by Various
* * * * *
"Orders!" said the voice now. "All A. F. F. ships report to your Division Headquarters. Division officers keep in communication with Washington. Mountain Division send all equipment east. Flying orders will be given you en route. The country--the whole world--is in flames!"
Beside him, Danny O'Rourke heard the voice of his Chief. "Unbelievable--impossible--preposterous!" His voice like that other was growing shrill. "The country--world--in flames!"
But he found voice to snap out a command to a waiting officer in the doorway of the adjoining room. "Repeat general order. Send all craft east!"
To Danny he whispered. "Your 'little doodad'--I wish to heaven we had a thousand of them now! But what does it mean? Lanes of fire across the country--whole cities destroyed! What devil's work is this?... There's nobody who knows."
But Danny was staring as if he saw through the high, instrument-covered walls. Back to a valley of flame that was like a doorway to hell, where rocks, gray with the frosty years, had been melted to pools ... back to a glinting light where something swift and scintillant had flashed once in a cloudless sky ... back--far back ... back to a street in a town half across the world, and a figure of a giant who strode away with a smile of triumph on his ill-formed face ... but first that giant had melted his way through walls of stone; and, like the stone, steel bars and human flesh were as nothing before the invisible heat that come from a slender rod!
His own voice, when he moved his dry tongue to speak, came huskily; it was as if another person were speaking far off:
"I think you're wrong ... yes, I thing you're wrong, Chief. There's one man who knows and 'tis myself is that one.... One man--and the other is a beast like no livin' man on the face of the earth! He knows--he and the devils he's brought with him!"
* * * * *
It was an unsatisfactory interview that Danny had with the Chief. "You're crazy!" was the verdict of that A. F. F. official when Danny had finished. "You're crazy, or else--or else--" His voice trailed off; his eyes were on the moving letters that flashed their message of disaster in an ever changing procession across the scanning screen on the wall.
"... outbreaks have ceased ... tremendous destruction ... no rational explanation ... meteors, perhaps ... thousands of lives ... no estimate...."
There seemed no end to the tale of disaster, and the Chief's voice died away into silence. If Danny was right he had no words to fit the unbelievable truth.
"Get into your new ship," the Chief ordered brusquely, "and take the Infant with you. I'll send a relief man to his station. Go east--lay your course for Washington; you'll get other orders on the way!"
And a half hour later the first rocket ship of the A. F. F. was blasting its way through the thin gases of the stratosphere eastward bound. But by now Danny O'Rourke had a more sympathetic listener than before.
"In big puddles it was, and lakes! 'Twas still melted, some of it, in that valley."
"Why not?" asked the Infant casually. "Radiant heat moves with the speed of light. We wouldn't think anything of focusing ten million candle power of light energy into a spot like that. Why not heat? Just because we haven't learned to generate it--focus it--shoot it out in a stream like water from a hose--there's no use in denying that someone else has beat us to the punch."
The Infant's calm blue eyes were upon the luminous plates of the ship's microscope where the swift moving terrain beneath them was pictured clearly. The mountains were behind them now; endless miles of ripening grain made the land a sea of yellow and brown and, across that ocean, like the lines of foam that mark the wake of ships, lay three straight lines of black.
"Meteors!" sneered the Infant. "Yet if you'd tell your story to some of these wise men they would die of laughing--and maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea, either; they will be dying in a way that's a damned sight more unpleasant unless someone finds how to catch these birds."
* * * * *
Ahead of them the lookouts framed blue emptiness. Below, on direct sight, was but the vaguest blur that meant earth and clouds far beneath. Only the magnification of the microscope brought out the details, and on its screen the unrolling picture showed those three lines broadening and merging to widespread desolation; then the smoke clouds came between to shut off a world reeking with the fumes of destruction. An occasional flash of red wings showed where the units of the A. F. F. were at work.
