The Floating Island of Madness Part 3

I raised my eyes. The doctor was standing before us. With a gesture he bade Foulet go to him. I watched beneath lowered lids. Thank G.o.d he had called Foulet first. Foulet had dabbled in the psychology of insanity. Foulet would know how to act, and I would ape him. Coldly, mechanically Doctor Semple ran him through a few tests. I watched with bated breath. The doctor nodded. Foulet had pa.s.sed!

It was my turn. I did exactly as Foulet had done--and succeeded! I had to turn away swiftly so that the doctor wouldn't see the gleam of triumph in my supposedly mad eyes.

He motioned to Brice. But just as Brice stepped forward the door opened and Fraser came into the room. For an instant everything reeled. We were gone! But even in that terrible instant of despair I remembered to keep my eyes blank. No trace of expression must appear or we were lost. I stretched my lips in that travesty of a smile I had seen the others use. Fraser stared at us, one after the other. He nodded.

"It is well," he said slowly and distinctly as if he were talking to small children. "Your names will still be as they were." We stared at him blankly and again he nodded. "You have forgotten your names--ah!

Yours," he pointed to me, "was Ainslee, and it still is. And you are Monsieur Foulet. But Brice--" he paused. My heart hung in my breast, suspended there with terror. What was the matter with Brice? What did Fraser suspect--or know? He turned to the doctor. "You will give Inspector Brice another injection," he said. "The Inspector has a strong mind, and a clever one. A normal injection would not be enough."

It seemed to me that my blood froze. In that terrible instant it ran, like tingling ice, through my veins. Brice! The brainiest man in Scotland Yard! For Fraser was right. Brice had more brains than Foulet and I together. And in another half hour Brice would be no better than an idiot! For I didn't fool myself. Even Brice couldn't outwit Doctor Semple twice.

"You will follow me," said Fraser, turning to Foulet and me. "I will put you under the nourishment ray while Doctor Semple attends to Brice." Obediently, with slightly shuffling, gait and vacant eyes we followed him into an adjoining room, leaving Brice behind. I didn't even trust myself to glance at him as we left. But my heart was in my boots. When would we see him again? And what would he be?

The room we entered was dark, but instantly Fraser switched on a mellow, orange-colored light, that flooded the room with a deep, warm glow.

"Strip yourselves and sit down," he said, pointing to deep lounging chairs that filled the room. "You will do nothing. Relax and allow the light to bathe you. In half an hour I will come back with instructions."

We obeyed, I imitating blindly every vague, mechanical movement of Foulet's. We settled ourselves in the comfortable chairs and Fraser left us. He had told us to relax--but to do anything else would have been impossible. The light soothed us, eased us; gave us, somehow, a penetrating sensation of peace and complete comfort. It flowed around us, warming us, lulling us to a delicious dreamy state that was neither waking nor sleeping. It wiped out danger; it wiped out Time; nothing existed but this warm and relaxing sense of utter satisfaction and peace.

Through this mist of contentment came Fraser's voice, "That is all!"

The light faded gradually, and as gradually we came to ourselves. "You will dress," directed Fraser in the same clear, clipped manner, "and you will come to me in my laboratory."

Fifteen minutes later we stood before him, vacant-eyed and solemn.

Fraser fastened his black, polished eyes upon us. "You will tell me,"

he said distinctly, "all you know."

We were silent. How could we tell him all we knew when we were supposed to have forgotten everything? Was this a trap? Or did our inside secret service information come under the general head of Science? But before these questions had actually formed in my mind I remembered that several times Fraser had answered my questions before they were asked. Might he be a mind reader? Best to take no chances! I made my conscious mind as blank as possible and gazed back at him. At my side Foulet made a vague and uncertain noise in his throat.

"Your countries are afraid of me?" Fraser leaned forward, that smug, vain smile curling his lips. "Your countries know there is a power abroad stronger than they? They feel that between the twin horns of economic pressure and the red menace they will be tossed to destruction?

