The Earth-Tube (27 page)

“Oh, it is good. so good to see you once again!” she exclaimed.

He calmed her as well as he could, trembling himself at the contact of her flesh, the warm, fragile paleness of her. Enfolding her body in his arms pro-tectingly, he stroked her hair. “Diane. Diane!” he exclaimed. “I love you. I will take care of you. But tell me. “

She drew back.

“The Tal Majod,” she said. “I have received word from him. He is in America now, to direct the war himself!”

“Diane! But how could he send you word?”

She caught aside the robe on her breast. King saw there a tiny harness, such as he had observed upon the person of Gun-Tar, and over her left breast was suspended a small silvered instrument.

“My communication phone,” she explained. “I forgot to remove it when we were preparing to make our escape from Tiplis, and since then I have been curiously unable to make up my mind to take it off.”

“And they have spoken to you through that?”

She nodded. “They have learned that I am still alive, though at first they were certain that we both had been killed by the air-blast. By some mysterious means they have also learned that I. am close to you, and that you are charged with the full weight of the defense.

“Now they are attacking you through me, King! I do not want harm to come to you or to the country I love. I don’t know what to do!”

“Have they threatened you. or me?”

“Yes. At first they begged me to come back. Painted the Asian pleasures. the grandeur of San Adel, the love of the Emperor. They promised me immunity and position. But I refused. I would not go back to the Asians now at any cost. I would rather die here by my own hand than surrender my body to the Tal Majod.”

King saw that she was weeping. He gathered her close to him, but she drew away again.

“I must tell you all of it, now,” she continued hysterically. “When they saw that I could not be induced to return of my own free will, they threatened me. I should be killed, secretly, at night, they said. This house would be bombed. An assassin would creep in here with a knife. There would be poison in my food. ...

“Night after night these threats kept up. I could not sleep. I dared not communicate with any one but you, and you were busy at the factories. Nor could I bring myself to leave the receiver off or refuse to listen to it. The Tal Majod, whose personality compels like hypnotism, had grasped me even through the distance and the air.

“But now, King, they have begun to threaten not only me but you. Some great disaster is about to befall America; they will not even wait to see if your defense with liquid air is a success. The Tal Majod is crafty. This morning I received this message, which I have translated and written down for you. Make what you can of it. I know it means attack from a new quarter; that it is no common warfare they bring, but some subtle destruction which cannot be met by ordinary means.”

She took from her girdle a carefully folded paper. Upon it was written:

“O Daughter of the Vile Americas, outcast and shamed Wife of the Tal Majod, hear if you will: Tonight the wings of the Tal Majod will fly, and by tomorrow noon Americans will kill themselves, and with them will America collapse before the knives and scimitars of Tal Majod.”

King re-read the message thoughtfully. “And there is no way by which this doom may be averted?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Diane. “It is promised that I will be saved and North America left unharmed if I will first kill you with poison and then return to Tiplis.”

“Have you replied?”

“No.”

“Then do not. I must talk this matter over with Dr. Scott.”

Diane was trembling. She touched King on the sleeve detaining him. “He and his daughter suspect and hate me. I cannot talk to them.”

“Surely you have misunderstood Dr. Scott and Anna,” returned King. “They have been like father and sister to me.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it is so,” murmured Diane.

He saw that she had been shaken by her experiences of the last two or three weeks; that she was afraid, despite the courage she had shown in the metal city, in the corridors and laboratories of Tiplis.

“Hereafter,” he said, stroking her hand, calming her, “you will go with me, Diane. to the battle front, to the factories, and everywhere. You need no longer fear for anything. Come, come. Diane!”

The hour for the dinner of the Chamber of Commerce of All the Americas was near, but King did not prepare for it until he had talked with Dr. Scott and communicated with the President by telephone.

“The air forces will be out in full strength to-night over the principal cities,” he told Diane later. “Things at the front are shaping up for the defense. We need be afraid of nothing.”

