Day work meant ten hours of incessant hard labour in building up the ruins Kronheim’s air fleet had created. The former American style of skyscrapers was, it appeared, to be excluded now in favor of long squat edifices of a new principle.
In one week Val found out plenty. Most of the camp guards were Europeans with a good knowledge of English. Not all of them were brutal at heart, though they obviously had to obey orders. The laxest man of the lot was the Captain of the Guard, rather too old for his job. Val was surprised to find that whip and gun seemed spared quite a lot, even though the ten hours labor was enforced on all men and women from 14 to 60. To exchange views on the regulations was to ask for death, but deep in Val’s mind was a growing fury for the slavery, a fury fanned every time he saw his wife’s drawn, weary face through the barbed wire at a quiet end of the two camps.
“Where is it all going to end, Val?” she asked him hopelessly, one night. “The whole country—and probably the whole world before long—mowed down and sacrificed to power? It isn’t sane! It just can’t obtain. So many against so few.”
“That isn’t it,” he said gravely. “The few have the power and the many have not…”
They were both mute for a moment or two, looking at each other in the glare of the floodlights. Around them roared the eternal propaganda from the loudspeakers. As usual they spouted tales of conquest; some of it true, and the rest of it at variance with the facts Val had heard by word of mouth. It was these little items drifting from the lips of oppressed prisoners that interested him most.
“Maybe a revolt yet,” he whispered presently. “The Captain is pretty stupid. There’s probably a way around him. There is another thing, too. You remember me telling Kronheim that Mane probably gave him something more than bombs?”
Rita nodded quickly. Val’s face, shaven clean like his head, was grinning bitterly.
“It wasn’t just talk,” he breathed. “The further Kronheim and his European masters and agents sink the world into destruction by the indiscriminate use of Mane bombs, the nearer comes the end of the whole damned control.”
“Why? How?”
Val glanced hurriedly round, leaned closer through the wire.
“Those bombs, as we know, have been sunk five miles down. Reports have come through from different sources that they have done more than just blast a mine in the earth. They have released volcanic matter—even in America here which is not definitely in the volcanic zone… I figured such a thing would happen because when I was in Alcatraz I spent my off time reading geology books from the prison library. One of them said volcanic seams start at three miles down or less. Read the books specially as a matter of fact thinking I might do something about it if I got out of jail. I figured using Mane bombs for the very purposes Kronheim accidentally found. Only I figured it out to bring us victory. He’s sowing world destruction—only the mug doesn’t know it yet.”
“But how do a few volcanic seams upset this regime?” Rita asked breathlessly.
“It’s not just that: it’s how long they continue that counts. Once you start breaking the seals on the earth’s inner forces you’re letting out Trouble. Kronheim’s started a juggernaut rolling over the world—”
“Move on there!”
The girl was suddenly swung aside by 200 pounds of female granite. At the same moment Val found himself pushed away by one of his own guards. He wandered off, hands in pockets, and presently found himself facing the undersized figure of Bilworthy.
Bilworthy’s eyes had the bright little gleam of a rat’s. He gave a slow smile as he hoarded the smoke of a prized cigarette end in his throat.
“Tellin’ your wife plenty, weren’t you?” he asked dryly.
“So what?” Val eyed him bitterly. “What the hell were you doing listening?”
“Why not? Don’t we all pick up news?” Bilworthy grinned the wider and smoke escaped from his stained teeth. He went away scratching his whiskery, receding chin.
Val looked after him through narrowed eyes. Three times he had encountered the slimy little prisoner poking his nose where it was not wanted. There was something about him that got thoroughly up Val’s back.
With an involuntary shudder he turned away to listen to the propaganda and cull from it what facts he could. In between the lines he learned plenty. Vesuvius was in violent eruption, for one thing, and hindering war activity. The Bay of Naples was in the midst of the greatest lava discharge in history. In England an extinct volcano in the Cumberland mountains had returned to life and was belching fire and destruction for nearly fifty miles over the war-racked island. China was suffering from earthquakes. In America the stubborn lava flow from the Frisco crater was if anything getting worse.
