Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 Part 49

"Poor Stanton," said Steinholt. "He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now," continued the Teuton, "I hope that we didn't do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves."

"Have you any theory regarding it?" asked Fragoni.

"Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe," replied Steinholt. "We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won't be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel."

"Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn't been for that artificial lightning," said Lazarre. "That's powerful stuff, Steinholt."

"Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from,"

agreed Steinholt, "we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn't left the well of their s.h.i.+p open, though, the lightning wouldn't have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the s.h.i.+p."

Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.

"It seems to me," he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, "that it is moving in the water. It is!" he exclaimed.

"Steinholt! Look!"

Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness.

"It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it,"

a.s.serted Steinholt. "You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one."

"It is rising, I tell you!" said Dirk. "The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!"

"You're right, Dirk," said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice.

"Look! It just dropped back into the water!"

Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea.

Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it.

"It's gone!" gasped Fragoni. "Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!"

"No," remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. "I don't believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into s.p.a.ce with the s.h.i.+p in that condition."

"Then what made it go up?" demanded Lazarre. "Can the d.a.m.n thing run itself, Steinholt?"

"I imagine," recalled the Teuton, "that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah," he moaned, "but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air."

A cry from Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes.

They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire.

"It's that thing!" exclaimed Fragoni. "I tell you that those upon it still live and that they are about to wreak vengeance upon us."

"No," said Steinholt positively. "You are wrong, Fragoni. What is happening may be almost as disastrous, though," he admitted. "That leviathan is in its death agonies; it is a metal monster gone mad, and none can say what will happen before it expires."

"The place for us," a.s.serted Dirk hurriedly, "is in the Worldwide Tower.

There we can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do."

The others agreed with him and, seeking the westward level of flight, he sped the plane in the direction of the mammoth pyramid from which the news of the world was broadcast.

They reached the vast structure in a few minutes, and, after dropping the plane on a landing stage, they went into the operating room.

Here they learned quickly that the craft of the Lodorians was doing incalculable damage, and that it was throwing the population of the world into an unprecedented panic.

It was, apparently, following an erratic, uncertain orbit that took it far out into s.p.a.ce and then back quite close to the surface of the earth again.

It had pa.s.sed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide through the buildings of that metropolis.

Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its irresistible and molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of people had been slain by it.

Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing, projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the night.

For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned throughout the cities of the whole civilized world.

But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route for San Francisco.

"Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense and clouds of steam are rising from the sea."

As the minutes pa.s.sed by after the report from the rocket-s.h.i.+p had been received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from s.p.a.ce seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean.

This was accepted as a certainty by eight o'clock in the morning.

"Ah," sighed Steinholt, "if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If there only was enough of it left for us to--"

"Enough of any d.a.m.n contraption of that kind," swore Lazarre fervently, "is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are scattered so far that we never can put them together again."

Dirk and Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan.

Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in the morning.

After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its ruins.

Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible to fish for the remains of the lost s.h.i.+p of Lodore.

"It seems like a dream, doesn't it, Dirk?" the girl remarked. "It is difficult to believe that we actually have seen and talked with people from some far-away world."

Together they looked up into the crystalline skies, where mazes of s.h.i.+ning stars gave testimony to the countless worlds which were wheeling around them.

"And just to think, Dirk," Inga continued proudly, "that it was you who saved this world and all of its people from that horrible Zitlan and his horde."