Killdozer! (42 page)

With such a war memorial, there could only be peace. The earth could never forget the horror that could be loosed by war
.

That was Grenfell’s dream
.

G
RENFELL HANDED THE
typewritten sheet back. “That’s it, Jack. My idea, and—I wish I could express it like that.” He leaned back against the littered workbench, his strangely asymmetrical face quizzical. “Why is it that it takes a useless person adequately to express an abstract?”

Jack Roway grinned as he took back the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. “Interestin’ question, Grenfell, because this
is
your expression, the words
are
yours. Practically verbatim. I left out the ‘er’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ that you play conversational hopscotch with, and strung together all the effects you mentioned without mentioning any of the technological causes. Net result: you think I did it, when you did. You think it’s good writing, and I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

Jack spread his bony length out on the hard little cot. His relaxation was a noticeable act, like the unbuttoning of a shirt collar. He laughed.

“Of course I don’t. Much too emotional for my taste. I’m just a fumbling aesthete—useless, did you say? Mm-m-m yeah. I suppose so.” He paused reflectively. “You see, you cold-blooded characters, you scientists, are the true visionaries. Seems to me the essential difference between a scientist and an artist is that the scientist mixes his hopes with patience.

“The scientist visualizes his ultimate goal, but pays little attention to it. He is all caught up with the achievement of the next step upward. The artist looks so far ahead that more often than not he can’t see what’s under his feet; so he falls flat on his face and gets called useless by scientists. But if you strip all of the intermediate steps away from the scientist’s thinking, you have an artistic concept to which the scientist responds distantly and with surprise, giving some artist credit for deep perspicacity purely because the artist repeated something the scientist said.”

“You amaze me,” Grenfell said candidly. “You wouldn’t be what you are if you weren’t lazy and superficial. And yet you come out with things like that. I don’t know that I understand what you just said. I’ll have to think—but I do believe that you show all the signs of clear thinking. With a mind like yours, I can’t understand why you don’t use it to build something instead of wasting it in these casual interpretations of yours.”

Jack Roway stretched luxuriously. “What’s the use? There’s more waste involved in the destruction of something which is already built than in dispersing the energy it would take to help build something. Anyway, the world is filled with builders—and destroyers. I’d just as soon sit by and watch, and feel things. I like my environment, Grenfell. I want to feel all I can of it, while it lasts. It won’t last much longer. I want to touch all of it I can reach, taste of it, hear it, while there’s time. What is around me, here and now, is what is important to me. The acceleration of human progress, and the increase of its mass—to use your own terms—are taking humanity straight to Limbo. You, with your work, think you are fighting humanity’s inertia.
Well, you are. But it’s the kind of inertia called momentum. You command no force great enough to stop it, or even to change its course appreciably.”

“I have atomic power.”

Roway shook his head, smiling. “That’s not enough. No power is enough. It’s just too late.”

“That kind of pessimism does not affect me,” said Grenfell. “You can gnaw all you like at my foundations, Jack, and achieve nothing more than the loss of your front teeth. I think you know that.”

“Certainly I know that. I’m not trying to. I have nothing to sell, no one to change. I am even more impotent than you and your atomic power; and you are completely helpless. Uh—I quarrel with your use of the term ‘pessimist’, though. I am nothing of the kind. Since I have resolved for myself the fact that humanity, as we know it, is finished, I’m quite resigned to it. Pessimism from me, under the circumstances, would be the pessimism of a photophobiac predicting that the sun would rise tomorrow.”

Grenfell grinned. ‘I’ll have to think about that, too. You’re such a mass of paradoxes that turn out to be chains of reasoning. Apparently you live in a world in which scientists are poets and the grasshopper has it all over the ant.”

“I always did think that ant was a stinker.”

“Why do you keep coming here, Jack? What do you get out of it? Don’t you realize I’m a criminal?”

