THE MAN WHO MURDERED LIGHT.
Hines's automatic pistol tore itself to pieces as the shells in its
butt went off all at once. Its fragments on the concrete floor glowed
dully red, then slowly cooled off when they ceased to emit sparks.
Hines staggered to his feet and found himself penned in behind a
monster bank of vacuum tubes which glowed redly. The glass of the tubes
was inordinately thick. These tubes would not break by concussion, nor
by however determined a blow of a man's fist--Preston had learned, from
his debacle in the Storm.
Hines was conscious of them, and of things below them which might have
been gigantic transformers of the type used in radio. But as his brain
cleared from the crack on the concrete floor, his whole attention was
taken up by the facts which it was immediately necessary for him to
face.
Schaaf was beside him, crouching a little to have his whole body behind
the banks of vacuum tubes. Schaaf was snarling a little, and his blue
eyes were glinting fire. He seemed to be unarmed as well as Hines,
and he was gazing across the deep-sunk room with an expression of
concentrated malevolence.
Preston was there, the man Hines had seen exactly once, and for half a
minute only, but whom he had been hunting for months. He was standing
by a small platform which itself was next to a wide door through which
the humming noise came. Preston's hand was on a small thing which
looked rather like a searchlight, except that instead of a mirror for
a reflector it had a sort of grid of glistening wires. There were two
switches on its top.
Preston was small and dapper, and wore a neat Vandyke beard trimmed
to an accurate point. He looked like a highly civilized man, even
alongside the nattily attired pair of followers who lounged always
within feet of him.
They were gangsters, those two, from impeccably tailored clothing to
impossibly expensive haberdashery in vivid color.
Preston seemed precisely the pattern of the professional man--until one
noticed his eyes. They were blank and hard and triumphant, precisely
the eyes of a madman with paranoiac delusions of grandeur. They were
insolent and scornful and very, very arrogant eyes. They were the eyes
of a man who has persuaded himself that he is invested with supreme
authority, and who derides and despises the mere worms of humans within
his gaze. Unfortunately, Preston's ideas of his own powers were not
delusions. They were facts.
He smiled at them, and his smile was filled with the same
vanity-inspired scorn.
"I assure you, Schaaf," he said in a metallic voice that made one long
to kick him, "I assure you that your being alive now is due to my
forbearance."
Schaaf spoke, his voice purring with rage. He spoke in German, and the
words crackled. At the end he added wrathfully:
"And if you don't understand der names I called you, you are a lot of
banana oil!"
He turned to Hines, growling, and Hines knew somehow that Schaaf was
inspecting the contrivances, the elaborate hook-ups, the involved
array of apparatus with a desperately concentrated attention, working
frantically to understand their operation.
Hines's head was clearing swiftly, and he looked about, and went sick
with a helpless rage at the same time that his pulses pumped with fury.
He looked at Preston with eyes like flames. Preston had had Kathryn
kidnaped. Preston had--
"You saw what happened to your weapons," said Preston, smiling
unpleasantly. "I'm letting you live because it amuses me to watch you.
I have--" he looked at a wrist watch--"I have more than half an hour
before Inspector Hines's artillery blows this island out of the water.
And I am inclined to let you two beg your lives. I won't give them to
you, but I'll listen."
"Beg, der deffil!" snapped Schaaf. "Breston, you are der most complete
idiot in der history of der human race! With der brains I reluctantly
admit you possess, you could haff been a benefactor of mankind! And now
we haff to kill you!--Where is Miss Bush?"
Preston threw back his head to laugh. His two guards regarded the two
men behind the vacuum tubes with a wary, indifferent alertness. They
were killers, hired to do murder to order. They regarded Schaaf and
Hines as the professional killer always does regard his prospective
victims.
"She's here," said Preston sardonically. "She's here! Quite a pretty
girl, too. And safe--so far!"
