THE DEADLY DUST

By WILLIAM FITZGERALD

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1947. By Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins) writing as William Fitzgerald. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

CHAPTER I

Where Is Bud Gregory?

A sturdy, small fishing-boat wallowed and rolled and heaved and pitched in the huge slow swells of mid-Pacific. It looked very much like any other fishing-boat and remarkably like those tuna-boats that put out from the West Coast of the United States and pursue their prey for as many thousands of miles as may be necessary.

It was just a little over a hundred feet long and was powered obviously by a Diesel engine. There was just one thing odd about the boat and one oddity about its crew and one about the object it towed and one about its wake.

The odd thing about the boat was that something remarkably like a radar antenna was fitted atop its pilot-house. The oddity about its crew was that every man wore heavy protective clothing of a sort usually found only among workers about atomic piles.

The oddity about the object it towed was that aside from the supporting pontoons that kept it afloat it was made of lead. It was a torpedo-shaped object some forty feet long and no more than eight or ten feet in diameter, kept from sinking by sheet-metal floats on either side.

The oddity of the wake was that it was quite clear for a few miles and then—miles and miles behind—dead fish lay on the water. It was possible to back-track the tuna-boat for a long, long way by dead fish lying on the surface. Of course, perhaps fifty miles astern the dead fish had been scattered by the waves and the trail had been thinned out and was not so clear.

But the fishy corpses made a trail for a hundred miles beyond that if you looked for them. Curiously, the trail was equally dense along its whole length, as if a certain poisonousness only had been towed through the water and did not spread afterward.

There was an oddity in the behavior, too, of the small craft after a while. The radar-antenna turned and 

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