_The Gas_
In the Blue Room of the White House the Council listened to old Luke
Evans's exposition of his invention with feelings ranging from
incredulity to hope.
"I've been at work all the time," said the old man, "not far from
here. I knew the day would come when you'd need me. I put my pride
aside for the sake of my country."
"Tell us in a few words about this discovery of yours, Mr. Evans,"
said Colonel Stopford.
Luke Evans placed the square black case upon the table. "It's simple,
like all big things, sir," he answered. "The original shadow-breaking
device that I invented was a heavy, inert gas, invisible, but almost
as viscous as paint. Applied to textiles, to inorganic matter, to
animal bodies, it adheres for hours. Its property is to render such
substances invisible by absorbing all the visible light rays that fall
upon it, from red to violet. Light passes through all substances that
are coated with this paint as if they did not exist."
"And this antidote of yours?" asked Colonel Stopford.
"Darkness," replied Luke Evans. "A beam of darkness that means
absolute invisibility. It can be shot from this apparatus"--he
indicated the box upon the table. "This box contains a minute portion
of a gas which exists in nature in the form of a black, crystalline
powder. The peculiar property of this powder is that it is the
solidified form of a gas more volatile than any that is known. So
volatile is it that, when the ordinary atmospheric pressure of fifteen
pounds to the square inch is removed, the powder instantly changes to
the gaseous condition."
"By pressing this lever"--Evans pointed at the box--"a vacuum is
created. Instantly the powder becomes a gas, which shoots forth
through this aperture with the speed of a projectile, taking the form
of a beam of absolute blackness. Or it can be discharged from
cylinders in such a way as to extend over a large area within a few
minutes."
"But how does this darkness make the invisible airships luminous?"
asked Stopford. "Why does not your darkness destroy all light?"
"In this way, sir," replied the old inventor. "The shadow-breaking gas
with which the airships are painted confers invisibility because it
absorbs sunlight. But it does not absorb the still more rapid waves,
or oscillations which manifest themselves as radio-activity. On the
contrary, it gathers and reflects these.
"Now Roentgen, the discoverer of the X-ray, observed that if X-rays
are allowed to enter the eye of an observer who is in complete
darkness, the retina receives a stimulus, and light is perceived, due
to the fluorescent action of the X-rays upon the eyeball.
"Consequently, by creating a beam of complete darkness, I bring into
clear visibility the fluorescent gas that coats the airships; in other
words, the airships become visible."
"If a light ray is nullified upon entering the field of darkness, will
it emerge at the other edge as a perfect light ray again?" asked
Stopford.
"It will emerge unchanged, since the black beam destroys light by
slightly slowing down the vibrations to a point where they are not
perceived as light by the human eye. On emerging from the beam,
however, these vibrations immediately resume their natural frequency.
To give you a homely parallel, the telephone changes sound waves to
electric waves, and re-converts them into sound waves at the other
end, without any appreciable interruption."
"Then," said Stopford, "the logical application of your method is to
plunge every city in the land into darkness by means of this gas?"
"That is so, sir, and then we shall have the advantage of
invisibility, and the enemy ships will be in fluorescence."
"Damned impracticable!" muttered Stopford.
"You seriously propose to darken the greater part of eastern North
America?" asked the Secretary for War.
"The gas can be produced in large quantities from coal tar besides
existing in crystalline deposits," replied Luke Evans. "It is so
volatile that I estimate that a single ton will darken all eastern
North America for five days. Whereas the concentration would be made
only in specific areas liable to attack. The gas is distilled with
great facility from one of the tri-phenyl-carbinol coal-tar
derivatives."
Vice-president Tomlinson was a pompous, irascible old man, but it was
he who hit the nail on the head.
"That's all very well as an emergency measure, but we've got to find
the haunt of that gang and smash it!"
An orderly brought in a telegraphic dispatch and handed it to him. The
Vice-president opened it, glanced through it, and tried to hand it to
the Secretary of State. Instead, it fluttered from his nerveless
fingers, and he sank back with a groan. The Secretary picked it up and
glanced at it.
"Gentlemen," he said, trying to control his voice, "New York was
bombed out of the blue at sunrise this morning, and the whole lower
part of the city is a heap of ruins."
* * * * *
In the days that followed it became clear that all the resources of
America would be needed to cope with the Invisible Empire. Not a day
passed without some blow being struck. Boston, Charleston, Baltimore,
Pittsburg in turn were devastated. Three cruisers and a score of minor
craft were sunk in the harbor of Newport News, where they were
concentrating, and thenceforward the fleet became a fugitive force,
seeking concealment rather than an offensive. Trans-Atlantic
sea-traffic ceased.
Meanwhile the black gas was being hurriedly manufactured. From
cylinders placed in central positions in a score of cities it was
discharged continuously, covering these centers with an impenetrable
pall of night that no light would penetrate. Only by the glow of
radium paint, which commanded fabulous prices, could official business
be transacted, and that only to a very small degree.
Courts were closed, business suspended, prisoners released, perforce,
from jails. Famine ruled. The remedy was proving worse than the
disease. Within a week the use of the dark gas had had to be
discontinued. And a temporary suspension of the raids served only to
accentuate the general terror.
