Chapter II: In an Open Car

Hines had started out at five o'clock in the morning, in hopes of getting away from the city before the heavy traffic began. But, of course, he turned out to be only one of many thousands who had the same idea. The heat wave in New York had been terrific. It is recorded that the traffic had piled up as early as 3 A.M., and when Hines started at five he was promptly swallowed up in a long lane of cars going up-State at a bare crawl.

His accident happened just out of Yonkers at a little after six, but it was nine before his wheel was replaced and a new mudguard in position. By that time the Storm had begun.

Down there, quite sixty miles from the storm-center, its development was less spectacular. Up among the mountains it is fairly certain that the wind began at a very few minutes after six. Watches found on victims of the first terrific rush of wind were almost invariably stopped at that hour, and clocks in houses, overturned and crushed, corroborate the figures. But it was nearly half past six when a strong wind began to blow from Yonkers toward the mountains.

The sun was just up. Hines was seething over the delay. He was engaged to Kathryn, and he resented anything that kept him away from her. The Catskills had been his suggestion in the first place. Kathryn, as a feature writer on the _Star_, didn't want to get too far from New York anyhow.

Other matters aside, there was a man named Preston who was rather definitely dangerous and who was still at large. Not less than twice, with his artificial darkness, he had set the whole city of New York by the ears, to his own enormous profit.

Hines, and Schaaf--now up in the Catskills, too, making some abstruse experiments with very short Hertzian waves for the research department of the American Electric Company--Hines and Schaaf had managed to checkmate him each time.

Each time Kathryn had been in at the death, and each time the _Star_ had scored a newspaper triumph. With Preston still at large, and both Hines and Schaaf convinced that sooner or later he would try to strike again, Kathryn had not wanted to get too far away even on her vacation. She wanted to handle the next battle with Preston for the _Star_ as she had the first two.

Hines moved restlessly about the garage, or scowled at the never-ending but often pausing line of cars that went crawling, crawling, creeping away from the heat of the city.

Those cars were leaving a sweltering city behind them, to steam upon sweltering roads in an atmosphere of exhaust-fumes, but at least they had hopes of reaching the hills and coolness. Instead, only too many of them reached the hills and disaster.

Hines noticed a breeze at twenty after six. At half past it was a wind. At seven, it was half a gale, blowing under a clear sky with a brazen sun already sending down a blistering heat.

Hines swore under his breath, but it was no use trying to hurry the mechanics. He was an inspector of police in the city of New York, but at a roadside garage he was merely a customer, and the traffic outside promised plenty of customers before the day was over.

It was shortly after eight that Hines saw the top of an ancient touring car torn to ribbons by the wind. Before nine o'clock came, he had seen dozens of them.

* * * * *

The traffic began to thin, abruptly. Cars headed for the mountains turned aside. They began to fight their way into storage garages, battling a terrific, solid mass of air.

Some of them stopped where trees on a side-road promised some measure of protection from the wind. Others were wiser and parked themselves in swarming masses wherever deep cuts or valleys ran across the prevailing direction of the wind.

The galvanized garage roof was a drumming tumult, now, rattling and booming from the wind that went sweeping across it. The mechanics finished Hines's car and very reluctantly opened the doors--closed a half hour before--to let him out.

He came out into a rather incredible world. Trees were leaning toward the mountains. The roads were nearly clear. The traffic had lessened almost to nothing. The noise of the wind was a distinct deep booming sound, to which the tortured trees added shrill whistles and shriller screams, and now and then sharp cracking sounds as limbs or trunks gave way under the intolerable pressure.

Hines turned toward the mountains and shifted gears. They clashed, horribly. It was seconds before he realized that the wind had pushed his car ahead of the motor-speed. He had to race the engine to get into second, and race it again to get into third.

The car seemed to be possessed of unlimited power. It sped toward the mountains like a mad thing. Every man comes to know his motor, but Hines found his own car acting like a thing possessed. With his foot off the accelerator it made forty-five miles an hour. The barest touch on the gas-pedal sent it leaping to sixty, seventy miles.

He saw an ancient flivver turned over, at the side of the road. There were no people near it. He braked, instinctively, and found his brakes nearly useless. His car flashed past, and he heard the brakes squealing, but felt hardly any diminution of his speed.

There was a ripping sound behind him. His back curtain had blown in. The split upper half of the windshield opened out, and wind poured from behind him out over the front. Another wreck. Two more.

He saw a car coming toward him and passed it with the speed of light, but in the instant of his passing saw the man at the wheel of that other vehicle working frantically at gas-lever and throttle, and it seemed to him that for the fraction of a second he heard the roaring of a motor laboring horribly in low gear, battling against the wind alone.

The road shot into a deep cut, and the abnormal acceleration of the car diminished. Hines jammed on the brakes and stopped with difficulty. The ripped fragments of his back curtain were flapping about him and he got out his knife to cut them away.

Now he felt the wind as a savage, gusty pressure. It was terrifically strong, even down here in a cut some thirty feet deep. Something was stirring in Hines's breast, just then, which he was grimly refusing to recognize. After all, there have been storms and storms. Kathryn, up in the mountains, would be safe enough.

The thin tooting of a horn came to him. A car had drawn aside from the road, some fifty or sixty feet ahead. A man in it was waving to him to come on ahead. Hines merely released his brakes and his car moved sluggishly for twenty feet and stopped. He put it in gear for the rest of the distance.

Here, remarkably, the air was calm. The man in the other car was smoking placidly. Overhead the wind rushed past with its deep, ominous roaring sound. At just this point between the sides of the cut there was a perfect lee, where no wind-currents of any sort were noticeable.

