Atomic!
I
The Eye
The alarm went off just after midnight. The red signal showed emergency. But it was always emergency at first. We all knew that. Ever since the arachnid tribe in the Chicago Ring had mutated we’d known better than to take chances. That time the human race had very nearly gone under. Not many people knew how close we’d been to extinction. But I knew.
Everybody in Biological Control Labs knew. To anyone who lived before the Three-Hour War such things would have sounded incredible. Even to us now they sound hard to believe. But we know.
There are four hundred and three Rings scattered all over the world and every one of them is potentially deadly.
Our Lab was north of what had been Yonkers and was a deserted, ruinous wilderness now. The atomic bomb of six years ago hadn’t hit Yonkers of course. What it struck was New York. The radiation spread far enough to wipe out Yonkers and the towns beyond it, and inland as far as White Plains—but everyone who lived through the Three-Hour War knows what the bomb did in the New York area.
The war ended incredibly fast. But what lingered afterward made the real danger, the time-bomb that may quite easily lead to the wiping out of our whole civilization. We don’t know yet. All we can do is keep the Labs going and the planes out watching.
That’s the menace—the mutations.
It was familiar stuff to me. I recorded the televised report on the office ticker, punched a few buttons and turned around to look at Bob Davidson, the new hand. He’d been here for two weeks, mostly learning the ropes.
My assistant, Williams, was due for a vacation and I had about decided to take young Davidson on as a substitute.
“Want to go out and look it over, Dave?” I asked.
“Sure. That’s a red alarm, isn’t it? Emergency?”
I pulled a mike forward.
“Send up relief men,” I ordered, “and wake Williams to take over. Get the recon copter ready. Red flight.” Then I turned to Davidson.
“It’ll be routine,” I told him, “unless something unexpected happens. Not much data yet. The sky-scanners showed a cave-in and some activity around it. May be nothing but we can’t take chances. It’s Ring Seventy-Twelve.”
“That’s where the air liner crashed last week, isn’t it?” Dave asked, looking up with renewed interest. “Any dope yet on what became of the passengers?”
“Nothing. The radiations would have got them if nothing else did. That’s in the closed file now, poor devils. Still, we might spot the ship.” I stood up. “The whole thing may be a wild-goose chase but we never take any chances with the Rings.”
“It ought to be interesting, anyhow,” Dave said and followed me out.
We could see it from a long way off. Four hundred and three of them dot the world now, but in the days before the War no one could have imagined such a thing as a Ring and it would be hard to make anyone visualize one through bare description. You have to feel the desolation as you fly over that center of bare, splashed rock in which nothing may ever grow again until the planet itself disintegrates, and see around that dead core the violently boiling life of the Ring.
It was a perimeter of life brushed by the powers of death. The sun-forces unleashed by the bombs gave life, a new, strange, mutable life that changed and changed and changed and would go on changing until a balance was finally struck again on this world which for three hours reeled in space under the blows of an almost cosmic disaster. We were still shuddering beneath the aftermath of those blows. The balance was not yet.
When the hour of balance comes, mankind may no longer be the dominant race. That’s why we keep such a close watch on all the Rings. From time to time we work them over with flamethrowers. Only atomic power, of course, would quiet that seething life permanently—which is no solution. We’ve got Rings enough right now without resorting to more atom bombs.
It’s a hydra-headed problem without an answer. All we can do is watch, wait, be ready. …
The world was still dark. But the Ring itself was light, with a strange, pale luminous radiance that might mean anything. It was new. That was all we knew about it yet.
“Let’s have the scanner,” I said to Davidson. He handed me the mask and I pushed the head-clips past my ears and settled the monocular view-plate before my eyes, expecting to see the darkness melt into the reversed vision of the night-scanner.
It melted, all right—the part that didn’t matter. I could see the negative images of trees and ruined houses standing ghostly pale against the dark. But within the Ring—nothing.
It wasn’t good. It could be very
