Chapter III: Declaring War

Under ordinary circumstances, it is probable that the little room in which Hines found himself would have seemed extraordinarily cramped and crowded.

It was perhaps eight feet by ten, certainly no more, and it was inset in a railroad fill which here was pierced for a vehicular roadway. A door opened upon the curbstone, and from the narrow doorstep it was no more than ten feet to the painted white line which normally marked the center of the road.

On the farther side of the railroad embankment there was another concrete highway, which explained the presence of the room. Here was a dangerous crossroad, and this little cubby-hole was a shelter for the State policemen.

There was a tiny stove, and a bench along one side of the wall, and a cupboard and a table. There were nails, from which a slicker, a belt with a holster attached, and a patched motorcycle inner tube depended. On the table a tiny radio blared forth intermittent sounds from an even tinier loud-speaker.

"To all authorities in New York State," said a voice crisply. "All traffic must be stopped where the wind has now reached a velocity of forty miles an hour. The storm is expected to increase in intensity until four o'clock this afternoon. Wherever possible the population must be warned of this fact. The storm will lessen markedly at about sunset and may have ceased entirely by morning.

"It is imperative also that Inspector of Police Hines be reached and warned not to enter the storm area. Where practicable, signs should be painted on stone walls or the pavement. 'Hines Stop!' will be enough to cause Inspector Hines to stop and make inquiry. He will probably travel on one of the following roads--"

Hines turned to his companion, who was busily raking together a heap of wires from the drawer of the table and twisting them together into a single long strand.

"I'm getting a buzzer signal ready," said the State trooper woodenly, "to use the railroad rails overhead. The radio said half an hour ago that all State troopers were to use buzzer signals and railroad tracks where they couldn't report otherwise. Not many, of us left, sir, and very few of us can report, anyhow. I didn't bother with that until I'd put up signs to stop you, sir."

The radio had finished a long list of highways. It began again, repeating the previous message word for word, while wind roared overhead in a deep-toned bellow which did not seem to vary by the fraction of a semitone. It was rising slowly in pitch, as a matter of fact, but so slowly that Hines's ears could not follow the change.

* * * * *

"This is an emergency means of communication, sir," said the trooper, joining wires together with painstaking care. "It's the old buzzer line that used to be used in the Army. I take an induction coil, the one from my motorcycle, sir, and put the secondary into the rail up overhead. The rail's iron, sir, and it isn't insulated, and it's not very efficient, but they can pick it up with amplifiers at the other end."

He bent two wires and fastened them to the storage-battery which ran his radio. He was busy for a minute or more, improvising a make-and-break contact.

The trooper put it down, satisfied, and tied a rope about himself.

"We have ropes here, sir, for towing," he observed. "I'm going out with the wire, sir, and try to fasten this to the railroad rail. If I'm blown away, sir, will you try to haul me back?"

"Wait a bit," said Hines shortly. "I'm going to do that. I don't know Morse code; and you're needed for signaling. I'll make the connection.... It's my order," he added sharply as the trooper shook his head.

Reluctantly, the trooper gave him the rope-end.

Hines knotted the rope tightly about his body and stepped out of the door. Wind struck him, and took his breath away. But that was the wind that blew through the relatively sheltered traffic way. He was crawling on his belly when he came out on the lee side of the railroad fill, and a monstrous eddy of wind lifted him six inches off the ground and flung him crashing ten feet away. He gasped, and began to crawl desperately up the incline toward the rails.

The wind, here, had formed a monstrous whirl over the slight obstruction. The dried cinders, dust, and small stones which once had covered the side of the embankment had long since been sucked up and flung madly away. It was naked damp clay that smeared him as he crawled toward the tracks.

He seemed to be weightless, as the wind-whirl tried to lift him upward. Hines had been in the European war, and he thought that he had learned to hug the ground, but never before in his life had he clung so desperately to the earth as he did now. He was blinded, strangled.

There was a vast, malevolent force pulling and tugging at his body. And then quite suddenly his fingers scraped concrete, and he fought the wind that strove to push his exploring hand aside and found a steel signal-post that must be beside the track.

It was that post that really made it possible for him to reach the rails. The blast that came over the top of the embankment was as fierce, as savage, as nearly irresistible as a flood of swiftly-flowing water. Nobody knows what velocity the wind ultimately attained in the Storm, but it had reached a hundred and forty miles an hour when the self-registering anemometer in the Burton observatory was wrecked.

