The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  The craft that was bearing him through the air at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, two thousand feet above the sunlit bosom of the broad Pacific, was a very elongated cigar-shaped cylinder constructed of papier mache, rolled and compressed to the hardness of steel. It was a hundred and fifty feet long from point to point, with a diameter of twenty-five feet, one-third of the distance from its forward point, and from thence tapering away astern to four feet.

  Five horizontal helices, or six-bladed screws, ranging from twenty to ten feet in diameter, worked on five short strong vertical masts above the hull, and three propellers, each seven feet in diameter, revolved on shafts, one projecting from each quarter and one from the stern in the middle line of the vessel. Through the cross-diameter of the hull ran four hollow shafts of aluminium steel, and each of these carried a somewhat wing-shaped aeroplane of lattice-work, the slats of which could be opened and shut like those of a venetian blind.

  The upper part of the hull was fitted with long windows of toughened glass, covered with external blinds, to moderate the light in the interior or to keep off the too intense heat of the sun when necessary. In the sides and bow there were other windows which, on emergency, could be protected by slides of aluminium steel, which gave an uninterrupted view ahead and on either side of the air-ship.

  Forward of the foremost mast was a conning-tower of oval shape, seven feet by five, and projecting three feet above the hull. This contained the steering-wheel, the lever which controlled the slats of the air-planes, and the switches which regulated the speed of the engines, together with a compass, barometer, and a speed-gauge, which indicated at the same time the velocity of the ship and the pressure of the wind on her air-planes.

  It was in this conning-tower that Renault was sitting, with windows on every side of him, commanding an uninterrupted view in every direction, as he indulged, as men are wont to do when they are as absolutely alone as he was, in his soliloquy on the prospects that were visible from the extraordinary situation in which he found himself. He had locked the steering wheel and the levers, and the air-ship was speeding along through the uninterrupted ocean of air independently of his attention, needing no further control until it should be necessary to increase her elevation in order to rise out of sight from the sea or to pass over mountains on land.

  It was a couple of hours after sunrise, on the 2nd of January. He had been in the air for a little more than twelve hours, and in that time had traversed over a thousand miles on his way from the Pacific to the Atlantic, across the Isthmus of Panama, towards which he was now steering. He had brought away provisions that would last him for a month, and there was sufficient supply of motor-fuel on board the air-ship to carry him a distance of twenty thousand miles, or nearly double the distance that he expected to travel before getting into communication with his friends in the Destroyer.

  Always flying at the uniform rate of a hundred miles an hour, the Vengeur passed north-eastward over the Pacific, across the Isthmus of Panama, at an elevation of six thousand feet, sped unseen over the West Indian archipelago, and then, swinging slightly to the northward, ran up the Atlantic, until, on the morning of the fifth day, Renault saw the harbour and city of New York through the breaks in the sunlit ocean of rolling, billowy clouds which lay between earth and sea in the serene and cloudless atmosphere in which the Vengeur was floating.

  CHAPTER X.

  ON THE SCENE OF ACTION.

  IN reaching New York in command of the airship, Renault had carried out the first and most important part of his scheme, but from this point his plans were necessarily rather vague.

  Before he could do anything definite, it was absolutely necessary that he should put himself into communication with Franz Hartog, on whom he would now be obliged to look as his right band in carrying out the designs on the peace and safety of society at large which had been shaping themselves in his brain for the past three years.

  He had accomplished the first and greatest achievement of the war which had already been definitely declared against the established Powers of the world. He had assisted Mr. Austen to work out and put into material form the ideas which his son had conceived, but which he had been destined never to see realised. He had improved upon these, and he bad assisted in the working out of every detail with an anxious care which the Utopians had taken as pure zeal for the welfare of the colony.

  With his own hands he had worked at the building of the air-ship and the construction of her engines and equipment, and then, when everything was complete, he had made the bold and successful stroke which had deprived those who had trusted in him of the fruit of their joint labours, and placed him in possession of the only machine in existence that was capable of navigating the air.

  This was much, very much, but more had to be done before the Vengeur could become the irresistible engine of destruction that he intended her to be. He knew that, skilful and far in advance of his age as he was himself in mechanical genius, he was but as a child in comparison with the eccentric little German, who was all brain and no heart, and who, before his departure to Utopia, had furnished him with the plans and designs which had enabled him to pose before his late fellow-colonists as a mechanical inventor of the first order.

  He knew that to Franz Hartog, and to him alone, he would have to look for the guns and projectiles which would form the offensive armament of the Vengeur. Without his aid she was merely an aerial pleasure cruiser; with it she could be transformed into a war-ship of such terrible power, that neither fleets nor fortresses could offer her any resistance worth the mentioning.

  Beyond all question Hartog was absolutely necessary to him. So, too, would be a crew of at least eight men to work the ship and man the guns in time of action if the Vengeur was to be brought up to the highest possible point of efficiency. There was no doubt about this; but with the conviction of this necessity came an uncomfortable doubt about the possibility of trusting to anyone save himself - yes, even to Franz Hartog, faithful and all as he believed him to be.

