Whole book · 9 sections
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Author of "The City of the Blind,"
"The Storm That Had to Be Stopped," etc.
Novelette—Complete
"As surely as the sun will rise to-morrow" goes the
saying—but that day the sun did not rise, and the blinded
world was at the mercy of a merciless scientific madman.
May the fifth was scheduled to be Police Inspector Hines's wedding day, but it happened that on that morning the sun did not rise, and so the wedding was postponed.
Otherwise it was just like every other morning. There were no storms, no earthquakes, no unusual phenomena of any kind. A great many people, as a matter of fact, simply disbelieved their clocks when they got up and therefore yawned and went back to bed again.
Others, checking up with the telephone company's time, reasoned sensibly that there was an eclipse or something of the sort, and searched the morning newspapers for details while they breakfasted by artificial light. But the morning newspapers, at least on the Atlantic Coast, bore only their usual quotas of divorces, embezzlements, ax murders and other diverting narratives. Having been printed during the night, they were entirely silent about the sun's eccentric absence. So it was quite a few hours before people became really alarmed.
Probably the first man in the United States to notice any oddity in the morning was a man wearing a green celluloid eyeshade, in the operating office of New York's gigantic uptown power station. He has no importance in the affair other than that priority.
He sat in a very brilliantly lighted office with a huge instrument board before him, on which were vast numbers of dials. A recording ammeter ticked away at his left, tracing a graph of current-consumption for one-half of the whole city. A master voltmeter and a visual master ammeter were just before his eyes.
There were windows on two sides of the room. Through them he could look out over the sleeping city. Long rows of unwinking street lights glittered in deserted avenues. The forms of the East River bridges were outlined in lines of fire. The city was silent and still, sleeping heavily. What few noises came from the empty streets seemed extraordinarily loud.
The man with the green eyeshade opened a window and took grateful breaths of the cool morning air. He was in his shirt sleeves, with his vest unbuttoned. It was hot in the office, with that peculiarly dry and stuffy heat with which we Americans fill our office buildings.
From far below, in the vast halls of the power station, there came a constant subdued, contented humming. Turbine-driven dynamos purred softly, making the electric current which supplied alike the street lamps and the buildings of half the city.
From the other windows he could see toward the east, over the sprawling bulk of Brooklyn toward the sea. There was a faint, pale-grayish glow in the sky. False dawn. Stars began to dim against its brightness. Gradually, very gradually, the dark shapes of buildings began to take form. There were no colors in the sky as yet, merely a subdued gray radiance. But a paler reflection of that pale gray light made rectangular shapes out of irregular bulks.
From the windows of the operating office the city ceased to be a pattern of glittering lights against the dark. It acquired a third dimension. Perspectives developed, and it was possible to discover that this dim, ungainly shape was nearer or farther away than that one.
The man with the green eyeshade—his name does not matter—lowered the window and went back to his seat. It was his task to forecast the demand of the city for power, and to see to it that there were always humming steel monster dynamos in readiness to supply that force.
An easy task, ordinarily. Framed upon the wall at his left, a typical graph of the city's consumption of electricity showed the normal use of current. From six to eight at night, when people dined and electric signs flared, and all dwellings were lighted up, the demand was at its peak. Then more lights burned. More cooking devices functioned. More current was consumed by all the contrivances of an electrified civilization.
The downtown power station had a lesser peak at this hour, but its greatest load came when electrically-driven power devices of lofts and factories were operating. Uptown, the peak load came from homes.
The man in the operating office rested his hand conveniently near a certain switch. It would signal for the cutting off of certain dynamos, assigned to run the street lighting system. He waited for those lights to be extinguished. He did not look out the window for his information, but at his master ammeter. When that needle flickered back to the normal indication for this hour, the dynamos below would cease to run until needed again. Most of the monster machines were idle now, anyhow.
Presently there would come a slow creeping upward, when a myriad early risers turned on lights for their dressing. The master ammeter would record that activity. And then ten thousand electric toasters would perform their function, beginning with half an hour after sunrise, and from then on would come the steady increase in the amount of current used, until ten o'clock would see the last electric dish-washing device turned off; and the normal load of elevators, curling irons, and other trivia would require only two giant generators to run until the noon hour approached.
The man with the green eyeshade waited. The needle held steady. The street lights had not been turned off. Presently there was a slow climb upward. A myriad early risers, wakened by their alarm clocks, had turned on their lights. Time passed slowly. The load increased again. Electric toasters were functioning, and eggs were being boiled.
The man in the operating office of the uptown power station could follow the activities of a city by watching a single giant dial. But he was frowning a little. The load was increasing. There was no drop. His eyes sought a clock at hand. Just the time for sunrise. The load continued to increase.
Frowning, he shifted his hand and swung another switch. A hitherto silent, idle monster below began to hum contentedly. Watching the dial, presently he threw another switch. Still another began to purr, down in the echoful open space where metal monsters lay quiescent.
A telephone rang beside him. He spoke impatiently.
"I don't know. That's what the load calls for." He lifted his eyes and searched a row of circuit ammeters. "No. Everything's all right. If you have to start up another boiler, better go ahead."
A few minutes later, frowning more markedly than before, he lifted the instrument and called himself.
"Get three extra boilers ready. I'm going to need them unless the load falls off."
He watched his instruments in frowning, concentrated attention. He was entirely too busy to glance out of the window. Twice he looked at a clock and at the graph on the wall. Three times the normal demand for power at this time. Now four times.
He called for more boilers to supply steam. Discipline in the power plant is as strict, of course, as in any naval vessel. Orders are obeyed. More and more of the metal monsters whirred and whined and purred themselves into a contented humming.
Eight o'clock. The man with the green eyeshade bit at his nails. Then he looked out of the window. Three seconds of incredulous gazing, and he picked up the telephone instrument.
"Prepare for peak loading," he said curtly. "There's an eclipse or something. It's still dark outdoors."
And from then on he glanced at the windows as often as at his instruments. It was dark outside. At eight o'clock in the morning the street lights of New York were glittering jewels set in rows. The East River bridges were limned in lines of glowing lights. Puzzled people began to appear upon the streets. Store fronts were lighted. Windows in apartments and in private homes began to glow in vivid small rectangles.
At half past eight the man in the green eyeshade raised the window and stared shakenly upward. The sky was a dull, dead, velvety black. No stars were visible. No trace of illumination; no faintest ray of light came down from above. The city lived and moved and had its being in what would have been an entirely normal fashion—for night-time. Nothing at all had happened. Nothing whatever had occurred. The only oddity that could be discovered anywhere was simply the fact that on that morning the sun had not risen.
Not everywhere did the phenomenon of darkness make its appearance so quietly. In London a bright sunshiny morning had been in being. The streets were filled with traffic. Children played in Kensington Gardens. Small tugs puffed importantly up and down the rather inadequate Thames.
In the houses of Parliament an impassioned debate was going on upon the subject of the manorial rights surviving in the village of Muttle Deeping, West Harborough, Hants. At the palace, a popular member of the royal family was in the act of entering a motor car to lay his fourth cornerstone for the week. London was, it is clear, in the middle of a normal, sunshiny morning.
Then the sky flickered, and all at once it was night. The sky was a dead, jet black. For a moment the city was stunned, before motor car headlights flamed into being. Two minutes later electric light bulbs began to glow in buildings. They dimmed, however, as the drain upon the power houses grew far more swiftly than the dynamos could be prepared to meet the load.
It was half an hour before the street lamps began to glow dully, and over an hour and a half before the city was illuminated as in a normal night, by which time the first and natural explanation of an eclipse in being was patently untrue. No eclipse ever lasted so long. And panic swept over London and all England.
In Budapest the darkness fell at high noon. In Madrid at eleven. At Stamboul—Constantinople—the sky was blotted out while myriads of the faithful bowed in prayer. In Calcutta the colors of the sunset were wiped out by an instantaneous curtain of utter darkness.
At Flagstaff, Arizona, an astronomer was peering patiently through a giant telescope at the planet Mars when the planet and all the stars beyond abruptly seemed to cease to be. He thought the telescope had met with some accident. Even later, when from the outside of the observatory the whole sky was seen to be blotted out, he still thought the obscuration due to an extremely heavy bank of clouds. But he puzzled bewilderedly over the suddenness of their forming.
Professor Schaaf was probably the first man in the whole world to evaluate the phenomenon at its true value. As May the fifth was the wedding day of his bosom friend Hines, Schaaf had spent the previous night at his flat, to listen patiently to the advantages of matrimony. He had shooed Hines benevolently to bed at two in the morning, and had slept peacefully himself. But at seven Schaaf was awake and found it dark outside.
The scientist looked at his watch and blinked, and listened to its ticking. He got up and stared out over the city, illuminated as if at midnight and already stirring. He saw the bright ribbon of an elevated train, several blocks away. He could see that it was filled with people.
He went to the telephone and called the apartment telephone operator. The Negro's voice came up gladly:
"Ya-as, suh, Professuh Schaaf! Seben o'clock. But, Professuh! Ah wish yo'd tell me 'bout dishere eclipse. Hit's dark outside, suh. How long's the eclipse goin' to last, suh? Sev'l of the tenants done asked me a'ready, suh."
Schaaf grunted, and turned around to squint out of the windows again.
"Der defil! Hm... Giff me der Meteorological Bureau. Find der number and call me back. I find out."
He padded to a window in carpet slippers. He heard Hines breathing evenly and regularly in the next room. Schaaf raised a window and stared up at the sky. An even, velvety black. No variation anywhere. As black as ink—blacker. Blacker than the darkness of an eclipse, because even during the moments of totality the stars can be seen. And starlight even upon a thick blanket of clouds would give more light than this.
Schaaf put down the window, blinking. He stood quite still, a disreputable figure in dressing-gown and slippers, with his luxuriant blond beard uncombed. And suddenly his eyes opened very wide, and he began to swear softly to himself.
He went back to the telephone.
"Der Meteorological Bureau? Professor Albert Schaaf speaking. Will you giff me der bolometer-reading of der moment?... Der bolometer reading! Der amount of heat being radiated to der earth from der sky! Yes!"
He fumed and fretted while the telephone receiver was silent. Then he became intent.
"Yes... Hm... That is larger than a night reading, hein?... What would be der reading during der moments of totality of an eclipse?..."
He shook his head impatiently. "Nefer mind der corrections for latitude. Abbroximate! Giff me der figures!"
Again he fumed nervously.
"Fery well. Thank you. Abbroximately one-fourth der normal amount of heat is being radiated to der earth from der sky. Which is too much for an eclipse, and fery much too much for night-time. I thank you. I thought I was cuckoo in der head."
He hung up the receiver and swore classic German profanity while he jiggled the hook.
"Der verdammt deffil!" he said bitterly; then, into the telephone: "Get police headquarters at once. Hurry!"
