Chapter V: Tricked

Two members of the crew of the tank volunteered to go with him. They went out as Alpine climbers travel, tied together with a long strand of wire that paid out behind them. It would insure that they returned to the tank, or would lead them to any of their number who was injured.

Hines went first, groping over unfamiliar ground, unable to guess where his next step would bring him. He had broken out the glass of a pocket compass proffered by one of the tank's company and steered by the feel of its needle, with the tank hooting dismally behind him at regular intervals for his better orientation.

He went on into the blackness which seemed almost familiar. His flash light bulb glowed dimly when three inches from his eyes. Farther away, its light was absorbed by the opaque air, and he seemed to swim through it as a diver might swim through a sea of ink.

A fall into a ditch crammed with débris corrected the sensation of swimming, however, and he blundered on and gashed his leg against the splintered stump of a tree whose knife-edged fragments were in nowise softened by the rain.

Rain pelted downward through the darkness. It poured from him in streams. He had to bend almost double to protect his open compass from the falling water while he felt of the needle.

The tank hooted behind him. He went on. The wire attached to his waist dragged. It jerked, and he halted to allow the following man to move forward and give him slack. He shouted, and the beginning of his shout was loud, and the end of it was drowned out by thunder. He listened, and heard only the terrible drumming of miles of rain.

Then a cry in answer. He shouted again, and plunged forward and stumbled ten feet on and gashed his forehead horribly, and went on again with warm blood mingling with the rain that beat down on his face. Suddenly he was sprawling on hands and knees on a monstrous heap of broken bricks and field-stone.

A cry came up almost below him. He cursed the darkness then, and called once more; and Kathryn sobbed.

"I--I'm all right, only some brick-work fell on me and I can't get up," she said unsteadily a moment later.

"I'm coming down to you," said Hines hoarsely.

"Be careful! There's an open space just above me, where the floor broke in, but there's loose rock there. You may fall."

Hines gritted his teeth and fumbled here and there with infinite caution. Loose rock above a hole over Kathryn's head meant not so much danger to him as to her.

He tore his hand on splintered planks. A figure came blundering nearby. He heard it gasping, but he saw nothing, anywhere.

"Fasy!" snapped Hines. "We're here! Stand still!"

Kathryn said steadily from below:

"You're nearly above me. I think you're at the edge of the hole in the flooring."

He found it, and called quietly to the other man.

"Our belts," he said briefly. "We'll put 'em together and you lower me. Then you can haul her up, and after her, me."

He went down, dangling in the blackness with no more knowledge of his whereabouts than a blind man would have had. He landed in a foot and a half of water.

"Here," said Kathryn unsteadily. "B-but be careful of the m-masonry."

* * * * *

He stumbled against her shoulder before he realized that she was trapped near the floor. The cellar was filling with the drainage of the rain. Hines was two men then, for an instant. One felt coolly until he had located the mass of brick and mortar that pinned her down, and had envisioned its position and its size. The other man was sick with horror at the thought of the death that had awaited her as the cellar slowly filled with water.

He had more than two men's strength as he wrenched at the mass of stone, though. It fell with a turgid splashing that was louder than the drumming of the rain and the constant splashing of water that came down into the stone-lined depression.

He lifted her and held her close, there in the unbelievable blackness. He sent her up, by the linked belts. And he carried her himself, the long, stumbling, rather terrible way back to the hooting tank, which slowly hauled in the wire as he advanced. The other men blundered on ahead of him to take any falls there might be while he carried Kathryn.

Her arm was broken, and she was badly bruised, but that was all. Hines set the arm himself, while she smiled at him gamely in the smelly, machinery-crowded war-engine.

Then Hines turned to the commander of the tank with a new and more savage grimness. He had gained a new motive from Kathryn's injury. Oddly enough, he had felt defeated in advance while he believed her dead, but a new and throbbing rage swept over him because of her injury, a fiercer passion than the hopeless hatred her death would have caused.

"Look here," he said savagely. "You've had orders to take directions from me. Preston's turned on the dark, outside. He thinks we're helpless. You radio headquarters and tell them I order you to go on. I take all responsibility."

The officer grinned.

The ordnance department maps of the Catskills leave some things to be desired, to be sure. There are errors, in spots, and they are not wholly up to date. But every road and bridle-path and every grade and hollow is shown upon them.

With a concrete road under their treads and the North Weddensdale corporate limits sign for a position-sign, the tanks could very nearly go to any spot in all the mountains, blinded though they were.

Men had walked about each of the tanks, with flash lights held close to their eyes. They discovered that for a short distance beyond the tank, in the direction away from the sending-station of the waves of darkness, there was a lee, a "shadow"--a relatively small and cone-shaped shielded area, in which the air was protected from the Hertzian waves that made it opaque to light. In those shielded areas lights could be seen. And those small spaces of transparent air gave a bearing--rough, to be sure, but still a bearing--on the station that was sending the short waves.