Roway’s eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I think you wish you were a criminal. The law says you are, and the chances are very strong that you’ll be caught and treated accordingly. Ethically, you know you’re not. It sort of takes the spice out of being one of the hunted.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Grenfell said thoughtfully. He sighed. “It’s so completely silly. During the war years, the skills I had were snatched up and the government flogged me into the Manhattan Project, expecting, and getting, miracles. I have never stopped working along the same lines. And now the government has changed the laws, and pulled legality from under me.”

“Hardly surprising. The government deals rather severely with soldiers who go on killing other soldiers after the war is over.” He
held up a hand to quell Grenfell’s interruption. “I know you’re not killing anyone, and are working for the opposite result. I was only pointing out that it’s the same switcheroo. We the people,” he said didactically, “have, in our sovereign might, determined that no atomic research be done except in government laboratories. We have then permitted our politicians to allow so little for maintenance of those laboratories—unlike our overseas friends—that no really exhaustive research can be done in them. We have further made it a major offense to operate such a bootleg lab as yours.” He shrugged. “Comes the end of mankind. We’ll get walloped first. If we put more money and effort into nuclear research than any other country, some other country would get walloped first. If we last another hundred years—which seems doubtful—some poor, spavined, underpaid government researcher will stumble on the aluminum-isotope space-heating system you have already perfected.”

“That was a little rough,” said Grenfell bitterly. “Driving me underground just in time to make it impossible for me to announce it. What a waste of time and energy it is to heat homes and buildings the way they do now! Space heating—the biggest single use for heat-energy—and I have the answer to it over there.” He nodded toward a compact cube of lead-alloys in the corner of the shop. “Build it into a foundation, and you have controllable heat for the life of the building, with not a cent for additional fuel and practically nothing for maintenance.” His jaw knotted. “Well, I’m glad it happened that way.”

“Because it got you started on your war memorial—The Pit? Yeah. Well, all I can say is, I hope you’re right. It hasn’t been possible to scare humanity yet. The invention of gunpowder was going to stop war, and didn’t. Likewise the submarine, the torpedo, the airplane, and that two-by-four bomb they pitched at Hiroshima.”

“None of that applies to The Pit,” said Grenfell. “You’re right; humanity hasn’t been scared off war yet; but the Hiroshima bomb rocked ’em back on their heels. My little memorial is the real stuff. I’m not depending on a fission effect, you know, with a release of one-tenth of one percent of the energy of the atom. I’m going to disrupt it completely, and get all the energy there is in it. And it’ll be
more
than a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, because I’m going to use twelve times as much explosive; and it’s going off on the ground, not fifteen hundred feet above it.” Grenfell’s brow, over suddenly hot eyes, began to shine with sweat. “And then—The Pit,” he said softly. “The war memorial to end war, and all other war memorials. A vast pit, alive with bubbling lava, radiating death for ten thousand years. A living reminder of the devastation mankind has prepared for itself. Out here on the desert, where there are no cities, where the land has always been useless, will be the scene of the most useful thing in the history of the race—a never-ending sermon, a warning, an example of the dreadful antithesis of peace.” His voice shook to a whisper, and faded.

“Sometimes,” said Roway, “You frighten me, Grenfell. It occurs to me that I am such a studied sensualist, tasting everything I can, because I am afraid to feel any one thing that much.” He shook himself, or shuddered. “You’re a fanatic, Grenfell. Hyperemotional. A monomaniac. I hope you can do it.”

“I can do it,” said Grenfell.

Two months passed, and in those two months Grenfell’s absorption in his work had been forced aside by the increasing pressure of current events. Watching a band of vigilantes riding over the waste to the south of his little buildings one afternoon, he thought grimly of what Roway had said. “Sometimes I think you wish you were a criminal.” Roway, the sensualist, would say that. Roway would appreciate the taste of danger, in the same way that he appreciated all the other emotions. As it intensified, he would wait to savor it, no matter how bad it got.