  As commander of the Vengeur, he would occupy an absolutely unique position, a position never before paralleled in the history of the world. He would be above and beyond the reach of all human laws, the wielder of such a power as the earth had never trembled at before, a power which would offer the most dazzling and perhaps irresistible temptation to the usurper who might aspire to reign in his stead.

  The buccaneers and pirates of past ages had, with more or less success, held control over their lawless crews, partly by force of personal influence, but chiefly because in their case failure meant capture, and capture meant either death on the high seas or a dance on nothing at Execution Dock. Hence, as a rule, the rank and file had preferred to trust themselves to the guidance of the master spirit, lest worse might befall them; but there would be no fear of this sort before the eyes of the crew of the Vengeur.

  To be in possession of the only air-ship in existence meant at once the impossibility of failure and the certainty of escape. There could be no pursuit, and so no capture. The most inaccessible parts of the world would be open to them, and they could take their choice of refuges in a thousand places where no man could follow them.

  To command a crew and to keep them disciplined and faithful under such circumstances would mean the exercise of qualities which he might or might not be proved to possess when the hour of trial came. To possess them meant the command of an empire such as no man had ever ruled over before; to be found wanting would mean death by assassination and the ignominious failure of all his splendid and far-reaching plans. That was the alternative, and in the long hours of leisure that the flight of the almost automatic Vengeur had afforded him, he had deliberately faced the contingencies in theory and made himself ready to meet them in practice.

  And now all there was to be done was to pick up the Destroyer, in whatever part of the ocean she might be cruising, accompany her to the secret stronghold which by this time her crew must have discovered, and there elaborate the plans for future
action. There was only one course which made it at all possible to arrive at this result, and that course he took.

  "This is Saturday morning," he said to himself, "and therefore the very day of all days in the week that I ought to be here, except perhaps Wednesday. Most of the big boats will be leaving New York for England to-day, and if Hartog is still playing the same game, I ought to stand a good chance of falling in with him if I pick up one of the big ones as she passes Sandy Hook and follow her across.

  "It'll be rather slow work for a craft like this, but still I can amuse myself running about a bit and seeing if there's any other game in sight. I don't suppose concealment matters very much now, and I may as well go down and see what there is to be seen."

  With the suspensory fans revolving at half speed, and the midship propeller working just fast enough to give steering way to the vessel, Max dropped her gently through the clouds, and in half an hour was hanging close under them, and about fifteen hundred feet over New York Harbour. Every part of the Vengeur was painted a dull, neutral grey, and he felt pretty well satisfied that at that altitude it would be quite impossible for any one on land or water to make him out against the grey background of the clouds.

  The wharves of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Brooklyn were already busy in preparation for the departure of the out-bound liners, and Renault, with a pair of powerful fieldglasses, watched them carefully for the first signs of the big ships putting to sea. The morning, though cloudy, was a good one for seeing, and he could easily make out the distinguishing funnels of the different liners as they lay alongside their wharves.

  He saw the red funnels with black tops and two black lines under them of a big Cunarder; the black funnels with the horizontal white stripe of a ship of the American line; the plain yellow funnels of a North German Lloyd boat over on the Hoboken side; and the black-topped yellow funnels of a huge White Star liner on the New York side.

  All these had the Blue Peter flying, showing that they were ready to put to sea as soon as the tide suited. Nine o'clock came, after he had waited nearly an hour and a half, and then one by one they began to cast off and work out into the stream. They steamed away slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed, past the Battery, between Brooklyn and the Statue of Liberty, through the Narrows, and so on round Sandy Hook. Huge as they were, they looked little more than toy steamboats floating on the surface of a lake at the altitude from which Renault watched them.

  Gradually one of them, a great three-funnelled White Star liner, began to draw ahead of the other, fast as they were now going.

  "Ah, I suppose that's the White Star boat Gigantic that they were building when I left England to beat the Campania and Lucania," said Renault, as he put the Vengeur after them, keeping her close up under the clouds. It doesn't matter which the others are, she's my game for the present. I can't go very far wrong in keeping her in sight, but I daresay they will keep pretty much together for the rest of the day. They are travelling very fast, considering the great, lumbering, floating hotels that they are.

  "Hullo, what the deuce are those things out there? A couple of cruisers, as sure as I'm lord of the air! Yes, and a brace of torpedo-boats in attendance on each of them. That means a convoy. Bravo, Franz! You must have made it pretty hot for them on the Atlantic to make anything like that necessary, and it also means that you're expected, so I suppose we shall see some fun before we get across.

  "Oh that I only had my guns and ammunition on board, and then I wouldn't mind if they had a fleet waiting for you!"

