Sinister Barrier (23 page)

As this expert completed his task, Graham spoke to him in harsh, deliberate tones. “I don’t fancy handling a trick circuit jumping the power line to the impeller switch.” The concentrated venom in his voice appalled his hearers.

The runt he had addressed turned on him a wizened, monkeyish face in which pale blue eyes regarded him blankly. Dropping a piece of thin cable, he felt casually in his pocket as if seeking a pair of pliers.

Graham shot him where he poised, the powerful, point-blank blast fairly flinging the fellow backward. While Laurie and the rest looked on white-faced, Art Wohl stepped unconcernedly to the body, felt in its pocket, extracted a small, egg-shaped object.

“Holy smoke, a bomb! He’d have shredded us along with the dingbat!”

“Never mind. Take it away, Art, and dump it in that reservoir out back.” He transferred his attention to Laurie. “Unhook that power by-pass and check the circuit, Duncan. See if the output is all right. If so, we’ll run the thing out and tie it to those earths.”

A minute later, Laurie pronounced, “It’s ready for action. It’ll never function more perfectly even if it achieves nothing.”

“Good!” They drove it out, earthed it. Laurie departed with his three men, leaving only Wohl.

Graham sat high up in the assembly, the power, impeller, elevator and turntable controls within easy reach. A dull, cloudy sky was heavy overhead. He had an argument with Wohl as the smoke and spume of a rocket-shot sprang high in the south.

“Beat it, Art,” he ordered. “There are Vitons over there.” He indicated a horde of glowing balls roaming in from the north-east. “This is no time to squat here and debate with you. Chase after Duncan and the others—I’ll give you half a minute to get clear.”

“But—” began Wohl, protestingly.

“Scram!” roared Graham in a frantic voice.

He watched Wohl slouch miserably away, waited until he was out of sight beyond the hangar. Before him as he sat, the cylindrical funnel projected like the barrel of a monster gun. The approaching luminosities were now only a mile distant.

Wide-sighted eyes raked the sky as he gave Wohl time to gain safe distance. The origin of the Vitons would never be known, he decided. Their existence would remain as much a mystery as that of pneumococci, poodles, or any other form of life. But it was his pet theory that they were true natives of Earth, and it was also his hunch that they were about to be wiped off Earth forever—if not by one battling human group, then by some other.

Zero hour had come, the fateful moment had arrived. He swung the great funnel, lined it upon the advancing orbs. The funnel moved lightly on its gimbals, and the entire assembly spun smoothly on its turntable frame. He heard power being made by the whining generators in the hangar, and noted that the time was ninety minutes from Europe’s deadline. Snapping a switch, he let the power pour through.

There followed a few seconds’ pause while the tubes warmed up. Over there, in strategic posts ten or twelve floors high, distant observers watched through field glasses that trembled in their hands.

The half-centimeter beam fountained into the shaft, polarized, directable. It spiked from the funnel’s maw, the axis of its whirling impulses parallel with the skeleton-sights lined upon the Vitons.

This frequency lay beyond even the Bjornsen vision-range, and the beam could not be seen. But its effect was startlingly visible. The leading luminosity of a prowling string of ten stopped in mid-air as if barred by an unseeable obstruction. It turned deeper in color, from bright blue to dark purple, almost instantaneously switched to orange of extreme brilliance, then popped into nothingness. It was gone so utterly and completely that its going shocked the army of hidden observers.

The remaining nine Vitons bobbed around undecidedly, and another stopped, went through the blue-purple-orange-obliteration cycle before the rest scattered at top speed. They bulleted straight upward, into the clouds.

Somebody was bellowing like a mad bull as Graham elevated the funnel and caught a third in full flight. Somebody howled an idiotic remark about it being more sporting to get ’em on the wing.

With the tail of his eye, he saw an enormous gout of yellow-white flame vomit from the general area of Broadway. The noise followed, then the air-blast. It rocked him in his seat. His lips closed firmly, the strange bellowing ceased, and he realized that he had been bawling himself hoarse.

Some sixth sense—probably his extra-sensory perception—made him whirl his assembly around. He spun dizzily behind the impeller casing, caught a line of spheres rushing him from the south.

He started yelling again as the leader went deep purple. The following luminosities slowed so suddenly that he fancied they had feet, braced forward, and still skidding. Their velocity was too great for that. They crashed headlong into their stricken fellow at the moment it flared into an eye-searing orange.

