The Gods Hate Kansas Read online

  At the end of a week they faced the grim truth.

  “We’ve flopped,” Farge said bitterly. “A week of trying everything we can think of without an inch of progress to show for it. We can’t even be sure that thing’s still on her head any more. We can’t see it or feel it or get a flicker of response on any energy detecting device known. For all we know, the thing could have set up a mental pattern telling her how to act for the next ten years and then gone off to find a new body to haunt.”

  He was talking across the top of Lee Mason’s bent head. She sat between them on the stool she occupied for their tests, her eyes demurely downcast. In the week of endless tests they had both forgotten her presence most of the time, except as another piece of inanimate laboratory equipment.

  Her own meekness and silence made the illusion easy to accept.

  Temple shrugged discouragedly and stared at the floor. His gaunt body slumped with weariness and strain. Suddenly he tensed, threw back his shoulders and looked at Farge with blazing eyes.

  “Wait a minute! I started by describing that thing wholly in terms of physical light and energy, and we’ve been sticking to that one track in our search ever since.”

  “What else could it be?” Farge asked dully.

  “Mental energy,” Temple cried. “Biophysics has proven that thoughts are electrical, or at least that they produce definite measurable electrical currents. Now, this entity apparently merges itself with brain activity, so why couldn’t it be pure brain energy, or something closely related?”

  Farge looked startled. “But biophysics can detect mental and nerve currents, even measure them and time the speed of their flow. We’ve used most of the same instruments here without getting any response of any kind. Besides, mind energy doesn’t fall in the ultraviolet band, Curt, but it was a good theory.”

  “It still is,” Temple said, “a sound one. Look, a generator produces electric current but it isn’t electricity in itself. Think of this entity as a generator instead of its product. We’re not positive about the nature of mind energy yet. Suppose it really belongs in a whole undiscovered spectrum of energies that may coexist with our familiar spectrum but only touch or impinge on it in one spot—such as the ultraviolet band. That might seem fantastic but instead of hunting for facts to fit theories, let’s examine some theories that fit facts.”

  “Sure,” Farge said, looking bewildered, “but how are you going to prove it with existing instruments, or make any use of the knowledge if you did prove it?”

  Temple had been staring intently at the polished brass base of a desk lamp. He whirled, his face alight with new hope. “Get her locked up and get back here fast, Al. We’re on our way.”

  Farge raced back in a moment, his face eager. “You’ve hit on something, Curt. Tell me quick.”

  “I hit the answer,” Temple said gleefully, “and proved it. I happened to be watching Lee’s reflection in that lamp base as I was rambling along on the mind-energy and unknown-spectrum idea. If looks could kill, I’d be dead right now. The expression on her face for an unguarded instant was the best evidence in the world that I’d stumbled on to the main track to our answer.”

  “But my Lord, Curt,” Farge said, mopping his face, “you’re blithely talking about moving into a wholly unknown science. We don’t know its simplest fundamentals. We haven’t any tools or instruments—”

  “Then we’ll create them,” Temple interrupted. “You took that blue beam projector apart and couldn’t find a battery or any recognizable power source, and it’s been driving you nuts. What you found was a gold grid in a sliding frame in front of a slice of unfamiliar and unidentifiable crystal. Give your thinking a twist and tackle it again, Al.”

  “All my thinking seems to be twisted,” Farge said irritably. “I don’t get you at all.”

  “That gadget doesn’t generate energy at all, man. It only concentrates natural energy the way a burning glass concentrates sunlight. Find that natural energy and we’ve got it.” He paced the floor, his tired face lighted by the glow of fresh excitement, his weary brain spurred to a new burst of life. He snapped his fingers. “There’s one screen we’ve never tried—element 87, moldavium. It’s one of the alkali metals but little is known about its properties because it resists efforts to isolate it in pure form. Maybe somewhere it exists in pure form now, or those entities found out how to isolate it. If they did it, we can. Order a supply right away, air express, in its purest available form, and we’ll take it from there.”

