Collected Short Fiction, page 408
His voice sank into black depths of hate.
“My father was a laborer in the Minturn steel mills,” he said. “He was not a strong man. He used to come home exhausted by the work. Iron drained the life out of him.
“Sometimes there was no work—because the iron industry was greater than men. Then he lay about the house, getting shabby and cross and despondent, while we lived up the few dollars my mother had saved. Or he drank, and stayed away from home, miserable and ashamed—because iron had beaten him, crushed him.
“Iron finally killed him. Hideously. I saw his body, after he had been splashed with liquid steel.
“I was nine years old, then. My mother had his compensation—the price that iron paid for his life. And she set up a little eating place for the men. “Ma Garrick’s,” they called it.
“She found money, somehow, to keep me in high school and college. ‘Study hard. Pete,’ she used to tell me. ‘Learn things, and get on top. Your Pa was a slave to iron. And you will be. But you can slave with your brains and not with your hands. You can live better than your Pa did, and die a civilized death.
“ ‘But you’ll always be a slave to iron, Pete.’
“She used to laugh, in a secret, bitter way she had. ‘We’re all slaves to iron, Pete,’ she would tell me. ‘You might think that Joseph Minturn isn’t, when he owns the mills. But when times were bad, I’ve had him stop for a cup of coffee in the middle of the night, white-faced and worried about ore-leases and strikers and markets and competition. He’s a puppet, just like the rest of us—on iron strings.’ ”
Peter Garrick’s dark eyes looked past tile girl’s white hat, past the straggling cabbage palms and the dazzling beach, over the flat, illimitable sea.
“I worked hard,” he said, “for her. I wanted to set her free from the tyranny of iron. I won a scholarship; I came back to work in your father’s research department, and after a while I was head of it.
His grim face smiled a little.
“I remember how proud she was, when I told her that I was working on a ray that would carry electricity thousands of miles; without a wire. She said, ‘Doctor Pete—it’s grand to call a son of mine Doctor—you’ve done wonderful things.’
“Then she shook her head. ‘But don’t think, Pete, that anything you ever do will set you free. Your invention will just make iron a stronger, harder master. Still men will sweat and die in the mines and the mills to make iron machines. And toil to own them. And die under them.
“ ‘Men won’t be happier. But iron will be a mightier master.”
Peter Garrick’s hollow dark eyes looked back at the girl, and lit again faintly with dim-remembered joy.
“It was that day, Jean, that I told her about you—that we were to be married as soon as the power beam was worked out. That pleased her mightily. She said, “Miss Jean’s a real lady, Pete—not to care that your father worked in her father’s mill. I’m proud of her for you—of both both of you, my son.
“ ‘The two of you will always be slaves to iron; but I hope you may be reasonably happy slaves.’ ”
The face beneath the white hat lifted, bright with a painful eagerness.
“We were happy, Pete,” said Jean Minturn. “And we could be again.”
Peter Garrick seemed unconscious of the interruption.
“My mother was interested in my work,” he went on. “She used to come down to the shops, every few days, to see what I was doing. When she saw the trial heliocopter, powered by the transmission beam, she wanted to go up with me.
“I wouldn’t let her go, of course, until the preliminary trials were complete. Then I thought it was perfectly safe. I was taking up the machine, and she got in with me. I hadn’t the heart to make her get out—she was so proud and happy.
“You know what happened. The beam apparatus worked perfectly at first, as it had always done. We climbed to two hundred feet, and drifted over the testing field. Then the grid burned out in the oscillation power valve—a consequence of earth-induction; I should have foreseen it.”
His lean jaw hardened bitterly.
“But I didn’t. We had no warning. We were so low that there was no time to do anything. We had parachutes. But there was no time—” He bit his lip. “Mother was killed, and I should have been.”
His dark eyes looked at the girl, moodily.
“You were splendid when I was in the hospital, Jean. But it wasn’t you that made me want to live. When I finally decided not to die, it was so that I could avenge my mother—”
Jean Minturn caught his arm again, anxiously.
