TERROR AND RETREAT.
When, despite Flint's imperative orders, Slade failed to reopen the
lines of communication for him, before nightfall, and when President
Supple wired in code for a little more time in obeying Air Trust orders,
the Billionaire recognized that something of terrible menace now had
suddenly broken in upon his dream of universal power.
He summoned Waldron and Herzog for another conference and together they
feverishly planned to put the works under defense, until such time as
troops could be got through to them.
The plant regiment was mustered and the Cosmos mercenaries and scabs
were made ready. The machine-guns were unlimbered for action and large
quantities of ammunition were delivered to them and to the aerial-bomb
guns, as nightfall lowered. Herzog set eight hundred men to work
covering all the tanks possible, with wire netting of heavy steel. The
search-lights were all ordered into use; steam and electrical
connections were made, the air-fleet was manned, and everything was done
that unlimited wealth and bitter hate of the Workers could suggest.
With curses on the fog, which hid the upper air from view, the old man
now stood at one of the west windows of his inner office--the office on
the top floor of the main Administration Building, overlooking nearly
the whole Plant.
"Damn the weather!" he snarled, his gold teeth glinting. "In addition to
all this mist from the Falls, there's a regular cloud-bank settling
down, tonight! Under cover of it, what may not happen? Nothing could
have been worse, Waldron. Though we shall soon control the air, that
won't be enough, so long as fogs and mists escape us. Our next
problem--hello! Now what the devil's _that_?"
"What's what?" retorted Waldron, testily. He had been drinking rather
more heavily than usual, that day, both because of the dull weather and
because the Falls invariably got on his nerves, during his brief
sojourns there. Away from New York and his favorite haunts, Waldron was
lost. "What's what?" he repeated with an ugly look. "This roaring,
glaring, trembling place gives me--"
"That! That light in the sky!" cried Flint, excitedly pointing. "See?
No--it's gone now! But it looked like--like a rocket! A signal, of some
kind, thrown from an aeroplane! A--"
Waldron laughed harshly.
"Seeing things, eh?" he sneered, coming across to the window, himself,
and peering out. "_I_ don't see anything! Nothing here to worry about,
Flint. With all these walls and guns, and netting, and air-ships and a
private army and all, what more do you want? Not getting nervous in your
old age, are you, eh?" he gibed bitterly. "Or is your conscience
beginning to wake up, as the graveyard becomes more a probability
than--"
"Enough!" Flint snapped at him. "When you drink, Waldron, you're an
idiot! Now, forget all this, and let's get down to work. I tell you, I
just now saw a signal-light up there in the mist. There's trouble coming
tonight, as sure as we own the earth. Trouble, maybe big trouble.
Merciful God, I--I rather think we oughtn't to be here, in person, eh?
We'd be much better off out of here. If there--there should be any
fighting, you know--"
His voice broke in a falsetto pipe. Waldron laughed brutally.
"Bravo!" cried he, with flushed and mottled face. "You'll do, Flint! I
see, right now, the firing-line is the life for you! Well, let the row
come, and devil take it, say I. Better anything than--"
The sentence was never finished, For suddenly a shattering explosion
hurled a vast section of the western encircling wall outward, out into
the River, and, where but a moment before, the partners had been gazing
at a high concrete-and-steel barrier, with electric lights on top, now
only a huge gap appeared, through which the foam-tossed current could be
seen leaping swiftly onward toward the Falls.
Hurled back from the window by the force of the explosion, both men were
struck dumb with terror and amaze. Flint rallied first, and with a cry
of rage, inarticulate as a beast's howl, sprang to the window again.
Outside, a scene of desolation and wild activity was visible. The great,
paved courtyard, flanked by the turbine houses and the wall, on one
hand, and on the other by the oxygen tanks' huge bulk that loomed
vaguely through the electric-lighted mist, now had begun to swarm with
men.
Flint saw a few forms lying prone under the hard glare of the arcs and
vacuum lights. Others were crawling, writhing, making strange
contortions. Here, there, men with rifles were running to take their
posts. Hoarse orders were shouted, and shrill replies rang back.
Then, all at once, a kind of sputtering series of small explosions began
to rip along the edge of the south wall. And now, machine-guns began to
talk, with a dry, hard metallic clatter. And--though whence these came,
Flint could not see--grenades began flying over the wall and bursting in
the court. Though unwounded, men fell everywhere these gas-projectiles
exploded--fell, stone dead and stiffening at once--fell, in strange,
monstrous, awful attitudes of death.