He scowled at the universe, represented by a section of Hines's library wall, until a voice answered. "Hello!" he said savagely into the transmitter. "This is der Herr Professor Albert Schaaf. You know me?"
A prompt affirmative came over the wire. In those few circles where Schaaf was unknown on his own account—few indeed after his notable part in battling the scientific fiend Preston—he was known as a friend of Police Inspector Hines, who had directed those fights.
"Now listen carefully. I am in Hines's apartment. He is still asleep. I haff not wakened him because he is going to need sleep before this thing is finished. But I giff an order in his name. Send some police at once to giff adequate protection to Miss Kathryn Bush, who is to marry Inspector Hines to-day. I haff reason to think she is in danger. Send them at once, and send plenty of them! You understand?"
A grunt of astonishment at the other end of the wire. Then the incisive voice of a man of action.
"Good!" said Schaaf, nodding into the telephone transmitter. "Fery good. And then if you haff more men to Spare, send them up to watch ofer Hines and me. We need them. And speed is der essence of der contract."'
The incisive voice asked a question.
"Think!" said Schaaf sardonically. "Look out of der window and think, if you can, of one man who makes a specialty of raising hell with der heafens, and who has no fondness for Hines and me. That is der answer. Good-by!"
He hung up decisively, drummed nervously on his knee, and called Kathryn Bush. She was not only Hines's fiancée, she was a very capable newspaper woman, and Schaaf alternately scolded and flattered her outrageously. He liked Kathryn very much, and since Hines was going to marry somebody, Schaaf approved his choice.
Her voice came clearly, hurried and uneasy.
"Hello! What is it?"
"Miss Bush," began Schaaf apologetically, "I am sorry that I am not Hines, but—"
"I'm leaving now," said Kathryn in a strained voice. "How is he, Professor Schaaf? Is he conscious yet?"
Sweat stood out suddenly on Schaaf's forehead.
"Gott in Himmel!" he said unsteadily. "I am just in time! Miss Bush! What kind of message haff you got? Hines is all right. There is nothing wrong. What haff you heard?"
Her voice—doubtful and desperately anxious—came over the wire, "Your note said there'd been an explosion and you both were hurt—"
"It is a forgery!" snapped Schaaf. "For der lofe of Gott, do not leafe your apartment! Call to der police! Raise der deffil! But stay where you are! Did you not look out of der window?"
There was a little pause, and he heard her gasp of amazement.
"I—I was awakened by the message," she said unsteadily, "and I didn't think of anything.... It's Preston, isn't it?"
"Der bolometer-reading has his name on it," said Schaaf grimly. "I haff telephoned der police to go to your house at once. I haff not waked up Hines, because I just found out what has happened. It must be der Heaviside Layer gone cuckoo. Stay where you are!"
"I will, I—I'm glad you telephoned."
"And so am I," said Schaaf from his heart. "You will telephone, Miss Bush, efery few minutes until der police come? They are on der way, but it may be minutes yet before you are safe. I am going to wake up Hines now."
"A-all right," said Kathryn. "Don't be afraid for me."
He heard the click of her receiver on its hook. And Schaaf wiped great droplets of sweat from his face.
"That deffil," he said unsteadily. "Oh, that damned deffil!"
He went padding into Hines's bedroom and shook the sleeping man. Outside, the world was dark save for a multitude of electric bulbs, which pierced the darkness with the effect of magic. Elevated trains were roaring all over the city, now. The people of the cities of the Atlantic coastline took the sun's absence with a quite astounding calmness. They classed the darkness as that of an eclipse, and thousands of offices opened, and hundreds of factories began their work with nearly full forces of workers on hand, though the telephone switchboards were nearly swamped with vain demands on the newspaper offices and weather bureau for information they did not have.
In his bedroom, Hines sat up and blinked, and was wide awake. He grinned at Schaaf.
"Good morning! This is my wedding day, isn't it?"
"I haff my doubts," said Schaaf soberly. "Hines, damned near der worst has happened. Preston is on der job again."
Hines was on his feet in seconds. "Kathryn—?"
"Is all right," said Schaaf. "I telephoned her minutes ago. She is all right and she is going to stay all right. Look out of der window and then at der clock." Hines stared blankly. Brightly lighted streets. Brilliantly illuminated stores. Elevated trains like streamers of fire, moving along distant steel trestles. Eight o'clock in the morning, and the sky was black with an utter, unrelieved blackness.
"But—it's night!" said Hines blankly.
"Verdamm!" said Schaaf impatiently. "Of course it is night! Night in der morning." He dropped into one of the wholly incongruous 'slang phrases that adorned his speech. "You are darned tooting it is night, Hines! Der sun did not rise this morning."
"The—sun—did—not—rise—this morning," said Hines slowly. "I—see."
The telephone rang shrilly. Hines started, and moved to answer it, while Schaaf stared out at the incredible darkness that lay upon the world hours after daylight should have appeared.
His identification of the darkness with a man named Preston was not an accident, of course. There was just one man in the world who could cause meteorological disturbances on a large scale, and the three previous disturbances of Preston's creation had been somewhat like this.
It was one of Schaaf's bitternesses that he had unwittingly helped in the development of the apparatus which had done so much harm. More than a year before, he had done some highly abstruse technical research for an electrophysicist named Preston. Schaaf's share had been the determination of the mass and dimensions of the ionized bodies in atmospheric air.
He had done that work, not guessing the devilish application to be made of it, for his fare back to his native Germany, since there seemed to be no room for a theoretic physicist in the United States. But before he sailed, he had been drafted by his present friend Hines to combat the danger his measurements had enabled Preston to create.
Using Schaaf's figures in his basic calculations, Preston had developed a way to make the air opaque, black, as horribly black as the ocean's deepest abyss. And he had done it. To be sure, heretofore he had confined his blackness to the surface of the earth, but that dull, dead, velvety sky overhead was like nothing as much as the darkness Preston produced.
Schaaf did not know what Preston had done now, or how he had done it, but that Preston was responsible he was sure.
There was a sudden blaring of horns down in the street. Minutes later, the clang of the elevator door outside the apartment. Then the doorbell.
Schaaf opened the door cautiously, with Hines's service revolver in the pocket of his dressing-gown pointed and ready. There were men in uniform in the hall, with only two figures in civilian clothes, one of whom carried a tripod and camera. Schaaf fixed those two with a distinctly unpleasant expression.
"Grab those two persons, please," he said shortly, "and bring them inside here. Inspector Hines will talk in a fery few seconds."
Hines hung up, smiling grimly, as they all crowded within. He nodded.
"That was Kathryn," he said briefly. "Thanks, Schaaf!"
The words said little. The tone said a great deal. Schaaf rumbled in his beard and indicated the sputtering civilians. One of them was snarling. Hines regarded them with a grim meditativeness.
"Who are these two men?" he asked softly.
"Lookin' for you, sir," said a sergeant of police, woodenly. "When Professor Schaaf called up for a detail to come up at once, sir, he said you were in danger. And these men were just asking for you at the switchboard downstairs, sir, and they tried to bolt—"
"I'm a reporter for the Messenger," snapped one of the two angrily, "and this man is one of our staff photographers. There's some talk that Preston's back of the sun not rising, and we came here to ask—"
Hines nodded pleasantly.
"Ah!" he said softly. "But reporters don't talk like that. If you were really a reporter you'd say, 'I'm from the Messenger' or maybe that you were 'on the Messenger,' but never that you were a reporter 'for the Messenger'. Never! Search 'em, sergeant!"
A search of the suddenly blaspheming man disclosed a pair of heavy automatics and no newspaper credentials whatever. The supposed photographer yielded the same, with a pair of brass knuckles as additional armament.
Hines smiled.
"It looks as if you two men came from Preston. You may be interested to hear that the attempt to kidnap Miss Bush has failed, and the taxi driver who waited below for her has been pinched. He's going to talk. Are you two going to tell what you know?"
The pseudo-reporter snarled and shut his lips tightly. He stared meaningly at the other man. The other man shook his head. Hines watched the by-play.
"Sergeant, I seem to remember that you were on the bomb squad once. That camera seems to be unusually heavy. Suppose you open it up—carefully?"
With infinite care he removed the pear-shaped bomb.
The sergeant lifted the camera, turned it this way and that, and began to use a penknife. He handled the thing gingerly after the first two or three incisions. Minutes later, with a grunt of satisfaction, he laid down a pear-shaped bomb upon the table. Dangling from it there was the exposure device, which here evidently functioned as a means of setting it off.
The two men in civilian clothes regarded the thing in gray-faced stupefaction. Hines looked at them. One of them tried to speak, and could not.
"You see," said Hines shortly, "it's a bomb. If you'd pulled the trigger, it would have blown us all to bits. But especially you. If I know Preston, he told you it was some kind of gun. Eh?"
The photographer croaked, abandoning all pose of innocence: "He tol' us it was a trick machine gun, an' if we sprayed y' wit' it—"
"At a guess," said Hines dryly, "it's combined high explosive and poison gas. That would seem logical. If I wasn't killed by the explosion, the gas would get me. You two men would be finished either way. A much better bet than a machine gun.... How much were you to get for standing behind this thing and setting it off?"
The pseudo-reporter cursed horribly.
"Ten grand, damn his soul!" he raged. "And him sending us to bump ourselves off—"'
"I'll give you ten grand," said Hines evenly, "for the dope on where to find him. Ten grand, and immunity."
"All I know," said the photographer hoarsely, "is he give us five grand ahead o' time an' said we'd get the rest if we croaked yuh. We don't know where he's at. We seen him yesterday in Brooklyn."
"Right," said Hines. "Tell me where and when you saw him, and you go clear."
The two men gave an address, and, to a second question, the time of their talk. Hines went to the telephone and asked for a number.
"All right, sergeant," he said impatiently, while he waited. "Turn 'em loose. And you two men remember there's ten grand in it for you if you get him. There's that much for anybody that gets him. And you'll get well taken care of if you tip off the man who gets him. Clear out!"
The two men stumbled to the door, too much shaken by the knowledge that they had been intended to blow themselves to bits, to be incredulous about their release.
Hines got his connection, in Brooklyn. He ordered a raid at once, with a succinct statement that Preston—who was sufficiently well known by name to the police and the nation at large—had been there the day before. He stood up.
"Why did you turn them loose?" demanded Schaaf irritably.
The doorbell rang. Hires nodded to a policeman to open it, and said dryly:
"Those two men spreading that offer and news of Preston's double crossing are a lot more useful out of jail than in.... What 've we got here?"
Three messenger boys had arrived simultaneously with sheafs of telegrams, radios, and cables. The extraordinary nightfall had been reasoned out in six nations as possibly an extension of certain previous events in the United States. The cables were mostly addressed to Schaaf, and were from every variety of scientific body and government authority, reporting the sudden falling of darkness and asking if he could explain its cause or possible duration.
