by Earl
The motor coughed to silence, luckily, eliminating the danger of fire if any gas had spurted out of the wing tanks.
CHAPTER II
The Invisible Spectre
HUGH CRANE picked himself up dazedly, then pulled the girl to her feet. She lay limp in his arms for a moment, half stunned. Finally her eyelids flew open. The warm color of her eyes was washed over with terror that faded, and wonder that grew.
“What happened?” she asked weakly. “Why did the plane act as if it had struck something?”
“Struck something!” Paul Harlan stood beside them, dark face glowering, a bruise over his right eye. “Bad piloting, that’s all,” he growled. “First he nearly wrecks the ship in taking off at Chicago. Now he nearly puts us down in pieces!”
His voice rose harshly. “Spies! Your father is worried about spies, you say. I just wonder if this Hugh Crane is a licensed pilot at all. Or if he’s using his right name!”
Jondra Damon’s eyes widened. She stepped back from Crane.
“Father warned me to be very careful, and now—”
“Good God!” Crane exploded. He’d had to bite his lips to keep from swinging at Harlan. Now the stark suspicion in the girl’s eyes added fuel to a mounting rage. He didn’t have to take this from anybody!
He lunged at Harlan, driving his fist forward.
The blow never landed. Crane was not quite sure why it didn’t. Some force seemed to grasp his wrist and hold his arm back. He tried again, more enraged than ever.
“Stop!”
Crane whirled. The new voice had come from the swung-open door of the plane’s cabin, with a bark of authority. A man leaned there, rifle upraised. Tall and thin, gray-haired, unshaven, boots and pants muddy, he looked the part of some desperate character. But there was intelligence in his high brow and level gray eyes.
“Dad!”
With the one word, Jondra flew to embrace him. He patted her head, then disengaged her gently, facing the two men again.
“I heard your little quarrel,” he said casually. “Your nerves are upset by the close escape you had. Calm down, please.”
Crane relaxed, anger draining from him as suddenly as it had come.
“You’re Dr. Sewell Damon, of course,” he said, and introduced himself and Harlan. He went on, grinning ruefully, “I was supposed to just land, and unload, and go. But I guess now I’ll have to stay till I can make repairs.”
The scientist’s lips pursed behind a week’s growth of beard.
Crane snapped, “If you think that’s a spy’s trick, so that I can stay and horn in on whatever you’re doing here—” He shrugged indifferently.
Dr. Damon’s eyes narrowed. His hand tightened on the rifle.
“If there’s any spying, it wouldn’t be healthy. The secret of this valley—”
“I don’t want a dime of it,” Crane growled. “Just tell me one thing—what spoiled my landing? Bad air-currents rising from the valley?”
DR. DAMON stared. “You haven’t guessed?” he said slowly.
“Guessed what?” Crane looked blankly at Harlan, who was equally mystified.
The scientist turned. “Follow me.”
The four stepped from the cabin. Dr. Damon dodged under the right wing and stood erect beside the motor cowling. There was a large round dent in the front wing-edge. Crane gaped at it.
“Exactly as though I’d struck a tree there, just before the plane stopped rolling.”
“You did,” Dr. Damon said.
“What? Where’s the tree?”
Crane looked around for the fallen tree, but there was no sign of one within hundreds of yards.
“Look, Dr. Damon,” he grunted, “I’m not in the mood for humor—”
A startled cry from Harlan interrupted. He had passed back of Crane, stretching his cramped muscles. Now he was toppling to the ground, for no visible reason—as if his legs had been knocked from under him!
Rising to his elbow, looking foolish, he slowly stretched out his hand near the ground. Crane watched in utter fascination as Harlan’s hand seemed to meet something, and explore its outline. Harlan looked up with his foolish expression altered to one of ghastly shock.
With a smothered curse, Crane kneeled and stretched out his hand to the same spot. In mid-air he felt something—the bark of a tree! Solid and real to his sense of touch, but unseen by his eyes.
Harlan’s whisper seemed to shatter the quiet air.
“It’s—invisible!”
