“Yes, Lord!” said Glass, with a bow.
“Krieg, lock this man in a cell and leave him there, under the surveillance of a guard. When he wakes up of his own accord, have him killed by the Kalmuks. They’ve been deprived of entertainment for a long time.”
“Yes, Lord.” Krieg bowed deeply.
“As for you, Wilfried, go make a detailed examination of the aeroplane and its contents, so that you can tell me about it when I question you.”
Wilfried made a reverent gesture identical to those of Glass and Krieg. “Yes, Lord!”
Then, outwardly calm but trembling with an inexpressible joy, in the grip of an emotion seemingly capable of turning him inside out, and burning with mad desire, Lucifer took the sleeping body of Laurence Païli in his arms and went out of the sinister room.
A few minutes later, he deposited his living burden on a long and broad blue divan, scattered with silk cushions in every shade of blue. There was a canopy above it, from which hung three light silk curtains, opened almost to their full extent, all in the same delicate shade of blue.
The large room, of which the divan took up the whole of one side, was hung with pale blue silk and furnished very elegantly, with a sort of comfortable voluptuousness. The low bed also had a canopy with blue curtains. There were a few armchairs, some poufs, two tables, a small settee and two wardrobes, all in a new style slightly reminiscent of the aristocratic English style of recent years, but much more graceful in its lines and more harmonious in its contours.
The room was an exact reproduction of the set of a lyrical drama in which La Païli had scored the greatest success of her career at the Opéra-Comique. If, instead of being shielded by masculine clothing of a military sort, the singer laid out on the divan had been wearing the delicate low-cut dress that had formerly hugged the curves of her divine figure while she relaxed, smiling, on an exactly similar divan on the stage of the Opéra-Comique, Glô von Warteck would not have waited for the young woman to wake up, naturally or otherwise! He would have forgotten his formidable role in the terrestrial world, his ambitions, his plans, and everything else. He would have forgotten it all... And the Man would finally have triumphed over the rebel Woman.
What would it have mattered that she was asleep? Why should that give him pause? There was so little difference between this sleeping Laurence and La Païli the performer, awaiting the arrival of her beloved in a near-rapturous state. Yes, if Laurence had been wearing La Païli’s dress here... But while La Païli was extended there, Glô von Warteck was abruptly brought back from the dream into which the room’s imitative appearance had transported him into reality–because Laurence was presently dressed like a man!
Glô released a kind of roar, threw himself backwards and clenched his fists upon his brow, where pearls of seat were forming, so violent and profound was his reaction. He muttered furiously: “Mad! Mad! Worse than mad! Stupid and ridiculous! What was I going to do? Waste in a matter of seconds that from which I expect ecstasies a hundred times renewed! And while that woman might have knowledge in her head crucial to success and failure, good and evil–which is to say, my life or my death. From her, I shall discover where my enemies are. From her, I shall discover what happened to Hunter and Rupert VI... That’s the immediate necessity! Afterwards, will there not be days and nights, weeks and months and years, years to renew my pleasure, provided that I don’t extinguish it forever in a few minutes! Come on! First, let’s find out why and how La Païli, the Nyctalope’s lover, and Grisyl of the Hollow Rock, are here, at the North Pole, with an aviator found tied up in his own aircraft!”
Lucifer, having conquered his lust, collected himself again. He propped Laurence’s sleeping body up, supporting it with a pile of cushions. Then he sat on a pouf, facing his victim. Simply extending his hands palm outwards, without making any ritual passes in the air, solely by the force of his will, he caused the young woman to pass from the sleep in which she was plunged into another far less innocent: a third-stage hypnotic trance. In a moderate tone, but forcefully, he said: “Laurence, tell me everything that you have done, heard, seen and said–everything, Laurence!–since I bit you on the breast on May 20. I want you to recall every slight detail, Laurence! Tell me, day by day, everything that has happened between the morning of May 12 and the night of June 4. I’m listening–speak!”
Meekly, Laurence began speaking in a monotonous voice, without inflection or pause, as someone with an excellent memory might recite, without being conscious of it, a patiently-memorized story.
