Twin of the Amazon

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Twin of the Amazon Page 3

by John Russell Fearn


  “Yes,” the Amazon agreed, frowning thoughtfully, “I’m perfectly aware of it. I’ve been watching what’s going on—”

  “And it’s going on every minute; every hour!” Kerrigan cried. “News keeps coming to headquarters of this or that building collapsing, of this or that power-unit blowing apart—”

  “The very stability of our basic metal, durrilium, is threatened,” added the chief of the Atomic Power Board.

  The Amazon glanced up as the maid entered.

  “Did you ring, Miss Brant?”

  “Yes, Tana. Have breakfast prepared for us four here, please. As quickly as possible. We’ve urgent business ahead.”

  “Yes, Miss Brant.”

  As the maid went out Slater Pratt gestured urgently.

  “Look here, Miss Brant, what do we do?”

  The Amazon gave a rather cynical smile. “As usual you come running to me in a crisis! After all, Mr. Pratt, you are the head of the Atomic Power Board. The problem falls within your sphere.”

  “But,” Pratt protested, “I don’t even know what has happened—or what is happening! Our basic metal has been tried and tested by every known scientific means to withstand corrosion, wear and tear, electrical influence—”

  “Yes, yes,” the Amazon interrupted, with an impatient wave of her hand, “but let us strip durrilium of its fancy name and get down to facts. Basically, like any other average metal, it is iron. Iron scientifically treated and case-hardened to the limit of resistance, but it is still iron. Therein, I believe, lies the answer to our troubles.”

  Chris Wilson looked puzzled. “But, Vi, even iron shouldn’t start to behave like this—as though it’s candle-wax, or something.”

  The Amazon’s violet eyes fixed on him with something of that calm contempt which always made him writhe inwardly.

  “I wonder,” she said slowly, “why it is that you men often give the right answer to a problem ahead of time—and then when the problem arises you forget what you said? You yourself guessed the truth at the outset, Chris—the meteorite.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Kerrigan exclaimed. “That ball of iron couldn’t have anything to do with this metal collapse.”

  “Your choice of expression is rather loose, Howard,” the Amazon told him. “That ball, in all probability, is not iron. In fact, judging from its colossal weight it is something very, very different.” The Amazon got to her feet and looked pensively down on the three men. “Gentlemen,” she continued quietly, “I blame myself for this! Absorbed as I have been with the Martian colonization scheme, I had no time for apparent trifles, otherwise I would have isolated that mysterious meteorite when it plunged to earth. In it there must have been something—I don’t know what—which escaped and later attacked our metals. How it escaped from a closed sphere is also a mystery. The fact remains that what we see about us now is a replica of what must once have happened on Mars. The reduction of metals to ferric oxide.... Rust!”

  The men glanced at each other anxiously, then back to the Amazon.

  “But, Vi, you can’t mean that something or other”—Chris moved a hand vaguely—“is eating up or somehow destroying everything metallic? Why, that would bring down all civilization around our ears!”

  “How can we be sure but what that isn’t the intention behind it?” the Amazon demanded. “Though I saw no life on Mars, nor got any registration of it, I am convinced that something, somewhere, watched me. There is no longer any room to doubt it. From Mars came that meteorite, loaded with something unknown which is now eating the heart out of our basic iron, as presumably it once ate the heart out of Mars and reduced the planet to a barren wilderness made up entirely of deserts of rust.... It is not a far cry to our world sinking into a similar terrifying abyss unless we fight this thing with everything we’ve got!”

  “But how?” Chris demanded. “I can’t even imagine where we should start. I’ve examined some pieces of the ‘corroded’ metal, as I’ll call it; in fact, they were rushed to me during the night when the Central Power-house collapsed. Since I couldn’t find you, I took the pieces to the laboratory of Science.” He paused and gave a grim smile, “By the time I had reached there the metal was no more! It looked like a mass of frozen quicksilver. How on earth can one analyse stuff like that?”

