Part 2

A trio of caretakers carried the struggling principal off the platform and shouting teachers herded the students on to their next classes. Thirty minutes later the word-of-mouth information was carefully spread through the school that the principal had been taken to the hospital for observation and he was doing nicely. But by that time his fate seemed unimportant, for the girls' tenth grade gym teacher was having hysterics on the front lawn, convinced that all her students had turned into fish; and the boys' glee club teacher had abruptly announced that the nation was being invaded by Martians. He, too, had been carried off to the hospital in haste.

The rest of the faculty was badly shaken. When they met at lunch, they unanimously wanted the school closed for the rest of the day. But the principal had been too small a man to delegate any of his authority; as long as he was hospitalized, the teachers could do nothing.

After the ominous activity of the morning, however, most of the afternoon passed in relative order. True, the counselor gave pick-up tests to three tenth graders whose earlier I.Q. scores had been so low the validity had been questioned; and this time the same three outdid an Einstein. And the tenth grade math teacher was almost driven to distraction by a classroom discussion of the algebraic symbology equating matter and time--all of which was entirely over his head.

Nothing really happened until five minutes before the end of the school day, when Miss Gerkin knocked weakly on Gary Elvin's door. As soon as he saw her face, he gave his class free reading and joined her in the hall. Fearfully she showed him a yellow Bunsen burner, which glowed softly in the afternoon sunlight.

"Do you know what it is, Gary?"

"It's one of those gas burners you have on the lab tables in--"

"The metal, I mean."

"Looks like gold. Aren't these rather expensive for a high school classroom?"

She sagged against the wall, running her trembling fingers over her thin lips. "It's that tenth grade, Gary. I have them last period for general science. Bill Blake and the Schermerhorn twins got to fooling around with the electro-magnet. They rewired it somehow and added a few--well, frankly, I don't understand at all! But now when anything--metal, glass, granite--when anything is put in the magnetic field, it's changed to gold."

"Transmutation of atomic structure? You know it can't be done!"

"Yes, I know it. But I saw it happen." She began to laugh, but checked herself quickly.

"It's a trick. I know that bunch better than you do. It's time one of us had it out with them."

* * * * *

He strode along the hall toward the science room, Miss Gerkin following meekly behind him. "I'm sure you're right, Gary, because the rest of the class hardly showed any interest in what the boys were doing. I actually asked Marilyn if she didn't want her necklace turned to gold, and she said she was too busy to bother. Imagine that, from a high school kid!"

"Busy doing what?"

"Working out the application of the Law of Degravitation, she said."

"The Law of Degravitation? I never heard of it."

Miss Gerkin sniffed righteously. "Neither have I, and I've taught science all my life."

Gary Elvin flung open the door of the science room. It was one minute before the end of the period. For a moment he looked in on a peacefully ideal classroom. Every student was at his bench working industriously. Then, row by row, they began to float upward toward the ceiling, each of them holding a tiny coil of thin wires twisted intricately around two pieces of metal and an electronic tube. The breeze from the open window gathered them languidly into a kind of huddle above the door.

The bell rang as Miss Gerkin began to scream. Elvin fought to hold on to his own sanity as he tried to help her, but a degree of her hysteria transferred itself to him. His mind became a patchwork of yawning blank spaces interspersed with uncoordinated episodes of reality.

He remembered hearing the bell and the rush of the class out of the room. He remembered the piercing screams of Miss Gerkin's terror echoing through the suddenly crowded halls. Beyond one of his black gulfs of no-memory, he was in the nurse's office helping to hold Miss Gerkin on the lounge while the school doctor administered a sedative.

Slowly the integrated pattern of his thinking returned when he was driving back toward the Schermerhorn ranch. It was late in the afternoon; the sun was setting redly beyond the ridge of mountains. As Elvin's fear receded, he was able to think with a kind of hazy clarity. He had seen a metal Bunsen burner that had been turned into gold; he had seen the crusty principal of the school break into a rumba, and three of his colleagues driven to hysteria; he had seen a tenth grade class floating unsupported in the air. All of it manifestly absurd and impossible.

