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ALSO BY MARCYKATE CONNOLLY

Shadow Weaver duology

Shadow Weaver
Comet Rising

with Dan Haring

The Star Shepherd
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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2020 by MarcyKate Connolly
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Nicole Hower/Sourcebooks
Cover art © Erwin Madrid/Shannon Associates

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in
writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any
similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the
author.

Published by Sourcebooks Young Readers, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebookskids.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Connolly, MarcyKate, author.

Title: Hollow dolls / MarcyKate Connolly.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Young Readers, [2020] |
Sequel to: Comet rising. | Audience: Ages 8-14 | Audience: Grades 4-6
Identifiers: LCCN 2019024127 (print) | LCCN 2019024128 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Magic--Fiction. | Families--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C64685 Hol 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.C64685 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024127
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024128

This product conforms to all applicable CPSC and CPSIA standards.

 Contents

Front Cover

Title Page
Copyright
Prologue

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three

Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover
For Mom and Dad
 Prologue

For as long as I can remember, I have served the Lady. I have

always been hers to control, a pawn in every game she plays.
Today, that ends.
The shadow weaver, Emmeline, and her friends have caught my
mistress here in her garden filled with giant flowers. I’m trapped,
too, bands of the shadow that Emmeline controls holding me back.
I couldn’t help the Lady even if I wanted to.
All I can do is watch as their talent taker strips Lady Aisling of her
magic as punishment for her crimes. Then something extraordinary
happens.
I’m freed. The invisible hold my mistress has had on my mind,
that connection that forces my limbs to submit to her will, is broken.
A strange, light feeling rises within me—hope, I think. Lady Aisling’s
wicked reign is finally over. I’m far from her only captive, and these
rebel children with talents are our saviors.
Though the shadow weaver’s bonds still hold me down, I feel as if
I could float away. The Lady can’t use me or my magic to harm
people ever again.
My talent is mind reading. It’s why Lady Aisling took me. Folks like
me were blessed with magic when the Cerelia Comet flew by in the
year of our birth, as it does every twenty-five years. There was a
time when the comet-blessed were adored and revered, but that
time is long past. Nowadays, people don’t look as kindly on the
talented as they once did. Many of the lucky ones who weren’t
captured by Lady Aisling have chosen to keep their talents hidden.
The comet came by in the year the Lady was born too. She is—
was—a magic eater, someone who can steal another person’s magic
in order to wield it themselves. She used one of her stolen talents to
create flowers out of other talented people, and she planted them
here in her infamous Garden of Souls so that she could assume their
powers just by nibbling on their petals. But something didn’t quite
work when she tried to transform the first of us with a mind-based
talent—like me—into a flower. Still, she found a way to use us. I’ll
never forget the feeling of another mind crawling under my skin.
Moving my arms and legs. Speaking with my voice.
But now I’m free. And I’m not alone.
The brilliant, beautiful garden Lady Aisling crafted from the souls
of her magically talented prisoners unravels before my eyes. It’s
bizarre and beautiful at the same time. The air hisses with magic
while flowers sprout heads, hands, and feet until they’ve returned to
their original human form. Bewildered cries ring through the air, and
underneath it all is the crush of many minds and their frantic
thoughts. Nothing remains now of the flowers that I twirled past so
many times—only barren dirt, dotted with hedges and grass.
Nothing remains of the only life I can remember.
For the first time since I encountered the comet-blessed rebelling
against the Lady, real fear creeps in. But so does hope.
 Once it’s determined that I and the other talented children Lady
Aisling had under her control no longer pose a threat, we’re
released. The crowd of people in the garden swells every minute.
Joyful reunions surround me. Parents and children, brothers and
sisters, aunts and nephews and nieces.
But for many of us, no one comes. We begin to gather together in
the middle of the garden, the confused and disoriented who aren’t
fully certain what happened or how. My best friend, Sebastian, finds
me and squeezes my hand. Several of the Lady’s other shells—those
with mind-based talents who she used as puppets like me—join us.
We’re the lost souls of the Lady’s garden, waiting for our past lives
to find us.
But as the day marches on and night falls, our hopes begin to
cool.
Where are our families? What about our loved ones? These
thoughts circle me in a lazy loop.
But I’m not surprised. Only sad.
I pull a little sheet of paper from the pocket of my dirty white
dress. I have several copies of this list, one always on my person,
the others tucked away in different parts of my little cell inside the
Lady’s manor. If I lose one, I don’t want to forget. On the paper is all
that remains of my family. Four names and a location: Wren. Their
faces are long lost; Lady Aisling’s memory stealer took care of that. I
cling to the paper, hoping against hope until the crowd begins to
thin, leaving behind only those without families to claim us.
I slide the paper back into my pocket. I may have my freedom,
but nothing more.
TWO WEEKS LATER
When Lady Aisling’s captives were freed, everyone eventually found
their home. Relatives waiting for them. Some for weeks, months,
years, even decades.
Waiting for everyone but me.
There is no trace left of my family because the village of Wren
does not exist.
At least, that’s what I’ve just been told.
The wind here in the garden where I sit—a very different, more
modest one—tosses wisps of hair in my face, bringing me back to
the conversation at hand.
“I’m sorry the network hasn’t been able to figure out what
happened to your family, Simone,” Sebastian says, his curls twisting
around the scar on his cheek like dark shadows. The network was
formed in response to Lady Aisling’s abduction of so many talented
folks. The loved ones of the comet-blessed began to keep records
and help each other evade the Lady’s clutches. But that began long
after I was taken.
Sebastian shifts uncomfortably on the bench. “Would you like to
stay with mine?” His eye twitches. It does that sometimes. While the
Lady no longer uses us, the effects of her magic linger. The people
who freed us have yet to find a talent that can fix it. Without the
Lady to give us a purpose, even one we hated, we’re little more than
hollow, broken dolls.
I tilt my head to gaze up at the white puffs of clouds, letting
Sebastian’s words make their way through my mind. Then I listen
harder, waiting for the real meaning behind them.
I know you can hear me—please say yes. Please say yes.
 I laugh and leap to my feet, suddenly fidgety. Staying too long in
one place isn’t good for me. Not until I find where I belong.
“Thank you. Yes.” I like Sebastian’s family. They’ve tried to help
me locate my own family. His older sister, Jemma, is kind, and I can
wander through the woods beyond their village whenever I please.
Once she was only a couple years older than Sebastian. But the Lady
held him captive for more than a decade, and now Jemma is all
grown up and can be our guardian. One thing does give me pause
though. “Your village is close to Lady Aisling’s prison. I don’t like that
much.” The village is in the territory of Parilla, just over the border
from Abbacho. I’ll stay with them for a while, but eventually I’ll have
to continue the search for Wren. I just don’t have a clue yet where
to start.
Sebastian’s hand trembles on the garden bench. I don’t like that
much either, he thinks. “She can’t trouble us anymore. We can
pretend she doesn’t even exist.”
I know why Sebastian really wants me to remain here. He
watched over me while we were under Lady Aisling’s control in the
Zinnian territory. He even took away the memories of the terrible
things the Lady made me do. But he was acting out of guilt. His
talent is memory stealing, and he’s the one who took my memories
of happier times in the first place.
I shiver, and Sebastian frowns.
“We’ll keep searching, Simone. I promise.”
I smile at him, but I don’t think it comes off quite right, because
he doesn’t seem relieved.
“I know,” I say. But I’m not sure there’s anything left to find.
 Chapter One