  “Analysing what causes the trouble is not the immediate necessity,” the Amazon responded. “What we have to do is protect what there is left from the ravages of this unknown something—and there is one way to do it. Find out what the meteorite is made of and, if possible, duplicate its metal.

  It stands to reason that it must be proof against this ‘something’, else it could never have survived crossing space without being reduced to a fluid state.... That’s the answer, gentlemen,” she added. “After breakfast we’ll fly to Salisbury Plain and see what that hunk of stuff can reveal to us.”

  CHAPTER III

  It was towards ten o’clock when the fast ’plane landed within a dozen feet of the deserted meteorite in the barrenness of Salisbury Plain. The Amazon, small scientific instruments packed into a bag, led the way to the gigantic pitted ball rearing up in the morning sunlight, and began a study of it from various angles.

  Chris, Kerrigan, and Slater Pratt watched her in silence. They had already seen this enigmatic object—and derived nothing from it. Now they were interested to see if the Golden Amazon could do any better.

  Without speaking she prowled about it, occasionally stopping and fingering the metal, inspecting the pits and scars in the surface; then presently she moved away about twelve feet and fitted up a portable instrument on a tripod, controlled by atomic force batteries no larger than a wrist-watch. When the instrument was assembled she switched it on and an invisible beam on the radar principle projected itself at the meteorite. The Amazon stood looking into the instrument's screen, a hood over the top masking the direct light of the sun.

  “Take a look,” she invited, after a while, and the men moved to her side.

  To their surprise the screen carried an image of an object exactly like a honeycomb—one mass of cells and connecting granular galleries.

  “What is it?” Kerrigan asked, puzzled.

  “I’m training a radar-beam on the back-reflecting principle on this ball of metal,” the Amazon explained. “It relays whatever it detects back to the screen and gives an exact picture of conditions reigning in the metal. I would add that the image is enormously magnified. So then we see now that this so-called solid ball is anything but it. It is more of a metallic sponge with a myriad pin-prick holes in its make-up, invisible to the naked eye. And that,” she finished, switching off, “is why no door is needed in this ball. It is obviously hollow—but whatever was inside it simply escaped through the interstices in the metal. Which indicates something infinitesimally small.”

  “Perhaps,” Kerrigan mused, “something on the lines of bacteria?”

  “Maybe,” the Amazon admitted. “I can’t form a guess until I can isolate whatever it is that causes our metals to fall apart. This metal does not, therefore I want to know what it is.”

  She changed the barrel-like radar instrument on top of the tripod for another piece of equipment, which, when switched on, operated a scale-reading needle running like a mercury thread up and down a ladder of numbers—only in this case it was the Periodic Table of Elements from 1 to 92, hydrogen at the lowest end, and uranium at the highest, with numbers 43, 61, 75, 85, and 87 left blank, still unknown elements in the table, even in this advanced period.

  The needle finally came to rest four degrees above the topmost element.

  “So!” the Amazon breathed, a gleam in her violet eyes. “In our scale reading it is Element 96! No wonder the stuff is so heavy, with ninety-six electrons in its makeup. Somehow I’ve got to have a piece for analysis.”

  This presented something of a problem. The Amazon tried three disintegrator rays, each one of greater strength than its predecessor, on the metal, without any effect—but at the fourth attem
pt, incorporating a power six-fold that already used, an uneven lump six inches long by one wide was chipped away. Immediately she dived for it and lifted its heavy mass in her hand.

  “All I need,” she said, in satisfaction. “In my laboratory I’ll soon make this give up whatever secrets it possesses—and if possible I’ll duplicate it.”

  She led the way back to the ’plane, and wasted no time in flying it back to her out-city home. On the way she and her companions gazed down on further enactments of tragedy, but the problem was so huge—and so unexpected that none of them spoke. At the girl’s home the men took their leave to hurry back to duty and keep a check on events. They all knew that the moment the Amazon had anything important to announce she would advise them quickly enough.

