For some days panic prevailed. A few adventurous or anguished souls attempted to penetrate the lethal zone, only to be effaced by Professor Pye’s drenching of that area with On-force. Once every hour the atomic gun covered every point of the compass. Half Somerset, Devon and Cornwall were isolated between the Channel and the Irish Sea. From villages and towns near the border line the population fled, pouring into Wales, Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield were flooded with refugees. During those first few days organized government, the very social scheme itself seemed in danger of dissolution.
It was in Manchester that resistance hardened. The Lord Mayor of Manchester and the city council formed themselves into a species of provisional government. The crisis was unprecedented, and improvisations were urgent and inevitable. The mayors of all the Yorkshire and Lancashire towns were gathered in. York proposed that the centre of authority should be located at Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, the whole world was in agitation.
Moscow both trembled and gloated. Bourgeois England had received a death-blow.
New York was all head-lines. Crowds filled the streets.
France, wounded at Calais, so near the terror, was arming with all its expert intelligence to combat the horror.
A deputation flew from Manchester to Paris to discuss with the French Government the confrontation of this crisis. Europe’s international quarrels were forgotten for the moment. Berlin, Prague, Rome, Madrid, each sent a body of representatives and experts to Paris. Signor Mussolini flew in person to the French capital, bringing with him a little Italian physicist from Turin, Professor Pirelli. The discussions were informal and held at the Elysée. It was Mussolini’s little professor who was in a position to bring forward data that might explain the cataclysm. He too was working on the atom. He had released from it certain energy that when controlled was lethal to mice and rats. His work was as yet an affair of the laboratory, but he postulated that the earth was being assailed by some inspired lunatic who had discovered how to release and control atomic energy.
The English members could produce certain facts. London, before its destruction, had telegraphed confidential information to the municipal authorities in the provinces. The source of the mysterious force was centred in Surrey, and probably on the North Downs within a few miles of Guildford. It was known that a certain eccentric scientist had a house there, and that he lived the life of a misanthrope and a recluse. Professor Pye was under suspicion.
Europe’s Council of War debated the problem. It was evident that the field of force was limited. The death area had not extended. It was like a spider’s web, and in the centre of it crouched the spider.
Signor Mussolini was for instant action.
“Aeroplanes—bombs.”
Reminded that the air was controlled over that area, he was not to be dissuaded.
“We must attack. Let our aeroplanes go out by the hundred, swarm after swarm, to observe, and to make sure. We must take risks, every risk.”
Those round the table looked to Professor Pirelli. Had he anything to suggest? He smiled whimsically. No, he had nothing more subtle to propose. Crude explosives, or perhaps gas bombs, were the only retort science could provide at the moment. Even if one aeroplane survived, and discovered one live human being in that death area, it might be assumed that that one live man was the monster who was attacking humanity.
One German delegate suggested the construction of long-range guns that could be mounted on the French coast to bombard Surrey.
The French President, with certain unhappy memories in his mind, asked the German to say how long it would take to manufacture those guns, and the German was silent.
No, action must be instant and co-ordinated. The terror might spread. They must make what use they could of the instruments that were to hand. Every country must supply its quota of planes. It would be better to call for volunteers as aviators and observers.
Signor Mussolini flew back to Rome, the Germans to Berlin. Orders were issued to the French Air Force. To begin with the air squadrons would patrol the outskirts of the death zone, observe and report, before attempting to locate and destroy the enemy.
XIII
Professor Pye waited for the earth to broadcast its appeal for mercy. The aerial voice might be English, French or German, but Alfred Pye spoke both French and German, and perhaps he expected the voice to be French.
Meanwhile, he had not had his clothes off for three days, nor had he slept, save in brief snatches. He was looking distinctly worn and dishevelled. He had omitted to shave that part of his face that was accustomed to be razored, and his eyes were the eyes of a man short of sleep.
He had carried a mattress and bed-clothes to the top of the tower. He took his perfunctory meals there beside his gun, with the portable wireless switched on, and a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. A dispassionate observer would have described him as a scraggy little man who was both scared and irritable, a grey rat on the alert. Professor Pye was feeling the strain of playing the part of Jupiter.
He was becoming more and more aware of the dreadful silence. He looked out upon a green world that was empty of all sound and movement, save the movement of the clouds and the trees. He was surrounded by a ghastly, stagnant greenness, and at night he was alone with the stars. Almost, he began to hunger for the sound of a human voice. The craving was illogical and absurd, but so strong was it that he carried a gramophone up to the tower and played Bach and Beethoven.
Moreover, the air was unaccountably silent. Even his large installation could pick up no voices. What was the earth doing? Had his On-force gradually penetrated over the whole globe, and had man ceased to be? But if so he himself should be dead, for the force would have circled the earth and returned to destroy him.
Most strange—this silence.
Or was it deliberate? Was civilization conspiring to isolate him? Were all the earth’s transmitting stations wilfully mute? Paris and Berlin and New York might be conferring by cable.
