by Jerry
THE wolfhound had evaded several outstretched hands and got to the buffet. There it crouched and cowered, fangs showing in a snarl, eyes reddening wickedly, while the growl rattled louder in its shaggy throat.
“Perhaps the heat has affected him,” said one.
All were looking at the dog now, marveling at its odd behavior. But of all the eyes that observed it a pair of unseen eyes watched with the utmost agitation.
Thorn stared, almost hypnotized, at the creature. A dog! What rotten luck! Men might be fooled by the masking invisibility, but there was no deceiving a dog’s keen nose!
The wolfhound started forward as though to leap, then settled back. Plainly it longed to spring. Equally plainly it was afraid of the being that so impossibly was revealed to its nostrils but not to its eyes. Meanwhile, one tearing sweep of blunt claws or sharp fangs—and a fatal rent would appear in Thorn’s encasing shell!
The dog snapped tentatively. Thorn flattened still harder against the wall, with discovery and death hovering very closely about him. Then the beast’s master intervened.
“Grego! Here, sir! A council room is no place, for thee, anyway. Here, I say! So, then—”
He hastened to the dog and caught its collar. Twisting the leather cruelly, he dragged the protesting, snarling brute to the doors and slid them shut with the wolfhound barking and growling on the outside. “Someone put him in his kennel,” he said through the panels. A scuffling in the hall told of the execution of the order. The council room became quiet again, and Thorn leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for an instant.
“We were saying, Soyo,” the leader addressed the dog’s owner, “that the Ziegler plans start for Arvania to-morrow night. All is arranged. These innocent looking bits of paper”—he thumped a small packet of documents lying before him—“shall deliver mighty America to us!”
A SUBDUED cheer answered the man’s words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but right before his eyes!
Involuntarily his hand extended eagerly toward the packet, then was withdrawn. Not now. He was invisible—but the papers, if he grasped them, would not be. Clenched in his unseen hand, they would be perfectly visible, moving in jerks and starts as he raced for the door.
Like lightning his mind turned over one plan after another for making away with that precious packet. Each scheme seemed impossible of fulfilment.
“The biggest difficulty is in getting them out of the country,” the spare, elderly man was saying. “But we have solved that. Solved it simply. I myself shall bear them, sewn in my clothes, to our native land. The American authorities could search, on some pretext, any other of our number who tried to smuggle them out. But me they dare not lay a finger on. That would be an overt act.”
Thorn’s thoughts whirled desperately on. Wait till later and follow whoever left the room with the plans? But he hated to let them get out of his sight.
And at this point he became suddenly aware that the man named Kori was gazing fixedly at him.
Thorn was between the section of the table where Kori sat, and the angular buffet-end. Kori could not possibly see anything but the shining mahogany, thought Thorn. And yet the man’s eyes were narrowing to ominous slits as he started in his direction.
THORN held his breath. Was the shielding film changing in structure? Were the repolarized atoms slowly losing their straight-line arrangement, allowing light rays to penetrate through to his body instead of diverting them to form a pocket of invisibility around him? The film had never acted like that before—but never before had Thorn applied it to living flesh with its disintegrating heat and moisture.
“Excellency,” said Kori at last, a hard edge to his voice, “look thou at that buffet. No, no—the end nearest my chair.”
“Well?” said the elderly man. “I see nothing.”
Thorn breathed a sigh of relief. But the relief was to be of short duration.
“Come to my place, if thou wilt, and see from here,” said Kori.
The leader got up and came to Kori’s place. Kori pointed straight at Thorn.
“There—seest thou anything out of the ordinary?”
“I see nothing,” said the leader, after a moment. “Thine eyes, Kori, are not good.”
“They are the eyes of a hawk,” said Kori stubbornly. “And they see this—the vertical line of the end of that buffet does not continue straightly up and down. At its middle, the line is broken, then continues up—a fraction of an inch to the side! Like an object seen under water, distorted by the sun-rays that strike the surface!”
Thorn fairly jumped away from the buffet and stood against bare wall. Fool! Of course the light refraction would not be perfect! Why hadn’t he thought of that—thought to stand clear of revealing vertical lines!
“There, it is gone,” said Kori, blinking. “But something, Excellency, made that distortion of line. And something made Soyo’s wolfhound act as it did! Something—”
“Art thou attempting to say a spy listens unseen in this room?” demanded the gray-mustachioed Arvanian.
“Something is odd—that is all I say.”
ALL eyes were ranging along the wall against which Thorn leaned his back. All eyes finally turned to Kori. “It is nonsense.”
“I see nothing whatever.”
“Kori has drunk of champagne in place of tea!” were some of the exclamations.
And then occurred the thing that, in Thorn’s perilous position, was like the self-signing of his own death warrant.
He sneezed.
That agony of helplessness, as a man’s nose wrinkles and twitches and—in spite of the most desperate attempts at repression—the betraying sound forces its way out! How many men have lost their lives because of that insistent soft nasal explosion which can be smothered, but not entirely hushed!
