The Science Fiction Megapack

by Bova, Ben; Brown, Frederic

  “Professor Maniel’s apparatus, the Vibration-Retarder, is able to recapture the vibrations, speeding outward endlessly through space, and to reconstruct, and draw back to visibility the objects destroyed by this visible vibratory ray, whatever it is. This problem, then, falls into the province of Professor Maniel!”

  * * *

  Through the heart and soul of Prester Kleig there suddenly flowed a great surge of hope.

  “General Munson, if you will operate the machinery of the Vibration-Retarder, I wish to talk with Professor Maniel!”

  Instantly, efficiently, without a word in reply to the eager command of Prester Kleig, General Munson relieved Professor Maniel at the apparatus which Maniel called the Vibration-Retarder, his invention which he had combined with audible teleview to complete this visual miracle of the Secret Room. Professor Maniel stepped to where Prester Kleig was sitting.

  Prester Kleig put fingers to his lips for silence, and an expression of surprise crossed the wrinkled dead-white face of the Professor.

  Before Kleig could speak, however, there came a signal from somewhere outside the Secret Room, a signal which said that the doors were being opened and that a personage was coming. The Secret Agents looked at one another in surprise, for every man who had a right to be inside the Secret Room was already present.

  “I know,” said Kleig, his face a mask of terror. “It is Charmion and Carlos Kane! Moyen, the devil, has managed to make sure of obedience to his orders!”

  The Secret Agents turned back to the screen, upon which the view of the first aerial brush of the American flyers with the minions of Moyen, in their aero-subs, was drawing to a terrible close.

  For, as the aero-sub commanders had played with the warships, which had no human beings aboard them, so now did they play with the planes of the Americas.

  * * *

  One American flyer, startled into a frenzy by the fate of his fellows, put his helicopter into action, and leaped madly out of the midst of the battle. Instantly an aero-sub zoomed, skyward after him. Again that golden streak of light from the nose of an aero-sub, and the helicopter vanes and the slender staff upon whose tip they whirled vanished, shorn short off above the vane-grooves in the top of the wing!

  The plane dropped away, fluttering like a falling leaf for a moment, before the aviator started his three propellers again.

  A cheer broke from the lips of Prester Kleig as he watched. The commander of that particular aero-sub, apparently contemptuous of this flyer who had tried to cut out of the fight, allowed him to fall away unmolested—and the American, driven berserk by the casual, contemptuous treatment accorded him by this strange enemy, zoomed the second his propellers whirred into top-speed action, and raced up the sky toward the belly of the aero-sub.

  “If only the aero-sub has a blind spot!” cried Prester Kleig.

  * * *

  In that instant a roaring crash sounded in the Secret Room as the American plane, going full speed, crashed, propellers foremost, into the belly of the aero-sub.

  And the aero-sub, whose brothers had seemed until this moment invincible, did not escape the wrath of the American—though the American went into oblivion with it!

  For, welded together, American plane and aero-sub started the eight thousand feet plunge downward to the sea!

  “Watch!” shrieked Munson. “Watch!”

  As the aero-sub and the plane plunged down through the formation of fighters, the aero-sub pilots saw it, and they fled in wild dismay and at top speed from their falling compatriot. Why? For a moment it was not apparent. And then it was.

  For out of the body of the doomed aero-subs came sheets of golden flame! Not the flames of fire, but the golden sheen of that streak which the aero-subs had used against the American planes already out of the fight! The American flyer had crashed into the container, whatever it was, that harnessed the agency through which the minions of Moyen had destroyed the Stellar, and the battleships raped from Hampton Roads!

  “It is liquid, then!” shrieked Munson.

  And it seemed to be. For a second the golden mantle, strange, awe-inspiring, bathed and rendered invisible the aero-sub and the plane which had slain her. Then the golden flame vanished utterly, instantly—and in the air where it had been there was nothing! The aero-sub was gone, and the plane whose mad charge had erased her.

