by Jerry
And the Taurog had picked him up! Ragnar’s brain simmered. He must do something at once—but what?
Call Washington? But Washington would naturally be incredulous. He himself was supposed to be in Europe. Valuable time would be frittered away proving his identity, checking up on his story. Damn all red-tape! By that time the Taurog would be at sea, five hundred miles off the coast, her prisoners and the invention transferred to another space-ship lurking somewhere on the blue waters of the Pacific.
Wire direct to Los Angeles?
But who would believe such a bizarre tale by wire? Besides the authorities would hesitate to interfere with an air vessel which enjoyed diplomatic immunity and bore the goodwill of Mars to the world. A mistake could well prove costly and embarrassing. No, the naval authorities would never make a move unless the highest power commanded.
Ragnar groaned. The whole thing was up to him, one man. He, and he alone must stop the Taurog. A wild plan came to him in a flash. He was acting as he thought. Fortunately, the old Ford in the garage was in good running shape. Down the road he shot at a precarious speed. Twelve miles away was a flying field where the fast western mail express stopped for fifteen minutes at noon. Praying fervently that there would be no blow-outs, Ragnar drove like a demon. A tire popped with a report like a pistol. The car skidded dangerously. Five precious minutes to put on the spare. He ground his teeth. Helen Lasser was in the hands of the puffy-jowled beast. A deadly weapon of warfare was being filched from America. Faster, he drove, faster. Bang! The car lurched, slowed, went into the ditch. Damn the luck! No spare to take the place of the flat, nothing to mend it with, even if he had the time. Despairingly he drove the Ford on, but at reduced speed, cursing the lonely road, the lack of houses. At this rate he would never make the field in time, would never. . . . But what was that? A Reo truck standing beside the road with engine running, loaded down with farm produce; a small adobe house back from the road a hundred yards, two men lolling in its shade. No time to talk, to barter for its use. Later he could pay them what they asked. To jump from the Ford into the cab of the Reo was a matter of seconds. As the heavy truck leaped ahead he heard the two men shouting. Then there was the throb of the engine and the whistle of the wind in his ears. Mile after mile vanished behind him. Now he could see the flying field and the big mail-plane like a white-winged bird. The pilot was in the cockpit, leaning out, ready for the take-off, a mechanic swinging the propeller. Through the open gate Ragnar swung, across the smooth expanse of field, the heavy truck-wheels plowing up the earth and clouds of dust.
“Wait!” he shouted, “wait!” though no one could possibly hear his words. But the mechanic paused in his task to watch the careening truck, and people drew back in alarm as it swept recklessly alongside the mail-plane and came to an abrupt stop. Fifteen minutes past twelve, and a disheveled man jumped from the cab of the Reo and into the cockpit alongside the pilot.
“Hey! what the devil!” cried that worthy.
“Government business!” shouted Ragnar crisply. He showed his dented plaque.
“What’s that?”
“Can’t you see? Secret Service badge.”
“Yeah! Looks phoney to me.”
A man was pushing forward from the airdrome office, a square-jawed individual with a rifle in his hands. Ragnar gave over trying to explain. The small automatic carried in a holster under his arm-pit came out with a jerk and bored into the side of the pilot.
“Listen! I’m O.K., see; but if you don’t give the signal for the take-off, it will be just too bad for you, too bad!”
The pilot’s face was a fighting one, but he decided not to take a chance.
“All right,” he cried to the mechanic, “turn her over!” and to the approaching guard, “this gentleman’s all right—Department man.”
Down the field they roared, the powerful machine zooming, lifting. Now they were up.
“Give ’er the gun!” yelled Ragnar.
He tried to explain to the pilot that he wasn’t a madman or a mail-robber, but he had little success. That icy-eyed young man merely itched for an opportunity to get the drop on his unwanted passenger. Ragnar’s face was grim.
“No funny tricks,” he warned.
The motor roared, the wind whistled by. Their speed was twice that of the Taurog, down here where there was atmospheric friction. At the worst he should come up with her twenty miles off the coast. Before reaching Los Angeles he nudged the pilot with his gun. He couldn’t go into action with him to hamper his movements.