* * * * *

"I thought I'd tip yuh," said the man in the other car. "This is the best place I've hit yet. Pull over off the road an' you'll be all right. Better get off the road, though. A car come through here like a bat out o' hell. Turned over at the end of the cut, yonder. The wind's near cross-wise there."

Instinct made Hines ask: "Anybody hurt?"

The man spat.

"Hell! They fell out an' the wind picked 'em up an' carried 'em off somewhere. Ain't it a wind, though? What y' call a hurricane, I guess."

Hines was staring, oblivious. Far, far away, a cloud was forming, but unlike any cloud Hines had ever seen before. Something, the sheer distance of the formation perhaps, told him that it was higher than any cloud he had known. It rose as a vast, incredible column, and then it spread out as a mushroom might spread above its stalk.

"Yeah," said the man in the other car. "It's been like that for half-an-hour, now. Looks like a volcano cloud, but it ain't. No earth shocks. Just wind. I reckon that's the storm-center. It's a peach, this storm. That cloud 'll be over the Catskills, somewheres."

Hines started, and then he turned grimly to his car-top. He slashed at it, wrenching away the cloth and flinging it away.

"I'm going on," he said, rather absurdly.

The man in the other car shrugged.

"I ain't stopping you," he observed. "But you better stay here. That wind is a hell-cat. If you want your car to stay on the road an' you're bound to go, load 'er down with rocks. Plenty of 'em. I mean that wind 'Il blow you clean to hell and gone if you don't."

Hines's brain was busy with a real, an acknowledged terror now, but something in the suggestion jerked at his mind.

"Right," he said suddenly. "Thanks. I'll do it. I believe it's needed."

The other man unfastened his car-door and stepped out.

"I'll help," he said amiably.

In silence they worked. The empty seat beside the driver was filled with bowlders and smaller rocks. All the floor-space filled up. Hines flung up the back of the rumble seat and they filled it with stones of smaller size.

"One more tip," said the other man thoughtfully. "Some flat rocks alongside your hood 'll help."

They found two huge stones, loosened by the dynamite that had made the cut. They wedged them in between the mudguards and the hood. Hines held out his hand. There was a bill in it.

"Go to hell," said the other man cheerfully. "Me, I'm a socialist and a proletarian, an' judging by your car you're a damn' capitalist--a bourgeois anyways. But one guy can help out another one, can't he?"

Hines put away the bill and shook hands instead.

"My girl's up there in the mountains," he said briefly. "I'm going up to see if she's all right."

"Good luck!"

* * * * *

Hines's car, with its top gone and its windshield laid flat before it, went into low gear with a vast groaning. It was burdened with over half a ton of stone. It went into second with a little difficulty. Then the wind began to make itself felt. Despite its added weight, the car went into high gear quite normally. It was rolling along at twenty miles an hour when it came out of the cut into the full blast of the wind again.

Hines was flung against the side door. The car shuddered horribly. Gasping for breath, with his head bent over, his hat gone instantly, Hines fought to keep it on the road. There was a curve here, and for two hundred yards he went squarely across the wind. Without the rocks, no vehicle ever built would have stayed on the road in such a blast.

Then the road turned again and the wind was behind him once more. Instantly the car picked up speed. Thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an hour. Forty-five miles--fifty--

The landscape flashed past, a mass of wrecked trees and débris. Hines saw the body of a motor truck a full hundred yards from the road, smashed against a rocky hillside. He saw two, three, a dozen cars overturned--always on the side of the road to which the wind would have flung them. He came to a town which was nearly obliterated. Wreckage littered the streets. He jammed on the brakes, raced his motor, got it into second, and slowed by the braking action of the engine. He raced it again and got into first and turned off his switch.

He was going no more than fifteen miles an hour when the car careened over a heap of rubbish which once had been part of a building, swung about insanely and crashed where splintered planks had piled up against a massive stone wall.

It was part of a road-tunnel underneath a railroad track.

Then Hines saw a man crawling on the pavement before him. The man had a rope about his waist, which was evidently tied to something. A paint-pot slopped white paint about as he pushed it ahead of him. He was painting huge letters on the concrete roadway.

HINES STOP!

HINES STOP!

HINES STO

That was as far as he had gone. He was painfully working on the last letter of the third "Stop" when Hines opened the side door of his car. Hines slid out, gasping for breath, and dropped flat on his belly on the road. He went crawling about the splintered planks to windward until the man saw him. Then he shouted, uselessly, while the man stared.

* * * * *

It was not until Hines had pointed repeatedly to his name and then to himself that comprehension slowly dawned on the crawling man's face. The fellow waved and shouted an order across the ten feet of intervening space, then hauled himself along the rope in the very teeth of the wind to a doorway in the side of the road-tunnel. Seconds later he was out again with another rope. He flung it into the air, and the wind stretched it taut.

Hines crawled, knotted it about his body, and felt himself hauled across the road.

For the second time he was in a blessed calm. He stood up, panting. The man who had been painting on the road made a peculiarly absurd salute.

"You're Police Inspector Hines, sir?" he asked woodenly.

Hines nodded, still unable to speak.

"Corporal Woodford of the State Police, sir," said the man who had pulled Hines across the road by a rope. "All wires are down, sir, but every broadcasting station that hasn't been wrecked has been broadcasting orders to every possible agency to stop you from going into the storm.

"Professor Schaaf managed to get a message out by radio, sir, from a spot very near the storm-center. He says that the storm is caused by Preston's darkness-apparatus, and that you are the only man able to stop it. And the storm, sir, simply has to be stopped. Will you step inside and give your instructions?"

Hines blinked, and then the meaning of the message came to him. Rage filled him, consumingly. And then he went sick with helplessness. Because, of course, he could have no instructions to give for the stopping of a storm.