by Earl
“There are steam springs in the central area,” Dr. Damon explained. “This valley was formed, ages ago, by the sinking of land into a volcanic bed. The underlying heat works up through the soil, keeping the valley warm.
“No seeds flying up out of the valley can take root in the cold, snow-covered regions above. Thus the invisible vegetation has been confined.”
They saw the steam springs soon after, puffs of vapor rising from porous ground and curling vagrantly into the air. Often the ghostly shapes of trees and flowers would be outlined for a moment, revealing the verdant character of the invisible forest before them.
Singularly, here and there an ordinary pine stood plainly in view, green and solid.
“Some seeds drift down into the valley from above and take root. Seeds of the common visible variety.”
Crane suddenly chuckled.
“Hunting invisible deer! Most hunters have a devil of a job bagging one they can see!”
“You think we’re fools to try?” countered Dr. Damon imperturbably. “Wait and see—”
He broke off and held up a warning hand. The line stopped. The scientist pointed ahead.
Two hundred yards beyond, a steam spring’s vapor wound lazily around and around a clump of bushes. Off and on, like the shutter of a blinking light, it outlined the form of a deer lying hidden. Sensing human presence and the consequent danger, the creature was on its haunches, ready to leap away.
BUT it was still there—a perfect target. The steam silhouette betrayed it, robbing it of the advantage of invisibility.
Pierre was slowly bringing up his rifle, with the caution of an experienced hunter. The others held their breaths. The gun streadied, then barked, sending echoes crashing back and forth between the cliffs.
Crane saw that Pierre had missed. The deer had leaped away at the crack of the gun, with all the lithe grace of its kind. It vanished utterly, passing beyond the steam curtain like a fading dream.
“What’s the matter with you, Pierre?” Dr. Damon snapped irritably. “First time I knew you to miss a perfect shot like that.”
The French-Canadian stood dazed, looking at his rifle in stark disbelief.
“Something push barrel,” he mumbled. “Spoil shot.”
“If that’s the best excuse you can think of—” The scientist glared at the man, then waved the party on. “Well, we’ll try our original scheme. We won’t find and more deer lying that conveniently in view.”
He explained his plan. “You’ve said frankly you’re a poor shot, Harlan. So you be our beater. Make a circle near the cliff edge quietly, and then cut straight toward us. Any deer you scare up will run our way.
“Now, there are three main springs ahead. Pierre, the one at the left. Crane, the middle one. I’ll take the right one. Between the three of us, we eventually should bag a steam-silhouetted deer.” The scheme was carried out. Harlan, carefully picking his way through the invisible forest, made a wide circle, then stamped noisily toward the three men with ready rifles. Two deer were seen leaping through the steam curtains—but away instead of toward them. Disconcerted, Crane’s shot went wild. Pierre and Dr. Damon hadn’t even tried to fire.
“Deer gone here now,” the scientist muttered. “We’ll try again in an hour.” The results were the same. The deer were again leaping away from them, at an angle they were unprepared for. No one fired.
“What’s wrong?” Dr. Damon rasped, his temper short. “You must make too much noise circling, Harlan.”
“I don’t!” the chemist snapped back. “If you ask me, something else scares them first, before I get near—and from the other direction.”
“A dragon?” Jondra gasped in alarm. “Of course not,” her father snorted. “We’d easily hear him.”
An hour later, Harlan tried again. Three deer came leaping. At the instant Crane saw a silhouette over his steam spring, he tensed to swing his rifle from right to left. The deer’s motion the other way—from left to right—completely disconcerted him. There was no use to shoot blindly, a second later, at the portion of thin air into which the deer had dissolved.
“Damn!” he grunted. “We’ll never get them that way. They just don’t come from the right direction. What’s doing it?”
HARLAN came back with a sober, almost frightened face.
“I think I saw—” he gulped.
“A dragon?” Jondra asked again.
“—the shape of a man!” Harlan finished.
His four listeners gasped. The thought of an invisible man, more than even the frightful dragons, sent chills down their spines.
