A human man fires upon a metal man.He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool’s handle just as Arlok came through the doorBy Hal K. WellsA strange man of metal comes to Earth on a dreadful mission.Hesat in a small half-darkened booth well over in the corner—the man with the strangely glowing blue-green eyes.The booth was one of a score that circled the walls of the “Maori Hut,” a popular night club in the San Fernando Valley some five miles over the hills from Hollywood.It was nearly midnight. Half a dozen couples danced lazily in the central dancing space. Other couples remained tête-à-tête in the secluded booths.In the entire room only two menwere dining alone. One was the slender gray-haired little man with the weirdly glowing eyes. The other was Blair Gordon, a highly successful young attorney of Los Angeles. Both men had the unmistakable air of waiting for someone.Blair Gordon’s college days were not so far distant that he had yet lost any of the splendid physique that had made him an All-American tackle. In any physical combat with the slight gray-haired stranger, Gordon knew that he should be able to break the other in two with one hand.Yet, as he studied the stranger from behind the potted palms that screened his own booth. Gordon was amazed to find himself slowly being overcome by an emotion of dread so intense that it verged upon sheer fear. There was something indescribably alien and utterly sinister in that dimly seen figure in the corner booth.The faint eery light that glowed in the stranger’s deep-set eyes was not the lambent flame seen in the chatoyant orbs of some night-prowling jungle beast. Rather was it the blue-green glow of phosphorescent witch-light that flickers and dances in the night mists above steaming tropical swamps.The stranger’s face was as classically perfect in its rugged outline as that of a Roman war-god, yet those perfect features seemed utterly lifeless. In the twenty minutes that he had been intently watching the stranger, Gordon would have sworn that the other’s face had not moved by so much as the twitch of an eye-lash.Thena new couple entered the Maori Hut, and Gordon promptly forgot all thought of the puzzlingly alien figure in the corner. The new arrivals were a vibrantly beautiful blond girl and a plump, sallow-faced man in the early forties. The girl was Leah Keith, Hollywood’s latest screen sensation. The man was Dave Redding, her director.A waiter seated Leah and her escort in a booth directly across the room from that of Gordon. It was a maneuver for which Gordon had tipped lavishly when he first came to the Hut.A week ago Leah Keith’s engagement to Blair Gordon had been abruptly ended by a trivial little quarrel that two volatile temperaments had fanned into flames which apparently made reconciliation impossible. A miserably lonely week had finally ended in Gordon’s present trip to the Maori Hut. He knew that Leah often came there, and he had an overwhelming longing to at least see her again, even though his pride forced him to remain unseen.Now, as he stared glumly at Leah through the palms that effectively screened his own booth, Gordon heartily regretted that he had ever come. The sight of Leah’s clear fresh beauty merely made him realize what a fool he had been to let that ridiculous little quarrel come between them.Then, with a sudden tingling thrill, Gordon realized that he was not the only one in the room who was interested in Leah and her escort.Over in the half-darkened corner booth the eery stranger was staring at the girl with an intentness that made his weird eyes glow like miniature pools of shimmering blue-green fire. Again Gordon felt that vague impression of dread, as though he were in the presence of something utterly alien to all human experience.Gordonturned his gaze back to Leah, then caught his breath sharply in sudden amaze. The necklace about Leah’s throat was beginning to glow with the same uncanny blue-green light that shone in the stranger’s eyes! Faint, yet unmistakable, the shimmering radiance pulsed from the necklace in an aura of nameless evil.And with the coming of that aura of weird light at her throat, a strange trance was swiftly sweeping over Leah. She sat there now as rigidly motionless as some exquisite statue of ivory and jet.Gordon stared at her in stark bewilderment. He knew the history of Leah’s necklace. It was merely an oddity, and nothing more—a freak piece of costume jewelry made from fragments of an Arizona meteorite. Leah had worn the necklace a dozen times before, without any trace of the weird phenomena that were now occurring.Dancers again thronged the floor to the blaring jazz of the negro orchestra while Gordon was still trying to force his whirling brain to a decision. He was certain that Leah was in deadly peril of some kind, yet the nature of that peril was too bizarre for his mind to imagine.Then the stranger with the glowing eyes took matters into his own hands. He left his booth and began threading his way through the dancers toward Leah. As he watched the progress of that slight gray-haired figure Gordon refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes. The thing was too utterly absurd—yet Gordon was positive that the strong oak floor of the dancing space was visibly swaying and creaking beneath the stranger’s mincing tread!Thestranger paused at Leah’s booth only long enough to utter a brief low-voiced command. Then Leah, still in the grip of that strange trance, rose obediently from her seat to accompany him.Dave Redding rose angrily to intercept her. The stranger seemed to barely brush the irate director with his finger tips, yet Redding reeled back as though struck by a pile-driver. Leah and the stranger started for the door. Redding scrambled to his feet again and hurried after them.It was then that Gordon finally shook off the stupor of utter bewilderment that had held him. Springing from his booth, he rushed after the trio.The dancers in his way delayed Gordon momentarily. Leah and the stranger were already gone when he reached the door. The narrow little entrance hallway to the Hut was deserted save for a figure sprawled there on the floor near the outer door.It was the body of Dave Redding. Gordon shuddered as he glanced briefly down at the huddled figure. A single mighty blow from some unknown weapon had crumpled the director’s entire face in, like the shattered shell of a broken egg.Gordoncharged on through the outer door just as a heavy sedan came careening out of the parking lot. He had a flashing glimpse of Leah and the stranger in the front seat of the big car.Gordon raced for his own machine, a powerful low-slung roadster. A single vicious jab at the starting button, and the big motor leaped into roaring life. Gordon shot out from the parking lot onto the main boulevard. A hundred yards away the sedan was fleeing toward Hollywood.Gordon tramped hard on the accelerator. His engine snarled with the unleashed fury of a hundred horsepower. The gap between the two cars swiftly lessened.Then the stranger seemed to become aware for the first time that he was being followed. The next second the big sedan accelerated with the hurtling speed of a flying bullet. Gordon sent his own foot nearly to the floor. The roadster jumped to eighty miles an hour, yet the sedan continued to leave it remorselessly behind.The two cars started up the northern slope of Cahuenga Pass with the sedan nearly two hundred yards ahead, and gaining all the time. Gordon wondered briefly if they were to flash down the other side of the Pass and on into Hollywood at their present mad speed.Then at the summit of the Pass the sedan swerved abruptly to the right and fled west along the Mulholland Highway. Gordon’s tires screamed as he swerved the roadster in hot pursuit.Thedark winding mountain highway was nearly deserted at that hour of the night. Save for an occasional automobile that swerved frantically to the side of the road to dodge the roaring onslaught of the racing cars, Gordon and the stranger had the road to themselves.The stranger seemed no longer to be trying to leave his pursuer hopelessly behind. He allowed Gordon to come within a hundred yards of him. But that was as near as Gordon could get, is spite of the roadster’s best efforts.Half a dozen times Gordon trod savagely upon his accelerator in a desperate attempt to close the gap, but each time the sedan fled with the swift grace of a scudding phantom. Finally Gordon had to content himself with merely keeping his distance behind the glowing red tail-light of the car ahead.They passed Laurel Canyon, and still the big sedan bored on to the west. Then finally, half a dozen miles beyond Laurel Canyon, the stranger abruptly left the main highway and started up a narrow private road to the crest of one of the lonely hills. Gordon slowly gained in the next two miles. When the road ended in a winding gravelled driveway into the grounds of what was apparently a private estate, the roadster was scarcely a dozen yards behind.The stranger’s features as he stood there stiffly erect in the vivid glare of the roadster’s headlights were still as devoid of all expression as ever. The only things that really seemed alive in that masque of a face were the two eyes, glowing eery blue-green fire like twin entities of alien evil.Gordon wasted no time in verbal sparring. He motioned briefly to Leah Keith’s rigid form in the front seat of the sedan.“Miss Keith is returning to Hollywood with me,” he said curtly. “Will you let her go peaceably, or shall I—?” He left the question unfinished, but its threat was obvious.“Or shall you do what?” asked the stranger quietly. There was an oddly metallic ring in his low even tones. His words were so precisely clipped that they suggested some origin more mechanical than human.“Or shall I take Miss Keith with me by force?” Gordon flared angrily.“You can try to take the lady by force—if you wish.” There was an unmistakable jeering note in the metallic tones.The taunt was the last thing needed to unleash Gordon’s volatile temper. He stepped forward and swung a hard left hook for that expressionless masque of a face. But the blow never landed. The stranger dodged with uncanny swiftness. His answering gesture seemed merely the gentlest possible push with an outstretched hand, yet Gordon was sent reeling backward a full dozen steps by the terrific force of that apparently gentle blow.Recoveringhimself, Gordon grimly returned to the attack. The stranger again flung out one hand in the contemptuous gesture with which one would brush away a troublesome fly, but this time Gordon was more cautious. He neatly dodged the stranger’s blow, then swung a vicious right squarely for his adversary’s unprotected jaw.The blow smashed solidly home with all of Gordon’s weight behind it. The stranger’s jaw buckled and gave beneath that shattering impact. Then abruptly his entire face crumpled into distorted ruin. Gordon staggered back a step in sheer horror at the gruesome result of his blow.The stranger flung a hand up to his shattered features. When his hand came away again, his whole face came away with it!Gordon had one horror-stricken glimpse of a featureless blob of rubbery bluish-gray flesh in which fiendish eyes of blue-green fire blazed in malignant fury.Then the stranger fumbled at his collar, ripping the linen swiftly away.Something lashed out from beneath his throat—a loathsome snake-like object, slender and forked at the end. For one ghastly moment, as the writhing tentacle swung into line with him, Gordon saw its forked ends glow strange fire—one a vivid blue, the other a sparkling green.Then the world was abruptly blotted out for Blair Gordon.Consciousnessreturned to Gordon as swiftly and painlessly as it had left him. For a moment he blinked stupidly in a dazed effort to comprehend the incredible scene before him.He was seated in a chair over near the wall of a large room that was flooded with livid red light from a single globe overhead. Beside him sat Leah Keith, also staring with dazed eyes in an effort to comprehend her surroundings. Directly in front of them stood a figure of stark nightmare horror.The weirdly glowing eyes identified the figure as that of the stranger at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of normal human beings.Now that his disguise was completely stripped away, his slight frame was revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine grained flexible metal.The creature’s face was hideously unlike anything human. Beneath the glowing eyes was a small circular mouth orifice with a cluster of gill-like appendages on either side of it. Patches of lighter-colored skin on either side of the head seemed to serve as ears. From a point just under the head, where the throat of a human being would have been, dangled the foot-and-a-half long tentacle whose forked tip had sent Gordon into oblivion.Behind the creature Gordon was dimly aware of a maze of complicated and utterly unfamiliar apparatus ranged along the opposite wall, giving the room the appearance of being a laboratory of some kind.Gordon’sobvious bewilderment seemed to amuse the bluish-gray monstrosity. “May I introduce myself?” he asked with a mocking note in his metallic voice. “I am Arlok of Xoran. I am an explorer of Space, and more particularly an Opener of Gates. My home is upon Xoran, which is one of the eleven major planets that circle about the giant blue-white sun that your astronomers call Rigel. I am here to open the Gate between your world and mine.”Gordon reached a reassuring hand over to Leah. All memory of their quarrel was obliterated in the face of their present peril. He felt her slender fingers twine firmly with his. The warm contact gave them both new courage.“We of Xoran need your planet and intend to take possession of it,” Arlok continued, “but the vast distance which separates Rigel from your solar system makes it impracticable to transport any considerable number of our people here in space-cars for, though our space-cars travel with practically the speed of light, it requires over five hundred and forty years for them to cross that great void. So I was sent as a lone pioneer to your Earth to do the work necessary here in order to open the Gate that will enable Xoran to cross the barrier in less than a minute of your time.“Thatgate is the one through the fourth dimension, for Xoran and your planet in a four-dimensional universe are almost touching each otherin spite of the great distance separating them in a three-dimensional universe. We of Xoran, being three-dimensional creatures like you Earthlings, can not even exist on a four-dimensional plane. But we can, by the use of apparatus to open a Gate, pass through a thin sector of the fourth dimension and emerge in a far distant part of our three-dimensional universe.“The situation of our two worlds,” Arlok continued, “is somewhat like that of two dots on opposite ends of a long strip of paper that is curved almost into a circle. To two-dimensional beings capable only of realizing and traveling along the two dimensions of the paper itself those dots might be many feet apart, yet in the third dimension straight across free space they might be separated by only the thousandth part of an inch. In order to take that short cut across the third dimension the two-dimensional creatures of the paper would have only to transform a small strip of the intervening space into a two-dimensional surface like their paper.“They could, do this, of course, by the use of proper vibration-creating machinery, for all things in a material universe are merely a matter of vibration. We of Xoran plan to cross the barrier of the fourth dimension by creating a narrow strip of vibrations powerful enough to exactly match and nullify those of the fourth dimension itself. The result will be that this narrow strip will temporarily become an area of three dimensions only, an area over which we can safely pass from our world to yours.”Arlokindicated one of the pieces of apparatus along the opposite wall of the room. It was an intricate arrangement of finely wound coils with wires leading to scores of needle-like points which constantly shimmered and crackled with tiny blue-white flames. Thick cables ran to a bank of concave reflectors of some gleaming grayish metal.“There is the apparatus which will supply the enormous power necessary to nullify the vibrations of the fourth dimensional barrier,” Arlok explained. “It is a condenser and adapter of the cosmic force that you call the Millikan rays. In Xoran a similar apparatus is already set up and finished, but the Gate can only be opened by simultaneous actions from both sides of the barrier. That is why I was sent on my long journey through space to do the necessary work here. I am now nearly finished. A very few hours more will see the final opening of the Gate. Then the fighting hordes of Xoran can sweep through the barrier and overwhelm your planet.“When the Gate from Xoran to a new planet is first opened,” Arlok continued, “our scientists always like to have at least one pair of specimens of the new world’s inhabitants sent through to them for experimental use. So to-night, while waiting for one of my final castings to cool, I improved the time by making a brief raid upon the place that you call the Maori Hut. The lady here seemed an excellent type of your Earthling women, and the meteoric iron in her necklace made a perfect focus for electric hypnosis. Her escort was too inferior a specimen to be of value to me so I killed him when he attempted to interfere. When you gave chase I lured you on until I could see whether you might be usable. You proved an excellent specimen, so I merely stunned you. Very soon now I shall be ready to send the two of you through the Gate to our scientists in Xoran.”A coldwave of sheer horror swept over Gordon. It was impossible to doubt the stark and deadly menace promised in the plan of this grim visitor from an alien universe—a menace that loomed not only for Gordon and Leah but for the teeming millions of a doomed and defenseless world.“Let me show you Xoran,” Arlokoffered. “Then you may be better able to understand.” He turned his back carelessly upon his two captives and strode over to the apparatus along the opposite wall.Gordon longed to hurl himself upon the unprotected back of the retreating Xoranian, but he knew that any attempt of that kind would be suicidal. Arlok’s deadly tentacle would strike him down before he was halfway across the room.He searched his surroundings with desperate eyes for anything that might serve as a weapon. Then his pulse quickened with sudden hope. There on a small table near Leah was the familiar bulk of a .45 calibre revolver, loaded and ready for use. It was included in a miscellaneous collection of other small earthly tools and objects that Arlok had apparently collected for study.There was an excellent chance that Leah might be able to secure the gun unobserved. Gordon pressed her fingers in a swift attempt at signalling, then jerked his head ever so slightly toward the table. A moment later the quick answering pressure of Leah’s fingers told him that she had understood his message. From the corner of his eye Gordon saw Leah’s other hand begin cautiously groping behind her for the revolver.Thenboth Gordon and Leah froze into sudden immobility as Arlok faced them again from beside an apparatus slightly reminiscent of an earthly radio set. Arlok threw a switch, and a small bank of tubes glowed pale green. A yard-square plate of bluish-gray metal on the wall above the apparatus glowed with milky fluorescence.