For a moment nothing more was said. The three newcomers to the valley looked at one another in dumb amazement, as human beings must when confronted by a wonder out of the realms of fantasy. Invisibility! A dream of science—and of superstition before that—come true!
Hugh Crane followed the length of the fallen trunk before he was satisfied. With his hands he felt the bole, the lower branches, and the upper foliage of some pinelike tree with needles and cones, knocked over by the plane.
He came back facing the scientist.
“So that’s the secret of this valley, Dr. Damon! Not gold or minerals, but invisibility!”
The elderly man nodded slowly.
“It’s a miracle that you landed without smashing up completely.” He swept an arm around. “The valley looks bare to the eye, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact, it teems with life! Trees, bushes, grass and animals. All invisible!”
THE others looked around. The level stretch of the valley floor was naked, to their eyes. Yet they realized now that between them and the cliffs must be a thousand unseen things. Jondra shivered. Crane could hardly keep from doing the same, overwhelmed by the eerie mystery.
Dr. Damon resumed. “By blind, lucky chance, you brought the ship down in a cleared patch of bush growths. Almost any other spot you would have cracked up against rows of trees.”
“Fools luck,” agreed Crane. “But why weren’t we warned?”
“I tried to warn you away,” the scientist reminded. “I fired my gun, hoping it’d go back and land up above somewhere.”
“But why wasn’t your daughter warned, before we even arrived?” Crane eyed the! man accusingly. “You risked your daughter’s life by keeping that so secretive!”
“No, I was told,” the girl spoke up. “That is, father mentioned invisibility in a message to me. But he didn’t tell me the whole story—that the valley is crammed with invisible trees and life.”
“I couldn’t,” Dr. Damon said gently. “You might have thought I was mad.” Then his voice sharpened. “But Jondra, I did warn you not to let the plane be landed in the valley, in my second message—”
“Second message?” The girl stared at him. “I didn’t get a second one!”
Dr. Damon whirled.
“Pierre!” he cried. “Didn’t you deliver my second message?”
Crane started as another figure silently stepped forth from the shadow of the plane.! He had come up so quietly that the others hadn’t known he was there. Black eyes, sleek black hair, emotionless features and buckskin garments tabbed him instantly as a French-Canadian guide and a roamer of the north country.
“Pierre, my guide,” Dr. Damon informed them parenthetically. Then again he demanded: “The second message, Pierre. By heaven, if you failed to send it—”
“I send it,” Pierre protested in a hoarse, taciturn voice. “I mail it from Good Hope, free week ago.”
“Then it was lost in the mails,” Dr. Damon sighed. “Well, things have been uncertain right along, since the war. Thank heaven you’re here safe and sound, Jondra. And you, Crane and Harlan. Sorry about your ship, Crane. I’ll pay for the damages.
“You can stay as long as you need to repair it. Plenty of food supplies came with Jondra. I have a comfortable cave-home in the nearby cliff. Well, You’re all probably tired and hungry. We can unload the plane tomorrow. Follow me.”
The night was coming on. The three who had spent a dozen hours in the air were ready for food and rest. And shelter. A chill wind swept down into the valley,
protected though it was.
As Crane stepped away from the plane, a thought ground forward in mind.
“Who turned off the motor, just after the landing?” he asked aloud. “Harlan, Miss Damon and I were on the floor, helpless. You, Dr. Damon, and Pierre were approaching. It couldn’t be any of us.” He grasped the scientist’s arm. “There wouldn’t happen to be—invisible men?”
Dr. Damon started. “Not that I know of,” he vouched. “It’s a preposterous thought. Your motor died by itself.”
CRANE shook his head. “I’d like to believe that. But the-ignition key was turned off.”
“Then the jar of landing turned it,” Dr. Damon retorted. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you.”
Imagination? Imagination that the plane at take-off had been heavily loaded? That Jondra Damon had kept on her feet in the bouncing air pocket? That a strange force had withheld his blow at Harlan? That a shock-cushioned ignition key had been turned by a human hand?
