful."

He drove back to his own camp with curiously mixed feelings.  What
worried him was the shortness of the time left.

As long as the giant atom was there above them it was still accessible.
Once it began its descent into the earth proper they stood a good
chance of losing it forever.

He had to make haste.

At New Eden he explained to Turner that essential parts of the ship had
been held up at the factory, and that he was going into town to
investigate the delay.  It might take a week or more.  It also might
take money.

How much was there left unexpended from the Ark fund?

"A little over six hundred thousand," said Turner, looking in the books.

"Better give me five hundred thousand of it.  I don't like the looks of
things at the mountain.  We may have to pay through the nose to
expedite what we need, and I want to have the money on me to do it
with."



When he shoved off for New York he had the check in his pocket.  In the
city he went to one manufacturer's office and paid for a strange bit of
equipment to attach to the spaceship.  Then he went down to Wall Street.

He found a broker that Dr. Pennell recommended.

"How's the market?" he asked.

"Have you a dime?" countered the broker.  "If you have, you can buy all
New York State lock, stock and barrel with New Jersey thrown in for
cumshaw.  For a quart of good rye whisky I can let you have ten
thousand dollars in Pennsylvania Railroad bonds.  If you are trying to
sell something, it is the other way around."

Bennion laughed.  The world was certainly topsy-turvy.  He scanned the
last quotations.  The broker had not exaggerated much.  He made out a
list of what he wanted.

The face value came to many millions, the broker figured.

"The heat must have got you, but here you go.  The securities come to
eighty-three thousand dollars, and adding commissions we get--"

Bennion handed over the money.

"Deliver the securities to the Reverend Tucker at this address.  Get
them to him by messenger on September first.  Thanks.  Goodbye."

The broker scratched his head perplexedly as his unexpected customer
walked out.  It was the first time in months that a buyer had paid the
asked price for anything he could not consume on the spot.  What a lot
of queer nuts there are in the world, was the broker's reflection.

Bennion acted even stranger than that.  He checked out of his hotel
room an hour later.  There was a week when the anxious Turner, who
became nervous at his prolonged absence, tried vainly to locate him.

Then he unexpectedly turned up on the job at New Eden, appearing serene
and contented.

"It's terrible, I tell you.  The people are getting worried," said
Turner, urgently.  "They are ready to put in the decks and partitions
in the forward section and none have come.  We cannot find copies of
the orders.  They had to stop work the day after you left.  I am afraid
some will crack up if the delay lasts much longer."

"It won't," assured Bennion.  "A shipment ought to reach here any hour.
Then there will be plenty to do."

With that he hopped into his car and drove up to the Pennell farm.




CHAPTER XVI

_Eureka!_

Upon seeing Bennion, Kitty Pennell was elated.  She was in Bennion's
arms and babbling happily before he got well out of the car.  The old
doctor stood smiling by.

"We've got it, Steve, we've got it!" she told him, jumping up and down.
"Adding the salt did it.  A few minutes' exposure to concentrated
cosmic rays does the rest.  It works beautifully."

She led him to the rear of the barn where the proving slide was set up.
Lying horizontally on it was a small projectile--three pounds of solid
steel; drilled in the base with a fine hole.  Back of it rose a massive
concrete block faced with sheet steel.  A hundred yards away there was
another such block.  Alongside the projectile lay a small portable
cyclo attached to the house by heavy copper cables.

Kitty opened a can of gray powder.  She dampened the point of a fine
needle and dipped it into the powder.  A tiny grain of the powder stuck
to the point.  This she carefully inserted in the depth of the drilled
hole.

"This stuff is highly radioactive since its exposure to the cosmic
rays.  One stiff jolt from the cyclo will start it to disintegrating at
an almost instantaneous rate.  Look!"

She slammed in the switch.  The cyclo gave a faint hum.  All stood well
back.

Wham!  Presto!

No human eye could follow what happened.  It was over even as it began.
There was a whiff of ozone in the air; a vague impression that an
instant before there had been a flash of unendurable violet light.
Their ears still ached with the last reverberations of the thunderbolt
that was let loose.  The projectile had vanished!

They walked over to the target where a clean round hole gaped in its
armored face.  Incandescent concrete glowed through the orifice.  The
hot metal around it graded from a blinding, sparkling white through
bright orange to dull cherry red and finally black.  Driblets of molten
iron ran down the face of the plate.

"Great Scott!" yelled Bennion.  "What an impact!"

"Yes, plenty of power there," said Dr. Pennell.

The fuel was powerful beyond Bennion's wildest dreams.  The
disintegration of a single grain had driven the small shell with
irresistible fury.  Its acceleration had been so swift that no one had
seen it leave the cradle.  Its impact on the target plate had been
terrific.  The force was too powerful for matter to withstand.  The
test projectile had not pierced the plate.  It had vaporized it, and
itself with it.

"It is too good," said Bennion, thoughtfully.  "No living thing could
endure accelerations of that order.  We will have to tone it down.
Have you tried mixing it with the earlier fuels?"

"Oh, yes.  Look here."

Nearby was another rocket stand.  This one held what must have been a
shell for a sixteen-inch gun.  Overhead was a high pole from which
dangled the wreckage of two velocity screens.  Pennell dragged the
cyclo over.

"You needn't worry about this one coming down again," said the old
scientist.  "We tried out some little ones first, firing them through
those screens.  The time between the puncture of the first screen and
the topmost one was recorded on an oscillograph that shows when the
electric leads were broken.  The velocities we get are around ten miles
per second.  Anything going up with that velocity won't ever come back.
Remember, Steve, that anything which exceeds a speed of about seven
miles per second will overcome gravitation."

He deposited the cyclo on the stand for it, adjusted its discharge
nozzle to suit, then drew away.

"The fuel in this shell consists of one ounce of the old and five
grains of the new as a booster.  You'd better give it lots of room.
The high ones flare a lot."

When the switch was thrown that time they had a repetition of what
happened before, though on a grander scale.  This time the shell left
the firing stand at a sufficiently low velocity to be seen for the
first half second of its flight.  There was the same ear-splitting
crack of thunder, the same vision of an intense violet flash, and what
appeared to be a slender column of gleaming steel reaching from the
cradle to the zenith.  And, as instantly, it disappeared.  Overhead all
that was left to be seen was a hair-like wisp of greenish smoke
trailing from some immeasurable height.  The rocket stand was no more.
It had melted under the rocket's heel and now lay in a slowly cooling
pool.