“T know it was a terrible thing, Peter,” she said urgently. “But it was just a dreadful accident. You mustn’t blame yourself for it—”
“I don’t,” he said harshly. “I blame iron. I was just the tool of iron—it was iron that killed my mother.” Into his voice had come a ring of terror. “It is an evil metal, Jean. It must have shed the blood of a thousand million men! It is the metal of knives and swords and bayonets and guns.”
His laugh had the wild elation of mania.
“But I have found a way to sweep it off the planet!”
Horror widened the girl’s gray eyes. They looked briefly, fearfully, back past the dunes and the palms to the plane on the lonely beach, and then again at Peter Garrick.
“Peter!” Her voice was low with dread. “You had—you have a splendid mind, Peter. Try to keep it. You can do wonderful things for the world, and for—us.”
His somber eyes regarded her, while he laughed with a short, hoarse sound.
“You think I’m crazy, Jean. Maybe the world would think so. But I’m telling you the truth. Come in here, and I will show you a discovery that will burn all the iron off the face of the earth!”
As she peered into his hollow, burning eyes, her disbelief was replaced by apprehension.
“Maybe you can do it, Peter,” she said at last. “But you mustn’t! Think what it would mean. All our civilization stands on a foundation of iron—”
Peter Garrick shook his shaggy head.
“Iron is the master,” his deep voice said. “It did take a happy savage and civilize him as you say—civilize him into a miserable slave, to toil for iron and die by iron! But men shall be free.” He seized her arm. “Home on. I’ll show you.”
“Listen, Peter—”
She hung back unwillingly, trembling with dread. He dragged her roughly into the cabin.
It was one long room. A cot stood in one corner, beside a small iron stove cluttered with cooking utensils. But most of the room was filled with work benches and apparatus. A little gasoline motor-generator stood near a large, cross-shaped vacuum tube, which was surrounded with coils, condensers, batteries, and equipment hidden in black rubberized boxes.
From a little rack on a rough improvised bench, Peter Garrick picked up a tube of heavy clear glass, with a close-fitting ground glass stopper. He gave it to the girl.
“Look at this.”
Within the tube she saw a little cluster of pointed triangular crystals, gleamin’ with a silvery metallic sheen. Her grey eyes studied it. Her forehead wrinkled into a puzzled frown.
“What is it, Peter.”
“Iron,” he told her. “Living iron. I might term it—just now in suspended animation. I turned off the catalytic ray, and stoop-id the change, or it should have been dead, now—dust.
“But watch. I’ll show you.” His hand moved toward the cross-shaped tube. “First I must start the ray. It serves a double purpose. First it acts as a sort of catalytic agent, to facilitate the sub-atomic reactions of the process. While it consumes but a few watts of power, the tube will make the change possible over all the earth.
“In fact, too great an intensity of the ray inhibits the reaction. The second purpose of the tube is to protect the iron parts of my apparatus, which I have arranged near it, where the ray is too strong to permit, the process to occur.”
He had bent, as he spoke, to start the noisy little gasoline motor. Now he moved switches and rheostats until coils buzzed angrily, and the tall, cross shaped tube lit with a painful, flickering green.
He drew the trembling girl beside him to a bench. Before her terrified eyes, he laid a common iron nail on a clean sheet of glass. Then, carefully, he removed the stopped from the glass tube, and poured out the little crystals a few inches away.
“Watch.”
At the instant they came from the tube, the argent crystals changed. They shone with a clear rosy light that deepened at their spear-like points to hot scarlet. They moved, grew longer. They budded; new tiny lances thrust from them.
“They’re changing!” Jean whispered. They’re alive!”
Garrick said, “But watch the nail.”
She saw that the nail, several inches away, was flecked with points of red fire. She saw minute sharp needles push away from it, branch, grow. The process became more rapid. A few moments, and the nail was a cluster of scarlet, glowing crystals.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “it’s like the other—”
Her voice stopped when she saw that the tangle of crystals was changing. The red light was fading from the needle points. They turned gray, crumbled. A little heap of gray dust was left on the glass.
