The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  The bell rang, and in a moment the commandant of the forts was ushered in.

  “Mr. Gerrod, Miss Hawkins,” he nodded to them, and then said: “They tell me Professor Hawkins is dead. The Narrows are frozen over again. Hampton Roads is frozen over. Charleston is frozen over. The Pan­ama Canal is frozen over! There’s no steam plume to blow up. Washington is worried. They’re calling me to clear out the channel. The navy department is going crazy. If it were a case of fighting men I’d know something, but I can’t fight a chemical combination. What’s to be done, since the professor is dead? Who on earth can fill his place?”

  He looked from one to the other, al­ready beginning to show the strain un­der which he was laboring.

  “Professor Hawkins,” said Teddy quietly, “was murdered by Varrhus some four hours ago.”

  “Murdered! Varrhus has been here!”

  “No, Varrhus has not been here, but we may be able to trace him. I’ll get the police. Then we’ll talk about ice floes. We know Varrhus’ method now. We’ll soon be able to anticipate him.”

  “But in the meantime,” the com­mandant snapped angrily, “he’ll play the devil with the world.”

  “We’ll play the devil with him when he is caught,” said Teddy evenly. “I’ve no intention of letting Varrhus get away. Just now there’s a possibility of catching him in the ordinary way. He mailed a present to the professor, an antique bracelet. Ancient jewelry was the professor’s hobby. He exam­ined the bracelet and died.

  “I heard he was dead,” said the com­mandant restlessly. “The paper said heart failure.”

  “So did the doctor.” Teddy took down the receiver of the telephone. “Give me police emergency, please.”

  In a few moments he hung up again. The statement that Professor Hawkins had been murdered and that there was a chance of catching Varrhus was all he needed to say. Hardly five minutes had passed before the commissioner of police himself was in the room with two of his keenest men.

  “You’ll have to explain what hap­pened,” he said at once to Teddy. “When news of the professor’s death came I phoned at once to the doctor mentioned in the paper and asked if there were any possibility of foul play.

  To tell the truth, I’d been rather afraid something like this might happen. What was it?”

  “Varrhus electrocuted the professor by an antique bracelet.”

  He handed over the ornament. The commissioner examined it gingerly.

  “Nothing funny about this except the workmanship.”

  “And the surface,” said Teddy. His set calm was surprising himself. “It looks as if it had been lacquered. That’s Varrhus’ secret.”

  “What is it? A powerful battery?”

  Teddy turned to the materials with which he and Evelyn had been work­ing.

  “I’ll show you. Here’s an instru­ment that measures the resistance of a given coil. This is one of the pro­fessor’s evaporation machines for pro­ducing low temperatures quickly. He evaporates ether in this sheath, that surrounds this oven and objects in the oven are cooled far below freezing point. Look at this coil of silver wire. We measure the resistance at room temperature. One hundred and twenty ohms. It is very fine wire. We put it in the cooling oven and set the en­gines going—” For some minutes there was silence while the small elec­tric pump thumped and rattled. “Now we’ll take the coil out. The thermom­eter inside the oven says twelve below zero.” Teddy handled the small coil of silver wire with thick gloves. “We’ll measure the resistance again. Four­teen and a half ohms resistance, ap­proximately. Low temperatures de­crease resistance and increase the con­ductivity of metals. You see?”

  “Yes, but why—”

  “The inside of that bracelet is nine hundred degrees below zero. The whole thing is coated with Varrhus’ lacquer, which, in this case, radiates all the heat from the inside out leaving it incredibly cold within. That cold makes the silver conduct electricity better.”

  “Well?”

  “At eight hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit silver has no measurable resistance to the passage of an electric current. Now watch.”

  Teddy laid the bracelet on top of a frame wound with many turns of glis­tening copper wire. He threw on a switch, and a small generator at one side of the laboratory began to run with a humming purr.