"Still too fast," commented Bennion, thinking of what it must feel like
to travel at speeds where the outer layers of the shell were burned off
by friction with the air.  "You'll have to cut down the mix some more."



But they had it!  The long-sought-after fuel that would drive ships
across the universe at any speed man could endure, was theirs.

"That stuff would make wonderful ammunition for a war," spoke up a
young fellow named Glover.  He was one of the student helpers the
Pennells had brought along to handle the extra trucks and part of the
lab routine.

"We aren't thinking of war," said Bennion, shortly, giving the
assistant a hard, appraising look.  Until that moment he had taken it
for granted that Dr. Pennell's assistants were trust-worthy.  Now a
doubt arose.  It was an old rule in laboratories where pure research
was done that when an assistant began to think of his work in terms of
military application it was time to look out.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Glover, and went about disconnecting the
cyclo.  "It was just a thought."

"It's all right, Glover," said the old doctor.  "I understand what you
meant, but this is no time to talk of it."

After the talkative assistant went into the house, Kitty Pennell had a
question to ask.

"Are you still planning to demolish the giant by playing a stream of
this energy on it?  Dad and I figured it yesterday and it looks
dangerous."

"It's worse than dangerous, it's impossible," said Bennion.  "I figured
some myself yesterday.  There is no doubt that those fierce violet rays
would disrupt the giant atom--swiftly, if we used a heavy jet,
eventually if we used a thinner one.  I neglected to take into account
the back thrust.  The starlet is too heavy, its inertia is tremendous.
We could build a gun and plant it in the tunnel and let it go at the
atom when it falls through.  But we'd have to brace it with a mountain
range to keep its own kick from hurling it backward over the horizon.
If we had thousands of men and the material to work with and the time,
we might anchor the gun sufficiently.  We haven't any of those things."

"That means," said Kitty, gravely, "that when the giant atom crashes
down there will be nothing we can do after all?  Then we had better go
home and make our plans for taking off in the _Katherine_."

"That can wait," said Bennion, absently.  "There is another stunt I
want to try first."

"And that?"

"All the details are not worked out yet," he said, evasively.  "You'll
know in due time."

They turned toward the farmhouse lab.  As they did, Bennion glimpsed a
man walking rapidly away along the main road.  As if he sensed he had
been seen, the man ducked quickly into the brush beyond and vanished.
He wore the same grayish dungarees that the laboratory assistants wore.

Bennion dashed into the lab and glanced quickly around.  He was looking
for Glover.  He was there, bending over a test tube.  Bennion counted
the others.  There were four present.  There should have been a fifth.
He called Kitty aside, who had just entered behind him.

"Who is missing?" he asked in a low voice.  Kitty turned and looked the
helpers over.

"Sid Ellington," she said.  "He has been acting ugly lately.  He told
my father he wasn't going to sit on a volcano much longer.  It was all
my father could do to keep him from quitting on the spot."

"I think he quit just now," said Bennion grimly.  Who was Ellington?
And who was Glover, really?  He hoped fervently that the next time he
had an impossible job to do it would not be complicated by interference
and mystery.

"You had better keep a sharp lookout," he warned her.  "Something is
cooking for us again, and it is something none of us are going to like.
What it is I don't know, but I have the same crawly feeling I had the
day we drove from the quarry to our old plant.  Meantime, I've got to
run over to the ship.  More stuff is coming in and I have to show the
men what to do with it."

He packed several tins of the new atomic fuel, both the high-powered
and the low, and stuck them into the back of his car.  Then, after a
wave of the hand, he drove off.

He drove fairly fast, for whoever had built the road down the valley
must have expected fast drivers to use it.  Every turn was steeply
banked so that a slow driver had the feeling of slipping off the road
sideways.  As he ate up the few miles between him and New Eden he had
little time to think of the events of the day.



On the credit side was a partial victory--now he had the precious fuel.
On the red side of the ledger he had several dubious factors.  The
material for the _Star of Hope_ was not arriving as fast as it should.
And there were the enigmatic trio--the FBI man, and the two laboratory
assistants.  Behind all of these the sinister figure of Farquhar
loomed.  It was still a week until the dreaded second of September came
around, ample time for anything to happen.

His spirits rose a few notches as he drew near the construction job,
for he saw that more trucks had come and the men were busily unloading
them.  But the moment he entered his office he sensed new trouble.
Buck Turner sat there with a dark scowl on his face.  As soon as
Bennion was inside and the door shut behind him, he flicked out a scrap
of paper and handed it across without a word.

Bennion took it and read the scrawl.  The first glance told him the
letter was phony, for its lines sprawled irregularly across the page
like the scribblings of a little child and the words were deliberately
misspelled.  An attempt at disguising the hand, obviously.  Moreover,
the note was signed with the poisonous name, "A Friend."  Stripped of
its camouflage, it read:


Dear Preacher Turner:

Here is something you ought to know.  That man calling himself Prof.
Lundstrom ain't Lundstrom but Bennion, the guy that set the Ward fire.
Him and the dizzy jane that helped him on that job are fixing to cross
you and your sucker gang.  Watch out!  What they call fuel is
_dynamite_--it will blow your ship up.  Gang up on him and don't let
him come near your ship again.  They've got a hideout up the valley
from you.  The gal's old man is helping out.  He is a jerkwater college
prof named Pennell.


"What does this, mean?" asked Turner.  "I found it stuck under my door
this morning."

"I wish I knew," said Bennion, darkly.  "Hop into my car and let's take
a quick run back to Pennell's farm.  I'm getting uneasier every minute."




CHAPTER XVII

_The Affair at the Farmhouse_

Like a flash Bennion jammed down the gas pedal when he saw that dark
blue sedan parked before the door of the farmhouse lab.  It was a car
he knew too well.  He had seen it before.  It was Farquhar's.  Bennion
turned into the lane leading to the farmhouse, and he only needed the
two off wheels for it.  He slid to a screeching stop and was halfway up
the steps when he checked his headlong charge.  It was just soaking in
that Farquhar had taken the trouble to turn his car around so that it
pointed outward, and he had also left the motor running.

