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its livid image still burned in the eyes of those who had been watching it.

Once more, it came hurling out of the west and, like the fang of some great and deadly serpent, darted into the monster that lay in the waters of the Sound.

Dirk and his companions could see plainly, by the light of the bolt itself, that it had crashed into the well from which the Lodorians first had appeared, and that it was beating and hammering its way into the very vitals of the craft.

Dazzling, blinding fire seemed to pour from the aperture through which the bolt had passed. The clamor that arose was deafening.

Then again the streak of fires was withdrawn, leaving the night intensely black until, in a moment more, it came thundering out of the west again and, with an impact that made the land and the sea and the very heavens tremble, hurled its way into the depths of the doomed leviathan.

Twice again it fell, a fiery scimitar out of the darkness, and twice again it careened at the vitals of the stricken monster.

Then, after the assault was over, the ship still floated on the surface of the Sound and its shell, as far as Dirk and the others could judge, still was unscathed.

“We will soon know our fate,” remarked Steinholt calmly. “If that didn’t kill those beasts we might as well give up our ghosts.”

“I’ll drop the plane a little lower and a little nearer to the ship,” said Dirk. “I don’t believe that any life is surviving in that thing.”

“My beautiful palace is nothing but dust,” sighed Fragoni, mournfully. “And all my beautiful treasures, too.”

“And that beautiful Zitlan,” Lazarre reminded him, “and his beautiful boy friends, they are all dust too, thank God!”

“It was a queer fate that Stanton met,” suggested Dirk. “He thought that he would save his life by going over to our enemies, and, instead of that, he lost it.”

Poor Stanton,” said Steinholt. “He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now,” continued the Teuton, “I hope that we didn’t do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves.”

“Have you any theory regarding it?” asked Fragoni.

“Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe,” replied Steinholt. “We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won’t be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel.”

“Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn’t been for that artificial lightning,” said Lazarre. “That’s powerful stuff, Steinholt.”

“Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from,” agreed Steinholt, “we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn’t left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn’t have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the ship.”

Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile 417 of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.

“It seems to me,” he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, “that it is moving in the water. It is!” he exclaimed. “Steinholt! Look!”

Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness.

“It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it,” asserted Steinholt. “You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one.”

“It is rising, I tell you!” said Dirk. “The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!”

“You’re right, Dirk,” said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice. “Look! It just dropped back into the water!”

Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea.

Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it.

“It’s gone!” gasped Fragoni. “Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!”

“No,” remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into space with the ship in that condition.”

“Then what made it go up?” demanded Lazarre. “Can the damn thing run itself, Steinholt?”

“I imagine,” recalled the Teuton, “that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah,” he moaned, “but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air.”

A cry from Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes.

They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire.

“It’s that thing!” exclaimed Fragoni. “I tell you that those upon it still live and that they are about to wreak vengeance upon us.”

“No,” said Steinholt positively. “You are wrong, Fragoni. What is happening may be almost as disastrous, though,” he admitted. “That leviathan is in its death agonies; it is a metal monster gone mad, and none can say what will happen before it expires.”

“The place for us,” asserted Dirk hurriedly, “is in the Worldwide Tower. There we can keep track of what is transpiring and try to decide what to do.”

The others agreed with him and, seeking the westward level of flight, he sped the plane in the direction of the mammoth pyramid from which the news of the world was broadcast.

They reached the vast structure in a few minutes, and, after dropping the plane on a landing stage, they went into the operating room.

Here they learned quickly that the craft of the Lodorians was doing incalculable damage, and that it was throwing the population of the world into an unprecedented panic.

It was, apparently, following an erratic, uncertain orbit that took it far out into space and then back quite close to the surface of the earth again.

It had passed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide through the buildings of that metropolis.

Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its irresistible and molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of people had been slain by it.

418

Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing, projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the night.

For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned throughout the cities of the whole civilized world.

But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route for San Francisco.

“Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense and clouds of steam are rising from the sea.”

As the minutes passed by after the report from the rocket-ship had been received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from space seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean. This was accepted as a certainty by eight o’clock in the morning.

“Ah,” sighed Steinholt, “if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If there only was enough of it left for us to––”

“Enough of any damn contraption of that kind,” swore Lazarre fervently, “is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are scattered so far that we never can put them together again.”