“I see you’re wearing your emergency parachute. Well, here’s where we part company. Overboard you g°!”
The glint in his gray eyes was compelling.
“You’ll get life for this,” warned the pilot.
Ragnar watched him falling through space, saw the great circle of silk snap open above him. Rough on the kid to ditch him like that.
From its place he took a second parachute, small, compact, and bound it on. It was just as well to be prepared. Flying this type of plane was no novelty to him. The air-coolled machine-gun and disintegrator ray with which all mail planes were equipped were also familiar.
Over Los Angeles he roared at an altitude of five thousand feet. With the pilot’s powerful binoculars he swept the horizon. No sign of the Taurog. The sea raced in to meet him. Smoke of tramps and tugs were rising smudges against a cobalt blue. Far off over the Catalina Islands a bank of gray clouds hung low. The space-cruiser must be hidden by that bank. Recklessly he gave his craft the gun. Through the clouds she tore, over them. Yes, there was the Taurog, a vast, cigarshaped monster, floating easily between a purple sea and a sapphire sky, sun glinting on burnished metal.
His plan was simple. Possessing greater speed, he would circle the cruiser, give her a taste of the disintegrator ray, with which all mail planes were equipped for use in an emergency, force her down. There was no danger, for on such a calm sea the Taurog could float for hours. Anyway, help would speedily come, the Doctor and his daughter would be rescued, he would be vindicated and the enemy foiled.
A wild plan, yes, but the only one Ragnar could devise.
Perhaps it might have succeeded if the wild speed of the pursuing plane hadn’t aroused the suspicions of one of the Taurog’s officers. He levelled his glasses at the approaching craft, caught the set face of her pilot in the circle of his lenses, glimpsed the disintegrator ray gun swung outward for action.
“My God!” he exclaimed.
Ragnar fired, lifted, went over the Taurog at tremendous speed, banked, came back, but the cruiser too had her skill at maneuvering. She turned, as if on a pivot, darted off at an angle, and the thin beam of dazzling light missed her by yards. Again he banked, turned, his face a grim-set mask. Not again would he miss. Now, now. . . . But even as his hand manipulated the control, it happened. With a thunderous crash, a sickening shock, the plane catapulted against an invisible wall, catapulted and bounded back with splintered propeller, shattered engine. There was a kaleidoscopic moment when the world turned over, when Ragner felt himself plunging, falling; then came a dislocating jerk, and miraculously enough the wrecked plane was suspended between the sea and sky, one wing snapped off, half-turned over, seemingly upheld by nothing but thin air. Ragnar stared, astounded Thirty yards away the Taurog floated, a section of open deck and cat-walks lined with angry faces. A puffy-jowled man with heavy-lidded green eyes was glaring at him. Rifles, pistol covered him menacingly.
“Damn you!” roared a husky voice, “come over here, quick, before we riddle your carcass with lead!”
They were commanding him to cross empty space. But that was impossible!
“Get a move on!” roared the voice.
Ragnar swung a leg out of the cockpit. Anyway the flat, inconspicuous parachute was on his back. If they meant him to plunge to his death, they would be disappointed. But incredibly enough his feet found firm footing underneath them. Though he could look down through thousands of feet of dizzy space, he did not fall. In
stead, he was walking towards the Taurog and those menacing weapons walking apparently on nothing.
The thing was impossible! He wondered if all this weren’t a dream. But the hands dragging him aboard the Taurog were real, the hard-faced men in dark uniforms who confronted him were no figments of the imagination. A wave of despair swept over him as he realized he had failed in his desperate attempt to force the cruiser down.
“God!” exclaimed a voice, “it’s the swine we left dead in the Doctor’s house!”
The green eyes of the puffy-jowled man narrowed.
“So it is. But why should he follow us, this Brown, this sportsman?”
An under-officer stepped forward and saluted smartly. “If it please the Commander, I recognize the prisoner. His name is not Brown.”
“NOT Brown?”
