The Hammer of Thor Part 5

And Danny, before he opened the switch that ended their talk, said meditatively: "Like lightnin' he moves ... but he'll have to move _faster_ than lightnin' to dodge me. And if you're near Boston, stick around; I'm comin' now, but not to meet you, Chief; I've got another important engagement. I'm keepin' it for--for the Infant. And give the Infant the credit, Chief; give it all to him, he's earned it: he's paid for it in full." Then the snap of a switch cut off the sound of Danny's voice before it showed a tell-tale quaver.

It was steady some minutes later, when Danny swept in above the mounting clouds that he had learned to know. Beneath them invisible fingers of death were sweeping back and forth where men and women ran shrieking in terror or waited calmly and dry-eyed for the end. Above them a slender rounded thing wove its pattern of destruction back and forth ... back and forth. A spectral s.h.i.+p--a pale phantom, elusive and dimly seen until it came against the black of rolling smoke from below.

But to Danny O'Rourke, slanting down from tremendous heights, the white shape was never lost. On the cross hairs of his directional sights the ghostly s.h.i.+p hung, and Danny threw his own red rocket like a living flame over and down where the white one sensed his coming and waited.

Beside him a human voice, high with horror, called to him. "Come back!" the Chief of the Mountain Division was commanding. "Danny! For the love of Heaven, turn back!"

But the voice was unheard by Danny O'Rourke. There was another voice speaking ... he could almost see the smiling pink and white face of one beside him who spoke of his "little tin s.h.i.+p" ... spoke, too, of a white s.h.i.+p that would be like a great thunder-cloud ... and of his own screaming meteor that was like the earth ... and there was to be a messenger of death like the hammer of Thor that would flash between the two....

Danny saw the white one slipping easily aside; the s.h.i.+p was swelling suddenly before him--it was close ... but the jagged lightning--the ripping flash of blue that joined the two craft in a cras.h.i.+ng arc--was neither seen nor heard by Danny. Danny was too busy to notice, for he was engaged in smiling converse with one whom he called the "Infant"

and whose pink and white face beamed gladly upon him "like a d.a.m.ned little cherub," as Danny was telling him....

But the Chief of the Mountain Division who saw all from afar could say nothing. He only stared from the lookout of his own speeding plane that framed a picture of two s.h.i.+ps; where the red one, flaming from within, kept on in its swift, straight dive; while the white one fell slowly, turning sluggishly to show its gashed and blasted sides ...

till the black clouds wrapped them both in a billowy shroud....

But clouds are no bar to man's inner vision. And the Chief looked through, as Danny had done, to see as in a lightning flash a world beaten to its knees, hopeless, ravaged and scarred--a world where courage might again be born--a world that would still be a world of men.