Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  He wrapped the clothing carefully and replaced it in the box. And he fingered the metal pellets in his pocket as he slipped quietly from the room.

  * * * * *

  He did not stop to talk with Doctor Brooks; he wanted to think, to ponder upon the incredible proof of the theory he had hardly dared believe. The Eye of Allah--the maniac--was real; and his power for evil! There was work to be done, and the point of beginning was not plain.

  How far did the invisible arm reach? How far could the Eye of Allah see? Where was the generator--the origin of this wireless power; along what channel did it flow? A ray of lightless light--an unseen ethereal vibration.... Delamater could only guess at the answers.

  The current to kill a man or to flash a spark into silken powder bags need not be heavy, he knew. Five hundred--a thousand volts--if the mysterious conductor carried it without resistance and without loss. People had been killed by house-lighting currents--a mere 110 volts--when conditions were right. There would be no peculiar or unusual demand upon the power company to point him toward the hidden maniac.

  He tossed restlessly throughout the night, and morning brought no answer to his repeated questions. But it brought a hurry call from his Chief.

  "Right away," was the instruction; "don't lose a minute. Come to the office."

  He found the big man at his desk. He was quiet, unhurried, but the operative knew at a glance the tense repression that was being exercised--the iron control of nerves that demanded action and found incompetence and helplessness instead.

  "I don't believe your fantastic theories," he told Delamater. "Impractical--impossible! But--" He handed the waiting man a paper. "We must not leave a stone unturned."

  Delamater said nothing; he looked at the paper in his hand. "To the President of the United States," he read. "Prepare to meet your God. Friday. The eighth. Twelve o'clock."

  The signature he hardly saw; the staring, open eye was all too familiar.

  "That is to-morrow," said Delamater softly. "The President dies to-morrow."

  * * * * *

  "No!" exploded the Chief. "Do you realize what that means? The President murdered--more killings to follow--and the killer unknown! Why the country will be in a panic: the whole structure of the Government is threatened!"

  He paused, then added as he struck his open hand upon the desk: "I will have every available man at the White House."

  "For witnesses?" asked Delamater coldly.

  The big man stared at his operative; the lines of his face were sagging.

  "Do you believe--really--he can strike him down--at his desk--from a distance?"

  "I know it." Delamater's fingers played for a moment with three bits of metal in his pocket. Unconsciously he voiced his thoughts: "Does the President have nails in his shoes, I wonder?"

  "What--what's that?" the Chief demanded.

  But Delamater made no reply. He was picturing the President. He would be seated at his desk, waiting, waiting ... and the bells would be ringing and whistles blowing from distant shops when the bolt would strike.... It would flash from his feet ... through the thick rug ... through the rug.... It would have to ground.

  He paid no heed to his Chief's repeated question. He was seeing, not the rug in the Presidential office, but below it--underneath it--a heavy pad of rubber.

  "If he can be insulated--" he said aloud, and stared unseeingly at his eagerly listening superiors--"even the telephone cut--no possible connection with the ground--"

  "For God's sake, Del, if you've got an idea--any hope at all! I'm--I'm up against it, Del."

  The operative brought his distant gaze back to the room and the man across from him. "Yes," he said slowly, thoughtfully, "I've got the beginning of an idea; I don't see the end of it yet.

  "We can cut him off from the ground--the President, I mean--make an insulated island where he sits. But this devil will get him the instant he leaves ... unless ... unless...."

  "Yes--yes?" The Chief's voice was high-pitched with anxious impatience; for the first time he was admitting to himself his complete helplessness in this emergency.

  "Unless," said Delamater, as the idea grew and took shape, "unless that wireless channel works both ways. If it does ... if it does...."

  The big man made a gesture of complete incomprehension.

  "Wait!" said Robert Delamater, sharply. If ever his sleepy indolence had misled his Chief, there was none to do so now in the voice that rang like cold steel. His eyes were slits under the deep-drawn brows, and his mouth was one straight line.

  * * * * *

  To the hunter there is no greater game than man. And Robert Delamater, man-hunter, had his treacherous quarry in sight. He fired staccato questions at his Chief.

  "Is the President at his desk at twelve?"

  "Yes."

  "Does he know--about this?"

  "Yes."

  "Does he know it means death?"

  The Chief nodded.

  "I see a way--a chance," said the operative. "Do I get a free hand?"

  "Yes--Good Lord, yes! If there's any chance of--"

  Delamater silenced him. "I'll be the one to take the chance," he said grimly. "Chief, I intend to impersonate the President."

  "Now listen-- The President and I are about the same build. I know a man who can take care of the make-up; he will get me by anything but a close inspection. This Eye of Allah, up to now, has worked only in the light. We'll have to gamble on that and work our change in the dark.

  "The President must go to bed as usual--impress upon him that he may be under constant surveillance. Then, in the night, he leaves--

  "Oh, I know he won't want to hide himself, but he must. That's up to you.

  "Arrange for me to go to his room before daylight. From that minute on I am the President. Get me his routine for that morning; I must follow it so as to arouse no least suspicion."

