Her face was not covered by a mask, nor her hair by a hood, and yet had that hypothetical aviator studied the woman, even had he made an especial effort to record her facial features, he would have found that had somehow failed to take note. Was she dark or fair, young or old; were her eyes of blue or brown, gray or green; was her hair blonde or dark, worn in flowing waves or close-cropped curls—he would have no inkling.
The graceful figure paused and surveyed the sky.
A thick blanket of gray covered all of Seacoast City, as it had for day after day, ever since the unseasonable descent of frigid air and unbelievable precipitation had attacked the metropolis. Snowflakes large, heavy, and moist, fell at a slow, steady pace. The blare of automobile horns, the clank of chains, and the clash and clatter of snowplows rose from the street below.
Above the great city the sun made its presence known in the form of a faint, blurred disk of light.
The woman on the balcony reached behind herself, adjusting some object attached at one shoulder blade, then at the other.
There was a sound, something between the unfurling of sails on an elegant clipper ship and the hum of an insect’s wings. The woman checked the objects projecting from her shoulder blades, then did something that caused them to furl once again and virtually disappear.
The woman leaped into the air, propelling herself with the muscles of her well-formed legs.
Had that imaginary Gyroplane pilot been present to see what happened next, he might well had thought himself witness to a tragedy, for the graceful woman plunged headfirst from the terrace of the Central Railroad Tower through the heavily falling snow and toward the busy traffic below.
Within seconds giant wings seemed to sprout from the shoulders of the falling woman. Membranes so thin they might have been invisible, yet remarkably strong. The woman’s trajectory was altered from a plunge to seemingly inevitable doom to a graceful, curving swoop.
An office worker in one of the many commercial enterprises housed in the Central Railroad Tower happened to raise her eyes from the document she was typing. She peered through the heavy plate-glass window and was astonished to behold a shimmering figure plunge past, then rise once more on shimmering membranous wings that gave her the appearance of nothing less than a gigantic, gorgeous dragon-fly.
The Golden Saint rose above the Central Railroad Tower and turned her course toward the snow-covered Molly Pitcher Park. She passed above streets clogged with snowbound vehicles, office buildings and department stores whose appearance was more suggestive of midwinter than Seacoast City’s summertime. In the distance she could see the city’s normally busy harbor, its usual traffic of heavily-laden freighters and gaily festooned ocean liners reduced to a bare minimum by the ice floes that clogged its channels.
As the Golden Saint reached Molly Pitcher Park she could not help noting the strange, unseasonable beauty of its trees and meadows. They were like a scene from a Christmas card. In the very center of the park lay the flat, white, frozen surface of Poseidon Pond. The air above Seacoast City was unnaturally silent, the usual hum of commerce damped to a mere whisper by the overlarge soft snowflakes that fell so steadily from layers of dark gray clouds. The atmosphere itself felt heavy and moist.
From the direction of North Orion Field the Golden Saint detected the faint, distant drone of mighty engines.
Her all but invisible wings whirring above her, she rose through layers of snow-laden clouds. Soon her rising spiral brought her to the highest cloud layer. As she broke through it the sun shone brilliantly from a sparkling clear blue sky. Here the air was colder than it was either within the cloud layers or beneath them, but it was a brisk, refreshing, dry cold. Accumulated snow fell from the Saint’s translucent, membranous wings.
Here the drone of approaching airplanes was louder, and the Golden Saint’s clear, rich brown eyes picked up a cluster of tiny specks approaching from North Orion. In mere minutes the specks resolved into miniature images of airplanes, flying at breakneck speed but in precise, disciplined formation.
Soon the aircraft reached their appointed place of rendezvous. It was obvious that the lead pilot and commander of the squadron communicated with his comrades, for the aircraft broke their formation of ranked chevrons and instead formed an immense circle, their engines setting up a mighty droning roar.
The command pilot must have been fully prepared by General Hopkins, for he remained calm when his co-pilot nudged him and pointed through the cockpit window.