Steam began billowing up; and crackling electrical discharges leaped
along the naked wires of the outer barricades.
The whole Plant shook and rattled with the violent concussions of the
aerial-bomb guns, already searching the upper air with shrapnel.
Somewhere, out of the range of vision, another terrible shock made the
building tremble to its nethermost foundation; and wild yells and cries,
as of a charge, a repulse, a savage and determined rush, echoed through
the vast enclosure. Came a third detonation--and, blinding in its
intensity, a globe of fire burst almost beneath the window, five stories
below.
The partners, shaking and pale, retreated hastily. A swift,
upward-rising shape swept over the courtyard and was gone--one of the
air-fleet now launched to meet the attackers.
Far below a sudden crumbling shudder of masonry told the Billionaire
not a moment was to be lost, for already one wing of the Administration
Building was swaying to its fall.
"Quick, Waldron! Quick!" he shouted, in the shrill treble of senility,
and ran into the corridor that led to the north wing. Waldron, suddenly
sobered, followed; and from the offices, where the night-shift of clerks
were laboring (or had been, till the first explosion), came crowding
pale and frightened men. Not the fighting cast of Air Trust slaves,
these, but the anaemic chemists and experimenters and clerical workers,
scabs, to a man. Now, in the common sentiment of fear, they jostled
Flint and Waldron, as though these plutocrats had been but common clay.
And in the corridor a babel rose, through which fresh volleys and ever
more and more violent explosions ripped and thundered.
Flint struck savagely at some who barred his way; and Waldron elbowed
through, with curses.
"Get out of the way, you swine!" shrilled the old Billionaire. "Make
way, there! Way!"
The two men reached a door that led by a private passage, through to the
steel-and-concrete laboratories.
"Here, this way, Flint!" shouted Waldron. "If those Hell-devils drop a
bomb on us, this building will cave in like jackstraws! Our only safety
is here, _here_!"
Thoroughly cowed now, with all the brutal bluster and half-drunken
swagger gone, Waldron whipped out a bunch of keys, tremblingly unlocked
the door and blundered through. Flint followed. Behind them, others
tried to press, on toward the armored laboratories; but with vile
blasphemies the plutocrats beat them back and slammed the door.
"To Hell with _them_!" shouted Flint, perfectly ashen now and shaking
like a leaf, the fear of death strong on his withered soul. "We've got
all we can do to look after ourselves! Quick, Waldron, quick!"
Both men, sick with panic, with fear of the unknown terror from above,
stumbled rather than ran along the passage, and presently reached the
laboratory.
Here Waldron unlocked another door, this time a steel one, and--as they
both crowded through--pressed a hand to his dizzy head.
"Safe!" he gulped, slamming the door again. "They can't get us _here_,
at any rate, no matter what happens! This place is like a fort, and--"
His speech was interrupted by a dazing, deafening tumult of sound. The
earth trembled, and the laboratory, steel though it was, with concrete
facing, rocked on its foundation. A glare through the windows, quickly
fading, told them the building they had just quitted was now but a
smoking pile of ruin.
Flint gasped, unable to speak. Waldron, shaking and cowed, tried to
moisten his dry lips with a thick tongue.
"We--we weren't any too soon!" he gulped, without one thought of the
doomed scabs in the Administration Building. Stern justice was now
overtaking these wretches. False to the working-class, and eager to
serve the Air Trust--not only eager to serve, but zealous in any attack
on the proletariat, and by their very employment serving to rivet the
shackles on the world--now they were abandoned by their masters.
Between upper and nether millstone, moving with neither, they were
caught and crushed. And as the great building quivered, gaped wide
open, swayed and came thundering down in a vast pile of flame-lit ruin,
whence a volcanic burst of fire, smoke and dust arose, they perished
miserably, time-servers, cowards and self-seekers to the last.
But Flint and Waldron still survived. Though the very earth shook and
trembled with the roar of bombs, the crumbling of massive walls, the
rattle of volley-fire and the crashing of the terrible grenades that
mowed down hundreds as they spread their poisonous gas abroad--though
the shriek of projectiles, the thunder of the air-ship guns now sweeping
the sky in blind endeavor to shatter the attackers all swelled the
tumult to a frightful storm of terror and of death; they still lived,
cowered and cringed there in the bomb-proof steel-and-concrete of the
inner laboratories.
