The Earth-Tube (11 page)

III

In the night a small airplane crossed over the ruins of what had been Buenos Aires and landed beyond the blackened battleground. Two men got out and shook hands gravely, without a word. One wore the clothing of a ragged old man. He walked with difficulty as if his joints were stiff with much hobbling. The other was pilot of the plane.

For a moment they stood there in the silence, listening. No sound was to be heard. The known enemy camps were miles away, and in the bruised and blackened site where they stood there was not even animal life to break the stillness.

“Be here in two weeks,” said the old man at length. “If you find me. well, you will find me. If not, report at once to Washington. That’s all.”

The two shook hands again, and the old one moved slowly away on his stick. When he had gone a short distance the engine of the airplane roared, and the ship rose easily into the darkness.

At nearly the same hour, a little over a hundred miles away, another man was creeping along the seashore north and east of what had once been Montevideo. Near by there was a long finger of land which reached out into the ocean until it was lost in the darkness and the faintly visible motion of the sea. At the land end of the causeway the great curved door was open a little crack, perhaps as wide or wider than a man, and through the opening came a yellow glimmer of light. The wayfarer turned his feet cautiously toward the illumination, and when he had reached the unguarded office he stood beside it and peeped around the edge. A little later he walked through the door and disappeared.

King and Anna, sitting in Dr. Scott’s library in New York, heard with mingled feelings that the two technicians had been successfully launched upon their dangerous visit to the camps of the enemy. Over the telephone the Secretary, who had just received reports from his base camps in South America, explained that he had every confidence in the two men he had selected for this mission, and they were bound to succeed.”

“Secretary Angell is always optimistic,” commented King.

“But surely he is right this time,” Anna returned. “It won’t be hard for those young men to get the information.” There was a note of dread and foreboding in her voice as she went on, exclaiming suddenly: “But King. if they should fail. !” She left the rest unsaid.

If King heard, he made no sign. He was busy with his own thoughts, revolving the Asian puzzle in his mind, trying to bring from it a clear plan of action and defense.

“The thing must be simple,” he said, half aloud. “It must be so simple that it has eluded us! It would mean something to me, Anna, if I were to be the one to find out that secret.”

His companion shuddered, but did not answer.

The hour was late, but in the laboratory adjoining the aged scientist was at his work. Through the open doors of the library there came strange noises and unreal lights and electrical crackings which echoed against the walls and flared grotesquely among the shadows cast by the yellow flickering of the soft wood fire.

King and Anna knew too well the nature of the task which was absorbing Dr. Scott’s time and energy in the other room. Almost feverishly he had been working in his long quest for rays that would destroy the atoms of the^Asian tanks or any other matter that should come within their range. It was his one hopeful contribution toward the winning of the war; if he could find the ray and harness it, the country might be saved.

As they were sitting in the library there came suddenly from the laboratory a new and louder sputter and a flare of most unearthly light. The entire building seemed to shudder with it, and a glass tube which had been resting on the table back of the silent pair seemed to sing out abruptly in unison with some distant vibration before it burst in many pieces with a loud pop. As quickly as it had come the ghastly light disappeared; the noises stopped. And Dr. Scott was shouting incoherently in the laboratory at the top of his voice.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he screamed. He came hurrying out of the gloom toward Anna and King, who had leaped, startled, to their feet.

“I had the disintegrating ray,” he explained with great excitement. “I produced it, but the first thing to disintegrate was the apparatus itself. I’ve got to learn how to avoid that, and we’ll have a weapon for the world.”

Turning on the lights the three went back into Professor Scott’s alcove. It looked as if a bombshell had burst in there, and under the light it was seen that Dr. Scott himself had not escaped without serious burns. Parts of his clothing had entirely disappeared. The table upon which he had been working was more than half gone, together with all of the elaborate apparatus which had been sitting on it. A small heap of grayish dust, less than a tablespoonful, lay on the floor.

