415
He saw beneath him a hand reaching toward a tube, and he kicked the instrument of death. It hurtled over in the direction of Stanton and landed close to his feet. Stanton might have picked it up and been in possession of the means of aiding his old friends or his new allies. But he shrunk away, panic-stricken, from the thing that lay so close to his reach.
A Lodorian leaped upon Dirk’s back in an effort to bring him to the ground, but he stooped swiftly forward and his assailant was catapulted over his head into those who were in front of him.
Hecaught a flash of the contorted face of Zitlan flying through the air, and saw him land with a crash on the terrace, and lie there writhing in pain.
“Steinholt, Lazarre!” he said convulsively. “We’ve got to strike once more! And then––run!”
He plunged into their enemies with every bit of energy that he had left, and saw two of them toppling down. Then, like a flash, he turned to Lazarre, who was trying to fight off three of the Lodorians. Seizing one of them by the waist, Dirk hurled him backward and he disposed of another one in the same manner. His sheer desperation seemed to have given him unbounded strength and power.
Lazarre sent his third opponent down with a blow under the chin and then, with Dirk at his side, they turned to the assistance of Steinholt.
With one mad rush they crashed into a group of Lodorians and sent them reeling away like so many nine-pins.
“Now! To the plane!” exclaimed Dirk, taking to his heels across the terrace. Steinholt and Lazarre followed after him and, turning the corner, they saw that the ship was in place and that Fragoni was anxiously waiting by the door of the cabin. Inga, Dirk knew, already was inside and safe. He stood aside while Steinholt and Lazarre leaped in. During the momentary wait he caught a glimpse of the great clock. It was one minute to four. Dirk jumping into the plane and switched on the helicopter without even waiting to close the cabin door.
Theship shot skyward like a rocket. When it reached an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet, he turned it north and raced at top speed in that direction.
It was miles away from the palace of Fragoni in less than thirty seconds. Dirk then stopped the plane and held it poised in the air with the helicopter.
The skies were turgid and black and the massed clouds, reflecting the lights of the great city below them, were permeated with an ugly, feverish, red glow.
From where they were hanging in midair, the occupants of the plane could plainly see the sparkling palace of Fragoni towering high up into the darkness of the night.
The lights of the magnificent mansion were reflected far out into the Sound where, looming in the golden ripples, lay the sinister monster from the terrible depths of unfathomable space.
Dirk took a watch from his pocket and, after glancing at it, he hastily replaced it.
“Two seconds more,” he said, “and––”
A sharpand dazzling bolt of greenish fire came hurling suddenly out of the west and, with a thunderous concussion, seemed to fasten itself on the crest of Fragoni’s palace.
It trembled and quivered, as if endowed with some uncanny life and power, as it remained there against the darkness, throwing a weird, green tinge over the water and up into the skies.
Blue waves of light could be seen pulsing and racing along the terrible beam and there, where it had fastened itself, they seemed to disappear in the vast and crumbling structure.
For four seconds that destructive416streak of light, one end of which was lost back in the mists that concealed Manhattan, tore at the proud pile.
And, as the stone crumbled and the steelite fused under the mighty assault, an ominous roar swept through the night. The air was so violently agitated that the plane, miles away, tossed up and down like a tiny boat on a stormy sea.
Then suddenly the bolt was gone, but its livid image still burned in the eyes of those who had been watching it.
Once more, it came hurling out of the west and, like the fang of some great and deadly serpent, darted into the monster that lay in the waters of the Sound.
Dirk and his companions could see plainly, by the light of the bolt itself, that it had crashed into the well from which the Lodorians first had appeared, and that it was beating and hammering its way into the very vitals of the craft.
Dazzling, blinding fire seemed to pour from the aperture through which the bolt had passed. The clamor that arose was deafening.
Then again the streak of fires was withdrawn, leaving the night intensely black until, in a moment more, it came thundering out of the west again and, with an impact that made the land and the sea and the very heavens tremble, hurled its way into the depths of the doomed leviathan.
Twice again it fell, a fiery scimitar out of the darkness, and twice again it careened at the vitals of the stricken monster.
Then, after the assault was over, the ship still floated on the surface of the Sound and its shell, as far as Dirk and the others could judge, still was unscathed.