Restless. That’s how I feel every day. The need to wander and
explore burns in my veins right alongside my blood.
This morning as I peer out the window of my little room, the sun
shines on the woods behind Sebastian’s village. I can never
remember the name of it for long. He always reminds me, but then
it slips away like dandelion puffs on a breeze. But the woods I adore.
A maze of little streams wind between the trees, and I’m determined
to follow every one of them to their destination before the end of
summer.
My wandering helps me think through the problem of my vanished
family. It doesn’t hurt that the woods happen to be on the side
farthest from the Lady’s prison.
“Simone?” Sebastian stands in my doorway, that look on his face
again. The one he always gets when he has to call my name a few
too many times. I climb off the bench by the windowsill sheepishly,
as I feel the weight of his thoughts.
He’s worried about me.
Many of Lady Aisling’s other servants seem to be nearly their old
selves again now that they’re no longer under her spell. We’ve heard
from old friends like Kalia the dream eater and Natasha the illusion
crafter. They were nearly able to pick up their former lives where
they left off. But not me. I’m not even sure what the old me was
like.
Sebastian worries that I’m broken. It worries me too.
“Simone.”
My eyes snap back to his, picking up the thread once again. “Good
morning, Sebastian.” I move toward him, momentarily distracted into
a twirl. He puts his hands on my shoulders to stop me. I grin.
“My sister just received good news. There are people coming here
tonight who might be able to help you.”
I can’t help peeking inside his mind. The words are a jumble—
something about libraries—but I can feel excitement fizzing in every
one.
“Who?”
“They’re from the Parillan Archives. It holds historical records
going all the way back as far as anyone can remember. If there’s a
trace of your village anywhere to be found, it will be there.”
“The librarians are coming here?” My hands sway my skirts, even
though I try to tell them not to.
Sebastian nods, and his mind begins to clear.
They heard about Lady Aisling’s garden and what happened to us.
“They want to interview us both in order to record the incident.
That’s what they wrote in their letter.”
The swell of hope subsides. “Then they’re not coming here to help
me.”
“But they might be able to all the same. We can ask.”
I shrug, trying not to let my disappointment show too much.
 “They’ll be here tonight. Jemma wanted me to tell you to be sure
you’re home for dinner.”
And not muddy, Sebastian can’t help but think.
I’ll do my best, I think back, sending my response into his mind,
and he smiles.
Jemma gave up on making me useful weeks ago. I tried, but the
tasks she gave me just couldn’t hold my attention for long. There
are too many minds, too many conversations, too many voices. It is
loud and distracting, and I forget what I’m doing sometimes. The
best she hopes for now is that I remember to come home after
wandering in the woods or the village. At least I haven’t forgotten
that yet.
“I will, I promise.”
“Are you going to the woods?” Sebastian asks, just as he does
every day. I give the same answer too.
“Yes.” I pause, already knowing what he’s going to say next. “And
I think I’d rather walk alone today.”
He means well, but I go there to feel the quiet. Bringing him with
me would defeat the purpose.
Sebastian and Jemma are kind to let me stay with them, but they
are not quite mine. It doesn’t help that I can hear their thoughts.
Mind reading may sound like a wonderful talent—Lady Aisling
certainly thought so—but the reality is less fun. In a village like this,
full of people and lives and little red-roofed houses, all those minds
are a constant dull roar. Sometimes when Sebastian is talking to me,
I don’t hear him over it at first. I have to work to block them out.
Actual silence is a rare thing.
 I slip out of the house, breezing by my friend, my head already full
of silent leaves and babbling streams.