  Renault had drawn his conclusions correctly. The terrorism exercised by the anarchists afloat on the Atlantic bad reached such a pitch that the American and British Governments had been compelled to enter into an agreement, in virtue of which an American squadron of fast cruisers and torpedo-boats convoyed each flotilla of liners from New York to a midway station on the Atlantic, where they were met by a similar British squadron, which convoyed the liners into English waters. In addition to this precaution, all the liners had themselves been converted into cruisers and fitted with quick-firing and machine guns, so as to be able to take care of themselves in an emergency.

  As soon as they were picked up by the liners, the cruisers stationed themselves one on each side of the line which they formed at a distance of about four miles. Two of the torpedoboats ran out a couple of miles ahead as scouts, and the other two brought up the rear about the same distance astern, and so, apparently secure from any attack save by an overwhelming force, which, under the circumstances, could not possibly be brought against them, the flotilla proceeded on its way.

  There was only one weak point in the arrangement, and that was due to the inevitable rivalry of the competing lines. The Blue Ribbon of the Atlantic was still as jealously coveted and as eagerly striven for as ever, pirate or no pirate. The Gigantic- for such the White Star liner really was- had been built to cross the ocean in five days, and she was expected to do it, so she took up the running, and gradually forged ahead.

  When the second morning dawned, Renault, looking down from the clouds, saw her over fifteen miles ahead of the other liners, and about ten miles ahead of the foremost cruiser, with the two torpedo-boats some four miles off either quarter. Behind the cruiser came the Cunarder, and far away astern he could just make out the smoke of the Lloyd and American liners and the two torpedo-boats that were bringing up the rear of the long procession. Another twenty-four hours' run would bring the White Star boat within touch of the British squadron, and two or three hours after her the others would come up.

  Every now and then other liners, with here and there a cruiser and a torpedo-boat or two, were met coming in the other direction. In fact, as Renault said to himself, the Atlantic looked more as though half the nations of Europe were at war rather than an ocean highway in time of perfect international peace.

  The second night came down dark and misty, but on a moderately smooth sea, and Renault, showing no lights, ran down to within eight hundred feet of the mast-heads of the Gigantic. She was now nearly twenty miles ahead of the rest of the flotilla. He could make her out easily by the lights that were gleaming from her decks and portholes, and he recognised that if Franz was on the war-path on the Atlantic track, and had any designs upon her, as he probably would have, seeing that she was the fastest, biggest, and richest prize of the lot, he would have to act before morning, for by daybreak the British squadron would probably be in sight, and he would also have to run the gauntlet of the more numerous convoys and other warships that might possibly be cruising in the more crowded waters of the Eastern Atlantic.

  Considering the force that was within such a short distance, Max, in spite of his anxiety to fall in with his comrades, half hoped that they would keep out of the way. Perhaps they were not on that part of the Atlantic at all. They might be on the African coast in the track of the Cape steamers, or down South waiting for some of the South American liners bound to Colon or Monte Video, or even away in the Indian Ocean playing havoc among the East-bound steamers.

  Thus, turning over the chances in his mind, he kept in touch of the Gigantic until close on midnight. The two torpedo-boats were now about eight miles astern of her and the cruiser five miles behind them. Suddenly a beam of light shot up out of the ocean astern, then vanished, and was repeated again three times in quick succession. Renault didn't understand it, but those on board the Gigantic recognised it as a danger signal which meant "stop and close up."

  "Ah, that means something," said Perrault, "I'll go back and see what it's all about."

  He had taken what sleep he needed during the day, so that he could spend the night on watch in the conning-tower, for he felt sure that if anything happened, it would be under cover of the darkness. He swung the Vengeur round, and, quickening her up to sixty miles an hour, darted back towards the cruiser which had shown the signal. Less than fifteen minutes brought him over the war-ship, which was now flashing her electric lays rapidly in all directions over the water. He stopped and watched for a few
minutes, circling slowly overhead, and soon their light revealed a strange spectacle to him.

  The two torpedo-boats, evidently badly rammed, were fast settling down, and the cruiser was rushing up to them at full speed, still flashing her search-lights ahead and to both sides of her. Just as she came up with them, one of the long beams fell upon a grey, low-lying, swiftly-moving object in the dark water to the south-east. Instantly a storm of thunder and flame burst from her decks, and a tempest of projectiles swept over the waves in the direction of the fast-flying assailant that had done her work so silently and with such terrible effect.

  CHAPTER XI.

  THE "DESTROYER" AT WORK.

  IT was of course impossible for Renault to see whether or not the broadside fired from the cruiser had taken any effect on the flying Destroyer, given that the assailant who had so mysteriously disabled the two torpedo-boats was, as was most probable, the now famous pirate craft. Moving, as she would do, at a speed of some twelve hundred yards a minute, the searchlights had no sooner picked her up than they lost her again, and as the night, although calm and cold, was now rather thick, the electric rays had only a short range, and a very few moments would take her beyond their radius.