Thorn had felt the sneeze coming on for seconds. He had fought it frantically, with life itself at stake. But he could not hold it back. In his naked body, beginning to burn with fever from the long-clogged pores and insulated not at all by the film from the coolness of the room, the seeds of that soft explosion had been planted—and they would bear fruit!
So he had sneezed!
Instantly there was chaos. Men looked at each other, and back at the blank wall from which had come the painfully muffled sound. Then all sprang to their feet.
“Champagne, is it!” Kori exulted savagely. “Did I not say my eyes were those of a hawk?”
“Double guard all doors!” roared the Arvanian leader, to the guards outside. “Someone is in the house! And you in here,” he went on in a lower tone, “see that this unseen one dies!”
Soyo and several other men whipped out automatics and pointed them at the wall. Thorn dropped to the floor. But with his quick action came Kori’s voice.
“No, no! The sword, gentlemen. It is not so noisy, and covers a wider sweep.”
Thorn shivered. Far rather would he have had bullets as his lot than cold steel. The prospect of being hacked to pieces, of gradually emerging from invisibility as a lump of gashed and bleeding flesh, turned him faint.
THE Arvanians split up into orderly formation. Two went to guard the door to the butler’s pantry, and two to cover the closed sliding doors to the outer hall. Six, with drawn swords sweeping back and forth before them, walked slowly toward the wall from which the sneeze had come.
Thorn set his jaws—only just catching himself in time to prevent his lips from opening in the half-snarl instinctive to the most civilized of men when danger is threatening. That lip motion would have revealed his teeth for an instant!
The sensation of perspiring heavily flamed over him again. There were so many trifling things to keep in mind! And each, if neglected, meaning certain death!
The nearest of the marching six stopped with his foot almost touching Thorn’s hand. The dancing sword the man carried almost grazed the scientist’s shoulder on its down sweep.
Thorn could not stay there. Lying flat along the baseboard, he would be stabbed at any instant by an inquiring sword point.
The six spread a little. A very little. But there was room enough for Thorn to slide between the two men nearest him and roll soundlessly under the table.
There was no sanctuary for him there. The cursed Kori, with his hawk eyes, glanced under the table after stabbing vainly along the wall.
“The carpet!” he bellowed. “See how the nap is pressed down! He is under there, comrades!”
The thrusting swords raked under the table a half second or so after Thorn had rolled out the other side, upsetting a chair in his hurry.
“After him!” panted Soyo. “By the living God, this is wizardry! But he must not get away—”
“He won’t!” snapped the elderly leader. “Men, form a line at the far end of the room and march slowly, shoulder to shoulder, to this end. The spy must be caught!”
THE move was executed. All the men in the room, save the four guarding the doors, lined up and advanced slowly, swerving and slashing their swords. Like a line of workers hand-harvesting a wheat field they came—foot by foot toward the corner where Thorn turned this way and that in a vain effort to escape.
The line reached the table. Over and under and around it the swords slashed viciously, leaving no space unprobed.
Thorn clenched his fists. He gazed at the packet containing the Ziegler plans. He gazed at the guarded door leading back to the kitchen. Then he tensed himself and leaped.
“The plans!” shouted Kori hoarsely. “Look—”
The vital packet, as far as the eye could see, had suddenly grown wings, soared from the table top, and was floating rapidly, convulsively, toward the door.
“Stop him!” yelled Soyo. “Stop—”
At that instant the heads of the two who guarded the door were dashed together. The door itself slammed open. The Ziegler plans sped into the butler’s pantry.
The door to the kitchen began to open just as Kori reached the pantry. An oath burst from the Arvanian’s lips. He flung his sword. In the air, shoulder high, appeared suddenly a small fountain of blood. Kori yelled triumphantly.
Thorn, feeling the warm drip following the glancing slash in his shoulder, knew the veil of invisibility had at last been rent. Abandoning efforts at noiselessness, knowing that his whereabouts was constantly marked by the packet in his hand, anyway, he fled through the kitchen to the rear door.
The bolt jerked back, under the astonished eyes of the five guards who had not yet realized precisely what the commotion was all about—and who only saw a packet of papers waving in mid-air, a trickle of blood appearing out of nothing, and a bolt banging open in its slot for no reason whatever.
THORN’S fingers worked feverishly at the chain. But before he could begin to get it undone, the guards had recovered from their surprise and had joined the Arvanians who poured in from the dining room under Kori’s lead.
With a score of men crowding the kitchen, Thorn looped back in his tracks like a hunted creature, and sought the cellar door. Four men he upset, one after another, aided by the fact that his twisting body could be only approximately placed by the papers and the wound.
Then Kori’s hand swept through the air above the waving packet, to clamp over Thorn’s wrist.
With an effort—that bulged the muscles of that blacksmith’s fore-arm of his till it seemed they must burst through the film, Thorn whirled Kori clear off his feet and sent him stumbling into the charge of three guards. But in the meantime the cellar was barred to him by a double line of men.
Fighting for his life—and, far more important, the existence of his country—Thorn lashed out with his invisible right fist while his left clutched the plans.
