by Various
Darkness washed over Chris Travers, lying limp beneath the shreds of a silky white shroud....
* * * * *
Electric light. A strong glare of it somewhere. A dull throbbing in his head. Then, a voice, with queer, hissing s's, speaking very close to him.
"Ah, yess. Look you, Kashtanov. He will be conscious soon, I think."
"You're a damned fool, Istafiev, to let him wake up," said another voice, cool and of easy correctness. "He'll see the machines. And these Americans are tricky--one can never tell."
"Tricky? Bah! This fellow is a service man; there are things I can learn from him. Come, now, wake yourself properly, you! That glass of water, throw it on his face."
Kashtanov--Istafiev. Names that could belong to only one country, to that huge power overseas which was hovering, so said rumors, on the brink of war, waiting only for a favorable opportunity to strike--the country which the war game around the Canal had been designed to impress. Chris Travers' mind cleared just then with complete comprehension of who had schemed to send both dirigibles down and who had built this secret lair on Azuero Peninsula.
Inwardly, he groaned. It was all too plain. The destruction of the ZX-2 and the thwarted destruction of her sister had only been the first step of some gigantic plan which was to provide the opportunity for the mighty fighting machine overseas to strike. And he, who might have balked it, had made a rotten landing from the scout and delivered himself, helpless by his own clumsiness, into the hands of these men. The self-accusation was bitter.
With their secret of invisibility, their deadly blue rays, what havoc couldn't they wreak, working from their cunningly concealed base?
And now they were waiting for him to recover consciousness--waiting to question him before killing him....
But as he lay there, apparently still senseless, Chris was grappling with the seemingly hopeless problem. So, even when he felt the tingling coldness of a spray of water on his cheeks, not one line of his face moved, nor did the tiniest flutter of eyelids betray him.
Although the fumbled landing in the jungle had been a catastrophe, it had granted him his only weapon. He was believed to be genuinely unconscious.
"Another--he iss stubborn," hissed the voice of the man called Istafiev. "His senses will soon come. I can bring them back--oh, yess!"
"Enough of this!" complained the suave, beautifully modulated voice. "Darkness is coming; there's a lot to be done. Shoot him and throw him out!"
"It iss I who am in command here, comrade Kashtanov. Remember that. I desire to speak to this man. There! No? No sign yet? Well! We will see if this helps those eyes of yours to open, my American!"
Then began sheer torture.
* * * * *
It was an ordeal of silence. By no motion, sound or slightest sign of consciousness could he seek relief. Inanimate Chris Travers lay, holding his pose sturdily, although it seemed that the sweat was spurting from the pores, while a thin, cruel knife-blade drove into the quivering nerves beneath his left thumb-nail.
Deeper and deeper it inched, accompanied by the soft breathing of the man who guided it, until Chris felt one great sob of pain welling up inside him, struggling to break past his lips; felt a tremendous urge to writhe, to break away from the digging steel. His tongue seemed to be trembling, shivering; but no other part of his body, not even the smallest flicker of eyelash, betrayed him. At long last there came a voice, sounding as if from miles away, and the disgust in it was very good to Lieutenant Christopher Travers.
"Bah! It iss no use. His thick skull must be fractured. I could cut him open and he would not awake. He might be conscious for minutes after some hours--no, do not shoot him. I shall learn a few details from him then. Throw him over there. Now--Zenalishin iss dead, but the mask and cylinder on him should be returned to visibility. Well, we will return him, too. Then, Kashtanov, to your instructions and your work."
Hands gripped Chris's body. He felt himself thud against a wall, and slumped into a heap, head lolling over. The cessation of pain was sweet, though his thumb was raw, but sweeter still was the knowledge that he had won the first tussle: that he was deemed to be harmlessly unconscious for hours.
And carefully, through his lashes, he permitted himself a glimpse of the room he lay in, and the men whom he had heard and felt but not yet seen.