"All set for a quick getaway, huh?" muttered Bennion.

He jerked out his jackknife and with two swift jabs punctured the rear
tires.  Then, while they were still whistling, he plunged into the
house with Turner close at his heels.

The laboratory was at the back.  Those in it either had not heard his
approach or did not care.  Bennion dashed on in.  Then froze.  There
were two reasons.  One was the tableau before him, the other the cold,
harsh voice behind him.  In one corner of the room three of the lab
assistants stood, whitefaced, with their hands stretched toward the
ceiling.  The one called Glover had them covered with a sub-machine
gun.  A few yards away old Dr. Pennell sat half-fainting on a stool.
He had a gash across his forehead.  Kitty Pennell stood beside him with
her arm around him for support, gazing with flaming eyes at Ellington,
who in turn, had her covered.  The voice from behind was that of
Farquhar.

Bennion turned slowly with his hands raised after a crisp warning.

"Stand where you are.  Hands up and turn around.  You haven't a chance,
Bennion."

It was Farquhar with a heavy automatic pistol.  Ward was there, too,
and his weapon was held on Turner.

"Get over there in front of me, padre," directed Farquhar, resuming his
old oily smile.  "I can carry double.  Ward has his work to do."

Turner looked at the pistols, then moved over nearer to Bennion.  Ward
pocketed his and started his "work."  He scurried about the lab,
snatching up sheets of memoranda, formulas, and diagrams.  He sniffed
bottles, sampled other chemicals, and pocketed some of them.  Then he
opened drawers and found the coded notebooks.  He took those too.

"Okay?" queried Farquhar.  "Then scram.  We'll mop up here after you've
had a good start.  We will make our getaway in one of the trucks and
bring along the heavy stuff."

Ward ducked out of the room.

Bennion's long suffering patience snapped like an overloaded wire.  He
had tried to play the game, but this enemy always stacked the cards.
It might be suicide.  He did not care; if only he could do a little
murder before the fatal bullet hit.

Without the slightest preliminary signal, without the flicker of an
eye, he dived straight at Farquhar.  The gun almost exploded in his
face but his impetus and the quickly upthrust left arm knocked the gun
upward and the shot went into the ceiling.  His right arm hooked up and
an iron fist landed an uppercut that jolted out a wounded grunt.  In
the next instant they were a tangled, writhing, slugging, gouging pair
of bodies rolling about on the laboratory floor.

Bennion expected to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire in the room but
all that his ears could bring him was the sounds of his own and his
adversary's breathing.  At last he managed to get a headlock on, and
this in turn became a stranglehold.  Bennion hung on until the other
went limp.  Then he stood up groggily.

His clothes were torn to shreds and he knew that blood was running down
his face.  He was unaware of it, for an astonishing state of affairs
met his eyes.  Glover still held the sub-machine gun, but how it was
trained on Ellington, who had dropped his and was holding his own arms
tremblingly aloft.  Dr. Pennell had fainted dead away.  He lay slumped
on the floor, with two of the assistants bending over him.  No one else
was in the room.  Where was Kitty?  And Turner?

Bennion picked up Farquhar's fallen gun and dashed from the room.  He
could get the explanations later concerning Glover's last about-face.
Now he must find Kitty.  He must prevent Ward from getting away with
the secret of the new fuel.



His heart sank the moment he reached the front door.  Kitty was not in
sight, but speeding up the road toward Foxboro was his own car, driven
by Ward.  He was already out of pistol range.  There was no vehicle for
a chase.  One disaster was an accomplished fact.  Bennion ran around
the side of the house.  There he had occasion to freeze again.

"Stand back, Steve!" came the warning scream from Kitty.  "Not another
step."  He saw what she was doing--and nearly choked--with gratitude.
She was crouched behind the testing block, squinting over it with her
eyes as her hands worried it this way and that.  Turner and the missing
assistant stood beside her, holding the portable cyclo in their arms.
Then Bennion saw her quick nod and saw Turner flip the switch.  He
whirled in his tracks and shot a glance up the road.  Ward, in his
fleeing car, was at the top of the divide, beginning to go down on the
other side.

A flash of violet, a crash of lightning, then for one blinding instant
it seemed as if the world came to an end.  Intolerable white light
filled the valley from wall to wall; wild, roaring winds whipped down,
leveling trees before it.  They struck Bennion like something solid and
sent him reeling against the farmhouse wall.  In the background he
could hear the rending of timbers as the barns went out of existence.
A frightful force had been unleashed.

A dead quiet succeeded.  Kitty Pennell picked herself up from a flower
bed where she had been hurled.  Turner was crawling groggily in the
grass.  The lab assistant was out cold.  Up the road, where it went
over the crest, there was no car, no road, no vegetation, no anything.

"What went wrong, Steve?"  Kitty was shivering, awed by the
tremendousness of her own performance.  "I didn't put in any more than
the usual charge."

"Nothing went wrong, darling," he said, putting a steadying arm around
her.  "You have an eye like an eagle's.  What you didn't know was that
I had several cans of rocket fuel on the back seat.  Ward--"

He stopped short.  She had slumped weakly into a faint.  He laid her
gently on the grass, only to find himself confronting the FBI man whom
he had seen twice before.  Where he had been during the excitement was
a mystery.

"Some gun, Bennion," said the man.  "You could go places with that."

"Yeah," said Bennion, tense and non-committal.

"She needn't have gone so strong," continued the government agent,
pointing at the prone Kitty.  "I had men planted down by Foxboro to
pick this gang up on the way out.  But I guess it is just as well this
way.  Ward stole a car containing explosives, didn't he, and the stuff
jarred off?  Suppose we agree on that.  It simplifies things.  As to
Farquhar and his stooge Ellington, my man Glover is tying them up now.
Our books are closed on them.  You can forget that crowd from now on.
I've been working on the General Atomics case for the last five years.
This is the final payoff."

"Say, who are you, anyway?" demanded Bennion.  The other man flashed a
badge.  It was of gold, with diamond insets.

"MacFarland is as good a name as any.  I am a Federal investigator.
I've learned most of what I want to know, but there are a few things I
still need to be wised up on.  Come clean.  What are you up to?"