Schaaf opened the first of them and swore. He opened more, and swore more luridly. He was sputtering German profanity in a steady stream before he reached the end of them. He looked up, still in his dressing-gown and slippers, and with his blond beard bristling in every direction, to find the room empty of police and Hines hunched over the telephone, talking quietly.
"Better get some clothes on, Schaaf," said Hines. "Kathryn's coming over here. We're going down to my office."
Schaaf scowled at him.
"Hines," he said hopelessly, "der verdammt scoundrel has cofered der whole world with darkness! I know what it is, of course. Fife to fifteen miles up in der air, all ofer der earth, there is a layer of ionization. It is der Heaviside Layer, which raises der deffil with wireless telegraphy. Breston has somehow managed to penetrate it, and he has filled it with an electric field which makes der air no longer transparent. Der whole world is in darkness, and there is no way in which we can possibly locate der sending-station. Because he has practically charged der entire roof of der world with darkness. What are we going to do?"
Hines grinned.
"I've already got him located within a couple of hundred miles," he said dryly. "Get busy finding out what he's got, and I'll find where he is, and together we'll settle him."
The morning passed in unbroken darkness. Traffic thickened, grew dense, and thinned out again. Two million people, balked of information from the usual sources, were asking two other million people what they thought about the darkness, and the second two million were telling the first that they didn't know what to make of it, but so-and-so was going down to the office and there was no use being docked for absence.
Crowds filled the subway platforms and the elevated trains, and other crowds swarmed up and down from the rapid-transit stations and split up into infinitesimal fragments which coalesced at the entrances to office buildings, and always the topic of conversation was the extraordinary, inexplicable continuation of night.
Modern civilized man, however, pays the very minimum of attention to the natural part of his environment. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in New York who are outdoors less than one hour in twenty-four. To those people the absence of daylight was an extremely trivial matter. Something to be puzzled about and something to ask questions about, but not especially anything to be worried about.
In the lesser cities of the United States, of course, the darkness loomed more largely. In the small towns it was a matter of immediate and overwhelming importance. In the villages it produced apprehension bordering on panic. On the farms it was stark tragedy. But on the whole the matter was taken with a surprising calmness. If it was a precarious sort of composure, likely to break into mob hysteria at any moment, it was nevertheless composure.
But the darkness held for hour after hour, unbroken and menacing. Ten o'clock arrived. Half past ten. Eleven. The sky remained a jetty black. The temperature of the air fell below the daunting chill which normally fills the small hours before dawn.
People in the offices and factories had worked almost gayly at first, taking the use of artificial light in daytime as a sort of adventure. But as time went on and the unwontedly protracted night continued, little groups gathered at windows, staring out uneasily.
The interchange of questions about the darkness ceased to be jocular. The adventure became serious. Concern deepened to apprehension. More and more offices were quietly closed for the day. More and more factories announced a holiday. A stream of homeward-bound folk began to crowd the elevated trains and subways.
The newspaper extras were late in getting out, and Hines, cooperating and conferring with the Washington authorities, was responsible. He had put police on guard at the publishing offices, and would not let one copy of the newspapers leave the publishing plants until he had made provision for the public reaction.
The subway and elevated lines needed to be prepared for a monster homeward rush. Traffic squads needed to be reinforced. The reserves of the police department posted themselves at strategic points, the elevated and subway lines prepared for a jam, and the Newspapers were unleashed. All over the city a chorus of voices was upraised, crying extra editions. In ten thousand office buildings the elevators became jammed with folk going down to buy them. And the subway tunnels roared and rumbled with empty trains rushing down town to carry back the mob that within minutes would be fighting for places.
The newspapers were much alike, though Kathryn Bush's story in the Star was naturally the one which gave the fullest account. All the papers, however, had reasonably complete accounts of the phenomenon. This was no time to play favorites. And nearly all of them printed Schaaf's explanation in full. He had lectured for nearly half an hour in Hines's office at police headquarters, and his explanation—though given so promptly—still holds good.
"Last year," said Schaaf, "there was a sudden flood of darkness on Fifth Avenue, and there were many robberies. Hines and myself, we discovered that a deffil named Breston had done it. He had learned that under der influence of certain fery short Hertzian wafes, der air ceases to be transparent. Actually, it was der phenomenon of der fluorescence of der ionized bodies in der atmosphere, when they absorbed all der fisible colors of light and emitted infisible ones instead.
"Der essential thing is that der air is opaque, there is no light. Now, three times, so far, those short short wafes haff been used. Once on Fifth Afenue. Once der whole city was made dark. Some few months ago Breston created a storm in der Catskill Mountains by means of der fact that when der air is no longer transparent it absorbs der heat of der sun, becomes hot, and rises in huge folumes." All this, of course, was ancient history. Everybody knew it. The Storm That Had to be Stopped was one of the most distressing catastrophes in the history of the United States.
"Now, at der time of der Storm," Schaaf went on bitterly, "when we got to der sending-station which sent out der short short wafes, we blew it to pieces and der storm stopped. But der apparatus for making those short short wafes had had thermit and explosifes placed about it so that it was destroyed. Breston did that. Also we found der body of a man, burned with der explosifes and der thermit. Der newspapers printed that it was the body of Breston. We hoped it was so. But later infestigation profed that it was not. Breston is fife feet three inches tall. Der dead body was fife feet nine inches tall.
"For months past, Inspector Hines has been defoting all his time to a search for Breston. And I haff worked on der problem of combating der short wafes. Himmel! How I haff worked! But in both cases, Breston has so far kept ahead of us. This morning's darkness is of Breston's contrifance. But we haff licked him three times before, we will lick him again, and anything that he says to der contrary is banana oil!"
So far, Schaaf was quoted verbatim. But the rest of his lecture was expanded in most of the papers, because Schaaf's mixture of technical terms and slang was confusing. The essence of his explanation, though, was very simple.
To make the earth's whole atmosphere opaque would have required millions of billions of horse-power. But far above the surface of the earth the Heaviside Layer in the atmosphere seemed as if made for Preston's purposes. From five to fifteen miles up there is an abrupt change in the characteristics of the air. At that height there is a layer of highly ionized air, markedly electrically conducting, which spreads over the whole earth. Schaaf likened it to a roof of conducting metal over the whole earth.
It was clear that if the short short waves of Preston's discovery could be introduced into that conducting layer of the atmosphere, they would spread out over the whole earth with but little loss of power. Five thousand horse-power would do it.
"Der thing we do not yet understand," said Schaaf, "is how Breston manages to introduce his short short wafes into der Heaviside Layer. We will find it out, fery shortly. Breston cannot bring der darkness down to der surface of der earth, because he can haff power enough to darken only a small part of it, and der moment he does that we locate him, and when we locate him we kill him. And sooner or later we locate him anyhow!"
His expressed optimism was not altogether unfeigned, of course. He had the desperate certitude of a man who simply dares not admit the possibility of failure. At the moment that the newspapers were blazoning his announcement on their front pages, Schaaf was actually in something close to despair.
Long, explorative fingers of light were poking upward toward the sky, from warships anchored in the harbor. Half a dozen giant ships of the Atlantic Fleet were in port. Army tanks had been loaned Hines to destroy Preston's storm-making apparatus, and all the resources of the government, of course, would be used to restore sunlight to the world again. The harbor was smoothly rippling, almost oily on its surface. Long lights glimmered on its waves. Then, suddenly, from the flagship of the fleet there came three or four staccato detonations. Seconds later there were thin crackling explosions high overhead. The searchlights shot back and forth, searching the roof over the world.
A little later, three or four more explosions. After a longer interval, brittle detonations high above. The searchlights moved restlessly over the ebon ceiling of the earth. And still again came the sharp sound of an anti-aircraft gun firing at an empty sky.
The searchlights followed a thin thread of whitish vapor upward. It stretched like a kite-string toward the sky. It was the trail of tracer-smoke left by the anti-aircraft shell.
Blinkers began to operate on the ships. A man on shore spoke crisply into a telephone.
Schaaf got the message, frowning bitterly in his despair.
"Yes. I haff it. Thank you."
He was in Hines's office, waiting for the information. An anti-aircraft gun had fired time-fused shells to burst at progressively greater heights. The shell which burst at an elevation of forty-two thousand feet had been unseen, because its cloud of smoke had been formed inside the now opaque Heaviside Layer of the atmosphere. The layer of darkness which kept the whole world deep in night was eight miles above the surface.
"What can we do, Hines?" demanded Schaaf in despair. "Can we send an afiator up eight miles to do intricate obserfations with delicate apparatus? We cannot. Then how are we going to locate der point of dissemination of der verdammt darkness-producing wafes?" Hines held up his hand, spoke quietly into a telephone. He was deathly pale, but Schaaf was too excited to notice it.
"We're coming along pretty well," said Hines grimly, "except that you've still got to find out more about Preston's weapons. I think I know, roughly, where he is."
Schaaf sat up and blinked.
"It's been apparent from the first that when we do locate Preston we have everything in our favor. We have an army we can fling against him, on land. We have aircraft to attack him by air. We can send the shells from fourteen-inch guns against him from the sea. He knows all that."
Schaaf ran his fingers through his beard. "Shoot der works," he said harassedly.
"The President received a letter from him telling what his demands are going to be. Other governments have got similar letters. He's fighting the whole world, and he knows it. What weapons has he got?"
"Darkness," said Schaaf bitterly, "and storms, and a total lack of humanity."
"And we have all the other weapons. Where can he defend himself, with the weapons he has, if we do locate him?"
Schaaf scratched his chin, underneath his beard.
"Wherefer he is. Tell me, Hines."
"If he's on an island," said Hines, "he can't be attacked by an army. If he can blind any ship within twenty or thirty miles by making all the atmosphere—not only the Heaviside Layer—opaque to light, no ship can navigate to that island. And if he cuts the darkness on the rest of the world, he can make a storm that will sink any ship or wreck any aircraft in the world."
"He is on an island!" said Schaaf instantly.
"Of course he is on an island! But where?"
"He gave himself away," said Hines grimly. "He talked to his assassins, in Brooklyn, just fourteen hours before the darkness went on. And he wouldn't trust anybody else to work an affair the size of this, so he's at his darkness plant. At most he's not more than twelve hours from New York. More probably only ten. And the last eleven of those hours were night hours, and there are no night-flying passenger air lines out of the metropolitan district now. He traveled by train or boat or motor car. Averaging, he's not more than four hundred miles from New York if he made the longest part of his journey by train or car. He's probably not less than two hundred, for reasons of discretion. Here's a map. Draw the two circles—two hundred miles and four hundred miles away. We can block off the land between the circles. He isn't there. We can block off the area where there are no islands. If he needs to make a storm, he'll want to be on an island, not a steamer."
