The Man Who Rocked the Earth Part 14

A splash of rain. He awoke, and found himself lying by the barbed-wire fence in the graying light of dawn. His muscles were stiff and sore, but he felt a strange sense of exhilaration. A mist was driving across the valley and enshrouding the scene of the night's debacle. Through the rain gusts he could see, still standing, the wreck of the tower, with a fragment of melted inductor drooping from its apex--and a long way off the Ring. The base of the tower and its surroundings were lost in mist.

He crawled to his knees and looked about him for Marc and Edouard, but they had disappeared. His field gla.s.ses lay beside him, and he picked them up and raised himself to his feet. Like stout Cortes, silent upon his peak in Darien, he surveyed the Pacific of his dreams. For the Ring was still there! Pax might be annihilated, his machinery destroyed, but the secret remained--and it was his, Bennie Hooker's, of Appian Way, Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts! In his excitement, in getting over the fence he tore a jagged hole in what was left of his sporting suit, but in a moment more he was scrambling down the ridge into the ravine.

He found it no easy task to climb down the jagged face of the cliff, but twenty minutes of stiff work landed him in the valley and within a thousand yards of the stark remains of the tower. Between where he stood and the devastation caused by the culminating explosion of the night before, the surface of the earth showed the customary ledges of barren rock, the scraggy scattering of firs, and stretches of moss with which he had become so familiar. Behind him the monorail, springing into s.p.a.ce from the crest of the hill, ended in the dangling wreckage of a trestle which evidently had terminated in a station, now vanished, near the tower. From his point of observation little of the results of the upheaval was noticeable except the debris, which lay in a film of shattered rock and gravel over the surface of the ground, but as he ran toward the tower the damage caused by the Ray quickly became apparent.

At the distance of two hundred yards from the base he paused astounded.

Why anything of the tower remained at all was a mystery, explicable only by reason of the skeleton-like character of its construction. All about it the surface had been rent as by an earthquake, and save for a fragment of the dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had disappeared. A glistening lake of leperous-like molten lead lay in the centre of the crater, strangely iridescent. A broad path of destruction, fifty yards or so in width, led from the scene of the disruption to the precipice against which the Ray had played. The face of the cliff itself seemed covered with a white coating or powder which gave it a ghostly sheen. Moreover, the rain had turned to snow and already the entire aspect of the valley had changed.

Bennie stood wonderingly on the edge of this inferno. He was cold, famished, horror-stricken. Like a flash in a pan the mechanism which had rocked the earth and dislocated its axis had blown out; and there was now nothing left to tell the story, for its inventor had flashed out with it into eternity. At his very feet a conscious human being, only twelve short hours before, had by virtue of his stupendous brain been able to generate and control a force capable of destroying the planet itself, and now----! He was gone! It was all gone! Unless somewhere hard by was hovering amid the whirling snowflakes that which might be his soul. But Pax would send no more messages! Bennie's journey had gone for naught. He had arrived just too late to talk it all over with his fellow-scientist, and discuss those little improvements on Hiros.h.i.to's theory. Pax was dead!

He sat down wearily, noticing for the first time that his ears pained him. In his depression and excitement he had totally forgotten the Ring.

He wondered how he was ever going to get back to Cambridge. And then as he raised his hand to adjust his Glengarry he saw it awaiting him--unscathed. Far to the westward it rested snugly in its gigantic nest of crossbeams, like the head of some colossal decapitated Chinese mandarin. With an involuntary shout he started running down the valley, heedless of his steps. Nearer and higher loomed the steel trestlework upon which rested the giant engine. Panting, he blindly stumbled on, mindful only of the momentous fact that Pax's secret was not lost.

Fifty feet above the ground, supported upon a cylindrical trestle of steel girders, rested the body of the car, constructed of aluminum plates in the form of an anchor ring some seventy-five feet in diameter, while over the circular structure of the Ring itself rose a skeleton tower like a tripod, carrying at its summit a huge metal device shaped like a thimble, the open mouth of which pointed downward through the open centre of the machine. Obviously this must be the tractor or radiant engine. There, too, swung far out from the side of the ring on a framework of steel, was the thermic inductor which had played the disintegrating Ray upon the Atlas Mountains and the great cannon of Von Heckmann. The whole affair resembled nothing which he had ever conceived of either in the air, the earth, or the waters under the earth, the bizarre invention of a superhuman mind. It seemed as firmly anch.o.r.ed and as immovable as the Eiffel Tower, and yet Bennie knew that the thing could lift itself into the air and sail off like a ball of thistledown before a breeze. He knew that it could do it, for he had seen it with his own eyes.

