Thus adjured, Herzog washed his hands with imaginary soap and in a deprecating voice began:
“Trouble, sir? What trouble could there be? There’s not the faintest sign of any organization among the men. They’re submissive as so many rabbits, sir, and—”
“Damn you, shut up!” roared Flint. “I didn’t summon you to come up here and give me a lecture on labor conditions at the works! The trouble I refer to is possible outside interference. Maybe some kind of wild-eyed Socialist upheaval, or attack, or what not. In case it comes, what’s our condition? Tell me, in a few words, and for God’s sake keep to the point! The way you wander, and always have, gives me the creeps!”
Herzog ventured nothing in reply to this outburst, save a conciliatory leer. Then, collecting his thoughts, he began:
“Well, sir, in a general way, our condition is perfect. We’ve got two regiments of rifle and machine gunmen, half of them equipped with the oxygen bullets. I guarantee that I could have them away from their benches and machines, and on the fortifications, inside of fifteen minutes. Slade’s armed guards, 2,500 or so, are all ready, too.
“Then, beside that, there are eight ‘planes in the hangars, and plenty of men to take them up. If you wish, sir, I can have others brought in. The aerial-bomb guns are ready. As for the oxygen supply, Tanks F and L are full, K is half filled, and N and Q each have about 6,000 gallons, making a total of—let’s see, sir—a total of just about 755,000 gallons.”
“How protected? Have you got those bomb-proof overhead nets on, yet?”
“Not yet, sir. That is, not over all the lines of tanks. We ran short of steel wire, last week, and have only got eight of the tanks under netting. But the work is going on fast, sir, and—”
“Rush it! At all hazards, get nets over the rest of the tanks. If anything happens, through this delay, remember, Herzog, I shall hold you personally responsible, and it will go hard with you!”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” murmured the servile wretch. “Anything else, sir?”
Flint thought a moment, glaring at Herzog with angry eyes, then shook his head in negation.
“Very well, sir,” said Herzog, withdrawing. “I’ll go to work at once. By tomorrow, everything will be safe, I guarantee.”
He closed the door softly—as softly as he had spoken—as softly as he always did everything.
Flint glared at the door.
“The sneaking whelp!” he murmured. “He makes my very flesh crawl. I wish to heaven he weren’t so essential to us; we’d let him go, damned quick!”
“You forget,” put in Tiger, “that he knows too much to be let go, ever. No, he’s a fixture. And now, dismiss him from your mind, and let’s go over those telegrams and radiograms again. If there is a new Socialist revolt under way—and I admit it certainly begins to look like it—we’ve got to understand the situation. Slade will have some more reports for us, in an hour or so. Till then, these must suffice.”
Flint, curbing his agitation, sat down at the big table and turned on the vacuum-glow light, for the October afternoon was foggy—a fog that mingled with the spray of the vast Falls and hung heavy over the world—and already daylight was beginning to fail.
“Fools!” he muttered to himself. “Fools, to think they can rebel against us! Ants would have just as much show of success, charging elephants, as they have against the Air Trust! By tomorrow they’ll be wiped out, smeared out, shattered and annihilated, whoever and wherever they are. By tomorrow, at the latest. Again I say, blind, suicidal fools!”
“Right you are,” assented Waldron, drawing up his chair. “They don’t seem to realize, even yet, that we own the whole round earth and all that is in it. They don’t understand that their rebelling is like a tribe of naked savages going against a modern army with explosive bullets. Ah, well, let them learn, let them learn! It takes a whip to teach a cur. Let them feel the lash, and learn!...”
At this same hour, in the last retreat, near Port Colborne, in the State of Ontario—once a province of Canada—half a dozen grim and determined men were gathered together. We already recognize Craig, Grantham and Gabriel. The other three, like them, all wore the Socialist button and the little tab of red ribbon that marked them as members of the Fighting Sections.
