SCIENTIST AT BAY.
Heavily, laboriously, clumsily, the tanks crawled on through the
darkness. They were blind and they were fumbling. They went clanking
through a blackness as of the Abyss, with the peculiar confidence of
things that have long been sightless, while rain beat upon them and
thunder roared about them.
Hines and the tank-officer were again bent over the map.
"Schaaf's experiment-station was here," said Hines shortly, touching a
spot on the engraved sheet. "It was more or less a secret, but he was
trying to work out how to make these same darkness-producing waves. He
was trying, in fact, to duplicate Preston's results in hopes of finding
some way to neutralize them. That accounts for his short-wave set and
the experimental license that enabled him to use it."
The tank-officer received a cross-bearing from the tanks they had left
behind at the wrecked bridge, and drew a line on his map.
"This is the third darkness-transmitter Preston's brought into use," he
said quietly.
"And he's using underground a rials," said Hines shortly, "because
anything above ground would have been blown away by the Storm. We
can't locate the transmitters closer than within a quarter of a mile,
by cross-bearings, and we can't count on destroying them even with
explosives unless we locate them more closely than that. Poison-gas
will be useless in the wind that will be blowing by dawn."
"We're licked, then," said the tank-officer.
"Not yet," said Hines grimly. "We've got the bearings now. Let's go on.
I've still got one hope. Schaaf's a smart man."
The tanks crawled on blindly, like gigantic eyeless slugs creeping
along the bottom of the ocean's deepest deep, while within a vast
irregular circle fifty miles across, the drenched, shivering,
hysterical survivors of the Storm itself went closer to madness from
the terror of the dark.
* * * * *
At one o'clock in the morning, while all over the United States people
sat up by their radios and listened fascinatedly to the never-ceasing
broadcasts of news and orders, reports and fragmentary pleas for help,
there was the first direct word from the man who had caused the Storm
That Had to be Stopped.
Radio broadcasting was, of course, the next most important factor,
after Hines's activities in lessening the damage Preston did to the
earth.
All the first night of the storm a warning was broadcast to the
isolated folk who hastily turned to the radio as their sole link
with the outside, that the wind was to be expected to begin again at
daybreak. By broadcasting the location of the few hamlets protected by
fortuitously placed mountains, much good was done.
Mostly, though, the radio served to make all the world realize the
extent of the catastrophe. It is to the credit of the people of America
that trains loaded down with supplies for the devastated area were
already on their way while the Storm still raged on its second day.
The radio enabled all the continent to share in the horror of the
Storm, and also the radio was the means of communication with Hines and
the blinded tanks in the storm-center, so that a hundred million people
shared in his adventure, in his attempt to stop the Storm.
Perhaps the most spectacular feat the radio performed that night was an
accident. It was at one o'clock. The tank-officer in charge of Hines's
tank was communicating with headquarters. The Red Cross had arranged
for half a dozen sentences from him, describing the devastation the
tank had passed through on its way to the mountains. If rehabilitation
was to take place, vast sums would be needed, and money could best be
got while the catastrophe was fresh in peoples' minds.
The tank-officer spoke curtly into the microphone to headquarters. His
words were amplified and rebroadcast and sent over the nation-wide
chains of radio stations. A hundred million people heard his voice
and even the noise of the machinery of the tank, crawling through the
darkness where the Storm was made.
But he had spoken no more than a dozen words when another voice cut
in. This other voice was harsh, metallic; an abominally cocksure and
arbitrary voice. It spoke with a studied insolence.
* * * * *
"This is Preston speaking," said the voice arrogantly, and instantly
folk all over the United States stiffened in their chairs as the
unexpected tones came from their loudspreakers.
"I have been much amused by the accounts of the efforts made to find
and kill me. I have been listening in, of course, from my entirely
secure retreat in the storm-center, and I am speaking on the same
wave-length the tanks have been using. I hear my own voice in another
speaker, being rebroadcast as the lieutenant's voice was supposed to
be. I think it about time that the people of the United States should
know with whom and what they deal."
Preston's voice stopped, and millions of people waited breathlessly.
Static interrupted his words, and whole phrases were sometimes
obliterated by the crashings made by the lightning, but on the whole
his message was clear.
"I have made this storm for my own private purposes. I can continue it
for days, for weeks, even for months. In one week, I am informed, I
will have so deranged the normal atmospheric conditions in the United
States that the crops of this fall will be practically ruined.
"In two weeks, by drawing down the colder air from the Arctic Circle,
I will have brought on winter in Canada. In three weeks there will
be four feet of snow in London, Germany will be frozen in, and all
the north of France will have a semi-arctic climate, while the United
States will face a famine. I invite the meterological experts of the
world to verify my statement.