Schaaf looked at the area that was left.
"Der Maine coast!"
"Of course," said Hines. "And now remember he wants an island well out at sea so storms can sweep clear around it, and one that's fairly isolated, so he could have built his plant without attracting attention."
Schaaf scrutinized the map with painstaking care.
"Hm. This little speck looks promising, Hines."
Hines said grimly, "The police of all New England have been questioning fishermen. I mentioned that island especially. Only one man has been near it recently. He was ordered off by guards who told him a rich man had bought it and was making a summer home on it. And so I've checked up, and it hasn't been sold, and the present owner knows nothing about guards there. And also, it isn't a rum-runner's rendezvous. What does that add up to?"
"Plenty!" said Schaaf exuberantly. "I take off der hat. I make der grand salaam! Now we go there and haff a Schrecklichkeit party; wait until night, because we do not want to haff him start a storm. And we line up der Nafy, and they take der sights, and there is a signal, and bam, pow, biff, and he is blooey! Blown off der map!"
Hines looked at Schaaf. And for the first time Schaaf saw how pale his friend was. His face was like a mask. He reached over his desk and tossed Schaaf a little envelope.
"I was to be married to-day," said Hines steadily. "Preston's men tried to kidnap Kathryn this morning, just as they tried to blow the two of us to bits. We beat the assassins, and Kathryn, thanks to you, Schaaf, escaped the trap that was set for her. We've been busy ever since. She wrote the account for the extra edition of the Star. We postponed our wedding as a matter of course."
Schaaf said suddenly, "Gott! Hines, you look like der deffil!"
"You blocked one attempt to kidnap Kathryn," repeated Hines evenly. "She went to the office of the Star. And another attempt was made three hours ago. The one thing she didn't expect was another attempt to kidnap her, made in exactly the same fashion as the first. This time it succeeded. Kathryn's disappeared. And I had a telegram from his man, sent from here in New York, saying that he's taking her direct to his headquarters. So she'll be killed if we kill Preston."
Hines moistened his lips and said with difficulty, "The—thing—that makes it bad is that we were to have been married to-day."
The lights of the city glowed in long, long rows. The whiter arc-lights on the Jersey side of the Hudson glittered more palely, but all lights shone bright, in the longest night in history. The gigantic electric signs flamed their advertising slogans for the world to admire at three o'clock in the afternoon. The Hudson River day boat came downstream as a glittering mass of lights. Her searchlight shot out and she docked by its rays. There was a deep-toned roaring on the surface of the river. Another. A third. A fourth motor added its roaring hum to the din. Then the four roaring noises swept swiftly across the harbor waves and lifted suddenly, and rose into the darkness that overlay the world. Tiny navigation lights flashed on, and drifted across the empty black sky where sun or moon or stars should have been. They headed out toward Long Island Sound and vanished.
The city, left behind, went valorously on about its business. At three in the afternoon of the day that the sun did not rise, New York was perhaps typical of the whole civilized world. The more savage territories of the planet were sunk in panic, and pagan gods were passionately besought to give back the sun to the world again. In China the shrines were filled with the sounds of gongs and firecrackers. In Soviet Siberia long-neglected chapels resounded to cries of "Hospodi pomilui!" Everywhere that men had temples, those temples were swarming masses of terror-stricken suppliants, pleading for the sun to come back again.
But New York was more typical of the more scientifically minded Occident. In one sense the terror was more acute, because New York had had bitter and-repeated experience of Preston and his works. But Hines and Schaaf had said there was no more danger, that Preston had done his worst.
New York had learned, by now, that they knew what they were talking about. Therefore, while there was not complete confidence in their ability to beat Preston again, there was a definite knowledge of the cause of the darkness and a definite idea that the source of the darkness was being attacked. So that New York was frightened but hopeful; terrified, but not panic-stricken because of its belief in Hines and Schaaf.
People in New York, too, had no clear idea of the magnitude of the disaster that impended. As long as artificial light could be used, the average New Yorker considered the matter a nuisance and a cause for alarm, but no immediately dangerous matter.
He read his newspapers avidly, and the statements issued by various scientists consulted by the newspapers struck him as melodramatic in the same way that his newspaper headlines were always melodramatic. But he considered them quite as remote from his own life as his morning torch-fiend narratives.
The darkness was, however, a serious matter enough. Leaving aside the matter of illumination from the sun, the earth was receiving only one-fourth its normal daily supply of solar heat. The layer of darkness intercepted the rest. True, the part of the earth that should have been dark was losing less than its usual nightly amount of heat by radiation into interstellar space, but matters were bad enough anyhow.
The equator was receiving no more heat from the sun than southern Greenland normally receives. New York was receiving less than is normal at the north pole itself. Only the fact that the stored up warmth of the earth's surface layers was being lost very slowly, prevented an immediate drop to below zero temperatures.
But by three o'clock in the afternoon, when the four seaplanes took off for a search of the Maine coast, the official thermometer in the Meteorological Bureau of New York City showed forty-four degrees Fahrenheit—twelve degrees above freezing. The nearness of the ocean with its vast supplies of stored heat had prevented a greater drop.
Inland, the temperature fall was greater yet. A heavy snow was falling in Cleveland. In Butte. Montana, zero had actually been reached. It was not at all difficult to compute a progressive temperature loss which would average twenty degrees a day after the first twenty-four hours, and in one week would make the normally temperate zones uninhabitable and permit of glacier formation in the Panama Canal Zone.
In the face of such figures as this, estimates that two weeks' darkness would destroy all planted crops and cause inescapable famine, seemed hardly worth worrying about. Agricultural experts were pointing out that unless Preston was defeated or his terms met, the world would starve to death. Sunlight is essential to vegetable growth, on which all life depends. But such fears, as a few physicists recognized grimly, were quite needless. Long before that catastrophe came about, mankind would not need to worry about planted crops. Long before the world went hungry, it would have frozen to death.
Schaaf was sunk in a bitter gloom as the four planes roared northward. Big planes, they were. Three Navy bombers, carrying flares and bombs and radio, and the multi-passenger flying transport which carried Hines and Schaaf and an impressive array of apparatus for measurements and photography.
The glow against the black sky, which was New York, faded away against the horizon. Only, there was no horizon. Little pin-pricks of light showed beneath the speeding ships. There were three men in the transport beside Hines and Schaaf. The pilot and his relief, and a radio operator who spoke from time to time to the pilot.
Schaaf saw Hines looking at him and said gloomily, "We are doing radio nafigation. I haff nefer been so helpless; I know more about Breston's apparatus than anybody else in der world—and I do not know der beginning of it! How does he get his wafes into der Heaviside Layer? How does he do it?"
Hines shrugged. His face was a mask, dead white and quite expressionless.
"They must have got Kathryn through," he said irrelevantly. "I had a cordon out that I didn't think a fly could break through. Every road, every bypath covered. There was a destroyer fleet out of Boston, too, to pick up any launch. But they got her through. I don't know how."
Schaaf said helplessly.
"What are we going to do, Hines? Tell me!"
Hines spoke tonelessly, without expression.
"Preston found out his power by accident. At first, I suppose, he merely thought of getting rich by helping out in robberies. But then he found he could manipulate the stock market by turning on the dark. He tried that, and found he could make storms. And now—you know his terms for making the sun shine again?"
"They haff not been made public," growled Schaaf, "and I haff been busy."
"He demands the submission of all the nations of the earth. He is to be Emperor of Earth—or he'll let the earth freeze until the survivors make him their emperor." Hines shrugged. "He has some involved conditions. Every living man to swear allegiance. Some trick arrangement by which he'll always have a corps of his gangsters about a darkness-transmitter somewhere, to keep the world cowed... Of course nobody is thinking of accepting his terms while there's a chance to fight. But there isn't much time."
"If he is on that Metinic Island," growled Schaaf, "we can mass artillery and ships and blow der whole damned thing to bits."
Hines fumbled for a cigar and smiled drearily. "Isn't it funny? Kathryn and I were to have been married to-day, and I'm massing artillery to blow Preston to bits—and she'll be blown to bits with him."
Schaaf swallowed something.
"Hines! Gott, Hines, I am sorry!"
"Don't be," said Hines. "I'm going to be on that island when it's destroyed by shell fire. So don't be sorry for me."
The planes flew steadily on through the darkness. Snow swirled about them for a while, and ceased. This was the afternoon of May the fifth. On the earth below, people were gazing hopelessly up at the sky of ebony. All over the world there was despair, as varied in its expression as the people who expressed it.
In Alabama, farmers moved along their cornfield rows with lanterns, watching the young shoots turning black with frost. There was frost as far south as Havana. In the western mountains, dry land farmers motored to the edges of mountain streams that had begun to flow freely. Now they were trickles again, flowing ever more slowly beneath a thickening shell of ice.
Men cursed the black sky that would not let the sun's warmth through. There was beach ice on the Great Lakes. A borax prospector in Death Valley saw by a thick miner's candle that there was a deposit of hoar frost even in that unbelievable place.
Everywhere human beings began to realize that darkness was not the worst of the evils upon them. The world was growing colder and ever colder beneath its sky of black. It was a dark world whose inky obscurity was broken only by the tiny yellow flames where yet hoping or desperately enduring people comforted themselves by the light it seemed would never come down from the sky again.
But the wild things had no comfort. Those creatures of the night which prey on others, at first moved freely. Bats soared in their erratic fashion until the increasing cold set them hunting their caves again. Owls swept abroad on noiseless wings. And some—not many—of the four-footed animals crawled or crept or slithered upon their private businesses.
But the other things lay hidden. Songbirds crouched in their nests while the night hung on interminably and the air grew icy. Little nestlings roused and chirped querulously from hunger. But night still remained. The age-old instincts, bred of terror, held the old birds still, though their young ones starved. And besides, to have left the nests after the cold increased would be to let the featherless young ones freeze.
There were very many small, bewildered tragedies in woods and forests and jungles while the darkness held.
Four planes roared on, ever northward, in their quest of the island where Preston had his stronghold. Gradually, the three bombers dropped down toward the earth. Gradually, the transport plane climbed. And then a signal came by radio. Schaaf grew tense and watchful. Hines grew grim and still, staring at the world of darkness all below. And then, quite suddenly, there was a vast, blinding glare below. A bomber had dropped a flare.
The sky above remained like ebony. The sea remained like ink. But there was a line of surf upon the sea, and an enormous glare beneath a swaying parachute, and three huge bombing planes in silhouette against a world all black and white.
Hines stared downward through powerful binoculars, focusing them quite calmly on the land beyond the surf.
"I see a man—two men, running," he said steadily.