But it had happened. Elvin could visualize only two plausible explanations: mass insanity or mass hypnosis. Hypnosis! A sluggish relay clicked in his mind. He remembered a book. One of the tenth graders had been reading it--_Hypnotism in Theory and Practice_.

Everything seemed clear after that. The tenth grade was an obstreperous bunch of unsocial adolescents. Somehow they had stumbled upon hypnotism and learned how to use it.

The time for an accounting had come. Because of where Elvin lived, he was admirably situated to break the Schermerhorn twins first; and they were, perhaps, the weakest members of the group. He would have them alone, without the support of their peers. It would be easy. After all, he was a mature adult; they were still children. Once he had a confession from them, it would only be a minor operation to clear up the whole mess.

When he reached the Schermerhorn ranch, dinner was on the table. He had no time to talk to the twins until afterward. Both David and Donald bolted the meal and rushed back to their workshop behind the garage. Their usual bad manners, Elvin realized, but what else could be expected?

* * * * *

Elvin finished a leisurely pipe in the living room, and then sauntered out to the boys' workshop. Surprisingly, the door was locked, the windows thickly curtained; they had never taken such precautions before. He knocked and, after a long wait, both David and Donald came outside to talk to him. They were naked to the waist and their husky, tanned bodies gleamed with sweat. A smudge of grease was smeared over David's unkempt blond hair.

"Working on your car, boys?" Elvin inquired indulgently. He knew the technique. Put them at their ease, first; then come to the point when their guard was down.

"Well, not exactly, Mr. Elvin." Donald said.

"Mind if I watch? I always say I can learn as much about motors from you two as you learn from me about grammar."

Neither of the twins said anything. After an uncomfortable silence, Elvin cleared his throat pointedly. He had never met with such disrespect. If they were his kids, they would long ago have been taught proper courtesy for their superiors! To fill the lengthening void, he asked.

"What did you think of the little test I gave this morning?"

"It was all right," Donald said.

"You both did pretty well; I'm proud of you."

"We had everything right," David pointed out without a flicker of expression.

Elvin couldn't seem to engineer the dialogue as he used to. In that case, this was as appropriate a time as any for the question he had come to ask. He spoke slowly, with a tone of disinterest. "Do either of you know anything about hypnotism?" As a shocker, Elvin realized, it left much to be desired; their faces told him nothing.

"A little," David volunteered.

"We read eight or nine books on it over the weekend," Donald added.

"That's a lot of reading. It must have taken a great deal of time."

"Oh, a couple of hours."

Elvin clenched his fists in futile anger, but he kept his voice steady. "Is anybody else in the tenth grade reading up on hypnotism?"

"I suppose so," Donald admitted. "I'm not sure. Why don't you ask in class tomorrow?"

"It occurs to me that a clever hypnotist could be responsible for what happened at school today."

"Some of it; isn't that rather obvious? We'd like to go on talking, Mr. Elvin, honest. But we have a lot of work to finish. It'll be bedtime soon enough."

"But you know about hypnotism, don't you?"

"We know how it's done, yes, and its limitations so far as genuine telepathy--"

"Who created that ridiculous scene in the auditorium?" Elvin's voice rose as he tried to put on pressure.

"I wouldn't worry about the principal, Mr. Elvin, if I were you. He's always been a neurotic."

"Mighty big words you're using these days, Donald. Where'd you hear them?"

"The principal is a little man--mentally, I mean. He's afraid of people because he isn't sure of himself. So he makes himself a tin god, a dictator, just to show the rest of us--"

"I want to know where you picked all this up!"

Patiently the twins began to talk, taking turns at delivering an improvised lecture in psychology, shot through with an array of highly technical terms. As Elvin listened to their monotonous voices, he slowly felt very tired. His head began to ache as his anger ebbed. More than anything else, he wanted a long night's sleep. Yawning wearily, he thanked the boys--for what, he wasn't quite sure--and went up to his room.