“We will soon know our fate,” remarked Steinholt calmly. “If that didn’t kill those beasts we might as well give up our ghosts.”
“I’ll drop the plane a little lower and a little nearer to the ship,” said Dirk. “I don’t believe that any life is surviving in that thing.”
“My beautiful palace is nothing but dust,” sighed Fragoni, mournfully. “And all my beautiful treasures, too.”
“And that beautiful Zitlan,” Lazarre reminded him, “and his beautiful boy friends, they are all dust too, thank God!”
“It was a queer fate that Stanton met,” suggested Dirk. “He thought that he would save his life by going over to our enemies, and, instead of that, he lost it.”
“PoorStanton,” said Steinholt. “He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now,” continued the Teuton, “I hope that we didn’t do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves.”
“Have you any theory regarding it?” asked Fragoni.
“Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe,” replied Steinholt. “We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won’t be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel.”
“Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn’t been for that artificial lightning,” said Lazarre. “That’s powerful stuff, Steinholt.”
“Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from,” agreed Steinholt, “we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn’t left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn’t have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the ship.”
Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile417of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.
“It seems to me,” he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, “that it is moving in the water. It is!” he exclaimed. “Steinholt! Look!”
Onlya comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness.
“It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it,” asserted Steinholt. “You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one.”
“It is rising, I tell you!” said Dirk. “The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!”
“You’re right, Dirk,” said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice. “Look! It just dropped back into the water!”
Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea.
Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it.
“It’s gone!” gasped Fragoni. “Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!”
“No,” remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into space with the ship in that condition.”
“Then what made it go up?” demanded Lazarre. “Can the damn thing run itself, Steinholt?”
“I imagine,” recalled the Teuton, “that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah,” he moaned, “but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air.”
A cryfrom Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes.
They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire.
“It’s that thing!” exclaimed Fragoni. “I tell you that those upon it still live and that they are about to wreak vengeance upon us.”
“No,” said Steinholt positively. “You are wrong, Fragoni. What is happening may be almost as disastrous, though,” he admitted. “That leviathan is in its death agonies; it is a metal monster gone mad, and none can say what will happen before it expires.”
“The place for us,” asserted Dirk hurriedly, “is in the Worldwide Tower.Therewe can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do.”
The others agreed with him and, seeking the westward level of flight, he sped the plane in the direction of the mammoth pyramid from which the news of the world was broadcast.
They reached the vast structure in a few minutes, and, after dropping the plane on a landing stage, they went into the operating room.
Here they learned quickly that the craft of the Lodorians was doing incalculable damage, and that it was throwing the population of the world into an unprecedented panic.
It was, apparently, following an erratic, uncertain orbit that took it far out into space and then back quite close to the surface of the earth again.
Ithad passed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide through the buildings of that metropolis.
Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of itsirresistibleand molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of people had been slain by it.
418
Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing, projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the night.
For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned throughout the cities of the whole civilized world.
But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route for San Francisco.
“Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense and clouds of steam are rising from the sea.”
As the minutes passed by after the report from the rocket-ship had been received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from space seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean. This was accepted as a certainty by eight o’clock in the morning.
“Ah,” sighed Steinholt, “if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If there only was enough of it left for us to––”
“Enough of any damn contraption of that kind,” swore Lazarre fervently, “is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are scattered so far that we never can put them together again.”
Dirkand Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan.
Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in the morning.
After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its ruins.
Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible to fish for the remains of the lost ship of Lodore.
“It seems like a dream, doesn’t it, Dirk?” the girl remarked. “It is difficult to believe that we actually have seen and talked with people from some far-away world.”
Together they looked up into the crystalline skies, where mazes of shining stars gave testimony to the countless worlds which were wheeling around them.
“And just to think, Dirk,” Inga continued proudly, “that it was you who saved this world and all of its people from that horrible Zitlan and his horde.”
“I saved you,” he told her gravely and tenderly, “and that somehow means more to me than saving all of this world and all of the other worlds which are rolling through the uncharted ways of time and space.”
