GeorgeTheDJ
May 30th, 2010, 04:28 PM
Looking for book I read around 1962, with these elements:
In the mountains somewhere in the southern US is a guy with an inherent capability for using nuclear physics. He makes a "dinkus" or a "dingus" out of wire, glass and junk whenever someone asks him for help with something.
Seems like the story begins when the hero is investigating why dead birds are falling from the sky someplace, and the birds are radioactive. He traces the birds back to the mountains where he finds a cabin surrounded by a strand of wire. Inside the cabin, he can see a body lying on a bed. The ground inside the wire is warm, the heat is rising, and there is no plant or animal life inside the wire enclosure. When the hero finds the country boy who made the wire circle, the guy says all he did was make an electric fence to keep animals out. The electric fence has generated a field that goes to the center of the earth, and turns everything inside the field into fissionable material, hence the heat, the radioactivity,and the dead birds.
The hero keeps investigating. The country boy leaves the area in a car with a "dingus" that makes every molecule in the car travel in one direction. He stops the car by turning off the dingus.
At the end of the book, the country boy has made a dingus that will make bullets stop in mid-flight and retrace their path back into the gun barrel. Seems like there is some kind of nuclear missile attack imminent, and the hero asks the country boy can he help stop it. The country boy justs points the dingus up in the sky, it zaps the ionosphere, and the missiles return to their silos.
Has anybody ever heard of this? As a 15-year-old, I loved it.
Any help with name or author would be appreciated.
George
In the mountains somewhere in the southern US is a guy with an inherent capability for using nuclear physics. He makes a "dinkus" or a "dingus" out of wire, glass and junk whenever someone asks him for help with something.
Seems like the story begins when the hero is investigating why dead birds are falling from the sky someplace, and the birds are radioactive. He traces the birds back to the mountains where he finds a cabin surrounded by a strand of wire. Inside the cabin, he can see a body lying on a bed. The ground inside the wire is warm, the heat is rising, and there is no plant or animal life inside the wire enclosure. When the hero finds the country boy who made the wire circle, the guy says all he did was make an electric fence to keep animals out. The electric fence has generated a field that goes to the center of the earth, and turns everything inside the field into fissionable material, hence the heat, the radioactivity,and the dead birds.
The hero keeps investigating. The country boy leaves the area in a car with a "dingus" that makes every molecule in the car travel in one direction. He stops the car by turning off the dingus.
At the end of the book, the country boy has made a dingus that will make bullets stop in mid-flight and retrace their path back into the gun barrel. Seems like there is some kind of nuclear missile attack imminent, and the hero asks the country boy can he help stop it. The country boy justs points the dingus up in the sky, it zaps the ionosphere, and the missiles return to their silos.
Has anybody ever heard of this? As a 15-year-old, I loved it.
Any help with name or author would be appreciated.
George