The first ball of fire was dropping swiftly. A second bloomed suddenly, farther on. An island was made clearly visible. An irregular, jagged shape, outlined by surf, with here and there a streak of white sand. Schaaf put his glasses to his eyes, and the earth seemed to leap toward him. Low, squat structures of a curiously ungainly form. A bowl-shaped apparatus ten feet or more across, made of wires which glittered in the unbearable light. And one other, incredible thing...
Schaaf blinked, and swore, and then shouted.
"I haff it!"
From the enter of the island a column of solid, jetty black reared upward toward the sky. It was opaque, solid-seeming, and utterly black. It looked like the drooping tentacle of some colossal waterspout, anchored and moored. It looked like a throbbing hose through which darkness was being pumped upward to discolor the sky.
Schaaf babbled.
"Four-centimeter wafes! He has got der four-centimeter wafes! Oh, der clefer scoundrel! Der verdammt clefer scoundrel!"
On the island three men were running toward the bowl-shaped apparatus of wires. A third flare blazed vividly. In the big ship seven thousand feet up the aircraft camera clicked steadily, exposing plates and changing them and exposing more. The radio operator was working his key feverishly.
The three bombing planes circled and soared over the island. A fourth flare filled the world with light. And suddenly one of the monster flying things down below wheeled in its flight and dived savagely.
"Difing for der blackness-beam!" panted Schaaf. "Difing—"
Three men were working frantically about the bowl-shaped apparatus on the ground. The giant bomber showed clearly for an instant, as if poised before its suicidal dash against the apparently solid column of blackness reaching upward to the sky. It shot into that blackness—
The sky split open!
From horizon to horizon lurid flames flashed into being. The sea and the island and all the world was lit by an unbearable, a terrific glare. It seemed as if all the world were being destroyed in one vast explosion, the steam and fumes of which had already mounted colossally toward the zenith.
But there was no blast of sound. The sky closed once more. There was utter silence save for the loud droning of the motors outside the cabin of the big plane. Far below, three magnesium flares glittered brightly.
"Gawd!" said the radio operator, awed, "What was that?"
Hines said dryly: "That was daylight, my friend. The sunlight and clouds. That was what we expect to see for twelve hours every day."
Schaaf was muttering, while he rubbed his light-dazed eyes: "There was four thousand kilowatts in that beam. What happened?"
He peered down again. There was a sudden flaring upward of lurid yellow flames. The bomber that had dived into the darkness-beam had crashed, now, and was burning fiercely on a narrow beach.
"Get der other ships away!" snapped Schaaf suddenly. "Recall them! And we haff to go like der deffil! Quick!"
But he was too late. The bowl-shaped contrivance of glittering wires moved suddenly. A beam of blackness shot out from it. That blackness swept upward and enveloped a burning flare. The flare went out. The beam of darkness swept on, and the flare was a dripping, swiftly falling mass of tiny yellow sparks. The beam swung sharply to one of the two remaining bombers. The plane dived and dodged, but the darkness caught it, enveloped it. The bomber dropped crazily out of the blackness, spitting sparks and burning. It crashed into the sea.
The third bomber was racing for safety. The beam shot toward it, and when it careened wildly to escape, expanded widely. It became an apparently solid object a hundred yards across. It closed over the bomber, and there was a terrific explosion. When the beam died away there was no falling, burning wreck. There was only a rain of small particles of debris.
"Go like der deffil!" snapped Schaaf. "Cut off der motors and glide! We haff to carry der news back. And for der lofe of Gott, do not use der radio! He will pick it up and we are geflooey!"
Hines sat at a telephone in Portland, and things began to move. He called Boston, and long, lean, greyhound-like ships with many funnels slipped their moorings and slid smoothly out to sea. Three cruisers raised steam and went after them. And there was vast activity in the Navy yard, and presently an old harbor-defense monitor went staggering gamely after the more modern ships.
He called New York, and trains were shunted swiftly here and there, and there were shouted orders and the rattling of accouterments and much profanity; then flatcars with squat, ungainly-wheeled shapes upon them rolled out of the city bound northward. They traveled at the speed of the fastest express trains, and passenger flyers were sidetracked to let them pass.
Hines called here and there, and everywhere there were swift and deadly preparations for action. At Newport, two battalions of Marines entrained with an astounding celerity. At other scattered cities other fighting men and fighting machines made ready. Three howitzer batteries were bumping at top speed over the rails to Maine. Two twelve-inch guns with railroad mountings formed a racing special train with cars of shells and their gun crews.
All the preparations were Hines's doing, and he explained his orders as he gave them in the manner of a man who does not expect to survive their carrying out. Metinic Island was no more than six miles from an accessible part of the mainland. Artillery will range that distance easily. Within two hours after Hines's return from the reconnaissance flight in which three bombing planes were lost, artillery officers had reached the future firing-point by plane and were marking out gun-emplacements and swearing at the inadequacy of the local maps.
Hines's plan was to mass artillery in such quantity and with such a supply of ammunition that Preston's headquarters could be smothered under a rain of explosives. One field gun to ten yards of target can keep that target under an adequate barrage fire. No man can live in the open under such a hail of death. But in addition there would be the warships. Four super-dreadnaughts, three cruisers, and a monitor would pound the island. Three hours before dawn there would be over twenty guns of twelve and fourteen-inch caliber trained upon the island, and upward of thirty eight-inch rifles to assist. Nothing should be able to live on the surface or beneath it, however deep the dugouts Preston might have prepared. Hines was grimly calculating that within three minutes of the opening of fire every square foot of earth upon the island should have been plowed up by explosives. And Kathryn was there. She must be.
It looked perfect, however, from the standpoint of destruction. The resources of one regional department of the Army would be at hand before dawn. The Navy would have its ships at hand with shotted guns. The air would be alive with flying craft. A signal; a blast of cannon-fire; a terrific, long-continued battering, and Metinic Island should disappear forever.
It did look perfect. Too perfect, considering that Preston knew what to expect now. Schaaf paced nervously back and forth as Hines gave his orders.
"He has something up his sleefe, Hines," he said irritably. "He has taken plenty from der cuffs, but he has something more."
Hines relaxed deliberately, with an effort.
"What has he got?'
"He has four-centimeter wafes," said Schaaf desperately. "They explain nearly eferything. It was calculated a year and a half ago that der death-ray of der imaginatif nofelists is theoretically impossible. But if a man makes Hertzian wafes of four centimeters frequency, he has der world by der tail. All der armies haff been trying to make them, because it can be proofed by mathematics that in der path of a beam of four-centimeter wafes der air will be a conductor der same as metal. Breston has them. He has sent a beam of them straight up to der Heaviside Layer. And his short wafes that make der air opaque, they trafel along der four-centimeter beam until they hit der Layer. There they spread out. So much is simple. Der bomber that was destroyed when we went to look simply difed through a beam of four-centimeter wafes that was carrying four thousand kilowatts of Breston's prifate short short wafes up to der Heaviside Layer. It is no wonder it crashed!
"Der thing that destroyed der other bombers is just as simple. A beam of der same conducting wafes, with darkness in it so they could see to aim it, and high-frequency current shot into it at der critical moment. A plane in a beam of those four-centimeter wafes is just like a plane touching a power-transmission line. If der frequency is high enough, there is no need of a ground wire to electrocute efery man on board. Der whole plane starts sparking, it bursts into flame and der bombs explode. That is what he has used!"
"I wonder," said Hines drearily, "if he can use it on the artillery?"
Schaaf shrugged. He resumed his impatient pacing up and down the room.
"But he has something else up der sleefe. I know he has something else up der sleefe. It is too easy! Much too easy!"
The clocks announced seven o'clock. Eight. Nine o'clock. Reports began to come in. Artillery units had arrived, were digging in. A battery of field 'guns was ready to fire.
Nine thirty: Two guns of a howitzer section were ready to fire. One naval gun on a railroad mounting was in position.
Ten: All the howitzers were ready to fire. The cruisers were in position and the battleships were coming up. Destroyers had ventured into the dense mass of darkness that hung about the island. The darkness was nearly a circle, six miles across. One of the destroyers came scuttling out with flames pouring from it. It reached the clear air and was aflame from end to end. It floated, a lurid torch, while its crew was taken off. It blew up and sank at eleven ten precisely.
At eleven thirty the basket-mast of a battle cruiser glowed red, halfway up its height, and its separate steel rods bent and buckled, and then cooled off again, leaving the fighting-top careened crazily over at right angles and far out over the ship's side.
"Breston is trying to fight," said Schaaf shortly. "He is swinging der beam of four-centimeter wafes around and shooting all der juice he can supply into it. It happened to hit der fighting-mast. The beam is infisible now. Since he cannot see what he is aiming at, he does not want anybody else to see der beam. It is infisible death, that beam."
Hines smiled queerly. He picked up a telephone and spoke almost softly into it.
"All ready for me?... Very well. It's understood that zero hour is 3 A.M. if the darkness is not cut before then. If it is cut, bolometer readings are to be taken and action judged by their indications. All ships and guns are to stand by in any event until the island is occupied. Very well. Good luck!"
He stood up and held out his hand to Schaaf.
"I'm going to the island, Schaaf. Good-by."
Schaaf scowled at him.
"Of all der double-barreled, triple-distilled idiots I efer saw," he said bitterly, "you are der worst! Hines, you are a verdammt fool! You are going to der island—"
Hines shrugged.
"It's a form of suicide," he said evenly. "I know it. But that devil has got Kathryn there. I've arranged for him to be blown off the earth. She'll be blown up with him. We were to have been married this morning. So I—well, I'm going to be there, too."
Schaaf swore explosively in guttural German.
"That is not what I am talking about!" he snapped. "That is lunacy, yes! But der magnificent imbecility is that you think I am going to let Breston's short-wafe outfit be blown to bits without getting a look at it! There is a place reserfed for me in der boat that is going to der island. Try and keep me out of it!"
Hines looked steadily at Schaaf for nearly half a minute. Then he smiled.
"You're a damned liar, Schaaf. You're going because—"
"Shut up!" snapped Schaaf again. He drew himself up to his full six feet and something of whiskered blondness. "Hines, I am a damned liar, yes! And you are a damned fool! So that makes two of us going out to be fery unpleasantly bumped off, and if you try to talk silly sentiment I will poke you in der eye. Come on!"
A destroyer took the pair northward, flinging itself madly over the dark, dark sea. After the lights of Portland vanished behind them there was a period when the solid deck beneath seemed the only object in existence. There was no sky, no sun, no horizon. There was no land. There was only an invisible bulk beneath them which quivered insanely, and a wind blowing from the oblivion before them to the oblivion behind. There was no up, no down. One grew giddy from the sheer absence of anything by which to orient oneself. The utter loneliness of the dark was terrifying, because not even the sea could be seen. Even in some imagined spaceship, isolated in empty space, there would be stars for comfort. Here there was only nothingness.