“Tonight,” Gabriel was saying, as he stood there in the gathering dusk—they dared not show a light, even behind the drawn curtains of their refuge—”tonight, comrades, the final die is cast. Everything is ready, or as nearly ready as we shall ever be able to make it. Our reports already show that every line of communication has been broken by one swift, sharp blow. True, in a few hours all these avenues can be opened up again. By morning, the Niagara works will be in receipt of messages; trains will be running; the troop-planes will be carrying their hordes at the command of Flint. By morning, yes. But in the meantime—”
He spread his fingers, upward, with an expressive gesture.
“By morning,” Craig mumbled, “what will there be left to protect?”
A little silence followed. Each was busy with his own thoughts.
All at once, one of the three newcomers spoke—a tall, light-haired fellow, he seemed, in that dim light, with a strong Southern accent.
“Pardon me for asking, Gabriel,” said he, removing a pipe from his mouth, “or for discussing details familiar to you all. But, coming as I have come direct from the New Orleans refuge—they blew it up, last week, you know—of course I haven’t got things as clearly in mind yet, as you-all have. Now, as I understand it, while we manoeuvre over the plant, blow up the barricades and, if possible, ‘get’ the oxygen-tanks, our men on the ground will pour in through the gaps and storm the place, under the command of Edward Hargreaves. Is that the idea?”
“Exactly, Comrade Marion,” answered Gabriel. “You’ve hit it to a T.”
Craig laughed grimly, as he drew at his pipe.
“Just as we’re going to hit those big tanks!” said he. “It’s tonight or never, comrades. They’re putting steel nets over them, already. By tomorrow the whole place will be protected by huge grill-work fully a hundred feet above the tops of the tanks. Oh, they seem to have thought of everything, those plutes! But they’ll be just a shade too late, this time; just a shade too late!”
Another silence, broken again by the tall Southerner.
“Just let me get this thing quite clear,” said he. “We’re to start at 5:30, you say, walk past the Welland Canal Feeder out to the Monck Aviation Grounds, and find everything ready there?”
“Correct,” said Gabriel. “All six of us. That’s our part of the program. Comrades you don’t know, out there—comrades in the employ of the Air Trust itself—will have six machines ready. One of them will be the very machine that they tried to get us with, in the Great Smokies! So you see, we’re going to use the Air Trust equipment, their field and even their own telenite, to put them out of business forever and to free the world!”
“Poetic justice, all right enough!” laughed Marion. “At the same time that we’re attacking from an elevation of perhaps three thousand feet, the lateral attack will be delivered. About how many men do you count, on, for that?”
“Well,” judged Gabriel, “within a ten-mile radius of the plant, at least a hundred thousand men are waiting, this very instant, with every nerve keyed up to fighting tension. Scattered in a vast variety of ingenious and cleverly-devised hiding places, with their chlorine grenades and their revolvers shooting little hydrocyanic acid gas bullets, they’re waiting the signal—a rocket in mid-heaven.”
“Hydrocyanic acid gas!” exclaimed Marion, forgetting to smoke. “Why, one whiff of that is death!”
“It is,” agreed Gabriel. “Remember, this is a war of extermination. It’s a case of them or us! And if we’re worsted, the whole world loses; while if they are, then liberty is born! That’s why this gas is justifiable. They’ll try to use oxygen-bullets on us, never fear. But where they can kill ten, with those, we can annihilate a hundred with our kind. Swine, they
have called us, and fools and apes. Well, we shall see, we shall see, when it comes to an out-and-out fight between Plutocrat and Proletarian, who is the better man!”
Again came silence. And this time it was Grantham who broke it.
“Comrades,” said he, “after you’ve seen as many Socialists shot down as I have—shot down and burned, as Brevard was—you’ll lose any lingering ideas of civilized warfare you may still retain. They hunt us like beasts, prison us in foul traps, ride us down, crush us, break and tear us, and burn us alive, because we struggle to be free men and women, not slaves. Now that our hour has struck, now that their lines of communication and defense are breached, and they—though they still don’t fully understand it—are penned there in their heaven-offending, monstrous, horrible plant at the Falls, no true man can hesitate to smash them down with no more compunction than as though they were so many rattlesnakes or scorpions!
“This isn’t 1915, when political and civil rights still existed, and we weren’t hunted outlaws. This is 1925, and conditions are all different. It’s war, war, war to the death, now; and if war is Hell, then they are going to get Hell this time, not we.”
