“We’re in,” breathed Kane, “and there’s the ship!”
Out on the field, far from all structures, it towered upright, its blunt nose five hundred feet above the blackened earth. Even though no light shone on or from it, they could recognize its lines as those of the vessel whose stolen plans they had gone over point by point—Siegfried, the dust ship.
“They must have raised it to launching position only tonight,” said Kane harshly. “Otherwise we could have seen it from across the river. So—it must be loaded and ready to go!”
A thousand feet of open and empty field separated them from the space ship. With straining eyes they could see tiny human figures scurrying about its base in the moonlight, forming a protective circle. Then floodlights went on all over the field and left not a shadow anywhere. The Germans knew, or feared, that the invisible attackers had slipped inside their citadel.
The rain of steel on the gateway had stopped; instead came dull thudding concussions, and a creeping haze obscured the entrance. Gas.
They had prepared for that. But now a more formidable threat made itself known; from near the buildings came a frenzied barking of dogs.
“We’ve got to get across the open,” snapped Kane. “Better stick together and run for it. If we can get among that gang around the ship—neither dogs nor instruments can tell the difference between visible and invisible men!”
They rose from their cover and pelted grimly across the endless-seeming field. To the right, parties of men with dogs were fanning out, too slowly to intercept the raiders. But they were only halfway to the ship when the lights suddenly snapped off—for a moment they stumbled, blinded, in darkness, and the lights flashed dazzlingly on again. A couple of seconds later the puzzling action was repeated.
And from the cordon about the ship, so near now, a voice screamed hysterically, “Da lauft einer!” On its heels came a thunder of shooting, and bullets snapped past the hurrying Americans.
They flung themselves flat on the scorched ground. The lights flashed again and again as if an insane hand were at the master switch. “What’s happened?” gasped Manning. “Did they see us?”
“They’ve learned or guessed one of our weaknesses,” said Kane in his ear. “When the whole field of vision is suddenly illuminated, the brain may register an invisible object, especially if it’s moving, for a moment before it melts into the background.” Something whimpered in the air and burst with an ear-splitting hang only a few yards away, showering the raiders with earth. “They’ve got our position. Get going—now!” as the lights flashed on.
Kane’s fingers had been busy fusing a bomb, and as he rose erect he threw it straight into the cordon. The crash of the explosion was followed by shrieks and then, as the lights flashed on again, by a prolonged volley of shots.
Larrabie spung around in midstride and rolled on the ground. The long-legged Clark flung out his arm and pitched forward. “Get the——” His voice choked off.
THE survivors charged at the gap where the bomb had wrought bloody havoc. The Germans were closing it from the sides. Manning caught a glimpse of sweating faces, staring eyes glazed with fear of an enemy they could not see; and he saw also the vast loom of the space ship above him. He fumbled woodenly with a detonator cartridge.
Kane’s fingers bit into his arm. “Into the ship!” he rasped. “You’d never dent it.” Nothing was between the invaders and the hull, where an open airlock, high overhead, showed as a black disc.
Manning glanced over his shoulder, and in the nightmarishly flashing illumination saw Larrabie’s body sprawled in a frozen convulsion, and standing over it, head thrown back, a huge hound. A black mass of yelling men was closing in . . .
Then the four of them were clambering up the ladder that rose dizzily to the space ship’s lock forty feet above ground. Every flash of the light silhouetted them so nakedly against the great hull that it seemed impossible they should not be seen and picked off as they clung helplessly. But Manning saw Dugan above him, disappear into the lock; he heaved himself up and stumbled into the saving blackness, followed by a panting bulk that must be Vzryvov.
Kane’s voice came, surprisingly steady, from deeper in the tunnel-like lock, where as their eyes adjusted a faint glow was evident, seeping no doubt from a passage beyond. This was the main loading lock, and I guess still is. They’ve apparently torn out all the freight decks and replaced them with a lead-lined tank for the dust, bin and they’ve been loading it through a hatch just across the peripheral walk. But eth hatch is sealed now.” He did not need to add what that meant. The Siegfried had its deadly cargo and was ready to take off.