"Stick around a week and you'll find out," said Bennion doggedly.  He
was close to the point where he trusted nobody--far.

MacFarland fished a document out of his pocket.  It was a special
commission from the President.  It authorized him to negotiate with
Stephen Bennion and assist him in any way he could in the event he
believed him worthy of assistance.  Bennion glanced down at Kitty.  She
was reviving.  She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and yawned.

"Let's take a little walk, Mr. MacFarland," suggested Steve.  "I've
done almost everything, but there are a couple of loose ends that
bother me.  It is outside interference I am worrying about."

"Why, sure," said MacFarland.  "I feel ripe for a little walk."

The work was going nicely when Bennion and Turner returned to the _Star
of Hope_.  Able workmen were installing the control chamber and
strengthening the struts about it.  But a puzzled foreman was regarding
a pair of long steel members laid beside the road and the various
accessories that accompanied them.



Included among the accessories was a husky atomic motor, a twin set of
racks and pinions, and other queerly shaped pieces.

"Say, Professor," complained the foreman, "there ain't anything in the
plans that calls for this stuff.  Where does it go?"

"Sure it is in the plans.  The stuff goes in the stern.  The motor sits
on the forty foot platform.  The beams go up on either side through the
two hatches we left."

"What are they for?" asked the man, still puzzled.  So far as he could
see, they were useless.

"To steady the ship when she takes off where there is no launching
cradle.  They are designed to drop down like legs."

"Oh.  But they are too long to get in now.  They ought to have been
installed before we finished the hull plating."

"I couldn't help that," said Bennion, "we couldn't afford to wait for
them.  You'll have to dig out a pit underneath.  That will give you
headroom enough."

"Yes, sir," said the foreman, and blew his whistle.

Turner broke in.

"What else is to come?"

"Lots of things.  Furnishings, bunks, galley fittings, food, and the
fuel.  Doc Pennell and Kitty are working on the last.  It ought to be
over any day.  The rest will take time.  Two or three weeks, I should
say."

"How much time have we to spare?"

"Plenty," lied Bennion.  He knew full well that the deadline was less
than seven days away, but there was no use in revealing that.  Even
Buck Turner, if goaded enough, might turn panicky.

As for the congregation, they were already showing signs of cracking
nerves.

"You are the boss, Steve," said Turner.  "I've gone along with you this
far.  I might as well go all the way.  We trust you, you know.  At the
same time--"

"I know," grinned Bennion.  "The shindig of this afternoon upset you.
It doesn't mean anything.  We settled some old grudges there--that was
all.  It won't make any difference.  I will perform as I promised."

Turner looked doubtful.

"Do you remember what you promised, Steve?" he asked, after a time.

"That I would save your congregation if I could," said Bennion, but
uncertainly.  He had been playing so many parts that for a moment he
forgot.

"You said," continued Turner, reproachfully, "that the ship was a sham.
That it was designed in the beginning to be a flop.  I gathered that
our activity was to be a front for something bigger.  I've shown my
loyalty, Steve.  What is up your sleeve?  I've got to know before the
showdown comes with my own flock."

"Don't you worry, Buck," laughed Bennion.  "I can't tell you yet, and
it wouldn't do you any good to know.  I'll give you a promise, though.
Nobody will ever know how far you stuck your neck out, and if trouble
comes it won't be blamed on you.  Satisfied?"

"No.  Not by a darn sight," the pastor of the great midtown church
exclaimed, then turned abruptly and walked away.

Bennion looked after him, slightly crestfallen until he remembered the
promises of the man who styled himself MacFarland.  After that he
smiled.  It would all come out in the wash.  Six more days of playing
the game.  And then--




CHAPTER XVIII

_Darkest Hour_

Hurrying matters was not easy.  Troubles multiplied.  There were delays
due to the slow arrival of needed parts, and there were delays caused
by grumbling.  On the third day there was something closely resembling
a strike.  The New Eden members quit in a body and marched to their
cottages, leaving Bennion to carry on alone with those men he had hired
from the outside.  Later in the day he was given the explanation.
Turner came to the office shack wearing a grave expression.

"My anonymous correspondent did quite a lot of letter writing before he
left," said Turner.  "The village is buzzing with rumors that you are
Bennion--that you are not Bennion, but Lundstrom--that Lundstrom is a
crook or insane.  They have been told that the design of the ship is
wrong, that no one knows how to fly it, and that the fuel is dangerous.
I did my best, but their spirit is not the same.  They have turned
suspicious.  They grilled me about the financial details and demanded
an accounting.  That last check I gave you I couldn't explain.  I left
them buzzing."

"Those letters were Ellington's work, I imagine," said Bennion.  "They
can't be undone.  We will have to carry on in spite of them."

The work did go on, but haltingly, since some of the volunteer workers
refused to come at all.  Those that did went about the job in sullen
silence.  At that, the control cabin was installed and the ship's nose
sealed.  Structurally the vessel was completed.  She lacked only the
living accommodations.  Trucks brought fuel every day.  She was
partially fuelled.

The most disturbing news came privately to Bennion in the form of a set
of X-ray photos and a note from Dr. Pennell.  Bennion stared at the
damning pictures with a sinking heart.  The giant atom had at last gone
through the transformation the world had been dreading.  It had
suddenly stepped up its rate of growth.  No one knew how much the
acceleration would be accelerated.  When it began doubling itself by
the hour the end of the earth was at hand.  Pennell's revised curve
turned up sharply, indicating that the zero time would be some time
early in the day on the first instead of mid-afternoon of the second.
Bennion's carefully computed time schedule was wrecked.

He drove furiously to the laboratory to confirm the news at first hand
and see what were the newest developments.  Again he approached the
farm building with growing dread, for he noticed that half the trucks
were gone.  They had been employed in bringing him fuel and there were
none at that time at the ship nor had he passed any on the road.  What
could Pennell be doing with them?

The ultimate shock came when he ran into the laboratory.  Neither Kitty
nor the doctor were there.  Two of the assistants were working over
some X-ray plates, and their faces were ashy white.  One came forward
and offered a plate with shaking fingers.

"Taken ten minutes ago," he said.  His eyes were full of terror.

