Chapter VII: The Man Who Murdered Light

Hines's automatic pistol tore itself to pieces as the shells in its butt went off all at once. Its fragments on the concrete floor glowed dully red, then slowly cooled off when they ceased to emit sparks.

Hines staggered to his feet and found himself penned in behind a monster bank of vacuum tubes which glowed redly. The glass of the tubes was inordinately thick. These tubes would not break by concussion, nor by however determined a blow of a man's fist--Preston had learned, from his debacle in the Storm.

Hines was conscious of them, and of things below them which might have been gigantic transformers of the type used in radio. But as his brain cleared from the crack on the concrete floor, his whole attention was taken up by the facts which it was immediately necessary for him to face.

Schaaf was beside him, crouching a little to have his whole body behind the banks of vacuum tubes. Schaaf was snarling a little, and his blue eyes were glinting fire. He seemed to be unarmed as well as Hines, and he was gazing across the deep-sunk room with an expression of concentrated malevolence.

Preston was there, the man Hines had seen exactly once, and for half a minute only, but whom he had been hunting for months. He was standing by a small platform which itself was next to a wide door through which the humming noise came. Preston's hand was on a small thing which looked rather like a searchlight, except that instead of a mirror for a reflector it had a sort of grid of glistening wires. There were two switches on its top.

Preston was small and dapper, and wore a neat Vandyke beard trimmed to an accurate point. He looked like a highly civilized man, even alongside the nattily attired pair of followers who lounged always within feet of him.

They were gangsters, those two, from impeccably tailored clothing to impossibly expensive haberdashery in vivid color.

Preston seemed precisely the pattern of the professional man--until one noticed his eyes. They were blank and hard and triumphant, precisely the eyes of a madman with paranoiac delusions of grandeur. They were insolent and scornful and very, very arrogant eyes. They were the eyes of a man who has persuaded himself that he is invested with supreme authority, and who derides and despises the mere worms of humans within his gaze. Unfortunately, Preston's ideas of his own powers were not delusions. They were facts.

He smiled at them, and his smile was filled with the same vanity-inspired scorn.

"I assure you, Schaaf," he said in a metallic voice that made one long to kick him, "I assure you that your being alive now is due to my forbearance."

Schaaf spoke, his voice purring with rage. He spoke in German, and the words crackled. At the end he added wrathfully:

"And if you don't understand der names I called you, you are a lot of banana oil!"

He turned to Hines, growling, and Hines knew somehow that Schaaf was inspecting the contrivances, the elaborate hook-ups, the involved array of apparatus with a desperately concentrated attention, working frantically to understand their operation.

Hines's head was clearing swiftly, and he looked about, and went sick with a helpless rage at the same time that his pulses pumped with fury. He looked at Preston with eyes like flames. Preston had had Kathryn kidnaped. Preston had--

"You saw what happened to your weapons," said Preston, smiling unpleasantly. "I'm letting you live because it amuses me to watch you. I have--" he looked at a wrist watch--"I have more than half an hour before Inspector Hines's artillery blows this island out of the water. And I am inclined to let you two beg your lives. I won't give them to you, but I'll listen."

"Beg, der deffil!" snapped Schaaf. "Breston, you are der most complete idiot in der history of der human race! With der brains I reluctantly admit you possess, you could haff been a benefactor of mankind! And now we haff to kill you!--Where is Miss Bush?"

Preston threw back his head to laugh. His two guards regarded the two men behind the vacuum tubes with a wary, indifferent alertness. They were killers, hired to do murder to order. They regarded Schaaf and Hines as the professional killer always does regard his prospective victims.

"She's here," said Preston sardonically. "She's here! Quite a pretty girl, too. And safe--so far!"

Hines's teeth ground together. Face to face with Preston, a consummation for which he had hoped and worked for months. And helpless. Preston had destroyed his weapons with that little searchlight-like thing. "It is lucky for you that she is safe," snapped Schaaf. "Breston, you _verdamumt_ fool, do you realize that you are licked before you start?"

* * * * *

Sweat was standing out on Schaaf's face. He stood tense in every muscle, and Hines had a queer impression that Schaaf was all brain, that every particle of him was racing madly to absorb the meaning of the wires, the tubes, the switches, the connections in this diabolical control room. He seemed to feel Schaaf working desperately to piece together the meaning of every appliance and how it worked.

"Licked?" Preston laughed, the mirthless, scornful laugh of the paranoiac. "You are living by my pleasure, because it amuses me to watch--"

"That is true to a certain extent only," said Schaaf. He spoke with a measured calmness in which only Hines could detect the false note. "I tell you why. I haff solfed your apparatus! Before I left der mainland to come here, I had explained to my assistants der entire method of all your defices. I tell you you are licked, and I proof it. Der darkness wafes I have made myself. And moreotfer, I haff made der four-centimeter wafes that make der air conducting and enable you to throw a beam of radiation that is like a life wire charged with electricity, wherefer you will. And der people on der mainland haff der apparatus too!"

Hines's eyes flickered. Schaaf was bluffing. It was a monumental sort of bluff, and the one thing that might work--if Schaaf could carry it out. Schaaf was bluffing for both their lives, now, and Kathryn's to boot.

"I tell you how you and I make der four-centimeter wafes," said Schaaf, grimly. "Der vacuum tube as at present designed cannot possibly go below a quarter of a meter, and then der wate is not a pure sine wafe. I know! But you haff four-centimeter wafes, and smaller. Yes! And der word of how you do them is going all ofer der cifilized world right now. Because you can take six tubes, each one emitting wafes of one-fourth meter length, and so adjust them that der separate wafes of der separate tubes come four centimeters after each other, gifing you a beam of der death rays. Hein?"