“I saw it way ahead, running through the steam curtain, swinging its arms and chasing the deer away before I could get near. He must have made enough noise to scare the deer, though they couldn’t see him.”
“Nonsense!” Dr. Damon had recovered and almost yelled the word. “You’re all letting your nerves go. Pierre and I have been here six months without running across this mythical invisible man. It was a bear walking upright, naturally.
“Now scare up the deer again, Harlan. And don’t picture your grandmother in the mists next!”
Crane this time deliberately watched for the deer to be scared up from some point opposite Harlan. When a steam silhouette did appear, he had the exact bead. The crash of his gun hurled from the nearest cliff.
In his eagerness, arriving first at the spot, he yelped as an invisible hoof cracked him smartly on the shin. He stared down. On the grass before him lay a creature kicking in its dying reflexes. He could actually see only one thing—the mushroomed bullet hanging apparently in mid-air, lodged in an invisible heart.
Then he saw more. A pool of liquid was slowly outlined at his feet and began to tinge with a faint ruddy hue.
“Quick, Jondra!” Dr. Damon panted, running up. “The incisor and pump.”
Jondra opened the case she had carried all morning, handing over the instruments. With the skill and speed of experience, the biologist inserted a large hypodermic in an invisible jugular vein. Crane and Harlan sat on invisible animal legs that were still striking out. Dr. Damon attached rubber tubing and pumped transparent blood into a series of flasks.
“Haemolin—sodium citrate!” he barked at Harlan.
Harlan dumped the prepared solutions in the flasks, reagents that prevented coagulation and deterioration. It was all done in a minute.
The blood-drained body beneath Crane shuddered, gave a final heave, and was still.
“Watch!” Dr. Damon commanded.
Slowly the corpse took form. Inner, organs misted into being, rapidly solidifying to visibility Then overlying tissue precipitated out of thin air. Muscles sprang into being. A vast network of veins and arteries snaked into vision. Finally hide, hair and hooves appeared.
In the space of fifteen minutes, an ordinary deer lay before them, no different from its cousins in the outer world. With the passing of life and the breakdown of the delicate invisibility hormone, flesh hidden from human eyes had dropped into the visible spectrum.
It was uncanny, eerie, like a magician’s trick perfected to an impossible degree.
“But its blood is still invisible!” Dr. Damon crowed, holding one flask up.
To all appearances the flask was empty, clean. Even the refractive index of the solutions added had been largely erased.
“The secret of invisibility—in a flask!” Harlan murmured.
CRANE glanced at him sharply. The man’s eyes were enigmatic.
Jondra shuddered and turned away from the scene.
“Let’s go back to camp—”
“What? Without taking along delicious cuts of venison?” her father scoffed.
Pierre already had his knife out and was expertly skinning the carcass. Soon after he was carving off choice steaks. The strong, salty smell of fresh meat rose into the air.
Crane fidgeted. “Isn’t this rather risky, in case one of the dragons—”
As if at a signal, a blasting roar thundered against the confining cl
iffs. A dragon had crept close, attracted by the smell, its noises camouflaged by the steady hiss of the surrounding steam spring. A treetop cracked, no more than a hundred feet away. In seconds the monster would be upon them, clawing and rending.
The five froze into the paralysis of fear.
Crane broke from it with a groan and fumbled for the grenade slung on his belt. Dr. Damon and Harlan were too stupefied to even remember them, or bring up their rifles.
Crane pulled at the pin with fingers of rubber. Before he could draw it, a hand clutched his wrist in a grip of steel.
“Pierre, you fool!” Crane snarled. “Let me go—”
“No kill beast!” Pierre muttered.
They struggled. The sound of monsters feet pounding heavily against their ears. Only seconds were left . . .
The grenade’s roar drowned out the triumphant bellow of the behemoth about to overtake them. A frightful scream shattered the air, as of a creature mortally wounded. Violent threshing sounded, as a mighty body writhed in death agony. A tree crackled and toppled, brushing at the five humans now stumbling away.
