Astounding Stories, May, 1931 Part 38

"To: All Officers of the Military Forces of the Americas.

Subject: Military a.s.sistance. Eric Bolton, Captain M.I.S., M.F.A. is authorized to call upon you for any a.s.sistance.

You will comply with his requests.

Alton Sommers, Lieut. General Commanding M.I.S., M.F.A.

By authority of the Commander in Chief."

In the corner appeared my thumb-print.

I stood there for a long time, mulling the thing over. The Staff was laying tremendous stress on the enemy's strange cloud formation, even to the extent of disclosing the secret of the new defensive device.

The Easterners, too, had something novel, something that would cut off absolutely the transmission of ether waves. Nothing either side had yet produced would do that. What was happening behind that screen?

Would they break through our defenses at last?

A vision arose before me. Hordes of yellow men, of black, of white renegades from the nations where the red flag waved dominant, pouring over the Americas. The horrors that Britain had undergone, the last European nation to hold out against the Red horde, flashed into my mind. I shuddered. Never. It must not be.

I was hurled from my feet by an electric shock. A great flood of sunlight burst in on me. A corner of the booth, three-foot concrete, had been sheared away, whiffed into nothingness! I arose and dashed into the open. A raid was in progress. The air was electric with the clas.h.i.+ng of opposing barrages. The terrible silence of the pitched battles of that war oppressed me. I saw a squad, caught in the beam of an Eastern ray-projector, destroyed. The end man must have been just on the edge of the beams--half his right side lay twitching on the ground. The rest of him, and the seven others, were smoking heaps of blackened cinders.

High over No Man's Land--queer how those old phrases last--a covey of enemy helicopters hung, waiting for the barrage to lift. A black hulk broke the surface of the water, split open: then another. Enemy sub-surface craft. The fight was being waged under water, too. A green ma.s.s spilled its contents as it leaped over the waves and fell back.

One of ours.

A huge buzzing came from behind me. A cloud of wasplike forms flew high overhead. It was reserve aircraft, hurrying up from the second line raft, ten miles west.

But this was no affair of mine. I had my orders. I must be in the North Atlantic by daybreak. I looked around. There at the further edge my little Zephyr rested, intact. I hurried to her and sprang into the c.o.c.kpit. I was off the coast of Chile. Twelve thousand feet would clear the highest range between. I set the height control. Today you don't have to do that, but Mason hadn't perfected his automatic elevator then. The starting indicator was already set for my position.

I adjusted the direction disk. The little green light showed that the power broadcast was in operation. I snapped over the starting switch and the whir of the helicopter vanes overhead told me all was well.

The machine leaped into the air. Nothing to do now till the warning bell told me I was within a hundred miles of my destination. The battle shot away from me, far below.

Darkness came swiftly. I was shooting into the eye of the sun at three hundred miles an hour. I swallowed a few pellets of concentrated food, then curled up in my bunk. There was no knowing how many hours would pa.s.s till I slept again.

I fell asleep at once.

The strident clamor of the alarm bell woke me. Dawn was just breaking.

Far below me I could make out the heaving Atlantic, calm and peaceful.

A long line of the huge second-line rafts just underneath, stretching north and south till it curved over the horizon. A bugle's clear notes came drifting up to me, reveille. Then I was hovering over my goal, raft 1264. The black rectangle was alive with activity unwonted at this early hour. I took over the controls from the mechanical pilot, sent my recognition signal and drifted downward.

The Zephyr settled on the raft with a soft hiss of the compressed air shock absorbers. A guard came hurrying up. My credentials pa.s.sed upon, I alighted. Momentarily, it was getting brighter. I was just in time.

I looked eastward, toward the enemy rafts. Beyond them, there it was, just as General Sommers had described it--a mountain of vapor, gleaming white in the gathering light. Not at all disquieting; merely a s.h.i.+fting, billowing cloud ma.s.s. Rather pretty. The rest of the sky was clear, unspecked.

