Chapter VIII: Preston's Fortress

Hines grinned savagely, up in the control-room.

"We got one of them!" he said grimly. "We got it by accident, maybe, but we got one of them!"

The speaking-tube whistled. The tank-officer answered, then turned to Hines.

"Tank Number Four thinks it has located another station. It is going ahead. The moment of light helped."

Grinding, pounding, roaring progress, with the wind a terrific pressure all about. One minute passed, two, three...

Light again. The leading tank was at the crest of the hill-road. Desolation was all about. Far away--miles and miles away, it seemed--there was a smother of white which would be a lake, with a dark spot upon it which would be a rocky islet.

Again the speaking-tube whistled.

"Number Four reports it set off two bombs. Light came on after the second."

Hines's jaws were clamped tightly.

"Every one destroyed," he said coolly, "helps to get the others. That's two of them, and we've got cats at the mouse-holes now!"

Again utter blackness. Mountains, the long straight stretch of white road descending, the frothing lake and the island at the end of the valley, all were blotted out. There was only the clanking of machinery and the bestial roar of the wind that thrust with a terrible force at the tanks.

Down the long road which no man could see. Despite the wall of wind without, the green mountainsides had seemed strangely inviting. And the sunlight had seemed brighter than ever the sun had seemed before. The deadly blackness was the more intolerable because weary eyes had looked upon the light again.

The machinery clanked and rumbled.

"Number Three tank reports--Number Seven also, that they have located transmitting stations--"

"One of them is wrong, maybe," said Hines coolly, "but let them both try."

The man at the steering-bar said quietly:

"We're nearly out of gas, Lieutenant. I just noticed it. Enough for two more miles, maybe."

The speaking-tube again.

"Number Three tank reports it exploded two bombs. Its station ceased to transmit, but the darkness still holds. Number Seven is letting go now.... Number Two has located a station.... Seven reports its station has ceased to transmit darkness. Number Two is bombing now.... Five has found its station."

"That completes the list," said Hines steadily, "if none of them made a mistake."

Again the voice from below.

"Two has put its station out of action.... Five fell into some sort of excavation. Can't get out at the moment. Asks for orders."

"If the ship can stand hand-grenades," said Hines savagely, "have them tossed out of all ports and see what happens."

Darkness. The pressure of the wind and its terrible steady roar. The noise of the machinery of the tank--

Light!

* * * * *

Again sunlight. Again the mountains. Again the smother of white which was the lake ahead. The leading tanks advanced heavily until the concrete road divided into two, and one went along each shore-line. This lake had been a summer resort once, but now the trees were splintered and blown away. The houses were utterly destroyed. There was only the uncannily blue sky and the still-green grass carpet of the shores, and a rocky small island half-smothered in foam.

The tank came to a cumbersome halt. Schaaf popped his whiskers through the companionway that led up to the control-room.

"Ha!" he said exuberantly. "We haff der son-of-a-gun! Hines, I haff to take some observations! I think and I suspect, but I haff to be sure where der last of der excitement takes place."

Hines-stared about, and then pointed. A stony cliff reared upward some hundreds of yards to the right. It was forty or fifty feet high, and a heap of débris beneath it was proof that it created a lee. He indicated it in silence. The tank crawled heavily, smashing a way into the heaped-up trash.

Its engines coughed and stopped.

"Out of gas, sir," reported some one from below.

"It is no matter," said Schaaf blandly. "I haff a hunch. Der island ofer yonder is a charming place. One could establish a residence there and put in a power-house."

"Get a range-finder reading on it," said Hines curtly. "Have all the tanks range it."

Schaaf was cautiously opening the tank-door. He put one hand cautiously outside.

"Me a rope around me," he said comfortably, "and I take a chance. There is a wind, but not such a hell of a wind. Der bank makes a lee."

He stepped outside with an electric-light extension and a square sheet of iron. It seemed peculiar, even futile, to be carrying an electric bulb in the overpoweringly bright sunshine. Schaaf balanced himself precariously.

Radiant heat could not be felt from the electric bulb; only in contact with the glass could its heat be detected. It was an exact parallel with the light-waves that Preston could neutralize, but with a metal plate between the bulb and the source of the neutralizing short waves.

A gun went off not ten feet above his head. Schaaf swore and sat down violently. His necktie flopped about his face, blinding him for an instant. Then he heard the dull concussions of other guns. Every tank was firing madly with every gun it could bring to bear. And Schaaf swore bitterly as he saw what they were firing at.

* * * * *

There was a little rocky island out in the lake. The lake itself was a smother of white foam. But projecting upward above the water there was a mass of dark-brown rock some fifty or sixty feet high. There were traces of grass still upon it, but if there had been trees they were gone, and if there had been a summer residence that also had long since vanished in the Storm. But now, quite insolently, there was visible a signal of Preston's presence and of his defiance.

A globular mass of darkness had formed about the islet's peak. It looked as if Preston had turned on a transmitter of darkness and had deliberately begun to transmit the short waves with an absolute minimum of power. The fraction of a watt, perhaps, was being put into a hidden or a buried antenna. An irregular, amoeba-like globule of darkness hovered about the islet's tip.

