“A mole torpedo—one that drills its way under ground,” Lietz whispered. “It must be that. Inventors in several countries have been working to produce them. But what this torpedo’s means of attack is, I cannot guess. We must wait and see. The barriers of concrete and steel are strong...”
Explosives? Was that what the thing carried? Or thermite—white-hot metal produced out of the chemical action between iron rust and powdered aluminum? Or poison gas? Any one of these things could easily be packed into a torpedo. Yet all of them seemed crude now—not the kind of agents that would be used by those who sought to end Erich Ketterer’s bloody career.
Nearer and nearer the torpedo came—drilling, drilling.... Now the sound it made was a harsh snarl, as its super-hardened, rotating blades gnawed savagely at steel. Now its grinding was smoother as it tore into softer concrete. Strained to the limit, it yet seemed to be getting slowly through the barriers. Something new... something created by the inventive skill of Kurt Rohrer, it must be. Kurt Rohrer, the mining wizard....
Erich Ketterer felt a wild impulse to flee—to open that great bank-vault door of his refuge, and rush up the long spiral stair to the surface. There were soldiers there to protect him. But he knew too that among those soldiers there were certain ones—unknown—who would kill now—kill and die—to save the world and the Fatherland from war.
NEVERTHELESS, Ketterer almost yielded to that insistent urge for flight. It was hard to tell which danger was the worse.... Ludwig Lietz stood at a half-crouch beside his master, facing the wall from which that grinding noise of unseen progress issued.
But then the sound stopped with a short, grating thump. And Erich Ketterer felt a little uncertain wave of relief. Had the torpedo been stopped by armor-plate at last? Had it broken down? Or—
Nemesis struck then, before Ketterer could complete the thought. Nemesis—or whatever it was. A sharp, convulsing spasm, as of electric shock. The odor of scorched rubber. Heat.... Nothing around him had changed very much—yet. There was no sound—no flash of flame.... As in a stunned vision, he saw Ludwig Lietz leap away, as if out of danger.... Lietz was shouting a warning of some kind....
Erich Ketterer tried to leap, too; but he could not. His body was paralyzed in a rigid muscle rigor. He tried to think what had happened—what this thing was that had gripped him—the manifestation of some apparatus that the mole torpedo had brought close, evidently. Heat. Electricity. Magnetism, it must be. An oscillating magnetic field of some kind. It would induce electricity in metal, such as the lead of his suit. It would create heat. And unlike electricity itself, it could penetrate rubber effortlessly. The steel armor-plate through which it was evidently operating, might distort it, but would not stop it. The steel armor-plate beyond the wall might even help direct its lines of force. Yes, this must be true....
Sheer agony had come to Erich Ketterer now. He could not move; he could not speak. It was like clutching a charged wire, and being unable to let go. Heat increased. Little jolts of electricity seemed to tear at his brain and nerves, bringing an ache that all but ripped the will to live from him by its excruciating torture. And his time-sense was curiously slowed....
Memories came back to him in scattering, vivid pictures. The other war, years ago.... He’d been in Paris at its outbreak—a spy, an agent.... And he remembered how they’d come over—that first time—his people. Just two swift scout planes.... They’d dropped flares in the night, to take pictures. Pretty flares—just like fireworks.... And in the intense darkness above those parachuting bits of blazing magnesium, the planes had been lost to view.... Only their roar had lived vividly, and the dazing thud and flash of anti-aircraft guns.... Quai St. Michel, Notre Dame, and the Seine, had looked pretty in that white, smoky glare.... Only when you saw the protective scaffolding, silhouetted black around the ancient towers of the Cathedral, you realized that this was real—not part of a show, and that the people who crouched in deep abris—bomb shelters—weren’t such fools, for this was war and death....
Death! Erich Ketterer knew that it was groping savagely for him now. This was real, too—this suffocating heat, these electrical shocks that dazed the brain and paralyzed the muscles—all this odd, fearsome miracle of projected magnetic lines of force, oscillating—inducing electric currents in the metal of his suit, just as in the secondary coil of a transformer.... But it was dreamlike. Maybe that was why his thoughts were softer—momentarily.... Now fierce anger blazed within him again. His rocket planes, his armada, was tearing on to London and Paris now!...