The facts were all treated lightly in the broadcast, but for Val they registered right on the button. He lounged in a corner of the camp ground and grinned to himself, and the guard who moved him on wondered vaguely what the hell there was to be amused about.
*
Whatever plans were afoot for a revolt received an untimely check the following morning when it was found Camp 4 had a new Captain of the Guard.
Val and his fellow prisoners saw the man for the first time at the line-up for building detail. Unlike his lax predecessor this individual insisted on preliminary inspection of his charges first. He walked slowly down the line with his hands on his hips.
He was big, possibly six feet three, with the shoulders and neck of a prize bullock. His uniform was smart, his boots polished like mirrors. His cap he wore at an angle on his shaven head. His face had square jaws and high cheekbones. His mouth slanted perpetually as he talked to reveal a line of magnificent teeth. His eyes were blue—a cold hard blue with more than a hint of the devil in them.
“There’s been too much sentiment around here,” he shouted, walking along slowly. “Too much!” He looked at the passive faces keenly and his short whip swung at his hip. “But it’s going to change from now on! I’ve been a soldier all my life. See? I know what men need to make ’em work, and that’s discipline! Discipline! And you’ll get it from me! We’re building an Empire here and you dogs will work your ten hours a day to the full while I’m in charge. Ten hours—no more, no less. I know my duty, and I do it! I am Abel Granvort, your new Captain of the Guard, better known as ‘Ox.’ Later on you’ll find out why! All right, Sergeant Mead, take over…On your way! March!”
The file fell into line with the guards around them. But as Val went past Ox shot out his hand and whirled him to one side.
“Not you,” he said briefly. “I want a word with you, Turner.”
Val waited, eyeing the man steadily.
“So you think Leader Kronheim is digging his own grave, do you?” Ox asked slowly.
Val’s eyes traveled to the undersized back of Bilworthy as he tramped away with the others.
“I spoke!” Ox bellowed.
“I heard you,” Val said calmly, turning back to him. “I guess Bilworthy’s been shooting off his mouth again, eh? Amazing what some people will do to try and get others into trouble…To answer your question, I do think Kronheim and his whole corrupt bunch are heading for trouble. Want to make something of it?”
Ox said briefly. “Come with me! March—one, two…” His shiny boots set the pace through the dust.
Val found himself taken to camp headquarters. Ox left him and stood aside at poker-like attention. Kronheim was present with the inevitable thick-lipped Angorstine.
Kronheim came straight to the point. “Last night, Turner, I understand that you had a conversation with your wife amounting pretty close to treason. That was why I had the guard tightened up and put Captain Granvort in charge…You had the impudence to tell your wife that we are destroying our regime by our own hand. What have you to say?”
“Nothing” Val answered coldly.
“You realize I could have you flogged and then shot? And your wife, too?”
At that Ox stepped forward stiffly. “I submit, sir, that the woman had nothing
to do with it,” he said briefly. “She was the recipient of information, involuntarily, and not the giver. Therefore, according to military regulations she—”
“Damn you, man, shut up!” Kronheim roared. “Get back to your place and don’t speak until you’re told…Now you!” He swung back to Val. “I could kill both you and your wife, but instead if you will give me some information I will spare you both and see that you have lighter duties.”
“We don’t want any favors, Kronheim…” Val paused and shook his head. “At least I don’t: but I have my wife to think of. What do you want to know?”
“Geologists and scientists are hard to find,” Kronheim said grimly. “Many of them have been disposed of—but you seem to know something. It is common knowledge that severe volcanic eruptions are taking place everywhere, and my European masters have demanded to know how these troubles can be stopped. They blame me because I instituted the Mane bomb. Earthquakes and landslides are seriously impeding army operations. Heavy fogs are beginning to cover the seas from the intense heat at the ocean floor. That hinders air work. Rivers, filled with flowing lava are drying up… You told your wife you read of the possibility of all this while you were in prison. In that case you may know how to stop it?”