Hines's teeth ground together. Face to face with Preston, a
consummation for which he had hoped and worked for months. And
helpless. Preston had destroyed his weapons with that little
searchlight-like thing. "It is lucky for you that she is safe," snapped
Schaaf. "Breston, you _verdamumt_ fool, do you realize that you are
licked before you start?"
* * * * *
Sweat was standing out on Schaaf's face. He stood tense in every
muscle, and Hines had a queer impression that Schaaf was all brain,
that every particle of him was racing madly to absorb the meaning of
the wires, the tubes, the switches, the connections in this diabolical
control room. He seemed to feel Schaaf working desperately to piece
together the meaning of every appliance and how it worked.
"Licked?" Preston laughed, the mirthless, scornful laugh of the
paranoiac. "You are living by my pleasure, because it amuses me to
watch--"
"That is true to a certain extent only," said Schaaf. He spoke with
a measured calmness in which only Hines could detect the false note.
"I tell you why. I haff solfed your apparatus! Before I left der
mainland to come here, I had explained to my assistants der entire
method of all your defices. I tell you you are licked, and I proof
it. Der darkness wafes I have made myself. And moreotfer, I haff made
der four-centimeter wafes that make der air conducting and enable you
to throw a beam of radiation that is like a life wire charged with
electricity, wherefer you will. And der people on der mainland haff der
apparatus too!"
Hines's eyes flickered. Schaaf was bluffing. It was a monumental sort
of bluff, and the one thing that might work--if Schaaf could carry it
out. Schaaf was bluffing for both their lives, now, and Kathryn's to
boot.
"I tell you how you and I make der four-centimeter wafes," said Schaaf,
grimly. "Der vacuum tube as at present designed cannot possibly go
below a quarter of a meter, and then der wate is not a pure sine
wafe. I know! But you haff four-centimeter wafes, and smaller. Yes!
And der word of how you do them is going all ofer der cifilized world
right now. Because you can take six tubes, each one emitting wafes of
one-fourth meter length, and so adjust them that der separate wafes of
der separate tubes come four centimeters after each other, gifing you a
beam of der death rays. Hein?"
He grinned savagely at Preston, though sweat stood out on his forehead.
And Preston snarled.
"You can carry der process farther," said Schaaf in a judicial tone.
Hines, listening, marveled at the assurance with which Schaaf was
stating, as definite facts, his hurried deductions from the apparatus
about them. "By der use of a sufficient number of tubes, you can make
wafes of any length you choose, merely by der superimposition of one
wafe-outline upon another. Der United States Gofernment is now turning
out this apparatus in quantity!"
He waved his hands about the room. "Der darkness wafes are made in that
way. Der conducting beam is made in that way. Eferything you haff is
made in that way. And we haff eferything you haff efer thought of, with
ten times der power you haff, and a hundred times der brains! You are
licked, Breston! Hines and I, we came to this island because you are
der damnedest scoundrel in forty nations. You haff Miss Bush here. Giff
her back and we giff you half an hour's start. No more! You are licked!
We make der bargain! Turn ofer Miss Bush, unharmed. Turn off der
darkness. We giff you half an hour to escape in. That is efery damned
thing we will giff you. And then we come after you, and I, personally,
choke you by der neck until I kill you!"
* * * * *
Preston was livid. Hines's pulse leaped in savage satisfaction. Schaaf
had worked out the whole thing from sight of Preston's outfit. His
bluff was working. Preston did believe the whole world was equipped to
fight him with his own weapons.
But his madman's eyes flamed with the crazy rage of shattered vanity.
"Everything I've got?" he snarled. "This too? Tell me how this is done!"
He flung a switch on the top of the tiny projector. There was a sudden
vivid glow at a table against the wall some fifteen feet from Hines. A
long, serried ray of tubes leaped into light. Utter silence fell.
"Look at that metal!" raged Preston. "Look at it!"
He pointed a shaking hand at the fragments of Hines's two weapons
on the concrete floor. And they turned suddenly white--snow white.