  “Her own death dealing agency destroyed her!” shrieked Munson. “And the other aero-subs cut away from the fight to save themselves, because they too carry death and destruction within them!”

  * * *

  Then the inner door of the Secret Room opened and two people entered. One of them, a dazzling beauty with glorious black hair and the tread of a princess, a picture of perfection from jeweled sandals to coiffured hair, was Charmion Kane. Behind her came her brother, whose face was chalky white. But Charmion, as she crossed to Kleig and kissed him, while her eyes were luminous with love, held her head proudly high, imperious.

  “I know,” she said softly to Kleig, “and I am not afraid! I know you will prevent it!”

  Kleig waved the two to chairs and turned again to Professor Maniel.

  On a piece of paper he wrote swiftly, using a mode of shorthand known only to the Secret Agents.

  “Professor,” he wrote feverishly, “can you reverse the process used in your Vibration-Retarder? Tell me with your eyes, for Moyen may even know this writing, and I am sure he hears what we say here, may even be able to see us?”

  Professor Maniel started and stared deeply into the eyes of Prester Kleig. His face grew thoughtful. He brushed his slender hand over the massive dome of his brow. Hope burned high in the heart of Prester Kleig.

  * * *

  Then, despite Kleig’s instructions to answer merely by the expression in his eyes, Professor Maniel leaned forward and wrote quickly on the piece of paper Kleig had used.

  “Two hours!”

  Nothing else, no explanations; but Prester Kleig knew. Maniel believed he could do it, but he needed two hours in which to perfect his theory and make it workable. Kleig knew that had he been able to do it in two years, or two decades, it still would have been in the nature of a miracle.

  But two hours....

  And Moyen had said that he was preparing to attack at once.

  In two hours Moyen, unless the Americas fought against him with every resource at their command, could depopulate half the Western World. Kleig looked back to the screen.

  There was not a single American plane in the sky above the graveyard of those vanished warships. And the aero-subs, swift flying as the wind, were racing back to the mother ship, scores of miles away.

  Munson worked with the Vibration-Retarder, the Sound-and-Vision devices, ranging the sea off the coast to either side of that huge, suspended fortress which was the mother submarine of the aero-subs.

  Gasps of terror, though the sight was not unexpected, broke from the lips of every person in the Secret Room.

  For super-monsters of Moyen were moving to the attack.

  CHAPTER IX

  Flowers of Martyrdom

  For a minute the Secret Agents were appalled by the air of might of the deep-sea monsters of Moyen, brought bodily, almost into the Secret Room by the activities of General Munson at the Sound-and-Vision apparatus.

  Off the coast, miles away, yet looming moment by moment larger, indicating the deceptively swift speed of the monsters, were scores of the great under-water fortresses, traveling toward the coast of the United Americas in a far-flung formation, each submarine separated from its neighbor to right and left by something like a hundred miles, easy cruising radius for the little aero-subs carried inside the monsters.

  That each submarine did carry such spawn of Satan was plainly seen, for as the great submarines moved landward, scores of aero-subs sported gleefully about the mother ships. There was no counting the number of them.

  Two hours Maniel needed for his labors, which meant that for two hours the flower of the country’s manhood must try t
o hold in check the mighty hordes of Moyen.

  “Somewhere there,” stated Prester Kleig, “in one or the other of those monsters, is Moyen himself. I know that since he wished Charmion saved for his attentions! Do your work with your apparatus, Munson, while I go out to the radio tower to broadcast an appeal for volunteers. Charmion—Carlos....”

  But Prester Kleig found that he could not continue. Not that it was necessary, for Charmion and Carlos knew what was in his mind. Charmion was a lady of vast intelligence, from whom life’s little ironies had not been hidden—and Kane and Kleig had already discussed the activities of Moyen where women were concerned.