“No. You will recollect that I am a member of the intelligence corps; that I have seen pictures, photographs, been given descriptions. This man’s name is Ragnar.”
“What!” roared the puffy-jowled man. “Not Ragnar of the American section of the Interplanetary secret service: Ragnar who upset our plans in 1945, caused their defeat, the death of our agents?”
“Yes,” said Ragnar coolly, perceiving further disguise impossible. “The same, Mr. Miller—pardon me, Prince Franz Josef! It seems,” he said conversationally, “that we both have a penchant for names other than our own.”
Franz Josef’s lips curled back from his teeth.
“And you were spying on me all the time?”
Ragnar shook his head regretfully.
“Unfortunately, no; otherwise the situation would no? be what it is now. Only this morning I recognized you, understood what you planned.”
An evil smile broke over the puffy-jowled face.
“To have you in my power—the nemesis of my plane!—God, that is good! But first let me tell you—let the knowledge embitter your last moments—Mars will yet put a conqueror’s hell on the face of your own insignificant Earth.”
Ragnar laughed scornfully, though his throat was dry, his heart like lead.
“Laugh,” cried the husky voice, “but you saw the weapon we shall use in action—the invention of your Doctor Lasser, who thought he was perfecting it for your own war department. That was a joke! You wrecked your plane against the resistant rays he discovered. The same rays directed beneath your plane held it up. You walked across an invisible floor of resistant rays from your craft to the Taurog. Ha, you begin to understand. Our soldiers can shoot from behind such rays in perfect safety, for they are not impervious save to bodies traveling against their line of projection. From the air we shall wipe out armies, cities, protected ourselves from gun-fire, poison gas, explosive shells, stamping them flat. First France, England, and then . . . he waved a fateful hand.
Ragnar schooled his features to express nothing but disdain, but within he felt cornered, lost. To think of such a weapon in the hands of this madman, in the hands of a ruthless enemy eager for revenge, for conquest of the solar system! To think that he, whose boast it was he had always succeeded, had blundered at last, had failed his country in its most crucial moment of need! He upbraided himself for his folly. Of course he should have called Washington, have wired the coast. But he had followed his own intuition instead, had trusted everything to his proverbial luck—and that intuition, that luck had betrayed, had deserted him at last.
And there was Helen—Helen Lasser—in the power of this brute. The thought was maddening. He knew Franz Josef’s reputation where women were concerned. There must be some way out, there must be! The malignant green eyes caught the swift glance with which he circled the deck. “Ha, you are thinking of escape. But there is no escape for you. None. You are about to die. And in a way that will again demonstrate your countryman’s invention. Seize him,” he commanded the guards.
It was useless to resist. Ragnar was dragged along the deck into the interior of the cruiser. There was a narrow passageway, a large cabin, a smaller one. Franz Josef gave commands in low husky tones. Soon a strange machine over five feet high was wheeled into the smaller cabin. There was a low square box, a tall metal shield studded with brass disks. The surface of the box was a control board bearing graduated dials and cogs. An operator seated himself at this control board. The low hum of a motor filled the cabin. A minute passed. Then Franz Josef straightened and with a wave of the hand dismissed all but the operator from the room. He looked at Ragnar with an evil grin.
“This machine generates Doctor Lasser’s resistant rays—with a few of our own additions. I now beg to inform you that the rays are being directed towards yourself. They form an invisible wall exactly the width of this cabin. Slowly but surely the length of the rays is increasing. I have told the operator to take his time; but inevitably the moment will come when the wall of rays will meet the wall of metal behind you, and then . . .”
“Good God!” breathed Ragnar, looking the horror he could not suppress.
“You fiend!” he cried, and whipping out the small automatic still in the holster under his arm, fired point blank at the gloating, puffy-jowled face. But three feet in front of it the bullet mushroomed and fell to the floor. Ragnar’s own impulsive leap was brought to an abrupt stop against an icy-cold surface of unyielding hardness. Franz Josef laughed raspingly.