Peter Garrick’s big hand moved abruptly to throw a switch. The angry coils became s lent, and the eye-probing flicker died from the cross-shaped tube. The red gleam faded with it from the new crystals. They became silvery again, motionless.
Carefully, with a card, he scraped them up. dropped them in the thick glass tube, replaced the stopper. The little engine made a gasping death-rattle, and stood still.
“Well,” said Peter Garrick, “you’ve seen it living iron, burning itself to ashes.”
He blew contemptuously at the gray dust left on the glass.
“What—” the girl whispered fearfully, “what was it?”
“It is a self-perpetuating sub-atomic process in some ways analagous to life—although little more so, perhaps, than fire is. It feeds on iron. It liberates energy in the radiation with which it propogates itself by affecting other masses of free iron.
“The iron is consumed by a process of atomic disintegration. Only dust is left—an end product of the atomic disruption—dead— utterly useless—”
“You’re not—” the girl protested fearfully. “You aren’t—”
“Yes,” Garrick said grimly, “I’m going to release the crystal life—”
She stared in wide-eyed horror.
“Then all the iron in the world—in automobiles and railroads and airplanes and ships, in buildings and tools and watches and plows— it will all grow and crumble into dust?”
His dark head nodded; his hollow eyes burned with a terrible fervor.
“And men will be freed from iron.”
“Freed!” Her voice was high with urgency.
“Men will die, Peter—”
He nodded somberly.
“There will be pain and death,” he said. “Because iron has made men into weaklings and slaves. Men will perish in their falling buildings, too stupid to escape. They will die because they are too weak and too ignorant to find their own food, their own shelter.
“But men will recover their lost independence. They can build another civilization, free from the cruel despotism of iron. They will find other useful substances, other metals. They will turn to peace instead of war. They will restore that simple happy age that was ended by the curse of iron.”
Jean Minturn whirled away from him suddenly, and ran to the door. She paused there, her white face quivering and tense.
“It’s a mad thing, Peter,” she cried. “And you aren’t going to do it! I’m going to send somebody to stop you! For your own sake, Pete, as well—”
Peter Garrick shook his lean shaggy head. A terrible strength rang in his voice.
“No, Jean, I can’t be stopped. If all the navy came, the men would find their ships growing into living crystals beneath them, and crumbling to dust. But wait, Jean—” His dark face was wrenched with pain. “You’ll be hurt—”
But she was gone Heedless of his shouts, she ran down across the low dunes, toward her plane waiting on the white beach. He watched her stonily until she had almost reached it. Then he turned abruptly.
“Now!” he muttered. “Before she can take off—or she’ll be killed—”
With trembling, desperate haste, he labored to crank the little balky engine. It fired at last, and ran with staccato explosions. The cross-shaped tube lit again with its painful green.
Garrick opened the glass tube, and poured the tiny crystals out of it upon the rusty iron stove. He stepped back quickly as they began to grow. Scarlet spears thrust away from it like the blades of some magic plant. In a few minutes it was no longer a stove, but a grotesque, jagged heap of scarlet, crystalline ore.
A sharp pain stabbed at his thigh—the knife in his pocket had turned to needle-pointed crystals. A sharp tinkle, as the crystal of the watch on his wrist was burst outward. The tin cooking vessels on the wall turned to crystals, and fell with a jangle like shattered glass. His little hunting rifle, leaning in a corner, fell in gleaming fragments.
The quick deep drumming of an airplane motor made him run out of the cabin. Jean was in the plane. Every atom of iron destroyed, he knew, was sending out the propagating radiation. Would it stop her plane in time, before the crash would be fatal?
He ran down toward the dunes, shouting: “Jean, don’t take off! You’ll be killed—” Her white arm flashed as she waved him back. The ship roared forward across the hard wet sand. It lifted. It wheeled away across the flat blue expanse of water, flying low.