•••

I trace the lines the streams make throughout the woods for hours
until I finally sink onto the edge of a bank. The water doesn’t think;
it just gurgles and moves cheerily on its way. Every day is the same.
There are no surprises for it, and even if there are, it simply flows
around easily.
I am not water, though sometimes I wish I was.
I tuck my knees up to my chest and close my eyes, letting my
magic reach out to my surroundings. Mind reading gives me a
different sort of sight, almost like a new sense. I can feel any nearby
minds. I’ve never measured the range, but the closer I am
physically, the louder they are. There’s a rabbit burrow nearby,
hidden by a thicket, with a mother and three little ones. Mice and
squirrels roam the underbrush, and every now and then the slippery
thoughts of a silver fish swim past.
No one can sneak up on me, not even the curious rabbit poking
her head out of the burrow. It’s a young one, and I know that if I
stay still, she’ll come closer.
It’s all right, little one, I tell her. It startles her back at first, but
then she inches closer until she nudges my foot with her long
whiskers. May I pet you? Rabbits don’t have words. They think more
in feelings and instinct, and hers are warm and welcoming. I reach
out a tentative hand, all the while sending her reassuring thoughts.
Her fur is soft, and she nuzzles up next to me.
 As I pet her, my mind wanders. I don’t have a lot of memories
since Sebastian took them. It’s like a thick, dull fog hovering in the
back of my brain where those memories should be. But while I don’t
always remember the details of my service to the Lady, I do know
that I’m responsible for expanding her garden, ferreting out those
who tried to stay hidden while she crawled around under my skin.
And even when she wasn’t actively using me, I was still only half
myself, trapped under the spells she used to keep her victims
compliant. The thought makes me want to curl up in the hollow of
one of these great trees and never leave.
Perhaps my family, my home, doesn’t want to be found.
With any luck, the librarians coming to visit tonight will have
answers. But what will I have to give in return? Reliving my time
with the Lady is unpleasant. And tricky with all the gaps in my
memories.
When the sun begins to flee the sky, I finally head back to
Sebastian’s home. The afternoon spent with the uncomplicated
minds of squirrels and earthworms and the occasional curious fox
and rabbit has smoothed the edges of my worries. I bid my new
woodland friends goodbye and get to my feet, steeling my spine.
I retrace my steps slowly, letting my hands rove over the bark of
the trees along the way and whisper over velvety ferns. Leaving the
peace of the woods is never easy, but today it is especially hard. The
route from the village gate to Sebastian’s home takes me through
the market square. Usually, there are so many people there that it’s
deafening, but no single mind ever stands out over the others, which
makes it bearable for the few moments it takes to pass through.
Today is different.
 The minute I set foot in the square, a sickly feeling washes over
me, strong enough that I have to sit down in the middle of the
street. It earns me more than a few stares.
What’s wrong with her?
Should I ask if she needs help?
Hmph. Lazy child.
Icy hands seem to grip my throat as I scan the crowd. I don’t see
anyone out of place. But that awful feeling remains, a taint of magic
lingering in the air.
I haven’t felt this way since Lady Aisling used me as her shell. The
feeling of some other mind roaming under my skin. I shudder.
The last thing I want to do is move toward it. But I must know the
source. I have to be sure.
I scramble to my feet and push forward, following the feeling of
that strange mind in the crowd. The noise rises as I get closer. My
hands quake and twist in my skirts, but my feet keep moving of their
own accord. When I press deeper into the mass of people, some
minds scream louder than others. I do my best to push them away,
but too many still get through.
What is he doing?
Poor woman, Joe must have fallen and hit his head.
I can’t see much until I reach a break in the crowds. A man and
woman argue by one of the stalls. On the surface, nothing much
seems out of the ordinary. But the woman clutches the man’s arm
while he tries to shake her off. I have seen them before—they’re a
nice couple. The woman sells flowers, and the man fixes odds and
ends for a price. Sometimes at the end of the day, she lets me have
one of the flowers that are starting to wilt.
 I go still and look closer at the pair, letting my talent loose. The