Nobody spoke, for a little while; but Marion and Craig smoked contemplatively, and the others sat there in the dusk, sunk in thought.
All at once a door opened, and the vague form of a woman became visible.
“Comrades, you must go,” said she. “It’s nearly half past five. By the time you’ve got everything in readiness, you’ll have no time to lose.”
“Right, Catherine,” answered Gabriel. “Come, comrades! Up and at it!”
Ten minutes later they all issued forth into the soft gloom. All were in aviator’s dress, and each carried a parcel by a handle held with stout straps. Had you seen them, you would have noticed they took particular pains not to jar or shake these parcels, or approach unduly near each other.
At the door of the refuge, Catherine said good-bye to each, and added some brave word of cheer. Her farewell to Gabriel was longer than to the others; and for a moment their hands met and clung.
“Go,” she whispered, “go, and God bless you! Go even though it be to death! Their airmen will take toll of some of the attackers, Gabriel. Not all the Comrades will return. Oh, may you—may you!”
“What is written on the Book of Fate, will be,” he answered. “Our petty hopes and fears are nothing, Catherine. If death awaits me, it will be sweet; for it will come, tonight, in the supreme service of the human race! Good-bye!”
With a sudden motion, the girl took his face between her hands, and kissed his forehead. For all her courage and strength, he sensed her heart wildly beating and he felt her tears.
“Good-bye, Gabriel,” she breathed. “Would I might go with you! Would that my duty did not hold me here! Good-bye!”
Then he was gone, gone with the others, into the thickening obscurity of the fog-shrouded evening. Now Catherine stood there alone, head bowed and wet face hidden in both hands.
As the little fighting band disappeared, back to the girl drifted a few words of song, soft-hummed through the dusk—the deathless chorus of the International:
“Now comes the hour supreme!
To arms, each in his place!
The new dawn’s International
Shall be the human race!...”
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE ATTACK.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
The challenge rang sharply on the night air, outside a small gate in the barricade of the Monck Aviation Grounds.
“Liberty!” answered Gabriel, pausing as he gave the password.
“All right, come on,” said a vague figure at the gate. The little group approached. The gate opened. Silently they entered the enclosure.
Another man stepped from a hangar. In his hand he held an electric flash, which he threw upon the newcomers, one by one.
“Right!” he commented, and took Gabriel by the hand. “This way!”
Ten minutes later, all of them were in the air, save only Gabriel, who insisted on staying till his entire squad had made a clean getaway. Then he too rose; and now in a long, swift line, the fighting squadron straightened away to north-eastward, on the twenty-mile run to Niagara.
The night was foggy, chill and dark. All the aviators had instructions to fly not less than 2,500 feet high, to keep a careful lookout lest they collide, and to steer by the lights of the great Air Trust plant. For, misty though the heavens were, still Gabriel could see the dim glow of the tremendous aerial search-lights dominating Goat Island—lights of 5,000,000 candle-power, maintained by current from the Falls, incessantly sweeping the sky on the lookout for just such perils as now, indeed, were drawing near.
Momently, as he flew, Gabriel perceived these huge lights growing brighter, through the mist, and apprehension won upon him.
“Incredibly strong!” he muttered to himself, as he glanced from his barometer to the shining fog ahead. “Even though the mist will be thicker over the Falls than anywhere else, there’s a good possibility they may pierce it and pick us up—and then, look out for their ‘planes and swift, fighting dirigibles!”
He rotated the rising-plane, and now soared to 2,800 feet. Below and on either side of him, nothing but tenuous fog. Ahead, the swiftly-approaching fan of radiance, white, dazzling, beautiful, that seemed to gush from earth so far below and to the eastward. Already the thunders of the Falls were audible.
“Where are the others?” Gabriel wondered, his thoughts seeming to hum and roar in his head, in harmony with the shuddering diapason of the muffler-deadened exhaust. “No way of telling, now. Each man for himself—and each to do his best!”
And then his thoughts reverted to Catherine; and round his heart a sudden yearning seemed to strengthen his stern, indomitable resolve—”Victory or death!”