When a yellow light glowed far away and seemed like a star, it was actually a lamp in a farmhouse window overlooking the sea. And in that farmhouse the sense of isolation was so great as to induce hysteria. The folk in the farmhouse were experiencing exactly the sensations of people on a tiny fragment of earth set floating free in a cosmos containing nothing else—nothing! Not even other worlds unthinkably remote.
It was a loneliness, a desolation, that clutched at the throat. All through the world that same despair was descending. In the cities it was less appalling, but on ships that steamed over invisible seas, and in lighthouses that were always isolated and now became small hells, and in tiny mountain cabins, and small hamlets and places innumerable, the dread of the dark grew and grew.
Some people went insane, and many grew hysterical. It is a matter of record that folk went solemnly out of their villages and set the woods about them on fire so that the flames and firelit smoke would give them something to look at other than the awful blackness which lay over the world. It was a curious aftermath of the darkness that the use of illuminants at night was multiplied many times. But on the destroyer these things were unknown. It swept on northward, horribly alone, until presently lights appeared to the left, and searchlights stabbed futilely upward, and there was a confused droning tumult over the land. The whole air force of the Army and Navy was being massed for action, together with the ships of a naval division and the artillery of an army corps.
Then the destroyer slackened speed, and went on into a bay where bonfires burned brightly, and its engines stopped and its anchor-chain clanged thunderously as it ran out. A thirty-foot cutter came alongside, moving by oars, and made fast to the landing-ladder of the destroyer. It waited.
"Efficiency," said Hines dryly. "No time lost, Schaaf. These men are volunteers for our forlorn hope. You know why I want to be on the island, but I'm able to have the zero hour held off only because the government wants to get hold of Preston's apparatus if it can. As a military weapon. We're going to try to take the island by storm."
"Der idea," observed Schaaf grimly, "is a lot of hooey."
Hines said nothing. He led the way down to the boat.
Oars dipped. The cutter pulled away. A navy launch swarmed up officiously and flung a line. Half a minute later the launch was speeding for the blackness of the open sea and the cutter went tearing through the water after it, squatted down astern until it seemed the waves should come in over the gunwale.
They could see little as the two boats moved, of course, but Hines stared up at the dark shore line. Guns were massed and massing there. Waiting and ready along a four-mile front. At one single word a storm of steel would spring from the hungry muzzles. A hurtling, screaming hail of death would leap upward and forward through the darkness. Six miles away it would descend.
Four miles of guns, packed as closely together as they could be brought up by straining locomotives and racing, swearing men. Four miles of guns concentrating on a little more than one mile of target, with the heaviest guns of the fleet to blast away what little of the island the shore artillery left.
There was no wind save that made by the movement of the towing launch, but that was bitter. The men on the seats of the cutter huddled down into their greatcoats, taking it easy. A flash light signaled off to seaward.
"We're passing between some islands," said Hines evenly. "They'll cast off when we're well on our way. The oars are muffled. If we can land on the damned island secretly, so much the better."
Five minutes, and the launch on ahead was slowing up. The men in the cutter bestirred themselves. A man in the bow tossed the towline overboard. The oars stretched out again. The launch swept around and went purring softly back into the darkness.
The cutter, without a word of command, began to move with the rhythmic pulsatory effect of a rowed boat toward the utter blackness of the open sea.
"Who's in command here?" demanded Hines.
"I am," said a voice. A flash light glowed through cupped fingers. A clean-shaved and rather anxious young ensign's face could be made out.
"Shoot der works," said Schaaf amiably. "What haff you done?"
"I've a pair of microphones overboard," explained the young officer nervously, "of the sort used for listening for submarines. They'll give us the line on two launches that are working submerged sounders for us. I can get the angles from both of them to make a course for the island even if we are blinded. And besides, we'll be able to hear the waves on the beach when we get near."
"Clefer," said Schaaf. "Fery good."
"And my men are all in linemen's boots and rubber. They're armed with—er—the regular mopping-up equipment."
"Which is?" said Schaaf encouragingly.
"Why—er—grenades, automatic pistols, and automatic shotguns throwing nine extra-sized buckshots to a shell. Also we've a couple of Lewis guns with us. We have twenty men."
"I can think of nothing you haff left out for a fine party but der beer," said Schaaf. "You haff done excellently, sir."
Oars rose and fell in a ghostlike silence. There was no splashing. Hines had ordered a boat propelled by oars because any motor-driven craft would be heard approaching the island. Hines had no hope of leaving that spot of land, but he did want to land on it alive. He fumbled for a cigar and lit it. The light of his match was the only glow of illumination in all the world.
They were far enough from shore and low enough in the water to make any possible light invisible. The sky was wholly black. The water was wholly black. Ahead and behind and to the right hand and the left there was no relief from the abysmal blackness anywhere. Hines's cigar small as was its gleam, provided a literal illumination by which the farthest man in the bow of the boat saw the face of his seat-mate faintly pinkened.
"If that darkness—" began the ensign.
He stopped. He was watching Hines's cigar fascinatedly. It had been a dull-red coal, brightening to what seemed a vivid incandescence when Hines puffed on it. Now it seemed to have gone out, and revived very, very faintly at each puffing. A moment later it seemed no longer to exist.
"We're in the darkness now," said Hines dryly.
His tone was entirely matter-of-fact, which was wise; for the men at the oars had been watching the glow of his cigar. It was the only spot of light in the universe. And when it went out, the effect was horrible.
"How do der microphones work?" asked Schaaf interestedly.
"I have the line," said the ensign unsteadily. "We're a shade under three miles from the island."
The boat went on silently. About the island Preston had brought darkness down to earth over a circular space some six miles across.
The cutter rose and fell, and rose and fell, and the three men in the stern felt the rhythmic pulling of the oars. Every man felt the opacity of the air weighing upon him, pressing upon him.
All the world had been dark enough anyhow, but to feel that by no possible device could a light be made to shine was queerly horrible. A man felt as if he were buried alive. He had an almost hysterical impulse to beat at the darkness with his hands, to thrust it away from him.
"I hear the surf on the beach in the headphones," said the ensign, a long time later.
"You should," said Schaaf placidly.
Hines then spoke shortly.
"We land and form a line. By the way, we want to land at the southern-most tip of the island. I know the lay of the land, roughly. We are to be entirely silent, passing signals by touching each other in the blackness. There are probably charged wires about the island. If we run into lines of wire, we will short-circuit them with gun-barrels to the earth, and then cut them. When Preston's instruments show a short-circuit, he will probably cut the darkness to see about it. We go ahead then. Mop up the island. There is one woman here. Be careful not to hurt her. But this is one time to fight hard! If we don't kill Preston, he'll kill us!"
The ensign said—steadily this time—"You men heard that. Those are your orders."
There was a little gurgling noise ahead, a washing, splashing sound. It ran a long distance in a straight line across the bow of the boat. The rudder squeaked, and the boat's course shifted until the sound was abeam. The oars worked monotonously. Presently the washing sound seemed to come to an end and to go away in the distance. The rudder squeaked again. They went on their former course once more.
"If you put your ear to the gunwale," said the ensign in a voice that was barely a whisper, "you'll hear a queer humming, sir. The hull picks up the sound from the water. I've been hearing it in the microphones for some time. It sounds like engines, sir."
"Dynamos," said Schaaf in as low a tone. "Der dynamos and der Diesel engines that make der juice."
"I'm heading in for the beach," whispered the ensign. "Easy, men! Get ready to beach her, up forward."
The word passed to the bow in murmurs. The washing of waves became louder and louder. The booming of small breakers on sand grew more distinct. Hines visualized the southern end of the island as he had seen it from the air and tried to guess at the spot from the fact that they were headed for a sandy beach. He nodded to himself.
The boat checked with a grating sound. There was the little lifting feel of men leaping out to ease it ashore.
"And now," said Schaaf grimly, "Gott strafe Breston!"
They disembarked as blind men, feeling the foaming small breakers beating utterly unseen about their rubber-booted legs. They fumbled at each other to form a skirmish-line. At a low word from Hines they moved on.
It was a slow, a stumbling, an infinitely cautious party of the blind. Every man's eyes were wide and staring, through sheer instinctive effort to catch some glimmer of the light that in nature is nowhere quite absent. But here, the very air was opaque.
The blackness was oppressive past conception. A man felt as if he were buried alive, as if the darkness pressed upon him, as if a shifting stuff pressed upon his breast and would presently stop his breathing.
A tiny clatter, off in the darkness. The line halted. A message passed along its length in a murmur.
"A wire about a foot off the ground. It isn't charged."
"Step over it and go on," ordered Hines. "At any alarm, fling yourselves flat on the ground and wait." The line moved on again. Hines had cracked the crystal from a watch-compass and by the feel of its needle led the way. He, also, came upon that uncharged wire, stretched upon stakes no more than a foot above ground. It gave a little as he touched it. He passed over it.
Then, quite suddenly, a man screamed, down at the end of the line. A weapon went off thunderously in the blackness. One of the two Lewis guns roared itself empty. There was the clatter of men flinging themselves to the earth. Then silence.
Hines pressed his jaws tightly together. Instinctively he peered about, though his eyes could convey no possible sensation to his brain. There was only blackness and stillness.
Presently he became aware of the surf drumming away behind him. Then he heard the faintest possible humming noise overheard. At the same time a pungent odor stung his nostrils. He heard Schaaf exclaim softly, swearing under his breath.
Some one came writhing along the ground, counting the prone figures he passed.
"Inspector Hines!"
The faint humming noise passed toward the right. It died away.
"Here," said Hines quietly.
The ensign's voice panted.
"We've lost three men. Stone dead. Electrocuted."
Schaaf's voice came from astonishingly near by.
"Der four-centimeter beam," he said grimly. "They heard us. Perhaps der low wires were burglar-alarms. Breston passed der beam of four-centimeter wafes all about, with der high-tension current in it. Those three men were struck by it. It was like being struck by a life wire with ten thousand volts in it. I smelled ozone just now. My nose stings yet with it. Der beam passed humming ofer our heads."
The ensign asked nervously: "What do we do now, sir?"
"Lie still," said Hines coldly. "They'll get curious presently."
The ensign crawled away. Darkness. Blackness. The sound of the surf behind them. Time seemed endless, waiting. One had a ghastly feeling that it had been an hour or more, two hours—that it was time for the massed guns, six miles away, to open fire. One's ears strained for the whistling sound of that first flight of projectiles from four miles of guns.
Gradually an infinitely faint rumbling noise made itself felt. It was felt as much as heard. The sound came through the earth. The dynamos and the monstrous generators in Preston's underground dugouts, making the power that had darkened the world.