  It was late the next afternoon when, in the midst of another experiment, Temple suddenly shouted. “Oh, what a dope I’ve been! Cosmic rays! That’s our whole answer, Al. That’s the radiation that destroys the entities. It’s been right there in front of me all the time and I couldn’t see it.”

  “I still can’t, Curt.”

  “I told you about stony meteorites slamming onto Kansas all these years with a concentration too great to be random. That implies intelligent bombardment for a purpose. Don’t ask me why Kansas; I haven’t gotten that far. But suppose the entities were responsible, yet as far as we know, none ever tried taking over people before. So we can safely guess that none ever survived the journey before.”

  Farge’s jaw dropped. “You mean all those meteorites that hit Kansas started out with a load of the things?”

  “Not all, but enough to upset the law of averages for distribution of natural meteorite falls. But until now, no entity survived the trip because of unshielded cosmic rays in space. According to Stilwell, the FBI man, this last swarm was covered with an unfamiliar pitch coating that might well have been some new kind of shielding. If so, it explains why these entities came through alive to start their deviltry on Earth—and what we must have to destroy them.”

  “But Curt, cosmic rays average six billion volts of energy, more than we could ever generate. And nothing short of a couple of hundred tons of magnets can concentrate them.”

  “Or” Temple said, “a little slice of alien crystal that might just act on them like a burning glass on sunlight. We’ve got a Wilson cloud chamber with a Geiger-Müller counter. Let’s start shooting the projector into it with that sliding grid at different settings and see what we can photograph in the nature of explosion trails.”

  As though Temple’s idea had supplied a key, the door suddenly swung open for them into a whole new world of discovery. The projector tapped not just one narrow band but a whole unsuspected range of free energy in variable intensities.

  Two days later, on a film of semi-refined moldavium, they saw a dull violet glow that moved when Lee Mason’s head moved. The image was faint and undefined, and it lacked the stereoscopic image Temple had seen on Lansdon’s screen, but it gave them all they needed.

  At last they could actually see the presence of entities. And with the ability to see their target, they could at last begin to develop a weapon with which to destroy it.

  They were too exhausted to celebrate the first major breakthrough in their struggle. They hung up the negatives of their latest cloud chamber photographs to dry and fell on their beds without stopping to undress.

  That night the alarmed enemy struck back.

  Temple awoke in inky darkness, bathed in cold perspiration. His lungs heaved in a wracking struggle for air and his nostrils burned with a stinging torment. He lay for a moment, gasping and trying to focus bleary eyes on what seemed to be a parade of gray ghosts that writhed and danced across a patch of moonlight.

  Abruptly his brain threw off the bonds of sleep and brought him a horrified realization of what he was seeing. He sprang out of bed, snatched open his door and recoiled from a solid wall of acrid smoke that filled the hall outside.

  Fire! The lodge was on fire. He could hear no sound to indicate that either Farge or Lee Mason were alive or conscious.

  With a cold terror clawing at his nerves he stumbled to the bathroom, soaked a towel to cover nose and mouth and plunged into the smoke. He fumbled his way down the hall to Farge’s bedroom.
The air inside was clear, the smoke kept out by a tight-fitting door, and Farge was snoring in blissful ignorance of the peril.

  Temple shook him roughly. “Al, wake up! The place is on fire. I don’t know how it started or how bad it is, but I’ve got to get Lee out of that death trap she’s locked in. You try to save the most important instruments and those last negatives.”

  He left Farge running for a wet towel to protect his own lungs and plunged out into the wall of smoke. It was thick and acrid but he could hear no crackle of flames nor see a glow of fire. With fear cold in his heart he felt his way across the smoke-filled laboratory to the door of her prison. He was feeling for the sliding bolt when the door swung open.

  The overhead light still worked and by its pale glow he read the story. The storage cabinet lay on the floor showing a glint of raw metal where the thin sheet-steel leg had been patiently bent back and forth until it broke off. With the jagged edge as a chisel she had gouged a hole in the door big enough for her slender hand to reach the bolt.

  He stared dully at the empty room, coughing. The thing that controlled Lee had been panicked into this. It had driven her to break out, set the building on fire and flee.