They beheld a city, below them--and smoking ruins where three great gashes had been torn with torches of flame. To Danny there came a thought that was sickening: it was as if some great three-toed beast had drawn one paw, red with the blood of helpless humans, ripping across the bosom of the land.
His number was flashing on the call board that had been registering incessant orders to other craft. He cut in on the Headquarters wave.
"O'Rourke--Mountain Division--Unit Five!" he reported. "Do you get my voice or shall I send by key?"
The man at Headquarters did not trouble to reply to the question. His voice came faint but clear:
"Number Five--O'Rourke--Orders! If that new ship of yours has any speed, show it now! Bear on Washington! Get here as quick as the good Lord will let you! Mountain Division says you've got something good in that sound-dampener; if you have, we need it now!"
O'Rourke shot back a crisp acknowledgment; took a reading from two radio beacons; projected them on the map; and pricked a point at their intersection. He had his own ship on a line with the Capitol in a matter of seconds.
"And there's hell poppin' there, I'm bettin'! That Headquarters lad didn't tell much--he wouldn't be worth a dime on a newscast--but I gathered there was somethin' doin'."
He had spoken more to himself than to his companion who had been a silent listener to the incoming orders. But the Infant replied in his own peculiar way.
"The one you saw," he said inquiringly: "he did his dirty work with a little rod or tube, you said?"
* * * * *
With an effort, O'Rourke brought his thoughts in line with the question. "Oh, you mean the man-thing I saw in Stobolsk? Yes, that's right; he had a thing like a gun."
"And he held it in his hand?"
"In the big paw that passed for a hand, yes!"
"All right! Now think carefully, Danny, and tell me: was there anything fastened to it--a wire, perhaps--a connection of some kind with the ground?"
O'Rourke stared at the pink and white face of the cherub who sat with him in the control room of a rocket-ship that threw itself like a red meteor across the high skies. "You're a bit of a devil, yourself," he said wonderingly at last. "How in the names of the Saints did you know? Yes, there was a wire, and I had forgotten it myself. It hung down, I remember, from the butt of the thing. But not to the ground. Infant--you missed it there; 'twas looped back like into the folds of the damn blue nightie he wore."
"And then went to the ground," said the Infant imperturbably, "--through his shoes most likely; or, if the robe was metal, that may have dragged on the ground instead."
He smiled seraphically at the bewildered pilot as he added: "That's all, Danny, for the present. Fly your little tin ship. I've got some heavy thinking to do."
Danny heard him ask one cryptic question, but he asked it as one who knows that only from his own brain can come the answer.
"How do they get rid of it?" the Infant was demanding. "If they stay in the air, how do they get rid of the load?"
And Pilot O'Rourke was glad enough to leave the answer to that one to the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place and accept the absurd improbabilities on which truth rests.
* * * * *
They were approaching their destination when the Infant opened his Cupid's-bow mouth to pronounce one additional question. "How high," he asked, "will your little tin ship fly? I know they've reached just under a hundred thousand experimentally, but how high will
this one go?"
"And that's a question neither you nor I can answer, Infant." Danny was working with careful fingers at tiny levers; their control room was filled with whining whispers and thin shrieks. "We're goin' down now," he continued, and again flipped over the switch that would put him in communication with the Washington office of the A. F. F.
"O'Rourke--Mountain Division--Unit Five," he said quietly. "Approaching Washington at altitude sixty-five thousand. Descending. Orders, please!"
Within the control room, where the voice of a Washington operator should have answered on the instant, there was silence. The rocket motor had been stilled. The two men were suddenly breathless with listening--listening!--where was heard only the whispering shrillness from without. The whispering grew as the red ship slanted down into denser air; it built up in volume; it varied its pitch and timber till it sounded like echoing voices ... ghostly voices and phantom words ... like orders from the dead....
And Danny O'Rourke found his eyes staring into those of the Infant, where he read only the confirmation of his own fears.
It was the Infant who first found words with which to break the dreadful silence.