“Then,” said Vzryvov matter-of-factly, “let us blast open the tank and scatter it with our remaining bombs. That will make it impossible for the Germans to salvage the ship, or even use this field, until the dust had burned itself out in a year or so.” When Kane did not answer, the Russian growled impatiently, “We must do it, and quickly. Our comrades’ bodies are out there, and with them the secret of invisibility. We must make this area unapproachable!”
“Wait,” said Kane with a curious tense urgency. Manning wondered fleetingly if the underground leader recoiled from the suicidal action which the other urged; then he realized that Kane was listening, and listened too.
The babble of voices from the ground outside had fallen to a mutter; and through it cut an incisive voice of authority.
“Es ware’ll ihrer nur zwei?”
Another voice answered, “Ja, Herr Oberst—wenigstens haben wir nur einen oder zwei bei der Blitzbeleuchtung gesehen——”
“Ihr habt gar nichts Verlassliches gesehen. Aber wieviel zeigen die Photos?”
“Zwei, Herr Oberst.”
They could almost hear the commander’s gusty sigh of relief. “Nun, so haben wir sie vor uns liegen, und die Sache ist erledigt. Noch dazu werde ich ein schones Geschenk nach Deutschland schicken konnen . . .”
“You see,” said Kane, “they think they’ve got us all. Evidently their cameras never caught more than two of us at once, and hooded we all looked alike. So we’re reasonably safe.”
“Safe!” stormed Vzryvov. He clambered awkwardly to his feet in the curved mouth of the lock. “If you have gone crazy or have got cold feet, I will go and blow up the dust compartment alone.”
“Wait!” snapped Kane. “Listen, Igor. You don’t seem to realize that luck—and the sacrifice of two of our best men—have given us a better chance than we ever hoped for. The Siegfried is just waiting for the crew to come aboard. If we lie low until the ship’s in space—then take care of the crew and seize control—Well, the invisibility unit will be in German hands, sure. But what good will that do them if there isn’t any Germany?”
THEY could hear each other’s breathing in the airlock. Then Vzryvov said, “I see. Forgive my stupidity.” Manning asked carefully, “You mean to turn the dust against Germany? Wipe out the whole country?”
“Certainly. It’ll be easy, once we take over the ship; a few degrees change in course——”
“Even your allies there?”
“Germans are Germans,” growled Vzryvov. “At best, they are confused dreamers who think they could repay their debt to the world with a gesture.”
Manning could not see Kane’s face; but the other’s voice held solemn earnestness. “We’ll only be doing to them what they’re trying to do to America . . . Oh, hell, that’s no valid argument. But, Manning, you come from an age when there weren’t any atomic weapons, and such things were unthinkable because they were impossible. You can’t think as we do, who’ve lived all our lives with the knowledge of what is possible—of how little human life is worth. “And you don’t have a hundred years of slavery behind you. We were as great a people as the Germans in your day, I think, but we’ve been trampled into the mud until we’ve not got much civilization or pride or decency left. And we won’t have, for a long time, even if Germany is destroyed. But if it isn’t we, and the other nations of the world, will never have
those things again—the things that make human beings worth something.
“I sometimes wonder what would happen if history had taken a different turning—if we, instead of the Germans, had been the ones to discover atomic energy. Would we have been any better than they were? Or would we have used the power to make ourselves the masters of Earth and to monopolize civilization, just as Germany did?”
“You would have,” snorted Vzryvov. “Russia would have. Any nationalism of that time, given such a power, would have behaved the same.”
“I don’t know,” faltered Manning. “You may be right, but I can’t imagine . . .”