  * * *

  Prester Kleig hurried to the Central Radio Tower, and as he passed through each of the many doors leading out to the roof of the new Capitol Building the guards at the doors left to form a guard for him, at this moment the most precious man in the country, because he knew best the terrible trials which faced her.

  The country was in turmoil. It seemed almost impossible that a whole day had passed since Prester Kleig had returned and entered the Secret Room. In the meantime a fleet of battleships had been drawn by some mysterious agency out to sea from Hampton Roads, and a fleet of fighting planes which had followed the ghost column outward had not returned.

  News-gatherers had spread the stories, distorted and garbled, across the western continents, and throughout the western confederacy men, women and children lived in the throes of the greatest fear that had ever gripped them. Fear held them most because they could not give the cause of their fear a name—save one....

  Moyen.... And the name was on the lips of everyone, and frenzied woman stilled their squalling babes with its mention.

  No word yet from the Secret Room, but Prester Kleig had scarcely appeared from it than someone started the radio signal which informed the frenzied, waiting world of the west that information, exact if startling, would now be forthcoming.

  In millions of homes, in thousands of high-flying planes, listeners tuned in at the clear-all hum.

  * * *

  Prester Kleig wasted no time in preliminaries.

  “Prester Kleig speaking. We are threatened by Moyen, with scores of monster submarines, each a mother ship for scores of aero-subs, combinations of airplanes and miniature submarines. They are moving up on our eastern coast, from some secret base which we have not yet located. They are equipped with death dealing instruments of which we have but the most fragmentary knowledge, and for two hours I must call upon all flyers to combat the menace; until the Secret Agents, especially Professor Maniel, have had opportunity to counteract the minions of Moyen.

  “Flyers of the United Americas! In the name of our country I ask that volunteers gather on the eastern coast, each flyer proceeding at once to the nearest coast-landing, after dropping all passengers. Your commanders have already been named by your various organizations, as required by franchise, and orders for the movement of the entire winged armada will come from this station. However, the orders will simply be this: Hold Moyen’s forces at bay for a period of two hours! And know that many of you go to certain death, and make your own decisions as to whether you shall volunteer!”

  This ended, Prester Kleig, excitement mounting high, hurried back to the Secret Room.

  Now the public knew, and as the American public is given to doing, it steadied down when it knew the worst. Fear of the unknown had changed the public into a myriad-souled beast gone berserk. Now that knowledge was exact men grew calm of face, determined, and women assumed the supporting role which down the ages has been that of brave women, mothers of men.

  * * *

  A period of silence for a time after Prester Kleig’s pronouncement.

  As he entered the first door leading into the Secret Room, Carlos Kane met and passed him with a smile.

  “You called for winged volunteers, did you not, Kleig?” he asked quietly.

  Kleig nodded. “You are going?” he said.

  “Yes. It is my duty.”

  No other words were necessary, as the men shook hands. Prester Kleig going on to the Secret Room, Carlos Kane going out to join the mighty armada which must fight against the minions of Moyen.

  The words of Prester Kleig were heard by the pilots of the sky-lanes. The passenger pits, equipped with self-opening parachutes which dropped jumpers in series of long falls in order to acquire swift but accurate and safe landing—they opened at intervals in long falls of two thousand feet, stayed the fall, then closed again, so that drops were almost continuous until the last four hundred feet—and pilots, swiftly making up their minds, dropped their passengers, banked their planes, and raced into the east.

  * * *

  All over the Americas pilots dropped their passengers and their loads if their franchises called for the carrying of freight, and banked about to take part in the first skirmish with the Moyenites.

  Dropping figures almost darkened the sky as passengers plunged downward after the startling signal from Washington. Flowers, which were the umbrellas of chutes, opened and closed like breathing winged orchids, letting their burdens safely to earth.

  And clouds and fleets of airplanes came in from all directions to land, in rows and rows which were endless, wing and wing, along the eastern coast.

