Allan tore himself loose from yellow hands that clutched at him, his fist crashed into Jung Sin’s fear twisted visage, and the crazed Oriental fell back into the roaring blaze.
But Allan himself was thrust backward by that blow, was swaying on the very edge of the chasm. His hand went out for a saving hold on the window sash; flame licked at it. He was toppling, against the strain of his body muscles to resist the inevitable fall, and death reached up from depths for him. Then an arm was around him, was drawing him back to life. Naomi had darted back, defying the terror of that height, the surge of heat. She had reached him just in time—a split-second later and his weight would have been too much for her puny strength. But in this instant, the merest touch was enough to save him. They crept along the ledge and climbed wearily in.
There was another plane in the hangar, and presently Allan had it rising through the well into clean, free air. He turned to the girl in the seat beside him and pointed at the scene they were leaving.
“Look,” he said.
The city was in darkness beneath them, save for the one staring rectangle that marked a pyre. But dawn shimmered opalescent in the east.
A soft white hand crept into Allan’s. There was a long moment of silence. Then Allan said, softly: “A new day, and a new world for their children.”
A sleepy, tired voice sighed: “For their children and ours, Allan.”
THE LANSON SCREEN
CHAPTER 1
Harry Osborn, First Lieutenant U. S. Army Air Corps, banked his wide-winged bombing plane in an easy, swooping curve. In the distance New York’s white pinnacles caught the sun above a blue-gray billowing of twilight ground-haze. A faint smile lifted the corners of his lips as he glanced overside, saw a train crawl along shining rails and come to a halt. Brown dots appeared from the passenger car behind its locomotive and clustered in ordered confusion about the other oblong that completed the train’s complement.
What appeared from his altitude to be a rather large pocket-handkerchief slid from the car and spread out on the grass. A metal tube glittered in the sun, came into motion, swiveling to the east. It looked like a cap-pistol, but Osborn knew it to be an eighteen-inch railroad gun.
He slanted down through lambent air. The terrain below was flat, lushly green. It was entirely vacant save at the very center of its five-mile sweep of marsh. Here a small hut was visible in the middle of a hundred-yard area ringed by a water-filled moat.
Two manikins stood before the structure. One was clothed in o.d., the other in black. The civilian’s tiny arms gesticulated, and he went into the house. The army man moved sharply into an automobile and sped in the direction of the waiting artillery train.
“Five minutes to zero, Harry.” The voice of Jim Raynes, his observer, sounded in the pilot’s earphones, “What’s the dope?”
“Target practice, Jim. We’re to spot for the railroad gun and then we’re to bomb. The target is—Good Lord!”
The plane wobbled with Osborn’s sudden jerk on its stick, steadied. “Harry!” Raynes exclaimed. “What is it, Harry?”
“The target’s that house down there. There’s a man inside it. I saw him go in.”
“The hell! What’s the big idea?”
“Search me. There’s no mistake though. Orders say ‘absolute secrecy is to be maintained by all participants in this maneuver as to anything they may observe…’”
“Maybe it’s an execution. Something special. Maybe—”
“…and this order is to be obeyed to the letter no matter what the apparent consequences,” Osborn finished. “General Darius Thompson signed it personally, not ‘by direction.’ Tie that, will you?”
“I can’t. But—it’s orders.”
Osborn leveled out, got his eyes focused on the astounding target.
Suddenly there was nothing within the watery circle. Not blackness, or a deep hole, or anything similarly startling but understandable. It was as if a blind spot had suddenly developed in his own visual organs so that he could not see what there was at that particular point, although the wide green expanse of the swampy plain was elsewhere clear and distinct.
* * * *
A key scraped in the door of a third-floor flat on Amsterdam Avenue. Junior’s two-year-old legs betrayed him and he sprawled headlong on the threadbare rug in the little foyer.