“One for Mayo!” he hollered, jigging on his seat. “One for Webb! One for Beach, you dirty, stinking gobs of parasitic lousery! Another for Farmiloe, and the whole damn lot of you for Bjornsen!”

Ceasing his insane howls, he watched the results of the aerial collision. For the space of a single heart-beat, the wildly whirling conglomeration of energy maintained enlarged but spherical form in the astounded heavens. Then it exploded with a terrible roar.

Graham’s ear-drums bounced against each other. Displaced air almost tore him from his precarious saddle. The entire apparatus wrenched at its fastenings and groaned. While the high-up mess of wavicles went haywire, fierce rays struck him like vicious sunburn, forcing him to close his eyelids to protect his pupils.

But he couldn’t keep quiet, he wouldn’t keep quiet. This was the end of the trail, this was his lone half hour if never he enjoyed another, and, above all, this was retribution. He whooped like a charging Sioux as deftly he swung the funnel through a ninety degree arc and blasted two scintillating menaces dropping upon him from above.

Now it was clear how they’d set off those tanks in Silver City. A dozen of them, or twenty, or perhaps fifty had committed suicide, plunging into the tanks, merging as they struck. That merging had destroyed their natural balance, collectively converting them into a super-detonator. They had in their ancient lore a secret only recently discovered by their human slaves: the secret of violent disruption when energy-forms—radio-active or Vitonic—exceed critical mass.

That silver nitrate had received the world’s worst wallop, a sock in the neck that made the atom-bomb look piddling. And that great black finger pointing to where Silver City’s souls had gone had been a monstrous column of maddened atoms seeking new unions as they splashed upward.

Whirling his turntable again, he threw a free sample of hell at an oncoming sextet, saw them dispel their energy in visible frequencies and cease to be. These Vitons could afford to be nonchalant about stuff coming at them along Lissajous’ complicated path, for nature had conditioned them to the solar output. They could stand it. Maybe they liked it. But hyperbolic:
that
corkscrewed into their very guts!

There was a tremendous array of luminosities collecting on the extreme limit of the northern horizon. He tried to reach them with his beam, found he was unable to discern any result, concluded that they must be beyond effective range. More man-made volcanos belched in the east. The air held smells of ozone, burning rubber and wet cement. Voices made indistinct by distance were shouting all around.

He thought of America’s grounded air fleet, ten thousand fast, efficient machines that dared not ascend so long as there were luminosities to take control of the pilots’ minds and set one against another. That was going to be altered pretty soon. Winged warriors were going to darken the sky, while below them people spoke the sweetest word of any man’s war—“Ours!”

So far, he’d wiped out only the reckless, lazy or unwary, but now they knew their danger. A mass attack was about to be made, an onslaught in which the Vitons would demonstrate once and for all the fullness of their united power. They would bullet toward him in companies, battalions, brigades, in numbers far greater than he could slaughter. They were going to blot him off the face of the disputed Earth, and the projector along with him. The end was near, but it had been a great run.

Searching the sky, he saw a squadron of Asian strat-planes zooming eastward with the calm confidence of things in cahoots with God. Puff-balls and sparks sprang into being behind and beneath them. He wondered whether their fanatical pilots had witnessed the fate of some of their supposed-ancestral spirits, concluded that they had not.

The news ought to have got around by now. It would be all over the New World, and probably Europe had full details. Europe would hold on, knowing that victory was now a matter of time rather than doubt. Maybe one of the other groups also had succeeded. Anyway, it didn’t matter—this success at Faraday’s was humanity’s triumph.

He ceased his pondering when the faraway cohorts soared upward. They made so huge and fantastic an aurora that it became hard to conceive their complete invisibility to ordinary, untreated eyesight. They were a bright blue myriad, a veritable army whose numbers filled the northern sky with a panorama of glowing horror, a heavenly host not born of heaven and long rejected by hell. The speed of their advance was almost incredible.

Even as Graham braced himself for what was coming, a small patch in the enemy’s center darkened to purple, went orange, puffed out of existence. It had him puzzled for a moment, then he remembered—Yonkers.

“Good old Steve!” he roared. “He’s done it. Give them hell, Steve!”

