The Hammer of Thor Part 2

"I think you're wrong ... yes, I thing you're wrong, Chief. There's one man who knows and 'tis myself is that one.... One man--and the other is a beast like no livin' man on the face of the earth! _He_ knows--he and the devils he's brought with him!"

It was an unsatisfactory interview that Danny had with the Chief.

"You're crazy!" was the verdict of that A. F. F. official when Danny had finished. "You're crazy, or else--or else--" His voice trailed off; his eyes were on the moving letters that flashed their message of disaster in an ever changing procession across the scanning screen on the wall.

"... outbreaks have ceased ... tremendous destruction ... no rational explanation ... meteors, perhaps ... thousands of lives ... no estimate...."

There seemed no end to the tale of disaster, and the Chief's voice died away into silence. If Danny was right he had no words to fit the unbelievable truth.

"Get into your new s.h.i.+p," the Chief ordered brusquely, "and take the Infant with you. I'll send a relief man to his station. Go east--lay your course for Was.h.i.+ngton; you'll get other orders on the way!"

And a half hour later the first rocket s.h.i.+p of the A. F. F. was blasting its way through the thin gases of the stratosphere eastward bound. But by now Danny O'Rourke had a more sympathetic listener than before.

"In big puddles it was, and lakes! 'Twas still melted, some of it, in that valley."

"Why not?" asked the Infant casually. "Radiant heat moves with the speed of light. We wouldn't think anything of focusing ten million candle power of light energy into a spot like that. Why not heat? Just because we haven't learned to generate it--focus it--shoot it out in a stream like water from a hose--there's no use in denying that someone else has beat us to the punch."

The Infant's calm blue eyes were upon the luminous plates of the s.h.i.+p's microscope where the swift moving terrain beneath them was pictured clearly. The mountains were behind them now; endless miles of ripening grain made the land a sea of yellow and brown and, across that ocean, like the lines of foam that mark the wake of s.h.i.+ps, lay three straight lines of black.

"Meteors!" sneered the Infant. "Yet if you'd tell your story to some of these wise men they would die of laughing--and maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea, either; they will be dying in a way that's a d.a.m.ned sight more unpleasant unless someone finds how to catch these birds."

Ahead of them the lookouts framed blue emptiness. Below, on direct sight, was but the vaguest blur that meant earth and clouds far beneath. Only the magnification of the microscope brought out the details, and on its screen the unrolling picture showed those three lines broadening and merging to widespread desolation; then the smoke clouds came between to shut off a world reeking with the fumes of destruction. An occasional flash of red wings showed where the units of the A. F. F. were at work.

They beheld a city, below them--and smoking ruins where three great gashes had been torn with torches of flame. To Danny there came a thought that was sickening: it was as if some great three-toed beast had drawn one paw, red with the blood of helpless humans, ripping across the bosom of the land.

His number was flas.h.i.+ng on the call board that had been registering incessant orders to other craft. He cut in on the Headquarters wave.

"O'Rourke--Mountain Division--Unit Five!" he reported. "Do you get my voice or shall I send by key?"

The man at Headquarters did not trouble to reply to the question. His voice came faint but clear:

"Number Five--O'Rourke--Orders! If that new s.h.i.+p of yours has any speed, show it now! Bear on Was.h.i.+ngton! Get here as quick as the good Lord will let you! Mountain Division says you've got something good in that sound-dampener; if you have, we need it now!"

O'Rourke shot back a crisp acknowledgment; took a reading from two radio beacons; projected them on the map; and p.r.i.c.ked a point at their intersection. He had his own s.h.i.+p on a line with the Capitol in a matter of seconds.

"And there's h.e.l.l poppin' there, I'm bettin'! That Headquarters lad didn't tell much--he wouldn't be worth a dime on a newscast--but I gathered there was somethin' doin'."

He had spoken more to himself than to his companion who had been a silent listener to the incoming orders. But the Infant replied in his own peculiar way.

"The one you saw," he said inquiringly: "he did his dirty work with a little rod or tube, you said?"

With an effort, O'Rourke brought his thoughts in line with the question. "Oh, you mean the man-thing I saw in Stobolsk? Yes, that's right; he had a thing like a gun."

"And he held it in his hand?"

"In the big paw that pa.s.sed for a hand, yes!"

"All right! Now think carefully, Danny, and tell me: was there anything fastened to it--a wire, perhaps--a connection of some kind with the ground?"

O'Rourke stared at the pink and white face of the cherub who sat with him in the control room of a rocket-s.h.i.+p that threw itself like a red meteor across the high skies. "You're a bit of a devil, yourself," he said wonderingly at last. "How in the names of the Saints did you know? Yes, there was a wire, and I had forgotten it myself. It hung down, I remember, from the b.u.t.t of the thing. But not to the ground.

Infant--you missed it there; 'twas looped back like into the folds of the d.a.m.n blue nightie he wore."

"And then went to the ground," said the Infant imperturbably, "--through his shoes most likely; or, if the robe was metal, that may have dragged on the ground instead."

He smiled seraphically at the bewildered pilot as he added: "That's all, Danny, for the present. Fly your little tin s.h.i.+p. I've got some heavy thinking to do."

Danny heard him ask one cryptic question, but he asked it as one who knows that only from his own brain can come the answer.

"How do they get rid of it?" the Infant was demanding. "If they stay in the air, how do they get rid of the load?"

And Pilot O'Rourke was glad enough to leave the answer to that one to the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place and accept the absurd improbabilities on which truth rests.

They were approaching their destination when the Infant opened his Cupid's-bow mouth to p.r.o.nounce one additional question. "How high," he asked, "will your little tin s.h.i.+p fly? I know they've reached just under a hundred thousand experimentally, but how high will this one go?"

"And that's a question neither you nor I can answer, Infant." Danny was working with careful fingers at tiny levers; their control room was filled with whining whispers and thin shrieks. "We're goin' down now," he continued, and again flipped over the switch that would put him in communication with the Was.h.i.+ngton office of the A. F. F.

"O'Rourke--Mountain Division--Unit Five," he said quietly.

"Approaching Was.h.i.+ngton at alt.i.tude sixty-five thousand. Descending.

Orders, please!"

Within the control room, where the voice of a Was.h.i.+ngton operator should have answered on the instant, there was silence. The rocket motor had been stilled. The two men were suddenly breathless with listening--listening!--where was heard only the whispering shrillness from without. The whispering grew as the red s.h.i.+p slanted down into denser air; it built up in volume; it varied its pitch and timber till it sounded like echoing voices ... ghostly voices and phantom words ...

like orders from the dead....

And Danny O'Rourke found his eyes staring into those of the Infant, where he read only the confirmation of his own fears.

It was the Infant who first found words with which to break the dreadful silence.

"Headquarters is gone," he said in a strange, dry voice, "wiped out!

They must have got it! It looks as if we were on our own.

"Where are you going?" he asked. "It's your s.h.i.+p."

And Danny answered with a single word, though he added other for emphasis under his breath:

"Down!" he said quietly. "And be d.a.m.ned to them!"

Rolling smoke clouds came to meet them. Danny O'Rourke was watching his altimeter sharply as he neared the ground. But he glanced more than once at the smoke. It was shot through with tongues of flame as they settled down; that was only what might be expected. But Danny was puzzled by the gray-white whirls that rose through the billowing smoke, until he knew it for the dust of powdered masonry, and realized that below him, where great buildings had been, were tumbled ruins.

Beside his control board a radio warning was telling of approaching s.h.i.+ps. Danny cut in on then on emergency wave-length, and found that two full squadrons of nitro-s.h.i.+ps were at hand with others coming.