Now and again he would patrol the top of the tower and turn his glasses on the green emptiness of Surrey, and scan the whole horizon. There were moments when he imagined movement upon some hill-side, or fancied that he could spot an aeroplane in the distance. He would rush to his gun and apply On-force to the imagined menace.
He was beginning to look very wild about the eyes.
September continued warm and sunny. A gentle breeze blew from the east, and at noon the mercury stood at seventy.
It happened that Professor Pye had gone below to make himself some tea. He was using tinned milk. He carried the tea tray to the top of the tower, and as he reached it he became aware of a faint odour, sickly and strange. It was as though the whole atmosphere was tainted. He put the tray down on a table, and stood with his nose to the wind.
An odour of death, of decay? Yes, that was it, millions of dead bodies swelling in the September heat. He was scenting London, Greater London, all those towns and villages, the dead cows in the field below, the dead men and women in the valley. And Professor Pye’s face looked suddenly bloodless and ashy. Almost, it was the face of a corpse. He left his tea untouched. He had not seen the horror he had perpetrated, but he could savour it.
Nausea attacked him. He went below and poured out two ounces of brandy.
XIV
Would nothing happen?
This silence was becoming unbearable.
He was possessed by a febrile and busy restlessness. He went out and walked along the downs—but that sickly smell of decay was everywhere. Even in green and solitary places he blundered upon death—bodies lying around a cloth with cups and plates and cushions, a dead lad and a girl, an old man with a book, a child and not far away a man and woman. He saw a dead dog lying in some rough grass. Was he himself alive or dead? More than once his fingers went to his throat. War, yes, war, but the silence and stench of a field after a battle! He slunk back to the white house. He found himself hungry for the f
ace of Hands, yes, even for a disfigured face.
And what had become of Hands?
He fell into a kind of frenzy. He drank more brandy. Where were his enemies? Why did they not attack?
But the war of the world against Professor Pye was developing. To begin with the reconnaissance in force was crudely conceived. A hundred aeroplanes flying in a vast half-circle crossed the Channel and passed over Sussex. The hour was about noon on a clear day and the planes had the sun above and behind them. Professor Pye heard the faint roar of the massed machines as they crossed the South Downs, for his ears had been straining to catch some sound that might break the stagnant silence. He turned his field-glasses on that stretch of sky. He saw the little black silhouettes strung out across the horizon. The planes were flying fast and low.
Here—at last—was something tangible to deal with. The earth was alive, and it had not surrendered. Those planes were coming to attack him. Anger and hatred revived. Insolent fools! Did they imagine that an aerial cavalry charge could contend with his On-force.
He sat by his gun. He waited until that half-moon of flying folly was within a mile of him, and then, slewing his gun from left to right, he shot the machines down. They seemed to falter and fall one after another like so many crows.
Once more there was silence.
The attack was repeated twice that day on the same unimaginative lines, but the second assault came from the north. Professor Pye might be dishevelled and wild of eye, but in annihilating those aerial enemies he recovered a kind of malignant exultation.
When would the fools realize that they had to deal with a superman who was their master?
This was the world’s Waterloo. Flying cuirassiers charging a little cube of concrete that was invulnerable! He would teach humanity that its salvation would be secured only by surrender.
There followed more than twenty-four hours of silence, and the next night Professor Pye dared to sleep. He was urgently in need of sleep. Wrapped in a great-coat he sat on the tower till two o’clock in the morning. It was too cold here. He dragged the mattress and bed-clothes down into the laboratory. He would allow himself two hours sleep on the laboratory floor.
He slept, but half an hour after the break of day he was awakened by a rush and a roar overhead. Something had passed with the speed of a shell, and set the glass bottles and jars in the laboratory vibrating. For some seconds Professor Pye sat sodden with sleep, wondering whether the thing had happened or whether he had dreamed it, but a distant and diminishing roar warned him of the reality.
In brief, the Italians had brought a couple of flying-boats to Dunkirk, machines built for the Schneider Cup and capable of flying nearly four hundred miles an hour. It was one of these swift machines, which, trusting to its speed, had roared over Sussex and Surrey, and was now making for the Bristol Channel. Professor Pye grasped the significance of the machine’s rush across his safety zone. It could enter the lethal zone, traverse its two hundred miles in half an hour, and escape to report.
He was in his pyjamas. He rushed upstairs to the tower. He shivered in the cold morning air. He saw a great yellow sun hanging above the Surrey hills. That screaming hydroplane was more than thirty miles away. In another ten minutes it would be beyond his reach. He ducked down behind his gun, slewed it round, and released the On-force. The hydroplane was over Reading and following the Thames when the force struck it. The machine crashed on to a roof in Friar Street and burst into flames. It started a conflagration that blazed for hours.
Professor Pye stood shivering.
“That fellow might have bombed me.”
He realized that with such machines in action against him his margin of safety had been reduced to fifteen minutes. This was serious. It suggested that he would have to sweep the air every quarter of an hour.
But had they located him? Were these machines merely groping for the enemy? Moreover, he could assume that there were not more than half a dozen machines in the world capable of such speed. Let them all come and crash, and the proof of his power would be all the more catastrophic.