* * * * *

Some time before dawn Elvin awoke for a moment. He thought he heard the sound of a motor in the driveway, but he was too sleepy to get up to see what it was. Two hours later he awoke to chaos.

Mrs. Schermerhorn was shaking his shoulder. He looked up into her white, terrified face. Her hand trembled as she clutched her quilted robe close to her throat.

"Mr. Elvin, they'll need your help. Mr. Schermerhorn's waiting for you."

He shook sleep out of his mind sluggishly. "Why? What's happened?"

"The bank's gone. Just--just gone!"

He blinked and shook his head again. "I--I don't think I heard you right, Mrs. Schermerhorn."

"There's a jungle where the bank used to be. With tigers in it." She laughed wildly for a moment, but the laughter dissolved into tears and she reached for the bottle of smelling salts in the pocket of her robe. "Most of them have been shot by this time, I think. The tigers. Think of it, Mr. Elvin--tigers in San Benedicto!" She began to laugh again.

When Elvin joined Pop Schermerhorn and the twins in the station wagon, Mrs. Schermerhorn followed him out of the house with a thermos of hot coffee. As she put it in the car, she saw the rifles they were taking with them. She began to weep again, clinging desperately to the side of the car. Suddenly the twins knelt beside her, and threw their arms around her neck.

"We're sorry, Mom," David whispered. "Terribly sorry."

"You've nothing to be sorry about," she replied. "It's not your fault."

"Better get back inside," Pop Schermerhorn told her. "Mind, keep the doors locked. Things ain't safe no more around here."

As they drove into San Benedicto, Elvin was considerably puzzled by the attitude of the twins. Normally talkative to the point of nausea, they were now strangely quiet. And this was exactly the sort of thing that should have inspired their most adolescent repartee.

The sun was rising as they stopped the station wagon among the clutter of cars filling Main Street. Elvin stared in disbelief at the neat square of tropical jungle rising cleanly in the heart of San Benedicto. Not only the bank but a whole block of business houses was gone. This could be written off neither as insanity nor hypnotism; it was a madness existing in actual fact. Elvin gave up trying to discover any logic in what was happening. Both reason and natural law seemed to have abdicated.

The periphery of jungle was surrounded by armed men. At intervals they shot at shadows lurking among the trees and, as the sun brightened, the accuracy of their aim increased. They were not worrying about causes, either; they were responding with excellent self-discipline to the emergency of tigers roaming the streets of San Benedicto. Afterwards, at their leisure, they could speculate on how the jungle had come to be there.

There was only one fatality. A tiger sprang out of the jungle and mauled a man who had pressed too close. It happened directly in front of the Schermerhorn twins. They turned their rifles on the tiger and killed it instantly; but the man was dead, too.

* * * * *

Elvin was surprised to see tears in the eyes of the twins, but he credited it to the unstable emotions of adolescence. Both of them had acted with maturity when they faced the tiger; no adult could have done more. Still they wept, even though the man was a stranger.

By eight o'clock the stirrings in the jungle had stopped. The men began to relax. Waitresses from the Bid-a-Wee Cafe brought out doughnuts and coffee and distributed them among the crowd.

There came, then, a new disturbance at the far end of Main Street, a shouting of tumultuous voices. A mob moved slowly into the center of town, clinging to the sides of an antiquated dump truck.

"Gold! Gold! Gold!" It was like a chant shouted with ecstatic antiphony. The dump truck stopped and Elvin saw the unbelievable--gleaming heaps of gold shoveled like gravel into the back of the vehicle. The driver stood on the running board, weaving drunkenly.

"The whole damn' desert," he shouted. "All of it, as far as I could see--all pure gold!"

He took a shovel and scattered the nuggets and dust among the throng. "Take all you like. Lots more where this came from!"

The mob stirred slowly at first, and then more and more violently, as the men began to race for their cars. The vehicles were already crowded close together. Gears ground and fenders crumbled. The street became helplessly jammed with locked cars. Only a few on the fringe escaped. Angry arguments broke out, degenerating into fist fights. The peak violence cooled a little after a few heads had been smashed, and grudgingly the men turned to the task of freeing their cars.