  Farge stumbled through the smoke, almost sobbing, carrying a tangle of wreckage in his arms. “Curt…look! The detector we just finished and your projector—smashed to pieces. Those negatives are gone and the phone has been torn from the wall and hammered to bits.”

  Temple whirled and snatched one of the fire extinguishers from the lab wall. “Come on. The fire must have been started in the basement. Maybe we can get it under control.”

  A pile of broken boxes had been heaped under the wooden stairway, paper and shavings dumped on top and the fire started in twists of paper underneath. It was still smoldering but in a moment it would reach the shavings and explode into a roaring inferno.

  Temple kicked the boxes away, then thrust the extinguisher into Fargo’s hands. “Douse it good, Al. It hasn’t gotten a start yet, which means Lee can’t have gotten far since setting it. I’m going after her.”

  He had reached the top of the stairs when he heard the wail of a starter and then the explosive bark of firing cylinders. The sound came from close by. Temple yelled, “Al, she’s getting away in the truck!” and sprinted for the door.

  He plunged through the dense smoke, slammed into an invisible bench and staggered on to the door. The truck was completing a tight turn toward the narrow road. In the dim dawn light he could see Lee at the wheel, struggling to shift cold-stiffened gears. He sprinted and was almost to the cab when the gears meshed with a grinding crash and the truck lunged ahead.

  Temple made a leaping dive and his hands caught the edge of the window frame. He hung on, taking enormous lunging steps to keep his balance as she speeded up, looking frantically for a place to swing up and brace his feet until he could get the cab door open.

  He was still trying when Lee leaned out and slammed an iron jack handle across the side of his face. Lights exploded in his eyes, his feet tangled and his grip on the cab door broke. He fell and rolled endlessly into darkness.

  Temple awoke with Farge patting cold water on his face and neck. Aside from skinned flesh, a stiff neck and a throbbing bruise along his jawline he seemed to be in fair shape. He sat up groggily.

  “There was no use trying to chase her on foot,” Farge said, “so I didn’t try.”

  Temple put his face in his hands and groaned. “It’s losing her right now that hurts, Al—just when we were on the verge of freeing her from that hellish influence. At any moment now we would have found the weapon to destroy it.”

  “We already had,” Farge said grimly. “I found the last cloud chamber negatives down where she’d tucked them among the shavings to be burned up in her fire. We can’t be sure without Johnson asymmetry measurements, of course, but a couple of those vapor trails look to me as if we’d been shooting in something with an energy value of well over five billion volts. That’s in the range of cosmic rays. It looks as if we’ve proved you were right, Curt, but too late to do anything about it. She didn’t leave us enough of that projector to tell whether it was vegetable or mineral.”

  Temple scrambled up, his aches forgotten. “Allen, we’ve got another projector, safe and intact. I snatched it that same night but I’ve kept it hidden even from you for fear that entity might peek into your mind somehow and learn about it. All we have to do is duplicate our last setting and go on from there.”

  “Eeowie!” Farge shouted like a schoolboy. “And we had a scrap of moldavium left over. I tucked it away in the safe. It will be big enough to make up one small detector.”

  “Then we’re in business, boy. Make this one so I can wear it on my forehead like a sun visor. I’ll be able to look through it by simply bending my head a little and my hands will be free to work the projector.”

  Farge stopped short. “Now, just a minute. If you have the idea you can buck that crowd alone, even with the projector, you’d better forget it. You told me yourself they’ve got the blue paralyzing beam, an army of goons and plenty of conventional weapons. They also have a supreme contempt for any human life that tries to stand in their way. You can’t hope to face them alone.”

  “I’ve got news for you,” Temple said soberly. “You and I are alone—alone against practically the whole world. Haven’t you been listening to the radio? Where their planes airlift the bodies of Plague victims for transportation to the moon, the epidemic has practically died out. Everywhere else it’s spreading like wildfire. Is it any wonder most of the world’s convinced humanity’s survival depends on that unselfish little group in Kansas? How far do you think we’d get with our crazy theories against that kind of evidence? Just about as far as the nearest booby hatch.”

