The Hammer of Thor, Charles Willard Diffin [fiction books to read txt] 📗

Section Eight—never mind the exact bearings—you'll find it without any trouble I imagine. Now beat it! And let me know what kind of a fire this is that starts on a fifty-mile front! You're in charge till I come."

Ten seconds later, had the Infant been watching, which he had not—for his eyes were all on the distant smoke—he would have seen the beautiful curving sweep of a scarlet projectile, whose screaming propeller swept her off and up; he would then have seen it lie back flat as the great stern exhaust made a rocket of the ship to send it roaring into the heights.

And in the air-tight cabin of the newest fire-fighting machine of the A. F. F., Danny O'Rourke pulled his body out of the slumped position into which his quick acceleration had forced him; then set his ship on her course to where a distant smoke made puffballs of gray against a cloudless sky. And, like his Chief, he was wondering with a wonderment that bordered upon disbelief what manner of fire this was that shot like a fifty-mile serpent across mountains and valleys.

He was over it in less than ten minutes, flying high to clear the tiny dots slipping swiftly across his view-finder. They were other firecraft; he saw them darting in and down from all sides. For himself, he took the line of smoke at its western end where it had begun. Here it would be at its worst, perhaps, although no reports were in as yet.

The radio had been bringing in messages unceasingly as patrols and firecraft answered the call. Some nearer than himself were reporting themselves "on the fire"; he saw them grouped in the usual echelon formation up to windward of the blaze. They darted down and in as he looked, and Danny thrilled at the sight which had never yet failed to reach the core of his emotional Irish nature.

The smoke and fire swallowed them up; their red bodies and short black wings drove unswervingly into the holocaust of flame.

"Like a bunch o' bats out o' hell!" said Danny admiringly. "And 'tis hell they're goin' into!" Which fact there was none to dispute with Danny O'Rourke who knew, if any man did, the full truth of the remark.

He saw them as they struck the fire; saw the whirling blast of snow that drove under them as they went into the fight with the wildest enemy of man; and he knew that a smothering blanket of carbon dioxide was driving with hurricane force upon the flames.

On the instrument at his side flashed the "Ascend!" order of the squadron commander, and an instant later the flight reappeared a half mile away.

The commander must have sighted O'Rourke's ship. "Shall we repeat over same course?" the instrument spelled out, while Danny, circling above, watched the effects of the drive.

It had checked the flames, that first blast of the CO_2 squadron; he saw blackened, jagged trees where a roaring furnace had been. But the flames were building up again. "Repeat!" O'Rourke answered; then watched them drive in again.

From a wooded valley beyond a low range came a call for help. A lone ship in the red and black of the service had driven down into that valley that was like a cauldron of seething flame.

"I can't touch it!" a thin voice said. "The up-draft kills my blast."

Danny O'Rourke was sending out another call. The answer came from powerful sending instruments.

"Nitro squadron Hundred and One, on the fire!" it said, and gave a position in quick figures. Danny's own voice transmitter was on. He snapped out the position of the lone fighter. "Get in there!" he ordered; "Show your stuff! No—wait! Follow me; I'll lead you in!"

And to himself he added: "Now we'll see what pure nitrogen will do in a real scrap."

He closed a switch, and from a compartment at his back a low whine rose and grew to a scream. It was echoed in a shriek more shrill from the bow where a port had opened to take in the air. And Danny knew that that air, of which eighty percent was nitrogen, was being rid of its oxygen in the retort at his back, and the nitrogen alone was pouring out beneath him in a tremendous and ceaseless blast.

The squadron had appeared—a row of dots that came in on a long slanting drive from the ten thousand level. They swung into faultless formation to "ride his tail" into whatever flaming breath he might lead. And Danny O'Rourke threw his red ship down and into the valley that seethed with a brew from the Pit itself.

There had been pines in that valley, and firs towering hundreds of feet in the air. They were living torches now, half seen through a whirling chaos of flame. It billowed as if the very gases that burned were tortured in the burning. The black-red of smoke-choked flames parted at times to show a deadlier white light below—a white, glaring heat in the heart of this gigantic, furnace—a scintillant, quivering horror on which Danny fixed the cross hairs of his sights as he rode his screaming meteor down into the pit.

"Bats out o' hell!" And now the brood was returning, it must have seemed. But beneath them, as they passed, that vivid whiteness went dead. Yet before it changed Danny saw unbelievable things—pools of molten rock, glaring white through the smoke.

Up and out at the end of the valley! And Danny gasped for breath even in the shelter of his cabin's insulated walls. And, used as he was to the red menace that they fought, he went sick at sight of a message that spelled itself beside his controls.

"Ship number six down. Failed to come out." It was signed with the name of the squadron commander who had followed where he led.

And the valley! For five miles they had laid a blanket of non-combustible gases. For five minutes, perhaps, their course could be seen. And at the end of that time it was as it had been before, and the flames raged on unchecked.

His own Chief's number flashed before him; then a message that clicked across his scanning plate:

"O'Rourke! Get out of that hole! Nitrogen won't touch it; we can't pour in enough. It's the same all along the line. We'll have to break it up—smother it one part at a time. Have you tried your sound dampener?"