All imagination? Or did it add up to some mystery, strangely linked with this phenomenal valley of invisibility?
Crane didn’t know. But he was determined to find out, one way or another.
CHAPTER III
Sabotage
THERE and Dr. Damon led the way.
Harlan, Jondra and Crane followed in single file, carefully stepping in the exact path they broke. Blundering into an unseen tree would not be pleasant.
Dr. Damon kept one hand directly before him like a sleepwalker, for emergency, but seemed able to avoid invisible trees by some instinct. He stepped along sure-footedly, as did Pierre.
“From experience,” he confided, “I can make out the trees. They aren’t absolutely invisible. Nothing can be, except air and colorless gases. The trees throw a faint shadow that my eyes—and Pierre’s—have learned to watch for. With the sun setting, the shadows are longer and more definite. Do you see them at all?”
Crane gradually made out the faintest of shadows slanting over what seemed barren ground. Like eyes adjusting themselves to gloom, he could squint and bring them up slightly. He sucked in his breath. There were hundreds of those long, faint shadow-streaks. A whole forest towered around them!
A forest of trees as solid as the ground, but as vagrant to the eye as smoke. Light went through them with less hindrance than through glass. It was amazing, almost incredible.
The ground was not barren, however, upon closer inspection. A carpeting of dead needles lay decaying over the ground, as in any pine forest. Here and there they stepped over legs and fallen trees, completely visible. Dead branches and sticks were in the visible spectrum.
“This valley’s invisibility is confined solely to its living life-forms,” Dr. Damon explained. “When a tree or animal dies, it passes into the visible.” He stopped, pointing. “Look—a rabbit!”
Crane barely made out a faint trail of mist streaking across their path. Invisible animals roamed these invisible forest glens.
“There are also fox, deer, and I think bear,” Dr. Damon elaborated. “It—”
He was interrupted by a blood-chilling roar that sounded faintly from far across the valley. Both Pierre and the scientist jerked their heads, exchanged a glance, and gripped their rifles more firmly.
“Lynx,” stated Dr. Damon briefly.
“Are you sure it wasn’t anything bigger?” Crane asked. “I just thought I saw a shadow thrown momentarily across the far cliff wall, near where the sound came from. It was the outline of—”
Crane stopped. He had been about to say something preposterous.
“Lynx,” repeated Dr. Damon tersely.
Crane saw the scientist’s surreptitious glance at his daughter. He kept still. But the shadow aside, the roar itself had never issued from the throat of a mere lynx. Of that Crane was dead certain.
A NATURAL rock overhang formed the roof of Dr. Damon’s valley dwelling. It extended back fifty feet in the base of the east cliff wall, which was three hundred feet high. Logs set upright to enclose the sides of the rock pocket were of Pierre’s handiwork.
The space within was warm, dry, with a hard-packed floor. Pierre, with his kind’s resourcefulness, had also fashioned several items of crude furniture—chairs, tables and low bunks cushioned with pine needles. One new bunk had been added, obviously for Harlan.
“You hadn’t meant for me to stay, then,” Jondra said. “There’s danger here, Dad! You wouldn’t say it in the message, but there is danger. I can feel it!”
Already unnerved by the hazardous landing, the girl’s face was strained. It was not a light shock suddenly to see—or not see—a valley of shadow-things in an otherwise normal world.
“Danger of stubbing your toe!” Dr. Damon forced a laugh and chucked his daughter under the chin. “Food and sleep are what you need, all of you.”
Pierre had already begun boiling a stew of jerked beef and onions over a stone stove just outside the pine-slab door. They are looking out over the now-dark valley. It was not so eerie with darkness substituting for invisibility. The unseen forest creaked and rustled under a whipping wind from regions above.
Crane woke twice in the night, on his unaccustomed bed of pine needles. Pierre sat dozing before the smouldering fire he kept up against the night chill of the northern latitude.
But the second time Crane woke up, Pierre was standing erect, staring out over the valley of shadow-life. His expression in the firelight was strange—fierce and determined.