Bennion needed but a glance to read the picture.  The giant atom was
raging now in earnest.  It was fully twelve feet in diameter--a gain of
a foot in half a day.  The crash would come soon--perhaps tomorrow.

"Where is the Doctor and Miss Pennell?" asked Bennion sharply.

"They left," said the other assistant.  "Went away early this morning
in three trucks with Sammy and Ted for drivers.  They went off Foxboro
way, and they took a big load of fuel with them."

"What!" cried Bennion.  It was unthinkable.  Something uncanny lay at
the roots of it.  "Why?" he demanded fiercely.  "What for?  What
happened?"

The two assistants exchanged uncertain glances.  Then one spoke.

"We don't know.  They wouldn't say.  They had a big fight between them
last night, and then they talked something over for hours.  We couldn't
understand what it was about.  All we know is that they got out just
after dawn."

"Miss Kitty left a note for you," volunteered the other, fumbling for
it in a drawer.  Bennion snatched at it, and read:


I am worried, Stevie, and I am going to do something about it.  You are
too darn noble, old dear, and too darn cagey.  While you are mooning
over saving every Tom, Dick and Harry, I am eating my heart out about
us.  You are playing a lone hand, now it is my turn.  By the time you
see this I will be a long way away.



He scowled at the note, cursing softly under his breath.  The crazy
little idiot, he was calling her.  For he knew what she was going to
try to do.  She was taking some of the new fuel to the old rock quarry
and try out the model Katherine.  His first impulse was to dash off to
the city, grab a plane and head her off.  Then he paused.  He could not
do that.  The situation was too grave where he was.  He had assumed
duties he could not forsake at the last hour.  Then again, she was in a
far safer place than this valley.  Perhaps it would be better to leave
things as they were.

The fuel job was done.  She was not needed any longer.

"Take this," he said, scribbling off a note and sealing it.

He handed it to one of the assistant's, with instructions as to where
it was to be delivered.

"Your work is finished and this place is too dangerous to stay in,"
said Bennion.  "I'll send for the rest of the fuel.  You fellows take
the other trucks and get out.  Goodbye and good luck."

The frightened tenseness of the two men relaxed.  They knew something
dreadful was in the air, though not exactly what.

"Thank you, sir," said the one who took the note; "We will be out of
here in ten minutes."

The note was for MacFarland.  Its cryptic wording would tell him what
he needed to know.

Bennion's words were:


Climax coming any hour.  Shove calendar up to now.


Bennion returned to the site of the _Star of Hope_ with trepidation.
The streak of luck that had been with him lately seemed to have left
him.  He feared that upon arrival at his base he might find himself
face to face with a new trial.  In that he was not wrong.

A thoroughly angry Buck Turner, accompanied by three of his most
influential parishioners, was awaiting him in his office.  On the table
lay an open package, its wrappings speckled brightly with blobs of
broken sealing wax.  A bushel of green and red and gold engraved
certificates spilled out upon the table.

Those were stocks and bonds by the millions, representing part
ownership of a third of America's wealth.  The broker had delivered too
soon.

"What shabby trick is this?" asked Turner with blazing eyes.  "Is it
meant as cheap joke or as an insult?  I asked money to back your
experiments and ship; and you do this to me.  You spend a quarter of a
million dollars for this rubbish while our ship waits for vital parts.
And you have the effrontery to have them bought for my account and sent
to me.  Are you trying deliberately to undermine me with my own
congregation?"

Bennion was caught utterly aback.  His face flushed furiously, When he
tried to speak he found he couldn't bring out the words.

All he could manage was a weak defense.

"I won't try to explain it, Buck," he said.  "Don't tear them up is all
I ask.  You'll understand why I did it in a day or so."

"We are fed up with that 'take it on faith' line, Lundstrom or Bennion,
or whatever your name is," spoke up one of the parishioners, owner of
one of New York's largest department stores.  "You are fired, do you
understand?  We'll hire another engineer and finish what you began--if
it can be finished, which we doubt.  You had better get out quietly
before the village gets wind of this last transaction."

"I won't do that," said Bennion, defiantly.  "Your nerves are shot, and
you've let them get you down.  You don't know what you are asking.  I
am staying here through low and high water.  That's all.  Now I tell
you to get out of my office!"

"We will be back shortly," cried another, "and with all New Eden at our
backs.  We'll see how big you talk then."

After they left, Bennion sat for a long time slumped deep in his chair.
It hurt him deeply that Turner should have lost faith in him after
trailing so long.  He thought once of the bitter expression "like rats
leaving a sinking ship," but he knew that that was not fair.  All these
who were leaving him had been patient and trusting and helpful.  They
could only stretch their faith so far.  He could not honestly blame any
of them.



Bennion got up and walked to the window.  In the distance there was an
increasing roar.  Vehicles by the hundreds were coming, and he could
hear the rumble of many men talking and giving orders.

What was it now?  The mob from New Eden could hardly have been
organized and back so soon.

Ten minutes later he knew the answer.  The army was intervening again.
A dozen armored cars, followed by a string of tanks, thundered past his
shack.  One sheered out and stopped.  An army captain stepped in.

"How many men at work up in the ship?" he asked.

"None," said Bennion, eyeing the man.  "They have quit for the day.
You will find everyone in this district over at New Eden, just beyond
this ridge."

"They'll have to get out," said the officer, "and you too.  This part
of the state has to be evacuated at once.  Colonel Flagg is in charge.
It is a Presidential order.  Pack up and get out."

He cast a searching look around and went out.  Through the open door
Bennion saw other soldiers searching the sheds and storehouses.  They
were making a clean sweep.  Bennion looked at his watch and sighed.
One hour!  One hour of grace before his plans collapsed like a house of
cards.  He wondered about MacFarland, whether he would get the note in
time and whether he would act effectively and promptly.  MacFarland
remained his last hope.  The other bubbles had burst.




CHAPTER XIX

_Taken for a Ride_

Colonel Flagg was a tough old egg.  He wouldn't budge.  Out meant out.
All of Bennion's protests were brushed away.  When he reached the end
of those the colonel lost patience.  Two soldiers rushed Bennion and
proceeded to hustle him into a car.  It was then that MacFarland
arrived to save the day.

