_Charmion_
"Prester Kleig," came suddenly into the Secret Room the voice of far
distant Moyen, "you will at once make a change in your rules regarding
the admission of other than Secret Agents to the Secret Room. You will
at once see that Charmion Kane, sister of your friend, is allowed to
enter!"
"God Almighty!" A cry of agony from the lips of Prester Kleig. He had
not forgotten Charmion, but simply had had to move so swiftly that he
had put her out of his mind. For a year he had not seen her, and an hour
or two more could not matter greatly.
"And her brother Carlos," went on the voice, "see that he, too, is
admitted. I wish, for certain reasons, that Charmion come unharmed
through the direct attack I am about to make against your country. I
confess that, save for this ability to speak to you, I am unable to work
any damage to the Secret Room, which is therefore the safest place for
Charmion Kane! Carlos Kane is being spared because he is her brother!"
There was no mistaking the import of this sinister command from Moyen.
He had singled out Charmion, the best beloved of Prester Kleig, for his
attentions, and that he was sure of the success of his attack against
the United Americas was proved by the calm assurance of his voice, and
the fact that, concentrating on the attack as he must be, he still found
time for a thought of Charmion Kane.
* * * * *
The hand of ice which had seldom been absent from the heart of Kleig
since he had first seen and heard the voice of Moyen gripped him anew.
Blood pounded maddeningly in his temples. Cold sweat bathed his body.
But the rest of the Secret Agents, save to freeze into immobility when
the hated voice spoke, gave no sign. They had worries of their own, for
no instructions had been given that they bring their own loved ones into
the sanctuary of the Secret Room.
As though answering the thoughts of the others, the hated voice spoke
again.
"I regret that I cannot arrange for sanctuary for the loved ones of all
of you, for you are gallant antagonists; why save the few, when the many
must perish? For I know you will not surrender, however much I have
proved to you that I am invincible. But Charmion Kane must be saved."
"God!" whispered Kleig. "God!"
Then spoke General Munson.
"I think this ray which the Moyenites use is a variation of the
principle used in the intricate machinery of Professor Maniel, though
how they render it visible I do not know. But it doesn't matter, and may
be only a blind! You'll note that when the black streak, or the golden
ray, strikes anything that thing instantly disintegrates. A certain
pitch of resonance will break a pane of glass. It's a matter of
vibration, solely, wherein the molecules composing any object animate or
inanimate, are hurled in all directions instantaneously.
"Professor Maniel's apparatus, the Vibration-Retarder, is able to
recapture the vibrations, speeding outward endlessly through space, and
to reconstruct, and _draw back_ to visibility the objects destroyed by
this visible vibratory ray, whatever it is. This problem, then, falls
into the province of Professor Maniel!"
* * * * *
Through the heart and soul of Prester Kleig there suddenly flowed a
great surge of hope.
"General Munson, if you will operate the machinery of the
Vibration-Retarder, I wish to talk with Professor Maniel!"
Instantly, efficiently, without a word in reply to the eager command of
Prester Kleig, General Munson relieved Professor Maniel at the apparatus
which Maniel called the Vibration-Retarder, his invention which he had
combined with audible teleview to complete this visual miracle of the
Secret Room. Professor Maniel stepped to where Prester Kleig was
sitting.
Prester Kleig put fingers to his lips for silence, and an expression of
surprise crossed the wrinkled dead-white face of the Professor.
Before Kleig could speak, however, there came a signal from somewhere
outside the Secret Room, a signal which said that the doors were being
opened and that a personage was coming. The Secret Agents looked at one
another in surprise, for every man who had a right to be inside the
Secret Room was already present.
"I know," said Kleig, his face a mask of terror. "It is Charmion and
Carlos Kane! Moyen, the devil, has managed to make sure of obedience to
his orders!"
The Secret Agents turned back to the screen, upon which the view of the
first aerial brush of the American flyers with the minions of Moyen, in
their aero-subs, was drawing to a terrible close.
For, as the aero-sub commanders had played with the warships, which had
no human beings aboard them, so now did they play with the planes of the
Americas.
* * * * *
One American flyer, startled into a frenzy by the fate of his fellows,
put his helicopter into action, and leaped madly out of the midst of the
battle. Instantly an aero-sub zoomed, skyward after him. Again that
golden streak of light from the nose of an aero-sub, and the helicopter
vanes and the slender staff upon whose tip they whirled vanished, shorn
short off above the vane-grooves in the top of the wing!
