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 pitchedin the huge slow swells of mid-Pacific. It looked very much like anyother fishing-boat and remarkably like those tuna-boats that put outfrom the West Coast of the United States and pursue their prey for asmany thousands of miles as may be necessary.
It was just a little over a hundred feet long and was powered obviouslyby a Diesel engine. There was just one thing odd about the boat andone oddity about its crew and one about the object it towed and oneabout its wake.
The odd thing about the boat was that something remarkably like a radarantenna was fitted atop its pilot-house. The oddity about its crew wasthat every man wore heavy protective clothing of a sort usually foundonly among workers about atomic piles.
The oddity about the object it towed was that aside from thesupporting pontoons that kept it afloat it was made of lead. It was atorpedo-shaped object some forty feet long and no more than eight orten feet in diameter, kept from sinking by sheet-metal floats on eitherside.
The oddity of the wake was that it was quite clear for a few milesand then—miles and miles behind—dead fish lay on the water. It waspossible to back-track the tuna-boat for a long, long way by dead fishlying on the surface. Of course, perhaps fifty miles astern the deadfish had been scattered by the waves and the trail had been thinned outand was not so clear.
But the fishy corpses made a trail for a hundred miles beyond that ifyou looked for them. Curiously, the trail was equally dense along itswhole length, as if a certain poisonousness only had been towed throughthe water and did not spread afterward.
There was an oddity in the behavior, too, of the small craft aftera while. The radar-antenna turned and flickered here and there,restlessly. It searched the horizon exhaustively. Then, suddenly, anoily liquid came out of the torpedo-shaped leaden object. It bubbledto the surface and spread out. It evaporated very quickly, though. Thevapor was blown to the eastward by the wind.
An oily liquid came out of the torpedo-shaped object, bubbled to the surface and spread out.
The seeming tuna-boat forged ahead sturdily, towing that odd object,which now gushed out a volatile liquid which evaporated quickly andwhose fumes were blown away. It went on for miles and miles and miles,its radar-antenna flickering nervously about the horizon while thetransient film of oily stuff trailed behind it.
And there was another peculiarity. The trail of dead fish grew muchthicker after the liquid spread out to dry up and blow away toeastward. Instead of forty or fifty fish per mile there were hundreds.In one place, where a school of some finny sort had swum beneath thetemporary layer of oil, the ocean was almost carpeted with scaly,belly-up corpses....
On August 8th the background-count of all the standard Geiger-Millertubes on the Pacific Coast, from Oregon to Southern California, went upfrom 1-3 to 3-5 per minute per square centimeter of