There were food riots everywhere, demands that the Government come to
terms, and counter-demands that the war be fought out to the bitter
end.
Fought out, when everything was disorganized? Stocks of food congested
all the terminals, mobs rioted and battled and plundered all through
the east.
"It means surrender," was voiced at the Council meeting by one of the
members. And nobody answered him.
Three days of respite, then, instead of bombs, proclamations
fluttering down from a cloudless sky. Unless the white flag of
surrender was hoisted from the summit of the battered Capitol, the
Invisible Emperor would strike such a blow as should bring America to
her knees!
* * * * *
It was a twelve-hour ultimatum, and before three hours had passed
thousands of citizens had taken possession of the Capitol and filled
all the approaches. Over their heads floated banners--the Stars and
Stripes, and, blazoned across them the words, "No Surrender."
It was a spontaneous uprising of the people of Washington. Hungry,
homeless in the sharpening autumn weather, and nearly all bereft of
members of their families, too often of the breadwinner, now lying
deep beneath the rubble that littered the streets, they had gathered
in their thousands to protest against any attempt to yield.
Dick, flying overhead at the apex of his squadron, felt his heart
swell with elation as he watched the orderly crowds. This was at three
in the afternoon: at six the ultimatum ended, the new frightfulness
was to begin.
At five, Vice-president Tomlinson was to address the crowds. The old
man had risen to the occasion. He had cast off his pompousness and
vanity, and was known to favor war to the bitter end. Dick and his
squadron circled above the broken dome as the car that carried the
Vice-president and the secretaries of State and for War approached
along the Avenue.
Rat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat!
Out of the blue sky streams of lead were poured into the assembled
multitudes. Instantly they had become converted into a panic-stricken
mob, turning this way and that.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Swaths of dead and dying men rolled in the dust, and,
as wheat falls under the reaper's blade, the mob melted away in lines
and by battalions. Within thirty seconds the whole terrain was piled
with dead and dying.
"My God, it's massacre! It's murder!" shouted Dick.
* * * * *
They had not even waited for the twelve hours to expire. To and fro
the invisible airplanes shot through the blue evening sky, till the
last fugitives were streaming away in all directions like hunted deer,
and the dead lay piled in ghastly heaps everywhere.
Out of these heaps wounded and dying men would stagger to their feet
to shake their fists impotently at their murderers.
In vain Dick and his squadron strove to dash themselves into the
invisible airships. The pilots eluded them with ease, sometimes
sending a contemptuous round of machine-gun bullets in their
direction, but not troubling to shoot them down.
Two small boys, carrying a huge banner with "No Surrender" across it,
were walking off the ghastly field. Twelve or fourteen years old at
most, they disdained to run. They were singing, singing the National
Anthem, though their voices were inaudible through the turmoil.
Rat-tat! Rat-tat-a-tat! The fiends above loosed a storm of lead upon
them. Both fell. One rose, still clutching the banner in his hand and
waved it aloft. In a sudden silence his childish treble could be
heard:
My country, 'tis of thee
Sweet land of lib-er-ty--
The guns rattled again. Clutching the blood-stained banner, he dropped
across the body of his companion.
Suddenly a broad band of black soared upward from the earth. Those in
charge of the cylinders placed about the Capitol had released the gas.
A band of darkness, rising into the blue, cutting off the earth,
making the summit of the ruined Capitol a floating dome. But, fast as
it rose, the invisible airships rose faster above it.
A last vicious volley! Two of Dick's flight crashing down upon the
piles of dead men underneath! And nothing was visible, though the
darkness rose till it obliterated the blue above.
* * * * *
At dawn the Council sat, after an all-night meeting. Vice-president
Tomlinson, one arm shattered by a machine-gun bullet, still occupied
the chair at the head of the table.
Outside, immediately about the White House, there was not a sound.
Washington might have been a city of the dead. The railroad terminals,
however, were occupied by a mob of people, busily looting. There was
great disorder. Organized government had simply disappeared.
Each man was occupied only with obtaining as much food as he could
carry, and taking his family into rural districts where the Terror
would not be likely to pursue. All the roads leading out of
Washington--into Virginia, into Maryland, were congested with columns
of fugitives that stretched for miles.
Some, who were fortunate enough to possess automobiles, and--what was
rarer--a few gallons of gas, were trying to force their way through
the masses ahead of them; here and there a family trudged beside a
pack-horse, or a big dog drew an improvised sled on wheels, loaded
with flour, bacon, blankets, pillows. Old men and young children
trudged on uncomplaining.
The telegraph wires were still, for the most part, working. All the
world knew what was happening. From all the big cities of the East a
similar exodus was proceeding. There was little bitterness and little
disorder.
It was not the airship raids from which these crowds were fleeing.
Something grimmer was happening. The murderous attack upon the
populace about the Capitol had been merely an incident. This later
development was the fulfilment of the Invisible Emperor's ultimatum.
Death was afield, death, invisible, instantaneous, and inevitable.