woman’s mind is frantic, but the man’s is like hot coals.
Help! Someone, help!
I yank back my magic with a small cry. There are two minds in
that man—the one the body belongs to, begging for help, and the
dominant one, shoving the owner down.
My knees shake and I sink into the dirt, garnering even more odd
looks for the second time that day. Jemma said it was best not to
share my talent with the villagers. But they can still tell that there’s
something different about me.
The man continues to act strangely, and the cry of the mind inside
is too loud to bear. I manage to find my feet and then break into a
run. I don’t stop, don’t listen to a single yell that follows me, until
I’m free of the market crowds.
I know that talent all too well. Body walking. The ability to take
control of another person’s body and silence the mind inside. All it
takes is one touch, and then the body walker can overtake a person
whenever they want regardless of distance. The connection doesn’t
fade over time either. At any moment, a victim could be back under
the body walker’s command. No talent terrifies me more. Lady
Aisling kept it in her garden. It’s what she used to control me and
Sebastian and her other servants.
But the original owner of that talent is no longer under the Lady’s
control. Now the body walker is on the loose.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
larger brass tube in the place of the gas-line of the earlier model. It
had once been part of a tire-pump.
There was the same strangely-shaped sequence of wire wrappings,
including the logarithmic spiral. Their sequence, however, was
reversed. And there was a new device at what had been the focus,
which was simply meaningless. Of course an iron wire was there.
Murfree knew it would turn white with frost when the device began to
operate. It absorbed heat and made electricity. Perhaps primarily it
made something else, with electricity only as a by-product. In any
case it provided the power.
"This here ought to take care of it, suh!" said Bud Gregory. "We set it
up an' aim it an' turn it on. Any kinda stuff that's in the wind that could
bust up of itself, gets like the water I put in the focus this mornin'. It
pulls to itself all the other kindsa stuff that busts down. Which way'll I
point it, suh?"
Murfree considered, rather hopelessly.
"We want to clean up the wind that blows to the coast. How far will it
range?"
"A long ways, suh! A long ways! It won't go straight off outa the air,
neither. It won't travel nowhere there ain't some air. It'll bounce back
when the air gets thin enough."
It would not be like a radar-wave, limited by the horizon.
"We'll try southwest," said Murfree. "Maybe a little west of southwest.
We want it to spread out and work as far offshore as possible. Are
you certain it will work?"
"You got a radium-dial watch?" asked Bud Gregory.
Murfree understood. He stripped off the watch. Bud Gregory hung it
to a bush some fifty yards away. He pointed the new device at it, and
turned it on. Instantly the faintly luminous numerals on the watch-
face seemed to flame a lurid blue. Bud Gregory turned off the
device. The watch-dial still glowed brightly—brightly!
"That dust that's been fallin'," said Bud Gregory humorously, "got
pulled to the stuff in your watch. You better not wear that watch no
more, Mr. Murfree. Not without you wash that dust off."
Murfree swallowed. Bud Gregory's device had endowed every
particle of radioactive matter in its beam with the property of
attracting and being attracted by all other radioactive matter. The tiny
particles of radium in the luminous paint—one part of radium in
twelve million of zinc sulfide—had been unable to move.
They were anchored in the paint. But the radioactive dust on the
ground could move. It did move, swiftly, to cluster about the watch.
And the zinc sulfide glowed as brightly as if it had suddenly been
enriched to a thousand times its former radium content.
Murfree drew a deep breath.
"We'll kill a lot of fish," he said grimly. "Maybe we'll do more damage
than that. But I'll take the responsibility. There's nothing else to do!
Come on, we'll aim it and turn it on again."
They did. They set it on a tree-stump and Murfree oriented himself
by the north star and pointed the botched-together device which only
Bud Gregory could understand a little to the west of southwest. That
was Murfree's best guess of the optimum setting, considering the
coastline. He threw over the switch. The iron wire frosted, providing
power. He saw it turn white in the starlight.
Aside from that, nothing at all seemed to happen.