There, hovering on oversized wings of translucent membrane, he could see what appeared to be a gigantic, golden-bodied dragonfly. But instead of the segmented body and faceted eyes of the insect, he beheld a graceful, feminine form and a striking countenance that, strangely, he would be unable to describe after the events of this remarkable day.
The Golden Saint gestured and the command pilot nodded his agreement, signaling with a thumbs-up and speaking into the radio microphone that connected him with the crews of his squadron.
As the Saint’s membranous wings whirred more rapidly she rose above the droning aircraft, studying their design from her advantaged position. The bombers had the distinctive twin tail booms of the B-16 model. Four mighty engines mounted on the leading edge of each bomber’s wings pulled it forward and two more on the trailing edge added their push. The twin tails of each aircraft bore a single vertical blue stripe and thirteen alternating red and white horizontal bands. The wing surfaces and fuselages bore the Air Corps’ marking of a blue disk with a white star and a smaller red disk in its center.
The Golden Saint smiled. These were the markings of her nation. For all the problems that remained to be solved, for all the struggle that she knew lay ahead, this was her nation.
From specially fitted vents in the fuselages of the bombers a fountain of sparkling diamonds rose to converge and form a rotating disk above the circling monoplanes. Sparkling diamonds, that is, or what appeared to be diamonds, for these were actually tiny ice crystals, specially formed by scientific experimenters.
The crystals whirled in a disk-like formation, disappearing as they fell into the uppermost layer of snow clouds above Seacoast City but constantly renewed as the bombers continued to spew forth more crystals.
Now the Golden Saint moved more rapidly, circling above the rotating disk. As she did so the brilliant rays of the summer sun—for, remember, although it was false winter in Seacoast City it was midsummer above and around that metropolis—those brilliant rays were bent and focused by the Saint’s membranous wings.
Focused on the whirling disk of ice crystals, the sun’s rays were further focused, bent and directed downward. Under the impact of this concentrated solar energy the heavy gray clouds broke apart almost as if they had been intelligent beings. A great clear shaft opened in the topmost layer of clouds. The focused energy reached the next layer of gray, which responded as had the first. And then the energy reached the bottommost layer and split it, flooding Poseidon Pond with a rush of life-giving light and warmth.
It was fortunate now that Seacoast City’s uniformed guardians of justice had cleared the surface of the pond and the pathways of the park of all legitimate visitors, for as the rays reached the icy pond its surface cleared.
Peering down through aerial telescopes from an altitude of more than a mile, the crews of the army bombers were astonished to perceive a battlemented structure. Until now it had been hidden beneath the ice of Poseidon Pond and the snow that had accumulated on top of the ice. But it could now be seen with increasing clarity.
The structure resembled a fairy tale castle, nor did it remain submerged for long, as the waters of the pond rose in vaporous clouds until the castle stood in the center of a miniature dry plain.
Their mission accomplished, the air corps bombers broke their circle and once more assumed a chevron formation that turned and droned majestically away from Seacoast City and toward North Orion Field.
The Golden Saint swooped low over the structure then dropped gently
into its courtyard. Her wings furled swiftly, like living things, and all but disappeared behind her shoulder blades. A replica of a medieval portcullis stood open, two guards stationed beside it. The Saint smiled grimly at their costumes. They wore the chain mail of mock-medieval villains; their chest cloths bore the ugly insignia of the European dictator.
The guards escorted the Golden Saint to a modern laboratory concealed within the false antiquity of the castle. Its vaulted ceiling rose fully fifty feet above its flagstone floor. Its tapestry-covered walls made a room that seemed as large as Seacoast City’s world-famed indoor botanical garden. Here at last she confronted the woman with whose image she had previously conversed.
“Yes,” the snake-haired woman hissed, “I am The Scorpion Queen. And you, I see, are the Golden Saint. It was inevitable that we should meet, soon or late. Very well, let it be now.”
The Scorpion Queen’s eyes were like cold emeralds, her skin was of an icy perfection, her hair arranged to create the illusion of a nest of writhing vipers.
Or was it an illusion?