Donald snatched Elvin's arm. "Stay here with Pop," he shouted above the clatter. "Dave and I are going back to the ranch. Mom may need us. The desert runs right up to the edge of our property, you know."

"Going to walk?"

"I think we can get the station wagon out. It's pretty far back."

Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn worked side by side helping untangle the mass of vehicles. After an hour order had been more or less restored, and the mob had thinned, since each of the freed cars had been driven off at top speed to the desert bonanza.

For a moment the sky darkened. Elvin looked up. The jungle had disappeared and a medieval castle, complete with knights, had taken its place. The mob shrank back in terror. So did the knights, although one or two on the battlements ventured to send shafts into this new enemy that had appeared at the castle gates. But there was no time for real hostilities to develop, for the castle vanished and a 19th century factory took its place. The factory survived less than thirty seconds, before it gave way to the bank and row of stores which had originally stood on the site.

For some reason the crowd began to cheer, as they would a victorious football team. But the tumult died quickly, for the buildings were covered with a slime of jungle vines, torn up by their roots, and a pair of snarling lions stood at bay on the sidewalk. After they had shot the lions, they found a cobra was coiled on the cashier's desk in the bank and an antelope was imprisoned in the dry goods store. They were still clearing out miscellaneous wild life when reporters from the city newspapers, apprised by the _San Benedicto News_ of the gold strike, descended upon the town. They were followed by a deluge of prospectors, arriving in anything that would move--bicycles and Cadillacs, Model T's and Greyhound buses.

The mob poured into town first by the scores, and then by the thousands. Primarily male, their prevailing mood was explosive instability, a glassy-eyed greed flamed higher as each truckload of gold poured back into town from the diggings. The four-man police force was helpless. The major telegraphed to Sacramento for the National Guard; in the interim, he deputized every townsman he could find, among them Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn.

* * * * *

Elvin worked until he was exhausted, herding the mob into the streets and through the town as rapidly as they would move; and still there was no relief, and the number in the throng increased by the minute. Newsreel trucks, television units, press cars twisted among the vehicles heading for the desert. Regularly, heavy duty trucks brought tons of gold back from the diggings and deposited them at the bank until the aisles overflowed and the precious metal sifted through the windows forming little pyramids in the street. By noon Treasury men flew in from Washington. They circled the diggings and landed to inspect the quality of the gold hoard at the bank.

Fifteen minutes later a rumor filtered among the deputies: the Treasury men estimated that the San Benedicto strike would yield upwards of two or three hundred thousand times the known gold supply of the world. When the _San Benedicto News_ came out in mid-afternoon, it headlined the first shock of the economic disaster.

World currencies were collapsing; three nations were already bankrupt; international trade was grinding to a standstill, with no medium of exchange; retail prices in the United States had started to skyrocket, in the wake of rising stock market quotations. And still the procession of dump trucks brought the tons of gold back from the desert. When the bank overflowed the dry goods store was commandeered as an emergency depository, and later the Five-and-Ten and the sprawling basement of Montgomery Ward's.

When the first contingent of National Guardsmen marched into San Benedicto, it was obviously too small to police the mob. The press estimated that a quarter of a million people were moving into the valley every hour. More Guard units were summoned and ultimately, at the Governor's request, two regiments of the regular army were dispatched to San Benedicto, along with a Tank Corps and ten thousand Marines from Camp Pendleton.

It was nightfall before the deputies were relieved. Tired and dirty, Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn rode back to the ranch on a prospector's truck. From the lawn they looked across Schermerhorn's ploughed fields at the desert, teeming with mobs of men and bright in the glare of countless searchlights. Mrs. Schermerhorn met them on the porch. She clung to her husband's arms, trembling.

"I'm so glad you're back safely!" she whispered. "They've been moving closer all day." She nodded toward the desert. "Like ants, trampling and destroying everything that gets in their way."