  For all that, she had plunged into a problem which taxed even her scientific skill to the uttermost. Day succeeded day as she worked tirelessly in the laboratory, never once pausing to sleep, only nourishing herself with restorative pills, calling on her superhuman reserves of strength to keep her going as she battled with the riddle of a metal which was unknown in Earth’s list of elements.

  And whilst she struggled, other things were happening in the world outside. The collapse of metal buildings, bridges, railroads, towers, vehicles, fliers, and so forth, comprised one steady and terrifying stream of reports. It was a trouble no immense that no one organization, or group of organizations, could possibly do anything about it. The cumulative effect was to demoralize the peace-loving citizens of Britain. They were panicked as they had never been in their lives before, and paralysis of industry and enterprise crept over the face of a slowly scarring, eroding country.

  Then, mysteriously, the menace leapt two ways simultaneously—to Federated Europe and the United States, destroying in the same silent, ruthlessly efficient manner. One moment there would be solid metal, and the next a flowing shell, like wood rotted inside with the work of white ants.

  Scientists concentrated all their efforts on trying to find the cause of the trouble and so isolate it, but without success. Deadly scars, each one reckoned in hundreds of thousands of lives, began to mark Earth’s face as days became weeks....

  Nor was this all. Famous leaders of public opinion, both men and women, mysteriously vanished from the communities in which they had become known and respected. Then, usually a week later, they returned, without a word of explanation as to what had happened to them or where they had been. Indeed, the only thing which seemed to interest them was delivering inflammatory speeches from the fast-tottering ruins of the world’s principal cities.

  There were even exhortations to war as the only means of weeding out the fit from the unfit. The pestilential head of conflict on a world-wide scale, with weapons staggering beyond belief, gradually became the main topic of conversation. Everywhere a public leader talked he or she glorified the art of destruction, insisted on it as the only escape from the crumbling hell which had descended on mankind.

  Of these dangerous speeches the Amazon only became aware a month after her self-imposed task to isolate Element 96 had begun. Then, even her tremendous strength weakened, she sent for Chris Wilson and Commander Kerrigan, as the two leading powers in industry on Earth and Venus respectively.

  They were inwardly shocked when they beheld her in the laboratory. Her strangely fascinating beauty was worn and hag-ridden: her violet eyes were hollow and roving after the stupendous strain she had thrown on herself. Only her manner was unchanged—quiet and perfectly self-assured. Almost languidly she gestured to the bench, where lay a thin sheet of metal catching the shadowless arc-lights.

  “There it is,” she announced. “Element 96 duplicated, and I’ve worked out the formula to the last detail so that our scientists and engineers can turn the metal out in endless miles. What we have to do is build a second outer wall round all valuable utilities and power-stations—those that have survived so far, that is—and whatever this menace is it will never get through that metal! I’ll stake my life on it. But what a job the analysis and computation has been!” she breathed, pushing a hand through her thick blonde hair and sitting down heavily. “And how much it tells me!”

  “You’re all in, Vi,” Chris told her seriously. “You need rest.

  “I know it; and now I can have it.” She looked up again, The old fire gleaming in her purple eyes. “One thing is now quite clear,” she continued. “Mars not only possesses life— which mysteriously evades registering itself on instruments but it is also life with an intelligence far ahead of ours, by which I mean mankind in a general way, as opposed to geniuses. Only creatures of phenomenal skill could ever have integrated the necessary formula to create that Element 96. It nearly defeated me, and I admit it.... I have also found,” she finished, “what it is that is destroying our metals.”

  “You have!” Kerrigan cried, his craggy face lighting. "That’s the best news of all, Vi. It shouldn’t take long to destroy it once we know what it is—”

  “Unfortunately I’ve not the least idea how to destroy it,” the Amazon interrupted, getting to her feet again. “Just take a look at this....”

  She went over to a corner of the laboratory and switched on a light behind a tall transparent tube filled with liquid.akin to water. In the midst of it shifted and stirred a myriad infinitesimal objects, moving like reddish scum.