Kurt Rohrer. A mole torpedo. And the magnetic wave apparatus. That seemed like the work of Willi Trachner, in Spandau. But it could be others....
Ketterer tried with all his might to move, but he could not. He stood there as stiff as wood, his muscles tautened in a tetanus-like spasm. Heat and shock and suffocation.... Dizzying fires wheeled in his skull. His consciousness was going—fast. This was death. There was metal in his protective suit—metal in which an alternating magnetic field could induce electricity. Rohrer must have hoped that he would be wearing such a suit.... This was the end....
Or was it—quite? Ludwig Lietz—was he a traitor too?
NO, THE little man seemed to float through the air now—in a kind of flying football tackle. Ketterer sprawled like a mannikin with rigor mortis. Momentum made him and his rescuer slide almost to the farther wall, beyond the magnetic waves. Ludwig had been clever, guessing the width of the beam well....
Ketterer came to presently—limp, aching, and scorched, and furious to the point of mania. Lietz had dragged him to a safe corner, and had removed both of their now dangerous protective suits. But sparks that played about metal objects in the center of the room, told that the magnetic beam was still active there....
Erich Ketterer’s sweating, blistered lips twisted themselves into a snarl. “You did well, Ludwig,” he rasped. “Again they tried. But I still live—for vengeance! Has there been time for the aerial attack to take place yet?”
Ludwig Lietz’s eyes were strange. His face glistened in the glow of lights. “No, Excellenz,” he said. “It has been scarcely more than a minute. But there are things to be done. There is little time to explain.... I will say this first: Steinbart, Marsch, and the others—they have genius—the clever, thorough genius of our people. Ich habe nur Geduld—I have only patience.... Die Geduld von zwanzig Jahren—the patience of twenty years....”
“What do you mean? What are you talking about, Ludwig?” Ketterer demanded puzzledly.
He tried weakly to rise, but Ludwig pushed him back with a bowed elbow, behind which there was somehow amazing power, for so small and withered a man.
“Twenty years,” Ludwig said. “While you led us away from defeat, I was your friend. But even then I watched carefully. I thought maybe you were big—in the heart and mind. I hoped, but when I saw that you were leading us to destruction, I changed. But I was careful to hide that change as well as I could—as a safeguard to our people. I even hoped, to the last, that you would alter your attitude. But you did not.... So—it is more just that I do this.... Instead of our men of genius.... Twenty years I have been watching, you understand.... To them, an incident. To me, the purpose of a life. So I rescued you, just now, from them....
“I was through the last war, Excellenz. The starvation. The defeat and misery.... So we will make no pledge of blood now. I have already telegraphed the order for the return of the rocket planes to their bases—contriving to draw the key here to this corner, where there are not enough magnetic waves to interfere with communication. Steinbart and Marsch will not be killed, for I have sent another order. As before, they will think it comes from you.... And I believe that in the end I will be able to keep up the bluff long enough to save myself from your loyal ones. Though it does not matter. That is all, except for this....”
A knife flashed in Ludwig Lietz’s free hand—just a simple knife—ironic contrast to the subtle death-methods of science. Ludwig did not use his pistol. Fuddled, Ket
terer hardly saw the blade, as it descended toward his chest. He only saw, with a strange startlement, the hate in Ludwig Lietz’s mild eyes....
DAWN.... Old Europe dreamed....
In the grey haze, an explosion puffed up redly, over a gun-factory in smoke-grimed Essen.... Revolution, grief and hot.... But there would be no real war this time.... On rocket fields, in buried forts, and in camouflaged gun turrets, men were singing.... History would not repeat its hard lesson.... Freedom lived....
The End
**********************************
Secret of the Comet,
by Raymond Z. Gallun
Thrilling Wonder Stories Jan. 1941
Novelette - 9937 words
Space Ships DON'T Land when
Two Explorers Find the Key
to All Interplanetary Traffic!