COMING––Murder MadnessAn Extraordinary NovelByMURRAY LEINSTER
COMING––Murder MadnessAn Extraordinary NovelByMURRAY LEINSTER
Transcriber NotesTypographical inconsistencies have been changed and are listed below.Hyphenation standardized.Archaic and variable spelling is preserved.Authors’ punctuation style is preserved.Transcriber ChangesThe following changes were made to the original text:Page 298: Changedworktowreck(wish to know whether anyone has visited the scene of thewreck)Page 299: Changedfocussedtofocused(This means that we havefocusedor concentrated cold)Page 317: Added beginning quotes (Its name-grid glowed with the letters:“Anita Prince.”)Page 321: Changedeavesdrooppertoeavesdropper(sitting in the smoking room when theeavesdropperfled past)Page 321: Changedpressure-cicktopressure-sick(We missed you at breakfast. Notpressure-sick, I hope?)Page 323: Changedlinquiststolinguists(people are by heritage extraordinarylinguists)Page 324: Added end quote (Did you have Prince’s cabinsearched?”)Page 328: Changedelipsetoellipse(Blackstone had roughly cast its orbital elements)Page 339: Changedfocussedtofocused(connected its little battery;focusedits projector)Page 339: Changedsyncronizedtosynchronized(as I crouched in the darkness behind the cylinder-case, Isynchronized)Page 340: Removed extra quote after leaped (Miko doubtless saw it, and the Martian’s hot angerleaped)Page 344: ChangedMikatoMiko(“Wait a minute!” I called toMiko. “Navigate––where?”)Page 344: Changedcatapaultedtocatapulted(The forcecatapultedme across the space of the room like a volplane)Page 345: ChangedHaliantoHaljan(“If you fire,Haljan, and kill me––Miko will kill you then, surely.”)Page 346: Changedfocussedtofocused(the image of the lounge interior presentlyfocused)Page 357: Changedterriffictoterrific(Perry beat aterrifictattoo on the ancient door)Page 362: Removed comma (for the news crew and editorial force of thepaperwere a carefully selected body of men indeed)Page 367: Changedvilliantovillain(Could the oldvillainbe playing possum?)Page 367: Removed ’the’ (With dexteroushands O’Haraswiftly went through the old man’s pockets)Page 367: Changedsimiliartosimilar(an ugly looking pistol of large caliber, a blackjacksimilarto his own and a small bottle)Page 369: Changedandtoany(If you search my car and findanyred liquor in the left back door pocket, I don’t know a thing about it)Page 372: ChangedHanlontoHandlon(could be recognized as those of Horace Perry and SkipHandlon)Page 372: Changedfocussedtofocused(All eyes were nowfocusedon Professor Kell)Page 373: ChangedKeltoKell(Hurry up and getKelldownstairs so we can see who he is)Page 374: ChangedRottontoRotten(“Rotten,” was the reply from the lips of Kell)Page 393: Changedecstacytoecstasy(Fear, despair, reckless abandon, mirth, doubt, religiousecstasyand all the other nuances in the gamut of human emotions)Page 394: Changedscandalstosandals(On her tiny feet she woresandalswhich were spun of webby filaments)Page 395: Changedknewtoknow(fairly close to it in my plane and Iknowwhat I am speaking about)Page 397: ChangedIgnatoInga(Dirk andIngaseated close together and Stanton, at a distance)Page 397: Changedparttoparts(a proclamation of martial law, to become effective at once in allpartsof the world)Page 399: Changedmelifluoustomellifluous(“Good morning,” the other replied in a soft andmellifluousvoice)Page 401: ChangedSteinholdtoSteinholt(“It’s colossal!”Steinholtthen exclaimed, lost in scientific admiration)Page 412: Changedfulgeranttofulgurant(High up into the heavens it tossed thefulgurantfires that betokened its wealth and power)Page 412: Changedheadtohand(with one of the deadly ray-tubes of the Lodorians in hishand)Page 413: ChangedLizarretoLazarre(walked over to where Fragoni andLazarrewere being guarded by two of the conquerors)Page 413: ChangedIgnatoInga(“AndInga?” questioned Dirk.)Page 414: Changedstacattotostaccato(flailing back and forth between each one of hisstaccatocommands.)Page 417: Removed extra quote beforeThere(“is in the Worldwide Tower.Therewe can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do.”)Page 417: Changedirresisibletoirresistible(Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of itsirresistibleand molten heat)
Transcriber Notes
Typographical inconsistencies have been changed and are listed below.
Hyphenation standardized.