A few steps more brought him into the centre of the circle of steel girders which supported the landing stage. Here the surface of the earth at his feet had been completely denuded and the underlying rock exposed, evidently by some artificial action, the downward blast of gas from the tractor. Even the rock itself had been seared by the discharge; little furrows worn smooth as if by a mountain torrent radiating in all directions from the central point. More than anything it reminded Bennie of the surface of a meteorite, polished and scarred by its rush through the atmosphere. He paused, filled with a kind of awe. The most wonderful engine of all time waited his inspection. The great secret was his alone. The inventor and his a.s.sociates had been wiped out of existence in a flash, and the Flying Ring was his by every right of treasure trove. In the heart of the Labrador wilderness Prof. Benjamin Hooker of Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, gave an exultant shout, threw off his coat, and swarmed up the steel ladder leading to the landing stage.

He had ascended about halfway when a voice echoed among the girders. A red face was peering down at him over the edge of the platform.

"h.e.l.lo!" said the face. "I'm all right, I guess."

Bennie gripped tight hold of the ladder, stiff with fear. He thought first of jumping down, changed his mind, and, shutting his eyes, continued automatically climbing up the ladder.

Then a hand gripped him under the arm and gave him a lift on to the level floor of the platform. He steadied himself and opened his eyes.

Before him stood a man in blue overalls, under whose forehead, burned bright red by the Labrador sun, a pair of blue eyes looked out vaguely.

The man appeared to be waiting for the visitor to make the next move.

"Good morning," said Bennie, sparring for time. "Well"--he hesitated--"where were you when it happened?"

The man looked at him stupidly. "What?" he mumbled. "I--I don't seem to remember. You see--I was in--the condenser room building up the charge--for to-morrow--I mean to-day--sixty thousand volts at the terminals, and the fluid clearing up. I guess I looked out of the window a minute--to see--the fireworks--and then--somehow--I was out on the platform." He shaded his eyes and looked off down the valley at the half-shattered, wrecked tower. "The wind and the smoke!" he muttered.

"The wind and the smoke--and the dust in my eyes--and now it's all gone to h.e.l.l! But I guess everything's all right now, if you want to fly." He touched his cap automatically. "We can start whenever you are ready, sir. You see I thought you were gone, too! That would have been a mess!

I'm sure you can handle the balancer without Perkins. Poor old Perk! And Hoskins--and the others. All gone, by G.o.d! All wiped out! Only me and you left, sir!" He laughed hysterically.

"Bats in his belfry!" thought Bennie. "Something hit him!"

Slowly it came over him that the half-stunned creature thought that he, Bennie Hooker, was Pax, the Master of the World!

He took the fellow by the arm. "Come on inside," he said. A plan had already formulated itself in his brain. Even as he was the man might be able to go through his customary duties in handling the Ring. It was not impossible. He had heard of such things, and the thought of the long marches over the frozen barrens and the perilous canoe trip down the coast, contrasted with a swift rush for an hour or two through the sunlit air, gave the professor the courage which might not have availed him otherwise. At the top of a short ladder a trapdoor opened inward, and Bennie found himself in a small compartment scarcely large enough to turn around in, from which a second door opened into the body of the Ring proper.

"It's all right--to-day," said the man hesitatingly. "I fixed--the air-lock--yesterday, sir. The leak--was here--at the hinge--but it's quite tight--now." He pointed at the door.

"Good," remarked Bennie. "I'll look around and see how things are."

This seemed to him to be eminently safe--and allowing for a program of investigation absolutely essential at the moment. Once he could master the secret of the Ring and be sure that the part of the fellow's brain which controlled the performance of his customary duties had not been injured by the shock of the night before, it might be possible to carry out the daring project which had suggested itself.

Pa.s.sing through the inner door of the air-lock he entered the chart room of the Ring, followed stumblingly by his companion. It was warm and cozy; the first warmth Hooker had experienced for nearly a month. It made him feel faint, and he dropped into an armchair and pulled off his Glengarry. The survivor of the explosion, standing awkwardly at his side, fumbled with his cap. Ever and anon he rubbed his head.

Bennie sank back into the cushions and looked about him. On the opposite wall hung a map of the world on Mercator's Projection, and from a spot in Northern Labrador red lines radiated in all directions, which formed great curved loops, returning to the starting-point.