Dirk and Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan.

Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in the morning.

After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its ruins.

Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible to fish for the remains of the lost ship of Lodore.

“It seems like a dream, doesn’t it, Dirk?” the girl remarked. “It is difficult to believe that we actually have seen and talked with people from some far-away world.”

Together they looked up into the crystalline skies, where mazes of shining stars gave testimony to the countless worlds which were wheeling around them.

“And just to think, Dirk,” Inga continued proudly, “that it was you who saved this world and all of its people from that horrible Zitlan and his horde.”

“I saved you,” he told her gravely and tenderly, “and that somehow means more to me than saving all of this world and all of the other worlds which are rolling through the uncharted ways of time and space.”

COMING––
Murder Madness
An Extraordinary Novel

By MURRAY LEINSTER

Transcriber Notes

Typographical inconsistencies have been changed and are listed below.

Hyphenation standardized.

Archaic and variable spelling is preserved.

Authors’ punctuation style is preserved.

Transcriber Changes

The following changes were made to the original text:

Page 298: Changed work to wreck (wish to know whether anyone has visited the scene of the wreck)

Page 299: Changed focussed to focused (This means that we have focused or concentrated cold)

Page 317: Added beginning quotes (Its name-grid glowed with the letters: Anita Prince.)

Page 321: Changed eavesdroopper to eavesdropper (sitting in the smoking room when the eavesdropper fled past)

Page 321: Changed pressure-cick to pressure-sick (We missed you at breakfast. Not pressure-sick, I hope?)

Page 323: Changed linquists to linguists (people are by heritage extraordinary linguists)

Page 324: Added end quote (Did you have Prince’s cabin searched?”)

Page 328: Changed elipse to ellipse (Blackstone had roughly cast its orbital elements)

Page 339: Changed focussed to focused (connected its little battery; focused its projector)

Page 339: Changed syncronized to synchronized (as I crouched in the darkness behind the cylinder-case, I synchronized)

Page 340: Removed extra quote after leaped (Miko doubtless saw it, and the Martian’s hot anger leaped)

Page 344: Changed Mika to Miko (“Wait a minute!” I called to Miko. “Navigate––where?”)

Page 344: Changed catapaulted to catapulted (The force catapulted me across the space of the room like a volplane)

Page 345: Changed Halian to Haljan (“If you fire, Haljan, and kill me––Miko will kill you then, surely.”)

Page 346: Changed focussed to focused (the image of the lounge interior presently focused)

Page 357: Changed terriffic to terrific (Perry beat a terrific tattoo on the ancient door)

Page 362: Removed comma (for the news crew and editorial force of the paper were a carefully selected body of men indeed)

Page 367: Changed villian to villain (Could the old villain be playing possum?)

Page 367: Removed ’the’ (With dexterous hands O’Hara swiftly went through the old man’s pockets)

Page 367: Changed similiar to similar (an ugly looking pistol of large caliber, a blackjack similar to his own and a small bottle)

Page 369: Changed and to any (If you search my car and find any red liquor in the left back door pocket, I don’t know a thing about it)

Page 372: Changed Hanlon to Handlon (could be recognized as those of Horace Perry and Skip Handlon)

Page 372: Changed focussed to focused (All eyes were now focused on Professor Kell)

Page 373: Changed Kel to Kell (Hurry up and get Kell downstairs so we can see who he is)

Page 374: Changed Rotton to Rotten (“Rotten,” was the reply from the lips of Kell)

Page 393: Changed ecstacy to ecstasy (Fear, despair, reckless abandon, mirth, doubt, religious ecstasy and all the other nuances in the gamut of human emotions)

Page 394: Changed scandals to sandals (On her tiny feet she wore sandals which were spun of webby filaments)

Page 395: Changed knew to know (fairly close to it in my plane and I know what I am speaking about)

Page 397: Changed Igna to Inga (Dirk and Inga seated close together and Stanton, at a distance)

Page 397: Changed part to parts (a proclamation of martial law, to become effective at once in all parts of the world)

Page 399: Changed melifluous to mellifluous (“Good morning,” the other replied in a soft and mellifluous voice)

Page 401: Changed Steinhold to Steinholt

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