XV. The Nyctalope versus Lucifer
At the moment when La Païli, unconscious and subjugated by Lucifer, began her recitation in the blue room in Fort Warteck, the Nyctalope’s three aircraft touched down ten kilometers away.
Leo Saint-Clair had not revealed the whole of his plan in the course of the councils held at Elmwood. He had allowed it to be believed that his offensive would be launched directly against Fort Warteck itself–but he had actually resolved, with Lourmel and Sir Patrick Swires, to strike first at the enemy’s submarine station, which was ten kilometers south of the Pole.
Having left Elmwood as if to head straight for Fort Warteck, the RC4, commanded by Saint-Clair and piloted by Captain Girard, soon veered slightly westwards, towards the point of the compass where the submarine station lay. The RC1 and RC2 followed meekly. The three aircraft, at some risk, attained and surpassed their officially-prescribed maximum speed, because the Nyctalope wanted to reduce the lead that Laurence and Grisyl had on him.
“Shall we arrive in time to save them?” he said to himself, anxiously. He did not think about the danger to which he might be exposed by revelations made by Laurence, a marvelous medium in Lucifer’s hands. In any case, Laurence did not know the principal dispositions and means of combat that the Nyctalope was employing. She also did not know that Saint-Clair and his companions would be outside the field in which the double sight of the medium and her hypnotic interrogator could operate. Tranquil on that matter, the Nyctalope had only to worry about the lives of Laurence, Grisyl and Romski. Naturally, he was primarily concerned with the perils threatening the diva, which he felt in is heart as a painful contraction.
“Faster, faster! Faster still!” he would have cried to Girard, had he not restrained himself.
Eventually, they arrived. The RC4’s chronometer showed 2:35 a.m. when Saint-Clair touched Girard on the shoulder–the signal which meant “land.” A red light was shining in the distance: the submarine station’s beacon.
The three aircraft had a suitable landing-ground beneath them. They set down without incident. Immediately, having been given orders in advance, Pilou ran to the RC1 and RC2. “Open the sacks,” he said, “and put on the diving-suits. Put the metal canisters on your backs. Screw the nozzles into the sockets on the left of the helmets, then open the taps. Buckle your Brownings and knives to your belts. Quickly! Quickly!”
Physical movement and cerebral excitation produce heat–fortunately, for taking off one’s furs outdoors, in a temperature of 30 degrees below zero, getting into a leather diving-suit, then putting on fur boots, suspending a metal canister from one’s shoulders, screwing the inferior circle of a helmet into the collar of the suit to make a hermetic seal, and manipulating a breathing-tube, straps and buckles, is neither easy nor without danger for any man.
Surprised by the unexpected occurrence–for the Nyctalope’s secret plan was known only to Lourmel and Swires–these men felt their excitement increase; obliged to hurry, they moved rapidly. Under their furs, the men were tightly swathed in wool. Within five minutes, all 15 were ready; Saint-Clair, Swires and Pilou, of course, had not needed the whip of surprise to excite them.
The Nyctalope’s plan comprised the employment of hermetically-sealed diving-suits, which would be infused with three hours’ supply of the radioactive gas contained under pressure in the metal canisters. Because each diving-suit formed a carapace which the external air could not penetrate, the entire bodies of the 15 me
n would be plunged for three hours into the radioactive atmosphere that even the effluvia of the Teledynamo could not penetrate.
The 15 men assembled in front of the three aircraft, their forms seeming bizarre and apocalyptic in the sinister daylight, with their huge spherical helmets lending a nightmarishly elephantine aspect to their heads. At a distance, though, they would have been hardly visible, for their fur boots, diving-suits, helmets and gauntlets all had the same off-white color as the grey-and-white ensemble of the glacial surface, the foggy horizon and the lowering sky.
The submarine station’s sentries were no less vigilant than Fort Warteck’s, for the spectral troop had not taken a hundred paces towards their goal when they were detected, located and illuminated. A searchlight-beam sprang forth from a squat tower and enveloped the 15 diving-suits with its rays.