CHAPTER I
To Prison and Back
Meteors? Yeah! They’ve done a lot of things besides drilling holes in space ships, and making widows out of girls reckless enough to marry space men. They’ve built fortunes for clever chair-warmers—fortunes that amount to blood money. They’ve choked invention. And they brought my kid brother, Spud MacCauley, a ninety-nine-year stretch in Alcatraz.
He was a goat, of course. The goat of a guy whose clever lawyers knew how to twist honest law, who knew how to get Spud and Doctor Avery refused permission to experiment. Things in space are dangerous, and you can’t let everybody monkey around with experiments. But if there ever was a fellow qualified to cut down death in the void, it was Doctor Frank Avery. Already he had won one minor victory against the meteors, and then it was practically pirated from him.
Nicolas Lorson, of Lorson Ether and Interplanetary Projects, had all research cornered by his own so-called experts. He could use his influence to get legal permission to experiment refused any scientist out of his control. He didn’t want space ships improved a lot—it might widen his business, but improvements cost money, and his exorbitant profits on Martian Mota Crystal and antiques, and Venusian medicinal herbs would fall with the increased supply.
So Avery and Spud defied the law. They set up their test station out there on the Silver Pall, a short-period comet that had established itself in the Solar System the year before—that is, in 2152.
Spud came back to Earth alone for supplies, and that’s where they got him. The plague had broken out in America, a highly contagious glandular disease that was fatal in five days. Since its point of origin was near the Columbia Space Port in Illinois, it was easy to conclude that it had come from another world. There had been other plagues from Mars and Venus.
You see how it all wound up. Spud had violated the Experiment Code, which was meant to guard against just such dangers. So Lorson and his lawyer pinned the blame for this new disease on him. And they got away with it. The Silver Pall Horror. Ten thousand deaths, before the plague was checked. Ninety-nine years in Alcatraz was too good for a guy like that, everyone said.
Yeah, only certain testimony was neglected in court. Spud had observed all the sanitary rules before landing—cleansing his ship inside and out with a two per cent blast ray. And he didn’t catch the plague himself. Moreover, a few cases of the disease had existed before he had brought his ship down, a reliable physician told me. But he died suddenly. Maybe from the plague, maybe not. And other people wouldn’t talk.
I saw Spud the night before they carted him out there to that sullen island off the California coast. Spud’s not big, like me. He’s only five feet six, but he’s built like a bobcat. Sitting in his cell in his undershirt, he didn’t look as depressed as you’d think—only tense and grim. And it was all topped off by a kind of jaunty, cynical grin. But there was a secret back of it. He was just twenty-three, then.
THE jail guard was a nice chap. He had wandered off discreetly down the corridor. And secret listening-phones are forbidden by law. So Spud said to me in a low, conversational tone:
“You quit your rocket engineer’s job with Lorson, eh, Buck? Good! They would have tried to bounce you because I happen to be your brother. But you just told them that you were leaving, and didn’t get mad, huh? That was good, Buck. But don’t ever think it’s over yet. Avery’s still out there on the Silver Pall comet, and he’ll go on testing meteor armor. And me—well, I figured I’d have bad luck sometime, so I was kind of prepared before I got hooked.’’
Spud paused then, and I knew some of the tension and determination under his grin, even though I couldn’t see it. He continued to fuss with his right biceps, pinching it significantly with calloused fingers.
The skin of his upper arm was all peppered with little scars, like those of antique buckshot. Fragments of an unusually slow meteor, ricocheting repeatedly inside a punctured ship of the void, had made them. Some of those fragments were still imbedded in the muscles.
“I’m not fighting against the law, Buck,’’ Spud continued, his eyes shining strangely. “I’m fighting for law, and against those that misuse it. You know that. And sometimes the means may have to be a little rough, when things get desperate. So, you see, when they put me in stir, they’ll examine me carefully for weapons. They'll X-ray my body, and their plates will show the meteor particles in my arm. I’ll tell them what they are, naturally, and how I got them. And most likely they won’t look further.