"I shall continue the storm I have created until the governments I have
mentioned make it worth my while to stop it. In the meantime, I assure
you that the tanks that are trying to locate me have no chance of
success. The Storm will continue until I wish it to stop. I will stop
it only when I am sufficiently paid for my trouble."
The arrogant voice ceased. Announcers' voices, quivering with
excitement, followed with a statement that radio compasses had picked
up the message before its cessation and that it had actually come from
the Catskills, from the storm-center.
The United States began to be afraid. The Boards of Governors of the
Stock Exchanges of New York and Chicago began to arrange, quietly, for
the closing of those exchanges. Cables began to carry long messages in
diplomatic code across the ocean-beds.
Suddenly another broadcast, as widely distributed as the first,
came from Schaaf, in his tiny laboratory set in a hillside. He had
a national reputation, now, as an associate of Hines, and he was
frantically called upon for a statement to nullify the panic that
Preston's announcement would cause.
Schaaf's speech, repeated in the same ten million receiving sets, was
entirely characteristic of him.
"I haff heard Breston's speech," he said dryly. "I remark that my
friendt Hines is on the way to join me in a little _Schrecklichkeit_
party, to be bractised on Breston. I consider that as imbortant as
anything Breston has said. We will haff him in a matter of hours. As
for his threats to mess up der weather of two continents, I say one
thing: No matter how thin you slice it, it is still boloney."
* * * * *
Schaaf's speech had just the tone necessary to restore confidence
without lessening the public's sense of the real urgency of the
situation. There were speculators in food-stuffs and other necessities,
of course, who immediately grasped the opportunity Preston's threats
created. They, by the way, suffered considerable losses by their
enterprise as things turned out.
But on the whole the public reacted in highly favorable fashion to
Schaaf's dry reassurance. Americans will always pay more for a good
joke than a pathetic story, and Schaaf raised more money by the
last line of his speech than all the tear-jerking efforts of radio
spellbinders during the rest of the night.
Schaaf did not listen in and hear himself eulogized on the ether-waves,
the details of his scientific career sandwiched in between casualty
lists and weather predictions. He was placidly unaware of his sudden
celebrity.
In fact, until the restored mail-services brought him sacks of admiring
and begging letters, and an astounding number of proposals of marriage
from female admirers, he was not aware that he had done anything out of
the ordinary.
He was busy. He turned from the microphone with a grunt of disgusted
relief. His experiment-station was a tiny stone-walled building half
sunk in a mountainside. It consisted of four rooms.
The laboratory alone was of use to him now. Experimenting as he had
been with short radio waves, he had needed a workshop in which the
only etheric disturbances would be those he made himself. The walls of
the workshop were lined with copper sheeting and the windows covered
with heavy copper gauze, all of which was grounded. The interior was
insulated from all Hertzian waves from without.
Now that laboratory glowed brightly with electric light, though he
had, only to open a door to see the apparently solid mass of no longer
transparent air which resulted from Preston's devices.
He took down a screen from a window. Instantly the blackness seemed
to pour, to stab, into the brightly lighted laboratory. Through the
opening in the grounded shielding, Preston's short-waves penetrated,
depriving the air of its ability to permit light to pass through it.
A long cone of darkness, so definite as to seem a solid substance,
projected into the room--more powerful than the shielding because of
the nearness to Preston's headquarters.
Schaaf grumbled and measured it, carefully making his measurements from
accurately marked points. He wrote down his figures and replaced the
screen. The seemingly tangible cone vanished with much the effect of
magic.
Schaaf sat down at a little table and began to calculate absorbedly. He
scowled as he worked, and mumbled irritatedly as he took down a book of
logarithms and ran his fingers down its columns.
* * * * *
The table trembled, from time to time, with the violence of the thunder
without. There was a very slow leak in the roof over in one corner,
and now and again a drop fell glittering to an enlarging puddle on the
floor. The wind howled outside. The rain drummed on the roof.
Schaaf finished his calculations, leaned back and absently combed out
his luxuriant yellow whiskers with his fingers, then filled and lighted
his pipe. Its poisonously strong odor filled the air.
The thunder was deafening and nearly continuous. The shrieking of the
wind was daunting. The drumming sound of the rain was unspeakably
depressing. Schaaf smoked comfortably for a space, and picked up the
remnant of a half-eaten sandwich. He bit into it, stopped, and listened
keenly.
There was a thin and dismal hooting above even the tumult from the
skies. Schaaf beamed, and then growled impatiently, He swathed himself
in oil-skins, muttering something about "Der _verdammt_ Breston!" and
took a huge reel of cord from the wall. It looked like the extra-strong
braided cord that is used for scientific kite-flying--or for getting
a kite aloft that is to carry up a temporary a rial. He fastened the
end inside the door, knotting and double-knotting it. He went out,
unreeling the cord behind him, and fought the door shut again.