It is hardly necessary to specify that these diving-suits carried none of the apparatus which, beneath the sea, has the effect of making them heavier than water. They had no lead weights on the chest and back, nor did they have lead-soled boots. There were the helmets–but the helmets were relatively light on robust shoulders. As for the metal canisters, they only weighed five kilograms.
As the searchlight-beam shot out, Saint-Clair cried: “Forward, quickly! Straight ahead!” All the helmets were equipped with miniature wireless telephone apparatus,
They broke into a run, Brownings in hand.
A shell fell some way behind the charging troop, burst like a grenade and released its cloud of soporific gas. Others fell, one by one–and the artillerists quickly corrected their range, so that these burst ahead of the troop. What did it matter? The noxious smoke could not get inside their helmets.
With Saint-Clair, Swires, Corsat and Pilou in a line at the head, then Girard leading a tightly-bunched platoon of ten, Lucifer’s enemies arrived at the searchlight tower. Beyond the squat buildings, there was a sparkling expanse of water, from which vapor was rising. There was a door at the base of the tower.
Saint-Clair put his left hand into a cartridge-bag secured to his belt. He drew out a gleaming tube with a screw-cap. He turned the cap through a semicircle and set the tube at the bottom of the door. Then he ran towards the squat buildings.
Everyone followed him. They went around the edge of the vast pool. A door opened in the facing wall of one of the buildings and a man appeared. What other reaction could he have to the sight of the white diving-suits save total bewilderment? His thoughts had not finished crossing his mind before he was seized, shoved back inside and handcuffed. The attackers rushed in like a whirlwind.
At that moment, the walls seemed to vibrate. A dull explosion had just sounded and resounded outside, like an earthquake. Men were shouting. desperately calling for help.
“That’s the tower blowing up!” said Saint-Clair. He ran on, now followed not by 14 soldiers but only by nine. They were the advance-party. By means of the detailed revelations obtained from Rupert VI under hypnosis, Saint-Clair and Swires knew the basic lay-out of both the submarine station and Fort Warteck; Swires and four other men were sufficient to hold the station; Saint-Clair and his nine men were going on to the fort.
First, Sir Patrick posted Elias Carter as a sentinel at the console controlling telephonic and telegraphic communications with Fort Warteck; he had a Browning in each hand. Thus, Wilfried received no warning of the attack on the station. As for the noise made by blowing up the watch-tower, if it was perceived at the Fort, it was confused with the ever-present cracking sounds emitted by the shifting ice-cap.
Sir Patrick and his four men, benefiting from surprise and the initial victory over the sentries, were adequate to close down the few ill-defended functions of the submarine station. As for the Kaiser-Gott, aboard which were 15 crew-members, including Commander Durbox and two officers, it was immobilized in the basin by its magnetic dock and isolated from the terrestrial buildings by the closure of its connecting tubes. The lever regulating the magnetization of the submarine dock was under Elias Carter’s control, for the entire control panel was before the geographer’s eyes, beside the telephono-telegraphic console. The little room occupied by the energetic and vigilant Elias was the heart of the submarine station, where everything worked by electricity.
By leaving the dock to which the Kaiser-Gott was stuck magnetized, they obliged the crew to suffer an indefinite imprisonment, for the escape of any individual through one of the submarine’s hatches in a diving-suit would expose the fugitive to deadly gunfire as soon as he emerged from the water. As for the possibility of a collective escape by means of the submersible launch with which the Kaiser-Gott was equipped, that was impossible for the simple reason that, being largely composed of metal parts, it would be drawn to and captured by the magnetic docks.
All these considerations, made in advance, had persuaded the Nyctalope to leave only four men with Sir Patrick to secure and hold the station; these four auxiliaries were Carter, Captain Berton, Cadet Dupuis and Wolf. Sir Patrick would much rather have gone to Fort Warteck than stay at the submarine station, but as he was the only seaman on the expedition, that marked him out as the best man to capture the Kaiser-Gott and he was destined to his role.
