Chapter IV: Into the Desolation

When sunset came and the Storm died down temporarily, it had left its marks all over a circle of territory a full thousand miles in diameter. The damage done ranged from a mere blowing-down of signs at the edge of that circle, to the absolutely unparalleled devastation of the territory immediately about the storm-center.

In the center, of course, the damage was terrific. Forests, houses, hamlets, towns, all were leveled to the ground. Yet, there were survivors. Cellars protected some, as did valleys and hollows. Probably four or five thousand people lived through it.

The fifty-mile circle of the storm-center was devastated, but it was not destroyed. And beyond the storm-center, where the wind had not reached its ultimate velocity, the amount of damage was neatly proportioned to the distance from the focus of the storm.

But about the edge of that central area--the space Schaaf had spoken of as the chimney--there was a ringlike strip of utter desolation, five to fifteen miles wide.

Every particle of vegetation had been swept away by the sheer force of the wind. The fields were bare even of grass. In spots apparently even the topsoil had dried to dust and gone sweeping away into oblivion in the storm-wind. The forests were shattered areas of splintered stumps. The houses had left as traces only small mounds of masonry, or else no signs at all.

The storm died down at sunset and for half an hour there was almost peace. But the vast chimney of sun-heated air which shot upward for miles had acted as a vacuum, drawing to itself air from every direction with terrific speed. When the vacuum abruptly ceased to be, the winds continued to blow for a time from sheer momentum, and piled up a colossal high-pressure system which was as intolerable as the previous storm-center had been.

Over all the North Atlantic States, then, there was atmospheric chaos. Dense clouds formed at nightfall. Rain in unexampled volume fell, while electric storms wrought havoc. In the Catskill section mountain streams, choked with the débris of the wind's creation, became flooded with falling water and abruptly turned to inundations.

In that terrible strip of desolation about the storm-center itself, the bare, stripped earth turned to a vast morass of mud. And that morass claimed victims when survivors in the central area tried to cross it during the darkness and the rain.

* * * * *

At nine o'clock, rain was falling in sheets, in columns, almost in solid masses. Lurid, unbelievable bolts of lightning leaped from one horizon to the other.

There were no electric lights, of course, in two thousand square miles of New York State that night. Beneath monstrous clouds which poured floods upon the earth, there was only blackness, save at one spot. There, pencil-beams of light stabbed futilely at the falling rain, where twelve huge tanks rocked and lurched and slid on up toward the mountains.

They had stopped in their advance and picked up Hines. He sat up in the control-room of the largest of all of them, and asked dreary questions and dully gave instructions which organized the attack.

The tanks would go on up toward the site of the storm-center. They would gather, presently, and Hines would give instructions which would be final. Then they would scatter to their several strategic points.

With dawn, when the Storm That Had to be Stopped began again, they would use the instruments Schaaf had originally designed for determining the point of origin of certain other short waves. They would find Preston's station. It would probably be a dugout, underground, for safety from the storm he could create at will. The tanks would bomb that station mercilessly. Or if he had intrenched himself upon a mountain peak, the gun-carrying caterpillars would come into action. Six-inch guns would assail a solitary man who essayed to devastate the earth.

Only colossal things such as they were--weighing forty tons each--could hope to exist and move in the atmospheric turmoil that would begin with sunrise.

The tanks rumbled and lurched as they made their way in a sedate long line toward the hills. Rain poured in rivulets from their steel sides. Sheets and masses of falling water scattered the beams from the searchlights mounted upon them. From the control-room it was possible to see perhaps twenty feet with some clarity, and dimly for thirty feet more. But after that even the searchlight glare was dissipated by the rain.

Hines looked weary and worn and haggard. All day long he had been in communication with New York, giving orders which men leaped to obey.

The State had given him full authority. He had shown his ability. Besides, the scale, the scope of this disaster was one to induce panic. The leadership of Hines, who had twice defeated Preston, would restore some confidence in a public otherwise more than inclined to be panic-stricken.

* * * * *

These were army tanks, shipped on flat-cars as far as the rails were undamaged, drawn by a locomotive that had crept on and on, as far as it dared, while the Storm still blew in the daytime. They had come at full speed immediately darkness fell.

Now they went lurching and pounding up toward the hills. The clanking of their mighty treads was thunderous in their reverberating interiors. The roaring of their motors was deafening.

They were full of the smell of hot oil and exhaust-gases and fuel, but up in the control-room the lightning and thunder blotted out all sights and sounds, and the sheer desert of mud over which they traveled toward the hills made it impossible for any man who saw it to think of anything else.

Hines, alone, thought of Kathryn. The awful desolation over which the tanks traveled had been covered with farms and houses and forests only twelve hours before. People had lived here--people who now were torn and draggled corpses flung haphazard amid the other débris of the Storm.

Hines had been cooped up for twelve hours knowing his helplessness, knowing that Kathryn was either dead or desperately in need of help. Now, he was sure, she was dead. The desert of mud over which the tanks passed was enough to convince him of her death.

The radio had told them that over most of the United States the wind had reached gale intensity.

The weather bureau in Washington was working like mad to predict the unpredictable, but from the one day's storm alone weeks of chaotic weather could be foreseen.

Already meteorologists were speculating upon the effect of the Storm upon the climate of Europe. California, it was certain, would be visited by subsidiary hurricanes, and from Texas on north there would be cyclonic whirls of terrible intensity as the air of the earth moved to fill up the vacuum Preston could create at will.

What news there was of the loss of life was so monstrous as to have lost all meaning. The record of towns destroyed, of villages wiped out, became monotonous. From the standpoint of property destroyed the Storm was one of the major catastrophes of history; and if the death toll was lighter than certain plagues and earthquakes, it was only because the larger cities were fortunately far from the circles of highest wind-velocity.