“It is easy to penetrate the barrier with light waves,” Arlok explained. “That is a Gate that can readily be opened from either side. It was through it that we first discovered your Earth.”Arlok threw a rheostat on to more power. The luminous plate cleared swiftly. “And there, Earthlings, is Xoran!” Arlok said proudly.Leah and Gordon gasped in sheer amaze as the glowing plate became a veritable window into another world—a world of utter and alien terror.The livid light of a giant red sun blazed mercilessly down upon a landscape from which every vestige of animal and plant life had apparently been stripped. Naked rocks and barren soil stretched illimitably to the far horizon in a vast monotony of utter desolation.Arlok twirled the knob of the apparatus, and another scene flashed into view. In this scene great gleaming squares and cones of metal rose in towering clusters from the starkly barren land. Hordes of creatures like Arlok swarmed in and around the metal buildings. Giant machines whirled countless wheels in strange tasks. From a thousand great needle-like projections on the buildings spurted shimmering sheets of crackling flame, bathing the entire scene in a whirling mist of fiery vapors.Gordon realized dimly that he must be looking into one of the cities of Xoran, but every detail of the chaotic whirl of activity was too utterly unfamiliar to carry any real significance to his bewildered brain. He was as hopelessly overwhelmed as an African savage would be if transported suddenly into the heart of Times Square.Arlokagain twirled the knob. The scene shifted, apparently to another planet. This world was still alive, with rich verdure and swarming millions of people strangely like those of Earth. But it was a doomed world. The dread Gate to Xoran had already been opened here. Legions of bluish-gray Xoranians were attacking the planet’s inhabitants, and the attack of those metallic hosts was irresistible.The slight bodies of the Xoranians seemed as impervious to bullets and missiles as though armor-plated. Thefrantic defense of the beleaguered people of the doomed planet caused hardly a casualty in the Xoranian ranks.The attack of the Xoranians was hideously effective. Clouds of dense yellow fog belched from countless projectors in the hands of the bluish-gray hosts, and beneath that deadly miasma all animal and plant life on the doomed planet was crumbling, dying, and rotting into a liquid slime. Then even the slime was swiftly obliterated, and the Xoranians were left triumphant upon a world starkly desolate.“That was one of the minor planets in the swarm that make up the solar system of the sun that your astronomers call Canopus,” Arlok explained. “Our first task in conquering a world is to rid it of the unclean surface scum of animal and plant life. When this noxious surface mold is eliminated, the planet is then ready to furnish us sustenance, for we Xoranians live directly upon the metallic elements of the planet itself. Our bodies are of a substance of which your scientists have never even dreamed—deathless, invincible, living metal!”Arlokagain twirled the control of the apparatus and the scene was shifted back to the planet of Xoran, this time to the interior of what was apparently a vast laboratory. Here scores of Xoranian scientists were working upon captives who were pathetically like human beings of Earth itself, working with lethal gases and deadly liquids as human scientists might experiment upon noxious pests. The details of the scene were so utterly revolting, the tortures that were being inflicted so starkly horrible, that Leah and Gordon sank back in their chairs sick and shaken.Arlok snapped off a switch, and the green light in the tubes died. “That last scene was the laboratory to which I shall send you two presently,” he said callously as he started back across the room toward them.Gordon lurched to his feet, his brain a seething whirl of hate in which all thought of caution was gone as he tensed his muscles to hurl himself upon that grim monstrosity from the bleak and desolate realm of Xoran.Then he felt Leah tugging surreptitiously at his right hand. The next moment the bulk of something cold and hard met his fingers. It was the revolver. Leah had secured it while Arlok was busy with his inter-dimensional televisor.Arlok was rapidly approaching them. Gordon hoped against hope that the menace of that deadly tentacle might be diverted for the fraction of a second necessary for him to get in a crippling shot. Leah seemed to divine his thought. She suddenly screamed hysterically and flung herself on the floor almost at Arlok’s feet.Arlokstopped in obvious wonder and bent over Leah. Gordon took instant advantage of the Xoranian’s diverted attention. He whipped the revolver from behind him and fired point-blank at Arlok’s unprotected head.The bullet struck squarely, but Arlok was not even staggered. A tiny spot of bluish-gray skin upon his oval skull gleamed faintly for a moment under the bullet’s impact. Then the heavy pellet of lead, as thoroughly flattened as though it had struck the triple armor of a battleship, dropped spent and harmless to the floor.Arlok straightened swiftly. For the moment he seemed to have no thought of retaliating with his deadly tentacle. He merely stood there quite still with one thin arm thrown up to guard his glowing eyes.Gordon sent the remainder of the revolver’s bullets crashing home as fast as his finger could press the trigger. At that murderously short range the smashing rain of lead should have dropped a charging gorilla. But for all the effect Gordon’s shots had upon the Xoranian, his ammunition might as well have been pellets of paper. Arlok’sglossy hide merely, glowed momentarily in tiny patches as the bullets struck and flattened harmlessly—and that was all.His last cartridge fired, Gordon flung the empty weapon squarely at the blue monstrosity’s hideous face. Arlok made no attempt to dodge. The heavy revolver struck him high on the forehead, then rebounded harmlessly to the floor. Arlok paid no more attention to the blow than a man would to the casual touch of a wind-blown feather.Gordon desperately flung himself forward upon the Xoranian in one last mad effort to overwhelm him. Arlok dodged Gordon’s wild blows, then gently swept the Earth man into the embrace of his thin arms. For one helpless moment Gordon sensed the incredible strength and adamantine hardness of the Xoranian’s slender figure, together with an overwhelming impression of colossal weight in that deceptively slight body.ThenArlok contemptuously flung Gordon away from him. As Gordon staggered backward, Arlok’s tentacle lashed upward and levelled upon him. Its twin tips again glowed brilliant green and livid blue. Instantly every muscle in Gordon’s body was paralyzed. He stood there as rigid as a statue, his body completely deadened from the neck down. Beside him stood Leah, also frozen motionless in that same weird power.“Earthling, you are beginning to try my patience,” Arlok snapped. “Can you not realize that I am utterly invincible in any combat with you? The living metal of my body weighs over sixteen hundred pounds, as you measure weight. The strength inherent in that metal is sufficient to tear a hundred of your Earth men to shreds. But I do not even have to touch you to vanquish you. The electric content of my bodily structure is so infinitely superior to yours that with this tentacle-organ of mine I can instantly short-circuit the feeble currents of your nerve impulses and bring either paralysis or death as I choose.“But enough of this!” Arlok broke off abruptly. “My materials are now ready, and it is time that I finished my work. I shall put you out of my way for a few hours until I am ready to send you through the Gate to the laboratories of Xoran.”The green and blue fire of the tentacle’s tips flamed to dazzling brightness. The paralysis of Gordon’s body swept swiftly over his brain. Black oblivion engulfed him.WhenGordon again recovered consciousness he found that he was lying on the floor of what was apparently a narrow hall, near the foot of a stairway. His hands were lashed tightly behind him, and his feet and legs were so firmly pinioned together that he could scarcely move.Beside him lay Leah, also tightly bound. A short distance down the hall was the closed door of Arlok’s work-room, recognizable by the thin line of red light gleaming beneath it.Moonlight through a window at the rear of the hall made objects around Gordon fairly clear. He looked at Leah and saw tears glistening on her long lashes.“Oh, Blair, I was afraid you’d never waken again,” the girl sobbed. “I thought that fiend had killed you!” Her voice broke hysterically.“Steady, darling,” Gordon said soothingly. “We simply can’t give up now, you know. If that monstrosity ever opens that accursed Gate of his our entire world is doomed. There must be some way to stop him. We’ve got to find that way and try it—even if it seems only one forlorn chance in a million.”Gordonshook his head to clear the numbness still lingering from the effect of Arlok’s tentacle. The Xoranian seemed unable to produce a paralysis of any great duration with his weird natural weapon. Accordingly,he had been forced to bind his captives like two trussed fowls while he returned to his labors.Lying close together as they were, it was a comparatively easy matter for them to get their bound hands within reach of each other, but after fifteen minutes of vain work Gordon realized that any attempt at untying the ropes was useless. Arlok’s prodigious strength had drawn the knots so tight that no human power could ever loosen them.Then Gordon suddenly thought of the one thing in his pockets that might help them. It was a tiny cigarette lighter, of the spring-trigger type. It was in his vest pocket completely out of reach of his bound hands, but there was a way out of that difficulty.Gordon and Leah twisted and rolled their bodies like two contortionists until they succeeded in getting into such a position that Leah was able to get her teeth in the cloth of the vest pocket’s edge. A moment of desperate tugging, then the fabric gave way. The lighter dropped from the torn pocket to the floor, where Leah retrieved it.Then they twisted their bodies back to back. Leah managed to get the lighter flaming in her bound hands. Gordon groped in an effort to guide the ropes on his wrists over the tiny flickering flame.Thenthere came the faint welcome odor of smoldering rope as the lighter’s tiny flame bit into the bonds. Gordon bit his lips to suppress a cry of pain as the flame seared into his skin as well. The flame bit deeper into the rope. A single strand snapped.Then another strand gave way. To Gordon the process seemed endless as the flame scorched rope and flesh alike. A long minute of lancing agony that seemed hours—then Gordon could stand no more. He tensed his muscles in one mighty agonized effort to end the torture of the flame.The weakened rope gave way completely beneath that pain-maddened lunge. Gordon’s hands were free. It was an easy matter now to use the lighter to finish freeing himself and Leah. They made their way swiftly back to the window at the rear of the hall. It slid silently upward. A moment later, and they were out in the brilliant moonlight—free.They made their way around to the front of the house. Behind the drawn shades of one of the front rooms an eery glow of red light marked the location of Arlok’s work-room. They heard the occasional clink of tools inside the room as the Xoranian diligently worked to complete his apparatus.They crept stealthily up to where one of the French windows of Arlok’s work-room swung slightly ajar. Through the narrow crevice they could see Arlok’s grotesque back as he labored over the complex assembly of apparatus against the wall.A heavy stone flung through the window would probably wreck that delicate mechanism completely, yet the two watchers knew that such a respite would be only a temporary one. As long as Arlok remained alive on this planet to build other gates to Xoran, Earth’s eventual doom was certain. Complete destruction of Arlok himself was Earth’s only hope of salvation.TheXoranian seemed to be nearing the end of his labors. He left the apparatus momentarily and walked over to a work-bench where he picked up a slender rod-like tool. Donning a heavy glove to shield his left hand, he selected a small plate of bluish-gray metal, then pressed a switch in the handle of the tool in his right hand.A blade of blinding white flame, seemingly as solid as a blade of metal, spurted for the length of a foot from the tool’s tip. Arlok began cutting the plate with the flame, the blade shearing through the heavy metal as easily as a hot knife shears through butter.The sight brought a sudden surge of exultant hope to Gordon. He swiftly drew Leah away from the window, farenough to the side that their low-voiced conversation could not be heard from inside the work-room.“Leah, there is our one chance!” he explained excitedly. “That blue fiendisvulnerable, and that flame-tool of his is the weapon to reach his vulnerability. Did you notice how careful he was to shield his other hand with a glove before he turned the tool on? He can be hurt by that blade of flame, and probably hurt badly.”Leah nodded in quick understanding. “If I could lure him out of the room for just a moment, you could slip in through the window and get that flame-tool, Blair,” she suggested eagerly.“That might work,” Gordon agreed reluctantly. “But, Leah, don’t run any more risks than you absolutely have to!” He picked up a small rock. “Here, take this with you. Open the door into the hall and attract Arlok’s attention by throwing the rock at his precious apparatus. Then the minute he sees you, try to escape out through the hall again. He’ll leave his work to follow you. When he returns to his work-room I’ll be in there waiting for him. And I’ll be waiting with a weapon that can stab through even that armor-plated hide of his!”They separated, Leah to enter the house, Gordon to return to the window.Arlokwas back over in front of the apparatus, fitting into place the piece of metal he had just cut. The flame-tool, its switch now turned off, was still on the work-bench.Gordon’s heart pounded with excitement as he crouched there with his eyes fixed upon the closed hall door. The minutes seemed to drag interminably. Then suddenly Gordon’s muscles tensed. The knob of the hall door had turned ever so slightly. Leah was at her post!The next moment the door was flung open with a violence that sent it slamming back against the wall. The slender figure of Leah stood framed in the opening, her dark eyes blazing as she flung one hand up to hurl her missile.Arlok whirled just as Leah threw the rock straight at the intricate Gate-opening apparatus. With the speed of thought the Xoranian flung his own body over to shield his fragile instruments. The rock thudded harmlessly against his metallic chest.Then Arlok’s tentacle flung out like a striking cobra, its forked tip flaming blue and green fire as it focussed upon the open door. But Leah was already gone. Gordon heard her flying footsteps as she raced down the hall. Arlok promptly sped after her in swift pursuit.As Arlok passed through the door into the hall Gordon flung himself into the room, and sped straight for the work-bench. He snatched the flame-tool up, then darted over to the wall by the door. He was not a second too soon. The heavy tread of Arlok’s return was already audible in the hall just outside.Gordon prepared to stake everything upon his one slim chance of disabling that fearful tentacle before Arlok could bring it into action. He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool’s handle just as Arlok came through the door.Arlok, startled by the glare of the flame-tool’s blazing blade, whirled toward Gordon—but too late. That thin searing shaft of vivid flame had already struck squarely at the base of the Xoranian’s tentacle. A seething spray of hissing sparks marked the place where the flame bit deeply home. Arlok screamed, a ghastly metallic note of anguish like nothing human.The Xoranian’s powerful hands clutched at Gordon, but he leaped lithely backward out of their reach. Then Gordon again attacked, the flame-tool’s shining blade licking in and out like a rapier. The searing flame swept across one of Arlok’s arms, and the Xoranian winced. Then the blade stabbed swiftly at Arlok’s waist. Arlok half-doubled as he flinched back. Gordon shifted his aim with lightningspeed and sent the blade of flame lashing in one accurate terrible stroke that caught Arlok squarely in the eyes.Again Arlok screamed in intolerable agony as that tearing flame darkened forever his glowing eyes. In berserker fury the tortured Xoranian charged blindly toward Gordon. Gordon warily dodged to one side. Arlok, sightless, and with his tentacle crippled, still had enough power in that mighty metallic body of his to tear a hundred Earth men to pieces.Gordon stung Arlok’s shoulder with the flame, then desperately leaped to one side just in time to dodge a flailing blow that would have made pulp of his body had it landed.Arlok went stark wild in his frenzied efforts to come to grips with his unseen adversary. Furniture crashed and splintered to kindling wood beneath his threshing feet. Even the stout walls of the room shivered and cracked as the incredible weight of Arlok’s body caromed against them.Gordoncircled lithely around the crippled blue monstrosity like a timber wolf circling a wounded moose. He began concentrating his attack upon Arlok’s left leg. Half a dozen deep slashes with the searing flame—then suddenly the thin leg crumpled and broke. Arlok crashed helplessly to the floor.Gordon was now able to shift his attack to Arlok’s head. Dodging the blindly flailing arms of the Xoranian, he stabbed again and again at that oval-shaped skull.The searing thrusts began to have their effect. Arlok’s convulsive movements became slower and weaker. Gordon sent the flame stabbing in a long final thrust in an attempt to pierce through to that alien metal brain.With startling suddenness the flame burned its way home to some unknown center of life force in the oval skull. There was a brief but appalling gush of bright purple flame from Arlok’s eye-sockets and mouth orifice. Then his twitching body stiffened. His bluish-gray hide darkened with incredible swiftness into a dull black. Arlok was dead.Gordon, sickened at the grisly ending to the battle, snapped off the flame-tool and turned to search for Leah. He found her already standing in the hall door, alive, and unhurt.“I escapedthrough the window at the end of the hall,” she explained. “Arlok quit following me as soon as he saw that you too were gone from where he had left us tied.” She shuddered as she looked down at the Xoranian’s mangled body. “I saw most of your fight with him, Blair. It was terrible; awful. But, Blair, we’ve won!”“Yes, and now we’ll make sure of the fruits of our victory,” Gordon said grimly, starting over toward the Gate-opening apparatus with the flame-tool in his hand. A very few minutes’ work with the shearing blade of flame reduced the intricate apparatus to a mere tangled pile of twisted metal.Arlok, Gate-opener of Xoran, was dead—and the Gate to that grim planet was now irrevocably closed!“Blair, do you feel it too, that eery feeling of countless eyes still watching us from Xoran?” There was frank awe in Leah’s half-whispered question. “You know Arlok said that they had watched us for centuries from their side of the barrier. I’m sure they’re watching us now. Will they send another Opener of Gates to take up the work where Arlok failed?”Gordon took Leah into his arms. “I don’t know, dear,” he admitted gravely. “They may send another messenger, but I doubt it. This world of ours has had its warning, and it will heed it. The watchers on Xoran must know that in the five hundred and forty years it would take their next messenger to get here, the Earth will have had more than enough time to prepare an adequate defense for even Xoran’s menace. I doubt if there will ever again be an attempt made to open the Gate to Xoran.”