CHAPTER VI
Ball of Fire
A tuna-boat was towing a lead torpedo through the darkness. It was,
as it happened, heading back toward the island which was its base
as it let the volatile liquid pour out on the sea. It had been forced to
make a wide circuit to avoid observation by ships below the horizon.
But otherwise everything was commonplace.
Then, without drama, the wind seemed to change peculiarly. Not the
upper wind above the sea's surface—just the wind at the water's
own level, saturated with the vapor of the liquid the torpedo had let
out.
It blew toward the island on which the uranium piles worked. Since
the tuna-boat lay in its path and offered resistance, the surface-wind
piled up near the hull and flowed over and through the little ship.
A bell clanged stridently. Frenziedly. The bell was attached to a very
ingenious device which tripped a relay if the background-count of a
standard Geiger-Miller tube went above a conservative minimum.
It was necessary on a boat towing tanks of volatile and furiously
radioactive liquid. But it was quite dependable. It gave instant
warning and the members of the crew hastened to put on their
protective suits, which long custom had led them to discard. The only
flaw in the whole affair was that the warning-device had not operated
fast enough. No device could have been fast enough.
The men who climbed into their protective suits breathed in as they
moved a concentration of radioactive vapor intended to provide a
day's increment of poison for acres in every breath. The men who
locked their suits air-tight locked in enough radioactive gas in their
lungs to kill them fifty times over.
Of course they did not notice it at the time. Perhaps they never
noticed it. The little tuna-boat went on through the night. Presently it
strayed off-course. The man at the wheel happened to be dead. So
was everybody else on board.
The great leaden float was empty of its poison, which did not happen
to be moving toward America. It constituted a cross-wind, blowing
toward the home island of the tuna-boat. It was drawn by the force
which holds the nuclei of atoms together, which force does not
diminish according to the law of inverse squares.[4]
At all distances, radioactive particles within the beam were drawn
together with a force proportional to their masses, but not in
proportion to distance.
There were atomic piles on the island from which the tuna-boat
came. There were tons upon tons of uranium in those piles. They
drew radioactive particles as the sun draws meteorites. Even
radioactive gas-particles given off in the decay of fish killed by the
towed tanks—even such gases moved toward the island.
There was nothing spectacular about anything which happened at
first. A tuna-boat drove aimlessly through the night with all of its crew
dead. A swift low breeze blew toward the island—many swift low
breezes. Until they arrived nothing in particular seemed to be in train.
But when those winds flowed over the island the situation altered
gradually.
Radioactive gases and vapors clustered about the shielding around
the atomic piles. More and more vapors and dust-particles arrived
momentarily, drawn as by irresistible magnetic attraction. They
reached the shielding-walls and clung. More came, and more, and
more, and more.
As they flowed and darted across the island the island's population
died. They did not notice. For a space they moved and chattered and
prepared celebration—before they discovered that their bodies were
still-moving corpses which gradually ceased to move.
There were no witnesses to what happened after that but it went on
quite rationally. The atomic piles had been limited in their size so that
they could be controlled. An atomic pile will never explode.
If it runs wild it will simply heat up and up to a temperature
dependent solely upon its size and material. But the homing
radioactive particles raised the temperature-limit of the piles they
clustered about and seeped in to join.
Pile-activity increased by the activity of the short-life products
returned to it. The cooling-water turned to steam and ceased to flow.
The piles glowed dull-red and then cherry-red and then blinding
white, still without reaching their self-limiting temperature.
There was too much short-life radioactive matter around. Presently
the piles vaporized and then they ran together in one monstrous
mass of incandescent vapor whose normal self-limited temperature
was higher yet.
This took time. It was all of an hour after the beginning of the whole
process when a great globe of incandescent gas burned everything
upon the island to a ghastly ash. The island was blasted, baked,
dead, desolate.
Then the globe of vaporized metal—it was almost a mile in diameter
—soared skyward in exactly the manner and for exactly the reason
that a balloon would have risen. It was as bright as the sun but it was
utterly harmless. The radiations it emitted were absorbed by other
elements which became radioactive—and instantly joined the globe.
 The globe of vaporized metal soared skyward in the manner of a
balloon.