“They won’t know that before I even left the Silver Pall, I gashed my arm and put three little globes just under the skin, and let the wound heal over them. They’ll think those globes are meteor particles too, not capsules of the new uranium tetramekalate. I’ll be a model prisoner, Buck. And I’ll wait a long time.”
Uranium tetramekalate! Even professional criminals hadn’t used it yet! It was so strange, hearing Spud talk so quietly like that, like a crook, planning. My heart started to pound wildly.
But I knew what was driving him. It wasn't just his unfair imprisonment. Not just an inventor’s dream interrupted. Not just buddies that had died with meteors ripping through them, or strangled in riddled space craft that no one yet had been able to armor effectively against bits of cosmic debris that travel at anywhere from three to thirty miles a second.
The latter, of course, was the basic problem. Space craft that leave the Earth have to be light. They can’t carry massive armor.
But it wasn’t just all this. Frank Avery was marooned out there on the Silver Pall comet now. Spud had taken their only ship back to Earth. And that wasn’t all. The comet was going away from the Sun now. It had passed into the region close to the Belt of Asteroids, where meteors were so thick that no space ship or pilot could ever hope to win through and survive. And the comet was swinging on out toward the orbit of Jupiter, beyond the range of all craft that now traveled the void.
And slender, sunny-haired Edna Avery was marooned on the Silver Pall with her father. Spud hadn’t spoken one word about her, but the haggard strain was in his eyes. The Silver Pall was a short-period comet, only a little more than five years. Five years! The comet wouldn’t come back within range of Earth for half a decade. And even then, as now, the Averys would be refugees, breakers of the Experiment Code.
SO I said good-by to Spud that night, when they put him on the Chicago-Pacific Tube. In just a half hour that sleek, projectile-like coach would have spanned two-thirds of a continent. The brace of plainclothes men to whom Spud was handcuffed were good-hearted mugs. We all joked, but I knew I’d remember what Spud had told me.
I got various engineering jobs, outside of the field of interplanetary traffic, and I took a house in the country. My flying license was revoked on the pretext of my physical condition, but it was just a bluff. I was as sound as a rock. More of Lorson’s work.
Still, I kept my little scout rocket, the Martia. It was a hobby with me keeping her polished, fueled, and ready. I knew things would begin to happen in five years, when the Silver Pall came back over the Asteroid Belt....
However, it turned out to be a stunning surprise. In the first place, it was after midnight, and
I was in bed and asleep. Someone grabbed my arm and jerked hard. It was plain house-breaking, since all the doors and windows were locked.
I woke up with a grunt, ready and primed to go for my blast-pistol. The lights had been turned on in the room. And there was Spud, standing over me! With Alcatraz in the background of my thoughts, it was like being scared by a ghost, or the apparition of a demon.
Yeah, a demon. Because that’s what Spud looked like. He was panting and almost worn out. Most of that bristly blond hair was singed off his head. His face was burned and blackened and covered with blisters. His prison tunic was all soggy with sweat and blood. And his raw skin was showing through holes charred in it.
Under one arm, he held the limp form of a man considerably bigger than himself. I recognized the bald head that kind of dangled from a scrawny neck, and the long, white arms and legs that protruded ludicrously from frayed and muddy silk pajamas.
The big, blue lump on the narrow, wolfish jaw must have represented the accumulated fury of many wrongs, and of five years of thinking. Spud had hit, and hit hard. Yes, the man was Nicolas Lorson. He had evidently been visited in the middle of the night, and “persuaded” to come on his present adventure, without even being permitted the formality of changing clothes for the occasion.
A shadow of Spud’s old jaunty grin flashed through the dirt and blisters.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re here.”
CHAPTER II
The Search Begins
Then he gave me a moment to figure things out for myself. I knew many space veterans who would have cheered the spectacle of Nicolas Lorson’s present plight until they were hoarse. But the situation was far more grim than funny. This was prison-break, assault and kidnap. And the future was a black question-mark.
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