"The flights of the Ring," thought Bennie. "There's the one where they busted the Atlas Mountains," following with his eyes the crimson thread which ran diagonally across the Atlantic, traversed Spain and the Mediterranean, and circling in a narrow loop over the coast of Northern Africa turned back into its original track. Visions came to him of guiding the car for an afternoon jaunt across the Sahara, the gloomy forests of the Congo, into the Antarctic, and thence home in time for afternoon tea, via the Easter Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska. But why stop there? What was to prevent a trip to the moon? Or Mars? Or for that matter into the unknown realms outside the solar system--the fourth dimension, perhaps--or even the fifth dimension----

"Excuse me," said the machinist suddenly, "I just forgot--whether you take--cigars or cigarettes. You see I only acted as--table orderly--once--when Smith had that sprain." His hands moved uncertainly on the shelves, beyond the map. The heart of Professor Hooker leaped.

"Cigars!" he almost shouted.

The man found a box of Havanas and struck a match.

The bliss of it! And if there was tobacco there must be food and drink as well. He began to feel strangely exhilarated. But how to handle the man beside him? Pax would certainly never ask the questions that he wished to ask. He smoked rapidly, thinking hard. Of course he might pretend that he, too, had forgotten things. And at first this seemed to be the only way out of the difficulty. Then he had an inspiration.

"Look here," he remarked, rather severely. "Something's happened to you.

You say you've forgotten what occurred yesterday? How do I know but you have forgotten everything you ever knew? You remember your name?"

"My name, sir?" The man laughed in a foolish fashion. "Why--of course I remember--my name. I wouldn't--be likely--to forget--that: Atterbury--I'm Atterbury--electrician of the _Chimaera_." And he drew himself up.

"That's all right," said Bennie, "but what were we doing yesterday? What is the very last thing that you can go back to?"

The man wrinkled his forehead. "The last thing? Why, sir, you told us you were going--to turn over the pole a bit--and freeze up Europe. I was up here--loading the condenser--when you cut me off from the alternator.

I opened the switch--and put on the electrometer to see--if we had enough. Next--everything was clouded, and I went--over to the window to see--what was going on."

"Yes," commented Bennie approvingly, "all right so far. What happened then?"

"Why, after that, sir, after that, there was the Ray of course, and er--I don't seem to remember--oh, yes, a short circuit--and I ran--out on the platform--forgot all about the danger! After that, everything's confused. It's like a dream. Your coming up--the ladder--seemed--to wake me up." The machinist smiled sheepishly.

The plan was working well. Professor Hooker was learning things fast.

"Do you think that the two of us can fly the _Chimaera_ south again?" he asked, inspecting the map.

"Why not?" answered Atterbury. "The balancer is working--better now--and--doesn't take--much attention--and you can lay the course--and manage--the landing. I was going to put a fresh uranium cylinder in the tractor this morning--but I--forgot."

"There you go, forgetting again!" growled Bennie, realizing that his only excuse for asking questions hung on this fiction. And there were many, many more questions that he must ask before he would be able to fly. "You don't seem quite right in your coco this morning, Atterbury,"

he said. "I think we'll look things over a bit--the condenser first."

"Very well, sir." Atterbury turned and groped his way through a doorway, and they pa.s.sed first into what appeared to be a storage-battery room.

Huge gla.s.s tanks filled with amber-coloured fluid, in which numerous parallel plates were supported, lined the walls from floor to ceiling.

An ammeter on the wall caught Bennie's attention. "Weston Direct Reading A. C. Ammeter," he read on the dial. Alternate current! What were they doing with an alternating current in the storage-battery room? His eyes followed the wires along the wall. Yes, they ran to the terminals of the battery. It dawned upon him that there might be something here undreamed of in electrical engineering--a storage battery for an alternating current!

The electrician closed a row of switches, brought the two polished bra.s.s spheres of the discharger within striking distance, and instantly a blinding current of sparks roared between the terminals. He had been right. This battery not only was charged by an alternating current, but delivered one of high potential. He peered into the cells, racking his brain for an explanation.

"Atterbury," said he meditatively, "did I ever tell you why they do that?"

"Yes," answered the man. "You--told me--once. The two metals--in the electrolyte--come down--on the plates--in alternate films--as--the current changes direction. But you never told me--what the electrolyte was--I don't suppose--you--would be willing to now, would you?"

"H'm," said Bennie, "some time, maybe."

But this cue was all that he required. A clever scheme! Pax had formed layers of molecular thickness of two different metals in alternation by the to-and-fro swing of his charging current. When the battery discharged the metals went into solution, each plate becoming alternately positive and negative. He wondered what Pax had used for an electrolyte that enabled him to get a metallic deposit at each electrode. And he wondered also why the metals did not alloy. But it would not do for him to linger too long over a mere detail of equipment.

And he turned away to continue his tour of inspection, a tour which occupied most of the morning, and during which he found a well-stocked gallery and made himself a cup of coffee.[5]