The only other person in the room was a small, cowering male. Both he and the Scorpion Queen wore laboratory white, but while the woman made her costume look like the brilliant uniform of a monarch, the male’s tunic and trousers had the appearance of a shabby, defeated weakling. Each of them wore high boots of a strange looking metallic material.
Was this cowardly weakling the blustering Lord Gorgon?
The Saint shook her head scornfully. She turned from the cowering male to his female commander. “You’re right, Scorpion Queen. You have made league with the European dictator. That is unforgivable. If you had acted from greed, even from hatred, I might have managed some small degree of empathy for you. For the world mistreats us all, in one way or another. But to sell your country to the brute of Europe, that places you beyond the pale.”
Even as the two women exchanged words, the cowering male had slipped from their immediate environs. Stationing himself behind a control console he turned dials, studying them until he was satisfied. Then he flicked a toggle switch.
As she stood confronting the Scorpion Queen, the Golden Saint felt a sudden pain. It was as if her feet and legs had burst into flame, yet at the same time a terrible chill shot through her.
An involuntary gasp of dismay escaped her lips. She slapped involuntarily at her legs and peered down. From the tips of her golden boots to her knees she seemed to be coated with frost. But even this was the case only for a moment. She realized, then, that the whiteness that covered her was not a single coating but an array of hundreds, thousands, of busily moving specks.
They were coming from a great tank that stood against a wall of the Scorpion Queen’s laboratory, an army of white specks that headed for the Saint and crawled up her boots and her gold cloth covered legs. And they were stinging, stinging, inflicting a pain that could only be described as that of ice-cold flame.
The Golden Saint managed to capture one of the white specks and raise it to the level of her eyes. It was nothing other than a scorpion, albino in color and reduced to tiny dimensions. As were all of its kind it was equipped with claws and multiple legs, like an Atlantic lobster, but with a curling tail terminating in a wicked stinger.
“You like my pets?” the Scorpion Queen asked. “Are they not lovely?”
The Golden Saint slapped and brushed at her legs, striving with frantic energy to scatter the tiny creatures, but as rapidly as she could brush the scorpions off they were replaced by more and more of the tiny stinging creatures.
They reached her thighs, then her waist. Wherever they had covered her, she felt first a burning agony, then a terrible cold, and then—worst of all—nothing.
This, the Golden Saint realized, was what had happened to the earlier victims of the mysterious plague that terrified Seacoast City. She knew that she had to act within seconds or she was doomed to become a hollow, frozen replica of herself, her flesh and bones devoured by ravening miniature scorpions. In a flash she realized that she had a chance not merely to survive but to triumph.
With a rustle and a sudden crack! the Golden Saint’s membranous wings spread to their full expanse. With a whirr she lifted off the flagstone floor and rose toward the laboratory’s vaulted ceiling.
Had the laboratory been of smaller dimensions there would not have been room for the Saint’s wings to spread to their full extent. Had the vaulted ceiling not been so high, it would have been impossible for the Saint to take flight. But the arrogance of the Scorpion Queen had dictated that her headquarters be gigantic, and now that very prideful splendor would lead to her defeat.
As the Saint rose above her enemies she opened a compartment on the belt that hung from her graceful hips. She drew an instrument from it and pointed it at the albino scorpions that had attached themselves to her boots and her legs. With a low humming sound, a brilliant ruby-tinted ray sped from the instrument. As it struck the tiny scorpions they flared briefly with color, then fell away, most of them landing unharmed on the flagstone floor. The stream of white specks had ceased to emerge from the tank. The creatures milled around on the flagstone floor, seeking some new victim. When they approached the oddly made boots of either the Scorpion Queen or her craven deputy they swerved from them, obviously repulsed by the strange material of the boots.
But not all the scorpions falling from the Golden Saint landed on the laboratory floor. Some landed on the Scorpion Queen; others, on the craven Lord Gorgon. Both of them brushed frantically at the tiny specks of white. It was obvious that the stings of the tiny creatures, as painful as they had been to the Golden Saint’s lower limbs, were agonizing beyond compare as they attacked the Scorpion Queen and Lord Gorgon’s faces, whipping their tiny stingers against sensitive eyeballs, exploring the insides of their nostrils, their panting mouths, the very channels of their ears.