He called the colonel aside and whispered a few words.  The colonel
nodded, then grumpily called off his dogs of war.  A moment later the
staff car whizzed away.  That meant the last of the soldiery was gone.
Bennion then saw that MacFarland had a number of men with him.  Three
were armed with cameras, two with portable microphones, and several
others with notebooks.  There were a couple of huskies along that
Bennion took to be plainclothesmen, and, of course, the drivers of the
two cars.

"I'll take over now," said MacFarland.  He walked up to Bennion and
began picking away the items of disguise that he was wearing in his
false character of Professor Lundstrom.  He flicked off the heavy blond
eyebrows, snatched away the mustache.  With a few other touches he
completed the unmasking.

"All right, Bennion," said MacFarland, stepping back and checking his
work.  "If you'll wash your face we can proceed with the pictures."

"Pictures?" asked Bennion, aghast.

"Sure.  We always take pictures.  Hurry."

It was good to wash his face and have it feel natural again, but
Bennion did not hurry.  He was still stalling for time.  Things were
not working out quite as he planned them.  MacFarland never had shown
his full hand.  Then came the business of being photographed, after
which a movie camera was set up and the microphone.

"Have you any final statement you would like to make?" asked
MacFarland.  "It will be released immediately to the public."

"Yes,", said Bennion proudly.  "It is this.  From first to last I have
done what I have done because I felt it my duty.  I apologize for
nothing.  I shall continue in the same line to the last moment unless I
am prevented by forces too great for me to control.  That is all."

"Splendid," said MacFarland.  "Okay, boys.  Take it away.  Burn up the
road getting back, you haven't any time to lose."

The newspapermen jumped into their car and rushed off.  Night was
falling.  If they drove fast they might still catch the morning
editions.  Bennion turned to MacFarland after he had sent his own men
out to wait in the car.  There were explanations due.  MacFarland
grinned and stuck out his hand.

"I did the best I could," he said.  "I rang the army in as being the
simplest way to get the New Eden villagers out of your way and in the
clear.  Now the army is in the clear with them.  In a couple of minutes
I'll be gone.  When does the big pop-off start?"

Bennion shook his head.

"Any time from now on.  An hour or so, maybe another day.  The atom is
pepping up fast.  You had better not hang around.  But what were the
cameras for?"

"The press, man!  This is the biggest show of the century!  Right now
there are fifty press planes soaring overhead waiting for the curtain
to rise.  I know you didn't order it.  The big boss did.  He thinks the
people ought to be told the truth.  It will be a proper sequel to the
Farquhar revelations.  We released the full story on that less than an
hour ago.  He broke down and told us the whole sordid business.  The
wires are already humming with it."

"That's good," said Bennion dully.  He had almost forgotten about
Farquhar, so much had been happening.  Lately he had come to regard the
fellow as no more than a minor nuisance, but it was just as well that
he was behind the bars.

"Any last messages?" asked MacFarland, more soberly.

"No," said Bennion.  "I have said all that is necessary, I think."

"No word for Miss Pennell?"

"She will understand," said Bennion shortly.

MacFarland gripped his hand.

"You're a brave man, Steven Bennion.  Good luck to you."

"Cut out the melodramatics, if you don't mind," said Bennion.  "I never
went out on a limb in my life unless I thought the limb was reasonably
strong.  I'm not starting now.  Believe it or not, I'm having the
grandest time of all right now.  We will have a good, laugh over this
yet.  Wait."

"I still think you are a brave man," said the FBI operative.

"Hogwash!"  And Steven Bennion meant it.



It was pitch dark except for the mild moonshine from a quartering moon
inching toward the zenith.  Bennion turned out the lights in his office
shack and surveyed the towering mass of the _Star of Hope_ that loomed
above him.  It was an impressive scene and a lonely one, for he knew
that by then not a living thing was within a radius of miles.

He made his way to the dark shadow beneath the hull and walked between
two of the giant tubes.  Carefully avoiding the deep hole that had been
dug to permit the placing of the long structural members that were late
in arriving, he found the ladder that led up into the interior.  He
climbed it, found the switch that turned on the auxiliary lighting
system, and went about the grim business of the night.

After he climbed two more ladders he came to the lower operating
platform.  He checked over the raymeters.  All were dead except for the
occasional tick as an outside cosmic ray trickled in through the
earth's atmosphere.  He set one auxiliary cyclo into motion and brought
it up to speed.  Then he stripped and shifted into the Anrad suit,
topping it with complete armor except for the heavy helmet.  He tested
various machines.  All were ready.  There was nothing left to do but
sit down and wait.  The next move belonged to the giant atom gnawing at
the heart of Fox Mountain.

It was dull in there.  Bennion adjusted the two-way periscope through
which he could either scan the country roundabout or the ground
immediately beneath him.  All that was to be seen was the moonlit
countryside.  To while away the time he put on a pair of headphones and
plugged in on the radio.  He tuned in AWCS, the recently formed All
World Broadcasting System.  What he heard made him squirm.

"Folks, stand by your sets--the most momentous moment in human history
may occur any second," a well modulated voice was saying.  "Here we
are, Bill Eddins of the AWCS news staff, and Ted Squivens and Bob
Blaufield, ready to give you a minute by minute description of what the
eruption of Fox Mountain will look like.  We are in an army bomber,
five miles up.  The sky is full of planes of the press, army and navy.
Don't go away.  Dr. Schnitzleberg, the eminent atomic expert, is also
with us.  He says that his computations reveal that the explosion may
occur at any time now."

Bennion snorted.  He had never heard of Schnitzleberg.  Whoever he was,
he could not possibly know what was about to happen.  Unless, of
course, he had been tipped off by MacFarland.  Worse was yet to come.

"Four miles away," continued the announcer, "all dark and deserted save
for the one heroic figure huddled within it with his secret plans for
saving our race, sits the man who may be destined to be the world's
greatest hero.  That man is Stephen Bennion, the maligned and
misunderstood lone fighter of our day.  You all heard earlier his noble
words 'I have done what I have done because I felt it to be my duty.  I
shall continue in the same line to the last.'"

Bennion groaned audibly, plucked the earphones from his head and hurled
them across the room.

