The Winged Men of Orcon Part 6

He fell without making a sound. I regained my weapon by planting my boot on his chest and wrenching it free.

I swung the spike like a club and crushed two heads with a single blow at each. A downward blow served almost to hack a long, clutching arm from an Orconite's body. With four men out of the struggle, I looked to see how my companions were faring, and was a.s.sured by a single glance that they were as well off as I.

Encouraged greatly, I met an advance of pressing, jostling bodies by a return to my original technique of stabbing. I stabbed every time a hand reached out to hold me, and if I did not take a life with each stab, I at least drew a spout of greenish-colored blood.

It was not a nice business, any of it, especially as the Orconites were as fearless before our onslaught as they were powerless. But it had to be done. We were fighting for far more than our own lives.

The blue-lighted corridor with its rippling sounds of static and its gigantic ammeters became worse than a shambles. We walked upon, stumbled over, wallowed amongst the piled corpses of the slain, whose master, knowing more of the science of destructive warfare than any other being in the Universe, had nevertheless forgotten that it was still possible for mankind to fight with their hands.

Such a fight could have only one ending.

When the end came I saw that Virginia Crane was splashed with the ugly blood of the Orconites from her smooth forehead to the soles of her flying boots, but she was unhurt. The rest of us were likewise blood-stained and uninjured. We were all too excited to feel tired. The moment the pressure about us began to relax, she surged toward the waiting cruiser at the end of the tunnel, and I shouted to Koto and LeConte.

"Go and help her, you two! I'll do the work on our ship!"

They did not question my order, but obeyed.

There were only ten or a dozen of the winged ones left now, and when the two men leaped after the woman, it was easy for me to fight a jabbing, slashing battle which not only protected the retreat, but enabled me to work my way slowly toward our own ship and its kotomite.

With Leider's cruiser already headed toward the tunnel which led out from the underground hangar, I knew that it could be taken into s.p.a.ce with a minimum loss of time. I believed that I could get an atomic gun going in our hold quickly, too. My hopes rose high as I darted a glance over my shoulder and saw Captain Crane and Koto taking, three at a time, the gangway steps which led to the deck and control room, with LeConte directly behind them. Now there were only seven guards left instead of a dozen, and those were at last showing signs of being cowed. I cut down two, and gave a great bound which carried me away from the others in the direction of our wrecked ship.

No sooner, though, did I tense myself for a second leap than I felt a nerveless sensation in my knees, as though the bones had turned to b.u.t.ter, and knew that my high hopes had budded too soon. Instead of leaping, I staggered on for two short steps, then stopped because I could stagger no farther. Looking back at the cruiser, I saw that LeConte, still on the gangway, had stopped also. Captain Crane and Koto were making weak, despairing signs at me from the entrance to the control room. Both of them looked as sick as cats. I heard a laugh, a shrill, rasping sort of laugh, from the forward end of the bright cruiser, and I looked in that direction.

I saw a short man, bald headed, with frog eyes peering at us from behind thick prismatic gla.s.ses. He was clad in baggy green overalls, and was slowly waving in our direction a glistening metal tube which he held in both hands. From the end of the tube emanated a purplish light.

"You were clever, my good young friends," he chortled, "to think of fighting with your hands, but you were not quite quick enough. Not to-day goes anyone in my cruiser! What do you think of the enervating ray, heh? Ingenious, not? Ludwig Leider discovered it. I am Ludwig Leider. You shall come with me and with your own eyes watch the de-energizing of New York and Paris and Berlin. For I am ready to do away with your paltry Earth now!"

I felt the last energy ooze out of me and I sunk, all in a heap, on the floor of Ludwig Leider's cavern.

CHAPTER V

_Death in a Box_

New York. We did see it with our own eyes. The instrument through which we gazed was like a metal box with a ground-gla.s.s top and a mesh of slender wires leading away from the table on which the box rested.

Leider touched a b.u.t.ton amidst a long row of b.u.t.tons on the table. All we had to do after that was to look at the ground-gla.s.s plate, and the picture was there.

We, in Leider's private laboratory on Orcon, saw the crowds of a ma.s.s meeting of some sort in Union Square, saw a boy and a girl kissing each other in the shadow of bushes in Central Park, saw a little fox terrier watching with only one eye open.