The plane dropped away, fluttering like a falling leaf for a moment,
before the aviator started his three propellers again.
A cheer broke from the lips of Prester Kleig as he watched. The
commander of that particular aero-sub, apparently contemptuous of this
flyer who had tried to cut out of the fight, allowed him to fall away
unmolested--and the American, driven berserk by the casual, contemptuous
treatment accorded him by this strange enemy, zoomed the second his
propellers whirred into top-speed action, and raced up the sky toward
the belly of the aero-sub.
"If only the aero-sub has a blind spot!" cried Prester Kleig.
* * * * *
In that instant a roaring crash sounded in the Secret Room as the
American plane, going full speed, crashed, propellers foremost, into the
belly of the aero-sub.
And the aero-sub, whose brothers had seemed until this moment
invincible, did not escape the wrath of the American--though the
American went into oblivion with it!
For, welded together, American plane and aero-sub started the eight
thousand feet plunge downward to the sea!
"Watch!" shrieked Munson. "Watch!"
As the aero-sub and the plane plunged down through the formation of
fighters, the aero-sub pilots saw it, and they fled in wild dismay and
at top speed from their falling compatriot. Why? For a moment it was not
apparent. And then it was.
For out of the body of the doomed aero-subs came sheets of golden flame!
Not the flames of fire, but the golden sheen of that streak which the
aero-subs had used against the American planes already out of the fight!
The American flyer had crashed into the container, whatever it was, that
harnessed the agency through which the minions of Moyen had destroyed
the _Stellar_, and the battleships raped from Hampton Roads!
"It is liquid, then!" shrieked Munson.
And it seemed to be. For a second the golden mantle, strange,
awe-inspiring, bathed and rendered invisible the aero-sub and the plane
which had slain her. Then the golden flame vanished utterly,
instantly--and in the air where it had been there was nothing! The
aero-sub was gone, and the plane whose mad charge had erased her.
"Her own death dealing agency destroyed her!" shrieked Munson. "And the
other aero-subs cut away from the fight to save themselves, because they
too carry death and destruction within them!"
* * * * *
Then the inner door of the Secret Room opened and two people entered.
One of them, a dazzling beauty with glorious black hair and the tread of
a princess, a picture of perfection from jeweled sandals to coiffured
hair, was Charmion Kane. Behind her came her brother, whose face was
chalky white. But Charmion, as she crossed to Kleig and kissed him,
while her eyes were luminous with love, held her head proudly high,
imperious.
"I know," she said softly to Kleig, "and I am not afraid! I know you
will prevent it!"
Kleig waved the two to chairs and turned again to Professor Maniel.
On a piece of paper he wrote swiftly, using a mode of shorthand known
only to the Secret Agents.
"Professor," he wrote feverishly, "can you reverse the process used in
your Vibration-Retarder? Tell me with your eyes, for Moyen may even know
this writing, and I am sure he hears what we say here, may even be able
to see us?"
Professor Maniel started and stared deeply into the eyes of Prester
Kleig. His face grew thoughtful. He brushed his slender hand over the
massive dome of his brow. Hope burned high in the heart of Prester
Kleig.
* * * * *
Then, despite Kleig's instructions to answer merely by the expression in
his eyes, Professor Maniel leaned forward and wrote quickly on the piece
of paper Kleig had used.
"Two hours!"
Nothing else, no explanations; but Prester Kleig knew. Maniel believed
he could do it, but he needed two hours in which to perfect his theory
and make it workable. Kleig knew that had he been able to do it in two
years, or two decades, it still would have been in the nature of a
miracle.
But two hours....
And Moyen had said that he was preparing to attack at once.
In two hours Moyen, unless the Americas fought against him with every
resource at their command, could depopulate half the Western World.
Kleig looked back to the screen.
There was not a single American plane in the sky above the graveyard of
those vanished warships. And the aero-subs, swift flying as the wind,
were racing back to the mother ship, scores of miles away.
Munson worked with the Vibration-Retarder, the Sound-and-Vision devices,
ranging the sea off the coast to either side of that huge, suspended
fortress which was the mother submarine of the aero-subs.
Gasps of terror, though the sight was not unexpected, broke from the
lips of every person in the Secret Room.
For super-monsters of Moyen were moving to the attack.