"What a fool I made of myself," he cried.  "Why did I say anything to
that slimy MacFarland, the double-crosser.  Oh, rats!"

Curiosity got the better of him.  He salvaged the battered headpiece
and put it on again.  The voice still went on.

"Throughout the world solemn services are being held and prayers are
going up that Bennion's unselfish sacrifice will avail--"

A violent vibration shook the ship, nearly tossing Bennion off his
seat.  The hull creaked and swayed and was filled with ominous
rattlings.  It was as if an earthquake was in progress.  Then the ship
steadied.  Bennion took a firm grip on himself.  This was it!  The
giant atom must have crashed through the ceiling of the tunnel and
struck the heavily reinforced concrete floor.  He corrected the
adjustment of his headphone.  Everything would depend on what followed.

"--we have just heard a dull boom even above the roar of our motor.  A
brilliant light is shining on the ridge east of Fox Mountain.  It is
like a searchlight beam, but it seems to be coming out of the side of
the mountain ... we hear a rumbling sound .... it gets louder.  The
light gets brighter ... ah-h-h--" the voice ceased for a moment.  Then
it resumed.

"Folks, we are now looking down at the most marvelous spectacle any of
us ever beheld.  A great globe of blue fire has erupted from the
mountain side, deep down in the valley.  It is moving ponderously down
the road, and the road is cracking under it and giving way.  It sounds
like artillery fire.  But the blue globe keeps going on, and there is a
broad trail of fire behind it where the concrete of the road has melted
into slag.  The country is lighted up like noon.  The trees and houses
and shrubs are burning furiously.  It is hell down there, folks, simply
hell.  We are glad we are thirty thousand feet above it.  Even here we
have to use black glasses--"



Bennion's breath was coming is heaving gasps.  He disregarded the radio
for a second and swept his glance across the instrument board.  The
raymeters were showing a distinctly higher activity.  He peered into
the periscope.  Outside it was like daylight.  But all he saw was the
familiar hills and nearby deserted houses.  He listened in again.  He
had to know what the giant atom would do next.  In theory he knew what
it would do, but he was worried about the strength of the roadbed.

"The fiery object is rolling slowly down hill.  It has come to the
junction of the army's tunnel road and the highway between Foxboro and
the town lately renamed New Eden.  It is following the road, though it
hesitates at the curves.  But it has made them all so far--",

"Thank heavens those curves were heavily banked," thought Bennion as he
listened.

"The flaming atom goes on down the valley," the radio voice was saying.
"It is winding and twisting, but it sticks to its course.  It is going
faster now, and everything it approaches bursts into flame.  We are
wondering what will happen when the road turns upward.  Hang on, folks,
and we'll let you know."

Bennion ripped off the headphones and carefully locked his leaden
helmet on.  It did not matter any longer what the birdseye view was.
The giant atom would soon be in his own lap.  He jammed his eye against
the periscope.  The light was growing brighter.  Its intensity was
getting to be unbearable to unshielded vision.  He left the periscope
for an instant and started up another cyclo motor.  Then he was back.

The dazzling giant atom rolled into full view.  It was coming fast.
Bennion snapped on the lead filters and resumed his vigil.  What would
it do next?  He was reminded of the grim humor of the old wisecrack
about engineers.  "Engineers never guess," it ran, "they estimate."
That was all he had done.  So many miles downhill, building up
velocity, then a sharp rise.  His car had done it--made the downgrade
and then topped the ridge and come to a stop.  But the frictions
involved were different.  He had tried to allow for that, but he did
not know how well.

The giant atom, blasting its fiery brilliance in every direction,
rolled inexorably on.  It came abreast the waiting _Star of Hope_, hit
the curve, wavered, and then started climbing up to it.  Bennion held
his breath as he watched.  Any second now would spell the difference
between the hope of success and flat failure.  The atom came on,
slowing gradually.  It was almost underneath the ship when it seemed to
come to a full stop.  But it was still moving ahead--a foot a minute.
It rolled out of sight and underneath the giant hull.

Bennion switched the field of the periscopic sight.  Now he was looking
straight down.  The atom hesitated on the brink of the hole beneath,
devoured its lips, then tumbled into it with a thud that nearly wrecked
the ship.  Bennion's hand reached out for the control levers that he
had cleverly located long before.  The giant atom was within the grasp
of the space ship.  The question to be decided was the strength of that
grasp.

The lower hatches rose on their hinges.  The two giant beams that the
colonists of New Eden had puzzled over slowly descended through the
openings.  At their lower ends they were fitted with grapnel like claws
of special barium alloys.  Bennion pushed other buttons.  The claws
closed after the manner of the maw of a steam shovel.  The giant atom
was within their grip.  The real test was to come.

Bennion flung his hands to the other side of the switchboard and jabbed
savagely at two buttons there.  Machinery whined and groaned as the
cycles came up to full power.  There was no result.  The atom was much
heavier than he had counted on.  He threw in a fifty per cent
overload--then a hundred, watching the gauges with an anxious eye.  He
cut in the last motor he had.  It was now or never.

The monstrous tongs began to rise.  It was slowly, to be sure, and with
groaning protests, but the giant atom was being lifted into the tail of
the _Star of Hope_.  Bennion waited with an almost unbeating heart
until the fiery ball was well up into the interior.  Then he slapped on
the magnetic brakes.  After that he threw a lever which opened a
spherical container of gargantuan size.  It was lined with many feet of
barium concrete.  Into that he eased the burden of the tongs.  With
another slash of the lever he clamped its jaws together and locked
them.  The giant atom was imprisoned on the _Star of Hope_!



With a clang Bennion closed his stern doors.  Then he shut off the
auxiliary cyclos.  He stepped into the elevator and went skyward toward
the nose.  Hurdles one, two, and three had been jumped.  The voracious
atom had taken the road in preference to sinking deeper into the
mountain.  It had kept the road all the way to the ship, where it had
fallen into the pit dug for it.  It had been lifted inside.  The rest
depended on the _Star of Hope_.

He crawled through the door of the control room, and seated himself in
the driving bucket.  At that height he felt safe in loosening his
helmet, for several decks of lead intervened between him and the deadly
menace below.  He replaced the headphones, then reached out for the
main drive switch.  The radio voice was still droning.