A human man fires upon a metal man.He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool’s handle just as Arlok came through the door
He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool’s handle just as Arlok came through the door
By Hal K. Wells
A strange man of metal comes to Earth on a dreadful mission.
Hesat in a small half-darkened booth well over in the corner—the man with the strangely glowing blue-green eyes.
The booth was one of a score that circled the walls of the “Maori Hut,” a popular night club in the San Fernando Valley some five miles over the hills from Hollywood.
It was nearly midnight. Half a dozen couples danced lazily in the central dancing space. Other couples remained tête-à-tête in the secluded booths.
In the entire room only two menwere dining alone. One was the slender gray-haired little man with the weirdly glowing eyes. The other was Blair Gordon, a highly successful young attorney of Los Angeles. Both men had the unmistakable air of waiting for someone.
Blair Gordon’s college days were not so far distant that he had yet lost any of the splendid physique that had made him an All-American tackle. In any physical combat with the slight gray-haired stranger, Gordon knew that he should be able to break the other in two with one hand.
Yet, as he studied the stranger from behind the potted palms that screened his own booth. Gordon was amazed to find himself slowly being overcome by an emotion of dread so intense that it verged upon sheer fear. There was something indescribably alien and utterly sinister in that dimly seen figure in the corner booth.
The faint eery light that glowed in the stranger’s deep-set eyes was not the lambent flame seen in the chatoyant orbs of some night-prowling jungle beast. Rather was it the blue-green glow of phosphorescent witch-light that flickers and dances in the night mists above steaming tropical swamps.
The stranger’s face was as classically perfect in its rugged outline as that of a Roman war-god, yet those perfect features seemed utterly lifeless. In the twenty minutes that he had been intently watching the stranger, Gordon would have sworn that the other’s face had not moved by so much as the twitch of an eye-lash.
Thena new couple entered the Maori Hut, and Gordon promptly forgot all thought of the puzzlingly alien figure in the corner. The new arrivals were a vibrantly beautiful blond girl and a plump, sallow-faced man in the early forties. The girl was Leah Keith, Hollywood’s latest screen sensation. The man was Dave Redding, her director.
A waiter seated Leah and her escort in a booth directly across the room from that of Gordon. It was a maneuver for which Gordon had tipped lavishly when he first came to the Hut.
A week ago Leah Keith’s engagement to Blair Gordon had been abruptly ended by a trivial little quarrel that two volatile temperaments had fanned into flames which apparently made reconciliation impossible. A miserably lonely week had finally ended in Gordon’s present trip to the Maori Hut. He knew that Leah often came there, and he had an overwhelming longing to at least see her again, even though his pride forced him to remain unseen.
Now, as he stared glumly at Leah through the palms that effectively screened his own booth, Gordon heartily regretted that he had ever come. The sight of Leah’s clear fresh beauty merely made him realize what a fool he had been to let that ridiculous little quarrel come between them.
Then, with a sudden tingling thrill, Gordon realized that he was not the only one in the room who was interested in Leah and her escort.
Over in the half-darkened corner booth the eery stranger was staring at the girl with an intentness that made his weird eyes glow like miniature pools of shimmering blue-green fire. Again Gordon felt that vague impression of dread, as though he were in the presence of something utterly alien to all human experience.
Gordonturned his gaze back to Leah, then caught his breath sharply in sudden amaze. The necklace about Leah’s throat was beginning to glow with the same uncanny blue-green light that shone in the stranger’s eyes! Faint, yet unmistakable, the shimmering radiance pulsed from the necklace in an aura of nameless evil.
And with the coming of that aura of weird light at her throat, a strange trance was swiftly sweeping over Leah. She sat there now as rigidly motionless as some exquisite statue of ivory and jet.
Gordon stared at her in stark bewilderment. He knew the history of Leah’s necklace. It was merely an oddity, and nothing more—a freak piece of costume jewelry made from fragments of an Arizona meteorite. Leah had worn the necklace a dozen times before, without any trace of the weird phenomena that were now occurring.
Dancers again thronged the floor to the blaring jazz of the negro orchestra while Gordon was still trying to force his whirling brain to a decision. He was certain that Leah was in deadly peril of some kind, yet the nature of that peril was too bizarre for his mind to imagine.
Then the stranger with the glowing eyes took matters into his own hands. He left his booth and began threading his way through the dancers toward Leah. As he watched the progress of that slight gray-haired figure Gordon refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes. The thing was too utterly absurd—yet Gordon was positive that the strong oak floor of the dancing space was visibly swaying and creaking beneath the stranger’s mincing tread!
Thestranger paused at Leah’s booth only long enough to utter a brief low-voiced command. Then Leah, still in the grip of that strange trance, rose obediently from her seat to accompany him.
Dave Redding rose angrily to intercept her. The stranger seemed to barely brush the irate director with his finger tips, yet Redding reeled back as though struck by a pile-driver. Leah and the stranger started for the door. Redding scrambled to his feet again and hurried after them.
It was then that Gordon finally shook off the stupor of utter bewilderment that had held him. Springing from his booth, he rushed after the trio.
The dancers in his way delayed Gordon momentarily. Leah and the stranger were already gone when he reached the door. The narrow little entrance hallway to the Hut was deserted save for a figure sprawled there on the floor near the outer door.
It was the body of Dave Redding. Gordon shuddered as he glanced briefly down at the huddled figure. A single mighty blow from some unknown weapon had crumpled the director’s entire face in, like the shattered shell of a broken egg.
Gordoncharged on through the outer door just as a heavy sedan came careening out of the parking lot. He had a flashing glimpse of Leah and the stranger in the front seat of the big car.
Gordon raced for his own machine, a powerful low-slung roadster. A single vicious jab at the starting button, and the big motor leaped into roaring life. Gordon shot out from the parking lot onto the main boulevard. A hundred yards away the sedan was fleeing toward Hollywood.
Gordon tramped hard on the accelerator. His engine snarled with the unleashed fury of a hundred horsepower. The gap between the two cars swiftly lessened.
Then the stranger seemed to become aware for the first time that he was being followed. The next second the big sedan accelerated with the hurtling speed of a flying bullet. Gordon sent his own foot nearly to the floor. The roadster jumped to eighty miles an hour, yet the sedan continued to leave it remorselessly behind.
The two cars started up the northern slope of Cahuenga Pass with the sedan nearly two hundred yards ahead, and gaining all the time. Gordon wondered briefly if they were to flash down the other side of the Pass and on into Hollywood at their present mad speed.
Then at the summit of the Pass the sedan swerved abruptly to the right and fled west along the Mulholland Highway. Gordon’s tires screamed as he swerved the roadster in hot pursuit.
Thedark winding mountain highway was nearly deserted at that hour of the night. Save for an occasional automobile that swerved frantically to the side of the road to dodge the roaring onslaught of the racing cars, Gordon and the stranger had the road to themselves.
The stranger seemed no longer to be trying to leave his pursuer hopelessly behind. He allowed Gordon to come within a hundred yards of him. But that was as near as Gordon could get, is spite of the roadster’s best efforts.
Half a dozen times Gordon trod savagely upon his accelerator in a desperate attempt to close the gap, but each time the sedan fled with the swift grace of a scudding phantom. Finally Gordon had to content himself with merely keeping his distance behind the glowing red tail-light of the car ahead.
They passed Laurel Canyon, and still the big sedan bored on to the west. Then finally, half a dozen miles beyond Laurel Canyon, the stranger abruptly left the main highway and started up a narrow private road to the crest of one of the lonely hills. Gordon slowly gained in the next two miles. When the road ended in a winding gravelled driveway into the grounds of what was apparently a private estate, the roadster was scarcely a dozen yards behind.
The stranger’s features as he stood there stiffly erect in the vivid glare of the roadster’s headlights were still as devoid of all expression as ever. The only things that really seemed alive in that masque of a face were the two eyes, glowing eery blue-green fire like twin entities of alien evil.
Gordon wasted no time in verbal sparring. He motioned briefly to Leah Keith’s rigid form in the front seat of the sedan.
“Miss Keith is returning to Hollywood with me,” he said curtly. “Will you let her go peaceably, or shall I—?” He left the question unfinished, but its threat was obvious.
“Or shall you do what?” asked the stranger quietly. There was an oddly metallic ring in his low even tones. His words were so precisely clipped that they suggested some origin more mechanical than human.
“Or shall I take Miss Keith with me by force?” Gordon flared angrily.
“You can try to take the lady by force—if you wish.” There was an unmistakable jeering note in the metallic tones.
The taunt was the last thing needed to unleash Gordon’s volatile temper. He stepped forward and swung a hard left hook for that expressionless masque of a face. But the blow never landed. The stranger dodged with uncanny swiftness. His answering gesture seemed merely the gentlest possible push with an outstretched hand, yet Gordon was sent reeling backward a full dozen steps by the terrific force of that apparently gentle blow.
Recoveringhimself, Gordon grimly returned to the attack. The stranger again flung out one hand in the contemptuous gesture with which one would brush away a troublesome fly, but this time Gordon was more cautious. He neatly dodged the stranger’s blow, then swung a vicious right squarely for his adversary’s unprotected jaw.
The blow smashed solidly home with all of Gordon’s weight behind it. The stranger’s jaw buckled and gave beneath that shattering impact. Then abruptly his entire face crumpled into distorted ruin. Gordon staggered back a step in sheer horror at the gruesome result of his blow.
The stranger flung a hand up to his shattered features. When his hand came away again, his whole face came away with it!
Gordon had one horror-stricken glimpse of a featureless blob of rubbery bluish-gray flesh in which fiendish eyes of blue-green fire blazed in malignant fury.
Then the stranger fumbled at his collar, ripping the linen swiftly away.Something lashed out from beneath his throat—a loathsome snake-like object, slender and forked at the end. For one ghastly moment, as the writhing tentacle swung into line with him, Gordon saw its forked ends glow strange fire—one a vivid blue, the other a sparkling green.
Then the world was abruptly blotted out for Blair Gordon.
Consciousnessreturned to Gordon as swiftly and painlessly as it had left him. For a moment he blinked stupidly in a dazed effort to comprehend the incredible scene before him.
He was seated in a chair over near the wall of a large room that was flooded with livid red light from a single globe overhead. Beside him sat Leah Keith, also staring with dazed eyes in an effort to comprehend her surroundings. Directly in front of them stood a figure of stark nightmare horror.
The weirdly glowing eyes identified the figure as that of the stranger at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of normal human beings.
Now that his disguise was completely stripped away, his slight frame was revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine grained flexible metal.
The creature’s face was hideously unlike anything human. Beneath the glowing eyes was a small circular mouth orifice with a cluster of gill-like appendages on either side of it. Patches of lighter-colored skin on either side of the head seemed to serve as ears. From a point just under the head, where the throat of a human being would have been, dangled the foot-and-a-half long tentacle whose forked tip had sent Gordon into oblivion.
Behind the creature Gordon was dimly aware of a maze of complicated and utterly unfamiliar apparatus ranged along the opposite wall, giving the room the appearance of being a laboratory of some kind.
Gordon’sobvious bewilderment seemed to amuse the bluish-gray monstrosity. “May I introduce myself?” he asked with a mocking note in his metallic voice. “I am Arlok of Xoran. I am an explorer of Space, and more particularly an Opener of Gates. My home is upon Xoran, which is one of the eleven major planets that circle about the giant blue-white sun that your astronomers call Rigel. I am here to open the Gate between your world and mine.”
Gordon reached a reassuring hand over to Leah. All memory of their quarrel was obliterated in the face of their present peril. He felt her slender fingers twine firmly with his. The warm contact gave them both new courage.
“We of Xoran need your planet and intend to take possession of it,” Arlok continued, “but the vast distance which separates Rigel from your solar system makes it impracticable to transport any considerable number of our people here in space-cars for, though our space-cars travel with practically the speed of light, it requires over five hundred and forty years for them to cross that great void. So I was sent as a lone pioneer to your Earth to do the work necessary here in order to open the Gate that will enable Xoran to cross the barrier in less than a minute of your time.
“Thatgate is the one through the fourth dimension, for Xoran and your planet in a four-dimensional universe are almost touching each otherin spite of the great distance separating them in a three-dimensional universe. We of Xoran, being three-dimensional creatures like you Earthlings, can not even exist on a four-dimensional plane. But we can, by the use of apparatus to open a Gate, pass through a thin sector of the fourth dimension and emerge in a far distant part of our three-dimensional universe.
“The situation of our two worlds,” Arlok continued, “is somewhat like that of two dots on opposite ends of a long strip of paper that is curved almost into a circle. To two-dimensional beings capable only of realizing and traveling along the two dimensions of the paper itself those dots might be many feet apart, yet in the third dimension straight across free space they might be separated by only the thousandth part of an inch. In order to take that short cut across the third dimension the two-dimensional creatures of the paper would have only to transform a small strip of the intervening space into a two-dimensional surface like their paper.
“They could, do this, of course, by the use of proper vibration-creating machinery, for all things in a material universe are merely a matter of vibration. We of Xoran plan to cross the barrier of the fourth dimension by creating a narrow strip of vibrations powerful enough to exactly match and nullify those of the fourth dimension itself. The result will be that this narrow strip will temporarily become an area of three dimensions only, an area over which we can safely pass from our world to yours.”
Arlokindicated one of the pieces of apparatus along the opposite wall of the room. It was an intricate arrangement of finely wound coils with wires leading to scores of needle-like points which constantly shimmered and crackled with tiny blue-white flames. Thick cables ran to a bank of concave reflectors of some gleaming grayish metal.
“There is the apparatus which will supply the enormous power necessary to nullify the vibrations of the fourth dimensional barrier,” Arlok explained. “It is a condenser and adapter of the cosmic force that you call the Millikan rays. In Xoran a similar apparatus is already set up and finished, but the Gate can only be opened by simultaneous actions from both sides of the barrier. That is why I was sent on my long journey through space to do the necessary work here. I am now nearly finished. A very few hours more will see the final opening of the Gate. Then the fighting hordes of Xoran can sweep through the barrier and overwhelm your planet.
“When the Gate from Xoran to a new planet is first opened,” Arlok continued, “our scientists always like to have at least one pair of specimens of the new world’s inhabitants sent through to them for experimental use. So to-night, while waiting for one of my final castings to cool, I improved the time by making a brief raid upon the place that you call the Maori Hut. The lady here seemed an excellent type of your Earthling women, and the meteoric iron in her necklace made a perfect focus for electric hypnosis. Her escort was too inferior a specimen to be of value to me so I killed him when he attempted to interfere. When you gave chase I lured you on until I could see whether you might be usable. You proved an excellent specimen, so I merely stunned you. Very soon now I shall be ready to send the two of you through the Gate to our scientists in Xoran.”
A coldwave of sheer horror swept over Gordon. It was impossible to doubt the stark and deadly menace promised in the plan of this grim visitor from an alien universe—a menace that loomed not only for Gordon and Leah but for the teeming millions of a doomed and defenseless world.
“Let me show you Xoran,” Arlokoffered. “Then you may be better able to understand.” He turned his back carelessly upon his two captives and strode over to the apparatus along the opposite wall.
Gordon longed to hurl himself upon the unprotected back of the retreating Xoranian, but he knew that any attempt of that kind would be suicidal. Arlok’s deadly tentacle would strike him down before he was halfway across the room.
He searched his surroundings with desperate eyes for anything that might serve as a weapon. Then his pulse quickened with sudden hope. There on a small table near Leah was the familiar bulk of a .45 calibre revolver, loaded and ready for use. It was included in a miscellaneous collection of other small earthly tools and objects that Arlok had apparently collected for study.
There was an excellent chance that Leah might be able to secure the gun unobserved. Gordon pressed her fingers in a swift attempt at signalling, then jerked his head ever so slightly toward the table. A moment later the quick answering pressure of Leah’s fingers told him that she had understood his message. From the corner of his eye Gordon saw Leah’s other hand begin cautiously groping behind her for the revolver.
Thenboth Gordon and Leah froze into sudden immobility as Arlok faced them again from beside an apparatus slightly reminiscent of an earthly radio set. Arlok threw a switch, and a small bank of tubes glowed pale green. A yard-square plate of bluish-gray metal on the wall above the apparatus glowed with milky fluorescence.
“It is easy to penetrate the barrier with light waves,” Arlok explained. “That is a Gate that can readily be opened from either side. It was through it that we first discovered your Earth.”
Arlok threw a rheostat on to more power. The luminous plate cleared swiftly. “And there, Earthlings, is Xoran!” Arlok said proudly.
Leah and Gordon gasped in sheer amaze as the glowing plate became a veritable window into another world—a world of utter and alien terror.