Garrick watched, open-mouthed. Was there some failure. Did the catalytic radiation not reach the plane in sufficient intensity? No, that was impossible, he knew; they must cover the whole planet. Then the propagating rays—would those from the stove be adequate? Or—
The thundering motor caught, stopped with a loud explosion. His anxious eyes glimpsed scarlet crystals stabbing from the doomed machine. It sagged toward the water, the alloys of its hull and wings still intact when the steel of the engine had been destroyed.
Clutching at his throat, Garrick watched the crash. The plane fell in shallow water, crumpled. The fuselage was half submerged. One broken wing was thrust up like an arm lifted in a signal of distress.
Jean—could she have survived—
Crash.
He started at the unexpected sound from behind him. For a moment he looked back, to see that the cabin had collapsed. The nails, of course! How many millions had died, throughout the world, as other buildings fell? He had not thought of that.
But in a moment he was running again. It was Jean who mattered now. He crossed the beach, waded out over the sandy bottom, toward the wreck. His heavy shoes came apart on his feet. Their hob-nails had been iron. He stopped to tear off the useless uppers. Rocks and shells were painful to his tender feet, but, splashing on, he ignored the pain.
Out beyond him, the black triangle of a shark’s fin cut the milky surface. It was yet far out, but it might—And there were barracuda in these waters, their razor sharp teeth far more dangerous. If he had a gun, even a knife—
He bit his lip. No man would ever again have the protection of a steel barreled gun, even of a good knife—
He went on, splashing, swimming when the water was too deep to wade. He came to the plane, clambered over the fuselage.
“Jean!” Panic edged his voice. “Jean, do you hear?”
There was no answer. The door was stuck. If he only had a knife, to cut his way into the half-submerged fuselage. Tearing at the wreckage, he cut his bare hands. At last the door came open. He saw the motionless form, touched it.
He gasped a grateful sigh.
Her head was above the water. She was living. He could feel the faint pulsation in her wrist. Her body moved limply when he tugged at it. He saw the ugly bleeding wound upon her temple, where it had struck something. The white hat was gone, her brown hair clotted with red.
His first frantic efforts failed to revive her. He dragged her inert body out of the wreckage, swam and waded with it back to the shore. At last, with his lungs heaving for breath, he staggered with her up across the beach, and laid her in the shadow of a palm.
She was conscious, then, for a little time.
“Water,” her voice came faintly through bloodless lips. “Oh, Pete, I feel so awful. Please—a drink—”
The pipes and the iron tank of the little water system had been destroyed. Pushing his way into the jungle, to the little spring that had fed the reservoir, Peter Garrick wondered blankly how many millions now must perish of thirst, for want of iron.
The rusty tin-can cup at the spring had crumbled away. He searched and at last found a broken cocoanut shell, and brought water in that.
The girl lifted her head weakly to rinse the brine from her mouth, and sip. Her blood-streaked face was rigid, sweat-beaded with agony.
“My head, Pete,” she murmured. “It hurts so awfully! Can’t you get me a doctor?”
“But if I leave you—”
“You must, Pete! My head hurts so—”
“I’ll try—”
Numb with the despair of a slow, sickening realization, he ran down the beach, to the white-painted skiff turned bottom-up over the little outboard motor. It was a frail craft, to meet miles of sea—
When he tried to right the boat, the gunwhale came away in his hand. The nails had been iron. And all the steel parts of the motor had fallen to dust.
He stood up, his face haggard and dull with despair.
Could he signal? Perhaps build a radio transmitter Am his apparatus in the cabin? Fingernails cut into his quivering palms. Even if he could, there was no radio set working anywhere, to pick up his message. Every iron part, every magnet in headphone and speaker, had been destroyed.
Teeth sunk savagely into his lip, he stumbled back to the girl. At first he thought her unconscious again. But she opened her sick gray eyes, whispered:
“Pete—the doctor—”