"Folks, this is the big moment--the pay-off.  The bright object, that
was going to devour the world has disappeared beneath the ship _Star of
Hope_.  It was drawn up into it.  It suddenly grew dimmer, though we
can see it still as a dim glow.  Oh, golly ... something terrific is
happening ... the entire district is bathed in blinding fire ... the
space ship has exploded ... no, NO ... it is taking off...."

Bennion heard no more.  His hand had already closed the ultimate
circuit.  His internal organs cried out in tortured pain as the
frightful acceleration flattened him against the back of his bucket
seat.

He was smothering from the sheer inability of expanding his breast to
take in another breath.

His circulation stopped.  He saw fire, then blackness.  After which he
passed completely out.




CHAPTER XX

_Star of Hope_

Inky blackness endured for eons.  Then it passed.  With great effort
Bennion opened his eyes.  The control room was flooded with brilliant
light.  Looming big in the lefthand ports was the moon, scarcely
twenty-five thousand miles away.  Bennion feasted his sight on the
sparkling surface, broken picturesquely, by mighty mountain ranges and
huge craters.  Then he found himself craning his neck to follow the
view, for the moon was rapidly drawing aft.  The _Star of Hope_ was
well launched into space, was already beyond the orbit of the moon.

Bennion adjusted the feed flow to the flaring tubes.  It was not enough
to get clear of the moon.  He must make certain that contact would not
be made with any other body in the solar system.  He threw the
propelling blasts sufficiently out of balance to ensure the rocket
ship's twisting upward, straight-way out of the plane of the ecliptic.
There was no more to do for the time being.  Bennion walked to a port
and gazed out at the multicolored stars that studded the heavens, now
to be seen with magnificent clarity.

"Beautiful, isn't it, Steve?" said a soft voice behind him.  Steve spun
as if struck by a lash.

"You!  Kitty!  You shouldn't be here!"

"I am here.  I couldn't let you do this thing alone.  I--you--that is
we--"

He dragged her to him in a grotesque embrace.  Unhelmeted, but with
bodies clad in heavy leaden suits, they must have appeared to an
astonished man on the moon as a species of ungainly turtle, from some
alien planet.

"I thought you were safe--on your way down south," he said.

"That is what I wanted you to think.  That is why I staged the thing
the way I did and left that note.  Instead I came here and stowed away.
It was just that we are partners in all other things.  I didn't want to
be left out on this."

"You're a selfish brat," he said, kissing her tenderly.

"What next?" she asked.  "Why did you have to come along at all?
Couldn't you have fired the rockets by remote control?"

"Yes.  I could have.  After that I would have lost control.  The giant
atom must be gotten rid of at all costs, and I mean completely.  If the
timing had been wrong, it would have hit the moon.  If you can imagine
the moon shrunk to a fireball one ten thousandth its size but with the
same mass, you can imagine also how little benefited the earth would be
by transferring the cancer atom from here to there.  Think, too, of how
much worse it would be if I were to dump the atom here and it should
wander into the field of Jupiter and set that enormous planet afire."

"Or let it drop into the sun to turn it into a raging nova," added
Kitty.  "Yes, I see now why you had to do it this way."

They fell silent, gazing at the jewelled skies.

"Let's have a look at our passenger," said Bennion, after a time.

He pulled over the periscope that gave a view of the interior of the
ship.  All that could be seen was a field of intolerable brilliance.

"I'm afraid our baby has eaten its way out of its shell.  Next it will
go for the driving tubes and the hull.  A spaceship with a ravenous
parasite in its bowels is not destined to last long, my dear."

Her laugh came as a merry tinkle.

"Don't go melodramatic on me, Stevie darling," she said.

"I won't," he cried.  "I was simply trying to prepare you for
something.  That was all."

He reached for a lever and gave it a vicious pull.  He jabbed at a
dozen buttons.  The ship shuddered in reply, seemed to twist and be
about to roll over.  Then it straightened out and went on before.  He
took another peep through the periscope.  He shoved the eyepiece away
and began unbuckling his armor.

"We may as well be comfortable," he said.  "Take off yours."

There followed the clankings and thuds as the heavy outer garments fell
to the deck.  They were left in their gray slacks they wore underneath.

"Now," he said, "how about throwing together some chow?  I can't
remember when I ate last."

She smiled gaily and opened the pantry door.  Then her hand reached for
a package of food concentrate.  She knew the crisis must have been
passed.



It was half an hour before they finished breakfast.  He smacked his
lips and strode to the periscope.  There were a few seconds of
twiddling and searching before he snapped on the switch that brought
the telescreen into full action.  The screen went dark and it was as if
they were looking out into the velvety star-studded void.

He shifted the controls slightly and a bright star came into view.  It
was blindingly brilliant, fiercely blue, and its dazzle made all the
other stars pale into insignificance.

He sat down and regarded it.  She sat down beside him and nestled close
to him, seizing his hand and holding it against her cheek.

"Is that it?" she asked.

"That is it," he said simply.  "The _Star of Hope_.  There goes our
little playmate of Fox Mountain--outward bound, forever and ever.  It
is the seed, the germ, of a new blue dwarf, but it will have to find
its fodder in some other system.  What we did was haul it out here into
the void and give it a parting kick to speed it on its way.  And there
it goes, wrapped in the fragments of Buck Turner's Ark.  Now we're
through.  We're on our way home."

She snuggled closer.  He placed an arm about her.

"When do we land?" she asked.

"Say," he cried, sitting up and taking his arm away, "you're a cool
one.  You are as matter of fact about this as if we were out for a spin
in a car."

"Why not?" she said.  "I got used to the idea days ago when I first
tumbled to what you were up to.  Don't forget that I can read
blueprints too.  This control car was too much like the little
_Katherine_ to be funny.  That was what gave me my first hunch.  And
then the detaching gear and all that.  I saw you could unhook it in
space and let the rest of the big ship drift on.  After that, when I
climbed up here yesterday and saw the Anrad lining--"

"You're just too smart," he said, smothering her in kisses.  "A guy
can't get away with a thing."

"No," she said, when she caught her breath, "not when he tells you
right at the outset that he has an ace up his sleeve."






[End of The Giant Atom, by Malcolm Jameson]