Shooting power along, he sprayed the rapidly swelling horde. Blue switched to purple and orange, became nixed. An untouched section detached itself from the main body, fell headlong on Yonkers, some changing color as they fell.

The rest shot vengefully toward Graham. He knew what was going to happen, sensed it from the way in which they gradually concentrated themselves as they sped along. Up to the last moment he let them have it hot and strong, cancelling them wholesale with furious words and lethal impulses. Then, as they merged suicidally, he reached the pit in four frantic leaps, embraced the pole, let the force of gravity snatch him down.

Ghastly, glowing blue momentarily wavered and undulated over the mouth of the shaft as he dropped at breathtaking speed. The whole sky had become a bowl of glossy azure. Then, abruptly, it flamed unbearably. A brain-searing roar as of the cosmos being ripped to tatters smashed into his already maltreated eardrums. The slide-pole danced like a juggler’s wand.

Helplessly, he was flicked off the pole, fell into shaking depths. The shaft quivered from base to mouth, its walls crumbled, earth, stones, lumps of concrete poured after him in a deadly rain. Something bigger and blacker than the rest came unstuck, fell ponderously through general blackness, landed dully on yielding flesh.

Graham emitted a queer sigh. His mind wandered off, a barge of funereal ebony floating in sooty seas.

It was comfortable in bed, so comfortable that the illusion was well worth preserving. Shifting his head contentedly, Graham felt a sharp pain lance through it, opened his eyes.

Yes, he was in bed. He waggled his fingers, felt around. Definitely a bed. Amazedly, he surveyed a white sheet, studied a picture on the opposite wall. It was
A Stag At Bay.
He extended his tongue at it.

A chair creaked at his side, he winced as he turned his head to look, discovered Wohl’s broad-shouldered figure.

“Good evening, Rip van Winkle,” greeted Wohl, with unctuous politeness. He indicated a clock and a calendar. “It’s ten in the evening of Thursday. For three days you’ve been deaf, dumb, dopey and doubled up. In other words, you’ve been your natural self.”

“Is that so?” Graham’s snort was a little less fiery than of yore. He glared toward the stag. “Did you hang that blasted thing? If so, it isn’t funny.”

Wohl looked at it, endured the pain of thought, then said, “Haw-haw!”

Struggling upward, Graham propped himself on one elbow, ignored his throbbing cranium. “Get me my rags, you ignorant flattie—I’m going places.”

“Nothing doing.” Wohl’s broad hand pressed him gently down. “This is one time when I give orders and you take ’em.” He made the declaration with unashamed relish, and went on, “Those luminosities devastated an area a couple of miles in diameter, killed many observers. It took us twelve hours to locate your funk-hole and dig out the lump of cat-meat that was you. So lie down and be at peace while Uncle Art tells you some bedtime stories.”

Producing a printed newspaper, he opened it, gave a brief sketch of the day’s events, reading in a voice that fairly gloated.

“Mayor Sullivan says city now adequately protected. Electra’s hundred scores new high for one day’s projector output. Two more Asian strat-plane squadrons land at Battery Park and surrender.” Glancing at his listener, he remarked, “That’s merely local stuff. An awful lot has happened while you snored on like a fat hog.”

“Humph!” Graham felt peeved. “What about Koenig?”

“He lost two operators when Yonkers took it on the chin. A lot of surrounding observers went west, too. But the rest are all right.” Wohl reversed his paper. “Listen to this,” he invited. “Nebraska line straightened. Our armor pushes on against weakening opposition. Rebellion spreads through Asian ranks as first transmitters reach front and destroy overhead luminosities. Pacifist Asians seize Chungking and start manufacture of anti-Viton beams. Europe pressing eastward at fast pace. Washington expects Asian offer of armistice and aid in wiping out luminosities.” He rolled up the paper, shoved it under Graham’s pillow. “The war’s as good as over, thanks to you.”

“Nuts!” said Graham, sourly. He lifted himself again. “Get me my cover-ups. I’m not a thieving louse like you—I don’t snitch blankets.”

Wohl came to his feet, stared in mock horror. “By God, Bill, you look awful. You look real bad. I guess you need a doctor.” He moved toward the door.

“Don’t play the fool,” shouted Graham. Hurriedly he sat up, held his head together until it decided not to fall apart. “Fetch me my pants before I get out and paste you one. I’m beating it out of this dump.”