Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/48

 find that they had secured, during the war, a number of Wilson Watkins intercommunications.

Back at home he assembled the components for what he had come to think of as the T assembly.

Then he drove out to the country, well away from traffic, and where the woods were thick and owned by Hydraulic Reserve.

He connected the flashlight cell, then pointed the assembly at the woods.

It took about a thousandth of a second, he imagined. There was a clear path through the standing timber. A path thirty feet wide, two miles long. There were great holes in the earth where the roots of trees had been, but no blade of grass nor living matter showed in that thirtyfoot width. There was no dust in the air where the trees had been—only the air, clear and very still.

The story was in the paper, three days later. It was written as an oddity, as though the rewrite man didn't expect any reader to take it seriously. A mysterious slash in the forest, forty miles from Temple City, and a few guesses as to what could have caused it.

Someone, Tredel thought, would know what had caused it, and would only want to know who.

That was what came of being a fool, he told himself. If he had to test the thing, he should have taken it further away. Got deeper in the woods, even. Pointed it toward the ground.

Too late for that. Too late, even, to wonder how the assembly worked. He could smile grimly over that. He had taken a component of it, imagined the whole assembly before he knew that such existed, and still he did not know why nor how it worked. He had connected it to an electric cell because that was the logical thing to do. Then he had pointed it, and expected something to happen. There was no trigger to press, no mechanism—just the desire that it should operate. He wondered: How much time?

How fast would they move, what would they do? How long would it take to narrow the field down to him?

He started, a dozen times in the next few weeks, to go to Washington. Turn the story and the weapon over to someone in the government. Get some strength on his side.

Yet, he didn't. He would see it through himself. By seeing it through, at that time, meant only waiting until they caught up with him. They were bound to, of course. A really efficient organization should have had him before. Put half a dozen factors together and there would be only one person it could be—Jim Tredel. Wait and see what they would do, though. Then it would be time enough—he really didn't think there would be time enough though, to scream for help.

Edith left him on the fourteenth, three days after their first wedding anniversary.

Tredel couldn't blame her, not 48