“I am sure it was in this general region,” she said, “and if the place was accurately described, it must lie in one of these two or three cross sections we have explored.” She checked over in her mind the route they had taken, seeking some explanation for their failure.
King’s mind was also working.
“See here,” he exclaimed, “these Asians would hardly be guilty of such crude apparatus as hidden springs or push-button mechanisms. Those were clever tricks in the Dark Ages, but surely modern trapdoors would operate more scientifically.”
Diane nodded. “Probably you’re right,” she admitted, “but that doesn’t solve our problem.”
“No. but it helps. It seems to me that the doors would probably be opened by sound-sensitive cells. Instead of pressing on the wall, we must strike it, or tap it. probably according to a certain system of signals. In America we commonly use these sound-cells, or impact cells as they are usually called, to start or stop automatic trains, elevators, and other appliances,17 which can, by this means, be controlled by speaking into a telephone transmitter or shouting in a certain manner or even by whistling. The number of impacts within a given time conditions the response, so that the mechanism may be made to go forward, reverse, or stop.”
“But if that is true, our problem is even more complicated, for we haven’t the slightest notion of the pre-arranged signals.”
“Well, we can use our reason on that, too. For one thing, we can look at the problem as an Asian engineer would, who wanted to build a door easily operated by the initiated, and yet one which would be most unlikely to be opened accidentally by a slave or worker. In the case of a sound or impact cell, a worker would accidentally excite it only in his daily labors in this section, probably by his broom or other tool. He would be extremely unlikely to strike it more than once or twice at the most in the same spot. Therefore, the signal to open should be greater than two taps. On the other hand, it should not require too many, for the savant who sought to gain entrance in a hurry would hardly care to attract attention to himself by thumping repeatedly on a portion of the wall which he wished particularly to keep secret.
“Taking these things into consideration, if I were the Asian engineer I would arrange my door in such a way that one tap would close it, two taps would keep the mechanism in a state of quiet, either opened or closed, and three taps would open it. That’s a safe working hypothesis, anyway, since we have no better one to go on.”
He took a small pocket knife from his clothing, and struck the wall before him three times, sharply, with it. Nothing happened directly, but far down the adjoining hallway, in the direction of the elevator, there was a faint trilling whistle, three times repeated, as if in direct response to the tapping. King looked at Diane momentarily for an explanation of the sound and saw his answer in the terror on her face.
“It’s the police,” she whispered. “It means that they have found our trail and will be upon us directly. Here, give me something to tap with, also!”
King produced a large coin. Diane, moving to the opposite wall, struck it in her excitement not three times, but four.
Something moved in the wall; they heard wheels turning, the distant buzz of machinery, before any rift appeared. Then, sliding back in grooves which were so cleverly dovetailed into the wall that no seam or joint had been visible, a door began to slide sidewise, and an opening grew in the wall where before it had appeared solid and unbroken. Diane and King watched it, fascinated, wondering when it would cease moving and dreading to enter the dark cavern disclosed behind it, though they dreaded discovery by the police even more.
The doorway opened about three feet, leaving a rectangular hole perhaps five feet tall, with its lower edge a few inches above the floor. When the door ceased to move, King went over to it and was about to step inside when an exclamation from Diane brought him to a halt. On the other side of the hall, not far away, an exactly similar opening was visible. It was impossible, from a cursory examination on the outside, to tell which was the right entrance to the laboratory tunnel.
“Maybe either one is right,” ventured King, striking a match and peering into the darkness of the second cavity.
“No, no!” exclaimed Diane. Stooping down quickly, she snatched up a small piece of cloth, upon which were smeared splotches of a dark, firm substance. “It’s part of the uniform of a servant,” she explained, “and that, I think, is. blood.”
King moved back from the doorway and hurried Diane with him toward the other.
“One of these entrances is a trap, then,” he said. “The initiated know which to enter; accidental visitors are encouraged to choose the wrong one, step inside, and be crushed by the closing of the door and other mechanisms there to take care of the gruesome job. Your bit of cloth is probably all that’s left of some poor devil who mistakenly chose the wrong passage. But his death may mean our safety. We will enter on this side.”
“But,” Diane objected, “the cloth may have been placed there as a part of the trap, to induce others to take the wrong route.”
Unable to decide, they hesitated before the first opening until they heard the footsteps of the police, and knew that they had no more time to waste in conjecture.
“We are trapped anyway,” said King. “I’ll take a chance on this one.”
“I’ll follow you,” murmured Diane.
Resolutely they stepped inside. There was a little landing or platform there which supported their weight, though it began to settle slowly as soon as they got upon it. At the same time, without any act on their part, the machinery of the door-mechanism resumed its whirring sound, and the panel of metal which had slid away to make the opening now began to return with exasperating slowness, moving easily along its oiled grooves.
