The Gregory Circle

The Gregory Circle by Murray Leinster - Trying to connect hillbilly Bud Gregory with the atomic dust destroying America was like joining simple math and nuclear physics, but Dr. Murfree found the answer!On Monday Bud Gregory sat in magnificent idleness before the shed which was his automobile repair-shop in the village of Brandon on the edge of the Great Smokies.That day something impalpable and invisible descended upon Cincinnati and people began to go to hospitals with their blood undergoing changes over which the doctors threw up their hands.On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing some work on the four automobiles awaiting repair in his shop, but did not feel like working and went fishing instead....On that day the Geiger counters in the Bureau of Standards in Washington went uniformly crazy, so that it was impossible to standardize the by-products of the atomic piles turning out nuclear explosive for national defense.On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly put in half an hour's work. Yawning, he took his pay for the job and went home and took a nap.That day forty head of cattle on a West Virginia hillside lay down and died and a trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full of dead fish. Four cancer patients in a home for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky, suddenly took a quite impossible turn for the better. They walked out of the hospital three weeks later and went back to work.On Thursday Bud Gregory—That was the way of it at the beginning. Bud Gregory seemed to have no connection with any one of the series of unusual events. The events themselves were simply preposterous. As, for example, the fact that all the foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain country in Pennsylvania turned vaguely purplish overnight, and then wilted and turned to unwholesome pulp.