  “Eddy currents are whirling all around that bracelet. A strong current is running in an endless circle in that closed circuit of silver, nine hundred degrees below zero. Silver at that temperature offers no resistance to an elec­tric current. Closed circuits have been left at that degree of cold for over four hours, and at the end of that time the electric current was still flowing round and round like a squirrel in a cage.”

  Teddy picked up the bracelet with a pair of wooden tongs. He took a sec­ond pair in his other hand. Rubber handles insulated the tongs from their handles.

  “There’s a current flowing around the inside of this bracelet. There was one flowing around it when the profes­sor received it in the mail. He opened it with his bare hands, suspecting noth­ing. I open it with these insulated tongs. Watch.”

  He jerked on the two tongs. The bracelet parted at the catch, and a daz­zling, blinding flash of light appeared with a sharp crackle at the parting.

  “I made the current jump the gap. The professor took it through his body and it killed him. Are you satisfied?”

  “God!” said the commissioner of po­lice, aghast.

  “The box and wrapper,” said one of the men who had come with the com­missioner. “Let us have the box and wrapper the bracelet came in and we’ll get the man that mailed it. But we’ll handle him with tongs, too, when we close in on him.”

  They took what they wanted and left. Teddy turned to the commandant.

  “Now, sir, we’ll see what can be done about the new berg. You say there’s no plume of steam. Have you had an aeroplane fly above it to make sure?”

  “Yes. The pilot says the whole ice cake is covered with mist, except for a round spot in the middle, but there’s no sign of a steam plume.” Teddy nodded at Evelyn. “No holes in this cold bomb. I won­der what happens to all the heat that comes in?”

  “Father mentioned that he expected something of the sort, but didn’t say what he thought could be done about it.”

  “The same as we did with the other, I suppose,” said Teddy reflectively. “Only this time we’ll have to blast down to the bomb and then break it up.”

  “I’ll set men to work if you’ll find the bomb,” said the commandant.

  “Almost anyone could find it,” Teddy remarked, “but there are going to be some queer difficulties when you get near the cold bomb. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to be at hand when it is broken up. I may really be of use there.”

  He began to pick out instruments he thought he might need. Among other things he took what seemed to be two silvered globes with small necks. They were Dewey bulbs. Several low-tem­perature thermometers and a thermo couple connected with a delicate galva­nometer completed his preparations.

  The two men left the house and started for the launch that would take them to the forts. On the way Teddy was asking crisp questions about the explosives he could have placed at his disposal, quite ignorant of what was happening at that moment in Jackson­ville.

  The river there was a mass of ice from one shore to the other. All the little reedy islands and the swampy shores were frozen solidly. To see the slender palm trees rising from icy shores, their reflections visible on the narrow strip of mist-free ice that ran along the shores of the river was an anomaly. To see fur-clad tourists stepping out of the tropical foliage to step gingerly out on the ice “just to say they’d done it” was even more strange. At the moment, however, in­terest centered on a little group of sol­diers out in the central clearing in the cloud of mist. They were bundled in furs and swathed in numberless gar­ments until they looked like fat pen­guins or some strange arctic animals. A major of engineers was waving them to the right and left, forward an
d back until they stood at equal distance around the clearing. Each man moved backward until the mist that rose grad­ually from the ice reached his waist. Then, at a whistle signal from the ma­jor, they began to move forward to­ward a common center. The major had reasoned that the cold bomb must be precisely underneath the exact cen­ter of the clearing, and this was a rough-and-ready means of finding that center. They advanced toward each other, and as they went nearer the cen­ter of the clearing the cold grew more intense. Infinitesimal ice crystals glit­tered in little clouds where the moisture of their breath froze instantly in the terrific cold. At a second whistle from the major they halted. They formed a fairly even circle about forty yards across. Each man began to stamp and fling his arms about to keep from freez­ing in that more than frigid atmosphere. No man could have stood that cold, no matter how hardy he might be, for more than a very few moments. The major trotted around the circle, mark­ing the place where each man stood. Four small sledge loads of explosives stood out in the clearing. The major intended to blast down toward the cold bomb with them.

