Teddy Gerrod straightened up and beat his hands together.
"Forty-seven below," he said to the soldier behind him. "Put a marker
here."
He moved off to the right. Already a dozen little flags showed where
the temperature reached that degree. Teddy was drawing what he would
have termed an isothermal line--a line where the temperature was the
same. He was making a circle about a large part of the open clearing
on the ice floe. Other flags led back into the mist, marking a path,
and from time to time a party of four or five fur-clad soldiers arrived
from the fort, dragging a loaded sledge behind them. They emptied the
load from the sled, turned, and vanished into the mist again. A small
pile of drills, explosives, and two of the squat trench mortars had
already been made.
When the circle of little red flags had been completed, two
signal-corps men set up their instruments and accurately located the
center. Directly under that spot, if Teddy's reasoning was correct,
the new cold bomb was resting. The sledge from the fort arrived again,
bearing a curious trench catapult for flinging bombs. Four long strips
of black cloth were unrolled, under direction of the signal-corps men,
pointing accurately to the center of the circle. No one had been able
to approach nearer, thus far, than thirty yards from the center. At
that distance Teddy's thermocouple indicated a temperature of more
than seventy-two degrees below zero, and flesh exposed to the air was
frostbitten on the instant. What the temperature of the air might be
directly above the cold bomb could only be conjectured.
One of the infantry men from the fort, the best grenade man in the
garrison, now picked up a Mills grenade, and after carefully picking
out the target with his eye, aided by the strips of black cloth, flung
the small missile. A hole perhaps four feet deep and twice as much
across was blasted in the brittle ice. A second, third, and fourth
grenade followed. At the end of that time the size and depth of the
hole had been doubled.
The trench catapult was set up. Half a dozen grenades were bundled
together and flung into the now much enlarged opening in the surface
of the ice. There was no explosion. One automatically braced oneself
for the report, and the utter silence that succeeded the disappearance
of the grenades came as a peculiar shock.
"Too cold," remarked Teddy to the young lieutenant in charge.
The lieutenant nodded stiffly.
"We'll try again."
A second batch of grenades was flung into the hole, and the same quiet
resulted.
"I would suggest----" Teddy begin.
"We'll fire a trench-mortar bomb," said the young lieutenant.
The heavy winged projectile flew up into the air, and then descended
squarely into the opening in the ice. Those standing fifty yards away
could hear the crash as it struck, and then a sound as of musical
splintering. The young lieutenant swore.
"The fuses are no good. Try once more."
"You can shoot all day and they won't go off," said Teddy mildly. "It's
too cold down there."
The officer said nothing, but supervised the firing of a second mortar
bomb with precisely the same result. He swore again.
"It's probably quite as cold as liquid air down there," said Teddy.
"In fact, there's quite possibly a pool of liquified air at the bottom
of the hole. Your bombs fall into that air and are frozen so solidly
before they strike that the metal gets brittle and simply falls to
powder from the shock. You can't do anything going on this way."
The young lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Teddy somewhat sulkily.
"What do you suggest, then?"
"We'd better enlarge the hole first. Blast down the walls of the
present cavity, then use wrapped dynamite until we have a shallow
crater. Then we'll place our explosives by long poles, keeping
them warm by running resistance wires around them and heating them
electrically."
The young lieutenant considered and agreed. Teddy went back to the fort
to arrange for the heated bombs and the long poles. When he returned
there was only a saucerlike depression in the ice clearing. It was
quite fifty yards across, but no more than twenty deep. Standing near
the edge, one could see the ice near the bottom glistening liquidly.
Air, liquified by the intense cold at the bottom of the crater, wet the
surface of the ice there.
"And that means the temperature down there is three hundred and
twenty-five degrees or more below zero Fahrenheit," explained Teddy
casually. "Here's where we use our heated explosives."
For an hour the party worked busily. Storage batteries brought out on
sledges furnished the current that kept the explosives from becoming
inert through cold. Charge after charge was fired, and the bottom of
the crater grew steadily deeper. At the lowest point a little puddle of
liquified air collected.
"We must be pretty nearly at the cold bomb now," said Teddy
thoughtfully. "There's a mass of liquid air at the bottom of our
crater, and something tells me there's solidified air at the bottom of
that puddle. That means seven hundred-odd degrees below zero."
He was clad in the warmest garments that could be found, and every one
of the others working in the clearing was quite as warmly clothed,
but the cold was intense. One of the soldiers by the small pile of
explosives was chewing a cud of tobacco. He spat. The brownish liquid
froze in mid-air and bounced merrily away across the ice. The soldier
looked at it with his mouth open, then shut it quickly. A thin film
of ice had formed from the moisture on his teeth. The breast of every
member of the party was covered with sparkling snow crystals from the
congealed moisture of their breath.
"I begin to doubt if we can keep our stuff from freezing much deeper,"
Teddy commented. "We want to go down as deep as we can before we use
our Dewey bulbs, though. I've only two of them."
The young lieutenant bustled away, and presently returned.
"The men say that the last bomb won't go off," he said aggrievedly.
"Your heating plan doesn't work."