"Destruction?" repeated Foulet with all the vacant inflection of idiocy.

"Tossed?" I asked imitating Foulet. But instantly I wondered if we were taking the right tack for Fraser's eyes grew red with fury.

"Answer me!" he raged. "Tell me that your countries know that soon I shall be master of the world! Tell me they are afraid of me! Tell me that in the last three years I have slowly gained control of commerce, of gold! Tell me that they know I hold the economic systems of the world in the hollow of my hand! Tell me that not a government on earth but knows it is hanging on the brink of disaster! And I--I put it there! My agents spread the propaganda of ruin! My agents crashed your Wall Street and broke your banks! I! I! I! Mad Algy Fraser!" He stopped, gasping for breath. His face was scarlet. His eyes glowed like red coals. Suddenly he burst into a cascade of maniacal laughter, high, insane, terrible.

It took all my control to keep my eyes blank, my face devoid of expression. Out of the tail of my eye I saw Foulet smiling, a vague, idiotic smile of sympathy with Fraser's glee. But suddenly the glee died--as suddenly as if a b.u.t.ton had snapped off the current. He leaned forward, his black eyes devouring our faces.

"They are afraid of me?" It was a whisper, sharply eager. "The world knows I am Master?"

"Master," repeated Foulet. It wasn't quite a question, yet neither was it sufficiently definite as an answer to arouse Fraser's suspicions.

To my relief it satisfied him. The congested blood drained out of his face. His eyes lost their glare. He turned and for several minutes tramped up and down the laboratory lost in thought. At last he came back to us.

"I have changed my mind," he muttered. "Come with me."

Without a word we followed him, out through the door and down the pa.s.sageway. Out of the building he led us. The air was stirring with the first breath of dawn and along the horizon glowed a band of pure gold where the sun would soon rise. When he had walked some thirty yards from the laboratory Fraser paused. With his toe he touched a spring in the platform. A trap door instantly yawned at our feet. I suppressed a start just in time, but through my body shot a thrill of fear. My muscles tensed. My heart raced. What now? Where could a trap door, two thousand feet above the earth lead? Was he going to shove us into s.p.a.ce because we refused to answer his questions?

"Go down," Fraser ordered.

For the s.p.a.ce of a breath we hesitated. To disobey meant certain and instant death at the hands of this soulless maniac. But to obey--to drop through this trap-door--also meant death. I took a step forward.

Could we overpower him? But what if we did? There were others here beside Fraser. How many others I had no idea, but surely enough to make things impossible for Foulet and me. Yet we dared not even hesitate. To hesitate implied thinking--and a man robbed of his brain cannot think! There was no way out. Together Foulet and I stepped to the brink of the yawning hole....

For an instant we were almost blinded by a glare of rosy light that seemed to burst upon us from the earth so far below. Here was the source of that strange afterglow! Away beneath us, evidently on the sands of the Arabian desert, glowed four red eyes sending forth the rosy rays that converged at the center of the floating platform.

Instantly I comprehended Fraser's scheme. The Fleot.i.te he had invented, and of which the platform and buildings were made, was lighter than air. It followed, therefore, that if it were not anch.o.r.ed in some way it would instantly rise. So Fraser had anch.o.r.ed it with four of his magnetic rays! He had told us that he could regulate the pulling power of the ray, so what he had obviously done was to calculate to a nicety the lift of the Fleot.i.te against the magnetism of the rays.

But instantaneously with this thought came another. Fraser was urging us into the glow of the magnetic ray! If once our bodies came entirely within the ray we would be yanked from the platform and dashed to death--sucked to destruction on the sands below.

In my ear I heard Fraser's fiendish chuckle. "The instinct of fear still holds, eh? My serum can destroy your conscious mind--but not your native fear? Cowards! Fools! But I am not going to push you off.

Look!" With his foot he pressed another lever which, while it did not shut off any of the light, seemed to deflect the ray. "Fools!" he said again scornfully. "Go down!"