* * * * *

The darkness was being transmitted from a spot nearly north-northeast of the steel monsters. A man swung up in top of each one with a flash light and a hammer. He worked himself around the central turret until he had the turret between himself and Preston's transmitter of darkness. His flash light gave him proof of his direction. He rapped on the turret-plates. One rap for each division of the compass to the east of north, and two for each division to the left, was the agreed signal. He would transmit the bearing of the source of darkness whenever the turret was pounded on from within.

"One more thing," said Hines crisply. "Arrange with the other tanks to navigate by whistle-signals instead of radio. Preston will be listening in, you can be sure."

Then through the sound of thunder and of rain, there came the multitudinous hoots of many whistles. There was a whirring and the roaring of engines. Then with a monstrous grinding, the tank set off.

Hines and the tank-officer bent over the map of this locality. Kathryn looked on, though her eyes rested most often upon the haggard, draggled figure that was Hines.

"The road curves here," said Hines quietly. "That will place us definitely."

The officer laid his finger on a certain spot.

"A bridge," he observed, "all of sixty feet high in the middle. We'll be crossing it--blind. And it may be blown out."

Hines shrugged. The tank rumbled on, and on.... Its whistle hooted, and was answered from behind. Then a long line of blind monsters hooted one after the other as they swam through obscurity as black as the blackest ink.

Concrete under the treads. They were steering the monster by compass, now, and the sound of the treads.

Quite suddenly, the tank wallowed off the concrete. It lurched, careened, swung about and then found the way again.

"That's the curve," said the officer. "We're located all right."

From this time on the navigation of the monster vehicle was confident and crisp. A modern tank records its course and distance so accurately that even in the densest fog it can retrace its way for miles without a landmark.

From the map a forecast of the course to be followed was being made and the tank lumbered on through oblivion. Utter darkness filled the world without its steel walls, save where one man sat in a terrific downpour in a triangular small space of transparent air, and watched a dripping compass by the light of a flash light.

From time to time he pounded savagely on the steel deck with a hammer, signaling to those within. From time to time, too, there were vast hooting noises, feet only from his head, and there were other dismal hootings behind him in the utter blackness.

* * * * *

The feel of the concrete underneath changed subtly. The forty-ton weight of the tank was making the huge bridge sway slightly. The tank's whistle howled, in a succession of long and short blasts.

"They'll wait until we're across the bridge," said the officer shortly. "One at a time is load enough."

The leading tank ground on. The bridge quivered and shook. Presently the earth was solid under it again. It halted and seemed to bellow into the surrounding bedlam of rain and wind and thunder. An answering hoot came faintly. There was stillness, and presently the earth-quivering that told of the near approach of another monster. More hootings of whistles. Another great tank, and another.

The fifth tank was on its way across the narrow causeway which the map said spanned a ravine some sixty feet above the mountain stream. Suddenly, there was a wild screaming of its whistle, a terrific crash, and then a deafening detonation. The waiting tanks trembled from the concussion that ensued.

"It fell off the bridge," said the officer of the tank in which Hines rode. He spoke very calmly. "I suppose the rest of us weakened the bridge in passing over it. Maybe the Storm helped, too. It gave way and the bombs went off when the tank crashed."

He looked at Hines.

"We'll go on with those that are here with us," said Hines grimly. "Signal the rest to hunt for shelter from to-morrow's wind."

The hooting, dismal cavalcade of four tanks began again to fumble its way along the narrow ribbon of concrete that wound among the mountains. Twice the treads crunched shrieking metal beneath them. Cars, wrecked and, it was to be hoped, abandoned. Half a dozen times, in one relatively sheltered valley, the leading tank crushed a way through splintered masses of limbs and foliage that were heaped up in monster windrifts.

The half-drowned men out in the flood of rain pounded regularly their signals of the source of the waves of darkness. The tanks had gone five miles in all in a little over an hour, when the poundings on the outside became frantic. A new signal of direction came through. Hines said shortly:

"Stop the whole line. Check with all of them."

The tanks had been boring their way through the blackness by map. The darkness-producing ether-waves demonstrably had been coming from the north-northeast. Now, abruptly, they were proved to be coming from a little south of west.

Hines studied the map and the line that had been drawn to indicate the tank's ultimate destination. The sending-station was no longer there. It had changed position.

"Either," said Hines harshly, "Preston's moved his sending-apparatus, or he has two or more of them. He turns one off and another one on. We haven't a burglar's chance of locating them if they turn off as we draw near them."

They were playing a deadly game of blind-man's-buff with Preston. Now Preston showed an unexpected resource. He had more than one outfit for producing darkness. When the tanks drew near one, that ceased to operate and another took up its task.

It seemed as if Preston had Hines beaten.