Without a trace of flickering, the darkness broke. With startling clarity the line of prone men could see. An unbearable glare smote upon their eyes, but despite it they saw.
The darkness had vanished from before their eyes. They seemed to be in a monstrous cavern whose walls were angular masses of jetty black. A great magnesium flare was burning on the ground. It lighted up three clumsy concrete structures three-quarters sunk in the ground. There were men standing near those structures. Three of them stood by a bowl-shaped thing of wires. They were looking—all the men were looking—at the line of prone riflemen. The darkness seemed to have been lifted for the precise purpose of permitting Preston's aids to look. From half a dozen tripods some six feet or so across darkness poured out in wide, fanlike beams. Those beams united overhead to form a roof of darkness, seemingly supported by the inverted pyramids of black. They united to shut off the rest of the world. They blended almost at the edge of the surf to cut off all vision upon the water. Hines and Schaaf and the volunteers gazed for exactly three seconds the length of a colossal cavern in which lights could glow, but which was roofed and walled with opacity.
Three seconds; while a man could breathe in and out and in again. Then from all along the line of prone men gunfire flashed at the exact instant that darkness fell upon them again. The remaining Lewis gum blared into nothingness, emptying its drum of cartridges. The automatic shotguns bellowed their magazines empty.
Somewhere off in the darkness a man shrieked, and there were shoutings, and then a deadly, snarling voice cried out. Something was roaring horribly, off there in the new-fallen blackness. A spark was leaping a colossal gap with the tearing thunderous rasp that only a current up in the thousands of volts will make.
"Scatter!" snapped Hines. "They've sighted that beam on us!"
He leaped to his feet and bolted—ahead. Some one pounded along beside him, though the presence of the other man was felt rather than heard, and of course nothing at all could be seen. Up ahead the sparking sound cut off sharply, leaving Hines's ears ringing with the sudden silence.
It seemed as if some wire—perhaps the high-tension wire to the four-centimeter beam—had been cut by a bullet, and now a switch was thrown. Through the ringing in his ears Hines heard the snarling voice ahead of him shout an order. He blundered on and tripped over something. The smell of scorched rubber rose from his boots.
He struck savagely at the thing with his gun-barrel, and somehow the darkness about him seemed to change. It was probably a beam darkness-transmitter, which he had smashed. But in an intangible cavern whose walls were opacity there was no great difference.
He went racing on, straining his yet-ringing ears for sounds, and crashed headlong into concrete. He gave a cry of satisfaction and began to fumble his way feverishly along its length. The man who had run beside him, panting, grunted with satisfaction as he in turn felt the concrete.
It was Schaaf. He mumbled to himself and Hines caught, "verdammt," and "Schrecklichkeit" and other much less repeatable words.
A door! Hines fumbled at his belt and found one single grenade.
"A steel door, Schaaf!" he panted. "I'm setting off a grenade before it. Get back around the corner!"
He deposited the little globe of iron, jerked out the pin, and fled.
The earth shook and a blast of sound which was like a blow on the chest smote them—for all that they were around the corner of the concrete. Then Hines flung himself forward again, rasping his fingers on the rough concrete and choking on the fumes of the explosive.
The door was blown away, blasted from its frame. No glimmer of illumination came through the awful darkness that was everywhere, but Hines stepped boldly through the opening with his automatic shotgun held ready for the instant light should reach him.
The curious feeling of a metal floor under his foot. Then emptiness! He went hurtling downward, falling into bright and blinding light. He struck something with his shoulder in the act of falling, and it wrenched his muscles cruelly but partly broke the drop. He wound up with a crash on concrete, all of fifteen feet down, and lay still for an instant, dazed.
He had a vague impression of a room that was sunk deep in the ground. There were masses of glittering glass, and many lights, and a humming noise filled all the air with a monotonous drone. Hines realized indistinctly that the curious squat structures on the island were merely the roofs of dugouts, dug down to safety below the surface of the earth. Then he heard a peculiar tearing, spitting sound near by.
His eyes focused dazedly on his shotgun, lying on the floor a little distance off. It was smoking strangely. Sparks were darting from it into the stone floor. It began abruptly to glow a dull red. Suddenly it exploded luridly. Every shell in its magazine went off in a single blast which was not disastrous solely because the red hot metal offered so little resistance to the expanding gases. They tore it apart almost like so much dough.
Somebody or other was racing down the steel steps Hines had tumbled from. Huge hands swept Hines from the floor. He smelled burning rubber. He knew that it was Schaaf who tore his automatic pistol out of his belt and flung it away. He knew, also, that it was Schaaf who leaped with him to one side of the room. He had a dizzy impression of glowing tubes of glass ail about him.
Then a snarling, arrogant voice said in insolent satisfaction:
"Police Inspector Hines, I believe, and my former assistant, Professor Schaaf. Very well met! I've wanted to have you two men killed for a long time."
Hines's automatic pistol tore itself to pieces as the shells in its butt went off all at once. Its fragments on the concrete floor glowed dully red, then slowly cooled off when they ceased to emit sparks.
Hines staggered to his feet and found himself penned in behind a monster bank of vacuum tubes which glowed redly. The glass of the tubes was inordinately thick. These tubes would not break by concussion, nor by however determined a blow of a man's fist—Preston had learned, from his debacle in the Storm.
Hines was conscious of them, and of things below them which might have been gigantic transformers of the type used in radio. But as his brain cleared from the crack on the concrete floor, his whole attention was taken up by the facts which it was immediately necessary for him to face.
Schaaf was beside him, crouching a little to have his whole body behind the banks of vacuum tubes. Schaaf was snarling a little, and his blue eyes were glinting fire. He seemed to be unarmed as well as Hines, and he was gazing across the deep-sunk room with an expression of concentrated malevolence.
Preston was there, the man Hines had seen exactly once, and for half a minute only, but whom he had been hunting for months. He was standing by a small platform which itself was next to a wide door through which the humming noise came. Preston's hand was on a small thing which looked rather like a searchlight, except that instead of a mirror for a reflector it had a sort of grid of glistening wires. There were two switches on its top.
Preston was small and dapper, and wore a neat Vandyke beard trimmed to an accurate point. He looked like a highly civilized man, even alongside the nattily attired pair of followers who lounged always within feet of him.
They were gangsters, those two, from impeccably tailored clothing to impossibly expensive haberdashery in vivid color.
Preston seemed precisely the pattern of the professional man—until one noticed his eyes. They were blank and hard and triumphant, precisely the eyes of a madman with paranoiac delusions of grandeur. They were insolent and scornful and very, very arrogant eyes. They were the eyes of a man who has persuaded himself that he is invested with supreme authority, and who derides and despises the mere worms of humans within his gaze. Unfortunately, Preston's ideas of his own powers were not delusions. They were facts.
He smiled at them, and his smile was filled with the same vanity-inspired scorn.
"I assure you, Schaaf," he said in a metallic voice that made one long to kick him, "I assure you that your being alive now is due to my forbearance."
Schaaf spoke, his voice purring with rage. He spoke in German, and the words crackled. At the end he added wrathfully:
"And if you don't understand der names I called you, you are a lot of banana oil!"
He turned to Hines, growling, and Hines knew somehow that Schaaf was inspecting the contrivances, the elaborate hook-ups, the involved array of apparatus with a desperately concentrated attention, working frantically to understand their operation.
Hines's head was clearing swiftly, and he looked about, and went sick with a helpless rage at the same time that his pulses pumped with fury. He looked at Preston with eyes like flames. Preston had had Kathryn kidnaped. Preston had—
"You saw what happened to your weapons," said Preston, smiling unpleasantly. "I'm letting you live because it amuses me to watch you. I have—" he looked at a wrist watch—"I have more than half an hour before Inspector Hines's artillery blows this island out of the water. And I am inclined to let you two beg your lives. I won't give them to you, but I'll listen."
"Beg, der deffil!" snapped Schaaf. "Breston, you are der most complete idiot in der history of der human race! With der brains I reluctantly admit you possess, you could haff been a benefactor of mankind! And now we haff to kill you!—Where is Miss Bush?"
Preston threw back his head to laugh. His two guards regarded the two men behind the vacuum tubes with a wary, indifferent alertness. They were killers, hired to do murder to order. They regarded Schaaf and Hines as the professional killer always does regard his prospective victims.
"She's here," said Preston sardonically. "She's here! Quite a pretty girl, too. And safe—so far!"
Hines's teeth ground together. Face to face with Preston, a consummation for which he had hoped and worked for months. And helpless. Preston had destroyed his weapons with that little searchlight-like thing. "It is lucky for you that she is safe," snapped Schaaf. "Breston, you verdamumt fool, do you realize that you are licked before you start?"
Sweat was standing out on Schaaf's face. He stood tense in every muscle, and Hines had a queer impression that Schaaf was all brain, that every particle of him was racing madly to absorb the meaning of the wires, the tubes, the switches, the connections in this diabolical control room. He seemed to feel Schaaf working desperately to piece together the meaning of every appliance and how it worked.
"Licked?" Preston laughed, the mirthless, scornful laugh of the paranoiac. "You are living by my pleasure, because it amuses me to watch—"
"That is true to a certain extent only," said Schaaf. He spoke with a measured calmness in which only Hines could detect the false note. "I tell you why. I haff solfed your apparatus! Before I left der mainland to come here, I had explained to my assistants der entire method of all your defices. I tell you you are licked, and I proof it. Der darkness wafes I have made myself. And moreotfer, I haff made der four-centimeter wafes that make der air conducting and enable you to throw a beam of radiation that is like a life wire charged with electricity, wherefer you will. And der people on der mainland haff der apparatus too!"
Hines's eyes flickered. Schaaf was bluffing. It was a monumental sort of bluff, and the one thing that might work—if Schaaf could carry it out. Schaaf was bluffing for both their lives, now, and Kathryn's to boot.
"I tell you how you and I make der four-centimeter wafes," said Schaaf, grimly. "Der vacuum tube as at present designed cannot possibly go below a quarter of a meter, and then der wate is not a pure sine wafe. I know! But you haff four-centimeter wafes, and smaller. Yes! And der word of how you do them is going all ofer der cifilized world right now. Because you can take six tubes, each one emitting wafes of one-fourth meter length, and so adjust them that der separate wafes of der separate tubes come four centimeters after each other, gifing you a beam of der death rays. Hein?"
He grinned savagely at Preston, though sweat stood out on his forehead. And Preston snarled.
"You can carry der process farther," said Schaaf in a judicial tone. Hines, listening, marveled at the assurance with which Schaaf was stating, as definite facts, his hurried deductions from the apparatus about them. "By der use of a sufficient number of tubes, you can make wafes of any length you choose, merely by der superimposition of one wafe-outline upon another. Der United States Gofernment is now turning out this apparatus in quantity!"