The globe rose skyward. It made all the sea as bright as day for
twenty miles around. It went up and up and up....
When dawn came it had burned out. Its energies had been so
trapped that only light and heat could permanently leave its mass.
Undoubtedly, if there were observers on the then-favorably-situated
planet Mars, they saw the flare.
But it did no harm beyond producing an anomalous warm area over
a certain part of the Pacific which ultimately resulted in a local low-
pressure area with resultant winds and precipitation—in short, a local
thunderstorm. That was all. Only the people on the island would
have noticed that. And they were dead....
When the background-count was down to 45-47 on the Pacific
Coast, Murfree agreed that the device could be turned off. It was
nearly a week before that happened and in the meanwhile he had
calculated very nearly what must have happened far out at sea.
He knew that nobody who had planned to murder America could still
be alive and it was very unlikely that anything remained of the
apparatus they had worked with. He did wait until the radioactive
dust that had spread over America had definitely entered the second
half of its life.
Then he got ready to go back to his wife and daughter.
"Yes, suh!" said Bud Gregory warmly, "you sure are a friend o' mine!
You goin' to send me that money regular, suh?"
"I'll send it," said Murfree. "Every week."
A boy came with a telegram for him. He put it in his pocket. It would
be a background-count report, he considered, and it didn't matter.
"I'd like to give you a—uh—present," said Bud Gregory warmly.
"Somethin' to show my appreciation, suh. Could—hm—would you
like to have this here dinkus I made first, suh? I'll just give it to the
children to play with if y'don't want it. If you'll take it to remember me
by—"
"Thanks," said Murfree.
He got on the bus that would take him to the nearest town with an
airport. After the bus pulled out, he idly opened the telegram. It was
from the generating station that had been using Bud Gregory's
gadget.
FRICTION ELIMINATION DEVICE SMASHED TODAY
STOP. WORKMAN DROPPED TOOL FROM OVERHEAD
STOP. CAN YOU SUPPLY OTHERS WIRE
IMMEDIATELY.
Murfree felt a little sick. He had to keep Bud Gregory's confidence for
dealings in the future should Bud Gregory be needed. He had
strained that confidence to the limit now. If he asked for more, on a
second threat to stop the ten dollars a day Bud Gregory counted on,
it would be an end to everything. With that money Bud Gregory
would sit in the sun and, when needed, he'd be on hand. If he didn't
get that ten dollars....
At the airport Murfree sent a telegram to his former superiors in the
Civil Service. He asked for his job back. He didn't know how he
could make out, having to pay Bud Gregory ten dollars a day out of a
forty-seven-hundred-a-year income but he felt desperately that it
simply had to be done.
At the Cleveland airport he got an answer.
YOU WERE WARNED YOUR RESIGNATION WOULD
BE CONSIDERED FINAL STOP. IT IS FINAL.
It was signed by the administrative officer who had objected to the
disarrangement of vacation-schedules in order that Murfree might
stop—as it had developed—a radioactive-dust attack upon the
United States.

