the United States over some weeks past. The men who had made the measurements were passengers on the ship which brought them.

They were highly elated. They were taken to see the atomic piles which had produced the measurements. They bowed profoundly before the atomic engines which silently produced death for a nation.

And that night there was celebration on the island. But the tuna-boat due to leave went out on schedule despite the festivities. It towed a torpedo-shaped lead object behind it....

On the 29th of August the background-count of standard Geiger-Miller tubes on the West Coast was 56-58 and still going up. The radioactivity-constant of the United States had risen to something like twenty-five times normal. It showed no tendency to stop.

Bud Gregory's boy was in trouble. The event itself was not important but it enabled Murfree to find Bud Gregory. The happening occurred within half an hour after Bud sent his son to town for some beer.

The fourteen-year old boy chuffed away from the shack into which his family had moved. The car in which Bud Gregory had taken his tribe across the continent was an ancient and dilapidated rattletrap. By any normal standard it should have wheezed its last mile years before.

It had a cloth top, a cracked windshield and, when it was running exclusively on its motor, it made noises like a broken-down coffee grinder working on a protesting cat. It should have groaned at any grade and balked at any really perceptible incline. Its absolute maximum of speed should have been twenty miles an hour downhill.

But Bud Gregory was something very much more than a genius. He had made a gadget for his car. It was a radio tube and a coil or two, the windings being made in a fashion nobody else could understand and Bud Gregory could not explain. When the gadget was turned on and attached to any bit of metal things happened.

Normally the molecules of—say—the metal of any automobile-engine block move in all directions in a strictly random fashion. When Bud Gregory's gadget operated, the molecules of the same automobile-block moved in the same direction—ahead.

If the motor wasn't running the metal cooled down as the heat-energy it contained was turned into kinetic energy. If it was kept running the burning fuel in its cylinders kept it from going so far below zero that it would condense liquid air upon itself.

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