And Danny O'Rourke had the grace to blush even through the flush that the fire's breath had given his face. "Forgot it!" he shouted into his voice sender. "Forgot the ship had the little doodad on it!"

The Chief responded audibly. "You didn't forget to go first into that doorway to hell," he said drily. "You fool Irishman, go back down and try the thing; give the 'little doodad' a chance!"

Once more the red ship fell swiftly under Danny's hand. As before, the valley yawned like the living threat of a volcano in eruption. But this time, instead of the whining nitro-producers, there came from beneath the ship a discordant shriek like nothing that the quiet mountains had ever heard. And Danny's fingers played over a strange keyboard whose three keys were rheostats, and the crashing discord below rose to a horror of sound that tore and battered at the ship's thick walls to set the nerves of the crouching man a-jangle. But his eyes, watching through a lookout below, saw strange disturbances of the flames; he saw the masses of flame shiver as if stricken—fall apart—vanish!

And he held the sound controls at that same horrendous shriek while his ship swept on and the thunder of her passing was lost in the pandemonium that went before. But the valley, when the red ship had passed, was a place of charred skeleton trees—of gray, swirling ashes, and of embers, here and there, that blew back to life only to be smothered by the gases of the ships that followed in his wake.

And the voice that spoke from the instrument beside him still spoke drily. "There's fifty miles more of that ahead," said the voice. "Just keep moving along; we'll mop up behind you.... Oh, and by the way, O'Rourke, give my congratulations to the Infant on the success of his invention. His sound-dampener is some little doodad; we'll be needing more of them, I should say."

It was an hour or more later at the Headquarters of the Mountain Division that the Chief amplified that remark in a way he himself could not have foreseen. He had been talking to Danny, and now on the wall of an adjoining room, where men sat at strange instruments, a red light flashed.

"We still don't know what started it all," the Chief was saying. "But it made a fine tryout for Morgan's invention. If I thought you and he could do it, I would believe you had started that fire yourselves for a"—his voice rose abruptly to a shout—"Man! There's the red on the board—a general alarm!"

"Throw the big switch!" he roared. "Cut us in, quick! Cut us in!"

Danny O'Rourke, under any ordinary circumstances would have been hugely amused at the extraordinary sight of the Chief of the Mountain Division in a ferment of excitement that was near hysteria. But the flashing of the red that swept like a finger of flame across every station number of the big board did not mean that ordinary matters were at hand. A voice was speaking; its high-pitched shrillness showed that the excitement of the moment was not confined to the office of the Mountain Division alone.

"A. F. F. Headquarters, Washington," it shrilled. "General Alarm. Chicago destroyed by fire. Flames sweeping in well defined paths across the country. Originated in Mountain Division. Cause undetermined. Three lines of fire reported; coming east fast—unbelievable speed.... There! Cleveland has got it; reports a path of fire has cut across city melting steel and even stone.... Now Buffalo!... God knows what it is." The voice broke with excitement for an instant; Danny could almost see the distant man fighting for control of himself as a maze of instruments about him wrote incredible things.

"Orders!" said the voice now. "All A. F. F. ships report to your Division Headquarters. Division officers keep in communication with Washington. Mountain Division send all equipment east. Flying orders will be given you en route. The country—the whole world—is in flames!"

Beside him, Danny O'Rourke heard the voice of his Chief. "Unbelievable—impossible—preposterous!" His voice like that other was growing shrill. "The country—world—in flames!"

But he found voice to snap out a command to a waiting officer in the doorway of the adjoining room. "Repeat general order. Send all craft east!"

To Danny he whispered. "Your 'little doodad'—I wish to heaven we had a thousand of them now! But what does it mean? Lanes of fire across the country—whole cities destroyed! What devil's work is this?... There's nobody who knows."

But Danny was staring as if he saw through the high, instrument-covered walls. Back to a valley of flame that was like a doorway to hell, where rocks, gray with the frosty years, had been melted to pools ... back to a glinting light where something swift and scintillant had flashed once in a cloudless sky ... back—far back ... back to a street in a town half across the world, and a figure of a giant who strode away with a smile of triumph on his ill-formed face ... but first that giant had melted his way through walls of stone; and, like the stone, steel bars and human flesh were as nothing before the invisible heat that come from a slender rod!

His own voice, when he moved his dry tongue to speak, came huskily; it was as if another person were speaking far off:

"I think you're wrong ... yes, I thing you're wrong, Chief. There's one man who knows and 'tis myself is that one.... One man—and the other is a beast like no livin' man on the face of the earth! He knows—he and the devils he's brought with him!"

It was an unsatisfactory interview that Danny had with the Chief. "You're crazy!" was the verdict of that A. F. F. official when Danny had finished. "You're crazy, or else—or else—" His voice trailed off; his eyes were on the moving letters that flashed their message of disaster in an ever changing procession across the scanning screen on the wall.

"... outbreaks have ceased ... tremendous destruction ... no rational explanation ... meteors, perhaps ... thousands of lives ... no estimate...."

There seemed no end to the tale of disaster, and the Chief's voice died away into silence. If Danny was right he had no words to fit the unbelievable truth.

"Get into your new ship," the Chief ordered brusquely, "and take the Infant with you. I'll send