“Anyway,” Kane’s tone grew bitter, “the Germans have made the world into what they wanted, and they’ve made us what we are. And now we’re going to smash their world. Maybe something better will come out of its destruction. Maybe not. If not—revenge will have to be enough for us.”
VI
THE CAPTAIN OF THE Siegfried squinted at the tables the navigator had handed him, mentally translating their figures into acceleration units. The ship was only an hour from the assigned point in space, and it was necessary to make a final, ultimately correct alignment, in which seconds of arc meant miles of displacement in the dispersion of the dust on Earth’s surface.
The captain’s concentration was disturbed by the nagging conviction that something was amiss—or had been amiss a minute or so earlier—about his familiar control room. For a moment he had fancied that the door to the sternward-descending stairshaft was standing open; but it was obviously closed . . .
He put the doubts angrily out of his mind, frowned at the papers, and ordered the expectant pilot: “Funf Minuten sechsunddreissig Sekunden dritter Geschwiddigkeit dem Backbordgetriebe!”
They were not very inspired last words, but he had no chance to make additions, for in the next instant Kane’s sharp knife sank between his ribs. The captain gurgled in an oddly muffled fashion and would have fallen, save that invisible hands caught and lowered him.
The navigator, looking straight at him, finally realized something had happened. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was cut from ear to ear and no sound emerged.
The pilot, about to press the buttons that would wake the portside rocket bank, was stupefied to see that his hand hung over the controls and refused to move as if paralyzed. Enveloped in the mind-numbing field of an invisibility unit at full power, he did not feel the grip that held him or the knife-thrust that killed him.
The four Americans switched off their units and indulged in the luxury of removing the metal-stiffened hoods. They had no more to fear aboard the Siegfried; two other members of the crew had already been disposed of in the cabins below, and now even if all Germany had known of their presence aboard the dust ship—no method had ever been devised for attacking a ship in space.
But they did not exchange many words. There was work that desperately had to be done as the Siegfried drove toward its rendezvous. Kane flung himself into the navigator’s seat, and glancing ever and anon at the figures for the original course, began to punch keys on the calculator. Manning hunched over the controls, continuing an intensive study that had begun over the German pilot’s shoulder. And Vzryvov stationed himself before a black box fixed to the wall beneath a large clock and conspicuously sealed with a Hakenkruz.
Dugan was left without a job; but he was content to slump into an unused seat and think queasily of Earth thousands of miles below. He was out of his element here—but so were the others. None of them had ever been into space before; only Kane had a theoretical acquaintance with rocket navigation.
So they worked like men inspired to alter the course of the ship. It would have been utterly impossible to make all the needful calculations from the beginning: but Kane was able to work from the course already laid out and the dead navigator’s correction tables, making small changes, which would mean life for millions of people and death for other millions.
Five minutes before the revised zerotime, Manning, his face like iron, shut off the engines. There must be no expanding rocket gases to interfere with the dust’s dispersion. The sudden silence and weightlessness were like a bad dream. Dugan gulped, floated into a corner and was sick. Even Kane’s face looked green under the unchanged light of the control room. But Vzryvov had broken the swastika seal on the black box and eyed the switch inside it greedily, between frequent glances at the clock.
WITH the second-hand sweeping into the last minute, he grasped the plastic handle, and at forty-five seconds pulled down. Instantly the stifling silence of the ship was broken by a muffled roar. The dust—not dust really, but exceedingly fine shot, heavy enough that it would not be carried away by winds in Earth’s atmosphere—was being flung into space through many nozzles in the Siegfried’s hull. “That’s that,” said Kane in a flat voice. Vzryvov swung about in his seat, facing the others, but he did not look at them. His eyes were far away and his teeth bared in a ferocious grin as he listened to the escaping storm of death.
“Dostalos’ sukinym synam,” he muttered to himself. “Za Ameriku i za Rossiyu!”
Manning said nothing.
They suffered through ten minutes of weightlessness while the dust was discharging, and waited another ten before they dared start the engines again and swing the ship—careless now of fine points of navigation—on a great arc toward Earth.