Pop Schermerhorn clenched his fists. "If they'd broken in here, I'd have--"

"If it hadn't been for the twins, I don't know what might have happened. They got their class over here, the whole tenth grade. All day long they've been patrolling our fences, without even stopping long enough to eat. They're all out in the workshop now; they've made it a kind of headquarters."

* * * * *

The three of them went into the living room. Pop Schermerhorn and Elvin dropped wearily on a couch, while Mrs. Schermerhorn poured stiff drinks for both of them. The radio was playing, a smoothly sweet dance orchestra from San Francisco. But the music faded abruptly, and an excited newscaster interrupted.

"It's been like this all day," Mrs. Schermerhorn said. She looked up nervously as the side door opened and the twins came in.

"We just wanted some more copper wire, Mom, for the thing we're making," Donald said, but he hesitated when he heard the news broadcast. Both twins dropped silently on the arms of an overstuffed chair and listened.

The bulletin was brief; it reviewed the growing chaos among the foreign exchanges, the expanding list of bankruptcies. Two European nations, driven to internal disaster, had gone to war; already the big powers were choosing sides, framing ultimatums. War seemed to be the one universal panacea for all things. In New York stores had started to quote new dollar prices every hour, although purchases made in silver were still relatively stable at the old value. The grating voice concluded, "The first estimates of today's yield from the San Benedicto field place it in the neighborhood of seventy-thousand tons; mining experts predict that tomorrow the figure may be tripled." As the music came on again, Donald got up and snapped off the radio.

"The economy of the world's being wrecked, isn't it?" he asked. "By too much gold."

"I don't understand," Pop Schermerhorn answered, shaking his head. "Gold's valuable; we need it; it makes us rich. But now, when we have all we want--"

"The trouble is, it has no use," David said. "Governments buy it and bury it. If gold becomes as plentiful as iron ore, we still can't do much with it. You can't make skyscrapers or sewer pipes out of gold; it's too soft."

"The government ought to clear out the field and stop the mining," Donald suggested. "That might help."

"Not as long as the world knows the gold is still here," Elvin answered. He studied the twins carefully; their comment on the economy seemed mature for tenth graders. Suddenly Elvin's weary mind began to piece together a vague kind of understanding, when he remembered the transformation of the Bunsen burner to gold. Beyond his shadowy comprehension loomed the vista of a grandiose dream of how he could use the situation for his own profit. It was intoxicating, like reaching out for the stars and finding them within his grasp.

"It's all crazy!" David cried. "We don't really use gold, anyway, in our economy. Why can't we just forget it, and go on using dollars the way we used to?"

"Because people are fools," Elvin said.

"Or, perhaps, just children," David replied. He stood up, stretching, so that his muscles rippled beneath his plaid shirt. "Well, we better get that wire, Don, and go back to work."

* * * * *

After the twins had left, Elvin went up to his room to bathe. His mind skipped pleasantly over the delightful and limitless possibilities of his new understanding. The whole thing, of course, hinged on his approach. But, after all, that shouldn't be hard; they were still children emotionally. Five years of teaching had demonstrated, to his satisfaction, that he could handle any adolescent.

He began to dress. The clothes he had worn that day were streaked and torn. He took his second suit out of the closet. As he hung the coat over the back of his desk chair, he heard metal strike against the wood. It was the coat he had worn on Friday night, when he found the rocket; in the pocket was the strip of metal that had been sealed over the cylinder of colored spheres.

He held it in his hand again. It was the first time the full surface of the metal had touched his skin. As he had before, he felt the sensation of jumbled words flooding his mind, but now the feeling was more intense. He could not put the metal down. Instead he dropped into his desk chair and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the pattern of tiny, translucent globes that dotted the surface of the metal. The heat of his body produced a chemical reaction; one by one the little globes exploded.

Pictures filled Elvin's mind, of cities, machines, towering stacks of books. These dissolved, and he saw planets whirling on the black emptiness of space around the glowing disk of a red sun. There was a cataclysmic splatter of light as the sun exploded, and slashing flame shot out to destroy its circling planets. That picture, too, disappeared and he was staring at a gray nothingness while an emotional voice spoke to him deep within his brain.