  The major was marking the position of the last man, completing his circle under which the cold bomb must lie, when a peculiar tremor was felt, by every man there. It was not like the shiver of an earthquake or the rever­beration of an explosion. It was an infinitely shrill vibration that a moment later was followed by a creaking sound that seemed to come from the center of the ice cake. The men on the ice stopped their stamping and swinging of arms to listen in instinctive apprehen­sion.

  The center of the circle around which they stood seemed to rise in the air. The ice on which they stood was shiv­ered into tiny fragments. A colossal and implacable roar filled the air, and a great sheet of flame of the unearthly tint of a vaporized metal rose to the heavens. The swathed and bundled soldiers were annihilated by the blast. A great hole five hundred feet across gaped in the center of the ice cake. Jacksonville shook from the concus­sion, and the plate-glass windows of its stores and office buildings splintered into a myriad tiny bits that sprinkled all its streets with sharp-edged, jagged pieces.

  Teddy Gerrod, all unconscious of the fate of those who had attempted to meddle with the Jacksonville ice cake, went on out to bare and blast open the cold bomb that blocked New York har­bor.

  CHAPTER VI.

  Teddy Gerrod straightened up and beat his hands together,

  “Forty-seven below,” he said to the soldier behind him. “Put a marker here.”

  He moved off to the right. Already a dozen little flags showed where the temperature reached that degree. Teddy was drawing what he would have termed an isothermal line—a line where the temperature was the same. He was making a circle about a large part of the open clearing on the ice floe. Other flags led back into the mist, marking a path, and from time to time a party of four or five fur-clad sol­diers arrived from the fort, dragging a loaded sledge behind them. They emptied the load from the sled, turned, and vanished into the mist again. A small pile of drills, explosives, and two of the squat trench mortars had al­ready been made.

  When the circle of little red flags had been completed, two signal-corps men set up their instruments and accu­rately located the center. Directly un­der that spot, if Teddy’s reasoning was correct, the new cold bomb was resting. The sledge from the fort arrived again, bearing a curious trench catapult for flinging bombs. Four long strips of black cloth were unrolled, under direc­tion of the signal-corps men, pointing accurately to the center of the circle. No one had been able to approach nearer, thus far, than thirty yards from the center. At that distance Teddy’s thermo couple indicated a temperature of more than seventy-two degrees be­low zero, and flesh exposed to the air was frostbitten on the instant. What the temperature of the air might be di­rectly above the cold bomb could only be conjectured.

  One of the infantrymen from the fort, the best grenade man in the gar­rison, now picked up a Mills grenade, and after carefully picking out the tar­get with his eye, aided by the strips of black cloth, flung the small missile. A hole perhaps four feet deep and twice as much across was blasted in the brittle ice. A second, third, and fourth gre­nade followed. At the end of that time the size and depth of the hole had been doubled.

  The trench catapult was set up. Half a dozen grenades were bundled together and flung into the now much enlarged opening in the surface of the ice. There was no explosion. One automat­ically braced oneself for the report, and the utter silence that succeeded the dis­appearance of the grenades came as a peculiar shock.

  “Too cold,” remarked Teddy to the young lieutenant in charge.

  The lieutenant nodded stiffly.

  “We’ll try again.”

  A second batch of grenades was flung into the hole, and the same quiet re­sulted.

  “I would suggest—” Teddy began.

  “We’ll fire a trench-mortar bomb,” said the young lieutenant.

  The heavy winged projectile flew up into the air, and then descended squarely into the opening in the ice. Those standing fifty yards away could hear the crash as it struck, and then a sound as of musical splintering. The young lieutenant swore.

  “The fuses are no good. Try once more.”

  “You can shoot all day and they won’t go off,” said Teddy mildly. “It’s too cold down there.”

  The officer said nothing, but super­vised the firing of a second mortar bomb with precisely the same result. He swore again.

  “It’s probably quite as cold as liquid air down there,” said Teddy. “In fact, there’s quite possibly a pool of liquefied air at the bottom of the hole. Your bombs fall into that air and are frozen so solidly before they strike that the metal gets brittle and simply falls to powder from the shock. You can’t do anything going on this way.”