Nevertheless, he watched the skies anxiously as they moved through the thronged streets together in an open car, toward the high Pan-American Building with its hundred-story walls of steel. Even the constant ovation they received along the way could not deaden the sense of foreboding which had been growing on him for several days and which had been heightened by Diane’s message.

Silently he gripped her hand, as they both stared upward.

III

That the planes of the Asians penetrated so far northward before meeting any resistance from the American forces was due largely to the fact that they were exact replicas of the defense machines, even to military markings and identifying numbers. The fraud was detected, in fact, only when it was observed by an American pilot that the numbers on the Asian planes were all the same; that the invaders had copied on each one the number of the machine they had captured several months before.

At virtually the same hour a fleet of the invaders appeared over Washington and another over Philadelphia. The alarmed defense forces, warned too late of the true nature of these apparently friendly planes, sprang into the air after them. The long, upward-pointing guns blazed. Needles of light from hundreds of anti-aircraft placements wove across the sky, crossing and recrossing to aid the batteries and the fighting planes of the defense.

Warning was sent to all citizens to protect themselves. The streets, which had been filled with gay throngs out to welcome King Henderson and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the beautiful Asian slave he had brought back with him from the domed city in the south, became places of terror. Cellars and basements filled rapidly. Couples hurried along the sidewalks, clinging close to the edges of buildings in panic, as the terrific battle between the Asians and the Americans began overhead.

The dinner of the Chamber of Commerce of All the Americas was in full swing when the first alarm reached the crowded banquet hall. The Secretary of War, gesticulating and thundering behind a battery of microphones and television sets, was in the midst of his speech. Diane and King, sitting side by side on the high dais, were half lost in reverie induced by the beauty of the hall, the heavy perfume of the flowers banked up before them, the reechoed cadences of Dr. Angell’s oratory, and the soporific luxury of a banquet which had been prepared without sparing expense.

The dinner had gone off exceedingly well. The food had been perfect, the wine excellent, the speeches pleasing. Only one thing had disturbed King; it was the fact that in some mysterious way word had leaked out about his plans for the defense. A secret which he had considered known only to himself, Dr. Scott, and the President was on every one’s lips. He heard it several times during the evening, and one fawning munition manufacturer had asked him point-blank, at the beginning of the dinner, if it were true.

“There is a rumor that you will try the first of the liquid air at Houston to-morrow,” he said. “It will be a great moment in history if it should succeed!”

King replied evasively, puzzled and uneasy at the speed with which the information had traveled. If the inmost secrets of the War Council were always as generously and readily distributed over America as this, how was it possible for any strategy to succeed?

“But after all,” he thought later to himself, “It doesn’t matter greatly who finds out about our liquid-air attack. Even if the Asians themselves learn of it, they will be unable to defend their tanks any better, once we get our howitzers close enough to shoot at them.”

The disturbance at the dinner did not come until near the end of the evening.

There was a momentary commotion near the door at one end of the room. A man there, in torn clothing, shouted, “Enemy airplanes!” Instantly the room was in confusion. Dr. Angell’s neat phrases were drowned by the buzz of many questioning voices. A uniformed messenger came in and laid a written communication before the chairman of the dinner.

King and Diane were on their feet almost at the first shout. Vaguely they had been waiting for this announcement all through the ceremonies. Enemy airplanes! What new destruction was now about to be loosed among the people of the crowded city, whose defenders had been tricked and outwitted by the invading machines? The chairman was in a quandary. His face grew red. The uneasiness of the diners increased. Dr. Angell paused to inquire what was the matter and smiled reassuringly when it had been explained to him.

“Ah, my friends,” he said, holding out his hand to quiet the murmurings, “it is nothing. nothing. These attackers will be shot down before they have passed the outer limits of the metropolitan area!”