  “That isn’t one creature, but multi-millions of them,” the Amazon explained. “And, like some of our sea-mites and bacteria, they multiply at an incredible rate, dividing by fission. With reagents I have more or less sterilized their rapid multiplication in this tube, but in the normal way they continue increasing by something like twenty-seven millions every twelve hours. We have, of course, similar creatures in our own sphere—the oyster, for instance, or the sea-urchin, with their millions of eggs annually. Then again, consider the coral reefs which, though looking solid, are actually packed multi-millions of small sea-creatures—”

  “But what are those things in the tube?” Chris interrupted, puzzled. “I never saw anything like them before.”

  “Hardly likely you would, since they’re Martian,” the Amazon replied. “I call them ‘Iron-eaters’. Watch this...”

  She scooped some iron filings into her palm from the bench and dropped them in the liquid. There was a foam of bubbles as the red cloud moved violently—then the iron had gone.

  “Hungry little blighters, aren’t they?” Kerrigan asked, with an uneasy smile.

  “Yes, from Mars,” the Amazon repeated, turning and switching off the tube-light. “And intelligent life directed them here in that meteorite, which they could not eat. This same intelligence knows that these mites, like bacteria, can withstand frightful heat—as when the meteorite became red-hot—and intense cold, without suffering, much less death. This same intelligence also knew that as the mites became hungry they would escape through the interstices of the metal, that honeycomb pattern being made on purpose, and seek out the nearest iron. That, apparently, proved to be London.

  “But since these mites have no intelligence of their own, they just couldn’t have selected the Central Power-house by chance. They were directed to it by some unfathomable power reaching across forty million miles of space! From then on, as the things fed—and destroyed metal—they multiplied. Until now they are in such colossal numbers they are eating the core out of our civilization. This metal I’ve devised will stop them, but since it is impossible to shield everything, our main job is to find a way to destroy this appalling menace.”

  “Well, at least you’ve slowed them down in that tube,” Chris commented, “which is a good start.”

  “True, but I couldn’t apply that method all over the world—and slowing them down isn’t killing them, Chris. Candidly, I don’t know what will kill them.”

  The Amazon sat down again and brooded wearily, rubbing her forehead.

  “I don’t like this a bit,” Kerrigan muttered. “We’re fighting a menace we can’t see, a life which doesn’t register, projected from
an apparently dead world! How’s that for a set-up? Look, Vi, do you suppose this sudden attack has been made upon us because you went to Mars?”

  “It would seem so,” the Amazon replied, sighing, “but I can’t even begin to grasp the reason.... I’ve got to rest,” she decided, stifling a yawn. “Take that formula, Chris, and the metal, and decide which utilities and main focal points need guarding against the menace. It’s in your hands from now on.”

  “Okay.” Chris picked up the metal and sheets of paper covered in mathematical formulae. “There’s something else, though, which I think you should know about...”

  “What?”

  “These warlike speeches being given up and down the country—and abroad too, for that matter. Before very long we’re going to have a war added to our troubles unless a firm hand is taken.”

  The Amazon frowned. “Warlike speeches? First I’ve heard about it. How do you mean?”

  In detail Chris explained, and he finished with a rather helpless shrug.

  “Financiers, soap-box orators, Presidents, Prime Ministers, men and women, all of them who have a bit of a following, are preaching the same unholy gospel. War, as the only solution to our problem, and the consequent emergence ol a dominant race.”

  “Such blasted bunk!” Kerrigan scoffed. “War never settled anything, and never will.”

  “In other words, the total elimination of the human race,” the Amazon said, musing. “There’s something queer about it,” she went on. “First, you say, these various people vanished and then came back to talk of war? Even Bradley Thomas, the financier?”

  “Even Bradley Thomas,” Chris confirmed gloomily. “I’ve always thought of him as one of the most fair-minded men in London affairs. Now he’s a rip-snorting warmonger. Same goes for the Prime Minister. Come to think of it, all the moderates the world over have suddenly turned into war-horses.”

 

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