  The young lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Teddy somewhat sulkily.

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “We’d better enlarge the hole first. Blast down the walls of the present cavity, then use wrapped dynamite until we have a shallow crater. Then we’ll place our explosives by long poles, keeping them warm by running resist­ance wires around them and heating them electrically.”

  The young lieutenant considered and agreed, Teddy went back to the fort to arrange for the heated bombs and the long poles. When he returned there was only a saucer-like depression in the ice clearing. It was quite fifty yards across, but no more than twenty deep. Standing near the edge, one could see the ice near the bottom glis­tening liquidly. Air, liquefied by the in­tense cold at the bottom of the crater, wet the surface of the ice there.

  “And that means the temperature down there is three hundred and twenty-five degrees or more below zero Fahrenheit,” explained Teddy casually. “Here’s where we use our heated explosives.”

  For an hour the party worked busily. Storage batteries brought out on sledges furnished the current that kept the explosives from becoming inert through cold. Charge after charge was fired, and the bottom of the crater grew steadily deeper. At the lowest point a little puddle of liquefied air collected.

  “We must be pretty nearly at the cold bomb now,” said Teddy thought­fully. “There’s a mass of liquid air at the bottom of our crater, and some­thing tells me there’s solidified air at the bottom of that puddle. That means seven hundred-odd degrees below zero.”

  He was clad in the warmest garments that could be found, and every one of the others working in the clearing was quite as warmly clothed, but the cold was intense. One of the soldiers by the small pile of explosives was chewing an end of tobacco. He spat. The brown­ish liquid froze in mid-air and bounced merrily away across the ice. The sol­dier looked at it with his mouth open, then shut it quickly. A thin film of ice had formed from the moisture on his teeth. The breast of every mem­ber of the party was covered with sparkling snow crystals from the congealed moisture of their breath.

  “I begin to doubt if we can keep our stuff from freezing much deeper,” Teddy commented. “We want to go down as deep as we can before we
use our Dewey bulbs, though. I’ve only two of them.”

  The young lieutenant bustled away, and presently returned.

  “The men say that the last bomb won’t go off,” he said aggrievedly. “Your heating plan doesn’t work.”

  “I didn’t expect it to work indefi­nitely,” said Teddy mildly. “We want to clear out that liquid air and shoot our two Dewey globes before it’s had time to reform. Will you please have a charge made ready to be fired just above the surface of that puddle? That should clear it away. Immediately after that charge has gone off we’ll drop our two T. N. T. charges in the Dewey bulbs. They ought to show us the cold bomb.”

  The dynamite charge was suspended about a foot above the surface of the watery, bubbling pool. Air was in that pool, air turned to transparent liquid by the intense cold. At—325° Fahrenheit air becomes a liquid. Here, ex­posed to the sunlight and the blue sky, a pool of liquefied gas had collected from the incredible cold of the cold bomb below. The charge of explosive burst with a shattering roar. The echoes of the explosion had not died away when the two Dewey bulbs filled with T. N. T. fell into the bared ice cavity. A Dewey bulb is a combination of six vacuum bottles placed one out­side the other. They are used for the keeping of liquid gases at a low tem­perature, but are obviously just as effec­tive in protecting their contents from exterior cold. They fell some five yards apart and rolled, then were still. Their fuses sputtered. They went off together. A huge mass of shattered ice was thrown aside, and a dark, globular mass was exposed to view. Almost as soon as it was exposed to the air a crust of frozen air coated it, and liquefied air began to trickle down its mis­shapen sides. There could be no doubt but that it was the cold bomb, invented by an insane genius to make him mas­ter of the world.

  Those about the rim of the crater looked at it and turned away. Just as the intense heat of a blast furnace sears unprotected flesh even yards from its flame, so the incredible cold of the dark object pinched and wrung with its freezing rays. Not one man who looked upon the cold bomb but suf­fered from a deep frostbite.