XXITHE SUBMARINE EAR
Almostbefore we knew it the speed demon had disappeared beyond the circle of the flares.
“Suspiciously near theSybarite,” remarked Kennedy, under his breath, watching the scout cruiser to the last moment as she ran away.
I wondered whether he meant that the swift little motor-boat might have some connection with Shelby Maddox and his new activities, but I said nothing, for Kennedy’s attention was riveted on the wake left by the boat. I looked, too, and could have sworn that there was something moving in the opposite direction to that taken by the boat. What could it be?
On the end of the dock was an incandescent lamp. Craig unscrewed the bulb and inserted another connection in the bulb socket, an insulated cable that led down to the apparatus on the float over which his assistant was still working.
By this time quite a crowd had collected on the dock, and on the float, watching us.
“Burke,” ordered Kennedy, “will you and Jameson make the people stand back? We can’t do anything with so many around.”
As we pressed the new-comers back I saw that among them was Paquita. Though I looked, I could not discover Sanchez, but thought nothing of it, for there were so many about that it would have been hard to find any particular person.
“If you will please stand back,” I implored, trying to keep the curious from almost swamping the float, “you will all be able to see what is going on just as well and, besides, it will be a great deal safer—providing there is an explosion,” I added as a happy afterthought, although I had almost as vague an idea what Kennedy was up to as any of them.
The words had the effect I intended. The crowd gave way, not only willing, but almost in panic.
As they pressed back, however, Paquita pressed forward until she was standing beside me.
“Is—Mr. Maddox—out there?” she asked, pointing out at theSybariteanxiously.
“Why?” I demanded, hoping in her anxiety to catch her off guard.
She shot a quick glance at me. There was no denying that the woman was clever and quick of perception.
“Oh, I just wondered,” she murmured. “I wanted to see him, so much—that is all. And it’s very urgent.”
She glanced about, as though hoping to discover some means of communicating with the yacht, even of getting out to it. But there did not seem to be any offered.
I determined to watch her, and for that reason did not insist that she get back as far as the rest of the crowd. All the time I saw that she was looking constantly out at theSybarite. Did she know something about Shelby Maddox that we did not know? I wondered if, indeed, there might be some valid reason why she should get out there. What did she suspect?
Again she came forward, inquiring whether there was not some way of communicating with theSybarite, and again, when I tried to question her, she refused to give me any satisfaction. However, I could not help noticing that in spite of the cold manner in which Shelby had treated her, she seemed now to be actuated more by the most intense fear for him than by any malice against him.
What it meant I had the greatest curiosity to know, especially when I noticed that Paquita was glancing nervously about as though in great fear that some one might be present and see her.Nor did she seem to be deterred from showing her feelings by the fact that she knew that I, Kennedy’s closest friend, was watching and would undoubtedly report to him. It was as though she had abandoned discretion and cast fear to the winds.
As the minutes passed and nothing happened, Paquita became a trifle calmer and managed to take refuge in the crowd.
I took the opportunity again to run my eye over them. Nowhere in the crowd could I discover Winifred, or, in fact, any of the Maddox family. They seemed to be studiously avoiding appearance in public just now, and I could not blame them, for in a summer colony like that at Westport facts never troubled gossipers.
“What do you suppose Kennedy is afraid of?” whispered Hastings in my ear, nervously. “Your friend is positively uncanny, and I can almost feel that he fears something.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I confessed, “but I’ve seen enough of him to be sure that no one is going to catch him napping. Here’s Riley. Perhaps he has some news.”
The Secret Service operative had shouldered his way through the throng, looking for Burke, who was right behind me.
“What’s the matter,” demanded his chief.
“There’s another message, by telephone from the Seaville Station,” Riley reported. “They say they are having the same trouble again—only more of it.”
“That operator, Steel, came back again,” considered Burke. “Where is he?”
“As soon as I got the message, I hunted him up and took the liberty of sending him up to Mr. Kennedy’s room to look at that arrangement there. I couldn’t make anything out of it myself, I knew, and I thought that he could.”
“Did he?” inquired Burke.
“Yes. Of course he hadn’t seen it work before. But I told him as nearly as I could what you had told me, and it didn’t take him very long to catch on to the thing. After that he said that what was being recorded now must be just the same as it had been before when Mr. Kennedy was there—not messages, but just impulses.”
“Where is he—down here?”
“No, I left him up there. I thought it might be best to have some one there. Did you want to speak to him? There’s a telephone down here in the boat-house up to the switchboard at the Lodge.”
Riley jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at a little shelter built on the end of the dock.