The livid light of a giant red sun blazed mercilessly down upon a landscape from which every vestige of animal and plant life had apparently been stripped. Naked rocks and barren soil stretched illimitably to the far horizon in a vast monotony of utter desolation.
Arlok twirled the knob of the apparatus, and another scene flashed into view. In this scene great gleaming squares and cones of metal rose in towering clusters from the starkly barren land. Hordes of creatures like Arlok swarmed in and around the metal buildings. Giant machines whirled countless wheels in strange tasks. From a thousand great needle-like projections on the buildings spurted shimmering sheets of crackling flame, bathing the entire scene in a whirling mist of fiery vapors.
Gordon realized dimly that he must be looking into one of the cities of Xoran, but every detail of the chaotic whirl of activity was too utterly unfamiliar to carry any real significance to his bewildered brain. He was as hopelessly overwhelmed as an African savage would be if transported suddenly into the heart of Times Square.
Arlokagain twirled the knob. The scene shifted, apparently to another planet. This world was still alive, with rich verdure and swarming millions of people strangely like those of Earth. But it was a doomed world. The dread Gate to Xoran had already been opened here. Legions of bluish-gray Xoranians were attacking the planet’s inhabitants, and the attack of those metallic hosts was irresistible.
The slight bodies of the Xoranians seemed as impervious to bullets and missiles as though armor-plated. Thefrantic defense of the beleaguered people of the doomed planet caused hardly a casualty in the Xoranian ranks.
The attack of the Xoranians was hideously effective. Clouds of dense yellow fog belched from countless projectors in the hands of the bluish-gray hosts, and beneath that deadly miasma all animal and plant life on the doomed planet was crumbling, dying, and rotting into a liquid slime. Then even the slime was swiftly obliterated, and the Xoranians were left triumphant upon a world starkly desolate.
“That was one of the minor planets in the swarm that make up the solar system of the sun that your astronomers call Canopus,” Arlok explained. “Our first task in conquering a world is to rid it of the unclean surface scum of animal and plant life. When this noxious surface mold is eliminated, the planet is then ready to furnish us sustenance, for we Xoranians live directly upon the metallic elements of the planet itself. Our bodies are of a substance of which your scientists have never even dreamed—deathless, invincible, living metal!”
Arlokagain twirled the control of the apparatus and the scene was shifted back to the planet of Xoran, this time to the interior of what was apparently a vast laboratory. Here scores of Xoranian scientists were working upon captives who were pathetically like human beings of Earth itself, working with lethal gases and deadly liquids as human scientists might experiment upon noxious pests. The details of the scene were so utterly revolting, the tortures that were being inflicted so starkly horrible, that Leah and Gordon sank back in their chairs sick and shaken.
Arlok snapped off a switch, and the green light in the tubes died. “That last scene was the laboratory to which I shall send you two presently,” he said callously as he started back across the room toward them.
Gordon lurched to his feet, his brain a seething whirl of hate in which all thought of caution was gone as he tensed his muscles to hurl himself upon that grim monstrosity from the bleak and desolate realm of Xoran.
Then he felt Leah tugging surreptitiously at his right hand. The next moment the bulk of something cold and hard met his fingers. It was the revolver. Leah had secured it while Arlok was busy with his inter-dimensional televisor.
Arlok was rapidly approaching them. Gordon hoped against hope that the menace of that deadly tentacle might be diverted for the fraction of a second necessary for him to get in a crippling shot. Leah seemed to divine his thought. She suddenly screamed hysterically and flung herself on the floor almost at Arlok’s feet.
Arlokstopped in obvious wonder and bent over Leah. Gordon took instant advantage of the Xoranian’s diverted attention. He whipped the revolver from behind him and fired point-blank at Arlok’s unprotected head.
The bullet struck squarely, but Arlok was not even staggered. A tiny spot of bluish-gray skin upon his oval skull gleamed faintly for a moment under the bullet’s impact. Then the heavy pellet of lead, as thoroughly flattened as though it had struck the triple armor of a battleship, dropped spent and harmless to the floor.
Arlok straightened swiftly. For the moment he seemed to have no thought of retaliating with his deadly tentacle. He merely stood there quite still with one thin arm thrown up to guard his glowing eyes.
Gordon sent the remainder of the revolver’s bullets crashing home as fast as his finger could press the trigger. At that murderously short range the smashing rain of lead should have dropped a charging gorilla. But for all the effect Gordon’s shots had upon the Xoranian, his ammunition might as well have been pellets of paper. Arlok’sglossy hide merely, glowed momentarily in tiny patches as the bullets struck and flattened harmlessly—and that was all.
His last cartridge fired, Gordon flung the empty weapon squarely at the blue monstrosity’s hideous face. Arlok made no attempt to dodge. The heavy revolver struck him high on the forehead, then rebounded harmlessly to the floor. Arlok paid no more attention to the blow than a man would to the casual touch of a wind-blown feather.
Gordon desperately flung himself forward upon the Xoranian in one last mad effort to overwhelm him. Arlok dodged Gordon’s wild blows, then gently swept the Earth man into the embrace of his thin arms. For one helpless moment Gordon sensed the incredible strength and adamantine hardness of the Xoranian’s slender figure, together with an overwhelming impression of colossal weight in that deceptively slight body.
ThenArlok contemptuously flung Gordon away from him. As Gordon staggered backward, Arlok’s tentacle lashed upward and levelled upon him. Its twin tips again glowed brilliant green and livid blue. Instantly every muscle in Gordon’s body was paralyzed. He stood there as rigid as a statue, his body completely deadened from the neck down. Beside him stood Leah, also frozen motionless in that same weird power.
“Earthling, you are beginning to try my patience,” Arlok snapped. “Can you not realize that I am utterly invincible in any combat with you? The living metal of my body weighs over sixteen hundred pounds, as you measure weight. The strength inherent in that metal is sufficient to tear a hundred of your Earth men to shreds. But I do not even have to touch you to vanquish you. The electric content of my bodily structure is so infinitely superior to yours that with this tentacle-organ of mine I can instantly short-circuit the feeble currents of your nerve impulses and bring either paralysis or death as I choose.
“But enough of this!” Arlok broke off abruptly. “My materials are now ready, and it is time that I finished my work. I shall put you out of my way for a few hours until I am ready to send you through the Gate to the laboratories of Xoran.”
The green and blue fire of the tentacle’s tips flamed to dazzling brightness. The paralysis of Gordon’s body swept swiftly over his brain. Black oblivion engulfed him.
WhenGordon again recovered consciousness he found that he was lying on the floor of what was apparently a narrow hall, near the foot of a stairway. His hands were lashed tightly behind him, and his feet and legs were so firmly pinioned together that he could scarcely move.
Beside him lay Leah, also tightly bound. A short distance down the hall was the closed door of Arlok’s work-room, recognizable by the thin line of red light gleaming beneath it.
Moonlight through a window at the rear of the hall made objects around Gordon fairly clear. He looked at Leah and saw tears glistening on her long lashes.
“Oh, Blair, I was afraid you’d never waken again,” the girl sobbed. “I thought that fiend had killed you!” Her voice broke hysterically.
“Steady, darling,” Gordon said soothingly. “We simply can’t give up now, you know. If that monstrosity ever opens that accursed Gate of his our entire world is doomed. There must be some way to stop him. We’ve got to find that way and try it—even if it seems only one forlorn chance in a million.”
Gordonshook his head to clear the numbness still lingering from the effect of Arlok’s tentacle. The Xoranian seemed unable to produce a paralysis of any great duration with his weird natural weapon. Accordingly,he had been forced to bind his captives like two trussed fowls while he returned to his labors.
Lying close together as they were, it was a comparatively easy matter for them to get their bound hands within reach of each other, but after fifteen minutes of vain work Gordon realized that any attempt at untying the ropes was useless. Arlok’s prodigious strength had drawn the knots so tight that no human power could ever loosen them.
Then Gordon suddenly thought of the one thing in his pockets that might help them. It was a tiny cigarette lighter, of the spring-trigger type. It was in his vest pocket completely out of reach of his bound hands, but there was a way out of that difficulty.
Gordon and Leah twisted and rolled their bodies like two contortionists until they succeeded in getting into such a position that Leah was able to get her teeth in the cloth of the vest pocket’s edge. A moment of desperate tugging, then the fabric gave way. The lighter dropped from the torn pocket to the floor, where Leah retrieved it.
Then they twisted their bodies back to back. Leah managed to get the lighter flaming in her bound hands. Gordon groped in an effort to guide the ropes on his wrists over the tiny flickering flame.
Thenthere came the faint welcome odor of smoldering rope as the lighter’s tiny flame bit into the bonds. Gordon bit his lips to suppress a cry of pain as the flame seared into his skin as well. The flame bit deeper into the rope. A single strand snapped.
Then another strand gave way. To Gordon the process seemed endless as the flame scorched rope and flesh alike. A long minute of lancing agony that seemed hours—then Gordon could stand no more. He tensed his muscles in one mighty agonized effort to end the torture of the flame.
The weakened rope gave way completely beneath that pain-maddened lunge. Gordon’s hands were free. It was an easy matter now to use the lighter to finish freeing himself and Leah. They made their way swiftly back to the window at the rear of the hall. It slid silently upward. A moment later, and they were out in the brilliant moonlight—free.
They made their way around to the front of the house. Behind the drawn shades of one of the front rooms an eery glow of red light marked the location of Arlok’s work-room. They heard the occasional clink of tools inside the room as the Xoranian diligently worked to complete his apparatus.
They crept stealthily up to where one of the French windows of Arlok’s work-room swung slightly ajar. Through the narrow crevice they could see Arlok’s grotesque back as he labored over the complex assembly of apparatus against the wall.
A heavy stone flung through the window would probably wreck that delicate mechanism completely, yet the two watchers knew that such a respite would be only a temporary one. As long as Arlok remained alive on this planet to build other gates to Xoran, Earth’s eventual doom was certain. Complete destruction of Arlok himself was Earth’s only hope of salvation.
TheXoranian seemed to be nearing the end of his labors. He left the apparatus momentarily and walked over to a work-bench where he picked up a slender rod-like tool. Donning a heavy glove to shield his left hand, he selected a small plate of bluish-gray metal, then pressed a switch in the handle of the tool in his right hand.
A blade of blinding white flame, seemingly as solid as a blade of metal, spurted for the length of a foot from the tool’s tip. Arlok began cutting the plate with the flame, the blade shearing through the heavy metal as easily as a hot knife shears through butter.
The sight brought a sudden surge of exultant hope to Gordon. He swiftly drew Leah away from the window, farenough to the side that their low-voiced conversation could not be heard from inside the work-room.
“Leah, there is our one chance!” he explained excitedly. “That blue fiendisvulnerable, and that flame-tool of his is the weapon to reach his vulnerability. Did you notice how careful he was to shield his other hand with a glove before he turned the tool on? He can be hurt by that blade of flame, and probably hurt badly.”
Leah nodded in quick understanding. “If I could lure him out of the room for just a moment, you could slip in through the window and get that flame-tool, Blair,” she suggested eagerly.
“That might work,” Gordon agreed reluctantly. “But, Leah, don’t run any more risks than you absolutely have to!” He picked up a small rock. “Here, take this with you. Open the door into the hall and attract Arlok’s attention by throwing the rock at his precious apparatus. Then the minute he sees you, try to escape out through the hall again. He’ll leave his work to follow you. When he returns to his work-room I’ll be in there waiting for him. And I’ll be waiting with a weapon that can stab through even that armor-plated hide of his!”
They separated, Leah to enter the house, Gordon to return to the window.
Arlokwas back over in front of the apparatus, fitting into place the piece of metal he had just cut. The flame-tool, its switch now turned off, was still on the work-bench.
Gordon’s heart pounded with excitement as he crouched there with his eyes fixed upon the closed hall door. The minutes seemed to drag interminably. Then suddenly Gordon’s muscles tensed. The knob of the hall door had turned ever so slightly. Leah was at her post!
The next moment the door was flung open with a violence that sent it slamming back against the wall. The slender figure of Leah stood framed in the opening, her dark eyes blazing as she flung one hand up to hurl her missile.
Arlok whirled just as Leah threw the rock straight at the intricate Gate-opening apparatus. With the speed of thought the Xoranian flung his own body over to shield his fragile instruments. The rock thudded harmlessly against his metallic chest.
Then Arlok’s tentacle flung out like a striking cobra, its forked tip flaming blue and green fire as it focussed upon the open door. But Leah was already gone. Gordon heard her flying footsteps as she raced down the hall. Arlok promptly sped after her in swift pursuit.
As Arlok passed through the door into the hall Gordon flung himself into the room, and sped straight for the work-bench. He snatched the flame-tool up, then darted over to the wall by the door. He was not a second too soon. The heavy tread of Arlok’s return was already audible in the hall just outside.
Gordon prepared to stake everything upon his one slim chance of disabling that fearful tentacle before Arlok could bring it into action. He pressed the tiny switch in the flame-tool’s handle just as Arlok came through the door.
Arlok, startled by the glare of the flame-tool’s blazing blade, whirled toward Gordon—but too late. That thin searing shaft of vivid flame had already struck squarely at the base of the Xoranian’s tentacle. A seething spray of hissing sparks marked the place where the flame bit deeply home. Arlok screamed, a ghastly metallic note of anguish like nothing human.
The Xoranian’s powerful hands clutched at Gordon, but he leaped lithely backward out of their reach. Then Gordon again attacked, the flame-tool’s shining blade licking in and out like a rapier. The searing flame swept across one of Arlok’s arms, and the Xoranian winced. Then the blade stabbed swiftly at Arlok’s waist. Arlok half-doubled as he flinched back. Gordon shifted his aim with lightningspeed and sent the blade of flame lashing in one accurate terrible stroke that caught Arlok squarely in the eyes.
Again Arlok screamed in intolerable agony as that tearing flame darkened forever his glowing eyes. In berserker fury the tortured Xoranian charged blindly toward Gordon. Gordon warily dodged to one side. Arlok, sightless, and with his tentacle crippled, still had enough power in that mighty metallic body of his to tear a hundred Earth men to pieces.
Gordon stung Arlok’s shoulder with the flame, then desperately leaped to one side just in time to dodge a flailing blow that would have made pulp of his body had it landed.
Arlok went stark wild in his frenzied efforts to come to grips with his unseen adversary. Furniture crashed and splintered to kindling wood beneath his threshing feet. Even the stout walls of the room shivered and cracked as the incredible weight of Arlok’s body caromed against them.
Gordoncircled lithely around the crippled blue monstrosity like a timber wolf circling a wounded moose. He began concentrating his attack upon Arlok’s left leg. Half a dozen deep slashes with the searing flame—then suddenly the thin leg crumpled and broke. Arlok crashed helplessly to the floor.
Gordon was now able to shift his attack to Arlok’s head. Dodging the blindly flailing arms of the Xoranian, he stabbed again and again at that oval-shaped skull.
The searing thrusts began to have their effect. Arlok’s convulsive movements became slower and weaker. Gordon sent the flame stabbing in a long final thrust in an attempt to pierce through to that alien metal brain.
With startling suddenness the flame burned its way home to some unknown center of life force in the oval skull. There was a brief but appalling gush of bright purple flame from Arlok’s eye-sockets and mouth orifice. Then his twitching body stiffened. His bluish-gray hide darkened with incredible swiftness into a dull black. Arlok was dead.
Gordon, sickened at the grisly ending to the battle, snapped off the flame-tool and turned to search for Leah. He found her already standing in the hall door, alive, and unhurt.
“I escapedthrough the window at the end of the hall,” she explained. “Arlok quit following me as soon as he saw that you too were gone from where he had left us tied.” She shuddered as she looked down at the Xoranian’s mangled body. “I saw most of your fight with him, Blair. It was terrible; awful. But, Blair, we’ve won!”
“Yes, and now we’ll make sure of the fruits of our victory,” Gordon said grimly, starting over toward the Gate-opening apparatus with the flame-tool in his hand. A very few minutes’ work with the shearing blade of flame reduced the intricate apparatus to a mere tangled pile of twisted metal.
Arlok, Gate-opener of Xoran, was dead—and the Gate to that grim planet was now irrevocably closed!
“Blair, do you feel it too, that eery feeling of countless eyes still watching us from Xoran?” There was frank awe in Leah’s half-whispered question. “You know Arlok said that they had watched us for centuries from their side of the barrier. I’m sure they’re watching us now. Will they send another Opener of Gates to take up the work where Arlok failed?”