Archaic and variable spelling is preserved.
Authors’ punctuation style is preserved.
Transcriber Changes
The following changes were made to the original text:
Page 298: Changedworktowreck(wish to know whether anyone has visited the scene of thewreck)
Page 299: Changedfocussedtofocused(This means that we havefocusedor concentrated cold)
Page 317: Added beginning quotes (Its name-grid glowed with the letters:“Anita Prince.”)
Page 321: Changedeavesdrooppertoeavesdropper(sitting in the smoking room when theeavesdropperfled past)
Page 321: Changedpressure-cicktopressure-sick(We missed you at breakfast. Notpressure-sick, I hope?)
Page 323: Changedlinquiststolinguists(people are by heritage extraordinarylinguists)
Page 324: Added end quote (Did you have Prince’s cabinsearched?”)
Page 328: Changedelipsetoellipse(Blackstone had roughly cast its orbital elements)
Page 339: Changedfocussedtofocused(connected its little battery;focusedits projector)
Page 339: Changedsyncronizedtosynchronized(as I crouched in the darkness behind the cylinder-case, Isynchronized)
Page 340: Removed extra quote after leaped (Miko doubtless saw it, and the Martian’s hot angerleaped)
Page 344: ChangedMikatoMiko(“Wait a minute!” I called toMiko. “Navigate––where?”)
Page 344: Changedcatapaultedtocatapulted(The forcecatapultedme across the space of the room like a volplane)
Page 345: ChangedHaliantoHaljan(“If you fire,Haljan, and kill me––Miko will kill you then, surely.”)
Page 346: Changedfocussedtofocused(the image of the lounge interior presentlyfocused)
Page 357: Changedterriffictoterrific(Perry beat aterrifictattoo on the ancient door)
Page 362: Removed comma (for the news crew and editorial force of thepaperwere a carefully selected body of men indeed)
Page 367: Changedvilliantovillain(Could the oldvillainbe playing possum?)
Page 367: Removed ’the’ (With dexteroushands O’Haraswiftly went through the old man’s pockets)
Page 367: Changedsimiliartosimilar(an ugly looking pistol of large caliber, a blackjacksimilarto his own and a small bottle)
Page 369: Changedandtoany(If you search my car and findanyred liquor in the left back door pocket, I don’t know a thing about it)
Page 372: ChangedHanlontoHandlon(could be recognized as those of Horace Perry and SkipHandlon)
Page 372: Changedfocussedtofocused(All eyes were nowfocusedon Professor Kell)
Page 373: ChangedKeltoKell(Hurry up and getKelldownstairs so we can see who he is)
Page 374: ChangedRottontoRotten(“Rotten,” was the reply from the lips of Kell)
Page 393: Changedecstacytoecstasy(Fear, despair, reckless abandon, mirth, doubt, religiousecstasyand all the other nuances in the gamut of human emotions)
Page 394: Changedscandalstosandals(On her tiny feet she woresandalswhich were spun of webby filaments)
Page 395: Changedknewtoknow(fairly close to it in my plane and Iknowwhat I am speaking about)
Page 397: ChangedIgnatoInga(Dirk andIngaseated close together and Stanton, at a distance)
Page 397: Changedparttoparts(a proclamation of martial law, to become effective at once in allpartsof the world)
Page 399: Changedmelifluoustomellifluous(“Good morning,” the other replied in a soft andmellifluousvoice)
Page 401: ChangedSteinholdtoSteinholt(“It’s colossal!”Steinholtthen exclaimed, lost in scientific admiration)
Page 412: Changedfulgeranttofulgurant(High up into the heavens it tossed thefulgurantfires that betokened its wealth and power)
Page 412: Changedheadtohand(with one of the deadly ray-tubes of the Lodorians in hishand)
Page 413: ChangedLizarretoLazarre(walked over to where Fragoni andLazarrewere being guarded by two of the conquerors)
Page 413: ChangedIgnatoInga(“AndInga?” questioned Dirk.)
Page 414: Changedstacattotostaccato(flailing back and forth between each one of hisstaccatocommands.)
Page 417: Removed extra quote beforeThere(“is in the Worldwide Tower.Therewe can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do.”)
Page 417: Changedirresisibletoirresistible(Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of itsirresistibleand molten heat)