“N-no,” considered Burke. “I wouldn’t know what to tell him.”
“But I think you ought to tell Kennedy that,” I interrupted. “He might know what to do.”
Together Riley and I walked across the float to where Craig was at work, and briefly I told him what had happened.
He looked grave, but did not pause in his adjustment of the machine, whatever it was.
“That’s all right,” he approved. “Yes, get the operator on the wire. Tell him to stay up there. And—yes—tell him to detach that phonograph recording device and go back to straight wireless. He might try to wake up the operator on theSybarite, if he can. I guess he must know the call. Have him do that and then have that telephone girl keep the line clear and connected from the boat-house up to my room. I want to keep in touch with Steel.”
Riley and I pushed through the crowd and finally managed to deliver Kennedy’s message, in spite of the excitement at the Lodge, which had extended by this time to the switchboard operator. I left Riley in the boat-house to hold the wire up to our room, and rejoined Burke and Hastings on the float.
Kennedy had been working with redoubled energy, now that the light bombs had gone outafter serving their purpose. We stood apart now as he made a final inspection of the apparatus which he and his assistant had installed.
Finally Craig pressed down a key which seemed to close a circuit including the connection in the electric-light socket and the arrangement that had been let over the edge of the float. Standing where we were we could feel a sort of dull metallic vibration under our feet, as it were.
“What are you doing?” inquired Hastings, looking curiously at a headgear which Kennedy had over his ears.
“It works!” exclaimed Craig, more to Watkins than to us.
“What does?” persisted Hastings.
“This Fessenden oscillator,” he cried, apparently for the first time recognizing that Hastings had been addressing him.
“What is it?” we asked crowding about. “What does it do?”
“It’s a system for the employment of sound for submarine signals,” he explained, hurriedly. “I am using it to detect moving objects in the water—under the water, perhaps. It’s really a submarine ear.”
In our excitement we could only watch him in wonder.
“People don’t realize the great advance thathas been made in the use of water instead of air as a medium for transmitting sounds,” he continued, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening, observing a stop watch, and figuring rapidly on a piece of paper, all at once. “I can’t stop to explain this apparatus, but, roughly, it is composed of a ring magnet, a copper tube which lies in an air gap of a magnetic field, and a stationary central armature. The magnetic field is much stronger than that in an ordinary dynamo of this size.”
Again he listened, as he pressed the key, and we felt the peculiar vibration, while he figured on the paper.
“The copper tube,” he resumed mechanically to us, though his real attention was on something else, “has an alternating current induced in it. It is attached to solid disks of steel, which in turn are attached to a steel diaphragm an inch thick. Surrounding the oscillator is a large watertight drum.”
“Then it makes use of sound-waves in the water?” queried Hastings, almost incredulously.
“Exactly,” returned Craig. “I use the same instrument for sending and receiving—only I’m not doing any real sending. You see, like the ordinary electric motor, it is capable of acting as a generator, too and a very efficient one. AllI have to do is to throw a switch in one direction when I want to telegraph or telephone under water, and in the other direction when I want to listen.”
“Talking through water!” exclaimed Burke, awestruck by the very idea, as though it were scarcely believable.
“That’s not exactly what I’m doing now,” returned Kennedy, indulgently, “although I could do it if there was any one around this part of the country equipped to receive and reply. I rather suspect, though, that whoever it is is not only not equipped, but wouldn’t want to reply, anyhow.”
“Then what are you doing?” asked Burke, rather mystified.
“Well, you see I can send out signals and listen for their reflection—really the echo under water. More than that, I can get the sounds direct from any source that is making them. If there was a big steamer out there I could hear her engines and propellers, even if I couldn’t see her around the point. Light travels in straight lines, but you can get sounds around a corner, as it were.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “I think I see. Even if that little scout cruiser did disappear around the point, you can still hear her through the water. Is that it?”
“Partly,” nodded Kennedy. “You know, sound travels through water at a velocity of about four thousand feet a second. For instance, I find I can get an echo from somewhere practically instantaneously. That’s the bottom of the bay—here. Another echo comes back to me in about a twentieth of a second. That, I take it, is reflected from the sea wall on the shore, back of us, at high tide. It must be roughly a hundred feet—you see, that corresponds. It is a matter of calculation.”
“Is that all?” I prompted, as he paused again.