Gordon took Leah into his arms. “I don’t know, dear,” he admitted gravely. “They may send another messenger, but I doubt it. This world of ours has had its warning, and it will heed it. The watchers on Xoran must know that in the five hundred and forty years it would take their next messenger to get here, the Earth will have had more than enough time to prepare an adequate defense for even Xoran’s menace. I doubt if there will ever again be an attempt made to open the Gate to Xoran.”
A (water)ship goes down in stormy seas.The great ship tore apart.The Eye of AllahBy C. D. WillardOn the fatal seventh of September a certain Secret Service man sat in the President’s chair and—looked back into the Eye of Allah.Blinky Collins’ part in this matter was very brief. Blinky lasted just long enough to make a great discovery, to brag about it as was Blinky’s way, and then pass on to find his reward in whatever hereafter is set apart for weak-minded crooks whose heads are not hard enough to withstand the crushing impact of a lead-filled pacifier.The photograph studio of Blinky Collins was on the third floor of a disreputable building in an equally unsavory part of Chicago. There were no tinted pictures of beautiful blondes nor of stern, square-jawed men of affairs in Blinky’s reception room. His clients, who came furtively there, were strongly opposed to having their pictures taken—they came for other purposes. For the photographic work of Mr. Collins was strictly commercial—and peculiar. There were fingerprints to be photographed and identified for purpose of private revenge, photographs of people to be merged and repictured in compromising closeness forreasons of blackmail. And even X-Ray photography was included in the scope of his work.Thegreat discovery came when a box was brought to the dingy room and Mr. Collins was asked to show what was inside it without the bother and inconvenience of disturbing lock and seals. The X-Ray machine sizzled above it, and a photographic plate below was developed to show a string of round discs that could easily have been pearls.The temporary possessor of the box was pleased with the result—but Blinky was puzzled. For the developer had brought out an odd result. There were the pearls as expected, but, too, there was a small picture superimposed—a picture of a bald head and a body beneath seated beside a desk. The picture had been taken from above looking straight down, and head and desk were familiar.Blinky knew them both. The odd part was that he knew also that both of them were at that instant on the ground floor of the same disreputable building, directly under and two floors below his workshop.Like many great discoveries, this of Blinky’s came as the result of an accident. He had monkeyed with the X-Ray generator and had made certain substitutions. And here was the result—a bald head and a desk, photographed plainly through two heavy wood floors. Blinky scratched his own head in deep thought. And then he repeated the operation.This time there was a blonde head close to the bald one, and two people were close to the desk and to each other. Blinky knew then that there were financial possibilities in this new line of portrait work.It was some time before the rat eyes of the inventor were able to see exactly what they wanted through this strange device, but Blinky learned. And he fitted a telescope back of the ray and found that he could look along it and see as if through a great funnel what was transpiring blocks and blocks away; he looked where he would, and brick walls or stone were like glass when the new ray struck through them.Blinky never knew what he had—never dreamed of the tremendous potentialities in his oscillating ethereal ray that had a range and penetration beyond anything known. But he knew, in a vague way, that this ray was a channel for light waves to follow, and he learned that he could vary the range of the ray and that whatever light was shown at the end of that range came to him as clear and distinct as if he were there in the room.He sat for hours, staring through the telescope. He would train the device upon a building across the street, then cut down the current until the unseen vibration penetrated inside the building. If there was nothing there of interest he would gradually increase the power, and the ray would extend out and still out into other rooms and beyond them to still others. Blinky had a lot of fun, but he never forgot the practical application of the device—practical, that is, from the distorted viewpoint of a warped mind.“I’veheard about your machine,” said a pasty-faced man one day, as he sat in Blinky’s room, “and I think it’s a lot of hooey. But I’d give just one grand to know who is with the district attorney this minute.”“Where is he?” asked Blinky.“Two blocks down the street, in the station house … and if Pokey Barnard is with him, the lousy stool-pigeon—”Blinky paid no attention to the other’s opinion of one Pokey Barnard; he was busy with a sputtering blue light and a telescope behind a shield of heavy lead.“Put your money on the table,” he said, finally: “there’s the dicks … and there’s Pokey. Take a look—”It was some few minutes later that Blinky learned of another valuable featurein his ray. He was watching the district attorney when the pasty-faced man brushed against a hanging incandescent light. There was a bit of bare wire exposed, and as it swung into the ray the fuses in the Collins studio blew out instantly.But the squinting eyes at the telescope had seen something first. They had seen the spare form of the district attorney throw itself from the chair as if it had been dealt a blow—or had received an electric shock.Blinky put in new fuses—heavier ones—and tried it again on another subject. And again the man at the receiving end got a shot of current that sent him sprawling.“Now what the devil—” demanded Blinky. He stood off and looked at the machine, the wire with its 110 volts, the invisible ray that was streaming out.“It’s insulated, the machine is,” he told his caller, “so the juice won’t shoot back if I keep my hands off; but why,” he demanded profanely, “don’t it short on the first thing it touches?”Hewas picturing vaguely a ray like a big insulated cable, with light and current both traveling along a core at its center, cut off, insulated by the ray, so that only the bare end where the ray stopped could make contact.“Some more of them damn electrons.” he hazarded; then demanded of his caller: “But am I one hell of a smart guy? Or am I?”There was no denying this fact. The pasty-faced man told Blinky with lurid emphasis just how smart. He had seen with his own eyes and this was too good to keep.He paid his one grand and departed, first to make certain necessary arrangements for the untimely end of one Pokey Barnard, squealer, louse, et cetera, et cetera, and then to spread the glad news through the underworld of Collins’ invention.That was Blinky’s big mistake, as was shown a few days later. Not many had taken seriously the account of the photographer’s experiments, but there was one who had, as was evident. A bearded man, whose eyes stared somewhat wildly from beneath a shock of frowzy hair, entered the Collins work-room and locked the door behind him. His English was imperfect, but the heavy automatic in his hand could not be misunderstood. He forced the trembling inventor to give a demonstration, and the visitor’s face showed every evidence of delight.“The cur-rent,” he demanded with careful words, “the electreek cur-rent, you shall do also. Yes?”Again the automatic brought quick assent, and again the visitor showed his complete satisfaction. Showed it by slugging the inventor quietly and efficiently and packing the apparatus in the big suitcase he had brought.Blinky Collins had been fond of that machine. He had found a form of television with uncounted possibilities, and it had been for him the perfect instrument of a blackmailing Peeping Tom; he had learned the secret of directed wireless transmission of power and had seen it as a means for annoying his enemies. Yet Blinky Collins—the late Blinky Collins—offered no least objection, when the bearded man walked off with the machine. His body, sprawled awkwardly in the corner, was quite dead….Andnow, some two months later, in his Washington office, the Chief of the United States Secret Service pushed a paper across his desk to a waiting man and leaned back in his chair.“What would you make of that, Del?” he asked.Robert Delamater reached leisurely for the paper. He regarded it with sleepy, half-closed eyes.There was a crude drawing of an eye at the top. Below was printed—not written—a message in careful, preciseletters: “Take warning. The Eye of Allah is upon you. You shall instructions receive from time to time. Follow them. Obey.”Delamater laughed. “Why ask me what I think of a nut letter like that. You’ve had plenty of them just as crazy.”“This didn’t come to me,” said the Chief; “it was addressed to the President of the United States.”“Well, there will be others, and we will run the poor sap down. Nothing out of the ordinary I should say.”“That is what I thought—at first. Read this—” The big, heavy-set man pushed another and similar paper across the desk. “This one was addressed to the Secretary of State.”Delamater did not read it at once. He held both papers to the light; his fingers touched the edges only.“No watermark,” he mused; “ordinary white writing stock—sold in all the five and ten cent stores. Tried these for fingerprints I suppose?”.“Read it,” suggested the Chief.“Another picture of an eye,” said Delamater aloud, and read: “‘Warning. You are dealing with an emissary from a foreign power who is an unfriend of my country. See him no more. This is the first and last warning. The Eye of Allah watches.’“And what is this below—? ‘He did not care for your cigars, Mr. Secretary. Next time—but there must be no next time.’”Delamaterread slowly—lazily. He seemed only slightly interested except when he came to the odd conclusion of the note. But the Chief knew Delamater and knew how that slow indolence could give place to a feverish, alert concentration when work was to be done.“Crazy as a loon,” was the man’s conclusion as he dropped the papers upon the desk.“Crazy,” his chief corrected, “like a fox! Read the last line again; then get this—“The Secretary of Stateismeeting with a foreign agent who is here very much incog. Came in as a servant of a real ambassador. Slipped quietly into Washington, and not a soul knew he was here. He met the Secretary in a closed room; no one saw him come or leave—”;“Well, the Secretary tells me that in that room where nobody could see he offered this man a cigar. His visitor took it, tried to smoke it, apologized—and lit one of his own vile cigarettes.”“Hm-m!” Delamater sat a little straighter in his chair; his eyebrows were raised now in questioning astonishment. “Dictaphone? Some employee of the Department listening in?”“Impossible.”“Now that begins to be interesting,” the other conceded. His eyes had lost their sleepy look. “Want me to take it on?”“Later. Right now. I want you to take this visiting gentleman under your personal charge. Here is the name and the room and hotel where he is staying. He is to meet with the Secretary to-night—he knows where. You will get to him unobserved—absolutely unseen; I can leave that to you. Take him yourself to his appointment, and take him without a brass band. But have what men you want tail you and watch out for spies…. Then, when he is through, bring him back and deliver him safely to his room. Compray?”“Right—give me Wilkins and Smeed. I rather think I can get this bird there and back without being seen, but perhaps they may catch Allah keeping tabs on us at that.” He laughed amusedly as he took the paper with the name and address.A waiterwith pencil and order-pad might have been seen some hours later going as if from the kitchen to the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. And the same waiter, afew minutes later, was escorting a guest from a rear service-door to an inconspicuous car parked nearby. The waiter slipped behind the wheel.A taxi, whose driver was half asleep, was parked a hundred feet behind them at the curb. As they drove away and no other sign of life was seen in the quiet street the driver of the taxi yawned ostentatiously and decided to seek a new stand. He neglected possible fares until a man he called Smeed hailed him a block farther on. They followed slowly after the first car … and they trailed it again on its return after some hours.“Safe as a church,” they reported to the driver of the first car. “We’ll swear that nobody was checking up on that trip.”And: “O. K.” Delamater reported to his chief the next morning. “Put one over on this self-appointed Allah that time.”But the Chief did not reply: he was looking at a slip of paper like those he had shown his operative the day before. He tossed it to Delamater and took up the phone.“To the Secretary of State,” Delamater read. “You had your warning. Next time you disobey it shall be you who dies.”The signature was only the image of an eye.TheChief was calling a number; Delamater recognized it as that of the hotel he had visited. “Manager, please, at once,” the big man was saying.He identified himself to the distant man. Then: “Please check up on the man in nine four seven. If he doesn’t answer, enter the room and report at once—I will hold the phone….”The man at the desk tapped steadily with a pencil; Robert Delamater sat quietly, tensely waiting. But some sixth sense told him what the answer would be. He was not surprised when the Chief repeated what the phone had whispered.“Dead?… Yes!… Leave everything absolutely undisturbed. We will be right over.”“Get Doctor Brooks, Del,” he said quietly; “the Eye of Allah was watching after all.”Robert Delamater was silent as they drove to the hotel. Where had he slipped? He trusted Smeed and Wilkins entirely; if they said his car had not been followed it had not. And the visitor had been disguised; he had seen to that. Then, where had this person stood—this being who called himself the Eye of Allah?“Chief,” he said finally. “I didn’t slip—nor Wilkins or Smeed.”“Someone did,” replied the big man, “and it wasn’t the Eye of Allah, either.”The manager of the hotel was waiting to take them to the room. He unlocked the door with his pass key.“Not a thing touched,” he assured the Secret Service men; “there he is, just the way we found him.”In the doorway between the bedroom and bath a body was huddled. Doctor Brooks knelt quickly beside it. His hands worked swiftly for a moment, then he rose to his feet.“Dead,” he announced.“How long?” asked the Chief.“Some time. Hours I should say—perhaps eight or ten.”“Cause?” the query was brief.“It will take an autopsy to determine that. There is no blood or wound to be seen.”Thedoctor was again examining the partly rigid body. He opened one hand; it held a cake of soap. There was a grease mark on the hand.Delamater supplied the explanation. “He touched some grease on the old car I was using,” he said. “Must have gone directly to wash it off. See—there is water spilled on the floor.”Water had indeed been splashed on the tile floor of the bath room; a pool of it still remained about the heavy, foreign-looking shoes of the dead man.Something in it caught Delamater’s eye. He leaned down to pick up three pellets of metal, like small shot, round and shining.“I’ll keep these,” he said, “though the man was never killed with shot as small as that.”“We shall have to wait for the autopsy report,” said the Chief crisply; “that may give the cause of death. Was there anyone in the room—did you enter it with him last night, Del?”“No,” said the operative; “he was very much agitated when we got here—dismissed me rather curtly at the door. He was quite upset about something—spoke English none too well and said something about a warning and damned our Secret Service as inefficient.”“A warning!” said the Chief. The dead man’s brief case was on the bed. He crossed to it and undid the straps; the topmost paper told the reason for the man’s disquiet. It showed the familiar, staring eye. And beneath the eye was a warning: this man was to die if he did not leave Washington at once.The Chief turned to the hotel manager. “Was the door locked?”“Yes.”“But it is a spring lock. Someone could have gone out and closed it after him.”“Not this time. The dead-bolt was thrown. It takes a key to do that from the outside or this thumb-turn on the inside.” The hotel man demonstrated the action of the heavy bolt.“Then, with a duplicate key, a man could have left this room and locked the door behind him.”“Absolutely not. The floor-clerk was on duty all night. I have questioned her: this room was under her eyes all the time. She saw this man return, saw your man, here”—and he pointed to Delamater—“leave him at the door. There was no person left the room after that.”“See about the autopsy, Doctor,” the Chief ordered.And to the manager: “Not a thing here must be touched. Admit only Mr. Delamater and no one else unless he vouches for them.“Del,” he told the operative, “I’m giving you a chance to make up for last night. Go to it.”And Robert Delamater “went to it” with all the thoroughness at his command, and with a total lack of result.Theautopsy helped not at all. The man was dead; it was apparently a natural death. “Not a scratch nor a mark on him,” was the report. But: “… next time it will be you,” the note with the staring eye had warned the Secretary of State. The writer of it was taking full credit for the mysterious death.Robert Delamater had three small bits of metal, like tiny shot, and he racked his brain to connect these with the death. There were fingerprints, too, beautifully developed upon the mysterious missives—prints that tallied with none in the records. There were analyses of the paper—of the ink—and not a clue in any of them.Just three pellets of metal. Robert Delamater had failed utterly, and he was bitter in the knowledge of his failure.“He had you spotted, Del,” the Chief insisted. “The writer of these notes may be crazy, but he was clever enough to know that this mandidsee the Secretary. And he was waiting for him when he came back; then he killed him.”“Without a mark?”“He killed him,” the Chief repeated; “then he left—and that’s that.”“But,” Delamater objected, “the room clerk—”“—took a nap,” broke in the Chief. But Delamater could not be satisfied with the explanation.“He got his, all right,” he conceded, “—got it in a locked room nine stories above the street, with no possible means of bringing it upon himself—and no way for the murderer to escape.I tell you there is something more to this: just the letter to the Secretary, as if this Eye of Allah were spying upon him—”The Chief waved all that aside. “A clever spy,” he insisted. “Too clever for you. And a darn good guesser; he had us all fooled. But we’re dealing with a madman, not a ghost, and he didn’t sail in through a ninth story window nor go out through a locked door; neither did he spy on the Secretary of State in his private office. Don’t try to make a supernatural mystery out of a failure, Del.”The big man’s words were tempered with a laugh, but there was an edge of sarcasm, ill-concealed.Andthen came the next note. And the next. The letters were mailed at various points in and about the city; they came in a flood. And they were addressed to the President of the United States, to the Secretary of War—of the Navy—to all the Cabinet members. And all carried the same threat under the staring eye.The United States, to this man, represented all that was tyrannical and oppressive to the downtrodden of the earth. He proposed to end it—this government first, then others in their turn. It was the outpouring of a wildly irrational mind that came to the office of the harassed Chief of the United States Secret Service, who had instructions to run this man down—this man who signed himself The Eye of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic inquiries as to why a Secret Service department was maintained.The Chief, himself, was directing the investigation—and getting nowhere.“Here is the latest,” he said one morning. “Mailed at New York.” Delamater and a dozen other operatives were in his office: he showed them a letter printed like all the others. There was the eye, and beneath were words that made the readers catch their breath.“The Eye of Allah sees—it has warned—now it will destroy. The day of judgment is at hand. The battleshipMarylandis at anchor in the Hudson River at New York. No more shall it be the weapon of a despot government. It will be destroyed at twelve o’clock on September fifth.”