“Do you know what it means?” continued the scientist, almost hysterical. “Do you know what it means? It means that if I can reproduce and control that ray we will be able to annihilate the enemy! But God, I’m not even sure that I can perform the experiment again. It happened when I wasn’t looking, quite by accident. Fortunately I was standing a little distance away when I threw the current on, else I, too, would have been down there.” He indicated the pile of dust.

“Look here,” said King, taking a pencil and paper, “let’s draw it out, the way your apparatus was fixed. Maybe we can study it over and find a better way to set it up.”

Already he was beginning to sketch the portions of the machine which he remembered, but Anna, looking at her father, gave a little cry. He was leaning against the wall, weak and very faint.

“Quick,” she exclaimed. “Get a doctor and help me get him in bed. He’s hurt. Quick, help me, King!”

Together they carried the old man to his bedroom, and King took off his clothes while Anna summoned aid. He was unconscious before the doctor came, breathing heavily. The physician examined him carefully. Aside from a few minor scars, which appeared to be burns, the old scientist was, to all appearances, unhurt.

“It’s just shock, I think,” the doctor said when he had heard the details of the experiment which Dr. Scott had been performing. “He’s been working too hard. He should rest two or three weeks. That will bring him around.”

“Two or three weeks,” exclaimed King in consternation. “Doctor, do you know the safety of the world may depend on what Professor Scott does in the next two or three weeks?”

The physician shook his head firmly.

“Either he rests,” he said, feeling his patient’s pulse, “or the world will have to get along without him. permanently.”

Anna took hold of King’s arm impulsively.

“Then it is up to us,” she said.

“Yes,” replied King. “Let’s try to set the apparatus up.”

IV

The Secretary of War of the Pan-Americas kept in his office a private file of messages sent to his department which must by no means reach the newspapers or other public information agencies. Into this file on the week after Dr. Scott’s sudden illness went a brief message from an isolated military camp in South America, which read as follows:

Pilot A. . went to the prearranged meeting place south of Buenos Aires last night in response to a special radio message from S. . N. . , who was dropped there eight days ago for espionage directed by the War Council. S. . N. . was equipped with a small radio sending apparatus with which he was to signal for aid or call the plane when he was ready to leave the enemy terrain with his information. When A. . reached the spot, he circled over it several times and finally sighted S. . N. . . He wirelessed us that he was landing, but no further messages were received from either A. . or S. . N. . .

In the file, clipped to the message, was a carbon copy of the reply, sent the same day:

Send searching party at once. Make every effort to learn what happened to the pilot and S. . N. . . Wire immediately results and spare no expense in the search.

Angell.

The Secretary now had the reply to this second message in his hand, and he was pacing nervously back and forth in his inner office, deliberating whether to call the President about it at once or wait for further word from South America. The spies had now been gone two weeks, the time limit set by the War Council. The searching expedition, in which more than a hundred airplanes had taken part, had found neither the spy who had been landed south of Buenos Aires disguised as a crippled old man,
or
the airplane in which A. . , the pilot whose name had been so carefully deleted from the dispatches as they were filed, had flown to meet his confederate.

It was the loss of the airplane which particularly puzzled and alarmed the Secretary. Somehow the Asians had taken the spy and had used him as a decoy to bring the pilot to the spot. But why had they done that? It was clear. because they wanted an airplane of the latest design. Perhaps they would reproduce them in hundreds of thousands, and the air would be full of a new terror.

“I will tell the President at once,” the Secretary decided, picking up a telephone. But in a moment he laid it down again. The capture of an airplane was, he felt, due to his blundering directions. It was his idea that the spy should be landed back of the lines in a plane, equipped with a radio to call the plane again. By any other strategy the airplane could not have been caught. How could he tell the President and the War Council that he had been responsible for the loss not only of a spy and pilot, but of an airplane as well?