As I gazed a line of red fire ran around the edge of the cloud. A violet glow suffused the whole, faded swiftly into pink. The sun was rising. Behind me I heard a huge whirring. Turning, I saw her, just rising, all the beautiful trim length of her. The _New York_! Pride of our air fleet!

Fifty paces to my right a little knot of officers caught my attention.

I recognized Jim Bradley. I remembered, someone had told me he was a major, and was commanding a raft. Good. Jim would work with me as he had in the old days at Stanford U., when I coached the air polo team that he captained. I walked over.

Time for only a hurried handclasp. The signal corps sergeant, earphones clamped to his head, was intoning the airs.h.i.+p's messages.

"We have reached the thousand-foot level. Will now head for the objective. All well."

We watched her. She was through our barrage-line. A snapped order from Jim restored the barrier, momentarily lifted to let her pa.s.s. A curious s.h.i.+mmering blurred the s.h.i.+p's outlines. I called Jim's attention to it. "That's the new device, a network of fine wires, charged with neutralising vibrations. Worked like a charm in the tests. But there's no telling how effective it is in actual service."

A cold s.h.i.+ver ran up my spine. Many a fine s.h.i.+p I had seen strike that invisible network of rays, and puff into smoke. Was that to be the _New York's_ fate?

"We are about to pa.s.s through the enemy barrage. All well," came the sergeant's unemotional monotone, repeating the voice in his ears. I knew that voice was being listened to in Was.h.i.+ngton by a little group whose every shoulder bore the stars of high command. My thoughts flashed to them, gazing breathless at the screen that imaged the very scene before us.

My breath stopped. Now! She must be in it now. The next second would tell the tale. A faint coruscation of sparks ran along the network, but the craft kept steadily onward. Thank G.o.d!

"We have pa.s.sed through the enemy first-line barrage. All well."

A faint whistling of released breath came from all about me. I was not the only one who had agonised at that moment. The first test had been pa.s.sed; would the other be as successful?

"We are increasing our speed to the maximum. Objective dead ahead. All well."

I saw the s.h.i.+p fairly leap through the sky. Five hundred miles an hour was her greatest speed. Another moment--

"We are entering the cloud. Bow is invisible. All--"

She was in it. She lurched. Plunged forward. She was hidden. I turned to the sergeant. Tremendous concentration was on his bronzed face. He reached out, twirled a dial in the set before him, and shook his head slightly. Twirled again. We were knotted around him, our faces bloodless. He looked up. "The last sentence was cut off sharp, sir. I can hear nothing more. Even the carrier wave is dead."

Jim ripped out an oath, s.n.a.t.c.hed the phones, and clamped them over his own ears. Dead silence.

At last he looked up. "Nothing, gentlemen."

We looked at each other, appalled.

Bradley handed the apparatus back to the sergeant. "Remain here, listening carefully. Let me know at once if you hear anything." The sergeant saluted.

Out there the white cloud billowed and gleamed in the sunlight. But there was something ominous in its calm beauty now.

A thought struck me. I spoke, and my voice sounded flat, dead.

"Perhaps it's only the radio waves that are cut off. Maybe she's all right, fighting there inside, smas.h.i.+ng them." But I knew that it was all over.

"G.o.d, I hope you're right. Five thousand men aboard her." Bradley's lips were white, his hands trembling. "Come to my office, Eric; we'll wait there. To your posts, gentlemen. Each of you will detail a man to watch that cloud bank, and report to me any change in its appearance, even the slightest."

We walked back to the concrete command-post. We didn't talk, though it had been years since we had seen each other. My brain was numbed, I know. I had seen plenty of fighting, watched many a man go to his death in the seven months since the war began. But this, somehow, was different.

An hour pa.s.sed. Jim busied himself with routine paper work. At least he had that relief. I paced about his tiny office. Already I was making plans. Force had failed. Strategy must take its place. I must get in there. But how?

Bradley looked up from his work, his face grim. "No news, Eric. If you were right we should have heard something from the _New York_ by this time. They're gone, all right."

"Yes, they're gone," I answered. "It's up to me, then."