Hines faced that wind, and fought his way inch by inch by means of the steel bands connecting the signal-post to the rails. An outstretched arm caught the wind. The sleeve ballooned out and burst. A flapping end was seized by the wind and the rest of the garment was literally peeled from him.

Here, of course, the wind was at its worst as far as Hines was concerned. He was protected by no more than the four-inch steel rail from its full force, and constantly there poured over him dust, smaller fragments of débris, and above all and over all the overpoweringly dense and solid wind itself.

When the connection was made, Hines was sobbing with sheer exhaustion. He slid back down the incline, an inch at a time. And then suddenly the wind caught him, and he felt himself lifted up. The rope about his body tightened and hurt intolerably, and then he felt a crash and lost consciousness.

* * * * *

When he came back to himself he was lying on the floor in the little eight-by-ten room again, and the State trooper was working the buzzer signal steadily. He stopped, and came over to Hines.

Hines stirred, and the trooper nodded to himself. He went back to the buzzer and worked it again.

The radio broke off in the midst of its tediously repeated message.

"Corporal Woodford!" said the loud-speaker crisply. "Since Inspector Hines has recovered consciousness, we will give him the message from Professor Schaaf. He is in communication with the American Electric Company by means of a short-wave set, and we will rebroadcast it to you."

There were clickings. One or two curious crashing noises. Then a re-enforcement of the roaring of the storm, only this extra roaring came from the speaker. It was evident that wherever Schaaf was speaking into a microphone, the storm was there too.

"Hello, Hines," said the placid voice of Schaaf. "This is a fery pleasant situation, I dondt think. Now I giff you der works, and you use your head. Here is what I haff found out.

"At six this morning der sun changed color. From where I am, I obserfe with a spectroscope that der infra-red part of der sun spectrum is completely gone cuckoo. I haff examined electric lights in der same manner, and der infra-red spectrum is missing there, also.

"Der air where I am no longer transmits radiant heat. Der air, in other words, is opaque to heat-wafes, as our friendt Breston has been able to make it opaque to light. I think he is up to some more of his deffilment. As you remember, he was able to make der air absorb and neutralize light, producing his infernal darkness.

"I conclude that he has contrifed to make der air absorb heat instead of permitting it to come on down to der ground, and in consequence der air within range of his sending-apparatus is getting hot as der deffil because it is absorbing all der heat that should pass through it to warm the earth. Getting hot, it expands and rises. More cool air is rushing in underneath. That, in turn, is getting excited and rushing to der upper stratosphere.

"Der result is der Storm, that is raising hell. From der communications I haff received from der American Electric Company, der storm-center is fifty miles across, which makes it a hell of a storm. Der aferage for a typhoon is ten to fifteen miles.

"Der information I haff for you is that it is definitely Breston who is making this storm. He has a sending-apparatus with a range of twenty to thirty miles in efery direction. Where his _verdammt_ short wafes reach, der air is no longer transparent to heat-wafes and all der heat of der sun is being used to heat der atmosphere, instead of der earth. There is bractically a chimney fifty miles across, full of hot air which is rising toward heafen and raising hell.

"You can locate der sending-station with apparatus like we used to line up der source of der darkness, before. I will be in communication with der Electric Company for some time to come. You can reach me, of course. But be careful as der deffil how you talk. Breston is no doubt listening in.

"I don't know what you are going to do, or how you are going to do it, but you haff got to do something. Der chimney of hot air will stop working, of course, at sunset. But it will probably begin again at sunrise, and in der meantime there will be der deffil of a storm all night long because of der hell that was raised all day. Good luck, Hines. I sign off now."

* * * * *

There were more clickings and the storm-roar from the loud-speaker stopped. Then the crisp voice of the announcer came once more.

"Mr. Hines! I hope you received Professor Schaaf's message. Woodford's communications are coming through quite clearly. It is not yet known just where you are. If you will send word, every effort will be made to reach you. In the meantime, will you give what orders you can about preparations for stopping 'this storm?"

The trooper, with his improvised key poised, looked expectantly at Hines.

