CHAPTER XI

The Electronic Space Ray

The story of Officers Frye and O'Madden was greeted at the station with incredulous smiles. Evidently these two doughty old members of the force had been drinking too heavily; or else, like so many thousands, had gone crazy with the heat. Nevertheless, thanks to their allegations, two of their brother officers were dispatched to investigate Philip Dunbar's apartment.

An hour later, they returned. Their uniforms were rumpled; their hair lay loose and dishevelled across their sweaty red brows; their eyes popped from their heads, and their hands shook and twitched with nervous palpitations. Their experience was thus reported to Captain Donnelley by Officer Halloran:

"We went up to that hell's nest, and worse luck to us! Got in without any trouble, didn't we, Jensen? Somebody pulled the door open, and said in the doggonest funniest voice you ever heard, 'Come in, earthlings, we want some sport!' We knew then there was bats in somebody's belfry, but went in anyway, and would you b'lieve it, there wasn't nobody near the door. We walked further inside, and saw a guy working over a lot of tubes and bottles; he said his name was Dunbar all right, and yelled at us, 'I warn you, get out, before it is too late!' ... 'We've got a warrant for your arrest,' says I, 'so you'd better come nice and quiet.' At that he just laughed, didn't he, Jensen?"

"You'd of thought it was something funny, being arrested, by jiminy!" affirmed Officer Jensen.

"Well, nobody wouldn't ever believe it, but before I could get to the guy, the handcuffs was knocked right outer my hands," went on Halloran. "Not by that fellow Dunbar, neither, curse him! He was over on the other side of the room. Somebody hit me right through the air, with something I couldn't see. May I be boiled in tar if I lie!"

"You sure oughter be boiled in tar, if you expect me to believe that tommy-rot!" growled the Captain.

"Well, b'lieve it or not, that ain't nothing to what happened to me," Jensen took up the story. "I felt something grabbing me by the hair. Yes, so help me God! I reached up my hand, and felt something cold and hard, like a lobster's claw. But you still couldn't see a damned thing!"

"Ought of heard what a yell Jensen let out," Halloran continued. "Sure was fit to wake the dead!"

"Oh, gwan!" countered Jensen. "'Twasn't nothing to the way you hollered when you was pitched plumb across the room!"

"Well, who wouldn't holler if they was batted hard against the wall by some invisible devil? I ain't boasting when I say I'm a tough nut to crack, but when that thing, whatever it was, began tweaking my ears and nose and saying, 'This is the way we'll twist your necks, earthlings, if the likes of you ever come back here'--well then, what in thunder do you think I'd do? Stay to get my neck twisted?"

The Captain meanwhile was smiling cynically.

"You boys sure must think I like fish stories!" he remarked.

It may not be that any one took Jensen and Halloran quite seriously. Yet was it not hard to believe that four trusty old members of the force had all gone crazy? The fact is, in any case, that when the Captain considered sending two more men to the mysterious apartment, he could find no one who did not threaten to resign from the force sooner than accept the assignment.

* * * * *

Eleanor meanwhile, as Dunbar had predicted, had regained consciousness. Yet she could give only a confused account of what had happened. "When the bell began ringing so furiously," she testified, "I thought I heard Dunbar stealing behind me, but paid no attention till suddenly I felt a sharp jab in one arm. By then it was too late even to cry out. Everything went black around me before I'd even had time to realize he'd stabbed me again with the hypodermic."

Thanks to her entreaties and the testimony of the officers, she was granted a bodyguard of two detectives; for, as she asserted, "The minute I walk out by myself, that fiend will re-capture me. And I have work to do--very important work, if the world is to be saved!"

Every one smiled in half-veiled amusement. Yet no one could deny the deadly seriousness of the girl's manner.

No one could deny, either, that she was in danger from some mysterious source. On the day after her release, two men in a taxicab swerved suddenly around a street corner, and came within an inch of snatching her from under the noses of the detectives. The would-be abductors, though unsuccessful, made good their escape; and, later that same day, a still more ominous event occurred.

Eleanor was walking in a fog not far from one of the city's main intersections, when suddenly she felt something clutching her. She cried out in her terror; and the detectives, though seeing nothing, fired into the mist. Evidently it was a mere lucky shot that struck the unseen aggressor under the left shoulder, at his "middle nerve center," his most vulnerable spot. At any rate, an unearthly howl came from the invisible--and, more significant yet, a spout of something thick, sticky and golden-orange jutted to the pavement as if from nowhere. And the girl felt the claws of the invisible relaxing.

"Another damned attack of nerves," Police Captain Donnelley called it, when the incident was reported. Yet, being unable to account for the golden-yellow liquid, he consented to double the girl's bodyguard.

Knowing that the time was exceedingly short--in fact, to take Dunbar's word for it, but four days of grace remained--she worked with desperation. Her first idea was to obtain possession of Gates' infra-red eye, which might show the authorities the cobweb meshes that entangled the planet, and so perhaps rouse them to eleventh hour action. But how obtain this invaluable device? Neither a search of the laboratory, nor a ransacking of Gates' home, revealed any trace of the instrument. Eleanor remembered in despair how, on that memorable evening on the roof, the inventor dropped the device just as the Saturnians swooped down; and she concluded that it had either been broken, lost, or snatched up by the invaders.