He crumpled the message in his hand and threw it to the floor. When he had taken the position of Secretary of War there had been no war in sight, and the likelihood of his ever having to mess around with military details, aside from parades and martial music, had been so remote as to seem negligible. But now he was faced suddenly with war. with war which was worse than anything any one had ever before imagined. A clever and ingenious enemy, threatening to engulf the continents, and here, in one of the moves intended to outwit them, he had played directly into their hands!

Should he tell the President? Secretary Angell slowly unwadded the message from his military aide in South America and read it again:

Have searched all night. Sent five squadrons of planes to take photographs of every inch of the terrain and others to make minute search. No sign of the enemy or of either of the men lost. No sign of the plane, though found searings in the soft dirt where it had landed. Will make further search by daylight today, though considered very dangerous. No enemy sighted on the plain.

He smoothed the wrinkled paper on his knee and placed it carefully in the files with the other communications. He would not tell what had happened to the first spy and the plane; at least not just yet. There was still another man who ought to be sending word any time now that he had successfully completed his mission. If he came back there would be no need to mention the earlier accident at all.

He dismissed the matter of the lost airplane from his mind. Why would the Asians go to such trouble to get a model plane? What need had they of planes, when their tanks were so effective?

He slammed the door of the filing cabinet shut and locked it. Turning, he brushed his hair into place and adjusted his tie. His fingernails appeared soiled. He took a small tool from his pocket kit and began to polish them. It was important, he was thinking, for a public official to look the part.

The Secretary’s office was at one end of a long corridor. It was heavily carpeted and richly furnished, as were all of the offices of the governmental buildings. In the hallway could be heard the whisperings of many feet as they passed, the aides and messengers and other servants of an empire government.

But the Secretary was thinking, as he worked over his hands, of something other than the great work of the State.

The Pan-American War Mothers Patriotic Society was giving a formal luncheon that afternoon, with the Secretary of War of the Pan-Americas as honor guest. He would make a speech about the war which would be broadcast over most of the two continents. He hoped his voice would be good.

He finished his nails with a flourish and held them up to the light.

There was a uniformed attendant at the door with a, telegram.

“It’s a confidential message, sir,” he asserted. “I was told to deliver it to you personally.”

The telegram was from the army base near Asuncion. It read:

your technician w. . n. . detailed for espionage work behind the lines and dropped three days ago vicinity enemy causeway picked up along coast in friendly territory by airplane squadron early to-day stop was blinded in both eyes ears had been amputated and other mutilation stop was babbling incoherently stop sent to military hospital here for treatment stop physicians unable to get anything out of him except enemy had captured tortured him then turned loose north the lines with warning to other spies stop in mutterings kept saying quote it is made out of mud comma only mud unquote physicians say temporary insanity shock and exposure.

The Secretary’s hand trembled. He thrust the message hastily into his pocket and walked briskly down the hall. He stopped before he left the building for a drink of water.

He was not quite so nervous by the time he had reached the scene of the luncheon. He was thinking by that time of what he would have to say over the radio. It would never do to betray excitement or alarm; rather he must appear to have the whole situation well in hand.

“We turn now to a few moments consideration of those barbarians from the other side of the earth who have presumed to invade this free and quiet land of ours,” he would say. “Let us have no fear of the outcome of this contest. At last we have the situation in hand, and day by day our fighting men are pouring southward to meet the far-flung attack with steel and shells and flame that will wipe these enemies from the earth!”

The ladies of the Pan-American War Mothers Patriotic Society applauded his speech most heartily that afternoon.

V

King Henderson was talking quietly and gravely with two men. One of them was the President of the Pan-Americas, and the other was Alexander Jenson, a war pilot whose reputation as a dare-devil flier had gained him fame throughout the world. It was he who had opened the first trans-polar air line from the old United States to Europe. It was he also who had charted the higher air currents over the Pacific Ocean, and had demonstrated the practicability of the highflying rocket plane for heavy passenger and freight duty. In his less spectacular hours he had practiced stunt flying and had, in addition, worked out at least seven improvements to wing design which had been incorporated on virtually every modern plane in the civilized world.