“In other words, you’re in a spot?”
“Answer my question!”
“O.K.—there’s no way to stop it. If there was I would tell you—not because I’ve any regard for you but in the interests of all human beings. You sank the Mane bombs too deep, that’s all. Later on, seams will open in the ocean beds and the fun will start in real earnest. Sea will pour into the gaps. Immense steam pressure will gather underground and blow chasms in the earth…” Val paused and smiled bitterly. “What you and your blasted butchers actually started was the end of the world! You’re getting the world, sure, just as you wanted—and you’ll perish in it, horribly, like the rest of us. But for the rest of us it doesn’t matter much because death is preferable to being ruled by you and yours.”
If Kronheim was disturbed he did not show it. His voice was hard as steel when he spoke again. “You mean you won’t help us?”
“I’ve told you the truth. Take it or leave it.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said. He turned back to Ox. “Return him to camp and deliver twenty-five lashes to the prisoner each day for a week. Do it yourself. At the end of that time he may choose to speak more freely. For the moment his wife will escape the lash: later I may not be so lenient. It’s up to you, Turner…”
“You damnable, blasted—” Val started to say, then Ox whirled him outside.
“Wait a minute!” Val shouted, tearing himself free. “I’ve got things to tell that granite-faced hyena! I—”
“Move!” Ox commanded inexorably, whipping out his gun. “Quick march—one, two!”
Helplessly Val turned and marched back to the workers on the building job. Once there he waited for the shirt to be ripped from his back and the flogging to commence.
“Well, what in blazes are you waiting for?” Ox roared.
Val turned in amazement. “But Kronheim said—”
“To work!” Ox commanded. “Kronheim ordered me to flog you. Regulation 19 of a soldier’s duty says a Captain can give orders but shall not execute them personally. That is for lesser ratings to do. Kronheim gave me an order I could not carry out…I know my duty and I do it! But that won’t save you doing your ten hours,” he finished with a sneer. “Ten hours— no more, no less! Get busy!”
Val turned, astounded at the rigid adherence of the man to laws and regulations. He seemed to be a brute by nature with Clauses A to Z blazoned on his rugged being. Yet somehow he made Val smile.
As he worked he studied him, standing motionless with feet apart and hands on hips, a twisted grin on his square face.
Then Val looked at somebody else…Bilworthy.
CHAPTER V
THE ARK
Not even the strangleholds of censorship or cooked news could entirely disguise the news leaking in in the days ensuing. A foggy steam settled over America and palled the Labor Camps completely. The guard was doubled to make escape impossible. Heat, too, smote the country like a white-hot bar. Reports came in of Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, Fujiyama, and other famous volcanoes going full blast. Smoke and scorching dust from their vigorous craters was penetrating into the atmosphere and producing the most extraordinary sunlight whenever it was glimpsed. The sky seemed to be mixed with blue and magenta colourings through high dust film.
From Italy came the news of the total destruction of Sardinia and Corsica through volcanic eruption. Molten lava pouring into the sea had turned the Bay of Naples into a death caldron, paralyzing shipping, giving up dead and bloated fish and driving poisonous fumes across the Italian and south European lands. The whole southern end of the Italian peninsula indeed seemed to be sinking under the scalding sea.
In two places in the Atlantic fissures had occurred across the ocean floor creating incredible havoc. Swollen with steam pressure, whole masses of ocean bed had blown up and driven a wilderness of raging steam and water before them. Earthquakes in mid-Europe and Asia, lava floods in parts of the Himalayas which menaced India and vast parts of Mongolia, had started an exodus of refugees greater than that produced by the war itself.
The already filled Labor Camps in the conquered countries began to swell to overflowing with unending streams of survivors from all manner of climes. In Camp 4 alone the course of one day saw the addition of a thousand prisoners, some of them dark-skinned men and women of the East who had caught the last surviving boats from their doomed lands and sought the apparent safety of the former United States, only to drop into the hands of human foes instead…
“We have got to revolt!” shouted one of the men in Val’s camp one night, when they were gathered in the narrow dormitory preparatory to “lights out” order. “You told us what caused it, Val—those damned Mane bombs! The whole world is cracking up—rivers and seas evaporating—and we sit here and take it! We’ve got to smash this regime to save our own lives.”