  “But if we could get to a few top men, Curt, show them what we’ve discovered, persuade them to use their influence—”

  “While the entities sit back and let them use it?”

  Farge’s face set in dogged lines. “They can be blocked by a silver shield.”

  “Oh, sure,” Temple said bitterly. “I can just picture us ringing the White House doorbell and saying, ‘Mr. President, there are millions of invisible blobs floating around, lousing up people’s brains. The only salvation is for you and everyone else to wear one of these clumsy, uncomfortable, expensive and silly-looking skullcaps night and day.’ We’d be in strait jackets in no time.”

  For a minute there was silence. Then Farge’s shoulders lifted in a heavy sigh. “Oh, hell, let’s get back to work, Curt. At least, I’m on your side for keeps.”

  “I’d rather have you than the Pentagon,” Temple said. With the windows open and a fresh breeze clearing out the smoke, they settled down to their interrupted work. Despite their good luck in having saved a projector and sufficient moldavium, a mood of gloom had settled over their spirits and would not be lifted.

  Temple could not forget that he had lost his chance to save Lee by a matter of hours. His somber gaze went to the bench by the wrecked door where a replica of Farge’s silver cap lay. He had hammered it out the first day in the lab and kept it there, awaiting their moment of triumph. If somehow they succeeded in destroying or driving out the entity that enslaved her, the cap would be her guarantee of continued freedom. He wondered now if there would ever be an opportunity to use it.

  Farge had been occupied with his own dark thoughts, his face haggard, his eyes haunted. He looked up suddenly. “Curt, I keep thinking of what you said about the Crimson Plague being deliberately caused by those things for some purpose of their own. If you’re right, and all those victims have only been in a state of suspended animation, what about the hundreds or thousands who’ve been buried or cremated or dumped into the sea in the wild panic to halt its spread?”

  “They were murdered,” Temple said harshly. “Cruelly and callously murdered by people who couldn’t know any better. I can’t forget Stilwell, the first victim, burned up in that shed while I stood by with the mob and l
et it happen. It’s one of the scores I mean to settle with those things…if I live long enough.”

  Night had closed down before their tasks were completed. A new detector, slightly smaller than the original, was finished. With Lee gone, there was no entity to test it on but every detail of the original had been faithfully duplicated and there was no reason to think this would not work as well. Temple had fashioned a light harness that fitted snugly to his head and held the detector snugly against his forehead. By tilting his head forward slightly he could bring the lenses to eye level. He tried it, bringing the moldavium screen to bear on every part of the roomy laboratory.

  “Either we goofed,” he said, more cheerfully, “or there are no entities prowling here. I’m inclined to think if there were any here, we’d see them with this.”

  “And shoot ’em down with this,” Farge said, matching Temple’s lightened mood as he held up the projector. “I’ve been checking the new cloud chamber shots and apparently we’ve got the same setting we used last night. The vapor trails show this thing is delivering either cosmic rays or something with an equal energy range. I almost wish a couple of those invisible glowworms would come around so we could try it out.”

  “You may get your wish, Al. By now Lee may be back at the camp reporting everything we’ve been doing and exactly how far along we’ve gotten. It’s a cinch they’ll strike back at us in one way or another, and soon. We’re too dangerous now to be left alone.”

  Farge’s face clouded. “Curt, I’m bothered about what this projector puts out. We know we’re all being bombarded night and day by cosmic rays without harm. They’re of such tremendous velocity that they shoot right through our bodies. But we can’t be certain that what we have here is the same, or as harmless. For all we know, this might kill anyone it touches. We wouldn’t dare turn it on Lee Mason or any of those others until we’d tested it first on some kind of guinea pigs to make sure.”

  “There will be such a test,” Temple said grimly. “It’s my theory and my gamble. I want you to turn that projector on me right now and pull the trigger. If I survive, we’ll know what we have and what to do with it. If I don’t, you’ll have to carry on alone, Allen. You know as much about the problem now as I do.”