  Prester Kleig had scarcely entered the Secret Room than the hated voice of Moyen again broke upon the ears of the machinelike Secret Agents.

  “This is madness, gentlemen! My people will annihilate yours!”

  But, since time for speech had passed, not one of the Secret Agents made answer or paid the slightest heed to the warning, though deep in the heart of each and every one was the belief that Moyen spoke no more than the truth.

  Too, there was a growing respect for the half-god of Asia, in that he was good enough to warn them of the holocaust which faced their country.

  By hundreds and thousands, wing and wing, airplanes dropped to the Atlantic coast at the closest point of contact, when the signal reached them. At high altitudes, planes crossing the Atlantic turned back and returned at top speed, dropping their passengers as soon as over land. That Moyen made no move to prevent the return of flyers out over the ocean, and now coming back, was an ominous circumstance.

  It seemed to show that he held the American flyers, all of them, in utter contempt.

  * * *

  Prester Kleig regarded the time. It had been half an hour since Moyen had spoken of attack, half an hour since the monsters of the deep had started the inexorable move toward land. On the screen the submarines were bulking larger and larger as the moments fled, until it seemed to the Secret Agents that the great composite shadow of them already was sweeping inland from the coast.

  As the coast came close ahead of the monster subs the little aero-subs, to the surprise of the Secret Agents, all vanished into their respective mother ships.

  “But they have to use them,” groaned Munson. “For their submarines are useless in frontal attack against our shores!”

  “I am not so sure of that,” said Prester Kleig. “For I have a suspicion that those submarines have tractors under their keels, and that they can come out on land! If this is so the monsters can, guarded by armour-plate, penetrate to the very heart of our most populated areas before their aero-subs are released.”

  None of the Secret Agents as yet had stopped to ponder how the monsters had reached their positions, and why Moyen was attacking from the east, when the Pacific side of the continents would have appeared to be the obvious point of attack, and would have obviated the necessity of long, secret under-sea journeys wherein discovery prematurely must have been one of the many worries of the submarine commanders.

  The mere fact of the presence of the monsters was enough. What had preceded their presence was unimportant, save that their presence, and their near approach to the shore undetected, further proved the executive and planning genius of Moyen.

  Two miles, on an average, off the eastern coast the submarines laid their eggs—the aero-su
bs, which darted from the sides of the mother ships in flights and squadrons, made the surface, and leaped into the sky.

  Five minutes later and the signal went forth to the phalanx of the volunteers.

  “Take off! Fly east and engage the enemy, and hold him in check, and the God of our fathers go with you!”

  One hour had passed since Moyen’s ultimatum when the first vanguard of the American flyers, obeying the peremptory signal, took the air and darted eastward to meet the winged death-harbingers of Moyen.

  CHAPTER X

  “They Shall Not Pass!”

  Prester Kleig’s heartfelt desire, as the American flyers closed with the first of the aero-subs, was to go out with them and aid them in the attack against the Moyenites. But he knew, and it was a tacit thing, that he best served his country from the safe haven of the Secret Room.

  As he watched the scenes unfold on the screen of Maniel’s genius, with occasional glances at the somewhat mysterious but profound and concentrated labors of Maniel, Charmion Kane rose from her place and came to his side.

  Wide-eyed as she watched the joining of battle, she stood there, her tiny hand encased in the tense one of Prester Kleig.

  “You would like to be out there,” she murmured. “I know it! But your country needs you here—and I have already given Carlos!”

  Prester Kleig tightened his grip on her hand.

  * * *

  There was deep, silent understanding between these two, and Prester Kleig, in fighting against the Moyenites, realized, even above his realization that his labors were primarily for the benefit of his country, that he really matched wits with Moyen for the sake of Charmion. Had anyone asked him whether he would have sacrificed her for the benefit of his country, it would have been a difficult question to answer.

  He was glad that the question was never asked.

  “Yes, beloved,” he whispered, “I would like to be out there, but the greatest need for me is here.”