INTO THE DESOLATION.
When sunset came and the Storm died down temporarily, it had left its
marks all over a circle of territory a full thousand miles in diameter.
The damage done ranged from a mere blowing-down of signs at the edge
of that circle, to the absolutely unparalleled devastation of the
territory immediately about the storm-center.
In the center, of course, the damage was terrific. Forests, houses,
hamlets, towns, all were leveled to the ground. Yet, there were
survivors. Cellars protected some, as did valleys and hollows. Probably
four or five thousand people lived through it.
The fifty-mile circle of the storm-center was devastated, but it
was not destroyed. And beyond the storm-center, where the wind had
not reached its ultimate velocity, the amount of damage was neatly
proportioned to the distance from the focus of the storm.
But about the edge of that central area--the space Schaaf had spoken of
as the chimney--there was a ringlike strip of utter desolation, five to
fifteen miles wide.
Every particle of vegetation had been swept away by the sheer force of
the wind. The fields were bare even of grass. In spots apparently even
the topsoil had dried to dust and gone sweeping away into oblivion in
the storm-wind. The forests were shattered areas of splintered stumps.
The houses had left as traces only small mounds of masonry, or else no
signs at all.
The storm died down at sunset and for half an hour there was almost
peace. But the vast chimney of sun-heated air which shot upward for
miles had acted as a vacuum, drawing to itself air from every direction
with terrific speed. When the vacuum abruptly ceased to be, the winds
continued to blow for a time from sheer momentum, and piled up a
colossal high-pressure system which was as intolerable as the previous
storm-center had been.
Over all the North Atlantic States, then, there was atmospheric chaos.
Dense clouds formed at nightfall. Rain in unexampled volume fell,
while electric storms wrought havoc. In the Catskill section mountain
streams, choked with the débris of the wind's creation, became flooded
with falling water and abruptly turned to inundations.
In that terrible strip of desolation about the storm-center itself, the
bare, stripped earth turned to a vast morass of mud. And that morass
claimed victims when survivors in the central area tried to cross it
during the darkness and the rain.
* * * * *
At nine o'clock, rain was falling in sheets, in columns, almost in
solid masses. Lurid, unbelievable bolts of lightning leaped from one
horizon to the other.
There were no electric lights, of course, in two thousand square miles
of New York State that night. Beneath monstrous clouds which poured
floods upon the earth, there was only blackness, save at one spot.
There, pencil-beams of light stabbed futilely at the falling rain,
where twelve huge tanks rocked and lurched and slid on up toward the
mountains.
They had stopped in their advance and picked up Hines. He sat up in the
control-room of the largest of all of them, and asked dreary questions
and dully gave instructions which organized the attack.
The tanks would go on up toward the site of the storm-center. They
would gather, presently, and Hines would give instructions which would
be final. Then they would scatter to their several strategic points.
With dawn, when the Storm That Had to be Stopped began again,
they would use the instruments Schaaf had originally designed for
determining the point of origin of certain other short waves.
They would find Preston's station. It would probably be a dugout,
underground, for safety from the storm he could create at will. The
tanks would bomb that station mercilessly. Or if he had intrenched
himself upon a mountain peak, the gun-carrying caterpillars would come
into action. Six-inch guns would assail a solitary man who essayed to
devastate the earth.
Only colossal things such as they were--weighing forty tons each--could
hope to exist and move in the atmospheric turmoil that would begin with
sunrise.
The tanks rumbled and lurched as they made their way in a sedate
long line toward the hills. Rain poured in rivulets from their steel
sides. Sheets and masses of falling water scattered the beams from the
searchlights mounted upon them. From the control-room it was possible
to see perhaps twenty feet with some clarity, and dimly for thirty feet
more. But after that even the searchlight glare was dissipated by the
rain.
Hines looked weary and worn and haggard. All day long he had been in
communication with New York, giving orders which men leaped to obey.
The State had given him full authority. He had shown his ability.