"Headquarters is gone," he said in a strange, dry voice, "wiped out! They must have got it! It looks as if we were on our own.
"Where are you going?" he asked. "It's your ship."
And Danny answered with a single word, though he added other for emphasis under his breath:
"Down!" he said quietly. "And be damned to them!"
* * * * *
Rolling smoke clouds came to meet them. Danny O'Rourke was watching his altimeter sharply as he neared the ground. But he glanced more than once at the smoke. It was shot through with tongues of flame as they settled down; that was only what might be expected. But Danny was puzzled by the gray-white whirls that rose through the billowing smoke, until he knew it for the dust of powdered masonry, and realized that below him, where great buildings had been, were tumbled ruins.
Beside his control board a radio warning was telling of approaching ships. Danny cut in on then on emergency wave-length, and found that two full squadrons of nitro-ships were at hand with others coming.
"Let them tend to it!" the pale-faced youngster beside him choked--one does not see his country's capital destroyed without a tightening of the throat. "They can cool it with CO-2 and put down a rescue squad, though what they can do in that furnace is more than I can see."
Danny nodded mutely; he opened the exhaust to the full, and the rocket-plane swept out on whirlwinds of raging fire, and smoke, whose flames reached up even where they flew and licked hungrily at their ship.
Jarring explosions sent shudders through their craft. Ahead of them bright flashes illumined the swirling fumes where bursting shells marked the destruction of some ammunition stores outside the city.
And Danny, as he drove his red meteor into the clear air of the upper levels, was searching the heavens above for the enemy he had expected to sight down below. He knew now that his mad plunge into the seething flames was only a blind impulse--an effort to satisfy that demand within him for a foe upon whom to wreak revenge.
* * * * *
Beside him, his companion spun the dial of a receiving set for the Airnews Service; a voice was shouting excitedly into their cabin: "... physicists unable to find cause ... no meteoric material seen ... new rays ... enormous temperatures ... some new and unknown conditions encountered in space--"
"Hell!" said the Infant wearily, and snapped off the instrument. "Meteors! New conditions in space! But, come to think of it, we can't blame them for being off the trail. You know that the bird that's doing this flies high and fast ... and when he stops there's nobody left alive to tell of it!... And don't look for him here."
"Why not?" Danny demanded aggressively. "This ship isn't armed, but if I get my sights on that flyin' devil--"
"You won't," said the Infant darkly. "He's off somewhere discharging the load he's accumulated."
He reached for a map, stuck his finger on a point in eastern New York State. "Let's go there, Danny--and I'd like to get there right now!"
And Danny O'Rourke, who, ordinarily was a bit particular about who gave him orders, looked at the Infant's blue eyes that had gone hard and cold, and he swung his roaring ship toward the north and a place that was marked by a steady finger on the map.
* * * * *
New York was a place of flashing reflections far beneath them as they passed. Danny pointed downward toward the miniature city, where a silvery river met the sea; where a maze of flaming lights in all of the colors of the spectrum gave indication of activity at the great Navy Field.
"How did he miss it, the murderin' devil?" he asked. "How come that he hit Washington first? Did he have some way of knowin' that it was the heart of the whole country?"
"And why pick on us here in this country? Or are we just the first, and will he spit his rage over the rest of the world before he's through? It it the end of the world that's come?"
To all of which there was no answer. And at last, when New York had vanished, they came to a smaller city and a broad expanse of roof that took their wheels.
Danny followed where his companion led into great buildings and a place of offices where excited officials stood in knots about news-casting cones; then they were in a quiet room, in the presence of a lean-bodied man whose hawklike face turned flinty at some request the Infant made.
"What the lad wants, I don't know," said Danny to himself, "but whatever it is he won't be gettin' it from old Gimlet-eyes."
* * * * *
But he saw the Infant write something on a card and he heard him say, as he handed it to the official: "Send that to the President--at once!" And though the words were hardly audible they had a quality that brought an instant response; while the written words brought a portly man who shook the Infant's hand fervently and inquired what service a great electric company could render.
