Astounding Stories, June, 1931 Part 24

"They said they would wait!" His voice was a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "General Vornikoff himself gave me his promise!"

I was on my feet, then. "What matter?" I shouted. "What difference does it make--a few hours or a day? Your d.a.m.ned patriots, your dear brothers in arms--they are destroying us this instant! And not one of our men but is worth more than the whole beastly mob!"

I was wild with the picture that came so clear and plain before my eyes. I had my pistol in my hand; I was tempted to fire. It was his whisper that stopped me.

"They have crossed Ma.s.sachusetts! And Maida is there in Melford!"

There was no resisting his strength that tore my weapon from me. His tritonite pistol was pressed into my side, and his hand upon my collar threw me ahead of him toward a rear room, then out into a huge shed. I had only a quick glimpse of the airplane that was housed there. It was a white cylinder, and the stern that was toward me showed a funnel-shaped port.

I was thrown by that same furious strength through a door of the s.h.i.+p; I saw Paul Stravoinski seat himself before some curious controls. The s.h.i.+p that held me rose; moved slowly through an opened door; and with a screech from the stern it tore off and up into the air.

I have said Paul could fly; but the terrific flight of the screaming thing that held us seemed beyond the power of man to control. I was stunned with the thundering roar and the speed that held me down and back against a cabin wall.

How he found Melford, I cannot know; but he found it as a homing pigeon finds its loft. He checked our speed with a sickening swiftness that made my brain reel. There were red s.h.i.+ps above, but they let the white s.h.i.+p pa.s.s unchallenged. There were no Red soldiers on the ground--only the marks where they had pa.s.sed.

From the distance came a never-ceasing thunder of guns. The village was quiet. It still burned, blazing brightly in places, again smouldering sluggishly and sending into the still air smoke clouds whose fumes were a choking horror of burned flesh. There were bodies in grotesque scattering about the streets; some of them were black and charred.

Paul Stravoinski took me with him as he dashed for a house that the flames had not touched. And I was with him as he smashed at the door and broke into the room.

There was splintered furniture about. A cabinet, whose gla.s.s doors had been wantonly smashed, leaned crazily above its fallen books, now torn, scuffed and muddy upon the floor. Through a shattered window in the bed-room beyond came a puff of the acrid smoke from outside to strangle the breath in my throat. On the floor in a shadowed corner lay the body of a woman--a young woman as her clotted tangle of golden hair gave witness. She stirred and moaned half-consciously.... And the lined face of Paul Stravoinski was a terrible thing to see as he went stumblingly across the room to gather that body into his arms.

I had known Maida; I had seen their love begin in college days. I had known a laughing girl with suns.h.i.+ne in her hair, a girl whose soft eyes had grown so tenderly deep when they rested upon Paul--but this that he took in his arms, while a single dry sob tore harshly at his throat, this was never Maida!

There were red drops that struck upon his hands or fell sluggishly to the floor; the head and face had taken the blow of a clubbed rifle or a heavy boot. The eyes in that tortured face opened to rest upon Paul's, the lips were moving.

"I told them of you," I heard her whisper. "I told them that you would come--and they laughed." Unconsciously she tried to draw her torn clothing about her, an instinctive reaction to some dim realization of her nakedness. She was breathing feebly. "And now--oh, Paul!--Paul!--you--have come--too late!"

I hardly think Paul knew I was there or sensed that I followed where he carried in his arms the bruised body that had housed the spirit of Maida. He flew homeward like a demon, but he moved as one in a dream.

Only when I went with him into the room where he had worked, did he turn on me in sudden fury.

"Out!" he screamed. "Get out of my sight! It is you who have done this--your d.a.m.ned armies who would not do as I ordered! If you had not resisted, if you had--"

I broke in there.

"Did we do that?" I outshouted him, and I pointed to the torn body on a cot. His eyes followed my shaking hand. "No, it was your brothers--your dear comrades who are bringing the brotherhood of men into the world! Well, are you proud? Are you happy and satisfied--with what your brothers do with women?"

It must be a fearful thing to have one's dreams turn bitter and poisonous. Paul Stravoinski seemed about to spring upon me. He was crouched, and the muscles of his thin neck were like wire; his face was a ghastly thing, his eyes so staring bright, and the sensitive mouth twisting horribly. But he sprang at last not at me but toward the door, and without a word from his tortured lips he opened it and motioned me out.

Even there I heard echoes of distant guns and the heavier, thudding sounds that must be their aerial torpedoes. My feet were leaden as I strained every muscle to hurry toward my s.h.i.+p. Through my mind was running the threat of the Russian, Vornikoff: "We even tell you the date: in thirty days." And this was the thirtieth day--thirty days that a state of war had existed.