Murfree sank back gloomily into his plane-seat. He had to find a new
source of income. He had to pay Bud Gregory thirty-six hundred and
fifty dollars a year before he bought a loaf of bread for his own
family. To live as he'd lived before he'd have to make over eight
thousand a year. And the only thing he had now that he hadn't
possessed before was the gadget Bud Gregory had made.
Suddenly his face went blank. He whistled softly to himself. He
stared out the plane-window for a long time. Then he went
composedly to sleep.
When he joined his family at the seashore his wife was worried. She
knew he'd left the Civil Service and had no immediate prospects.
She asked him what his plans were. He grinned at her.
He unpacked the untidy parcel Bud Gregory had made for him—the
device that had drawn water from a half-mile away. This was in the
boarding-house where his wife and daughter had stayed while he
was on the West Coast.
"I think I'll go in business for myself," he said comfortably. "Lend me
your wedding-ring for capital, my dear."
Her expression was bewildered as she gave him the plain gold band.
He put it in the focus of the device where Bud Gregory had put a
drop of water. He sighted the gadget out of the window at the ocean.
He turned it on. It would draw to itself any particles in its beam which
happened to be of the same material as that in the focus of the
device.
There was a metal plate to catch the drawn particles. His wife's
golden wedding-ring was in the focus—and the sea contains gold.
Only about a grain of gold to a ton of seawater, to be sure, but still—
A deposit of tiny, impalpable particles built up on the baffle-plate.
Each infinitesimal grain, perhaps, came from a ton of seawater. But
there were some thousands of billions of tons of seawater in view
from the boarding-house window, and it would change, more or less,
with each tide. Gold-dust came to the baffle-plate with respectable
speed. Murfree turned it off presently.
"This is useless stuff, though," he said. "I'll go out and buy you
something made of platinum. That's useful—and it's worth more than
gold besides. I'd rather go into the platinum-producing business, any
day!"
His wife gaped at him. He explained.
"I have to pay Bud Gregory a pension," he explained, "and this is the
answer. I'm going to build myself a laboratory and see if I can get an
inkling of what he knows offhand.
"I'll be able to give him all the money he can use now and I've always
wanted to do some research on my own. I know just about exactly—
what sort of a laboratory I want!"
Then he added: "Somewhere on the seashore."
[1] See "THE GREGORY CIRCLE," Thrilling Wonder Stories,
April, 1947.
[2] See "THE BOOMERANG FIELD," Thrilling Wonder Stories,
June, 1947.
[3] Note: It is referred to in the Smyth Report on "Atomic Energy
for Military Purposes"—the official report on the atom bomb.
[4] Note: The binding-force holding atomic nuclei together is
known not to diminish according to the law of inverse squares, as
do magnetism, gravity, electrostatic force, etc.—W.F.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEADLY
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