They stopped and faced one another, a hundred feet from the danger spot, pale, trembling, shaken to the roots of their souls at the narrow escape.
Dr. Damon suddenly let out a jubilant shout.
“It’s dying right on the spot! More blood! Come on, all of you, back to camp for more bottles—”
Not till an hour later, after they had returned, did the reptilian monster give its final gusty sigh of death. One last swish of an invisible tail flung dirt, needles and splintered branches in all directions. Then all was quiet.
The scientist brought up with a jerk as Crane held him from running close.
“Let go!” Dr. Damon screeched. “I have to pump that blood out before it’s too late.”
“You’ll wait five minutes, till we’re sure he hasn’t one last kick in him,” Crane said firmly, holding the biologist tight. “That tail, if I know anything about dinosaurs, could bash in the side of a locomotive.”
Jondra touched his hand and flashed him a smile of thanks.
But the monster lay still, and in fifteen minutes they had drained gallons of viscid fluid into the jars they had lugged from camp. Harlan dumped in wholesale quantities of his preserving chemicals.
THEN they watched, gasping, as the corpse passed, by degrees, into the optical realm. Thirty feet long, from snout to tail-tip, spined, armor-plated, huge as a house, it lay in a mass of trampled vegetation and half-splintered trees which more slowly assumed a visible status in death.
It was the first dinosaur seen by human or near-human eyes for an unthinkable age.
“Look what it took to kill it!” Harlan said, awed.
The exploding grenade had torn out its entire chest. Bullets alone would have been a laughable farce against the gargantuan creature.
“Thank heaven for the grenades!” Dr. Damon breathed. “I’m wondering now how Pierre and I dared to sneak around for six months with our pea-shooters, under their very noses!”
He turned with a glowing face, waving at the bottles filled with invisible blood.
“We owe you our lives, as well as this, Crane. You tossed that grenade just in time!”
Crane said nothing. Obviously the others, paralyzed in blind terror, hadn’t seen that desperate moment when he struggled with Pierre. He looked at Pierre, but the impassive face avoided his. Pierre had no explanation for his astounding act.
But what bothered Crane the most was something else.
He hadn’t thrown the grenade! Nor had Pierre or the others! An unseen hand had done it.
Had there been a man’s shape in the steam mists?
CHAPTER VI
The Invisible Robinhood
THE following day dawned clear and bright. But there was a cloud in Crane’s mind. He watched Dr. Damon and Harlan busily transferring the blood to sealed cans, at the workbench.
Jondra watched moodily. This was not the right environment for her. Her feminine nerves would give way in a few more days.
Pierre sat in the sun, staring out over the valley, as though observing the shadow-life.
Crane’s churning mind strove to put the jigsaw puzzle together. Why had Pierre wanted the dragon to live? And what lay veiled in Harlan’s cold eyes?
And was there a fifth man—invisible—in the valley?
Crane strode to his plane, in sudden alarm. This was their only way of getting out of the valley—as a group. If someone had other plans.
Too late! He knew it the moment he entered the cabin. The panel-board lay smashed by a wrench from the tool chest. The drive-wheel had been battered to bits, and the steering post bent and twisted out of shape. The plane was useless, beyond repair!
They were trapped, in the valley of invisibility!
Crane stood cursing. It had been done the night before. Harlan or Pierre? Or—a chill went down his spine—the unknown presence?
Returning on the trail to camp, Crane held his rifle grimly. Harlan, Pierre or the invisible man? It surged through his mind like the beat of a drum.
Pierre still sat impassively before the cave entrance. His beady eyes did not turn. Crane watched him for a long, cautious moment. Was he shamming, fully aware that Crane must know of the ruined instrument board? Was he waiting for Crane to make the first hostile move. . . .
“I’d advise you to drop your gun!”
Crane whirled. It was Harlan in the doorway, half smiling. An automatic in his hand pointed straight for Crane’s heart.
Caught off guard, Crane had little choice. He dropped his rifle. Pierre, starting from his daze, was tensing preparatory to lunging for his rifle, a yard away.
