Chapter VIII: Zero Hour

The two of them came above ground with Kathryn, and only two minutes to spare. The ensign and ten men were about to assail a squat concrete structure after the orthodox fashion of warfare when Hines gasped, "Get your men! Get 'em to the boat! We killed Preston but not his men! Zero hour's two minutes off!"

The air upon the island itself was no longer opaque. Schaaf's berserk rage among the vacuum tubes had cut that off. But the column of darkness leading to an utterly black sky still held steady. Somewhere in the extraordinarily clear air a rocket shot up, very far away.

The ensign's whistle shrilled madly. Hines, Schaaf, Kathryn, and a dozen men raced for the boat. Other men loomed up, panting, and flung themselves through the night. Once a man tripped over a low wire and four men fell on top of him. There was a long drawn out, deliberate whining sound in the air. It was growing louder. It rose to a shriek and passed overhead and went off deafeningly a quarter of a mile away. The four fallen men were up in the fractional part of a split second at that sound.

Into the boat in desperate, panting haste. Shoving off.

They had been rowing a pitifully short time when little licking flames became visible on the skyline toward shore. Somewhere in the upper darkness there was a hail of steel and high explosive hurtling toward the island.

Something shrieked and splashed overboard not a dozen yards away. The drumming noise of a barrage began and held for nearly a second, and then the sound of exploding shells was not like a barrage at all. It was like one long, continuous explosion, punctuated with monstrous blasts of sound which could be nothing less than twelve-inch shells exploding.

The men at the oars pulled like madmen. The air was full of the shrieking of steel missiles, and the island behind them was lost in a mass of darting flames like marsh fire. Things fell into the sea on all sides with monstrous splashings, and the cutter pitched crazily, and more shells screamed and whistled and howled, and lambent flames of death and destruction played over the island, with ever and again a blinding flash and an overpowering concussion where a big projectile had hit.

It seemed to Hines, holding fast to Kathryn, that they would be battered to pieces by sheer waves of sound if stray shells did not do the work. For that was a more immediate danger still. Many shells that fell short of the island ricocheted and exploded in mid-air or splashed into the sea again on the farther side. Some fell fearfully near them. Some struck in the shallows near the shore, and those explosions sent concussions through the water that made the hull of the speeding cutter quiver and shake. They racked and twisted the little cockleshell. The monstrous waves generated by the explosions flung it crazily about, and the concussions wrenched its timbers, and the blasts of the detonating shells half-dazed those in it.

But the oarsmen pulled like madmen. The ensign shouted encouragement and orders. And slowly--so slowly--the cutter drew away from the inferno that was the island.

* * * * *

Hines was holding Kathryn fiercely tight when he realized that Schaaf was shouting in his ear. They were a mile away from the island, but the din was still deafening.

"Hines!" bellowed Schaaf. "Hines! _Die Sterne!_ Der stars are shining!"

The wind over the water was bitter cold, but as the cutter drew farther and ever farther away from the low-lying place that had been Preston's stronghold, all the world seemed to take on a nearly normal seeming.

Stars twinkled and glittered in the sky overhead. Far to the east a vast, partly round orb was coming up over the edge of the world. For the world had an edge again! It was the moon. And there were dusky little shadows against the stars, which would be clouds, and generally the world seemed astoundingly normal.

Later on, of course, the sun would rise, and there would be great winds rushing to meet its warm rays, and men and women and children would go mad with joy at sight of the orb they had missed for exactly one day.

Schaaf, swearing joyful Teutonic profanity, would plunge into a new task before him, of research and duplication of Preston's results, and would come out of it bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, but with apparatus which would perform every one of Preston's tricks to order.

He would hale Hines back from his honeymoon to join with him in forming the International Weather Control Corporation, whose typhoon patrol vessels are to be found wherever bad weather threatens in the tropics, using Preston's discoveries to create half a dozen small counter-storms where a hurricane or typhoon threatens. Those same tiny storms, too, he and Hines would use to lengthen the Alaskan summer by two months and raise the winter temperature by nearly thirty degrees.

All this was yet to happen, and the possibly greater benefit of liberating an unlimited supply of power by Preston's freezing ray. Liquid air drips from every iron surface on which those rays are playing. Nowadays, that liquid air provides the power to run the monster generating stations at Manhasset, and Panama, and at Algiers. And since their success, others are being built as rapidly as the structures can be completed. It seems probable that within a relatively few years coal need no longer be mined for power, nor need nations bicker or quarrel over petroleum.

But on that morning when the ship's cutter rowed away from Metinic Island the coast toward which it moved was flickering oddly as if heat lightning were playing there. There were lurid spoutings of fire and shattering explosions coming from the land they had left, and there were dim bulks all around the horizon which emitted tongues of flame and unbearable thunderings. Even overhead there was noise. It was a constant, long-continued screaming of things soaring through the air to fall upon and shatter further the already devastated earth of the island. The battleships and cruisers were literally destroying that small bit of Earth. Where the fourteen-inch shells exploded there was only empty space left, into which the salt water seeped slowly.

The cutter went on, snail-like, while destruction raged behind it. Schaaf fingered his beard and made blissful explanations to the ensign, to whom his blending of abstruse technicalities and incongruous slang was nearly unintelligible. Hines relaxed slowly from his tension. He knew that Preston was dead now. He was sure of it at last. Quite, quite sure--he clenched his strong hands.

Kathryn said uneasily:

"I--I've a great story for the _Star_."

"Forget it," said Hines briefly. "We were supposed to be married yesterday, Kathryn."

"Y-yes," she admitted. "We were."

"So," said Hines, "we are going to be married to-day."

He held her hand fast.

"Y-yes," she said, after a long time. "We are... But oh, when I think what might have happened, I wish I'd never heard of Preston. I wish he never had existed."

"Shush, my dear," said Schaaf paternally. "He got you a husband. Der statement is banana oil."