As if in direct contradiction to his words, there sounded overhead the roar of fighting planes, the crash of bursting shells. Waving the Secretary aside, King took charge of the situation. “Unfortunately,” he said quietly, but with firmness, “I am not sure but that this attack will be of extreme consequence. We have had warning of it; nevertheless, the enemy has succeeded in breaking through our lines for some sinister purpose which still remains to be seen. Please go to your homes, all of you, and stand by to support your government. I may have reason in the next few hours to call upon you in a practical way for the support many of you have volunteered verbally this evening.”

King smiled inwardly as he saw the diners clatter toward the exits, crying in excited voices for their wraps. Here were the well-to-do manufacturers and merchants of America, many of whom had been made extremely wealthy by the war. The owners of the liquid-air factories had all been present to hail him. Makers of shot and shell and armor plate had gripped him by the hand, murmuring fervent admiration and promises of aid. Men who lived by supplying the army with clothing and equipment at exorbitant prices were also there. The salt of the earth, the Secretary had called them, the backbone of the nation, the Government’s staunchest supporters! Like frightened rabbits they scurried for the street when exposed, for the first time during the war, to actual danger. The room began to clear as if by magic, leaving Dr. Angell, cut off and dangling in the middle of his radio speech, white-faced and trembling on the dais. Dr. Scott, Anna, King, and Diane stood together and regarded each other questioningly, wondering what the aerial attack might bring.

The room had been cleared hardly soon enough. It was on the top floor of the building, and above it was a tremendous, many-paned skylight of opaque glass. With a crash that shivered the chandeliers and sent bits of flying crystal everywhere, the overhead protection suddenly burst through.

The score of persons at the table on the dais took refuge instantly behind it. An explosion shook the entire building, and from the men and women near the doorway, who had been unable to escape, there came a piercing scream.

King rose from behind the table as soon as the crash was over. By the dim light of the remaining bulbs in the shattered chandeliers, he saw that many had been killed.

In the center of the room, where the bomb had spent its fury, tables, chairs, and glasswork lay in a tangled mass of wreckage. On the floor, scattering in all directions were lumps of yellow metal. With an exclamation he ran and picked one of the pieces up.

It was gold!

Gold! They were bombing the city with gold, showering it with wealth, which, being so abundant, was no longer wealth but ugly yellow metal, no more. And these diners, the last to reach the door, had been killed by pellets of gold! King, holding a bit of the accursed metal in his hand, was struck by the irony of it.

He might have known, he might have guessed that the Asians were storing that metal, useless to them, for some such purpose. Now they were showering New York, Washington, Philadelphia. all the big centers of population, with gold. Of what value was gold, then, with tons of it falling into the streets? When this word got out, what a panic there would be!

The servants and the bellboys had seen the gold, too. Screaming and fighting, they were already upon the floor on hands and knees, scratching among the wreckage and picking it up. The word spread through the building quickly. In five minutes the place was bedlam. The maids quit their work; the cooks came up from their kitchens armed with butcher knives and cleavers.

Gold!

Once men had risked their lives in the Klondike and over desert California trails for less than this. Gold lay free and scattered on the ballroom floor, and though King and Dr. Scott and the Secretary of War, all three aroused now to the true seriousness of the situation, cried themselves hoarse with commands, they might as well have screamed their orders to the errant winds.

It was with difficulty, even, that they escaped unharmed into the streets, where on every side scenes of debauchery and stupid greediness met their eyes. Even while the battle raged overhead, the word had spread that gold was showering into the streets. Without considering the uselessness of gold when there was plenty to be had, the whole population had turned out to rake the glittering metal from the gutters and to kill each other on the curbs for plunder.

The city was demoralized. With difficulty did King get a wire through to Washington, only to learn that conditions were equally bad there. The whole economic system had collapsed. The President, beside himself, unable to gather together even his personal aides, could hardly keep himself from giving way to the general panic which had stricken every one in authority. He realized that the whole financial structure of the country depended upon the stability of gold. Of what value now would be the money in the banks, the wages paid to workers day by day, the huge issues of fiat currency which were guaranteed by the Government on the strength of the value of gold?