John Sims bent to his first-born, tossed him into the air, caught him and chuckled at the chubby, dirt-grimed face. He’d been tired as the devil a moment before. But now—
June Sims was flushed from the heat of the kitchen range, but her black hair was neat and a crisply ironed housedress outlined her young slim figure. Junior was a warm bundle against her breasts as she kissed John.
“You’re early, dear. I’m glad.”
“Me too. What’s for supper?”
“Pot roast.” June’s hazel eyes danced. “Johnny, mother phoned. She’s going to come over tomorrow night to take care of Junior so that we can go out and celebrate your birthday.”
“That’s right! Tomorrow is May ninth!”
“Yes. Listen, I have it all planned. ‘Alone With Love’ is playing at the Audubon. We’ll see that, and then splurge with chow mein. I’ve saved two dollars out of the house money just for that.”
“You have! Maybe you’d better get yourself a bat. I saw an ad—”
“Nothing doing. We’re going to celebrate! You go downtown.”
And so on, and on…
* * * *
“They’re starting, Harry.”
Raynes’ businesslike crispness somewhat eased Lieutenant Osborn’s feeling that something uncanny was happening down there and his hand was steady as he jerked the stick to cope with the bump of the big gun’s discharge. A dirt mushroom sprouted in the field.
“Short, two-tenths. Right, four point three,” Jim intoned, correcting the range.
A white panel on the ground acknowledged his message. The cannon fired again and slid back in the oil-checked motion of its recoil.
“Over a tenth. Center.”
The target was bracketed, the next try must be a hit. Harry banked, leveled out. The brown dots that were the gunners jerked about feverishly, reloading. Whatever it was that obscured his vision of the shack would be smashed in a moment now.
The gunners were clear. The pilot saw an officer’s arm drop in signal to fire. Yellow light flickered from the big rifle. Osborn imagined he saw the projectile arc just under his plane. His eye flicked to where that house should be.
And nothing happened! No geyser of dirt to show a miss, no dispersal of that annoying blind spot. Had the gun misfired?
Wait? What was that black thing gliding in mid-air, sliding slowly, then more rapidly toward the ground? The shell that could pierce ten inches of armor was incredibly falling along what seemed the surface of an invisible hemisphere.
It reached the grass and exploded with the contact. The earth it threw up spattered against-nothing. Why hadn’t the shell exploded on contact with whatever had stopped it? What was going on down there?
“I—I can’t make a report, sir.” There was a quiver in Jim’s phlegmatic voice. Even his aplomb had now been pierced. “I think it would have been a hit, but—”
Again and again the great gun fired. Osborn and Raynes, got the signal to go ahead, dropped five three-hundred-pound bombs point-blank on the mysterious nothingness. The area around the circular canal was pitted, excavated, scarred as No Man’s Land had never been.
Aviation Lieutenant Harry Osborn flew back to Mitchell Field in the gathering dusk. His young head was full of dizzy visions. Armies, cities, a whole nation blanketed from attack by invisibility. Spheres of nothingness driving deep into enemy territory, impregnable.
It was good to be alive, and in the old uniform, on this eighth day of May in 1937.
CHAPTER 2
In the tea room of the Ritz-Plaza, the violins of Ben Donnie’s orchestra sobbed to the end of a melodic waltz. Anita Harrison-Smith fingered a tiny liqueur glass
nervously.
“I’m afraid, Ted. What if he suspects, and—”
The long-fingered hand of the man whose black eyes burned so into hers fisted on the cloth.
“Afraid. That has been always the trouble with you, Nita. You have always been afraid to grasp happiness. Well, I can’t make you do it. But I’ve told you that I’m sick of this hole-and-corner business. If you don’t come with me tomorrow, as we have planned, I go alone. You will never see me again.”
The woman’s face went white and she gasped.
“No! I couldn’t bear that. I’ll come, Ted. I’ll come.”
Van Norden’s sharp, dark features were expressionless, but there was faint triumph in the sly purr of his voice.