"My messages are getting through, sir," he said woodenly. "And I imagine that they can't be read by anybody except at the other end of the rails. Before you recovered consciousness, the commissioner of police in New York City broadcast a message giving you full authority. The State authorities have done the same. What shall I tell them you want done?"

Hines's hands were clenched tightly. Kathryn was up in the mountains somewhere, somewhere near the center of the storm which was Preston's work. Preston's work!

She was probably dead by this time. Few buildings could stand the blast that blew outside. There was nothing to do, now, but get Preston.

Preston was the one man on earth that Hines unfeignedly hated. He had seen the man once. He had fought him twice, with the scientist Schaaf's aid. Preston should have been one of the greatest scientific geniuses on earth, but instead had now made himself the most cold-blooded murderer in history.

Preston found that certain short Hertzian waves produced a state of fluorescence in the air[1] so that the visible waves of light were absorbed by the ions of the atmosphere, and an utter darkness was produced.

[Footnote 1: The fluorescence of atmospheric air under the influence of certain wave-lengths of radiation was described as long ago as 1911 in a lecture before the Royal Institution of Great Britain by Professor R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University. The very short rays discovered by Schumann were demonstrated to produce fluorescence in air. The experiments and a photograph of the phenomenon may be found reprinted in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1911, which is available in many public libraries. See page 165 _et seg_.]

Once, some months before, he had sent a beam of those waves down Fifth Avenue, in New York. In fifteen minutes of utter blackness the forewarned underworld of the city reaped a harvest of which Preston received his share.

With every resource of science and courage, Hines and Schaaf had fought him then, and had won. His apparatus for producing darkness was destroyed, and he seemed to have been killed. It was that success that had won Hines promotion to an inspectorship of police.

* * * * *

Preston, however, was not dead. Three months since, he had reappeared with a new and larger apparatus for the broadcasting of his short waves. He filled the whole city with the unbelievably high-frequency broadcast, and the air above the whole metropolitan district absorbed all visible rays and transformed them into invisible heat. The whole city was immersed in an ocean of oblivion.

Again Hines had fought him, with Schaaf's assistance. That bulky blond German scientist had invented instruments for locating the source of this radiation which had an almost catalytic effect in producing darkness. The effect of the waves was out of all proportion to the power used in producing them.

By Schaaf's instruments and Hines's courage, again the menace to the city had been nullified; but Preston had gone scot-free, and had become a millionaire through the panic in the stock-market his horrible weapon had caused.

He remained undiscovered and at large, and his captured apparatus had been destroyed by the explosion of an evidently prepared bomb before it could be examined.

Now he was again at work. He had prepared apparatus which could send over a circle from fifty to sixty miles across. Wherever that station maintained a field of force of the extremely short radio waves, there the effects of the unholy radiation were evident.

He seemed to be using now a slightly different wave-length than had caused all light radiation to be absorbed by the air. Now it was that all heat was arrested by the atmosphere. The warmth of the sun did not reach the earth. The air itself became heated instead. Heated, it rose, and created a cyclonic storm beyond all parallel.

Preston, in the midst of that storm, was as safe from any danger save that of the storm as if he were protected by armies. No man could reach him, alive. He was invulnerable, protected by the sheer destruction he had invoked.

* * * * *

Hines clenched his hands in the cubby-hole dug in the railroad embankment. His eyes narrowed. Kathryn was very probably dead, and Preston still lived. Preston would have to be killed for the sake of humanity alone; yet Hines would kill him to avenge her only.

"First," said Hines in a cold and utterly bitter tone, "I want everybody who's sold stocks short for a week past to be checked up. Preston will be operating in terms of millions. I suggest that the stock-market be closed, because when it's closed he can have no motive to continue the storm. And then--"

He paused to marshal his thoughts, while rage pumped in every artery and an almost insane hatred maddened him.

"Then," he said harshly, "I want the biggest tanks in the United States Army to be sent up here as soon as the wind dies down a little. They'll have to travel under their own power, because the roads and railroads alike are useless. I want the big forty-ton ones. I want at least two gun-carrier tanks with six-inch guns and a supply of gas and high explosive shell. And I want some bombs."

He went on to list cables, more bombs, and airplane photo maps of all the Catskills.

Meanwhile the Storm increased in force. It had been unbelievable before. Now the wind reached an intensity hitherto unknown upon the earth.