Danny heard Gimlet-eyes protesting; heard broken bits of sentences: "... the great Sorenson tube ... he knows of our disintegrator ... insists upon our furnishing ... preposterous...."
The portly man cut him short. "You will give Mr. Morgan whatever he wishes," he ordered crisply. Then Danny saw him clutch at a desk for support as still another man appeared at the open door to shout:
"New York! My God! New York's gone! Burning! The Empire State Building melted! Crashed!... The whole city is being destroyed!"
And in the moment of numbness that seized Danny O'Rourke he heard the Infant say: "How soon can we have it? I want it in our ship--up above--an hour? We'll be there." But Danny had no further interest in the Infant's arrangements for obtaining some unknown equipment; he was plunging through the doorway and running at full speed toward the ramp where they had descended.
He knew dimly that the younger man had followed and was crowding into the cabin after him. Danny, as he locked the port and lifted his red ship off her guides, was fully conscious of only one fact: that a hundred miles south a city was being destroyed and that somewhere in the vast heights above the city he would find the destroyer.
* * * * *
The Hudson that had been a thread of silver was no longer bright as they approached the city at its mouth; burnished now with its reflection of black smoke clouds and red tongues of flame, it vanished at last under a mountain of black that heaped itself in turbulent piles and whirling masses until the winds swept the smoke out over the sea.
And high above it all--so high that all clouds were below it--there hung in a lucent sky one tiny, silvery speck. There was a delicate steering sight on Danny's ship; he could direct the red craft as if it were in very fact a projectile that could be controlled in flight. And under the cross hairs of that sight swung a silvery speck, while the man who looked along the telescopic tube cursed steadily and methodically as if in some way his hate might span the gap and reach that distant foe.
And then the speck vanished. Danny followed it with the powerful glasses of
his sighting tube; he saw it swing inland--saw it move like a line of silvery light, almost, swifter in its motion than his instrument could follow. But even in that swift flight Danny's eyes observed one fact: the enemy ship was coming down; it slanted in on that long volplane that must have ripped the air apart like a bolt of lightning. And Danny's red rocket swept out and around in a long, looping flight, while he laid the ship on the course that other had followed.
"That's one of them," he said savagely; "there must be two more. But I'll get this one if I have to crash him in air and smash my own ship right through him."
* * * * *
The mind of Danny O'Rourke was filled with only one idea; he had sighted his prey--the ship in which sat a man-thing who had sent a terrible death to Danny's fellows. And, though his hands moved carefully and methodically, though externally he was cool and collected, within him was a seething maelstrom of hate. All he saw was that giant figure as he had seen it before; all he knew was that he must overtake that speeding ship and send it to earth.
He had even forgotten Morgan; perhaps he was never fully conscious of his coming from the moment when that other trembling, shaken man had shouted: "New York! New York's gone!"
"There aren't two more," the Infant was saying from his seat at the rear of the cabin: "there's just one. Those three lines were always parallel except when they widened out: that meant that he had gone up higher. If we ever see that ship, we'll see three discharge tubes for the ray."
Danny O'Rourke turned his eyes that had gone haggard and deep-sunk with the sights they had seen. He stared vacantly at the Infant.
"Didn't know," he said thickly, "--didn't know you were here. I'll set you down; I'll let you out before I ram him...."
For reply, the other pointed ahead. The red ship had torn through a layer of thick clouds; Danny was flying below them above a mountainous world of bare hill-tops and wooded valleys. Directly ahead, hovering high over a mountain higher than its fellows, was the white craft of the enemy; Danny, saw it in hard outline against the darker masses of clouds beyond. He saw that it was motionless, that a slender cable was suspended for a thousand feet below, and that the end of the cable, hanging close above the mountain top, was split into a score of wires that stood out in all directions, while, from each, poured a stream of blue fire.