Further means of transport were supplied by automatic electric trams and a double-track line some ten kilometers long, set on foundations of black basalt between two walls of streaming ice, which connected the submarine station to the agglomeration of buildings known as Fort Warteck. Saint-Clair felt no disquiet relative to Swires and his four men as he boarded the carriage that was already mounted on the ascendant rail within its garage.
The Nyctalope set himself at the conductor’s post and took hold of the rheostat by means of which the intensity of the current–and hence the speed of the tram–was increased or decreased. Corsat and Pilou stood to either side of him, silent Brownings in hand. Then they were off!
What emotions those men were feeling! What a tempest of suppositions was whirling in their minds! Corsat and Pilou were shivering to the point of grinding their teeth. This time, they were going up against Lucifer himself! At Schwarzrock, during the fist offensive, they had had no idea of what awaited them. At Schwarzrock again, during the second offensive, circumstances had suggested to them from the outset that the enemy had slipped away. Here, though, at Fort Warteck, at the North Pole, it was the end. The beast would be cornered. The net’s fall would be definitive, since Lucifer’s mother and his remaining relatives would be in it with him. The lair would be swept clean, completely.
But what form would the final battle take?
Corsat and Pilou were so violently overexcited–the radioactive atmosphere in which they were enclosed contributed to that–that they both felt the need, simultaneously, to let their feelings out in speech. The miniature radiotelephones in their helmets permitted that.
“Boss!” said the impulsive Provençal.
“Boss!” said the Burgundian, immediately afterwards.
“What is it, my friends?” replied the Nyctalope, calmly.
The tramway ran almost silently at a speed of 30 kilometers an hour. Six minutes had gone by since the departure; three kilometers had been covered. Only seven kilometers and 14 minutes, remained.
“If anything has delayed the RC3,” Pilou said, “we might have a chance of finding Lucifer asleep.”
“Why should the RC3 have made poorer time than our own squadron?” objected Corsat. “We’ll find Lucifer awake.”
“Provided that Mademoiselle Laurence and Grisyl...”
“And Romski...”
Pilou and Corsat had had no more difficulty than Saint-Clair in deducing the goal of the RC3’s flight with the two women aboard.
“My friends,” the Nyctalope put in, “don’t form unnecessary hypotheses. We don’t know and can’t know what has been happening in Fort Warteck for the last half hour or so, what is happening at this moment, or what will happen in the dozen minutes that still separate us from the moment when we leap out on to the platform...”
“Damn it...!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You both need to talk, because you’re overexcited and because we have nothing to do while the tram is running–nothing that would serve to let it out. Well, grit your teeth, stretch your muscles, tense your nerves–and shut up!”
“Yes, boss.” This time, the two voices were obedient. Nothing more was heard. Outside the tram, as in the interior, there was silence.
The temperature of the heated air in the trench was the same as that of the air in the tram, whose doors remained open, its thick crystal windows no only slightly misted. On the other hand, the glass visors of the diving-suit helmets remained perfectly clear, because the condensation that the men’s breath might have produced was rendered impossible by the radioactive atmosphere–to such an extent that the more studious travelers could observe the walls of the trench. That served them as a distraction for a few minutes, and they exchanged their thoughts on the subject–for they all felt, perhaps unconsciously, a sort of puerile pride in demonstrating that they were not entirely preoccupied by what awaited them at the end of the line. But that game only took up the first five or six minutes of the journey; after that they spoke less, then no longer looked outside at all, then fell silent.
Eventually, the seven men, who had been sitting down, got up–and, without a word of explanation, as if by instinct, separated into two groups. One group, of five men, moved on to the more spacious rear platform; the other, a mere couple, went on to the forward platform to stand behind Corsat and Pilou. Saint-Clair heard them, and turned his head.
“Berge and Dopp,” he said. “That’s good. Girard will command the others–the second line.” He had read the newcomers’ names on their breasts, for he and Swires had taken the hasty precaution, at Elmwood, of using a paintbrush and black ink to scrawl the name of each of the 15 men–including his and Swires’s–on the front of his white diving-suit, and on the sacks in which they were contained.
The Nyctalope vs Lucifer 3: The Triumph of the Nyctalope Page 15