“It’ll be forty hours, plus or minus, before the stuff hits the atmosphere,” said Kane. “The Germans are going to realize something is wrong before then—pretty soon, I imagine, because every observatory will be watching the cloud. We’ll do better to stay out here.”
Manning shrugged. Kane looked at him with understanding and sympathy. “There’s still work for us. By now the general uprising will have started in America, and maybe spread to other countries; it was to be our organization’s last effort, in case we couldn’t stop the dust ship. And the ship took off . . . Let’s see if we can pick up some broadcasts.”
They did, after accelerating the ship and throwing it into a low, hastily-calculated orbit. At first the destroyers had no word of their work. The news was all about the fierce flare of rebellion in America; though they didn’t say so, it must have caught the few Germans there in the throes of departure before the coming doom. An attack on the Long Island colony was in progress, the bridges blown and the East River aflame with burning oil. Then the insanely desperate rebels had found their way onto the island and overwhelmed the settlement. The air crackled with eye-witness accounts of atrocities against the master race. The German leaders were turning the insurrection to account, using it to prepare the minds of their own people to accept the fait accompli of America’s extermination.
Then came a pause in the news broadcasts. A German station played music . . .
Somewhere a group of rulers must be sitting in hasty council, staring unbelievably at the astronomers’ reports. Having to believe, and trying to make a decision where there was no more deciding to do, because their future was as immutable as the velocity and direction of the dust cloud in space.
They had to make it public, of course, so that there could be an attempt at evacuation. Twenty-first century Germany was a nation of motors, wheels, and wings, and a day and a half might yet be time for a large part of the population to flee beyond the limits of the dust-fall which would cover Greater Germany from the Rhineland to the Volga. If the exodus was orderly, the radio emphasized again and again . . .
FOR the first few hours it was both orderly and successful, according to report. But the announcement that Germany’s catastrophe had carried to hidden ears beyond its boundaries, and the word had passed like lightning around the world, telling all nations that the moment of deliverance had come. Four hours afterward, and American station went on the air; and the listeners in the space ship tensed as they heard the English words.
“Three or four thousand air-borne refugees are reported landing on the Florida coast. The local revolutionary authorities have taken steps f
or their reception . . . A dispatch from France states that a refugee column of about twenty thousand Germans was overwhelmed and wiped out, despite defense by armored vehicles, in the vicinity of Lyons . . . Similarly we hear from Italy . . .”
The transmission was weak and the voice faded out, but it went on, counting up with unholy glee the victories and the massacres. All over Earth, people were digging up the guns that had laid buried for a hundred years, and when those were lacking, seizing scythes and axes, sticks and stones, and going out to meet the fleeing Germans. The German military retaliated by unloading its whole arsenal of atomic and other weapons against the rebelling peoples. But the world was mad with blood and liberty. What if for every German ten of their ex-slaves died? Soon there would be no more Germans . . .
Other radio stations began to be heard, babbling in strange tongues that had not been spoken over the air for a century, but all reciting the same burden of hate and holocaust, glorying in the tales of carnage that they called to each other across the Earth.
Marshaled by leaders who rose to power on the wings of a shout, or with no leaders at all, the hordes poured even across the borders of the Reich, into the doomed area. Such German radio stations as were still operating showed by their frantic and contradictory efforts to direct the evacuation the hopeless panic and confusion that had fallen on the Herrenvolk in its last hour. Perhaps they had once been a people of blood and iron, but if so they were that no longer after a century of security and peaceful prosperity behind their impregnable bulwarks; and the refugees, fleeing those defenses now, were like fat tame rabbits escaping a burning hutch and falling victim, terrified and uncomprehending, to the claws and fangs and primeval savagery of the wild. Germany had sowed the wind for a hundred years, and the storm that had arisen would not soon abate . . .
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 22