* * * * *
It seemed more like the belly of a submarine than a room, that maze of tubes, levers, wheels, switchboards and queer metallic shapes; and the blur cast upon his vision by barely raised eyelashes made it appear doubly unreal and grotesque. It might have been another world.
Some of it was recognizable. A massive radio-telephone set, by which, he judged, all communications between the fleets in the Pacific were overheard; a squat dynamo; a set of huge cylinders, from which, probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things--strange, monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up to the hut's ceiling, its base a mass of wheels and dials and tubing, was evidently the weapon of the ray that had struck the scout down.
There were three men visible in the room, and Chris switched his attention now to them.
Two were standing by a table in the center of the room, directly under a shaft of light from a powerful electric bulb. The shorter of them was saying to a third man, who knelt in front of the dynamo:
"On full." Then, as a full-throated drone pulsed from it: "Zenalishin iss there? Yess. Put him in."
The voice of the hissing s's--that was Istafiev. Short, stocky, black-haired, he was a direct contrast to the tall figure next him of one whose pointed black beard gave elegance to sharp, thin features. He carried a gun at his waist, and he identified himself as Kashtanov by saying languidly:
"Better strap him in. He'll fall, otherwise. Get some cord; I'll lift him."
The other man, by the dynamo, apparently a subordinate mechanic, dull-faced, drew a loop of cord from a box nearby, while Kashtanov went through actions that seemed fantastic. He stooped, groped along the floor, and then gripped what looked like thin air with his fingers and lifted upwards. But it wasn't air, Chris knew; it was the invisible body of a man--the man who had destroyed the ZX-2, the man whom he had shot at in the cubby of the ZX-1--whose invisibility was now to be stripped from him.
By what? Carefully Chris swivelled his gaze around until it caught on an object which dwarfed Istafiev, now waiting by its side with one hand on the small panel of a switchboard.
* * * * *
A strange thing, truly, to find in a little hut on Azuero Peninsula! Row upon row of slender curved tubes, describing a three-quarter ovoid so that there was an opening for entrance in front, rose to a height of some eight feet, the whole topped by a curious glassy dome which was filled with creamy substance. There was room inside the layers of tubes for a man's body to stand upright--and a man's body was upright in it now, held by cords strapped to his unseen arms.
Invisibility! The dream of scientists for years! Here created, here taken away--by the simple manipulation of two levers on the control panel.
Intently Chris watched Istafiev pull down the right-side lever.
As it came down, the creamy liquid in the dome above the cage began to swirl slowly, then to froth and boil and whip round and round, while thick, dropsical bubbles slid up from its heaving surface and burst, discharging a kind of grayish mist, under which the white substance sank, until there was nothing left in the dome but drab-colored vapor. On the completion of this stage, the layers of tubes below warmed into life. They glowed with a soft vari-colored brightness that filled the cage with a golden splendor and seemed to rim each one of the watching men with fire.
"See you, Kashtanov," came Istafiev's voice. "The refractive index, lowered to that of air to produce invisibility, iss being raised again--all through a simple adaptation of Roentgen's theories! The substance above, mark, in the dome, which this morning you saw affect Zenalishin's blood and the pigment o
f his hair so that the vibrations would render his colorless tissues transparent, iss now reversing. Soon--see!--already he becomes visible!"
Something was growing in the heart of the ribbons of color, and Chris strained his shrouded eyes to discern what it was.
Black lines, standing out in the dazzling welter of light--lines that grew and became more solid as he peered at them--lines that were shaping into a recognizable form, the form of a man's skeleton!
The effect was that of an X-ray. A skeleton hung in the cage, held steady by the cords around its arms, its naked skull with yawning eye-pits grinning out at the four men in the room. Soon other details became visible: black lumps that were organs, the web of fine thin lines that were veins; and then a hazy, ghostly outline of flesh that quickly assumed solidity, burying the bones and veins and organs which had been first apparent.
* * * * *
And all the time the dynamo was filling the hut with its sweeping drone, and the million points of light flung from the intercrossing flame-tongues inside the cage were dancing madly on the walls and floor and ceiling, making the whole scene unreal, fantastic, as from a dream....