“Wild talk,” said the Chief, “but today is the fourth. The Commander of theMarylandhas been warned—approach by air or water will be impossible. I want you men to patrol the shore and nail this man if he shows up. Lord knows what he intends—bluffing probably—but he may try some fool stunt. If he does—get him!”Eleven-thirtyby the watch on Robert Delamater’s wrist found him seated in the bow of a speed-boat the following morning. They patrolled slowly up and down the shore. There were fellow operatives, he knew, scores of them, posted at all points of vantage along the docks.Eleven forty-five—and the roar of seaplanes came from above where air patrols were-guarding the skies. Small boats drove back and forth on set courses; no curious sight-seeing craft could approach theMarylandthat day. On board the battleship, too, there was activity apparent. A bugle sounded, and the warning of bellowing Klaxons echoed across the water. Here, in the peace and safety of the big port, the great man-of-war was sounding general quarters, and a scurry of running men showed for an instant on her decks. Anti-aircraft guns swung silently upon imaginary targets—The watcher smiled at the absurdity of it all—this preparation to repel the attack of a wild-eyed writer of insane threats. And yet—and yet— He knew, too, there was apprehension in his frequent glances at his watch.One minute to go! Delamatershould have watched the shore. And, instead, he could not keep his eyes from the big fighting-ship silhouetted so clearly less than a mile away, motionless and waiting—waiting—for what? He saw the great turreted guns, useless against this puny, invisible opponent. Above them the fighting tops were gleaming. And above them—Delamater shaded his eyes with a quick, tense hand: the tip of the mast was sparkling. There was a blue flash that glinted along the steel. It was gone to reappear on the fighting top itself—then lower.Whatwas it? the watching man was asking himself. What did it bring to mind? A street-car? A defective trolley? The zipping flash of a contact made and broken? That last!Like the touch of a invisible wire, tremendously charged, a wire that touched and retreated, that made and lost its contact, the flashing arc was working toward the deck. It felt its way to the body of the ship; the arc was plain, starting from mid-air to hiss against the armored side; the arc shortened—went to nothing—vanished…. A puff of smoke from an open port proved its presence inside. Delamater had the conviction that a deadly something had gone through the ship’s side—was insulated from it—was searching with its blazing, arcing end for the ammunition rooms….The realization of that creeping menace came to Delamater with a gripping, numbing horror. The seconds were almost endless as he waited. Slowly, before his terrified eyes, the deck of the great ship bulged upward … slowly it rolled and tore apart … a mammoth turret with sixteen-inch guns was lifting unhurriedly into the air … there were bodies of men rocketing skyward….The mind of the man was racing at lightning speed, and the havoc before him seemed more horrible in its slow, leisurely progress. If he could only move—do something!The shock of the blasted air struck him sprawling into the bottom of the boat; the listener was hammered almost to numbness by the deafening thunder that battered and tore through the still air. At top speed the helmsman drove for the shelter of a hidden cove. They made it an instant before the great waves struck high upon the sand spit. Over the bay hung a ballooning cloud of black and gray—lifting for an instant to show in stark ghastliness the wreckage, broken and twisted, that marked where the battleshipMarylandrested in the mud in the harbor of New York.Theeyes of the Secret-Service men were filled with the indelible impress of what they had seen. Again and again, before him, came the vision of a ship full of men in horrible, slow disintegration; his mind was numbed and his actions and reactions were largely automatic. But somehow he found himself in the roar of the subway, and later he sat in a chair and knew he was in a Pullman of a Washington train.He rode for hours in preoccupied silence, his gaze fixed unseeingly, striving to reach out and out to some distant, unknown something which he was trying to visualize. But he looked at intervals at his hand that held three metal pellets.He was groping for the mental sequence which would bring the few known facts together and indicate their cause. A threat—a seeming spying within a closed and secret room—the murder on the ninth floor, a murder without trace of wound or weapon. Weapon! He stared again at the tangible evidence he held; then shook his head in perplexed abstraction. No—the man was killed by unknown means.And now—theMaryland! And a visible finger of death—touching, flashing, feeling its way to the deadly cargo of powder sacks.Not till he sat alone with his chief did he put into words his thoughts.“A time bomb did it,” the Chief was saying. “The officials deny it, but what other answer is there? No one approached that ship—you know that, Del—no torpedo nor aerial bomb! Nothing as fanciful as that!”Robert Delamater’s lips formed a wry smile. “Nothing at fanciful as that”—and he was thinking, thinking—of what he hardly dared express.“We will start with the ship’s personnel,” the other continued; “find every man who was not on board when the explosion occurred—”“No use,” the operative interrupted; “this was no inside job, Chief.” He paused to choose his words while the other watched him curiously.“Someonedidreach that ship—reached it from a distance—reached it in the same way they reached that poor devil I left at room nine forty-seven. Listen—”Hetold his superior of his vigil on the speed-boat—of the almost invisible flash against the ship’s mast. “He reached it, Chief,” he concluded; “he felt or saw his way down and through the side of that ship. And he fired their ammunition from God knows where.”“I wonder,” said the big man slowly; “I wonder if you know just what you are trying to tell me—just how absurd your idea is. Are you seriously hinting at long-distance vision through solid armor-plate—through these walls of stone and steel? And wireless power-transmission through the same wall—!”“Exactly!” said the operative.“Why, Del, you must be as crazy as this Eye of Allah individual. It’s impossible.”“That word,” said Delamater, quietly, “has been crossed out of scientific books in the past few years.”“What do you mean?”“You have studied some physical science, of course?” Delamater asked. The Chief nodded.“Then you know what I mean. I mean that up to recent years science had all the possibilities and impossibilities neatly divided and catalogued. Ignorance, as always, was the best basis for positive assurance. Then they got inside the atom. And since then your real scientist has been a very humble man. He has seen the impossibility of yesterday become the established fact of to-day.”The Chief of the United States Secret Service was tapping with nervous irritation on the desk before him.“Yes, yes!” he agreed, and again he looked oddly at his operative. “Perhaps there is something to that; you work along that line, Del: you can have a free hand. Take a few days off, a little vacation if you wish. Yes—and ask Sprague to step in from the other office; he has the personnel list.”Robert Delamaterfelt the other’s eyes follow him as he left the room. “And that about lets me out,” he told himself; “he thinks I’ve gone cuckoo, now.”He stopped in a corridor; his fingers, fumbling in a vest pocket, had touched the little metal spheres. Again his mind flashed back to the chain of events he had linked together. He turned toward an inner office.“I would like to see Doctor Brooks,” he said. And when the physician appeared: “About that man who was murdered at the hotel, Doctor—”“Who died,” the doctor corrected; “we found no evidence of murder.”“Who was murdered,” the operative insisted. “Have you his clothing where I can examine it?”“Sure,” agreed the physician. He led Delamater to another room and brought out a box of the dead man’s effects.“But if it’s murder you expect to prove you’ll find no help in this.”The Secret Service man nodded. “I’ll look them over, just the same,” he said. “Thanks.”Alone in the room, he went over the clothing piece by piece. Again he examined each garment, each pocket, thelining, as he had done before when first he took the case. Metal, he thought, he must find metal.But only when a heavy shoe was in his hands did the anxious frown relax from about his eyes.“Of course,” he whispered, half aloud. “What a fool I was! I should have thought of that.”The soles of the shoes were sewed, but, beside the stitches were metal specks, where cobbler’s nails were driven. And in the sole of one shoe were three tiny holes.“Melted!” he said exultantly. “Crazy, am I, Chief? This man was standing on a wet floor; he made a perfect ground. And he got a jolt that melted these nails when it flashed out of him.”He wrapped the clothing carefully and replaced it in the box. And he fingered the metal pellets in his pocket as he slipped quietly from the room.Hedid not stop to talk with Doctor Brooks; he wanted to think, to ponder upon the incredible proof of the theory he had hardly dared believe. The Eye of Allah—the maniac—was real; and his power for evil! There was work to be done, and the point of beginning was not plain.How far did the invisible arm reach? How far could the Eye of Allah see? Where was the generator—the origin of this wireless power; along what channel did it flow? A ray of lightless light—an unseen ethereal vibration…. Delamater could only guess at the answers.The current to kill a man or to flash a spark into silken powder bags need not be heavy, he knew. Five hundred—a thousand volts—if the mysterious conductor carried it without resistance and without loss. People had been killed by house-lighting currents—a mere 110 volts—when conditions were right. There would be no peculiar or unusual demand upon the power company to point him toward the hidden maniac.He tossed restlessly throughout the night, and morning brought no answer to his repeated questions. But it brought a hurry call from his Chief.“Right away,” was the instruction; “don’t lose a minute. Come to the office.”He found the big man at his desk. He was quiet, unhurried, but the operative knew at a glance the tense repression that was being exercised—the iron control of nerves that demanded action and found incompetence and helplessness instead.“I don’t believe your fantastic theories,” he told Delamater. “Impractical—impossible! But—” He handed the waiting man a paper. “We must not leave a stone unturned.”Delamater said nothing; he looked at the paper in his hand. “To the President of the United States,” he read. “Prepare to meet your God. Friday. The eighth. Twelve o’clock.”The signature he hardly saw; the staring, open eye was all too familiar.“That is to-morrow,” said Delamater softly. “The President dies to-morrow.”“No!”exploded the Chief. “Do you realize what that means? The President murdered—more killings to follow—and the killer unknown! Why the country will be in a panic: the whole structure of the Government is threatened!”He paused, then added as he struck his open hand upon the desk: “I will have every available man at the White House.”“For witnesses?” asked Delamater coldly.The big man stared at his operative; the lines of his face were sagging.“Do you believe—really—he can strike him down—at his desk—from a distance?”“I know it.” Delamater’s fingers played for a moment with three bits of metal in his pocket. Unconsciously he voiced his thoughts: “Does the President have nails in his shoes, I wonder?”“What—what’s that?” the Chief demanded.But Delamater made no reply. He was picturing the President. He would be seated at his desk, waiting, waiting … and the bells would be ringing and whistles blowing from distant shops when the bolt would strike…. It would flash from his feet … through the thick rug … through the rug…. It would have to ground.He paid no heed to his Chief’s repeated question. He was seeing, not the rug in the Presidential office, but below it—underneath it—a heavy pad of rubber.“If he can be insulated—” he said aloud, and stared unseeingly at his eagerly listening superiors—“even the telephone cut—no possible connection with the ground—”“For God’s sake, Del, if you’ve got an idea—any hope at all! I’m—I’m up against it, Del.”The operative brought his distant gaze back to the room and the man across from him. “Yes,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, “I’ve got the beginning of an idea; I don’t see the end of it yet.“We can cut him off from the ground—the President, I mean—make an insulated island where he sits. But this devil will get him the instant he leaves … unless … unless….”“Yes—yes?” The Chief’s voice was high-pitched with anxious impatience; for the first time he was admitting to himself his complete helplessness in this emergency.“Unless,” said Delamater, as the idea grew and took shape, “unless that wireless channel works both ways. If it does … if it does….”The big man made a gesture of complete incomprehension.“Wait!” said Robert Delamater, sharply. If ever his sleepy indolence had misled his Chief, there was none to do so now in the voice that rang like cold steel. His eyes were slits under the deep-drawn brows, and his mouth was one straight line.Tothe hunter there is no greater game than man. And Robert Delamater, man-hunter, had his treacherous quarry in sight. He fired staccato questions at his Chief.“Is the President at his desk at twelve?”“Yes.”“Does he know—about this?”“Yes.”“Does he know it means death?”The Chief nodded.“I see a way—a chance,” said the operative. “Do I get a free hand?”“Yes—Good Lord, yes! If there’s any chance of—”Delamater silenced him. “I’ll be the one to take the chance,” he said grimly. “Chief, I intend to impersonate the President.”“Now listen— The President and I are about the same build. I know a man who can take care of the make-up; he will get me by anything but a close inspection. This Eye of Allah, up to now, has worked only in the light. We’ll have to gamble on that and work our change in the dark.“The President must go to bed as usual—impress upon him that he may be under constant surveillance. Then, in the night, he leaves—“Oh, I know he won’t want to hide himself, but he must. That’s up to you.“Arrange for me to go to his room before daylight. From that minute on I am the President. Get me his routine for that morning; I must follow it so as to arouse no least suspicion.”“ButI don’t see—” began the Chief. “You will impersonate him—yes—but what then? You will be killed if this maniac makes good. Is the President of the United States to be a fugitive? Is—”“Hold on, hold on!” said Delamater. He leaned back in his chair; his face relaxed to a smile, then a laugh.“I’ve got it all now. Perhaps it will work. If not—” A shrug of the shoulders completed the thought. “And I have been shooting it to you prettyfast haven’t I! Now here is the idea—“I must be in the President’s chair at noon. This Allah person will be watching in, so I must be acting the part all morning. I will have the heaviest insulation I can get under the rug, and I’ll have something to take the shot instead of myself. And perhaps, perhaps I will send a message back to the Eye of Allah that will be a surprise.“Is it a bet?” he asked. “Remember, I’m taking the chance—unless you know some better way—”The Chief’s chair came down with a bang. “We’ll gamble on it, Del,” he said; “we’ve got to—there is no other way…. And now what do you want?”“A note to the White House electrician,” said Robert Delamater, “and full authority to ask for anything I may need, from the U. S. Treasury down to a pair of wire-cutters.”His smile had become contagious; the Chief’s anxious look relaxed. “If you pull this off, Del, they may give you the Treasury or the Mint at that. But remember, republics are notoriously ungenerous.”“We’ll have to gamble on that, too,” said Robert Delamater.Theheart of the Nation is Washington. Some, there are, who would have us feel that New York rules our lives. Chicago—San Francisco—these and other great cities sometimes forget that they are mere ganglia on the financial and commercial nervous system. The heart is Washington, and, Congress to the contrary notwithstanding, the heart of that heart is not the domed building at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, but an American home. A simple, gracious mansion, standing in quiet dignity and whiteness above its velvet lawns.It is the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common throng that visits the capital.But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others.It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a mass of correspondence.Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call—or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang.On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence—so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake.Toany observer the busy routine of the morning must have passed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew.The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer.“Notice this,” he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. “An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me—just a penetrating ray.”He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it.“So that is that,” he said, and picked up a document to which he called the visitor’s attention.“Just acting,” he explained. “The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o’clock.”“Stand by is right,” the Chief agreed; “that’s about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds—there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del.”“Your expression!” warned Delamater. “Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that.”“Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room.”“Perhaps,” agreed the pseudo-executive, “and again, perhaps not. He won’t get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut—my conversations there are all faked.“There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can’t see it—it is under those papers.”“Andif the current comes—” began the visitor.“When it comes,” the other corrected, “it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly—I hope.”“And then what? How does that let you out?”“Then we will see,” said the presidential figure. “And you’ve been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President’s secretary as you go out.”“He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other’s shoulder.“Good-by,” he said, “and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call.”“Good luck,” said the big man huskily. “We’ve got to hand it to you, Del; you’re—”“Good-by!” The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.There was more careful acting—another conference—some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.Eleven fifty-nine—and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.“Ready,” the man called softly. “Don’t stand too near that line.” The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.The President—to all but the other actors in the morning’s drama—leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away….The man at the desk was waiting—waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.Froma point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current—saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.Then: “Contact!” he shouted. “The switch! Close the switch!”“Closed!” came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: “Stand back there—back—there’s twenty thousand volts on that line—”Again the silence….“Would it work? Would it?” Delamater’s mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation’s’ head. He would leave the ray on—look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?—make of himself a conductor?In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness….And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.“Don’t be a fool,” he told himself fiercely. “Don’t be a fool! Imagination!”The light was out.“Switch off!” a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him—lifting him—as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black….Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.“That’s it, I suppose,” he said, and pointed to a short notice.“X-ray Operator Killed,” was the caption. “Found Dead in Office in Watts Building.” He had read the brief item many times.“That’s what we let the reporters have,” said the Chief.“Was he”—the operative hesitated for a moment—“pretty well fried?”“Quite!”“And the machine?”“Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell.”“The Eye of Allah,” mused Delamater. “Poor devil—poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled—and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?”“Hell, no!” said the Chief. “Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.“Now, there’s a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we’ll have to get after—”
A (water)ship goes down in stormy seas.The great ship tore apart.
The great ship tore apart.
By C. D. Willard
On the fatal seventh of September a certain Secret Service man sat in the President’s chair and—looked back into the Eye of Allah.