  * * * * *

  "But I don't see--" began the Chief. "You will impersonate him--yes--but what then? You will be killed if this maniac makes good. Is the President of the United States to be a fugitive? Is--"

  "Hold on, hold on!" said Delamater. He leaned back in his chair; his face relaxed to a smile, then a laugh.

  "I've got it all now. Perhaps it will work. If not--" A shrug of the shoulders completed the thought. "And I have been shooting it to you pretty fast haven't I! Now here is the idea--

  "I must be in the President's chair at noon. This Allah person will be watching in, so I must be acting the part all morning. I will have the heaviest insulation I can get under the rug, and I'll have something to take the shot instead of myself. And perhaps, perhaps I will send a message back to the Eye of Allah that will be a surprise.

  "Is it a bet?" he asked. "Remember, I'm taking the chance--unless you know some better way--"

  The Chief's chair came down with a bang. "We'll gamble on it, Del," he said; "we've got to--there is no other way.... And now what do you want?"

  "A note to the White House electrician," said Robert Delamater, "and full authority to ask for anything I may need, from the U. S. Treasury down to a pair of wire-cutters."

  His smile had become contagious; the Chief's anxious look relaxed. "If you pull this off, Del, they may give you the Treasury or the Mint at that. But remember, republics are notoriously ungenerous."

  "We'll have to gamble on that, too," said Robert Delamater.

  * * * * *

  The heart of the Nation is Washington. Some, there are, who would have us feel that New York rules our lives. Chicago--San Francisco--these and other great cities sometimes forget that they are mere ganglia on the financial and commercial nervous system. The heart is Washington, and, Congress to the contrary notwithstanding, the heart of that heart is not the domed building at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, but an American home. A simple, gracious mansion, standing in quiet dignity and whiteness above its velvet lawns.

  It is the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common
throng that visits the capital.

  But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others.

  It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a mass of correspondence.

  Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call--or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang.

  On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence--so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake.

  * * * * *

  To any observer the busy routine of the morning must have passed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew.

  The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer.

  "Notice this," he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. "An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me--just a penetrating ray."

  He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it.

  "So that is that," he said, and picked up a document to which he called the visitor's attention.

  "Just acting," he explained. "The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o'clock."

  "Stand by is right," the Chief agreed; "that's about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds--there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del."

  "Your expression!" warned Delamater. "Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that."

  "Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room."

  "Perhaps," agreed the pseudo-executive, "and again, perhaps not. He won't get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut--my conversations there are all faked.

  "There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can't see it--it is under those papers."

  * * * * *

  "And if the current comes--" began the visitor.

  "When it comes," the other corrected, "it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly--I hope."

  "And then what? How does that let you out?"

  "Then we will see," said the presidential figure. "And you've been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President's secretary as you go out."

  "He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other's shoulder.

  "Good-by," he said, "and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call."

  "Good luck," said the big man huskily. "We've got to hand it to you, Del; you're--"

  "Good-by!" The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.

  There was more careful acting--another conference--some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.

  Eleven fifty-nine--and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.

  "Ready," the man called softly. "Don't stand too near that line." The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.

  The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away....

  The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.

  * * * * *

  From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.

  Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.

  The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.

  Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!"

  "Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--"

  Again the silence....

  "Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

  In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

  From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

  And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

  "Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool! Imagination!"

  The light was out.

  "Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black....

  * * * * *

  Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.

  "That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice.

  "X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times.

  "That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief.

  "Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?"

  "Quite!"

  "And the machine?"

  "Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell."

  "The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?"

  "Hell, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.

  "Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--"

  THE "TELELUX"

  Sound and light were transformed into mechanical action at the banquet of the National Tool Exposition recently t
o illustrate their possibilities in regulating traffic, aiding the aviator, and performing other automatic functions.

  A beam of light was thrown on the "eyes" of a mechanical contrivance known as the "telelux," a brother of the "televox," and as the light was thrown on and off it performed mechanical function such as turning an electric switch.

  The contrivance, which was developed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, utilizes two photo-electric cells, sensitive to the light beam. One of the cells is a selector, which progressively chooses any one of three operating circuits when light is thrown on it. The other cell is the operator, which opens or closes the chosen circuit, thus performing the desired function.

  S. M. Kintner, manager of the company's research department, who made the demonstration, also threw music across the room on a beam of light, and light was utilized in depicting the shape and direction of stresses in mechanical materials.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE HAMMER OF THOR

  By Charles Willard Diffin

  Like the Hammer of Thor was the clash of Danny O'Rourke with the mysterious giant of space.]

  The Director General of District Three, Ural Division of the Russian States, was a fool. Danny O'Rourke had reached that conclusion some time before--a conclusion, however, that he was most careful to keep unexpressed.

  And then Danny not only thought it; he knew the Director was a fool; and the amazing incident that proved it took place in Stobolsk, the Governmental Headquarters of District Three. Although Danny's regular station was on a lonely peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the United States, the occurrence was nevertheless observed by him; and this happened for two reasons.

  The New Soviet Government that took over control of all the Russias in 1943 wanted, among other things, to install the most modern fire-fighting system, the equal of anything in the world. They turned, quite naturally, to the United States of America for their instruction; and this was reason number one why Danny O'Rourke, pilot of the Air Fire Force, was where he was on the morning of June 13th.