* * * * *

The feel of slippery mud beneath the tanks' great treads changed subtly. The earth became curiously more solid. A great bowlder appeared not far from the leading tank's track, glistening and running with rain. The tank changed course to avoid it. Hines looked back. Despite the falling water, he could detect a long lane of white glows, which were the searchlights of the following tanks.

The tanks still went on. They were in what seemed to be a semi-solid mass of water, intermittently made into a greenish universe of light by lightning-flashes which were blurred by the rain to mere indefinite illumination. In the periods of darkness between those flashes, the searchlights gleamed brightly ahead. And water poured from the tanks in floods.

D bris appeared, water-soaked and shredded. The stumps of wind-whipped, obliterated Indian corn began suddenly to the left. The treads of the tanks clanked suddenly on concrete. There was a road beneath the leading tank.

A speaking-tube whistled in the leading tank.

"Headquarters," came up thinly to the control-room, "orders you to try to locate yourself by road signs or any other evidences of position."

The officer in command of the tank snorted and made no answer.

The tank went on. There was concrete under the left tread only. The tank wallowed around and climbed back on the road. It went rumbling blindly on in the rain. Presently bare concrete was visible. Mud had not washed across it here.

"There!" said Hines sharply. "A road-sign bent over by the wind! It's in place!"

An unearthly hooting set up. The tank stopped with a grinding noise. Hines peered out of the little vision-slits and saw a dripping man with a flash light bent over something by the side of the road. It was one of the cast-iron road signs one finds in the Catskills. They are set up on wrought-iron posts, which are fixed in concrete.

Originally the sturdiness of construction was made necessary by the vandal habits of a motoring populace, but it served a useful purpose now. Set facing the wind, the cast-iron plate had caught the full blast. And the wrought-iron shaft had bent slowly but definitely until the sign lay nearly flat, facing upward.

The dripping soldier came sprinting back into the tank. The speaking-tube whistled again,

"The sign says 'North Weddensdale Corporate Limits,' sir."

Hines clenched his hands. This was the village where Kathryn had been staying! He strained his eyes desperately through the rain.

A rectangular hole to the left of the concrete caught his eye. It was a cellar. The house had been taken cleanly away from above it. Nothing was left. Nothing.

"Go on," he said hoarsely.

The tank ground into motion again. Rain poured from its sides. Its searchlight ray stabbed into the darkness and was dissipated by falling water.

Then the searchlight ray went out.

* * * * *

Almost instantly thereafter the speaking-tube whistled. "All the tanks, sir, report their searchlights have gone out."

The officer commanding the leading tank swore to himself. "All right. Everybody stop and repair them."

Hines heard his voice speaking hoarsely:

"It's the Darkness. The metal walls of the tank act as shields, so we can see inside, but it's the Darkness--the same darkness Preston turned on in New York. If you send a man outside to make sure, keep up a noise so he can find his way back."

Hines went, himself, to the exit door of the tank. He heard two men moving about outside. The interior of the tank was brightly lighted, and the door was opened wide, but the light from inside did not strike upon the earth beneath the tank. It seemed to be absorbed by some solid black substance which surrounded the metal monster and stretched solidly almost with an inward bulge, across the open door.

Thunder shook the earth. There was a crashing and crackling of electricity. From the violence of the report, the lightning-flash must have struck somewhere near by. But there was no faintest flickering of light.

Then, in a peculiarly ghastly fashion, a groping hand came out of the solid wall of blackness across the tank's exit door. It seemed disembodied, detached from any body. It caught at the edge of the door. A man came, wild-eyed and staring, out of the apparently solid opacity. His teeth chattered as he swung into the illuminated tank.

"The--the flash light don't work," he gasped. "I held it up to my eyes and it just glowed, but it don't give any light. See?"

He pressed the button. A brilliant gleam shot from the flash light. His jaw dropped open. But Hines nodded his head very bitterly.

The Storm had been made by the broadcasting of very short Hertzian waves which caused the atmosphere to be opaque to heat; a mere variation of a device that Preston had used before. Now he had gone back to the use of his first device again.

Now, from somewhere within a thirty-mile radius, he was broadcasting short waves differing perhaps by the fraction of a millimeter in length from those that had produced the Storm. And these tiny ripples in the ether caused the absorption of all that band of frequencies which made visible light.

There was darkness outside the tanks so dense as to be tangible, so complete as to constitute utter blindness, so thick that it caused the perfect absorption of even the ten thousand candle-power searchlight beams within a distance of three feet.

* * * * *

Hines thought grimly, staring at the apparently solid wall of darkness without the door. The metal walls of the tanks, of course, absorbed and grounded the waves that impinged upon them. The darkness could not invade the tanks themselves. But it blinded the drivers beyond the possibility of a remedy.

The engines of the tank stopped suddenly. The officer in command swung down from the control-room, his lips twisted wryly.

"I reported to headquarters," he said briefly, "and received orders to stop my motors and wait for dawn. It is believed that the darkness will be lifted when the Storm is started up again."

Hines did not hear him. He was listening with his ears strained to their utmost. In the near-silence that came with the engine's stopping, the sound of the rain and thunder outside seemed to redouble. The rain was invisible, the lightning unseen, but there was a tumult without the tank that was terrifying. Yet in the midst of that tumult Hines thought he heard a faint cry.

It was repeated. Again, and again. And cold sweat came out upon Hines. He could not believe his ears, yet he dared not disbelieve them. Out there in a storm such as would have been called a tornado if the Storm itself had not given a new meaning to the word, he heard a voice which he could swear was that of Kathryn!

The storm itself was violent enough to make venturing into it madness--and he would have to go into it as a blind man.

The cry came once more. It was fainter, this time.