There was no longer any movement or any activity in the laboratory.
A loud-speaker made nasal noises in one corner, which the booming of
thunder and of wind and rain drowned out to inarticulateness. The
lights burned steadily.
An open fire alternately leaped madly upward and died down to nothing
beneath an improvised damper closing off most of the chimmey-space
above it. Rain made rattling noises on the windows, and wind screamed
overhead, and always, always, always, the thunder boomed and crashed.
Then the door burst open and Schaaf came in again, fumbling his way
back along the cord. He was soaked. Behind him, guiding themselves by
the cord, came three other people. Hines was one of them, tattered
and ragged and with a great gash on his forehead. He carried Kathryn
lightly, in spite of the storm. She was wrapped in an oil-skin, one arm
in improvised splints.
Hines set her down carefully and blinked with the air of a man whose
sight has suddenly been restored. The third person was the officer in
command of the leading tank.
Schaaf put his whole weight against the door and closed it.
"It was not bad work," he observed comfortably. "You stopped on der
concrete road where der big tree had blown down, as I told you by
radio. I came down, blundered into you, and banged on der door. Here we
are. Now, where is der map?"
The tank-officer produced a sheet he had carried under his slicker.
Schaaf began to unroll it.
"I haff sworn--_Gott!_ How I haff sworn!--because I didt not haff a
map of der locality. Miss Bush, go ofer by der fire and get warm. Now,
Hines, show me my bresent location and tell me der scale of der map."
The tank-officer, instead, obeyed both orders. Hines was settling
Kathryn comfortably by the fire. And Schaaf took dividers and a
pencil and calculated feverishly, grumbling in guttural German at
the absurdity of calculating distances in feet and inches instead of
meters. Eventually he measured with painstaking accuracy, drew six
lines from the location of his laboratory to very precise and exact
lengths, and put large dots at their ends.
"There," he said decisively. "That is der best I can do. I have watched
der _verdammt_ darkness. Look!" He pulled out a window-screen and
a black cone of opacity stabbed across the brightly lighted room.
He replaced the screen and it vanished. "Der wafes that destroy
der transparency of der air," he said briskly, "can come in der
window-opening when I remofe part of der copper insulation inside. They
interfere with each other, dissipate, and generally lose der original
effectifness. Which gifes me my information. By der shape of der cone
of blackness, I haff calculated der direction and distance of six
different points from which Breston has transmitted darkness. At these
six spots he has sending-stations."
The tank-officer said warmly:
"Splendid, sir! We took bearings as we came along--see my pencil-lines,
Sir?--and they intersect your lines at just the spots you indicate! It
looks as if you are correct."
"Of course I'm correct! And if I had had der intelligence of an
angle-worm I would haff made der same measurements of der wafes that
made der storm and we would know where Breston is. He is not at all of
those places, certainly."
"No," said Hines. "But what I'm hoping for, Schaaf, is some way to see
in spite of the darkness. Once--"
"_Gott in Himmel!_" cried Schaaf angrily. "Haff I not kicked myself
forty-sefen times? Before, when we fought Breston in New York, his
wafes made der air opaque to fisible light, but not to ultra-fiolet,
and we did tricks with that to find our way about. But now, he has
juggled his wafe-lengths to make der air absorb der ultra-fiolet rays
also. I am as blind as a bat at der bottom of der sea, Hines, and I am
mad! I am mad as der deffil, Hires!"
Hines frowned at the map.
"He'll keep the darkness on, even after daybreak," he said coldly.
"He'll shoot the storm-producing waves out as an addition. And since he
turns off his sending-stations when a tank draws near--"
"Maybe he has microphones in der ground," said Schaaf gloomily. "Der
sound of a tank is unmistakable. Or maybe he switches them on and off
for der mere purpose of being confusing. In any efent I haff done all I
can. I tell you abbroximately where his sending-stations are. But you
cannot find them without seeing them or tracing der wafes home, and he
turns them off when a tank comes near. It is like trying to catch a
mouse that is in six holes at once."
Hines smiled faintly.
"But we have lots of cats," he observed, "Lieutenant, I want these
orders given."
Schaaf listened critically, then appreciatively, and then he beamed as
Himnes's voice went on.
"Hines," he said comfortably, "if your brains were dynamite and they
went off, der report would be like Vesuvius. We got der son-of-a-gun!"
Even the tank-officer grinned confidently as he prepared to make his
way back to the tank by the guiding cord.