“No, I’ve located the echo from theSybariteand some others. But,” he added slowly, “there’s one I can’t account for. There’s a sound that is coming to me direct from somewhere. I can’t just place it, for there isn’t a moving craft visible and it doesn’t give the same note as that little cruiser. It’s sharper. Just now I tried to send out my own impulses in the hope of getting an echo from it, and I succeeded. The echo comes back to me in something more than five seconds. You see, that would make twenty thousand-odd feet. Half of that would be nearly two miles, and that roughly corresponds with the position where we saw the scout cruiser at first, before it fled. There’s something out there.”
“Then I was right,” I exclaimed excitedly.“I thought I saw something in the wake of the cruiser.”
Kennedy shook his head gravely. “I’m afraid you were,” he muttered. “There’s something there, all right. That wireless operator is up in our room and you have a wire from the boathouse to him?”
“Yes,” I returned. “Riley’s holding it open.”
Anxiously Kennedy listened again in silence, as though to verify some growing suspicion. What was it he heard?
Quickly he pulled the headgear off and before I knew it had clapped it on my own head.
“Tell me what it sounds like,” he asked, tensely.
I listened eagerly, though I was no electrical or mechanical engineer, and such things were usually to me a sealed book. Still, I was able to describe a peculiar metallic throbbing.
“Record the time for the echo from it,” ordered Kennedy, thrusting the stop watch into my hands. “Press it the instant you hear the return sound after I push down the key. I want to be sure of it and eliminate my own personal equation from the calculation. Are you ready?”
I nodded and an instant later, as he noted the time, I heard through the oscillator the peculiar vibration I had felt when the key was depressed.On thequi viveI waited for the return echo. Sure enough, there it was and I mechanically registered it on the watch.
“Five and thirty-hundredths seconds,” muttered Kennedy. “I had five and thirty-five hundredths. It’s coming nearer—you hear the sound direct again?”
I did, just a trifle more distinctly, and I said so.
Confirmed in his own judgment, Craig hastily turned to the student. “Run up there to the boat-house,” he directed. “Have Riley call that wireless operator on the telephone and tell him to get theSybariteon the wireless—if he hasn’t done it already. Then have him tell them not to try to move the yacht under any circumstance—but for God’s sake to get off it themselves—as quick as they can!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, breathlessly. “What was that humming in the oscillator?”
“The wireless destroyer—the telautomaton model—has been launched full at theSybarite,” Craig exclaimed. “You remember it was large enough, even if it was only a model, to destroy a good-sized craft if it carried a charge of high explosive. It has been launched and is being directed from that fast cruiser back of the point.”
We looked at one another aghast. What couldwe do? There was a sickening feeling of helplessness in the face of this new terror of the seas.
“It—it has really been launched?” cried an agitated voice of a girl behind us.
Paquita had pushed her way altogether through the crowd while we were engrossed in listening through the submarine ear. She had heard what Kennedy had just said and now stood before us, staring wildly.
“Oh,” she cried, frantically clasping her hands, “isn’t there anything—anything that can stop it—that can save him?”
She was not acting now. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of her anxiety, nor of whom the “him” meant. I wondered whether she might have been directly or indirectly responsible, whether she was not now repentant for whatever part she had played. At least she must be, as far as Shelby Maddox was involved. Then I recollected the black looks that Sanchez had given Shelby earlier in the evening. Was jealousy playing a part as well as cupidity?
Kennedy had been busy, while the rest of us had been standing stunned. Suddenly another light-bomb ricocheted over the water.
“Keep on sending them, one by one,” he ordered the student, who had returned. “We’ll need all the light we can get.”
Over the shadowy waves we could now see the fine line of foam left by the destroyer as it shot ahead swiftly.
Events were now moving faster than I can tell them. Kennedy glanced about. On the opposite side of the float some one of the visitors from the cottages to the dance at the Casino had left a trim hardwood speedboat. Without waiting to inquire whose it was, Craig leaped into it and spun the engine.
“The submarine ear has warned us,” he shouted, beckoning to Burke and myself. “Even if we cannot save the yacht, we may save their lives! Come on!”
We were off in an instant and the race was on—one of the most exciting I have ever been in—a race between this speedy motor-boat and a telautomatic torpedo to see which might get to the yacht first. Though we knew that the telautomaton had had such a start before it was discovered that we could not beat it, still there was always the hope that its mechanism might slow down or break down.
Failing to get there first, there was always a chance of our being in at the rescue.
In the penetrating light of the flare-bombs, as we approached closer the spot in which Watkins was now dropping them regularly, we could seethe telautomaton, speeding ahead on its mission of death, its wake like the path of a great man-eating fish. What would happen if it struck I could well imagine.
Each of us did what he could to speed the motor. For this was a race with the most terrible engine yet devised by American inventive genius.