“Have you got it straight? The Marechal Fock sails at midnight tomorrow from Pier 57, foot of West Fifteenth Street. You must get away from the Gellert dance not later than eleven-thirty. I’ll meet you at the pier, but if there is a slip-up remember that your name is Sloane. Anita Sloane. I have everything ready, stateroom, passports, trunks packed with everything you can possibly need. You have nothing to do but get there. Whether you do or not I’ll sail. And never come back.”
“I’ll be there,” she breathed.
“Good girl. Tomorrow is the ninth. By the nineteenth we will be in Venice.”
* * * *
General Darius Thompson stood at the side of his olive-green Cadillac and looked at his watch. The bombing plane was a vanishing sky-speck just above the horizon, the railroad-gun had chugged back toward its base. He was alone under the loom of that sphere of nothingness against which the army’s most powerful weapons had battered in sheer futility. It existed. It was real. Unbelievably.
A man was in the doorway of the flimsy hut that had been the target of the shells. Quarter-inch lenses made his bulging eyes huge; his highdomed head was hairless and putty-colored; his body was obscenely fat. Professor Henry Lanson gave one the impression that he was somehow less than human, that he was a slug uncovered beneath an overturned rock. But his accession to the Columbia University faculty had been front-page news and the signal for much academic gloating.
“Well?” From gross lips the word plopped into the warm air like a clod into mud. “What do you think now, my dear General? Against my Screen your biggest shells were as puffballs. Yes? Your most gigantic bombs as thistledown. You thought me utterly insane when I insisted on remaining within.” The scientist grinned, humorlessly. “What do you think now?”
Thompson shook his grizzled head, as if to rid it of a nightmare. “You took an awful chance. Suppose it had cracked.”
“Cracked! In the name of Planck cannot you understand that the Lanson Screen is not matter that can crack?” The other spread veined, pudgy hands. “It is the negation of all energy, a dimensionless shell through which energy cannot penetrate. And since matter is a form of energy—” The physicist checked himself, shrugged. “But what’s the use? I cannot expect you to understand. Besides myself there are perhaps a dozen in the world who could comprehend, and none is an American. Enough for you to know that I had to be inside to operate the B machine that cut the negative force the A apparatus set up. From outside it could not be done. The Screen would have remained forever and you would not be convinced there had been no effect of your bombardment within it.”
“Could you not have managed some remote control device, some way of working your B machine from outside?”
“Lord, but you military men are stupid!” the physicist burst out exasperatedly. “Don’t you understand yet that once the Lanson Screen is erected all within is as absolutely cut off from the rest of the universe as if it were a different space, a different dimension? Nothing can penetrate within—electricity, wireless, the cosmic rays, the sun’s radiations. Nothing!”
“Then if a city were covered by it, as you suggest, there would be no means of communication with the outside?”
“That is correct.”
“If knowledge of this were universal there could be no more war.” Thompson’s gray eyes lifted and met the other’s. A momentary silence intervened while a message flashed between these two so diverse characters. Then the general went on. “But if it were the exclusive property of a single nation that nation could become master of the world.”
Lanson nodded. His voice betrayed knowledge of the rapprochement established in that single, long glance. “If I published my results I should gain very little from it. But if I sell it to one power it is worth almost anything I choose to demand. That is why I have worked at it alone. That is why I have never set the details down on paper, to be stolen. After I have sold the invention to you secrecy will be your concern, but till you meet my terms all knowledge of how I produce the effect remains here in my brain.” Lanson tapped his clifflike brow. “Here and nowhere else.”
“After we purchase it you might still sell your device to others.”
“With a million dollars in hand I shall have no temptation to do so. No one could want, or use, more. That is one reason why you should be willing to recommend its payment.”
The general shrugged. “I can get it for you when I am convinced that you can veil an entire city as you did this one small house. It seems to me impossible, or so tremendous a task, requiring such huge installations, such vast power, that it would be forbiddingly costly.”
The physicist’s grating, short laugh was contemptuous. “I’ll shield New York for you with the same machine I used here, with the same power storage batteries not larger than those in your car. Their energy is needed, for only an instant, to start the complex functioning of forces whose result you have just witnessed. I’ll erect a screen for you about Manhattan Island, an ellipsoid as high and as deep as the least axis of the enclosing rivers. Will that satisfy you?”