“So that unnerves you, eh? I wish I could stay and see you squirming—like a rat in a trap. But some sights are too unpleasant. Imagine it, smeared to a jelly between two walls!”
He went away, then, closing the door after him, leaving Ragnar alone in the room with the silent operator who, hidden from sight behind the metal shield, uttered never a word.
RAGNAR fought desperately for coolness. If was impossible that he should perish so hideously. Hadn’t he escaped from a fortress on Jupiter—outwitted the torture chamber of Betula, the far-famed monstrosity of Venus? There must be a way out of this present predicament—there must be. But as inexorable as fate, the invisible wall of rays advanced, driving him back step by step. Against its smooth surface he pressed with hands that ran this way and that. Unconsciously panting for breath—as if already the wind were being crushed from his lungs—he darted the breadth of his narrowing prison, seeking an avenue of escape, but seemingly there was none.
With an effort of will he compelled himself to stand still, to think calmly. It was a theory of his that there was a way out of any difficulty, if only one could see it. He mustn’t break—that would be his finish—he wouldn’t beg; and he’d be damned if he’d give them the satisfaction of hearing him squeal.
But still, to be crushed to death!
He raised a hand to wipe the perspiration from his brow and for a moment stared stupidly at the automatic clutched in it.
There was a way out!
At any moment he could shoot himself!
But with all his healthy nature he recoiled from the thought of self-destruction. Not until the very last second only would he entertain the idea. But the last second was almost upon him. Three feet of space left; two. He raised the automatic to his head. God! was this to be his inglorious end? He cast his eyes upward as if imploring divine intervention and in the act of doing so was smitten by an idea, like a bolt from the blue. The ceiling! The rays! The latter filled the width of the room from wall to wall, but did they reach as exactly from floor to roof? To think was to act. The roof was five feet above his head. Up, he climbed, up, his legs, his arms, his body braced for leverage against opposing walls steadily closing. God! What if there was no space between the rays and the ceiling? What if. . . .
But there was such a space! His fingers slid over the top of the advancing wall and his body followed. But just in time! The reaction from what had seemed certain death left him for a moment unstrung and trembling. Yet he wasn’t dead. His heart sang. It was with an effort he restrained an exultant shout. Luck was with him again, the Ragnar luck. The top of the rays declined smoothly towards the metal shield. Noiselessly he squirmed forward until poised over the unsuspecti
ng operator’s head. On the upper thickness of the metal shield was a short rod of steel loose under a tentative hand. He drew it from the casting into which it sank, unaware of the fact that his doing so rendered the control board useless.
A deadly weapon. Up he swung it, up, and down upon the bowed head below. He hated to do it but his life was at stake, the safety of the woman he loved, of America, of the world—possibly the whole solar system, and it was no time to be squeamish. Without a groan, the operator collapsed. Ragnar leaped to the floor and shook himself together. He was the old Ragnar again, optimistic, dynamic. There was no weapon on the operator, but his own automatic was minus only a single bullet. For a moment he had a wild idea of using the resistant ray machine to conquer his enemies, but found it immovably anchored to the spot by the power of the rays it was shooting forth. Nor could he shut them off by a manipulation of the dials and cogs. None would turn for him, for some reason. So, every sense on the alert, he stole to the door, pushed it open a crack, and peered into the passageway beyond. It was dimly lighted, deserted.
His situation was still desperate. He was one man against many aboard the Taurog. Nor did he have any plan of action save the vague one of finding the whereabouts of the Doctor and his daughter and of foiling Franz Josef. In whatever he did he must be guided by circumstances.
Bar in hand he crept along the passageway. Behind him, from the room he had quitted, came an ominous creaking and straining, but he was too intent on what lay ahead to give it much attention. To the left was the large cabin he had been dragged through. He heard voices shouting, the sound of approaching feet, and darted to the right. A man, an ordinary mechanic by his looks, started back at sight of him, with lips parted to shout. Ragnar batted him down with the bar of steel. Someone was coming. Through a half-open door he hauled the body of his victim and hastily swung shut the door, throwing into place a steel bolt. Whoever it was went unsuspectingly by.