Twice Grenfell shut off the instigating power of the carbon-aluminum pile he had built, as he saw government helicopters hovering on the craggy skyline. He knew of hard-radiation detectors; he had developed two different types of them during the war; and he wanted no questions asked. His utter frustration at being unable to announce the success of his space-heating device, for fear that he would be punished as a criminal and his device impounded and forgotten—that frustration had been indescribable. It had canalized his mind, and intensified the devoted effort he had put forth for the things
he believed in during the war. Every case of neural shock he encountered in men who had been hurt by war and despised it, made him work harder on his monument—on The Pit. For if humans could be frightened by war, humanity could be frightened by The Pit.

And those he met who had been hurt by war and who still hated the late enemy—those who would have been happy to go back and kill some more, reckoning vital risk well worth it—those he considered mad, and forgot them.

So he could not stand another frustration. He was the center of his own universe, and he realized it dreadfully, and he had to justify his position there. He was a humanitarian, a philanthropist in the world’s truest sense. He was probably as mad as any man who has, through his own efforts, moved the world.

For the first time, then, he was grateful when Jack Roway arrived in his battered old convertible, although he was deliriously frightened at the roar of the motor outside his laboratory window. His usual reaction to Jack’s advent was a mixture of annoyance and gratification, for it was a great deal of trouble to get out to his place. His annoyance was not because of the interruption, for Jack was certainly no trouble to have around. Grenfell suspected that Jack came out to see him partly to get the taste of the city out of his mouth, and partly to be able to feel superior to somebody he considered of worth.

But the increasing fear of discovery, and his race to complete his work before it was taken from him by a hysterical public, had had the unusual effect of making him lonely. For such a man as Grenfell to be lonely bordered on the extraordinary; for in his daily life there were simply too many things to be done. There had never been enough hours in a day nor days in a week to suit him, and he deeply resented the encroachments of sleep, which he considered a criminal waste.

“Roway!” he blurted, as he flung the door open, his tone so warm that Roway’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “What dragged you out here?”

“Nothing in particular,” said the writer, as they shook hands. “Nothing more than usual, which is a great deal. How goes it?”

“I’m about finished.” They went inside, and as the door closed,
Grenfell turned to face Jack. “I’ve been finished for so long I’m ashamed of myself,” he said intently.

“Ha! Ardent confession so early in the day! What are you talking about?”

“Oh, there have been things to do,” said Grenfell restlessly. “But I could go ahead with the … with the big thing at almost any time.”

“You hate to be finished. You’ve never visualized what it would be like to have the job done.” His teeth flashed. “You know, I’ve never heard a word from you as to what your plans are after the big noise. You going into hiding?”

“I … haven’t thought much about it. I used to have a vague idea of broadcasting a warning and an explanation before I let go with the disruptive explosion. I’ve decided against it, though. In the first place, I’d be stopped within minutes, no matter how cautious I was with the transmitter. In the second place … well, this is going to be so big that it won’t need any explanation.”

“No one will know who did it, or why it was done.”

“Is that necessary?” asked Grenfell quietly.

Jack’s mobile face stilled as he visualized The Pit, spewing its ten-thousand-year hell. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Isn’t it necessary, though, to you?”

“To me?” asked Grenfell, surprised. “You mean, do I care if the world knows I did this thing, or not? No; of course I don’t. A chain of circumstance is occurring, and it has been working through me. It goes directly to The Pit; The Pit will do all that is necessary from then on. I will no longer have any part in it.”

Jack moved, clinking and splashing, around the sink in the corner of the laboratory. “Where’s all your coffee? Oh—here. Uh … I have been curious about how much personal motive you had for your work. I think that answers it pretty well. I think, too, that you believe what you are saying. Do you know that people who do things for impersonal motives are as rare as fur on a fish?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I believe that, too. Sugar? And milk. I remember. And have you been listening to the radio?”

“Yes. I’m … a little upset, Jack,” said Grenfell, taking the cup.
“I don’t know where to time this thing. I’m a technician, not a Machiavelli.”

“Visionary, like I said. You don’t know if you’ll throw this gadget of yours into world history too soon or too late—is that it?”

“Exactly. Jack, the whole world seems to be going crazy. Even fission bombs are too big for humanity to handle.”