Val looked at the angry worker thoughtfully, then he said:
“To revolt is the sure way to lose our lives, not save them, Hoyle.”
“Then what do we do?” Hoyle spat out. “Sit here until we fry? The heat gets worse every day. We sweat and build and sweat some more, and that grinning swine of an Ox looks on and enjoys every minute of it! It can’t go on—”
“Now listen, boys.” Val got to his feet, set-faced. “Listen to me a minute. I’ve told you the truth every time so far, haven’t I? I predicted this would happen though you doubted it at the time? Right?”
“Yeah, sure,” admitted another. “But I agree with Hoyle that it’s time we got action against Kronheim. The war is finished now by this upheaval of Nature and Kronheim and his European big shots are left as the masters of the world quicker than they had figured…Are we going to sit down to that?”
“For the time being, yes,” Val retorted. “In a while these vast volcanic upheavals will cease—they are bound to find a new level. But in that time something will happen. Seas and rivers are evaporating at top speed—but did you stop to think where the steam is going? Not all of it is included in the world-mist…”
“What’s that got to do with our revolt?” Hoyle shouted.
“Plenty! The conditions which existed at the beginning of the world are being repeated through a blunder of Kronheim’s making! In the early days of the Earth vast heat drove colossal clouds of steam and vapor way out beyond the atmospheric limits. It formed into a ring round the Earth, drawn into that position by centrifugal force. A vast, vapor girdle wrapped the Earth about as today the rings of Saturn girdle that giant planet…Today, the driven steam from rivers and seas and lakes will do the same thing. The outer part of the ring will be frozen by space, the inner part still vapor by reason of the Earth’s heat. But after a while the girdle will be inevitably drawn back to Earth and will condense…”
“Then what?” asked Hoyle in a quieter voice.
“The Deluge,” said Val gravely. “A world swept clean with only a few survivors. That is where this insane drive for domination is going to end…But there will be a few who can perhaps build anew on better lines.”
The men looked at one another with blank faces, then they started talking all at once. They quieted again at the voice of a little, leathery-faced Mongolian who had been sitting passively listening. He spoke perfect English.
“You are right, my young friend, but you put it badly,” he commented. “My name is Kang, by the way. I was driven here from Mongolia by disasters beyond the memory of man being again repeated. I foresaw long ago that the present happenings would repeat themselves in a Deluge…”
He looked round on his listeners, smiled from his wizened visage.
“It is a matter of geologic history that the vapors ascended while the earth was hot and cooled into the Deluge when the Earth cooled—just as they will do now. In Jupiter we behold today a water canopy round the planet in the form of cloud belts. So must Earth have looked once. Proof of the original Deluge is imprinted forever in the legends and histories of nations…”
“For instance?” Hoyle asked dryly.
The Mongolian shrugged. “The Japanese Bible—the Kojiki—refers to a ‘floating bridge in heaven where live the Gods’. On the other hand, Veruna—which as all Sanskrit scholars know was the primitive Indian heaven of the Vedas—means when translated ‘watery Heaven.’ Again, Scandinavian history refers to a ‘bridge of heaven which broke through’—and does not your own orthodox Bible refer frequently to ‘the waters above and the waters below?’ Yes, there was a Deluge.”
“Yeah,” Hoyle admitted blankly. “Guess you’re right at that.”
There was a silence for a while. The words of the gnome-like intellectual had rather stunned them. Val was the first to recover.
“From the rate at which evaporation has gone on,” he resumed, “it is possible that the return of the waters to Earth when the cooling off begins may produce a flood which will cover the world! Even a rainfall of fifteen feet in the space of forty days and nights, like the early Deluge, would produce a flood transcending our imagination. And this one threatens to be even worse…”
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 91
