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

had gone.

"And I'm thinkin'," he told the beastly occupant of that carrier of death, "that you didn't shoot your damned ray quite quick enough. The Infant beat you to it! He got his message to me first!"

How he got to the flat-roofed landing zone of the Consolidated Electric, Danny, doubtless, could never have told. Nor was he aware of the hand that set in the forward cabin of his ship a strange machine. But he growled his instructions:

"Set it goin'! 'Tis the Infant's orders—I mean Mr. Morgan's. What the devil it is I don't know, but 'Turn it on!' he told me—'Have them put it on full!'" And, though a man whom Danny knew only as Gimlet-eyes stared at him curiously, he reached down to the apparatus, set a dial, closed a switch here and there, then stepped back.

But Gimlet-eyes ventured one protest. "You're not grounding it!" he exclaimed, in a voice that was tinged with horror. "You'll get an accumulation on your ship that will shoot off like lightning—millions of volts!"

"How long would that be takin'?" Danny inquired gruffly.

And Gimlet-eyes replied, as one who washes his hands of all responsibility in a rather horrible affair: "An hour—not more than an hour!"

"Then I'll just be drivin' around for an hour," said Danny, and slammed shut the door-port of the red ship.

The red rocket drove in slow circles that were a hundred miles across while that hour passed and the numbness of mind that had held Danny in a stupor slipped away. For the first time he realized the emptiness of the world that the Infant had left; he knew with a sharp stab of self-reproach how much had gone from his life in that instant when he sprang vainly toward the giant enemy.

He called himself wild names for his fancied sluggishness. Then that, too, passed, and at thought of the weapon the Infant had given him and of the work that lay ahead, his haggard face forgot the lines that horror had drawn and relaxed into a tired smile that told of a mind content.

Gradually his looping whirls had carried him toward the east. Another city was being devastated by the enemy; that Danny got from the newscast. Only that and one other message broke the tedious eternity of that long hour.

Danny's number flashed on the screen beside his controls. Unconsciously he answered, but he sat up alertly at sound of his Chief's voice.

"I can't get anyone," the voice said. "Headquarters is gone; I just called you on a chance. And I believe you now, Danny. That devil wiped out a whole fleet of our planes; melted the cruisers with one shot, and the scouts couldn't go fast enough to escape. Only one got away....

"But where are you? What's to be done? I've just got here. My God! What can we do?"

"Wait," said Danny O'Rourke calmly, and glanced at his watch; "wait for another ten minutes! He's over Boston now. And he's waitin' there for me—though he doesn't know it yet. But I'll be droppin' in on him."

"Don't be an utter fool, Danny," urged the voice of the Chief; "there isn't a thing you can do. You try to come down on him, and he'll do as he did with the cruisers—just slip aside like lightning and nail you with his damned heat ray when you're below! I'm near Boston now. You keep away. Where can I meet you? We've got to think—got to do something!"

And Danny, before he opened the switch that ended their talk, said meditatively: "Like lightnin' he moves ... but he'll have to move faster than lightnin' to dodge me. And if you're near Boston, stick around; I'm comin' now, but not to meet you, Chief; I've got another important engagement. I'm keepin' it for—for the Infant. And give the Infant the credit, Chief; give it all to him, he's earned it: he's paid for it in full." Then the snap of a switch cut off the sound of Danny's voice before it showed a tell-tale quaver.

It was steady some minutes later, when Danny swept in above the mounting clouds that he had learned to know. Beneath them invisible fingers of death were sweeping back and forth where men and women ran shrieking in terror or waited calmly and dry-eyed for the end. Above them a slender rounded thing wove its pattern of destruction back and forth ... back and forth. A spectral ship—a pale phantom, elusive and dimly seen until it came against the black of rolling smoke from below.

But to Danny O'Rourke, slanting down from tremendous heights, the white shape was never lost. On the cross hairs of his directional sights the ghostly ship hung, and Danny threw his own red rocket like a living flame over and down where the white one sensed his coming and waited.

Beside him a human voice, high with horror, called to him. "Come back!" the Chief of the Mountain Division was commanding. "Danny! For the love of Heaven, turn back!"

But the voice was unheard by Danny O'Rourke. There was another voice speaking ... he could almost see the smiling pink and white face of one beside him who spoke of his "little tin ship" ... spoke, too, of a white ship that would be like a great thunder-cloud ... and of his own screaming meteor that was like the earth ... and there was to be a messenger of death like the hammer of Thor that would flash between the two....

Danny saw the white one slipping easily aside; the ship was swelling suddenly before him—it was close ... but the jagged lightning—the ripping flash of blue that joined the two craft in a crashing arc—was neither seen nor heard by Danny. Danny was too busy to notice, for he was engaged in smiling converse with one whom he called the "Infant" and whose pink and white face beamed gladly upon him "like a damned little cherub," as Danny was telling him....

But the Chief of the Mountain Division who saw all from afar could say nothing. He only stared from the lookout of his own speeding plane that framed a picture of two ships; where the red one, flaming from within, kept on in its swift, straight dive; while the white one fell slowly, turning sluggishly to show its gashed and blasted sides ... till the black clouds wrapped them both in a billowy shroud....

But clouds are no bar to man's inner vision. And the Chief looked through, as Danny had done, to see as in a lightning flash a world beaten to its knees, hopeless, ravaged and scarred—a world where courage might again be born—a world that would still be a world of men.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Hammer of Thor, by Charles Willard Diffin