But it was cold on the tower. There had been a slight ground frost. He regretted that warm bed; and that morning he mixed brandy with his coffee.
XV
In Paris there was gloom and consternation. Not an aeroplane had returned. The death zone had swallowed them up, and mocked the world with a malignant and ominous silence.
Was humanity helpless?
It was a delegate from Manchester University, a pawky and rather reticent young man with a squint, who brought psychology to bear upon the problem.
Said the Manchester lad: “Granted that there is something inhumanly human behind this devilment—that’s to say we have to deal with a man. He is using atomic force or some sort of ray. Let us presume that he has to function, eat, sleep, remain alert. Now, an apparatus or a machine may be more or less infallible—man is not. The flesh can fail, and so can concentration. Let him stew in silence for a week.”
The French President nodded.
“You suggest—that silence might unnerve him.”
“It might fool him. Imagine a man making war on the world. Silence, solitude, a ghastly and fantastic solitude. He might go potty.”
Continental gentlemen had to have “potty” explained to them.
“Mad? But yes, we understand——”
“Surely—the creature cannot be considered sane?”
“He’s most damnably sane,” said the psychologist, “but he must have sleep. Imagine a man sitting by some apparatus, listening and watching for days and nights. He won’t stand it for ever. He’ll break down. He’ll fall asleep. He might commit suicide.”
The shrewd common sense of Manchester was accepted, and the conference at Paris decided to blockade Professor Pye with silence.
For the first twenty-four hours Professor Pye examined this silence and its various and possible implications. His enemies had been profoundly discouraged, or perhaps they were trying to fool him into over-confidence. None the less, this silence worried him; it kept him on the alert—especially so at night. It was so profound and so inhuman. It chained him to the top of the tower. He had connected flexes and ear-phones to his larger installation, and for hours he sat on the tower listening and listening—to silence. Every quarter of an hour he had to sweep the horizon with his atomic gun.
Once more the silence began to frighten him. It was as though nothingness possessed powers of attrition, like dropping water or blowing sand. There was pressure in this silence. It became almost like a heavy hand upon the top of his head, bearing more and more heavily upon his brain. The stillness was both so alive and so dead. He began to long for sound, even for some hostile sound that was human.
The landscape had become a painted scene, the sky a kind of hard blue ceiling across which artificial clouds floated. It seemed to be pressing nearer and nearer. His eyes ached. Almost, he was conscious of his tense and overstrained ear-drums. He had aged; he looked haggard and grey and dishevelled.
Three days and three nights of that silence.
His brain was beginning to manufacture sounds, and sometimes these auditory hallucinations were so real, that he would jump up and look over the parapet. Surely he had heard voices down there? Or he would switch on his gun and sweep the horizon.
He had fed in snatches and slept in snatches. He fought sleep. His desire for sleep was as terrible as the silence. It menaced him like a dark wall of water. He fought it off. It would be fatal for him to sleep for any length of time.
Why had he not thought of this before? He should have been prepared with some mechanism that would keep his gun revolving while he rested.
Why did not those fools flash him a message of surrender?
He was becoming less and less of a superman, God Pye contra Mundum, but a little dishevelled ape of a man who was beginning to chatter to himself and to react to imaginary noises.
On the third night he was convinced that he heard a dog barking outside the ho
use. Hands’s dog—Jumbo? Had the little beast been near him all the time? But no, he had driven Hands and the dog to Guildford. Nevertheless, he rushed out in a state of strange excitement. He called; he appealed to the ghost dog in a wheedling voice.
“Hallo—doggie! Come here, good dog. Come along, old man. Nice bone for nice doggie.”
He whistled and whistled and called, but the silence was like grey rock.
He cursed—“Go to hell, you beast.”
He slammed the door and burst into sudden tears.
XVI
Mrs. Hector Hyde’s landing at Le Bourget was not fortuitous. The famous airwoman had been engaged in one of her adventurous escapades over Asia, finding other hazards to conquer, when she had picked up an aerial message from Tashkent. This piece of world news had been sufficiently wild and improbable to pique Mrs. Hyde. She had turned the nose of her plane westwards, and landing at Baghdad, had asked to be enlightened.
“What is this absurd rumour?”
Baghdad could assure her that this was no rumour but very terrible reality.
Mrs. Hector Hyde ate, slept for two hours, had her machine refuelled, and took off for Paris. She arrived at Le Bourget late in the afternoon, and asked to be driven at once to the English embassy. Mrs. Hector Hyde, being both a gentlewoman and a world figure, was treated as a person of some significance. In fact she was to be supremely significant. If some nasty little male was—as usual—making a horrid mess of civilization, it was time for woman to intervene.
The ambassador gave her five minutes. He was due to attend a conference at the Elysée at six. Mrs. Hyde listened to all that he had to tell her, and then asked to be allowed to attend the conference with him.
“I would like to come as a volunteer. I might be of some use——”
She was calmly yet passionately determined to be of use. She had lost things in England, irreplaceable things—relations, friends, a home, dogs who were waiting for her.
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