A RACE TO SAVE THE WORLD
Huyck was working in a straight line. Almost before his last words on
the phone were spoken he had requisitioned that automobile outside;
whether money or talk, faith or force, he was going to have it. The
hum of the motor sounded in his ears as he ran down the steps. He was
hatless and in his shirt-sleeves. The driver was just putting some
tools in the car. With one jump Charley had him by the collar.
“Five thousand dollars if you can get me to Robold Mountain in twenty
hours.”
The very suddenness of the rush caught the man by surprise and lurched
him against the car, turning him half around. Charley found himself
gazing into dull brown eyes and sardonic laughter: a long, thin nose
and lips drooped at the corners, then as suddenly tipping up—a queer
creature, half devil, half laughter, and all fun.
“Easy, Charley, easy! How much did you say? Whisper it.”
It was Bob Winters. Bob Winters and his car. And waiting. Surely no
twist of fortune could have been greater. He was a college chum of
Huyck’s and of the professor’s. If there was one man that could make
the run in the time allotted, Bob was he. But Huyck was impersonal.
With the burden on his mind he thought of naught but his destination.
“Ten thousand!” he shouted.
The man held back his head. Huyck was far too serious to appreciate
mischief. But not the man.
“Charley Huyck, of all men. Did young Lochinvar come out of the West?
How much did you say? This desert air and the dust, ’tis hard on the
hearing. She must be a young, fair maiden. Ten thousand.”
“Twenty thousand. Thirty thousand. Damnation, man, you can have the
mountain. Into the car.”
By sheer subjective strength he forced the other into the machine. It
was not until they were shooting out of the grounds on two wheels that
he realized that the man was Bob Winters. Still the workings of fate.
The madcap and wild Bob of the races! Surely Destiny was on the job.
The challenge of speed and the premium. At the opportune moment before
disaster the two men were brought together. Minutes weighed up with
centuries and hours outbalanced millenniums. The whole world slept;
little did it dream that its very life was riding north with these two
men into the midnight.
Into the midnight! The great car, the pride of Winter’s heart, leaped
between the pillars. At the very outset, madcap that he was, he sent
her into seventy miles an hour; they fairly jumped off the hill into
the village. At a full seventy-five he took the curve; she skidded,
sheered half around and swept on.
For an instant Charley held his breath. But the master hand held her;
she steadied, straightened, and shot out into the desert. Above the
whir of the motor, flying dust and blurring what-not, Charley got the
tones of his companion’s voice. He had heard the words somewhere in
history.
“Keep your seat, Mr. Greely. Keep your seat!”
The moon was now far up over the mountain, the whole desert was bathed
in a mellow twilight; in the distance the mountains brooded like an
uncertain slumbering cloud bank. They were headed straight to the
northward; though there was a better road round about. Winters had
chosen the hard, rocky bee-line to the mountain.
He knew Huyck and his reputation; when Charley offered thirty thousand
for a twenty-hour drive it was not mere byplay. He had happened in at
the observatory to drop in on Williams on his way to the coast. They
had been classmates; likewise he and Charley.
When the excited man out of the observatory had seized him by the
collar, Winters merely had laughed. He was the speed king. The three
boys who had gone to school were now playing with the destiny of the
earth. But only Huyck knew it.
Winters wondered. Through miles and miles of fleeting sagebrush, cacti
and sand and desolation, he rolled over the problem. Steady as a rock,
slightly stooped, grim and as certain as steel he held to the north.
Charley Huyck by his side, hatless, coatless, his hair dancing to the
wind, all impatience. Why was it? Surely a man even for death would
have time to get his hat.
The whole thing spelled speed to Bob Winters; perhaps it was the
infusion of spirit or the intensity of his companion; but the thrill
ran into his vitals. Thirty thousand dollars—for a stake like
that—what was the balance? He had been called Wild Bob for his daring;
some had called him insane; on this night his insanity was
enchantment.
It was wild; the lee of the giant roadster a whirring shower of
gravel: into the darkness, into the night the car fought over the
distance. The terrific momentum and the friction of the air fought in
their faces; Huyck’s face was unprotected: in no time his lips were
cracked, and long before they had crossed the level his whole face was
bleeding.
But he heeded it not. He only knew that they were moving; that slowly,
minute by minute, they were cutting down the odds that bore disaster.
In his mind a maze of figures; the terrible sight he had seen in the
telescope and the thing impending. Why had he kept his secret?