Then they became wet. A liquid trickled from them and dripped to the
concrete, where it bubbled furiously and formed a thick white mist
that spread out over the floor. Preston flung back his switch and as
the bank of tubes went out, he laughed in shrill, insolent, vanity mad
triumph--because Schaaf's cheeks had become drained of every particle
of blood.
"That's what I'm going to use on Hines's artillery?" boasted Preston
hysterically. "This little projector is all I need! All!"
Schaaf clenched his hands more tightly still.
"_Gott!_" he muttered thickly. "_Gott!_"
"You didn't work out that one, eh?" demanded Preston arrogantly. "Now
I'll tell you: that's the same thing as all the rest! Fluorescence!
Causing one type of energy to be changed to another! Under my
four-centimeter waves, the air becomes fluorescent. But these waves
work on iron!
"Where these waves strike, the surface of the iron becomes fluorescent.
It absorbs heat from the air and from its own interior! It turns heat
to short radio waves, and every particle of iron in the beam of these
waves, no matter how far away it is, radiates away every particle of
energy it possesses! It sinks to absolute zero! Four, hundred and
sixty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit!
"You saw air liquefy in contact with the iron that was red hot a
moment ago. What's going to happen to the men on your battleships
when every particle of iron or steel drops to the temperature of
liquid air? What's going to happen to your guns when they're down to
the temperature of liquid helium and the gun crews try to fire them?
They'll fly to bits like brittle ice! Licked, am I? I'll wipe out your
damned artillery with half a kilowatt in this projector! Ill sink your
battleships with their crews frozen solid.
"I'll play that beam on New York and every particle of steel in the
city will be brittle as ashes! I'll bring down every damned skyscraper
in the town. I'll teach them a lesson they won't forget. Make my
apparatus and try to work it against me? I'll--"
He was working himself into frothing rage. He was shouting. He was
bellowing. His voice was a strident scream of rage, the rage of the man
who has convinced himself that he is the most intelligent of all living
men and then finds the distinction threatened.
"You fools?" Preston gasped. "Trying to fight me! Like savages with
clubs going against a battleship! I'll show you! I'll show--"
Schaaf had bluffed, working out what Preston had done, after a swift
survey of the apparatus about him. He'd seen Preston's transmitters
and had raced his brain to the manner of their operation. He'd tried
to bluff that all the world knew now how Preston had kept it sunk in
night. But he hadn't known this one last trick, which was the most
deadly of all. And Schaaf muttered thickly to himself with his eyes
sunken in and dull. Because this last weapon was invincible.
Then Hines looked sharply upward and snapped, "All right, men!
Everybody in here!"
He gained two seconds only; two seconds in which Preston was looking
upward, and his guards with him, toward the door into which Hines
himself had stumbled. But that two seconds was enough. Before they
could look down, Hines had leaped, dragging from their sockets two of
the thick tubes to use as missiles.
The first one struck Preston and flung him against the projector. Hines
was within a yard of Preston when he heard Schaaf cry out. But it was
too late to stop then. He sank his fingers in Preston's throat as one
of the guards screamed.
The projector of the freezing beam had been whirled around. A guard
had felt his arm frozen to the elbow as he tried to raise his weapon.
He screamed, and screamed, and Schaaf went into action frantically,
flinging the huge vacuum tubes about and crashing them until the second
guard was helpless and the freezing beam was off.
But Hines paid no attention. He forgot that he should be getting a
bullet in the back of his head at any instant. Preston was squirming
under him, getting at something in his pocket. There was a sickeningly
muffled explosion in the middle of the battling pair of men. Another.
Preston seemed literally to go mad. Frothing at the mouth, he tried to
sink his teeth in Hines. He fought crazily, insanely, with maniacal
strength. Hines forgot that there was anything in the world but this
one single man he hated. He forgot everything--
And then Schaaf was pulling him to his feet, crying:
"We haff fife minutes, Hines! Fife minutes only! Find Miss Bush!"