Death blown on the winds, in the form of the deadliest of unknown
gases.
* * * * *
In the Blue Room of the White House a score of experts had gathered.
Dick, too, with the chiefs of his staff, Stopford, and the army and
naval heads. Among them was the chief of the Meteorological Bureau,
and it was to him primarily that Tomlinson was reading a telegraphic
dispatch from Wilmington, South Carolina:
"The Invisible Death has reached this point and is working havoc
throughout the city, spreading from street to street. Men are dropping
dead everywhere. A few have fled, but--"
The sudden ending of the dispatch was significant enough. Tomlinson
picked up another dispatch from Columbia, in the same State:
"Invisible Death now circling city," he read. "Business section
already invaded. All other telegraphists have left posts. Can't say
how long--"
And this, too, ended in the same way. There were piles of such
communications, and they had been coming in for eighteen hours. At
that moment an orderly brought in a dozen more.
Tomlinson showed the head of the Meteorological Bureau the chart upon
the table. "We've plotted out a map as the wires came in, Mr. Graves,"
he said. "The Invisible Death struck the southeast shore of the United
States yesterday afternoon near Charleston. It has spread
approximately at a steady rate. The wind velocity--?"
"Remains constant. Seventy miles an hour. Dying down a little,"
answered Graves.
"The death line now runs from Wilmington, South Carolina, straight to
Augusta, Georgia," the Vice-president pursued. "Every living thing
that this gas has encountered has been instantly destroyed. Men,
cattle, birds, vermin, wild beasts. The gas is invisible and
inodorous. These gentlemen believe it may be a form of hydrocyanic
acid, but of a concentration beyond anything known to chemistry, so
deadly that a billionth part of it to one of air must be fatal,
otherwise it could not have traveled as it has done. Warnings have
been broadcasted, but there are no stocks of chemicals that might
counteract it. Flight is the only hope--flight at seventy miles an
hour!"
* * * * *
His voice shook. "This gas has been loosed, as you told us, upon the
wings of the hurricane that came through the Florida Strait. What are
the chances of its reaching Washington?"
"Mr. Vice-president, if the wind continues, and this gas has
sufficient concentration, it should be in Washington within the next
eight hours." Graves replied. "If the wind changes direction,
however, this gas will probably be blown out to sea, or into the
Alleghanies, where it will probably be dissipated among the hills, or
by the foliage on the mountains. I'm not a chemist--"
"No, sir, and I am not consulting you as one," answered old Tomlinson.
"A death belt several hundred miles in length and three or four
hundred deep has already been cut across this continent. We are faced
with wholesale, unmitigated murder, on such a scale as was never known
before. But we are an integral part of America, and Washington has no
more right to expect immunity than our devastated Southern States. The
question we wish to put to you is, can you trace the exact course
taken by the hurricane?"
"I can, Mr. Vice-president," answered Graves. "It originated somewhere
in the West Indian seas, like all these storms. We've been getting our
reports almost as usual. Our first one came from Nassau, which was
badly damaged. The storm missed the Florida coast, as many of them do,
and struck the coast of South Carolina--in fact, we received a report
from Charleston, which must have almost coincided with your first
report of the gas."
"If the storm missed the Florida coast, it follows that the gas was
not discharged from any point on the American continent," said
Tomlinson. "From some point off Florida--from some island, or from a
plane or from a ship at sea."
"Not from a ship at sea, Mr. Vice-president," interposed the head of
the Chemical Bureau. "To discharge gas on such an extensive scale
would require more space than could be furnished by the largest
vessel, in my opinion."
"In all probability the gas was 'loaded,' so to say, onto the gale
somewhere in the Bahamas," said Graves. "That seems to me the most
likely explanation."
* * * * *
Vice-president Tomlinson nodded, and picked up one of the latest
telegraphic dispatches, as if absently.
"Gentlemen," he said, "the Invisible Death has already reached
Charlotte."
He picked up another. "Reported Abaco Island, Bahamas, totally wrecked
by storm. All communication has ceased," he read. He turned to Dick
and spoke as if inspired. "Captain Rennell, there is your
destination," he thundered. "They've betrayed themselves. We've got
them now. You understand?"
"By God, sir! It's from Abaco Island, then, that those devils have
been carrying on their game of wholesale murder!"
Suddenly a contagion of enthusiasm seemed to sweep the whole
assemblage. Every man was upon his feet in an instant, white,
quivering, lips opened for speech that trembled there and did not
come.
It was Secretary Norris spoke. "The Vice-president has hit the mark,"
he said, with a dramatic gesture of his arm. "Yes, they've betrayed
themselves. Their headquarters are on Abaco Island. It's one of the
largest in the Bahamas." He turned to the Secretary for the Navy. "You
can rush the fleet there, sir?" he asked.
"Within forty-eight hours I'll have every vessel that can float off
Abaco Island."
"I'll concentrate all airplanes. Take your flight, Captain Rennell.
We'll stamp out that nest of murderers if we blow Abaco Island to the
bottom of the sea. It can be done!"
"It can be done, sir--with Luke Evans and his invention," answered
Dick.