We could not speak, any of the four of us, as we stared at that very simple box which wrought miracles. I stood still, thinking of the things which had happened after our capture, when the cruiser had already seemed to be in our grasp.

First of all, Leider had restored our energy to us by the simple process of turning off the ray which emanated from the tube in his hands. Then a veritable legion of Orconites had come to the cavern in which the cruiser rested, and we had been marched through the very heart of the power rooms, with their hum and clack and dazzle of mighty machinery, to the laboratory. That was all.

The Orconites had left us outside the heavy doors of the private room, but, just as there had been no opportunity to attack while they marched with us, Leider gave us no opportunity to harm him while we were alone.

Though he had forgotten once the damage we could do in a fight, he was not going to be fooled again. He kept the great table of the box between ourselves and him, and his wary hands were always closer to a certain row of control b.u.t.tons than ours were to his.

It was he who broke at last the silence which had fallen as we watched New York from Orcon, and his voice was loud in the hushed laboratory from which the noises of his subterranean power houses were shut out.

"Sit down," he commanded, "and keep away from the table and the reflector."

Then, when we had taken chairs beside the table, he began to speak to us.

"That little dog you saw--I have it in my power to withdraw from him in one second all the energy which makes him run, jump about, live. That I can do by touching controls here at my table without even leaving this marvelous, marvelous room." A frown crossed his forehead above his pop-eyes, and he exclaimed with swift anger, in a croaking voice, "And what I do to the little dog, I can do as easily to the whole population of your loathsome Earth!"

I looked up at him where he stood with the table between us, and at length found my tongue.

"And of course you will do it, you swine!" I burst out.

His momentary anger had pa.s.sed as swiftly as it had come, and, ignoring my epithet, he rocked smugly on the b.a.l.l.s and heels of his feet and smiled.

"Ah, Herr Doktor," he answered contentedly, "I will destroy Earth, of course! For who has better cause than I, whom Earth would not accept as her master? All of the people there will lose the power to move, and they will die. I am ready now, in the uttermost degree. After you so neatly but uselessly saved yourselves from drowning last night, I finished. As easily can I de-energize the peoples of Earth as I can you--the four of you--if you should make the move to harm me."

Captain Crane was staring first at Leider, then at me, and her cheeks were gray and ghastly looking. Koto and LeConte were both sitting tight in chairs beside our own, watching me rather than Leider. I looked over the shelves, the whole complex apparatus of that incredible room, but saw no weapon of any kind. And my hands were useless because _his_ were so close to the d.a.m.nable controls.

"But what becomes of Earth itself, after our peoples are gone?" I asked presently.

Leider shrugged and his eyes twinkled behind the thick gla.s.ses.

"Herr Doktor, you are a brilliant man. Amongst the most brilliant, I should say, of any who on the Earth have labored. Yet of science you know less than a child. What should I do with Earth except to sit here in my own room, and, with the anarcostic ray, reduce its solid structure into stardust which will drift away into s.p.a.ce like the smoke from one tiny match? Pouf! like that."

I looked at the table, at Leider's wary hands. I knew that the man was ready, even as he had said, to do away with Earth. I guessed that we would die, too, when Earth was gone--probably here in this room. And it seemed likely that the destruction would begin at a not distant moment, for there was some quality of fanatical evil lurking even now in Leider's face.

Then, however, I stiffened in my chair very suddenly indeed. If I could find a way to get close to the box on the table without rousing Leider's suspicion, the outlook might not be so black!

"Leider," I exclaimed all at once, and there was a vigor in my words, "it's all very well for you to be saying these mighty things, but do you know what? I don't believe you can draw the energy out of the human race or disintegrate the Earth, either!"

I think if I had kicked him I could not have surprised him more. Which was exactly what I had hoped to do.

"You--you do not _believe_?" he said, incredulously.

"No I don't!"

"Ach, Gott!" A black fury overcame him. Hideous fury. He was already standing beside the table. Quaking from head to foot, he pointed savagely at the box. "Get up and look into the reflector!" He choked and his voice rose to a scream. "Get up! Stoop close to the reflector and watch! Watch there, I say!"

The thing which had launched me on my course of action was the fact that the picture-making box was not screwed to the table. The only thing which held it there was the soft mesh of wires!