Besides, the scale, the scope of this disaster was one to induce
panic. The leadership of Hines, who had twice defeated Preston, would
restore some confidence in a public otherwise more than inclined to be
panic-stricken.
* * * * *
These were army tanks, shipped on flat-cars as far as the rails were
undamaged, drawn by a locomotive that had crept on and on, as far as it
dared, while the Storm still blew in the daytime. They had come at full
speed immediately darkness fell.
Now they went lurching and pounding up toward the hills. The clanking
of their mighty treads was thunderous in their reverberating interiors.
The roaring of their motors was deafening.
They were full of the smell of hot oil and exhaust-gases and fuel,
but up in the control-room the lightning and thunder blotted out all
sights and sounds, and the sheer desert of mud over which they traveled
toward the hills made it impossible for any man who saw it to think of
anything else.
Hines, alone, thought of Kathryn. The awful desolation over which the
tanks traveled had been covered with farms and houses and forests only
twelve hours before. People had lived here--people who now were torn
and draggled corpses flung haphazard amid the other débris of the Storm.
Hines had been cooped up for twelve hours knowing his helplessness,
knowing that Kathryn was either dead or desperately in need of help.
Now, he was sure, she was dead. The desert of mud over which the tanks
passed was enough to convince him of her death.
The radio had told them that over most of the United States the wind
had reached gale intensity.
The weather bureau in Washington was working like mad to predict the
unpredictable, but from the one day's storm alone weeks of chaotic
weather could be foreseen.
Already meteorologists were speculating upon the effect of the Storm
upon the climate of Europe. California, it was certain, would be
visited by subsidiary hurricanes, and from Texas on north there would
be cyclonic whirls of terrible intensity as the air of the earth moved
to fill up the vacuum Preston could create at will.
What news there was of the loss of life was so monstrous as to have
lost all meaning. The record of towns destroyed, of villages wiped out,
became monotonous. From the standpoint of property destroyed the Storm
was one of the major catastrophes of history; and if the death toll
was lighter than certain plagues and earthquakes, it was only because
the larger cities were fortunately far from the circles of highest
wind-velocity.
* * * * *
The feel of slippery mud beneath the tanks' great treads changed
subtly. The earth became curiously more solid. A great bowlder appeared
not far from the leading tank's track, glistening and running with
rain. The tank changed course to avoid it. Hines looked back. Despite
the falling water, he could detect a long lane of white glows, which
were the searchlights of the following tanks.
The tanks still went on. They were in what seemed to be a semi-solid
mass of water, intermittently made into a greenish universe of light
by lightning-flashes which were blurred by the rain to mere indefinite
illumination. In the periods of darkness between those flashes, the
searchlights gleamed brightly ahead. And water poured from the tanks in
floods.
D bris appeared, water-soaked and shredded. The stumps of wind-whipped,
obliterated Indian corn began suddenly to the left. The treads of
the tanks clanked suddenly on concrete. There was a road beneath the
leading tank.
A speaking-tube whistled in the leading tank.
"Headquarters," came up thinly to the control-room, "orders you to try
to locate yourself by road signs or any other evidences of position."
The officer in command of the tank snorted and made no answer.
The tank went on. There was concrete under the left tread only. The
tank wallowed around and climbed back on the road. It went rumbling
blindly on in the rain. Presently bare concrete was visible. Mud had
not washed across it here.
"There!" said Hines sharply. "A road-sign bent over by the wind! It's
in place!"
An unearthly hooting set up. The tank stopped with a grinding noise.
Hines peered out of the little vision-slits and saw a dripping man with
a flash light bent over something by the side of the road. It was one
of the cast-iron road signs one finds in the Catskills. They are set up
on wrought-iron posts, which are fixed in concrete.
Originally the sturdiness of construction was made necessary by the
vandal habits of a motoring populace, but it served a useful purpose
now. Set facing the wind, the cast-iron plate had caught the full
blast. And the wrought-iron shaft had bent slowly but definitely until
the sign lay nearly flat, facing upward.