The Scorpion Queen ran for the portal that opened upon the great hall of her castle. Lord Gorgon followed but halfway across the laboratory he stumbled across a heavy cable and fell to the flagstone floor. Even as he struggled to rise he was attacked by tens of thousands of albino scorpions. He got as far as his hands and knees, then threw his hands into the air. He uttered a single, final cry of anguish and despair, then fell to the floor, a cold, white shell all that remained of what had once been a man.
The Golden Saint pursued the Scorpion Queen from the laboratory, her membranous wings holding her aloft and safe from the Scorpion Queen’s white warriors, but as the Saint emerged into the great hall of the castle, her arch-foe was nowhere to be seen.
Shortly the Golden Saint would leave the castle, circling above its walls and towers, searching for the Scorpion Queen, but the latter was nowhere to be seen.
Later, her ravaged lower limbs treated with exotic unguents developed by ancient scholars in hidden cities still concealed in the vastness of the continent of Africa and unknown to the outer world save for the towering redoubt of the Golden Saint, the Saint spoke with General Hopkins. Her message for him, transmitted across the ether by a device of her own devising, was urgent.
It was imperative, the Saint told the military man, that the fleet of B-16 warplanes be loaded with high explosive bombs. They must return to Seacoast City from their base at North Orion Field carrying their load of destruction and utterly obliterate the Scorpion Queen’s now abandoned redoubt in Poseidon Pond.
To his great credit, the General agreed without argument. Within the hour the squadron of mighty B-16’s were refitted with high explosive bombs. Within another hour they were airborne, and shortly they would make their bombing runs over Molly Pitcher Park.
The menace of the miniature scorpions was ended. The ice in Seacoast Harbor would melt, the city would return to its summer norm, children would play once more in the grassy meadows of the city’s parks. The baseball league would hold a special selection of players to create the once idolized Seacoast City Superbas. And foodstuffs and vital war materiel would flow from Seacoast Harbor and the ot
her great ports of America to the beleaguered, heroic resistance fighters of suffering Europe.
The following morning Ruby Mae Jones, formerly of Savannah, Georgia, now a proud resident of Seacoast City, reported for work as usual. Seated at her manicurist’s station in Madame Cerise’s Salon of Beauty, she carefully manipulated a cuticle stick on the carefully maintained fingernails of one of her regular patrons.
“Isn’t it nice,” the patron asked, “that the sun is shining again and summer has returned to Seacoast City?”
“Oh, yes’m,” Ruby Mae smiled. “It was real nice and warm down South where I was raised up. I do love living here in Seacoast City, but I didn’t like having that extra winter this year, not one bit.”
The patron laughed. Ruby Mae was a smart girl. She was going to go places in the world, the customer thought.
She was right. Even more than she knew.
The Whisperers
The so-called editorial offices of Millbrook High School’s student paper would never have been mistaken for the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle or even, to stick closer to home, the Marin Independent-Journal. A cardboard sign with hand- lettered copy was taped to the frosted glass; it said Millbrook Hi-Life, and inside the musty room, wrestled a decade ago from a protesting language teacher, half a dozen battered desks crowded into an area suitable for half that number.
Karen Robertson sat behind the biggest of those desks. On its battered composition top stood a plastic sign announcing Karen’s position, Editor-in-Chief, and on a rolling table beside the desk resided a battle-fatigued electric typewriter, its once bright paint-job suffering severely from the chips and fades.
Mario Cipolla and Annie Epstein sat in straight-backed chairs opposite Karen. All three were seniors at Millbrook High; another half year and they would have their diplomas and be off for a final carefree summer before they started college. They’d been friends and schoolmates for a long time, but fall would see them scattered, to Cal across the bay in Berkeley, to the local College of Mann in nearby Kentfield, to USC nearly half a thousand miles due south.
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