But now there was scant time for thought. The moment of action was already close at hand. Far below there, hidden by night and dark and mist, Gabriel knew a hundred thousand comrades, of the Fighting Sections, were lying hidden, waiting for the signal to advance.
“And it’s time, now!” he said aloud, thrilled by a wondrous sense of vast responsibility—a sense that on this moment hung the fate of the world. “It’s time for the signal. Now then, up and at them!”
Taking the rocket—a powerful affair, capable of casting an intense, calcium light—he touched the fuse to a bit of smouldering punk fastened in a metal cup at his right hand. Then, as it flared, he launched the rocket far into the void.
Below, came a quick spurt of radiance, in a long, vivid streak that shot away with incredible rapidity. Gabriel followed it a moment, with his gaze, then smiled.
“The Rubicon is crossed,” said he. “The gates of the Temple of Janus are open wide—and now comes War!”
He rose again, skimming to a still higher altitude as the glare of the great Works drew closer and closer underneath. The wind roared in his ears, louder than the whirling propellers. The whole fabric of the aeroplane quivered as it climbed, up, up above the rushing, bellowing cataract.
“Where are the others?” thought he, and reached for a thanatos projectile, in the rack near the metal cup where the punk still glowered.
All at once, a glare of light burst upward through the white-glowing mist; and the ‘plane reeled with the air-wave, as now a thunderous concussion boomed across the empty spaces of the sky.
At the same moment, a faint, ripping noise mounted to Gabriel—a sound for all the world like the tearing of stout canvas. Then followed a chattering racket, something like distant mowing-machines at work; and now all blent to a steady, determined uproar. Gabriel almost thought to hear, as he launched his own projectile, far sounds as of the shouts and cries of men; but of this he could not make sure.
“They’re at it, anyhow!” he exulted. “At it, at last! By the way our men have launched the attack, the first explosion must have breached a wall! God! What wouldn’t I give to be down there, in the thick of it, rather than her
e! I—”
Crash!
Again a spouting geyser of light and uproar burst into mid-air.
“That was my thanatos speaking!” cried Gabriel. “Now for another!”
Before he could drop it, as he circled round and round, directly over the great, flailing beams of the Air Trust search-lights, a third detonation shattered the heavens, nearly unseating him. Up sprang the roar, with wonderful intensity, reflected from the earth as from a giant sounding-board. And Gabriel noted, with keen satisfaction, that one of the huge light-beams had gone dark.
“Put out one of them, anyway, so far!” thought he, and swung again to westward, and once more dropped a messenger of death to tyranny.
Now the bombardment became general. Trust aerial-gun projectiles began bursting all about. Every second or two, terrible concussions leaped toward the zenith; and the earth, hidden somewhere down there below the fog-blanket, seemed flaming upward like a huge volcano. One by one the search-lights, whipping the sky, went black; and now the glow of them was fast diminishing, only to be replaced by a ruddier and more intermittent glare.
“The plant’s burning, at last,” thought Gabriel. “Heaven grant the fire may spread to the oxygen-tanks! If we can only get those—!”
Again he launched a projectile, and again he circled over the doomed plant.
A swift black shape swooped by him. He had just time to exchange a yell of warning, when it was gone. The near peril gripped his heart, but did not shake it.
“Close call!” said he.
If that machine and his had met, good-bye forever! But after all, the danger of collision in mid-air, or of being struck by a projectile from some other machine, above, was no greater than his comrades on the ground were facing. Not so great, perhaps. Many a one would meet his death from the aerial attack. In a war like this, a thousand perils threatened. Gabriel only hoped that Hargreaves, down below there, could hold them back, away, till the walls should have been destroyed.
Circling, ever circling, now hearing some echoes of the earth-battle, some grenade-volleys and rapid-fire clattering, now deafened and all but blinded by the vast, up-belching explosions of the thanatos projectiles, Gabriel flew among the drifting mists and vapors. Still was he guided by one or two search-lights; but most of these were gone, now. Yet the glare of the conflagration, below, was luridly shuddering through the fog, painting it all a dull and awful red.
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