"There! That iss enough," said Istafiev.
The lever went back. The streaks of blue-white that threaded the cage died; the grayish vapor in the dome above faded away, leaving more of the creamy, bleaching substance than had been there originally; the dynamo was shut off, and silence fell in the room. A naked man with a very white, peaked face and a blotch of blood encrimsoning his neck hung inside the cage, his head pitched over lifelessly to one side.
Chris stared, almost forgetting the pose of unconsciousness in his bewilderment. A queer mechanism shaped in the form of a cylinder from some oddly sparkling, almost transparent material, was clasped to the nude body's chest: over the nose and mouth was another small attachment of the same substance. A nozzle midway in the large cylinder's front side gave him the clue: from it, obviously, had come the gas which had strangled the crews of the dirigibles, and the covering over nose and mouth was a novel gas mask. The material they were made of could, obviously, be rendered invisible--a virtue not possessed by ordinary inorganic substances. Invisible death from an invisible container, carried by an invisible man!
"Yess, dead," hissed Istafiev, probing the motionless, naked body. "He just got here, told what had happened, and died. He was hurt too badly to think of taking off the gas cylinder or putting on a coat. Well, it makes no difference.... Here, Grigory, take off the mask and cylinder and bury him. And you, Kashtanov, look well at this."
From the table, he picked up a large white piece of cardboard and tapped it meaningly. There were two broad lines on it, running side by side through other smaller lines and shaded patches, and there was also a thick black arrow pointing to one particular place on it.
The chart was easy to understand. Chris Travers recognized it immediately, and his heart seemed to stop for a moment as he did.
Their first step had been the dirigibles: their second was a blow which paled the other into insignificance. And Chris told himself desperately:
"It can't go through! It can't!"
The lines on the cardboard were a detailed map of the Panama Canal; and the black arrow pointed unerringly to its most vulnerable, unguarded and vital point, the Gatun Spillway, which, if wrecked, would put the whole intricate Canal hopelessly out of commission.
* * * * *
Istafiev was speaking again, in low, terse tones, oblivious of the desperate resolve forming in Chris's brain.
"Only one of the dirigibles had been destroyed. Well, it iss too bad, but not fatal to the plan. The ZX-1 can hamper our country's operations when she strikes, but if the ZX-2 were also in action, they would be hampered much more--perhaps fatally. It iss not serious. So we go ahead. Now, Kashtanov, for the last time, the scheme of wrecking Gatun Spillway iss this:
"Note, here, the small golf course. That iss your landing space. You know its location: a mile, perhaps, from Gatun Dam and the spillway. At night, there iss no one near it or on it. You drop down to the golf course from seven thousand feet: the helicopter motors are muffled, and no one will hear you come. Some of the stretches of the course are secluded and hidden by the surrounding jungle; choose one of these to land on. Well, that iss easy.
"The spillway iss about midway in Gatun Dam: its channel has been cut through a hill. You come along the side of this channel right up close to the spillway--close, remember!--and leave the box there. The range of the rays, you know, iss two hundred feet: set them to fire one minute after you leave the box. They will destroy the seven gates of the spillway and also part of the dam and the hydro-electric station. Gatun Lake will then empty itself; the canal will be half drained; the power will be gone--it will take half a year to repair it all. The ZX-1 can fly up to the east coast, thanks to Zenalishin's fumbling--yess; but these American fleets are massed in the Pacific; they will have to go around South America to reach the Atlantic--and that will take weeks.
"And in that time the Soviet has crossed the Atlantic uncontested and has paralyzed the heart of America, her eastern states. Ah, it iss magnificent!"
* * * * *
But Kashtanov's thoughts were elsewhere. Peering hard at the chart, he said:
"I have a minute to get clear, eh? Well, I can do that; but won't the water sweeping through from Gatun Lake after the spillway is wrecked catch me?"