Shells were bursting in and about it. A section of rock split outward from the island's side and fell into the foaming water. Instantly, it seemed, the globule of darkness expanded. From feet, its size could only be measured by hundreds of yards. The tanks were firing into a vast expanse of nothingness, and one by one they ceased to fire. There was nothing to aim at.

Then, very swiftly, the darkness increased in size. Preston was putting more power into his transmitter. And quite suddenly the world was dark again.

It had been a gesture of pure insolence. Tanks could not reach the island. He had seen the gray monsters gathered on the shore, and Preston had blanketed the world in darkness after showing the only men to reach his stronghold the utter futility of further effort to reach him.

He was protected by the deep waters of a mountain lake from attack by tanks, by hills and the Storm from all other means of attack, and by the unthinkable blackness of his own creation even from assault by projectiles.

Up in the control-room, the tank-officer swore bitterly and turned to Hines.

"I think we're done, sir," he said savagely. "We can't wade out through the lake to him, and of course the Storm--"

Hines's eyes were slits.

"Let's look at the map," he said shortly. "We might as well get the other tanks alongside us, by the way. In the lee of this cliff, we can go from one to the other."

He had taken figures from the map before Schaaf came back inside the tank, cursing mightily in German. Hines was asking curt questions and giving even curter orders, and when the other tanks came clanking into place men went out into the alleviated storm beneath the cliff and made demands of gasoline and wire cable and bombs.

Two tanks only had fuel for a run of another two miles. The rest supplied cable and bombs, and men gingerly unscrewed the fuses of the monster bombs and emptied four of the huge cases of all their contents. Then they labored terrifically to bind four still-loaded cases to the emptied ones, and fastened wire cable to the clumsy mass.

All this was done in darkness with the Storm roaring overhead, and while Schaaf was calculating feverishly at Hines's demand and the tank-officer was writing out his results in terms of formal orders, according to the customs and ordinances of the United States Army.

Then the ground quivered as two huge tanks moved away from their fellows. Now was the moment of greatest tension. The bombs had to be dragged over soft earth, and if they exploded with their loads of two hundred pounds each of T. N. T.--eight hundred pounds in the four loaded bombs--then the tank-force would be wiped out and Preston would win his single-handed war against the world. But the fuses had been changed, and they had hopes.

* * * * *

There were still three people up in the control-room of the tank that had carried Hines. One was Hines, of course, and one was the tank-commander, and Kathryn was the third. Hines knew the chance he was taking. If the tanks were wiped out, he wanted to be near Kathryn when the end came. Schaaf was down by the wireless transmitter, biting at his nails and growling guttural profanity at the intervals between reports.

"Both tanks have reached their first position," came the report up the speaking-tube. "They're reeling in the cable."

Hines held Kathryn protectively close. But it was rather useless. They had combined four depth-bombs with four empty depth-bomb cases to make a monster floating bomb. They had fastened it in the center of a long, spliced-together steel cable, with a tank hauling at each end.

Those tanks were now posted where the shores of the lake began to curve together. They were reeling in their lines. When the lines tightened, the bomb would be dragged away from the now fuelless remnant of the tank-force and out into the water of the lake. With luck, the bombs would not go off. But if luck were bad, and a purposely insensitized fuse struck a rock or stone or bit of débris--

Long minutes went by. The speaking-tube whistle was a blessed sound.

"Reeling completed, sir. The cable is taut."

Two tanks now went crawling through the blackness down the opposite shores of the little lake. Between them stretched the cable with the monstrous floating bomb.

It is well known that fifty pounds of T. N. T. will shatter the walls of a submarine, and that a torpedo carries a hundred and fifty, and that the effect of an explosion varies as the square of the amount of explosive present. Eight hundred pounds of T. N. T. in one blast would sink any ship or shatter any rock.

But against the massive walls of even a small island--well, it would produce a concussion. It might shake down fifty tons or a hundred tons of rock. It might do impressive local damage, to be sure, but the damage would be strictly local, The rest of the island would feel nothing worse than a sharp concussion. And that was all Hines could hope for.

Schaaf had assigned arbitrary coordinates and positions for the tanks' reports. When their treads had covered so much ground in such-and-such directions, the cable should be out so much....

"Second position reached," said the speaking-tube briefly. "All figures are as anticipated."

Hines's hands clenched fiercely. The range-finders had given the distance of the island. The map had given the outline of the lake. Down the center of the turmoil of frothing water a bomb of colossal destructive power was moving with two straining tanks towing it from the shore, and all for an absurdly trivial physical effect which was all that could be looked for.

"Third position reached," said the speaking-tube. "All figures seem correct. The tanks await orders."

"Tell them to go ahead," said Hines. His voice was hoarse. On this everything depended.

There was no movement inside the tank. There was no sound except the deep, deep roaring of the Storm overhead. But then, quite suddenly, the tank quivered all over. It was as if the ground had slipped, had quivered suddenly; as if it had been struck an abrupt though far from dangerous blow. It was just enough to bring Hines's elbow sharply into contact with the steering-bar.