Blinky Collins’ part in this matter was very brief. Blinky lasted just long enough to make a great discovery, to brag about it as was Blinky’s way, and then pass on to find his reward in whatever hereafter is set apart for weak-minded crooks whose heads are not hard enough to withstand the crushing impact of a lead-filled pacifier.
The photograph studio of Blinky Collins was on the third floor of a disreputable building in an equally unsavory part of Chicago. There were no tinted pictures of beautiful blondes nor of stern, square-jawed men of affairs in Blinky’s reception room. His clients, who came furtively there, were strongly opposed to having their pictures taken—they came for other purposes. For the photographic work of Mr. Collins was strictly commercial—and peculiar. There were fingerprints to be photographed and identified for purpose of private revenge, photographs of people to be merged and repictured in compromising closeness forreasons of blackmail. And even X-Ray photography was included in the scope of his work.
Thegreat discovery came when a box was brought to the dingy room and Mr. Collins was asked to show what was inside it without the bother and inconvenience of disturbing lock and seals. The X-Ray machine sizzled above it, and a photographic plate below was developed to show a string of round discs that could easily have been pearls.
The temporary possessor of the box was pleased with the result—but Blinky was puzzled. For the developer had brought out an odd result. There were the pearls as expected, but, too, there was a small picture superimposed—a picture of a bald head and a body beneath seated beside a desk. The picture had been taken from above looking straight down, and head and desk were familiar.
Blinky knew them both. The odd part was that he knew also that both of them were at that instant on the ground floor of the same disreputable building, directly under and two floors below his workshop.
Like many great discoveries, this of Blinky’s came as the result of an accident. He had monkeyed with the X-Ray generator and had made certain substitutions. And here was the result—a bald head and a desk, photographed plainly through two heavy wood floors. Blinky scratched his own head in deep thought. And then he repeated the operation.
This time there was a blonde head close to the bald one, and two people were close to the desk and to each other. Blinky knew then that there were financial possibilities in this new line of portrait work.
It was some time before the rat eyes of the inventor were able to see exactly what they wanted through this strange device, but Blinky learned. And he fitted a telescope back of the ray and found that he could look along it and see as if through a great funnel what was transpiring blocks and blocks away; he looked where he would, and brick walls or stone were like glass when the new ray struck through them.
Blinky never knew what he had—never dreamed of the tremendous potentialities in his oscillating ethereal ray that had a range and penetration beyond anything known. But he knew, in a vague way, that this ray was a channel for light waves to follow, and he learned that he could vary the range of the ray and that whatever light was shown at the end of that range came to him as clear and distinct as if he were there in the room.
He sat for hours, staring through the telescope. He would train the device upon a building across the street, then cut down the current until the unseen vibration penetrated inside the building. If there was nothing there of interest he would gradually increase the power, and the ray would extend out and still out into other rooms and beyond them to still others. Blinky had a lot of fun, but he never forgot the practical application of the device—practical, that is, from the distorted viewpoint of a warped mind.
“I’veheard about your machine,” said a pasty-faced man one day, as he sat in Blinky’s room, “and I think it’s a lot of hooey. But I’d give just one grand to know who is with the district attorney this minute.”
“Where is he?” asked Blinky.
“Two blocks down the street, in the station house … and if Pokey Barnard is with him, the lousy stool-pigeon—”
Blinky paid no attention to the other’s opinion of one Pokey Barnard; he was busy with a sputtering blue light and a telescope behind a shield of heavy lead.
“Put your money on the table,” he said, finally: “there’s the dicks … and there’s Pokey. Take a look—”
It was some few minutes later that Blinky learned of another valuable featurein his ray. He was watching the district attorney when the pasty-faced man brushed against a hanging incandescent light. There was a bit of bare wire exposed, and as it swung into the ray the fuses in the Collins studio blew out instantly.
But the squinting eyes at the telescope had seen something first. They had seen the spare form of the district attorney throw itself from the chair as if it had been dealt a blow—or had received an electric shock.
Blinky put in new fuses—heavier ones—and tried it again on another subject. And again the man at the receiving end got a shot of current that sent him sprawling.
“Now what the devil—” demanded Blinky. He stood off and looked at the machine, the wire with its 110 volts, the invisible ray that was streaming out.
“It’s insulated, the machine is,” he told his caller, “so the juice won’t shoot back if I keep my hands off; but why,” he demanded profanely, “don’t it short on the first thing it touches?”
Hewas picturing vaguely a ray like a big insulated cable, with light and current both traveling along a core at its center, cut off, insulated by the ray, so that only the bare end where the ray stopped could make contact.
“Some more of them damn electrons.” he hazarded; then demanded of his caller: “But am I one hell of a smart guy? Or am I?”
There was no denying this fact. The pasty-faced man told Blinky with lurid emphasis just how smart. He had seen with his own eyes and this was too good to keep.
He paid his one grand and departed, first to make certain necessary arrangements for the untimely end of one Pokey Barnard, squealer, louse, et cetera, et cetera, and then to spread the glad news through the underworld of Collins’ invention.
That was Blinky’s big mistake, as was shown a few days later. Not many had taken seriously the account of the photographer’s experiments, but there was one who had, as was evident. A bearded man, whose eyes stared somewhat wildly from beneath a shock of frowzy hair, entered the Collins work-room and locked the door behind him. His English was imperfect, but the heavy automatic in his hand could not be misunderstood. He forced the trembling inventor to give a demonstration, and the visitor’s face showed every evidence of delight.
“The cur-rent,” he demanded with careful words, “the electreek cur-rent, you shall do also. Yes?”
Again the automatic brought quick assent, and again the visitor showed his complete satisfaction. Showed it by slugging the inventor quietly and efficiently and packing the apparatus in the big suitcase he had brought.
Blinky Collins had been fond of that machine. He had found a form of television with uncounted possibilities, and it had been for him the perfect instrument of a blackmailing Peeping Tom; he had learned the secret of directed wireless transmission of power and had seen it as a means for annoying his enemies. Yet Blinky Collins—the late Blinky Collins—offered no least objection, when the bearded man walked off with the machine. His body, sprawled awkwardly in the corner, was quite dead….
Andnow, some two months later, in his Washington office, the Chief of the United States Secret Service pushed a paper across his desk to a waiting man and leaned back in his chair.
“What would you make of that, Del?” he asked.
Robert Delamater reached leisurely for the paper. He regarded it with sleepy, half-closed eyes.
There was a crude drawing of an eye at the top. Below was printed—not written—a message in careful, preciseletters: “Take warning. The Eye of Allah is upon you. You shall instructions receive from time to time. Follow them. Obey.”
Delamater laughed. “Why ask me what I think of a nut letter like that. You’ve had plenty of them just as crazy.”
“This didn’t come to me,” said the Chief; “it was addressed to the President of the United States.”
“Well, there will be others, and we will run the poor sap down. Nothing out of the ordinary I should say.”
“That is what I thought—at first. Read this—” The big, heavy-set man pushed another and similar paper across the desk. “This one was addressed to the Secretary of State.”
Delamater did not read it at once. He held both papers to the light; his fingers touched the edges only.
“No watermark,” he mused; “ordinary white writing stock—sold in all the five and ten cent stores. Tried these for fingerprints I suppose?”.
“Read it,” suggested the Chief.
“Another picture of an eye,” said Delamater aloud, and read: “‘Warning. You are dealing with an emissary from a foreign power who is an unfriend of my country. See him no more. This is the first and last warning. The Eye of Allah watches.’
“And what is this below—? ‘He did not care for your cigars, Mr. Secretary. Next time—but there must be no next time.’”
Delamaterread slowly—lazily. He seemed only slightly interested except when he came to the odd conclusion of the note. But the Chief knew Delamater and knew how that slow indolence could give place to a feverish, alert concentration when work was to be done.
“Crazy as a loon,” was the man’s conclusion as he dropped the papers upon the desk.
“Crazy,” his chief corrected, “like a fox! Read the last line again; then get this—
“The Secretary of Stateismeeting with a foreign agent who is here very much incog. Came in as a servant of a real ambassador. Slipped quietly into Washington, and not a soul knew he was here. He met the Secretary in a closed room; no one saw him come or leave—”;
“Well, the Secretary tells me that in that room where nobody could see he offered this man a cigar. His visitor took it, tried to smoke it, apologized—and lit one of his own vile cigarettes.”
“Hm-m!” Delamater sat a little straighter in his chair; his eyebrows were raised now in questioning astonishment. “Dictaphone? Some employee of the Department listening in?”
“Impossible.”
“Now that begins to be interesting,” the other conceded. His eyes had lost their sleepy look. “Want me to take it on?”
“Later. Right now. I want you to take this visiting gentleman under your personal charge. Here is the name and the room and hotel where he is staying. He is to meet with the Secretary to-night—he knows where. You will get to him unobserved—absolutely unseen; I can leave that to you. Take him yourself to his appointment, and take him without a brass band. But have what men you want tail you and watch out for spies…. Then, when he is through, bring him back and deliver him safely to his room. Compray?”
“Right—give me Wilkins and Smeed. I rather think I can get this bird there and back without being seen, but perhaps they may catch Allah keeping tabs on us at that.” He laughed amusedly as he took the paper with the name and address.
A waiterwith pencil and order-pad might have been seen some hours later going as if from the kitchen to the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. And the same waiter, afew minutes later, was escorting a guest from a rear service-door to an inconspicuous car parked nearby. The waiter slipped behind the wheel.
A taxi, whose driver was half asleep, was parked a hundred feet behind them at the curb. As they drove away and no other sign of life was seen in the quiet street the driver of the taxi yawned ostentatiously and decided to seek a new stand. He neglected possible fares until a man he called Smeed hailed him a block farther on. They followed slowly after the first car … and they trailed it again on its return after some hours.
“Safe as a church,” they reported to the driver of the first car. “We’ll swear that nobody was checking up on that trip.”
And: “O. K.” Delamater reported to his chief the next morning. “Put one over on this self-appointed Allah that time.”
But the Chief did not reply: he was looking at a slip of paper like those he had shown his operative the day before. He tossed it to Delamater and took up the phone.
“To the Secretary of State,” Delamater read. “You had your warning. Next time you disobey it shall be you who dies.”
The signature was only the image of an eye.
TheChief was calling a number; Delamater recognized it as that of the hotel he had visited. “Manager, please, at once,” the big man was saying.
He identified himself to the distant man. Then: “Please check up on the man in nine four seven. If he doesn’t answer, enter the room and report at once—I will hold the phone….”
The man at the desk tapped steadily with a pencil; Robert Delamater sat quietly, tensely waiting. But some sixth sense told him what the answer would be. He was not surprised when the Chief repeated what the phone had whispered.
“Dead?… Yes!… Leave everything absolutely undisturbed. We will be right over.”
“Get Doctor Brooks, Del,” he said quietly; “the Eye of Allah was watching after all.”
Robert Delamater was silent as they drove to the hotel. Where had he slipped? He trusted Smeed and Wilkins entirely; if they said his car had not been followed it had not. And the visitor had been disguised; he had seen to that. Then, where had this person stood—this being who called himself the Eye of Allah?
“Chief,” he said finally. “I didn’t slip—nor Wilkins or Smeed.”
“Someone did,” replied the big man, “and it wasn’t the Eye of Allah, either.”
The manager of the hotel was waiting to take them to the room. He unlocked the door with his pass key.
“Not a thing touched,” he assured the Secret Service men; “there he is, just the way we found him.”
In the doorway between the bedroom and bath a body was huddled. Doctor Brooks knelt quickly beside it. His hands worked swiftly for a moment, then he rose to his feet.
“Dead,” he announced.
“How long?” asked the Chief.
“Some time. Hours I should say—perhaps eight or ten.”
“Cause?” the query was brief.
“It will take an autopsy to determine that. There is no blood or wound to be seen.”
Thedoctor was again examining the partly rigid body. He opened one hand; it held a cake of soap. There was a grease mark on the hand.
Delamater supplied the explanation. “He touched some grease on the old car I was using,” he said. “Must have gone directly to wash it off. See—there is water spilled on the floor.”
Water had indeed been splashed on the tile floor of the bath room; a pool of it still remained about the heavy, foreign-looking shoes of the dead man.
Something in it caught Delamater’s eye. He leaned down to pick up three pellets of metal, like small shot, round and shining.
“I’ll keep these,” he said, “though the man was never killed with shot as small as that.”
“We shall have to wait for the autopsy report,” said the Chief crisply; “that may give the cause of death. Was there anyone in the room—did you enter it with him last night, Del?”
“No,” said the operative; “he was very much agitated when we got here—dismissed me rather curtly at the door. He was quite upset about something—spoke English none too well and said something about a warning and damned our Secret Service as inefficient.”
“A warning!” said the Chief. The dead man’s brief case was on the bed. He crossed to it and undid the straps; the topmost paper told the reason for the man’s disquiet. It showed the familiar, staring eye. And beneath the eye was a warning: this man was to die if he did not leave Washington at once.
The Chief turned to the hotel manager. “Was the door locked?”
“Yes.”
“But it is a spring lock. Someone could have gone out and closed it after him.”
“Not this time. The dead-bolt was thrown. It takes a key to do that from the outside or this thumb-turn on the inside.” The hotel man demonstrated the action of the heavy bolt.
“Then, with a duplicate key, a man could have left this room and locked the door behind him.”
“Absolutely not. The floor-clerk was on duty all night. I have questioned her: this room was under her eyes all the time. She saw this man return, saw your man, here”—and he pointed to Delamater—“leave him at the door. There was no person left the room after that.”
“See about the autopsy, Doctor,” the Chief ordered.
And to the manager: “Not a thing here must be touched. Admit only Mr. Delamater and no one else unless he vouches for them.
“Del,” he told the operative, “I’m giving you a chance to make up for last night. Go to it.”
And Robert Delamater “went to it” with all the thoroughness at his command, and with a total lack of result.
Theautopsy helped not at all. The man was dead; it was apparently a natural death. “Not a scratch nor a mark on him,” was the report. But: “… next time it will be you,” the note with the staring eye had warned the Secretary of State. The writer of it was taking full credit for the mysterious death.
Robert Delamater had three small bits of metal, like tiny shot, and he racked his brain to connect these with the death. There were fingerprints, too, beautifully developed upon the mysterious missives—prints that tallied with none in the records. There were analyses of the paper—of the ink—and not a clue in any of them.
Just three pellets of metal. Robert Delamater had failed utterly, and he was bitter in the knowledge of his failure.
“He had you spotted, Del,” the Chief insisted. “The writer of these notes may be crazy, but he was clever enough to know that this mandidsee the Secretary. And he was waiting for him when he came back; then he killed him.”
“Without a mark?”
“He killed him,” the Chief repeated; “then he left—and that’s that.”
“But,” Delamater objected, “the room clerk—”
“—took a nap,” broke in the Chief. But Delamater could not be satisfied with the explanation.
“He got his, all right,” he conceded, “—got it in a locked room nine stories above the street, with no possible means of bringing it upon himself—and no way for the murderer to escape.I tell you there is something more to this: just the letter to the Secretary, as if this Eye of Allah were spying upon him—”
The Chief waved all that aside. “A clever spy,” he insisted. “Too clever for you. And a darn good guesser; he had us all fooled. But we’re dealing with a madman, not a ghost, and he didn’t sail in through a ninth story window nor go out through a locked door; neither did he spy on the Secretary of State in his private office. Don’t try to make a supernatural mystery out of a failure, Del.”
The big man’s words were tempered with a laugh, but there was an edge of sarcasm, ill-concealed.
Andthen came the next note. And the next. The letters were mailed at various points in and about the city; they came in a flood. And they were addressed to the President of the United States, to the Secretary of War—of the Navy—to all the Cabinet members. And all carried the same threat under the staring eye.
The United States, to this man, represented all that was tyrannical and oppressive to the downtrodden of the earth. He proposed to end it—this government first, then others in their turn. It was the outpouring of a wildly irrational mind that came to the office of the harassed Chief of the United States Secret Service, who had instructions to run this man down—this man who signed himself The Eye of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic inquiries as to why a Secret Service department was maintained.
The Chief, himself, was directing the investigation—and getting nowhere.
“Here is the latest,” he said one morning. “Mailed at New York.” Delamater and a dozen other operatives were in his office: he showed them a letter printed like all the others. There was the eye, and beneath were words that made the readers catch their breath.
“The Eye of Allah sees—it has warned—now it will destroy. The day of judgment is at hand. The battleshipMarylandis at anchor in the Hudson River at New York. No more shall it be the weapon of a despot government. It will be destroyed at twelve o’clock on September fifth.”