The battle was on; the radio had spoken truly. I saw its raging fires as I came up from our rear where the gray-like smoke clouds s.h.i.+vered in the unending blast. But I saw stabbing flames that struck upward from the ground to make a wall of sharp, fiery spears, and I knew that every darting flame was launching a projectile from our anti-aircraft guns.

The skies were filled with the red aircraft of the enemy, but their way was an avenue of h.e.l.l where thousands of sh.e.l.ls filled the air with their cras.h.i.+ng explosions. There were torpedoes, the unmanned airs.h.i.+ps whose cargo was death, and they were guided to their marks despite the inferno that raged about the red s.h.i.+ps above.

I saw meteors that fell, the red flames that enveloped them no redder than the bodies of the s.h.i.+ps. And, as I leaped from my plane that I had landed back of our lines, I sensed that the enemy was withdrawing.

There was a colonel of artillery--I had known him in days of peace--and he threw his arms around me and executed a crazy dance.

"We've beaten them back, Bob!" he shouted, and repeated it over and over in a delirium of joy.

I couldn't believe it; not those cruisers that I had seen over Paris.

Another brief moment showed my fears were all too rational.

A shrieking hailstorm of torpedoes preceded them; the s.h.i.+ps were directing them from afar. And, while some of the big sh.e.l.ls went wild and overshot our lines, there were plenty that found their mark.

I was smashed flat by a stunning concussion. Behind me the place where Colonel Hartwell had stood was a smoking crater; his battery of guns had been blasted from the earth. Up and down the whole line, far beyond the range of my sight, the eruption continued. The ground was a volcano of flame, as if the earth had opened to let through the interior fires, and the air was filled with a litter of torn bodies and sections of shattered guns.

No human force could stand up under such a bombardment. Like others about me, I gripped tight upon something within me that was my self-control, and I marveled that I yet lived while I waited for the end.

Beyond the smoke clouds was a hillside, swarming with figures in red; solid ma.s.ses of troops that came toward us. Above was the red fleet, pa.s.sing safely above our flame-blasted lines; there were bombs falling upon those batteries here and there whose fire was unsilenced. And then, from the south, came a roar that pierced even the bedlam about me. The sun shone brightly there where the smoke-clouds had not reached, and it glinted and sparkled from the wings of a myriad of our planes.

There was something that pulled tight at my throat; I know I tore at it with fumbling hands, as if that something were an actual band that had clamped down and choked me, while I stared at that true line of sharp-pointed V's. The air-force of the United States had been ordered in; and they were coming, coming--to an inevitable death!

I tried to tear my eyes away from that oncoming fleet, but I could not move. I saw their first contact with the enemy; so small, they were, in contrast with the big red cruisers. They attacked in formations; they drove down and in; and they circled and whirled before they fluttered to earth....

Dimly, through the stupor that numbed my brain, I heard men about me shouting with joy. I felt more than saw the fall of a monster red craft; it struck not far away. The voices were thanking G.o.d--for what?

Another red s.h.i.+p fell--and another; and through all the roaring inferno a sound was tearing--a ripping, terrible scream that went on and on. And above me, when I forced my eyes upward, was a flash of white.

It darted like a live thing among the red ones whose guns blazed madly--and the red s.h.i.+ps in clotted groups fell away and over and down as the white one pa.s.sed. They had been burst open where some power had blasted them, and their torn hulls showed gaping as they fell.

For a time the air was silent and empty above; the white, flas.h.i.+ng thing had pa.s.sed from sight, for the line of red s.h.i.+ps was long. Then again it returned, and it threw itself into the mad whirl in the south where the air-force of the American people was fighting its last fight.

I was screaming insanely as I saw it come back. The white s.h.i.+p!--the blast of vapor from its funneled stern--It was Paul!--Paul Stravoinski!--Paul the Dictator!--and he was fighting on our side!

His s.h.i.+p had been prepared; I had seen the machine-guns on her bow.

Paul was working them from within, and every bullet was tipped with the product of his brain--the deadly tritonite!

The white flash swung wide in a circle that took it far away. It came back above the advancing army of the Reds. It swerved once wildly, then settled again upon its course, and the raging h.e.l.l that the Reds had turned loose upon our lines was as nothing to the destruction that poured upon the Red troops from above.

A messenger of peace, that s.h.i.+p; I knew well why Paul had painted it white. And, instead of peace--!

He was flying a full mile from our lines, yet the torn earth and great boulders crashed among us even then. There were machine-guns firing ceaselessly from the under side of the s.h.i.+p. What charges of tritonite had the demented man placed in those sh.e.l.ls?

Below and behind it, as it flashed across our view, was a fearful, writhing ma.s.s where the earth itself rose up in unending, convulsive agony. A volcano of fire followed him, a fountain of earth that ripped and tore and stretched itself in a writhing, tortured line across the land as the white s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed.

No man who saw that and lived has found words to describe the progress of that monstrous serpent; the valley itself is there for men to see.