“Easy, Pierre!” Harlan warned, and the French-Canadian relaxed. “Now step to the right, both of you, away from your guns.”
As they complied, Dr. Damon and Jondra came running out.
“What is this, Harlan?” the scientist demanded testily. “What—”
He gasped, seeing the gun.
Harlan herded them all together, unarmed and helpless before his automatic. He looked from one to the other with undisguised triumph.
“So it was you, Harlan!” Crane said. “You smashed the instrument panel so we couldn’t leave the valley. What’s your game?”
“I can say it in one word—invisibility!” Harlan retorted.
“You mean you want the secret of invisibility for yourself?” Dr. Damon guessed belatedly. “Why? For what earthly purpose? Harlan, this is outrageous—”
“Shut up!” Harlan grinned strangely. “For what purpose? Can’t you guess? You mumbled about it all morning. That a person could take a dose of that animal blood with its invisibility hormone—and become invisible himself!”
CRANE cursed, but at himself. Why hadn’t he seen that before? The secret of invisibility was of incalculable significance. From the first, Harlan must have plotted to hog it.
Harlan resumed. “Last night, Crane, after smashing the panel-board, I used your batteries. They furnished power for a little private radio in my belt. I sent a prearranged signal, to friends of mine. They should arrive, by plane, in an hour or so. You called my hand, but a little too late.
“We’ll take all those cans of blood. And then we’ll leave the valley—alone!”
The plain, brutal threat sent icy rage through Hugh Crane. His muscles knotted, and a growl rasped from his throat.
“Watch yourself, Crane!” Harlan yarned. “I prefer to let my less squeamish friends do the job. But if I have to, I’ll fill you full of lead! This is too big a thing to stop at anything. No one will ever find the four bodies rotting away in an undiscovered valley on the Arctic Circle.”
Crane leaped away. It was a desperate gamble, but Pierre might have a chance to get at Harlan afterward. Better the try than tamely to wait for certain death later.
Crane’s big body lunged forward like a football tackier, toes digging in the dirt. Head low, he aimed for Harlan’s legs.
Jon
dra screamed. Crane knew he could never make it. The ugly snout of the automatic leveled straight for him. Harlan’s finger began to squeeze. Crane mentally winced, waiting for the slugs that would churn through his brain.
A shot rang out . . .
Harlan had missed! Another shot . . . four more shots . . . and still no bullet touched Crane!
It was an impossible miracle. And then Crane gasped. He stopped short, staring at the amazing phenomenon occurring before him.
Harlan stood in a strangely unnatural position. His right arm was stiff before him, the wrist bent, the automatic pointed upward where he had pumped the useless shots. It was exactly as though a man had grasped Harlan’s wrist from the side, jerked his arm up, and twisted the wrist!
Yet there was no man there.
Harlan gave a shriek suddenly, as his wrist almost turned in a complete circle. His arm looped awkwardly back and he staggered in an off-balance position. A moment later the automatic dropped to the dust from Harlan’s nerveless fingers.
The automatic bounced once, then miraculously rose into the air by itself, pointing at Harlan. The chemist reeled back, groaning with the pain of his bruised wrist, and at the unnerving sight of his own gun, unsupported, threatening him.
“It’s an invisible man!” Jondra whispered.
Crane tensed himself again. Friend or enemy? Had they been rescued from Harlan only to face a new menace?
“Who are you?” he demanded.
A LOW, quiet voice issued weirdly from a spot just above the gun, held by an invisible hand.
“I’m known as the Invisible Robinhood.”
Crane’s mouth fell open.
“The Invisible Robinhood? You mean that publicity myth that stirred up the country last year?”[2]
“Publicity myth?” The unseen man chuckled. “Yes, I suppose most of you hard-headed people never did quite believe I actually existed as an invisible man. For a year I spied and tracked down criminal rings, and still no one believes I exist. No one except the criminals whose careers I ended, and my one confidant and contact man. Well—”