“If you can do it, and I cannot blast through, it will. When can you—get ready?”
“As soon as I can move my machines to the required location, and set them up. Tomorrow night, if you wish.”
“Very well. What help do you require?
“Only an army truck to convey my apparatus, and, since I will use the rivers as a delimiting guide for the screen, a place near the water to set it up.”
The general was eager now, eager as the other. “I’ll order a truck out here at once. And there is an army pier at West One Hundred and Thirtieth Street that you can use. I’ll see that it is made ready for you.”
CHAPTER 3
Midnight of May eighth, 1937. An army truck noses into the Holland Tunnel. On its flat bed are two tarpaulin-covered bulks, machinery of some sort. Its driver is crowded against his wheel by the rotund form of a black-clad civilian whose chins hang in great folds on his stained shirt and whose bulging eyes glow with a strange excitement behind thick lenses. The truck comes out on Hudson Street and turns north.
Tenth Avenue is alive as puffing trains bring the city’s food for tomorrow. A herd of bewildered cattle file into an abattoir. West End Avenue’s apartment houses are asleep. Under the Riverside Viaduct a milk plant is alight and white tank trucks rumble under its long canopy. At One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street the army van waits for a mile-long refrigerator car, loaded with fruit from California, to clear the tracks it must cross. The way is cleared. The truck thunders across cobbles and steel, vanishes within the dark maw of a silent pier.
Two blocks eastward a lighted subway train crawls out on its trestle for a breath of air, pauses fleetingly, dives underground again like a monstrous serpent seeking its burrow. Above the southward course of that burrow midtown Broadway is a streak of vari-colored illumination, exploding into frantic coruscation and raucous clamor at Forty-seventh Street. Crowds surge on sidewalks, in shrieking cabs, private cars; pleasure seekers with grim, intent faces rushing to grills, night clubs; rushing home, rushing as if life must end before they can snatch enough of it from greedy Time. Blare of the latest swing tune sets the rhythm for them from a loud-speaker over the garish entrance of a so-called music store.
Ti
me writes its endless tale in letters of fire drifting along a mourning band around Time’s own tower.
MARKET CLOSES STRONG TWO POINTS UP PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES RECOVERY ACCOMPLISHED CHAMPION CONFIDENT OF VICTORY FRIDAY HITLER DEFIES LEAGUE POLICE WILL SMASH DOCK RACKET SAYS VALENTINE GIANTS WIN….
There is no Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on that slender wall for some prophet to read.
Felix Hammond knots the gold sash rope of his black silk dressing gown. His satin slippers make no sound as they cross the thick pile of the glowing Kermanshah on the floor of his study to a darkly brooding Italian Renaissance secretary. He fumbles in the drawer for a silent moment, pulls out a book whose tooled-leather cover should be in some museum. He sits down, opens the book.
Minuscule, neat writing fills page after page. Hammond reads an entry. Something that might be a smile flits across his ascetic countenance. His bloodless lips wince at another item. He riffles the sheets rapidly to the first blank space, reaches for a fountain pen and starts writing.
May 8: Wednesday. Another day gone. I confess I do not know why I continue this diary, except, it may be, that it serves as a reminder of the utter futility of life. There are, however, certain scarlet pages, and lavender ones also, that still have the power to titillate emotions I thought long atrophied. I wonder if anyone save I will ever read them.
Aloysia opened in her new show tonight. I have just come from the theatre. She wanted me to join the supper Stahlbaum is giving the company, but I declined with thanks—thanks that I was in a position to decline. Time was that I should have leaped at the invitation, but I no longer need to share her with others. Her part suits her—Norton has given her fully two-thirds of the lines and she trails languid sensuality across the stage to her heart’s content. I noticed that she used that trick with the mouth she first developed for my benefit. It was lost on the rabble…
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 26