“Wild talk,” said the Chief, “but today is the fourth. The Commander of theMarylandhas been warned—approach by air or water will be impossible. I want you men to patrol the shore and nail this man if he shows up. Lord knows what he intends—bluffing probably—but he may try some fool stunt. If he does—get him!”
Eleven-thirtyby the watch on Robert Delamater’s wrist found him seated in the bow of a speed-boat the following morning. They patrolled slowly up and down the shore. There were fellow operatives, he knew, scores of them, posted at all points of vantage along the docks.
Eleven forty-five—and the roar of seaplanes came from above where air patrols were-guarding the skies. Small boats drove back and forth on set courses; no curious sight-seeing craft could approach theMarylandthat day. On board the battleship, too, there was activity apparent. A bugle sounded, and the warning of bellowing Klaxons echoed across the water. Here, in the peace and safety of the big port, the great man-of-war was sounding general quarters, and a scurry of running men showed for an instant on her decks. Anti-aircraft guns swung silently upon imaginary targets—
The watcher smiled at the absurdity of it all—this preparation to repel the attack of a wild-eyed writer of insane threats. And yet—and yet— He knew, too, there was apprehension in his frequent glances at his watch.
One minute to go! Delamatershould have watched the shore. And, instead, he could not keep his eyes from the big fighting-ship silhouetted so clearly less than a mile away, motionless and waiting—waiting—for what? He saw the great turreted guns, useless against this puny, invisible opponent. Above them the fighting tops were gleaming. And above them—
Delamater shaded his eyes with a quick, tense hand: the tip of the mast was sparkling. There was a blue flash that glinted along the steel. It was gone to reappear on the fighting top itself—then lower.
Whatwas it? the watching man was asking himself. What did it bring to mind? A street-car? A defective trolley? The zipping flash of a contact made and broken? That last!
Like the touch of a invisible wire, tremendously charged, a wire that touched and retreated, that made and lost its contact, the flashing arc was working toward the deck. It felt its way to the body of the ship; the arc was plain, starting from mid-air to hiss against the armored side; the arc shortened—went to nothing—vanished…. A puff of smoke from an open port proved its presence inside. Delamater had the conviction that a deadly something had gone through the ship’s side—was insulated from it—was searching with its blazing, arcing end for the ammunition rooms….
The realization of that creeping menace came to Delamater with a gripping, numbing horror. The seconds were almost endless as he waited. Slowly, before his terrified eyes, the deck of the great ship bulged upward … slowly it rolled and tore apart … a mammoth turret with sixteen-inch guns was lifting unhurriedly into the air … there were bodies of men rocketing skyward….
The mind of the man was racing at lightning speed, and the havoc before him seemed more horrible in its slow, leisurely progress. If he could only move—do something!
The shock of the blasted air struck him sprawling into the bottom of the boat; the listener was hammered almost to numbness by the deafening thunder that battered and tore through the still air. At top speed the helmsman drove for the shelter of a hidden cove. They made it an instant before the great waves struck high upon the sand spit. Over the bay hung a ballooning cloud of black and gray—lifting for an instant to show in stark ghastliness the wreckage, broken and twisted, that marked where the battleshipMarylandrested in the mud in the harbor of New York.
Theeyes of the Secret-Service men were filled with the indelible impress of what they had seen. Again and again, before him, came the vision of a ship full of men in horrible, slow disintegration; his mind was numbed and his actions and reactions were largely automatic. But somehow he found himself in the roar of the subway, and later he sat in a chair and knew he was in a Pullman of a Washington train.
He rode for hours in preoccupied silence, his gaze fixed unseeingly, striving to reach out and out to some distant, unknown something which he was trying to visualize. But he looked at intervals at his hand that held three metal pellets.
He was groping for the mental sequence which would bring the few known facts together and indicate their cause. A threat—a seeming spying within a closed and secret room—the murder on the ninth floor, a murder without trace of wound or weapon. Weapon! He stared again at the tangible evidence he held; then shook his head in perplexed abstraction. No—the man was killed by unknown means.
And now—theMaryland! And a visible finger of death—touching, flashing, feeling its way to the deadly cargo of powder sacks.
Not till he sat alone with his chief did he put into words his thoughts.
“A time bomb did it,” the Chief was saying. “The officials deny it, but what other answer is there? No one approached that ship—you know that, Del—no torpedo nor aerial bomb! Nothing as fanciful as that!”
Robert Delamater’s lips formed a wry smile. “Nothing at fanciful as that”—and he was thinking, thinking—of what he hardly dared express.
“We will start with the ship’s personnel,” the other continued; “find every man who was not on board when the explosion occurred—”
“No use,” the operative interrupted; “this was no inside job, Chief.” He paused to choose his words while the other watched him curiously.
“Someonedidreach that ship—reached it from a distance—reached it in the same way they reached that poor devil I left at room nine forty-seven. Listen—”
Hetold his superior of his vigil on the speed-boat—of the almost invisible flash against the ship’s mast. “He reached it, Chief,” he concluded; “he felt or saw his way down and through the side of that ship. And he fired their ammunition from God knows where.”
“I wonder,” said the big man slowly; “I wonder if you know just what you are trying to tell me—just how absurd your idea is. Are you seriously hinting at long-distance vision through solid armor-plate—through these walls of stone and steel? And wireless power-transmission through the same wall—!”
“Exactly!” said the operative.
“Why, Del, you must be as crazy as this Eye of Allah individual. It’s impossible.”
“That word,” said Delamater, quietly, “has been crossed out of scientific books in the past few years.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have studied some physical science, of course?” Delamater asked. The Chief nodded.
“Then you know what I mean. I mean that up to recent years science had all the possibilities and impossibilities neatly divided and catalogued. Ignorance, as always, was the best basis for positive assurance. Then they got inside the atom. And since then your real scientist has been a very humble man. He has seen the impossibility of yesterday become the established fact of to-day.”
The Chief of the United States Secret Service was tapping with nervous irritation on the desk before him.
“Yes, yes!” he agreed, and again he looked oddly at his operative. “Perhaps there is something to that; you work along that line, Del: you can have a free hand. Take a few days off, a little vacation if you wish. Yes—and ask Sprague to step in from the other office; he has the personnel list.”
Robert Delamaterfelt the other’s eyes follow him as he left the room. “And that about lets me out,” he told himself; “he thinks I’ve gone cuckoo, now.”
He stopped in a corridor; his fingers, fumbling in a vest pocket, had touched the little metal spheres. Again his mind flashed back to the chain of events he had linked together. He turned toward an inner office.
“I would like to see Doctor Brooks,” he said. And when the physician appeared: “About that man who was murdered at the hotel, Doctor—”
“Who died,” the doctor corrected; “we found no evidence of murder.”
“Who was murdered,” the operative insisted. “Have you his clothing where I can examine it?”
“Sure,” agreed the physician. He led Delamater to another room and brought out a box of the dead man’s effects.
“But if it’s murder you expect to prove you’ll find no help in this.”
The Secret Service man nodded. “I’ll look them over, just the same,” he said. “Thanks.”
Alone in the room, he went over the clothing piece by piece. Again he examined each garment, each pocket, thelining, as he had done before when first he took the case. Metal, he thought, he must find metal.
But only when a heavy shoe was in his hands did the anxious frown relax from about his eyes.
“Of course,” he whispered, half aloud. “What a fool I was! I should have thought of that.”
The soles of the shoes were sewed, but, beside the stitches were metal specks, where cobbler’s nails were driven. And in the sole of one shoe were three tiny holes.
“Melted!” he said exultantly. “Crazy, am I, Chief? This man was standing on a wet floor; he made a perfect ground. And he got a jolt that melted these nails when it flashed out of him.”
He wrapped the clothing carefully and replaced it in the box. And he fingered the metal pellets in his pocket as he slipped quietly from the room.
Hedid not stop to talk with Doctor Brooks; he wanted to think, to ponder upon the incredible proof of the theory he had hardly dared believe. The Eye of Allah—the maniac—was real; and his power for evil! There was work to be done, and the point of beginning was not plain.
How far did the invisible arm reach? How far could the Eye of Allah see? Where was the generator—the origin of this wireless power; along what channel did it flow? A ray of lightless light—an unseen ethereal vibration…. Delamater could only guess at the answers.
The current to kill a man or to flash a spark into silken powder bags need not be heavy, he knew. Five hundred—a thousand volts—if the mysterious conductor carried it without resistance and without loss. People had been killed by house-lighting currents—a mere 110 volts—when conditions were right. There would be no peculiar or unusual demand upon the power company to point him toward the hidden maniac.
He tossed restlessly throughout the night, and morning brought no answer to his repeated questions. But it brought a hurry call from his Chief.
“Right away,” was the instruction; “don’t lose a minute. Come to the office.”
He found the big man at his desk. He was quiet, unhurried, but the operative knew at a glance the tense repression that was being exercised—the iron control of nerves that demanded action and found incompetence and helplessness instead.
“I don’t believe your fantastic theories,” he told Delamater. “Impractical—impossible! But—” He handed the waiting man a paper. “We must not leave a stone unturned.”
Delamater said nothing; he looked at the paper in his hand. “To the President of the United States,” he read. “Prepare to meet your God. Friday. The eighth. Twelve o’clock.”
The signature he hardly saw; the staring, open eye was all too familiar.
“That is to-morrow,” said Delamater softly. “The President dies to-morrow.”
“No!”exploded the Chief. “Do you realize what that means? The President murdered—more killings to follow—and the killer unknown! Why the country will be in a panic: the whole structure of the Government is threatened!”
He paused, then added as he struck his open hand upon the desk: “I will have every available man at the White House.”
“For witnesses?” asked Delamater coldly.
The big man stared at his operative; the lines of his face were sagging.
“Do you believe—really—he can strike him down—at his desk—from a distance?”
“I know it.” Delamater’s fingers played for a moment with three bits of metal in his pocket. Unconsciously he voiced his thoughts: “Does the President have nails in his shoes, I wonder?”
“What—what’s that?” the Chief demanded.
But Delamater made no reply. He was picturing the President. He would be seated at his desk, waiting, waiting … and the bells would be ringing and whistles blowing from distant shops when the bolt would strike…. It would flash from his feet … through the thick rug … through the rug…. It would have to ground.
He paid no heed to his Chief’s repeated question. He was seeing, not the rug in the Presidential office, but below it—underneath it—a heavy pad of rubber.
“If he can be insulated—” he said aloud, and stared unseeingly at his eagerly listening superiors—“even the telephone cut—no possible connection with the ground—”
“For God’s sake, Del, if you’ve got an idea—any hope at all! I’m—I’m up against it, Del.”
The operative brought his distant gaze back to the room and the man across from him. “Yes,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, “I’ve got the beginning of an idea; I don’t see the end of it yet.
“We can cut him off from the ground—the President, I mean—make an insulated island where he sits. But this devil will get him the instant he leaves … unless … unless….”
“Yes—yes?” The Chief’s voice was high-pitched with anxious impatience; for the first time he was admitting to himself his complete helplessness in this emergency.
“Unless,” said Delamater, as the idea grew and took shape, “unless that wireless channel works both ways. If it does … if it does….”
The big man made a gesture of complete incomprehension.
“Wait!” said Robert Delamater, sharply. If ever his sleepy indolence had misled his Chief, there was none to do so now in the voice that rang like cold steel. His eyes were slits under the deep-drawn brows, and his mouth was one straight line.
Tothe hunter there is no greater game than man. And Robert Delamater, man-hunter, had his treacherous quarry in sight. He fired staccato questions at his Chief.
“Is the President at his desk at twelve?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know—about this?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know it means death?”
The Chief nodded.
“I see a way—a chance,” said the operative. “Do I get a free hand?”
“Yes—Good Lord, yes! If there’s any chance of—”
Delamater silenced him. “I’ll be the one to take the chance,” he said grimly. “Chief, I intend to impersonate the President.”
“Now listen— The President and I are about the same build. I know a man who can take care of the make-up; he will get me by anything but a close inspection. This Eye of Allah, up to now, has worked only in the light. We’ll have to gamble on that and work our change in the dark.
“The President must go to bed as usual—impress upon him that he may be under constant surveillance. Then, in the night, he leaves—
“Oh, I know he won’t want to hide himself, but he must. That’s up to you.
“Arrange for me to go to his room before daylight. From that minute on I am the President. Get me his routine for that morning; I must follow it so as to arouse no least suspicion.”
“ButI don’t see—” began the Chief. “You will impersonate him—yes—but what then? You will be killed if this maniac makes good. Is the President of the United States to be a fugitive? Is—”
“Hold on, hold on!” said Delamater. He leaned back in his chair; his face relaxed to a smile, then a laugh.
“I’ve got it all now. Perhaps it will work. If not—” A shrug of the shoulders completed the thought. “And I have been shooting it to you prettyfast haven’t I! Now here is the idea—
“I must be in the President’s chair at noon. This Allah person will be watching in, so I must be acting the part all morning. I will have the heaviest insulation I can get under the rug, and I’ll have something to take the shot instead of myself. And perhaps, perhaps I will send a message back to the Eye of Allah that will be a surprise.
“Is it a bet?” he asked. “Remember, I’m taking the chance—unless you know some better way—”
The Chief’s chair came down with a bang. “We’ll gamble on it, Del,” he said; “we’ve got to—there is no other way…. And now what do you want?”
“A note to the White House electrician,” said Robert Delamater, “and full authority to ask for anything I may need, from the U. S. Treasury down to a pair of wire-cutters.”
His smile had become contagious; the Chief’s anxious look relaxed. “If you pull this off, Del, they may give you the Treasury or the Mint at that. But remember, republics are notoriously ungenerous.”
“We’ll have to gamble on that, too,” said Robert Delamater.
Theheart of the Nation is Washington. Some, there are, who would have us feel that New York rules our lives. Chicago—San Francisco—these and other great cities sometimes forget that they are mere ganglia on the financial and commercial nervous system. The heart is Washington, and, Congress to the contrary notwithstanding, the heart of that heart is not the domed building at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue, but an American home. A simple, gracious mansion, standing in quiet dignity and whiteness above its velvet lawns.
It is the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common throng that visits the capital.
But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others.
It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a mass of correspondence.
Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call—or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang.
On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence—so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake.
Toany observer the busy routine of the morning must have passed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew.
The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer.
“Notice this,” he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. “An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me—just a penetrating ray.”
He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it.
“So that is that,” he said, and picked up a document to which he called the visitor’s attention.
“Just acting,” he explained. “The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o’clock.”
“Stand by is right,” the Chief agreed; “that’s about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds—there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del.”
“Your expression!” warned Delamater. “Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that.”
“Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room.”
“Perhaps,” agreed the pseudo-executive, “and again, perhaps not. He won’t get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut—my conversations there are all faked.
“There is only one spot in this room where that current can pass. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can’t see it—it is under those papers.”
“Andif the current comes—” began the visitor.
“When it comes,” the other corrected, “it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly—I hope.”
“And then what? How does that let you out?”
“Then we will see,” said the presidential figure. “And you’ve been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President’s secretary as you go out.”
“He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other’s shoulder.
“Good-by,” he said, “and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call.”
“Good luck,” said the big man huskily. “We’ve got to hand it to you, Del; you’re—”
“Good-by!” The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.
There was more careful acting—another conference—some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surreptitious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.
Eleven fifty-nine—and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.
“Ready,” the man called softly. “Don’t stand too near that line.” The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.
The President—to all but the other actors in the morning’s drama—leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away….
The man at the desk was waiting—waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.
Froma point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.
Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current—saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.
The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.
Then: “Contact!” he shouted. “The switch! Close the switch!”
“Closed!” came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: “Stand back there—back—there’s twenty thousand volts on that line—”
Again the silence….
“Would it work? Would it?” Delamater’s mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation’s’ head. He would leave the ray on—look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?—make of himself a conductor?
In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.
From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness….
And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.
“Don’t be a fool,” he told himself fiercely. “Don’t be a fool! Imagination!”
The light was out.
“Switch off!” a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him—lifting him—as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black….
Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.
“That’s it, I suppose,” he said, and pointed to a short notice.
“X-ray Operator Killed,” was the caption. “Found Dead in Office in Watts Building.” He had read the brief item many times.
“That’s what we let the reporters have,” said the Chief.
“Was he”—the operative hesitated for a moment—“pretty well fried?”
“Quite!”
“And the machine?”
“Broken glass and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell.”
“The Eye of Allah,” mused Delamater. “Poor devil—poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled—and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?”
“Hell, no!” said the Chief. “Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.
“Now, there’s a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we’ll have to get after—”