"Come, come!" Flint quavered, peering about him at the deserted room,
still glaring with electric light--the room now abandoned by all its
workers, who, members of Herzog's regiment, had run to take their posts
at the first signal of attack. "Come--this isn't safe enough, even here.
In--in there!"
He pointed toward a vault-like door, leading to the subterranean steel
chambers where Herzog eventually counted on storing some hundreds of
thousands of tons of liquid oxygen--the reserve-chambers, impregnable to
lightning, fire, frost or storm, to man's attacks or nature's--the
chambers blasted from the living rock, deep as the Falls themselves,
vacuum-lined, wondrous achievement of the highest engineering skill the
world could boast.
"There! There!" repeated Flint, plucking at the dazed Waldron's sleeve.
"Tool-steel and concrete, twenty-five feet thick--and vacuum chambers
all about--_there_ we can hide! There's safety! Come, come quick!"
Staring, white-faced (he who had been so red!) and dumb, Waldron
yielded. Together, furtive as the criminals they were, these two
world-masters slunk toward the steel door, while without, their empire
was crashing down in smoke, and flame, and blood!
They had almost reached it when a smash of glass at the far end of the
laboratory whipped them round, in keener terror.
Staring, wild-eyed, they beheld the crouching figure of Herzog. Running,
even as he cringed, he had upset a glass retort, which had shattered on
the concrete floor. And as he ran, he screamed:
"_They're in! They're coming! Quick--the steel vaults! Let me in, there!
Let me in!_"
The coward was now a maniac with terror, his face perfectly white,
writhen with panic, and with staring eyes that gleamed horribly under
the greenish vacuum-lights.
"Back, you! Get out!" roared Waldron, raising a fist. "We--"
A sudden belch of flame, outside, split the night with terrible
virescence. The whole steel building trembled and swayed. Some of its
girders buckled; and the east wall, nearest the oxygen-tanks, caved
inward as a mass of many tons was hurled against it.
A stunning concussion flung all three men to the floor; and, as they
fell, a withering heat-wave quivered through the place.
"The oxygen-tanks!" gasped Flint. "They're blown up--they're
burning--God help us!"
Scorching, yet still eager to live, he crawled on hands and knees toward
the steel door. Waldron dragged himself along, half-dead with terror.
Now, dripping gouts of inextinguishable fire were raining on the roof of
the building. A whirlwind of flame was sweeping all its eastern side;
and a glare like that of Hell itself seared the eyes of the fugitives.
Quivering, trembling, slavering, the old man and Waldron wrenched the
steel door open.
"_Me! Me! Let me in! Me! Save me!_" howled Herzog, dragging himself
toward them.
They only laughed derisively, with howls of demoniacal scorn.
"You slave! You cur!" shouted Waldron, and spat at him as he drew the
vault door shut. "You cringing dog--stay there, now, and face it!"
The great door boomed shut. In the cool of the winding stairway of steel
which led, lighted by electricity, to the trap-door and the ladder down
into the tremendous vaults, the world-masters breathed deeply once more,
respited from death.
Herzog, screaming like a fiend in torment, clawed at the impenetrable
steel door, raved, begged, entreated, and tore his fingers on the lock.
No answer, save the muffled echo of a jeer, from within.
_Boom!_
What was that?
Mad with terror though he was, he whirled about, and faced the room now
quivering with heat.
Even as he looked, a great gap yawned in the western wall, farthest from
the flame-belching oxygen-tank that had been struck.
Through this gap, pouring irresistibly as the sea, swept a tide of
attackers, storming the inner citadel of the infernal, world-strangling
Air Trust.
At the head of this victorious army, this flood triumphant of the
embattled proletaire, Herzog's staring eyes caught a moment's glimpse of
a dreaded face--the face of Gabriel Armstrong.
Gasping, the coward and tool of the world-masters made one supreme
decision. Close by, a rack of vials stood. He whirled to it, snatched
out a tiny bottle and waiting not even to draw the cork--craunched the
bottle, glass and all, in his fang-like, uneven teeth.
An instant change swept over him. His staring eyes closed, his head fell
forward, his whole body collapsed like an empty sack. He fell, twitched
once or twice, and was dead--dead ere the attackers could reach the door
of steel where his bestial masters had betrayed him.
Thus perished Herzog, coward and tool, a victim of the very forces he
himself had helped create.
And at the moment of his death, the masters he had cringed to and had
served, sneering with scorn at him even in their mortal terror, were
tremblingly descending the long metal ladder to the impregnable vaults
of steel below.