Then it was I saw where he was sending us! Thirty feet below the platform there swung a small cabin, attached by cables and reached by a swinging steel ladder. As I looked a door in the roof slid back.

"Climb down!" ordered Fraser again. There was nothing to do but obey.

Accustomed as I was to flying, inured as I had become to great heights, my head reeled and my hands grew icy as I swung myself through that trap door and felt for a footing on the swinging ladder.

Suppose Fraser turned the ray back on us as we climbed down? Suppose he cut the ladder? But instantly my good sense told me he would do neither. If he had meant to kill us he could have done it easier than this. No, somewhere in his mad head, he had a reason for sending us down to this swinging cabin.

Five minutes later Foulet and I stared at each other in the cramped confines of our prison. The tiny door in the roof, through which we had dropped, was closed. The steel ladder had been pulled up. We were alone. Alone? Were there no eyes that watched us still, or ears that listened to what we might say? Foulet evidently shared my sense of espionage, for, without even a glance at me, he lay down on the hard floor of our bare little cabin and, to all intents and purposes, fell asleep.

For a few minutes I stood staring at him, then followed his example.

As I relaxed I realized I was tremendously weary. The c.u.mulative exhaustion of the past thirty-six hours seemed to crowd upon me with a smothering sense of physical oppression. I looked at my watch and wound it. Five o'clock. Through the narrow slits near the roof of our swinging cell I could see the changing light of dawn, melting in with the rosy glow from the magnetic rays. My eyelids drooped heavily....

When I awoke Foulet was standing near me, his arms folded across his chest, scowling thoughtfully. He nodded as he saw my open eyes, but when I started to speak he shook his head sharply. With his gesture there flooded back to me the feeling that we were watched--even through the walls of our aerial prison and the floor of the platform above us.

I sat up and, clasping my knees with my hands, leaned against the wall. There must be a way out of this for us! All my life I had worked on the theory that if you thought hard enough there was a way out of any difficulty. But this seemed so hopeless! No matter how hard we thought the mad mind of Fraser would always be one jump ahead of us!

And maybe we didn't dare even think! If Fraser were able to read minds--as I was nearly sure he was--then hadn't we better keep our minds blank even down here? But an instant's thought showed me the flaw in my logic. Fraser could, without much doubt, read minds--when those minds were close to him. If he could read minds at a distance then he wouldn't need to ask us for information.

But why had he put us here? I burrowed around for the answer. Had he guessed we had outwitted Doctor Semple and not taken the mad serum after all, and was this punishment? No, if Fraser had guessed that he would simply have given us more serum, as he had Brice. Brice! Where was poor Brice now? Was he an idiot, with blank face and shiny, soulless eyes? My mind shuddered away from the thought, taking refuge in my first question: Why were we here? What was Fraser going to do with us?

We lost all track of time. In spite of my winding it my watch stopped and the hours slipped by uncounted. Night came, and another dawn and another night. Twice our roof was lifted and our tiny swinging cell filled with the orange light of the nourishment ray. But we saw no one nor did anyone speak to us. The third day pa.s.sed in the same isolated silence. Occasionally Foulet or I would utter a monosyllable; the sound of our voices was comforting and the single words would convey little to a listener.

But as the hours of the third night slowly pa.s.sed the atmosphere in our tiny swinging cell grew tense. Something was going to happen. I could feel it and I knew by Foulet's eyes that he felt it too. The air was tight, electrical. Standing on tiptoe, I glued my eyes to the narrow slit which was our only ventilation. But I could see nothing.

The brilliant rosy glow blinded me. I couldn't even see the huge platform floating above our heads.

Then, suddenly, our roof slid back. The magnetic ray was deflected.

Above us, in the opening of the trap-door, leered the bright, mad eyes of Fraser.

"Good evening," he said mockingly. "How do you feel?" We smiled hesitantly. Something in his voice made me feel he was addressing us as sane men and not idiots. But why? Weren't we supposed to be idiots when he put us down there?