The dripping soldier came sprinting back into the tank. The
speaking-tube whistled again,
"The sign says 'North Weddensdale Corporate Limits,' sir."
Hines clenched his hands. This was the village where Kathryn had been
staying! He strained his eyes desperately through the rain.
A rectangular hole to the left of the concrete caught his eye. It was
a cellar. The house had been taken cleanly away from above it. Nothing
was left. Nothing.
"Go on," he said hoarsely.
The tank ground into motion again. Rain poured from its sides. Its
searchlight ray stabbed into the darkness and was dissipated by
falling water.
Then the searchlight ray went out.
* * * * *
Almost instantly thereafter the speaking-tube whistled. "All the tanks,
sir, report their searchlights have gone out."
The officer commanding the leading tank swore to himself. "All right.
Everybody stop and repair them."
Hines heard his voice speaking hoarsely:
"It's the Darkness. The metal walls of the tank act as shields, so we
can see inside, but it's the Darkness--the same darkness Preston turned
on in New York. If you send a man outside to make sure, keep up a noise
so he can find his way back."
Hines went, himself, to the exit door of the tank. He heard two men
moving about outside. The interior of the tank was brightly lighted,
and the door was opened wide, but the light from inside did not strike
upon the earth beneath the tank. It seemed to be absorbed by some
solid black substance which surrounded the metal monster and stretched
solidly almost with an inward bulge, across the open door.
Thunder shook the earth. There was a crashing and crackling of
electricity. From the violence of the report, the lightning-flash must
have struck somewhere near by. But there was no faintest flickering of
light.
Then, in a peculiarly ghastly fashion, a groping hand came out of
the solid wall of blackness across the tank's exit door. It seemed
disembodied, detached from any body. It caught at the edge of the door.
A man came, wild-eyed and staring, out of the apparently solid opacity.
His teeth chattered as he swung into the illuminated tank.
"The--the flash light don't work," he gasped. "I held it up to my eyes
and it just glowed, but it don't give any light. See?"
He pressed the button. A brilliant gleam shot from the flash light. His
jaw dropped open. But Hines nodded his head very bitterly.
The Storm had been made by the broadcasting of very short Hertzian
waves which caused the atmosphere to be opaque to heat; a mere
variation of a device that Preston had used before. Now he had gone
back to the use of his first device again.
Now, from somewhere within a thirty-mile radius, he was broadcasting
short waves differing perhaps by the fraction of a millimeter in length
from those that had produced the Storm. And these tiny ripples in the
ether caused the absorption of all that band of frequencies which made
visible light.
There was darkness outside the tanks so dense as to be tangible, so
complete as to constitute utter blindness, so thick that it caused the
perfect absorption of even the ten thousand candle-power searchlight
beams within a distance of three feet.
* * * * *
Hines thought grimly, staring at the apparently solid wall of darkness
without the door. The metal walls of the tanks, of course, absorbed
and grounded the waves that impinged upon them. The darkness could not
invade the tanks themselves. But it blinded the drivers beyond the
possibility of a remedy.
The engines of the tank stopped suddenly. The officer in command swung
down from the control-room, his lips twisted wryly.
"I reported to headquarters," he said briefly, "and received orders to
stop my motors and wait for dawn. It is believed that the darkness will
be lifted when the Storm is started up again."
Hines did not hear him. He was listening with his ears strained to
their utmost. In the near-silence that came with the engine's stopping,
the sound of the rain and thunder outside seemed to redouble. The rain
was invisible, the lightning unseen, but there was a tumult without the
tank that was terrifying. Yet in the midst of that tumult Hines thought
he heard a faint cry.
It was repeated. Again, and again. And cold sweat came out upon Hines.
He could not believe his ears, yet he dared not disbelieve them. Out
there in a storm such as would have been called a tornado if the Storm
itself had not given a new meaning to the word, he heard a voice which
he could swear was that of Kathryn!
The storm itself was violent enough to make venturing into it
madness--and he would have to go into it as a blind man.
The cry came once more. It was fainter, this time.