Voltage--from Nowhere!
Somewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.
I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. "There's your
eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday." I started to reel
in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. "Get the
camera, and we'll try for a picture."
We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird
of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy
was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,
his eyes glued in the image-finder. "Golly--" he whispered, almost
prayerfully, "six foot wing spread--maybe more--"
The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to
leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The
eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the
cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its
beak--
A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird--the bird--I leaped out of
cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us
from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting
knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise
in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings--then,
in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and
felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,
ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of
wide wings. A red haze spun around me--
Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my
shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was
hardly recognizable. "Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?
You must be crazy!"
I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I
was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird
blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, "What happened?"
My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling
wrathfully. "You tell _me_ what happened! Mike, what in the devil
were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack
a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped
out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with
your knife! You must be clean crazy!"
I let the knife drop out of my hand. "Yeah--" I said heavily, "Yeah,
I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry--I didn't--" my voice
trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let
it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. "That's
all right, Mike," he said in a dead voice, "you scared the daylights
out of me, that's all." He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my
face. "Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind
the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare
hands--" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run
down the slope in the direction of the cabin.
I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken
pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with
it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in
the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time
and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency
of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I
didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than
half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally
promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,
carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I
started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd
rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A
smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded
bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He
did not turn.
"Andy--" I said.
"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the
fish."
"Andy--I'll get you another camera--"
"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat."
He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a
second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,
restlessly. "Mike--" he said entreatingly, "you came here for a rest!
Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?" He
looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light
spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. "You've
turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!"
"I can't stop now!" I said violently. "I'm on the track of
something--and if I stop I'll never find it!"
"Must be real important," Andy said sourly, "if it makes you act like
bughouse bait."
I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known
it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big
blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't
care.
"Sit down, Andy," I told him. "You don't know what happened down there.
Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you
what happened."
I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my
mouth. "That is--I will if I can."
Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a
government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I
never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough
to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd
built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set
of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up
I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I
was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and
this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions
that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they
thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I
would have liked to think so.
It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive
short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By
the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got
a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen
before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very
old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver
in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because
right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes
later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through
the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and
I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,
and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in
the report that I'd been struck by lightning.
It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast--faster
than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except
that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without
burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered
_before_ I woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But
the _kind_ and _type_ of scars on my body didn't ring true.
Electricity--even freak lightning--doesn't make that kind of burns. And
my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.
But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they
were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's
face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't
think I was crazy; he thought _he_ was.
I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it
too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time
we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his
log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.
"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the
vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But--" his jaw
grew stubborn, "the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to
have something for the record."
I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated
me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division
and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up
those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook
while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they
could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of
that.
The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane
to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.
"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We
can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,
you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage
out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying
to find out where that spare energy came from--and where it went. But
we've marked that whole line of research _closed_, Kenscott. If I
were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it."
"It wasn't a message from Mars," I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't
think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left
the office and went to clean out my drawer.
I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.
The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the
States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to
Andy. "They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something
funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments
they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.
Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't
make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or
whatever they were--and when they talked about weather disturbances
after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when
we came down here--" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions
together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A
tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. "It started up again
the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following
me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the
lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and
blew out five fuses trying to change one."
"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them--" My brother's
eyes watched me, uneasy. "Mike, you're kidding--"
"I wish I were," I said. "That energy just drains into me, and nothing
happens. I'm immune." I shrugged, rose and walked across to the
radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the
disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.
"I'll show you," I told him.
The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the
speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.
"Turn it up--" Andy said uneasily.