He grinned savagely at Preston, though sweat stood out on his forehead. And Preston snarled.

"You can carry der process farther," said Schaaf in a judicial tone. Hines, listening, marveled at the assurance with which Schaaf was stating, as definite facts, his hurried deductions from the apparatus about them. "By der use of a sufficient number of tubes, you can make wafes of any length you choose, merely by der superimposition of one wafe-outline upon another. Der United States Gofernment is now turning out this apparatus in quantity!"

He waved his hands about the room. "Der darkness wafes are made in that way. Der conducting beam is made in that way. Eferything you haff is made in that way. And we haff eferything you haff efer thought of, with ten times der power you haff, and a hundred times der brains! You are licked, Breston! Hines and I, we came to this island because you are der damnedest scoundrel in forty nations. You haff Miss Bush here. Giff her back and we giff you half an hour's start. No more! You are licked! We make der bargain! Turn ofer Miss Bush, unharmed. Turn off der darkness. We giff you half an hour to escape in. That is efery damned thing we will giff you. And then we come after you, and I, personally, choke you by der neck until I kill you!"

* * * * *

Preston was livid. Hines's pulse leaped in savage satisfaction. Schaaf had worked out the whole thing from sight of Preston's outfit. His bluff was working. Preston did believe the whole world was equipped to fight him with his own weapons.

But his madman's eyes flamed with the crazy rage of shattered vanity.

"Everything I've got?" he snarled. "This too? Tell me how this is done!"

He flung a switch on the top of the tiny projector. There was a sudden vivid glow at a table against the wall some fifteen feet from Hines. A long, serried ray of tubes leaped into light. Utter silence fell.

"Look at that metal!" raged Preston. "Look at it!"

He pointed a shaking hand at the fragments of Hines's two weapons on the concrete floor. And they turned suddenly white--snow white. Then they became wet. A liquid trickled from them and dripped to the concrete, where it bubbled furiously and formed a thick white mist that spread out over the floor. Preston flung back his switch and as the bank of tubes went out, he laughed in shrill, insolent, vanity mad triumph--because Schaaf's cheeks had become drained of every particle of blood.

"That's what I'm going to use on Hines's artillery?" boasted Preston hysterically. "This little projector is all I need! All!"

Schaaf clenched his hands more tightly still.

"_Gott!_" he muttered thickly. "_Gott!_"

"You didn't work out that one, eh?" demanded Preston arrogantly. "Now I'll tell you: that's the same thing as all the rest! Fluorescence! Causing one type of energy to be changed to another! Under my four-centimeter waves, the air becomes fluorescent. But these waves work on iron!

"Where these waves strike, the surface of the iron becomes fluorescent. It absorbs heat from the air and from its own interior! It turns heat to short radio waves, and every particle of iron in the beam of these waves, no matter how far away it is, radiates away every particle of energy it possesses! It sinks to absolute zero! Four, hundred and sixty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit!

"You saw air liquefy in contact with the iron that was red hot a moment ago. What's going to happen to the men on your battleships when every particle of iron or steel drops to the temperature of liquid air? What's going to happen to your guns when they're down to the temperature of liquid helium and the gun crews try to fire them? They'll fly to bits like brittle ice! Licked, am I? I'll wipe out your damned artillery with half a kilowatt in this projector! Ill sink your battleships with their crews frozen solid.

"I'll play that beam on New York and every particle of steel in the city will be brittle as ashes! I'll bring down every damned skyscraper in the town. I'll teach them a lesson they won't forget. Make my apparatus and try to work it against me? I'll--"

He was working himself into frothing rage. He was shouting. He was bellowing. His voice was a strident scream of rage, the rage of the man who has convinced himself that he is the most intelligent of all living men and then finds the distinction threatened.

"You fools?" Preston gasped. "Trying to fight me! Like savages with clubs going against a battleship! I'll show you! I'll show--"

Schaaf had bluffed, working out what Preston had done, after a swift survey of the apparatus about him. He'd seen Preston's transmitters and had raced his brain to the manner of their operation. He'd tried to bluff that all the world knew now how Preston had kept it sunk in night. But he hadn't known this one last trick, which was the most deadly of all. And Schaaf muttered thickly to himself with his eyes sunken in and dull. Because this last weapon was invincible.

Then Hines looked sharply upward and snapped, "All right, men! Everybody in here!"

He gained two seconds only; two seconds in which Preston was looking upward, and his guards with him, toward the door into which Hines himself had stumbled. But that two seconds was enough. Before they could look down, Hines had leaped, dragging from their sockets two of the thick tubes to use as missiles.

The first one struck Preston and flung him against the projector. Hines was within a yard of Preston when he heard Schaaf cry out. But it was too late to stop then. He sank his fingers in Preston's throat as one of the guards screamed.

The projector of the freezing beam had been whirled around. A guard had felt his arm frozen to the elbow as he tried to raise his weapon. He screamed, and screamed, and Schaaf went into action frantically, flinging the huge vacuum tubes about and crashing them until the second guard was helpless and the freezing beam was off.

But Hines paid no attention. He forgot that he should be getting a bullet in the back of his head at any instant. Preston was squirming under him, getting at something in his pocket. There was a sickeningly muffled explosion in the middle of the battling pair of men. Another.

Preston seemed literally to go mad. Frothing at the mouth, he tried to sink his teeth in Hines. He fought crazily, insanely, with maniacal strength. Hines forgot that there was anything in the world but this one single man he hated. He forgot everything--

And then Schaaf was pulling him to his feet, crying:

"We haff fife minutes, Hines! Fife minutes only! Find Miss Bush!"