A score of men arrayed in a death struggle against one! But the odds were not twenty to one. Not quite. The score could mark Thorn’s general whereabouts—but they could not see his flying right fist! That was an invisible weapon that did incredible damage.
But if they could not see the fist to guard against it, they could see the results of the fist’s impacts. Here a nose suddenly crumpled and an instant later gushed red. There a head was snapped back and up, while its owner slowly sagged to the floor. And all the while the still dripping wound and the packet of documents kept with devilish ingenuity between the body of some swordless guard and the impatient blades of the Arvanian nobles.
Almost, it seemed to Thorn, he would win free. Almost, it appeared to the Arvanians, the unseen one would reach the big window near the door—which the path of his wreckage indicated was his goal. But one of the wildly swinging fists of a guard caught Thorn at last.
It landed on the glass cup over his right eye, cutting a perfect circle in the skin around the eyesocket, and tearing the film over the glass!
NOW there were three things about the lithe, invisible body that the Arvanians could see: the crumpled papers, a slowly drying patch of blood that moved shoulder high in the air, and a blood-rimmed, ice-gray eye that glared defiance at them from apparently untenanted atmosphere.
Then came what seemed must be the end. Soyo appeared in the pantry doorway with a machine gun.
“Everybody to the end of the kitchen by the window!” he cried. “To the devil with silence—we’ll spray this room with lead, and let the sound of shots bring what consequences it may!”
The men scattered. The machine gun muzzle swept toward the place where the eye, the papers, and the blood spot were to be seen.
That spot was now at one end of the great kitchen range on which a few copper pots simmered over white-hot electric burners. At the other end of the range, in the end wall of the kitchen, was a second window. It was small, less than a yard square, and had evidently been punched through the wall as an afterthought to carry off some of the heat of the huge stove.
Soyo’s face twisted exultantly. The machine gun belched flame. Chasing relentlessly after the dodging, shifting blood spot, a line of holes appeared in the wall following instantly on the tap—tap—tap of the gun.
Eye and papers and blood spot appeared to float through the air. One of the copper pots on the range flew off onto the floor. The glass of the small ventilating window smashed to bits. In the jagged frame its broken edges presented, the Arvanians saw for a flashing instant the seared, blistered soles of a pair of human feet.
“Outside!” bawled Kori. “He jumped onto the range and dove through the window! After him!”
TFTER precious seconds had been wasted, the rear door was unchained and wrenched open. The Arvanians, swords and guns drawn, raced out to the rear yard.
His Excellency’s town car, that had been standing in front of the open garage doors, leaped into life. With motor roaring wide open, it tore toward the Arvanians, some of whom leaped aside and some of whom were hurled to right and left by the heavy fenders . . .
Startled people on Sixteenth Street saw a great town car swaying down the asphalt seemingly guided by no hand other than that of fate; some said afterward they saw a single eye gleaming through the windshield, but no one believed that. Equally startled people saw the car screech to a stop in front of the home of the Secretary of War. After it, scarcely a full minute later, three motors with the Arvanian coat of arms on them came to a halt.
“My dear fellow,” said the Secretary blandly to the livid Arvanian Ambassador, “no one has come in here with papers or anything else. I saw a man jump out of your town car and run south on Connecticut Avenue. That’s all I know.”
“But I tell you—” shrieked the Arvanian.
He stopped, impaled on the Secretary’s icy cold glance.
“Your story is rather incredible,” murmured the Secretary. “Valuable plans stolen from your Embassy by an invisible man? Come, come!”
Dark Arvanian eyes glar
ed into light American ones.
“By the way,” said the Secretary affably, “I am thinking of giving a semi-official banquet to celebrate future, friendly relations between our two countries. Do you approve?”
The Arvanian Ambassador tugged at his collar to straighten it. World dominion had been in his fingers—and had slipped through—but he would not have been a diplomat had he let his face continue to express the bitterness in his heart.
“I think such a banquet would be a splendid idea,” he said suavely.
THE RESISTANT RAY
Francis Flagg
IT would almost seem as though we might be amply protected—if knowledge of possible dangers is a-protection—against any kind of inimical overture or impending invasion from another planet, by the time we have attained the reality of interplanetary travel—assuming, of course, that all the obstacles to such-travel will be overcome and conquered in time. Our well-known author gives us yet another idea and asks us, in most vivid manner, to hearken to his warning.
RAGNAR was sitting on a boulder outside his adobe lodge, when he saw Doctor Bush. Several mornings he had observed him lumbering by, his thin figure stooped, his lips moving as if he conversed with himself. But this was the first morning he stopped and spoke.
“They tell me, young man, you own the place here?” Ragnar nodded pleasantly.
“All this hillside belongs to me.”
“Then I suppose I’m trespassing. It doesn’t, I trust, incommode you?”
Ragnar suppressed an inclination to smile at the stilted phrasing.
“Not at all. So long as you don’t yodel, stand under my window and recite, or heave rocks through it, you’re welcome to trespass all you want to.”
“Thanks,” said the Doctor stiffly, walking on.