"I didn't expect it to work indefinitely," said Teddy mildly. "We want
to clear out that liquid air and shoot our two Dewey globes before it's
had time to reform. Will you please have a charge made ready to be
fired just above the surface of that puddle? That should clear it away.
Immediately after that charge has gone off we'll drop our two T. N. T.
charges in the Dewey bulbs. They ought to show us the cold bomb."
The dynamite charge was suspended about a foot above the surface of the
watery, bubbling pool. Air was in that pool, air turned to transparent
liquid by the intense cold. At -325° Fahrenheit air becomes a liquid.
Here, exposed to the sunlight and the blue sky, a pool of liquified
gas had collected from the incredible cold of the cold bomb below. The
charge of explosive burst with a shattering roar. The echoes of the
explosion had not died away when the two Dewey bulbs filled with T. N.
T. fell into the bared ice cavity. A Dewey bulb is a combination of
six vacuum bottles placed one outside the other. They are used for the
keeping of liquid gases at a low temperature, but are obviously just
as effective in protecting their contents from exterior cold. They
fell some five yards apart and rolled, then were still. Their fuses
sputtered. They went off together. A huge mass of shattered ice was
thrown aside, and a dark, globular mass was exposed to view. Almost as
soon as it was exposed to the air a crust of frozen air coated it, and
liquified air began to trickle down its misshapen sides. There could be
no doubt but that it was the cold bomb, invented by an insane genius to
make him master of the world.
Those about the rim of the crater looked at it and turned away. Just as
the intense heat of a blast furnace sears unprotected flesh even yards
from its flame, so the incredible cold of the dark object pinched and
wrung with its freezing rays. Not one man who looked upon the cold bomb
but suffered from a deep frostbite.
"We can't approach that thing," said Teddy, with his hand over his
eyes. "I'd just as soon, or sooner, try to tinker with burning
thermite. We'll have to shoot armor-piercing shells at it. They'll
freeze when they get near it, but the impact ought to crack the thing."
He motioned to the fur-clad soldiers to move back from the crater, and
after a hasty consultation with the lieutenant went off toward the fort
to ask for a small-caliber field gun.
The lieutenant paced back and forth restlessly. He was an ambitious
young man. He did not relish taking orders from a civilian like Teddy.
His eye fell on the heap of equipment that had been brought out from
the fort. Two trench mortars, a trench catapult, a liquid-flame
apparatus--one of the American inventions that had far outdone the
original German _flamenwerfers_! There had been some thought of trying
to reach a point just above the cold bomb and melting the ice down to
it with liquid flame. That had been quickly proven impracticable, but
the liquid-fire apparatus had not been sent back. The young lieutenant
was not stupid. On the contrary, he was a singularly intelligent man.
In a flash he saw how the liquid flame could have been used much more
efficiently than Teddy's resistance coils about his explosive charges.
The idea simply had not occurred to Teddy, or the young lieutenant,
either. Now, however, he became all eagerness. If he succeeded in
breaking up the cold bomb during Teddy's absence it would be a feather
in his cap. If, in addition, he pointed out a method of dealing with
the cold bombs superior to Teddy's plodding system, it would certainly
mean his promotion and a very desirable reputation for himself in his
profession.
He gave his orders briskly. The liquid-flame tank was set up, and began
to spray out its stream of fire. The young lieutenant had it trained so
that it passed just above the top of the ungainly cold bomb and grazed
the upper edge. Then the two trench mortars were made ready for firing.
The young lieutenant set them at their proper elevation himself. He
was tremendously excited. He pointed the two mortars with the most
meticulous precision. To aim them properly he had to expose his face
again and again to the direct rays from the cold bomb, but he paid no
attention to the searing, freezing rays.
The stream of liquid fire shot upward in a perfect parabola, and fell
evenly, exactly, where it was aimed. The young lieutenant knew that a
mortar bomb would be frozen by the intense cold if it were fired at
the cold bomb direct, but his plan got around that difficulty. With
the liquid fire playing just above and grazing the cold bomb, when the
shell from the mortar struck the incredibly cold surface, both the
shell and the cold bomb would be bathed in flame.
All was ready. The lieutenant fixed his eyes on the cold bomb and gave
the signal. The two small trench mortars spouted flame. Two ungainly
bombs rose high in the air and fell hurtling down toward the strange,
frosted object at the bottom of the crater. One of the bombs would
fall a little to the left. The other--squarely on top!
The cracking explosion of the bomb from the trench mortar was lost in
the greater roar that followed it. Before the young lieutenant or any
of his men could lift a finger they were enveloped by a colossal sheet
of vaporized metal that seemed to fill the earth, the air, and all the
sky. Of a weird and unearthly tint, the white-hot flame leaped into the
air. It sprang up three thousand feet in hardly more than two seconds.
The blast had the velocity of many rifle balls, and the withering heat
of molten metal. The young lieutenant and his men were swept into
nothingness in the fraction of a second. The crater they had worked
for hours to blast out was as a puny ant hole beside the vast chasm
that opened in the ice down to the red clay far beneath the bed of the
Narrows. And New York shook and trembled from the shock of the terrific
explosion.