* * * * *

Therefore she turned to her one other hope. For almost a year, during spare hours in the laboratory, she had been working on what she called the Electronic Space Ray--a beam designed to pierce and dissolve the upper cloud formations. This ray, a modification of the X-ray, engendered by an application of several hundred thousand volts of electricity, had the power of cutting like a knife through any mist, causing the vapors to disperse as though blown aside by a gale. Its range, apparently, was enormous; Eleanor believed it capable of bridging the gulf from the earth to the moon, and held that it would be highly effective at several hundred miles.

Therefore the question arose: if the rays could dissipate a cloud, could they not penetrate the gelatinous envelopes of the Crystal Planetoids? Was it not conceivable that they could rip the Planetoids apart, as a balloon may be ripped by a bullet? She did not know, but the chance, however fantastic it seemed, was not to be ignored.

Surrounded by her four guards, she hastened to the laboratory of the Merlin Research Institute; and, requiring solitude for efficient work, busied herself from dawn to dusk and even through the early hours of daylight to perfect her invention. Formerly she had expected to be able to finish the contrivance at her leisure. But now with what feverish haste she labored, scarcely taking time to eat, to sleep, to think except of one thing only!

At first the fear haunted her that the Saturnians would break in, and steal her away despite her bodyguard. But was it that the one lucky shot, which had spilled the golden-orange blood of her attacker, had deterred the invaders? More probably, they did not think her worth bothering about--what could she, one poor feeble woman, do to avert the doom that had been so well plotted, and that was so soon to descend?

The heat, as she worked, had risen to furnace intensity. Temperatures below a hundred were now rarely found near sea level in the so-called temperate regions; all breezes, except those engendered by electric fans, were memories of the dear departed days; while so many areas were parched and browned, so many people were perishing on all sides, that bureau of statistics no longer kept records. That the long-awaited Day of Judgment was at hand; that the destruction of the earth and all its inhabitants was a matter but of weeks or at most of months, was now the theme of preachers and laymen alike; millions, ceasing to hope, passed their days amid a long mumbling of lamentations and prayers.

* * * * *

Meanwhile few knew or cared about the young woman who, with eyes red and strained, with fingers deft yet nervously hurried, with skin and apron mottled with chemicals, yet with a spirit that refused to give up, labored amid the motors and ray-spouting tubes, the flasks and crucibles of the steamy hot laboratory. Nearly five days had gone by before she had put her machine into working order--five days which, in view of the time lost under the spell of the hypodermic drug, should bring her beyond the deadline set by Dunbar. Already, perhaps, he had turned over the containers of compressed air to the Saturnians! Already they were making their last deadly assault! Already it was too late--too late to save the earth!

Nevertheless, if but one chance in ten thousand remained, that chance must not be tossed aside.

Her machine, when ready, was a monstrous-looking affair, somewhat resembling a siege-gun in appearance. The fifteen-foot steel snout, shooting upward like a spire from the central mass of lenses, prisms and radio-like tubes, was attached by wires to several huge dynamos. A telescope, fastened to the side of the main tube, connected with the range finder; while the whole could be moved hither and thither on wheels, a little like a great gun on its carriage.

Three skilled mechanics, who had helped to construct the apparatus on Eleanor's instructions, shook their heads doubtfully over the completed instrument. "The lady must be crazy," they muttered in private, "if she thinks such a rigamagig can save the world!"

The skeptics were, it is true, just a little impressed by the first demonstration. The machine was wheeled into a courtyard adjoining the Research Institute; and its mouth was pointed upward into the mists that precluded visibility above a hundred feet. At a signal, the power was turned on; there came a low whirring, accompanied by blue flashes; and almost instantly, as if some unseen fist had thrust its way through them, the vapors disappeared from a circle of sky about ten degrees across, and the azure of heaven appeared for the first time in many days.

Equally impressive was the next experiment. A number of open jars of gelatin were placed against the walls of the building, and the machine was pointed toward them. For half a dozen seconds they were bombarded by the rays; then, upon examination, the gelatin was found to have vanished--to have dissolved despite the intervening glass of the jars, which themselves had seemingly been unaffected!

A faint glow of hope came to the girl's mind as she witnessed these results. Could it be that, after all, not everything was lost? A machine that could work such miracles might also perform wonders against the Planetoids!

But even as this thought flashed over her, there came another realization--a numb, dull realization that struck her like a hand of lead. On one of the Planetoids, hundreds if not thousands of humans were held--at least, so she judged from the reports of the many that disappeared mysteriously after setting out to see Gates dangled from the web of the invaders. Worst of all! The man she loved was a prisoner! If she destroyed the Planetoids, she would destroy Ronald! And after that, though the world lived on, what meaning would life have for her?

But only for a moment did she hesitate. They had reached a point where the fate of individuals did not matter. The sacrifice of all the captives, lamentable as it would be--the sacrifice of her lover--the sacrifice of herself--what did all this count beside the future of the human race?

Gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, she turned back to the Electronic Space Ray. Her eyes were desolate but her manner was determined as she picked up the range finder and revolved the telescope through a newly cleared circle of blue sky.