They heard the clatter as the police came hurrying around the last corner and looked into the hallway where they had been standing a moment before. They heard exclamations of surprise and rage. But the door closed inexorably upon them as the platform settled, and in the darkness of the shaft they moved downward without power to arrest their movement or knowledge of their destination.
Diane clung impulsively to King. “If this is the end. “ she murmured softly, “well. “
The sentence remained unfinished. As abruptly as it had started its descent, the platform came to a full stop, with a faint metallic sound, upon a landing. There was a sputter of automatic switches. King drew Diane close to him, closing his eyes, but no scythe of destruction descended upon them.
Instead, a small, phosphorescent light began to glow overhead, and they looked around to find themselves alone in a small, circular room from which, at a point almost directly opposite them, a small passage led off on a horizontal plane. There were benches and chairs in the room and additional lights which could have been turned on by the pressure of a finger. It was obviously fitted up as a place for resting or lounging, but King and Diane had no inclination to take advantage of its invitation. Moving uncertainly in the dim light and hardly able to realize that thus far they had escaped the dangers of the metal city, they cautiously approached the uninviting passage ahead and entered it.
IV
Even as King and Diane were moving silently along the uncharted cranny they had discovered in the shining city, events were taking place in North America, thousands of miles away, which were destined to have an important bearing on the outcome of that mad adventure.
The Secretary of War of the Pan-Americas was, for one thing, in a new quandary, or rather a new development of the old one. He had been making speeches of great promise with regard to the war and the success of the American defense against the metal tanks of the invaders. He had been in great demand at parties and dinners, and his thrice-daily talks over the radio had been received with interest and eagerness by more than two hundred millions of persons on two continents. The speeches had even been transmitted to Europe, where the governments of the petty countries which had survived the Second European War were greatly alarmed at the A
sian invasion, reasoning that if the Americans could not stop them, the new forces from the Eastern Hemisphere would turn to Europe next.
For a time, it seemed, there was some truth in the War Secretary’s statements. The Asians had stopped their advance in the tangle of jungles north of the Amazon, and the American troops, deployed along a ragged line from Quito to Cayenne wherever the terrain permitted of occupation, were shelling the quiet tanks with all the valor and show of an equal battle along a deadlocked front. Millions of dollars worth of shells were being blown into the air to descend and lash the tangles of undergrowth with their explosions or to pop harmlessly off the gleaming sides of the huge enemy tanks which were resting on knolls here and there like giant saurians in siesta after a heavy meal.
But it was the speech which the Secretary made on the night of May 7, at nearly the same hour that King had selected for his landing at Tiplis, that brought him his greatest glory and nearly ruined his career. He made it in Chicago, where the citizens, realizing the importance of the man they were entertaining, had organized a banquet out of doors, in a new park which had been created for the occasion on the shore of the lake and which they had already named for the Secretary in a civic ceremony which lasted three hours.
It was, as the mayor of Chicago himself had said, in his capacity as presiding officer at the dinner, an occasion no less than auspicious. All Chicago, said the mayor, felt honored to have a great green park bearing the name of so learned a man, and in the center of that park, on the spot where the Secretary himself now sat, there would rise before the end of summer a modernistic tower of heroic design, commemorating the occasion and the presence of the Secretary.
“Folks,” said the mayor, holding high his glass of champagne, of which he had been drinking copiously, “I, for one, am glad to live in such an age as this,” and as he said it he smiled beatifically at the Secretary and drank his health for the ninth time that evening. His admiration for the official, it was clear, knew virtually no bounds. In addition to his political activities, the mayor was half owner of a munition plant, and shells from his factories were at that same hour brightening the night over the South American tangles.
There were many others present whose admiration for Dr. Angell was equally great. On all sides they cheered him and helped him to the wine. Filled with rich food, surfeited with oratory and flattery, and no little affected by the sparkling liquids, which were both good and plentiful, the Secretary rested serenely in his place until his time to speak should come.
It was a great sensation, he was thinking, to be surrounded by friends and admirers, to know that even the distant roar of the city was a clamor of approbation. These folk would be expecting a great speech from him to-night, something more than he had been giving all along, a definite promise of victory, perhaps. By secret information he had been assured that King had made the venture upon which so much depended. There was a young man who’d come home with the information he had gone to get! It would do no harm to capitalize a little in advance on the victory that King Henderson would bring back with him. It would be a fine thing to share with these Chicago folk, discreetly, of course, the assurance and confidence now felt by the War Council as to the outcome of the affair.
The Secretary stepped a little self-consciously before the microphones, glancing appreciatively toward the tableful of reporters, who had already received copies of his speech in advance. He began to talk. His voice was a little hoarse, but that, he reflected, added a great deal to its effectiveness. It gave him the proper ring and gruffness for a military man; he was filled with pride to hear the voice, which had crackled into so many microphones, rumble roundly as it came upward from his chest.