He waved his hands about the room. "Der darkness wafes are made in that way. Der conducting beam is made in that way. Eferything you haff is made in that way. And we haff eferything you haff efer thought of, with ten times der power you haff, and a hundred times der brains! You are licked, Breston! Hines and I, we came to this island because you are der damnedest scoundrel in forty nations. You haff Miss Bush here. Giff her back and we giff you half an hour's start. No more! You are licked! We make der bargain! Turn ofer Miss Bush, unharmed. Turn off der darkness. We giff you half an hour to escape in. That is efery damned thing we will giff you. And then we come after you, and I, personally, choke you by der neck until I kill you!"
Preston was livid. Hines's pulse leaped in savage satisfaction. Schaaf had worked out the whole thing from sight of Preston's outfit. His bluff was working. Preston did believe the whole world was equipped to fight him with his own weapons.
But his madman's eyes flamed with the crazy rage of shattered vanity.
"Everything I've got?" he snarled. "This too? Tell me how this is done!"
He flung a switch on the top of the tiny projector. There was a sudden vivid glow at a table against the wall some fifteen feet from Hines. A long, serried ray of tubes leaped into light. Utter silence fell.
"Look at that metal!" raged Preston. "Look at it!"
He pointed a shaking hand at the fragments of Hines's two weapons on the concrete floor. And they turned suddenly white—snow white. Then they became wet. A liquid trickled from them and dripped to the concrete, where it bubbled furiously and formed a thick white mist that spread out over the floor. Preston flung back his switch and as the bank of tubes went out, he laughed in shrill, insolent, vanity mad triumph—because Schaaf's cheeks had become drained of every particle of blood.
"That's what I'm going to use on Hines's artillery?" boasted Preston hysterically. "This little projector is all I need! All!"
Schaaf clenched his hands more tightly still.
"Gott!" he muttered thickly. "Gott!"
"You didn't work out that one, eh?" demanded Preston arrogantly. "Now I'll tell you: that's the same thing as all the rest! Fluorescence! Causing one type of energy to be changed to another! Under my four-centimeter waves, the air becomes fluorescent. But these waves work on iron!
"Where these waves strike, the surface of the iron becomes fluorescent. It absorbs heat from the air and from its own interior! It turns heat to short radio waves, and every particle of iron in the beam of these waves, no matter how far away it is, radiates away every particle of energy it possesses! It sinks to absolute zero! Four, hundred and sixty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit!
"You saw air liquefy in contact with the iron that was red hot a moment ago. What's going to happen to the men on your battleships when every particle of iron or steel drops to the temperature of liquid air? What's going to happen to your guns when they're down to the temperature of liquid helium and the gun crews try to fire them? They'll fly to bits like brittle ice! Licked, am I? I'll wipe out your damned artillery with half a kilowatt in this projector! Ill sink your battleships with their crews frozen solid.
"I'll play that beam on New York and every particle of steel in the city will be brittle as ashes! I'll bring down every damned skyscraper in the town. I'll teach them a lesson they won't forget. Make my apparatus and try to work it against me? I'll—"
He was working himself into frothing rage. He was shouting. He was bellowing. His voice was a strident scream of rage, the rage of the man who has convinced himself that he is the most intelligent of all living men and then finds the distinction threatened.
"You fools?" Preston gasped. "Trying to fight me! Like savages with clubs going against a battleship! I'll show you! I'll show—"
Schaaf had bluffed, working out what Preston had done, after a swift survey of the apparatus about him. He'd seen Preston's transmitters and had raced his brain to the manner of their operation. He'd tried to bluff that all the world knew now how Preston had kept it sunk in night. But he hadn't known this one last trick, which was the most deadly of all. And Schaaf muttered thickly to himself with his eyes sunken in and dull. Because this last weapon was invincible.
Then Hines looked sharply upward and snapped, "All right, men! Everybody in here!"
He gained two seconds only; two seconds in which Preston was looking upward, and his guards with him, toward the door into which Hines himself had stumbled. But that two seconds was enough. Before they could look down, Hines had leaped, dragging from their sockets two of the thick tubes to use as missiles.
The first one struck Preston and flung him against the projector. Hines was within a yard of Preston when he heard Schaaf cry out. But it was too late to stop then. He sank his fingers in Preston's throat as one of the guards screamed.
The projector of the freezing beam had been whirled around. A guard had felt his arm frozen to the elbow as he tried to raise his weapon. He screamed, and screamed, and Schaaf went into action frantically, flinging the huge vacuum tubes about and crashing them until the second guard was helpless and the freezing beam was off.
But Hines paid no attention. He forgot that he should be getting a bullet in the back of his head at any instant. Preston was squirming under him, getting at something in his pocket. There was a sickeningly muffled explosion in the middle of the battling pair of men. Another.
Preston seemed literally to go mad. Frothing at the mouth, he tried to sink his teeth in Hines. He fought crazily, insanely, with maniacal strength. Hines forgot that there was anything in the world but this one single man he hated. He forgot everything—
And then Schaaf was pulling him to his feet, crying:
"We haff fife minutes, Hines! Fife minutes only! Find Miss Bush!"
The two of them came above ground with Kathryn, and only two minutes to spare. The ensign and ten men were about to assail a squat concrete structure after the orthodox fashion of warfare when Hines gasped, "Get your men! Get 'em to the boat! We killed Preston but not his men! Zero hour's two minutes off!"
The air upon the island itself was no longer opaque. Schaaf's berserk rage among the vacuum tubes had cut that off. But the column of darkness leading to an utterly black sky still held steady. Somewhere in the extraordinarily clear air a rocket shot up, very far away.
The ensign's whistle shrilled madly. Hines, Schaaf, Kathryn, and a dozen men raced for the boat. Other men loomed up, panting, and flung themselves through the night. Once a man tripped over a low wire and four men fell on top of him. There was a long drawn out, deliberate whining sound in the air. It was growing louder. It rose to a shriek and passed overhead and went off deafeningly a quarter of a mile away. The four fallen men were up in the fractional part of a split second at that sound.
Into the boat in desperate, panting haste. Shoving off.
They had been rowing a pitifully short time when little licking flames became visible on the skyline toward shore. Somewhere in the upper darkness there was a hail of steel and high explosive hurtling toward the island.
Something shrieked and splashed overboard not a dozen yards away. The drumming noise of a barrage began and held for nearly a second, and then the sound of exploding shells was not like a barrage at all. It was like one long, continuous explosion, punctuated with monstrous blasts of sound which could be nothing less than twelve-inch shells exploding.
The men at the oars pulled like madmen. The air was full of the shrieking of steel missiles, and the island behind them was lost in a mass of darting flames like marsh fire. Things fell into the sea on all sides with monstrous splashings, and the cutter pitched crazily, and more shells screamed and whistled and howled, and lambent flames of death and destruction played over the island, with ever and again a blinding flash and an overpowering concussion where a big projectile had hit.
It seemed to Hines, holding fast to Kathryn, that they would be battered to pieces by sheer waves of sound if stray shells did not do the work. For that was a more immediate danger still. Many shells that fell short of the island ricocheted and exploded in mid-air or splashed into the sea again on the farther side. Some fell fearfully near them. Some struck in the shallows near the shore, and those explosions sent concussions through the water that made the hull of the speeding cutter quiver and shake. They racked and twisted the little cockleshell. The monstrous waves generated by the explosions flung it crazily about, and the concussions wrenched its timbers, and the blasts of the detonating shells half-dazed those in it.
But the oarsmen pulled like madmen. The ensign shouted encouragement and orders. And slowly—so slowly—the cutter drew away from the inferno that was the island.
Hines was holding Kathryn fiercely tight when he realized that Schaaf was shouting in his ear. They were a mile away from the island, but the din was still deafening.
"Hines!" bellowed Schaaf. "Hines! Die Sterne! Der stars are shining!"
The wind over the water was bitter cold, but as the cutter drew farther and ever farther away from the low-lying place that had been Preston's stronghold, all the world seemed to take on a nearly normal seeming.
Stars twinkled and glittered in the sky overhead. Far to the east a vast, partly round orb was coming up over the edge of the world. For the world had an edge again! It was the moon. And there were dusky little shadows against the stars, which would be clouds, and generally the world seemed astoundingly normal.
Later on, of course, the sun would rise, and there would be great winds rushing to meet its warm rays, and men and women and children would go mad with joy at sight of the orb they had missed for exactly one day.
Schaaf, swearing joyful Teutonic profanity, would plunge into a new task before him, of research and duplication of Preston's results, and would come out of it bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, but with apparatus which would perform every one of Preston's tricks to order.
He would hale Hines back from his honeymoon to join with him in forming the International Weather Control Corporation, whose typhoon patrol vessels are to be found wherever bad weather threatens in the tropics, using Preston's discoveries to create half a dozen small counter-storms where a hurricane or typhoon threatens. Those same tiny storms, too, he and Hines would use to lengthen the Alaskan summer by two months and raise the winter temperature by nearly thirty degrees.
All this was yet to happen, and the possibly greater benefit of liberating an unlimited supply of power by Preston's freezing ray. Liquid air drips from every iron surface on which those rays are playing. Nowadays, that liquid air provides the power to run the monster generating stations at Manhasset, and Panama, and at Algiers. And since their success, others are being built as rapidly as the structures can be completed. It seems probable that within a relatively few years coal need no longer be mined for power, nor need nations bicker or quarrel over petroleum.
But on that morning when the ship's cutter rowed away from Metinic Island the coast toward which it moved was flickering oddly as if heat lightning were playing there. There were lurid spoutings of fire and shattering explosions coming from the land they had left, and there were dim bulks all around the horizon which emitted tongues of flame and unbearable thunderings. Even overhead there was noise. It was a constant, long-continued screaming of things soaring through the air to fall upon and shatter further the already devastated earth of the island. The battleships and cruisers were literally destroying that small bit of Earth. Where the fourteen-inch shells exploded there was only empty space left, into which the salt water seeped slowly.
The cutter went on, snail-like, while destruction raged behind it. Schaaf fingered his beard and made blissful explanations to the ensign, to whom his blending of abstruse technicalities and incongruous slang was nearly unintelligible. Hines relaxed slowly from his tension. He knew that Preston was dead now. He was sure of it at last. Quite, quite sure—he clenched his strong hands.
Kathryn said uneasily:
"I—I've a great story for the Star."
"Forget it," said Hines briefly. "We were supposed to be married yesterday, Kathryn."
"Y-yes," she admitted. "We were."
"So," said Hines, "we are going to be married to-day."
He held her hand fast.
"Y-yes," she said, after a long time. "We are... But oh, when I think what might have happened, I wish I'd never heard of Preston. I wish he never had existed."
"Shush, my dear," said Schaaf paternally. "He got you a husband. Der statement is banana oil."