But suddenly the tank-commander was snapping orders.

"Open fire! All guns!"

And the whole inside of the tank resounded with the sledge-hammer blows, the terrific impacts of guns firing at their highest rate.

* * * * *

For perhaps the last time, it seemed to Hines, the island was again in view. It was already the center of a storm of bursting shells. There was a colossal wave of water yet subsiding from beside it, and a huge column of rock was topping soundlessly and very deliberately into the lake, and every tank on the lake-shore was pouring shell after shell after shell upon the mass of stone that remained.

Hines had made his last gamble. The destruction of the other darkness-sending stations by concussions seemed to him to show one possible weakness in Preston's preparations.

It was not likely that in every case the dropped time-bombs that had put the other darkness-transmitters out of action, had made direct hits upon the apparatus. It seemed most probable that Preston, like all other experimenters with radio waves, had used vacuum tubes for his oscillators. And vacuum tubes are made of glass, and they are thin, therefore concussion will break them.

Hines had not expected the shock of the explosion against the island's rocky shore to destroy Preston's apparatus. Not at all. He had only hoped for a single sharp shock, a single smart snapping effect.

As a matter of fact, on the island itself there had been exactly the impression of a sudden and terrific earth-shock. And it was sudden enough to make the glass vacuum tubes of the short-wave transmitter shiver to atoms in their sockets. The transmitter was quite unharmed, but it was thoroughly useless after that!

Watching, with the flashes of high-explosive shells breaking about every portion of the island, Hines saw a sudden thick cloud of smoke arise. It was too dense, too thick, to be dissipated even by the wind which still blew madly. And great cracks appeared in the rocks of the island, and steam poured forth.

Schaaf went out of the tank with his hands over his ears. He held up his face to the sun and abruptly began to dance with a wholly elephantine lack of grace. Because the sun's rays were warm!

Gradually, slowly, the tanks ceased firing. They exhausted their ammunition upon their target, and the surface of the island was a mass of splintered rock and steam poured in dense clouds from its interior.

Then it was possible to hear Schaaf bellowing.

"Der storm-wafes are off! Der storm-wafes are off! We got der son-of-a-gun! We got him!"

And very abruptly, it seemed, clouds were forming overhead, and the wind of the Storm began to change from a monstrous steady blast to something no worse than a mere tornado, and in an hour it was hardly more than a terrific gale.

Before nightfall thunder was rolling over a circle two thousand miles across, and rain was falling in torrents only precedented by the night before. Two weeks or more of chaotic weather conditions were being predicted by the weather bureaus, but after that the air conditions would again become normal.

* * * * *

Schaaf was the first man on the island, and his gloomiest predictions were verified. Preston's apparatus had been destroyed by explosions from below. Not only had explosives been placed by Preston to ruin the apparatus and prevent it from being examined, but great masses of thermit had been placed here and there to complete the destruction. Apparently, Preston had intended to destroy his devices when their use was completed, and so had been prepared, by accident, for the disaster that came upon his plans. No notes, no diagrams, no single article of any value to Schaaf was ever found, on which account he swore bitterly. But a human skeleton was found charred and half-consumed in the ruins of the underground workshop. It was assumed to be Preston, but Schaaf regarded even this hopeful thought with disfavor.

He expressed his bitterness after a complete round of the six other transmitting-stations showed them all destroyed with thermit and explosive, apparently by some contrivance which would act automatically when they were no longer operable.

"Der _verdammet_ scoundrel," he said bitterly to Hines. "He gifes me a pain in der duodenum. If I had der information he had, I would be der greatest benefactor of der world! I haff an idea, and if I can only find out how he did his tricks, I show you der Golden Age again! _Ach, Gott!_ Why is it that fillains haff der best brains?"

He was smoking furiously in Hines's apartment when he made his plaint. The telephone rang. Hines spoke into it, smiling. When he had ended, Schaaf said suspiciously:

"That was Miss Bush. She is clefer, Hines. But--is she too clefer?"

"Did you see how she wrote up the whole business for the _Star_?"

Schaaf nodded, and puffed at his pipe.

"She made you a hero, and me a hero, and she threw enough flowers at der tank-men to make der worldt see how brafe and courageous and altogether der cat's-whiskers you are, Hines. Yes. She is clefer. But as your friend I ask it; is she too clefer?"

Hines was standing up, now, and absently looking at his hat on a nearby chair.

"Too clever?" he repeated abstractedly, but smiling nevertheless. "What is too clever?"

"A woman," said Schaaf shrewdly, "that makes eferybody see how clefer der man she lofes is, is clefer. But when she sees that she has brains also, and that when she marries she will haff to take der back seat, and she sees that she is a darned fool to do it--then she is too clefer."

"She's not," said Hines blithely. "She's going to marry me. In fact, we're going down town now to pick out some rings and such things." He added perfunctorily: "Want to come along?"

"Nix," said Schaaf cynically. "You don't want me now. But I come in, Hines, _ach_, I come in when it is time to buy der teething-rings and der baby-mugs. Then I won't be in der way!"

END.