Pierre would bear watching too, Crane told himself. Had he delivered that second message, or not? If not, why not?
UNLOADING THE plane took the better part of the next day. Pierre, Harlan and Hugh Crane shuttled between the plane and cave with arms full, Pierre leading. Besides food supplies for an extended stay, there were crates of apparatus and chemicals.
Dr. Damon unpacked the latter eagerly, and set the items up on a long table previously made for the purpose, at the back of the cave. His laboratory workbench. Crane felt growing wonder at the array of test-tubes, flasks, hypodermic needles, morphine, alcohol and more complicated reagents.
“Now I’ll get somewhere,” the biologist asserted, rubbing his hands together. “Pierre wasn’t able to pack more than a few pounds of equipment here to me from the small town of Good Hope, northwest of here. I’ll have the answer soon.”
“Answer to what?” ventured Crane, nettled at the man’s secretiveness.
Dr. Damon’s gray eyes veiled themselves.
“How long will it take you to repair your ship?” he countered in a tone that meant, “How soon will you get out of my way?”
“I don’t know, probably a week or two,” Crane lied.
Brief examination had shown him that the ship could leave now. The motor was intact, also the fuel tanks. The left wing was rather badly ripped, and the undercarriage out of line, but with most of its former load gone, the plane would take off easily in the same cleared stretch they had miraculously landed in.
THE plane was ready to go, but Crane wasn’t. Not till he was sure Jondra Damon was in no danger.
He couldn’t leave a girl—any girl, of course—in the midst of unknown risks.
“You have a radio in the plane?” Dr. Damon said. “If you contact your airport, to tell them of the delay, I’ll trust you not to reveal this valley’s exact location. Name your price and you’ll go back with my bank draft—”
“No sale,” Crane snapped, angered at the cheap approach. He turned on his heel, aware that the scientist was staring after him with narrowed eyes.
He trudged to the plane, following the trail now marked with stones, winding through trees that he could feel with his hands in passing, but whose bulks were as transparent as air.
The wonder of it was somewhat subdued this second day. His thoughts revolved more around the undertow of human cross-currents gradually shaping themselves.
He passed Pierre on the trail, lugging a box on his broad shoulders. Reaching the plane, Crane stepped into the cabin. Harlan
was there, and he turned with a startled air.
“The doctor’s supplies are all in the fuselage compartment, not here,” Crane said coldly.
Harlan’s shrug was studied.
“I suppose now I’m some sort of spy?” he retorted sarcastically. He stepped out to hoist a box to his shoulders, leaving.
Crane glanced around the ship. What had Harlan been doing? Then he saw . . .
When he left a minute later with the last box, his eyes were hard. He strode rapidly. He set the box down inside the doorway of the cave, and straightened with grim accusation on his face.
“Who smashed the plane’s radio?” he demanded, eying them one after another. His glance came back to Harlan. “You were there last, Harlan.”
“You’d have heard it if I did it,” Harlan returned easily. “I was just ahead of you—don’t you remember?” His eyes flicked to Pierre significantly.
Pierre’s beady eyes met Crane’s, then shifted.
“Pierre wouldn’t do it,” Dr. Damon declared quickly. “I know him too well.”
Crane ground his teeth.
“Someone did it! It was done between the time I talked to you last, and went to the plane.” He smiled grimly. “If Harlan and Pierre are eliminated, that leaves—”
“How dare you!” Jondra Damon blazed, stepping before him. Neither Dad nor I would do such a thing. You could have done it yourself, since accusations are in order!”
Crane threw up his hands.
“I’m getting tired of all this!” he exploded. “That radio was our only emergency contact with the outside world, since the plane is damaged. Someone in this group smashed it, for reasons of his own. What’s more—”
He stopped suddenly and ripped free a lath of the crate he had last brought. Reaching within excelsior packing, he drew out something by a handle and held it up.
“Grenades!” he hissed. “Potato-masher type. You say there is no danger here, Dr. Damon, yet you had your daughter bring rifles and hand grenades. Are the mosquitoes that big here?”