Over and again he impeached himself and Dr. Robold. It had come to
this. The whole world sleeping and only himself to save it. Oh, for a
few minutes, for one short moment! Would he get it?
At last they reached the mountains. A rough, rocky road, and but
little traveled. Happily Winters had made it once before, and knew it.
He took it with every bit of speed they could stand, but even at that
it was diminished to a minimum.
For hours they fought over grades and gulches, dry washouts and
boulders. It was dawn, and the sky was growing pink when they rode
down again upon the level. It was here that they ran across their
first trouble; and it was here that Winters began to realize vaguely
what a race they might be running.
The particular level which they had entered was an elbow of the desert
projecting into the mountains just below a massive, newly constructed
dam. The reservoir had but lately been filled, and all was being put
in readiness for the dedication.
An immense sheet of water extending far back into the mountains—it was
intended before long to transform the desert into a garden. Below, in
the valley, was a town, already the center of a prosperous irrigation
settlement; but soon, with the added area, to become a flourishing
city. The elbow, where they struck it, was perhaps twenty miles
across. Their northward path would take them just outside the tip
where the foothills of the opposite mountain chain melted into the
desert. Without ado Winters put on all speed and plunged across the
sands. And then:
It was much like winking; but for all that something far more
impressive. To Winters, on the left hand of the car and with the east
on the right hand, it was much as if the sun had suddenly leaped up
and as suddenly plumped down behind the horizon—a vast vividness of
scintillating opalescence: an azure, flaming diamond shot by a million
fire points.
Instantaneous and beautiful. In the pale dawn of the desert air its
wonder and color were beyond all beauty. Winters caught it out of the
corner of his eye; it was so instantaneous and so illusive that he was
not certain. Instinctively he looked to his companion.
But Charley, too, had seen it. His attitude of waiting and hoping was
vigorized into vivid action. He knew just what it was. With one hand
he clutched Winters and fairly shouted.
“On, on, Bob! On, as you value your life. Put into her every bit of
speed you have got.”
At the same instant, at the same breath came a roar that was not to be
forgotten; crunching, rolling, terrible—like the mountain moving.
Bob knew it. It was the dam. Something had broken it. To the east the
great wall of water fall-out of the mountains! A beautiful sight and
terrible; a relentless glassy roller fringed along its base by a lace
of racing foam. The upper part was as smooth as crystal; the stored-up
waters of the mountain moving out compactly. The man thought of the
little town below and its peril. But Huyck thought also. He shouted in
Winter’s ear:
“Never mind the town. Keep straight north. Over yonder to the point of
the water. The town will have to drown.”
It was inexorable; there was no pity; the very strength and purpose of
the command drove into the other’s understanding. Dimly now he
realized that they were really running a race against time. Winters
was a daredevil; the very catastrophe sent a thrill of exultation
through him. It was the climax, the great moment of his life, to be
driving at a hundred miles an hour under that wall of water.
The roar was terrible. Before they were half across it seemed to the
two men that the very sound would drown them. There was nothing in the
world but pandemonium. The strange flash was forgotten in the terror
of the living wall that was reaching out to engulf them. Like insects
they whizzed in the open face of the deluge. When they had reached the
tip they were so close that the outrunning fringe of the surf was at
their wheels.
Around the point with the wide open plain before them. With the flood
behind them it was nothing to outrun it. The waters with a wider
stretch spread out. In a few moments they had left all behind them.
But Winters wondered; what was the strange flash of evanescent beauty?
He knew this dam and its construction; to outlast the centuries. It
had been whiffed in a second. It was not lightning. He had heard no
sound other than the rush of the waters. He looked to his companion.
Hucyk nodded.
“That’s the thing we are racing. We have only a few hours. Can we make
it?”
Bob had thought that he was getting all the speed possible out of his
motor. What it yielded from that moment on was a revelation.
It is not safe and hardly possible to be driving at such speed on the
desert. Only the best car and a firm roadway can stand it. A sudden
rut, squirrel hole, or pocket of sand is as good as destruction. They
rushed on till noon.
Not even Winters, with all his alertness, could avoid it. Perhaps he
was weary. The tedious hours, the racking speed had worn him to
exhaustion. They had ceased to individualize, their way a blur, a
nightmare of speed and distance.
It came suddenly, a blind barranca—one of those sunken, useless
channels that are death to the unwary. No warning.
It was over just that quickly. A mere flash of consciousness plus a
sensation of flying. Two men broken on the sands and the great,
beautiful roadster a twisted ruin.