“To-night,” he began, after a proper pause, “we stand upon the turning point of the war; upon the hairline pivot between retreat. and victory. Thus far we have fought bitterly, with great losses; we have faced with misty eyes, albeit brave, what seemed like certain failure as the metal tanks of Asia rolled gory over the fair and crumpled forms of our brave defenders in the South. But now, to-night, my friends, amid the beautiful light which falls fresh upon the greens and bowers you have seen fit to name for me, amid the sparkle of the moon on yonder lake and the sweet purl of the fountain waters in the still, warm air of spring, I tell you that American ingenuity and military skill have at last outwitted the diabolical plans of our enemies, and victory is within our grasp!”
The Secretary was trembling with the effort of his oratory, perspiring with the warmth of wine and spring. He had not followed his set speech, which was conservative, only vaguely promising victory; it had seemed to him, as he stood before the microphones, that he had made that vague promise too many times before. Like a clever saying, too much repetition had worn it out. On a really big occasion, such as this, it needed dynamite to shake things up; something definite, something folks could get their teeth into.
“Oh, I have promised victory before,” he shouted suddenly, almost belligerently, “but never with the reason that I have to-night. Victory is now but a matter of weeks. it may be days. America will meet the Asians with their own weapons. America, meeting these invaders with the secrets they themselves have brought to us, will roll them back, metal against metal, ray against ray, into their fiendish earth-tube and down beneath the sea!”
He had discounted the chance that King might never come back, or that, returning, he would fail to have the Asian weapons he had gone for. In the lights, before the microphones, his imagination had leaped like lightning over days and weeks, over obstacles and delay, and when he had finished, amid cheers and screams and the bursting of fireworks, he was himself filled with belief and exaltation and buoyancy. The victory he had predicted seemed, indeed, already a reality; his was the triumph of a conqueror.
The spell of his oratory had been caught up and carried away on every side. The city already believed with him that the war was as good as won. A tremendous roar of applause arose, as the hundreds of thousands of persons who had been listening at their radios went out into the streets to celebrate. The hundreds at the dinner were not satisfied with hand-clapping and common noise. They broke their glasses on the boards, and tore the tables down, while the reporters, hastily catching up their notes, fled to the nearest telephones to report the prediction to the continents.
Chicago took the Secretary to the airdrome for his return journey to Washington in a new automobile, especially designed and covered with gold leaf at the expense of the city. Along the streets cheering millions threw confetti18 and screamed. Long streamers of colored paper drifted down from the windows high above, where even the charwomen paused in their work of cleaning the offices of Chicago to pour out cheers of victory and soiled paper into the night. And the Secretary, who had by this time calmed a little from the heat of the speech, smiled and bowed and smiled again as the sirens of the police cleared the way ahead for the triumphal procession. Surprised and a little alarmed by the demonstration, he wondered uneasily if, in his exuberance, he had not said too much.
A momentary surge of the crowd broke through the police lines ahead and stopped the procession until order could be restored. There was but one thing lacking to complete his triumph that night, the Secretary was thinking. That was the fact that the place beside him in the large gold car, where a woman might have sat, was occupied only by the mayor of Chicago.
“Even though I have become a figure of importance,” he was thinking, “I am a lonely man.”
The gay procession moved again slowly through the throng of his admirers, and in another moment he had forgotten his moody thoughts.
It was not until the next morning that he learned the trick fate had played on him. During the night the Asians, like patient but hungry worms along a leaf, had begun their advance again. Before daybreak they had taken Quito, and by the rising of the sun defending troops were fleeing in all directions to escape capture or death.
Not long afterward the Secretary was awakened by the hoarse shouts of a messenger, wh
o had been ordered at all costs to reach the official with his tidings of general disaster. The Asian advance had apparently been resumed at a dozen points. The army of the defense was being hurled back along a two-thousand-mile front as helpless to stop the enemy as if it had been armed with pitchforks and pea-shooters.
The Secretary was a little late in getting the information, but the papers were not. Already, in the first morning editions, the story of the advance had come out in full. Many sheets maliciously ran the story of the Secretary’s prediction and the news of the new advance together on their front pages. Others pointed out the incongruity editorially and in cartoons. Scarcely had word of the new disaster reached him when the Secretary’s phone began to ring. The Washington correspondents wanted to know what explanation he had to offer.
“Tell the reporters I will see them. “ he commanded his aide, “at one o’clock, in my library. You might tell them that I have both an explanation and. an announcement.”
He walked up and down his library for three hours and a half. He had his lunch served to him there. A manicurist and a bootblack came in, and a valet with a fresh suit of clothes. By one o’clock he was dressed and barbered and shined and manicured. He looked fit and self-confident. As the bell rang, announcing the first of the reporters, he surveyed himself in the glass and approved of what he saw there.
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