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Read Ebook: Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909 by Saderra Mas Miguel
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Ebook has 123 lines and 56126 words, and 3 pages
But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying sounds of the overheated motor dwindled and ceased.
Presently Murfree got out and paced up and down beside the car, restlessly.
After a time he went to the back and took out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and there was a freakish-looking metal-lined glass tube with electrical connections plainly showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of a completely different shape.
Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from somewhere inside the box a "click" sounded. A moment later, there was another. Then two clicks close together, and a pause, and another.
Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked briskly but unrhythmically.
There was no order in the sequence of tiny sounds.
Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade. He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree and the box.
"What good does that do?" Murfree's wife said.
"None at all," Murfree said wretchedly. "It only tells me nothing's happened to us yet."
He stood watching the box, in which nothing moved at all, but from which clickings came at brief intervals.
Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed and stridulated.
The box clicked.
Bud Gregory got up and came over curiously. He regarded the box with an interested intentness. It was not an informed look, as of someone looking at a familiar object. It wasn't even a puzzled look, as of someone trying to solve the meaning of something strange. He wore exactly the absorbed expression of a man who picks up an unfamiliar book and reads it and finds it fascinating.
"What's--uh--what's this here thing do?" asked Bud, drawling.
"It's a Geiger counter," said Murfree. He had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had. Not even Bud. But Murfree said, "It counts cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It's a detector for cosmic rays and radioactivity."
Bud's face remained uncomprehending.
"Don't mean nothing to me," he drawled. "Kinda funny, though, how it works. Somethin' hits, an' current goes through, an' then it cuts off till somethin' else hits. What you want it for?"
It was genuine curiosity. But an ordinary man, looking at a Geiger counter, does not understand that a tiny particle at high velocity--so small that it passes through a glass tube and a metal lining without hindrance--makes a Geiger tube temporarily conductive. Murfree stared blankly at Bud Gregory.
"How the heck--" Then he said curiously, "It was invented to detect radiations that come from nobody knows where. And it's used in the plants that make atom bombs, to tell when there's too much radioactivity--too much for safety."
"I heard about atom bombs," Bud Gregory drawled. "Never knew how they worked."
Murfree, still curious, spoke in words as near to one syllable as he could. This man had said he could make an impossible repair and had the air of knowing what he was talking about.
He looked at a Geiger counter and he knew how it worked and had not the least idea what it was used for. Murfree gave him a necessarily elementary account of atomic fission. He was appalled at the inadequacy of his explanation even as he finished it. But Bud Gregory drawled:
"Oh, that--mmm--I get it. Them little things that knock that ura--ura--uranium stuff to flinders are the same kinda things that make this dinkus work. They kinda knock a little bit of air apart when they hit it. I bet they change one kinda stuff to another kind, too, if enough of 'em hit. Huh?"
Murfree jumped a foot. This lanky and ignorant backwoods repairman had absorbed highly abstruse theory, put into a form so simplified that it practically ceased to have any meaning at all, and had immediately deduced the fact of ionization of gases by neutron collision. And the transmutation of elements! He not only understood but could use his understanding.
"Right interestin'," said Bud Gregory and yawned. "I reckon your motor's cool enough to work on."
He put his hand on the cylinder-block. It was definitely hot, but not hot enough to scorch his fingers.
"Yeah," he said. "I'll fix the pumpshaft first."
He went languidly to a well beside the repair shed. He drew a bucket of water. He poured it into the radiator. There was a very minor hissing, which ceased immediately. He filled the radiator, reached down and worked at the pumpshaft with his fingers and with a speculative, distant look in his eyes, then straightened up.
He shambled into the shed and came out, trailing a long, flexible cable behind him. Up to the very edge of the Smokies and for a varying distance into them, there is no village so small or so remote that it does not have electric power. He put a round wooden cheesebox on the running-board of the car and drew out two shorter cables with clips on their ends. He adjusted them.
Murfree saw an untidy tangle of wires and crude hand-wound coils in the box. There were three cheap radio tubes. Bud Gregory turned on a switch and leaned against the mud-guard, waiting with infinite leisureliness.
"What's that?" asked Murfree, indicating the cheesebox.
"Ain't got any name," said Bud Gregory. "Somethin' I fixed up to weld stuff with. It's weldin' your shaft." He looked absently into the distance. "It saves a lotta work," he added without interest.
"But--but you can't weld a shaft without taking it out!" protested Murfree. "It'd short!"
Bud Gregory yawned.
"This don't. It's some kinda stuff them tubes make. It don't go through iron. It just kinda bounces around. Where there's a break, it heats up an' welds. When it's all welded it just bounces around."
Murfree swallowed. He walked around the car and looked at the apparatus in the cheesebox. He traced leads with his eyes. His mouth opened and closed.
"But that can't do anything!" he protested. "The current will just go around and around!"
"All right," said Bud Gregory. "Just as y'please."
He waited patiently. Presently there was a faint humming noise. Bud Gregory turned off the switch and reached down. He removed the connecting clamps and meditatively fumbled with the water pump.
"That's okay," he finally said. "Try it if y'like."
He poked in the cheesebox, changing connections apparently at random. Murfree reached down and fingered the water pump. He had made certain of the trouble with his car and he knew exactly how the broken shaft felt. Now it was perfect, exactly as if it had been taken out, welded, smoothed, trued and replaced.
"It feels all right!" said Murfree incredulously.
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory. "It is. Y'car's froze, now, though. Take the handle an' try it."
Murfree got out the starting-handle from the tool-box. He inserted it and strained. The motor was frozen solid. It could not be stirred. Murfree felt sick.
"Wait a minute," said Bud Gregory, "an' try again."
He put a single one of the clamps on the motor and tucked the other away in the cheesebox. He turned on the switch.
"Heave now," he suggested.
Murfree heaved--and almost fell over. There was no resistance to the movement of the motor except compression which was infinitely springy. There was no friction whatever. It moved with an incredible, fluid ease. It had never moved so effortlessly--though the compression remained as perfect as it had ever been. Murfree stared. Bud Gregory took off the clamp.
"Try again," he said, grinning.
With all his strength, Murfree could not move the motor. Overheated, it was frozen tight with all the oil burned from the inner surface of the cylinders. Yet an instant before--
"Yeah," said Bud Gregory, drily.
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