"No. You run up the hill the spillway channel is cut through; it iss high ground, and the golf course iss on high ground. No one will see you coming or going, naturally, and the box iss not big enough to be noticed at night. The noise of its equalizers will be covered by the water coming through the spillway. It iss--what they say?--fool-proof. You cannot fail, Kashtanov. And--" he broke into swift-flowing, liquid Russian, his swarthy face lighting up, his arms waving, one of them slapping the other's back.
"Stop the dramatics," said Kashtanov, "and speak in English. I've worked so long in America, Russian is hard to understand. Time to begin?"
Istafiev glanced at a watch on his wrist. "A few minutes. Look you." He went to a side locker in the room, opened it, hauled out with both hands a box of plain dull metal, and put it on the table. It was larger than the one Chris Travers had seen on the ZX-1, but otherwise similar.
"A double charge of nitro-lanarline iss in this," murmured Istafiev complacently. "Imagine it, when released! You know the working well, do you not? Yess. Well, I put it in the plane, ready." He stepped to the hut's single door and passed out. Through it Chris could see the tiny clearing, dark under the camouflaged framework, now closed once more; the light from the hut showed him the wings of the helicopter-plane standing there. He heard, moreover, the sound of a shovel from somewhere, and knew that a lonely grave was being dug in the wilderness. Then Istafiev shouted:
"Grigory! That grave, make it wide, make room for two." He came back and peered sidewise at Chris. "Not conscious yet?" A foot thudded into the American's side. "No. Well, I see to him when you are gone, Kashtanov. Yess, thick darkness iss here. Time to begin. Take off your clothes."
* * * * *
Chris was now keenly alert, poised, ready for any chance that might come. The odds were two or three to one, and a gun into the bargain, but the stakes were higher than any ever played for before; and a stroke had to be made, no matter how seemingly hopeless. Through his lashes he watched, turned things over in his mind--and something leaped within him when he saw Kashtanov unbuckle the gun around his waist and lay it down, meanwhile taking off the clothes he was wearing: and when he heard the question which followed, and Istafiev's answer.
Naked, lean-muscled and sinewy, Kashtanov paused before the door of the cage. "How will this affect me?" he asked. "Painful?"
"You will be conscious of no sensation. You will see me, yess, and the room, but you will be paralyzed completely while the power is on."
"Paralyzed, eh?" murmured Kashtanov. "Well, let's go," and he placed himself inside the cage.
Paraly
zed, when the power was on! In effect, that left only Istafiev in the room: the man Grigory was outside, and the noise of the dynamo would drown any shouts for help. And Kashtanov's gun was on the table....
Imperceptibly, Chris's muscles tensed as he judged the distance to the table and reckoned out each movement after the first leap. One sweeping blow with the gun would put Istafiev safely out of action; then he could be bound and Grigory summoned and tied also at the point of the gun. If, by that time, Kashtanov was invisible inside the cage, the levers could be reversed and his body brought back to visibility and bound.
Then--a call broadcast from the hut's radio-telephone to headquarters at the Canal and the fleets in the Pacific!
"It'll work," Chris told himself. "It's damn well got to!"
But a certain part of the invisibility machine did not enter his plans.
* * * * *
The creamy liquid in the glassy dome began, as before, to swirl slowly: but apart from that its action was different. The white mass, instead of discharging the vapor-laden bubbles, became a whipping, highly agitated whirlpool as the tubes below glowed softly and ribbons of golden light snaked out and laced through the nude body of Kashtanov. The liquid above flowed rapidly in a complete circle, its center sucked hollow, exactly as a glass quarter-filled with water behaves when rotated quickly. Thus the outer surface of the dome, coated inside with the milky liquid, gleamed and scintillated as the whirl of light struck it and danced off it: and it even became dimly reflective.
In seconds Kashtanov's figure lost definite outline and assumed a ghostly transparency that bared the internal organs and veins: and then his skeleton appeared.
Istafiev was facing the control panel. As he gathered his limbs for the decisive leap, Chris's eyes were on his stocky back. But Istafiev was watching keenly the gleaming, glassy dome above.
