A Thousand Degrees Below Zero, Murray Leinster [beginner reading books for adults txt] 📗

to Teddy. "When news of the professor's death came I phoned at once to the doctor mentioned in the paper and asked if there were any possibility of foul play. To tell the truth, I'd been rather afraid something like this might happen. What was it?"

"Varrhus electrocuted the professor by an antique bracelet."

He handed over the ornament. The commissioner examined it gingerly.

"Nothing funny about this except the workmanship."

"And the surface," said Teddy. His set calm was surprising himself. "It looks as if it had been lacquered. That's Varrhus' secret."

"What is it? A powerful battery?"

Teddy turned to the materials with which he and Evelyn had been working.

"I'll show you. Here's an instrument that measures the resistance of a given coil. This is one of the professor's evaporation machines for producing low temperatures quickly. He evaporates ether in this sheath that surrounds this oven and objects in the oven are cooled far below freezing point. Look at this coil of silver wire. We measure the resistance at room temperature. One hundred and twenty ohms. It is very fine wire. We put it in the cooling oven and set the engines going——" For some minutes there was silence while the small electric pump thumped and rattled. "Now we'll take the coil out. The thermometer inside the oven says twelve below zero." Teddy handled the small coil of silver wire with thick gloves. "We'll measure the resistance again. Fourteen and a half ohms resistance, approximately. Low temperatures decrease resistance and increase the conductivity of metals. You see?"

"Yes, but why——"

"The inside of that bracelet is nine hundred degrees below zero. The whole thing is coated with Varrhus' lacquer, which, in this case, radiates all the heat from the inside out, leaving it incredibly cold within. That cold makes the silver conduct electricity better."

"Well?"

"At eight hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit silver has no measurable resistance to the passage of an electric current. Now watch."

Teddy laid the bracelet on top of a frame wound with many turns of glistening copper wire. He threw on a switch, and a small generator at one side of the laboratory began to run with a humming purr.

"Eddy currents are whirling all around that bracelet. A strong current is running in an endless circle in that closed circuit of silver, nine hundred degrees below zero. Silver at that temperature offers no resistance to an electric current. Closed circuits have been left at that degree of cold for over four hours, and at the end of that time the electric current was still flowing round and round like a squirrel in a cage."

Teddy picked up the bracelet with a pair of wooden tongs. He took a second pair in his other hand. Rubber handles insulated the tongs from their handles.

"There's a current flowing around the inside of this bracelet. There was one flowing around it when the professor received it in the mail. He opened it with his bare hands, suspecting nothing. I open it with these insulated tongs. Watch."

He jerked on the two tongs. The bracelet parted at the catch, and a dazzling, blinding flash of light appeared with a sharp crackle at the parting.

"I made the current jump the gap. The professor took it through his body and it killed him. Are you satisfied?"

"God!" said the commissioner of police, aghast.

"The box and wrapper," said one of the men who had come with the commissioner. "Let us have the box and wrapper the bracelet came in and we'll get the man that mailed it. But we'll handle him with tongs, too, when we close in on him."

They took what they wanted and left. Teddy turned to the commandant.

"Now, sir, we'll see what can be done about the new berg. You say there's no plume of steam. Have you had an aëroplane fly above it to make sure?"

"Yes. The pilot says the whole ice cake is covered with mist, except for a round spot in the middle, but there's no sign of a steam plume."

Teddy nodded at Evelyn.

"No holes in this cold bomb. I wonder what happens to all the heat that comes in?"

"Father mentioned that he expected something of the sort, but didn't say what he thought could be done about it."

"The same as we did with the other, I suppose," said Teddy reflectively. "Only this time we'll have to blast down to the bomb and then break it up."

"I'll set men to work if you'll find the bomb," said the commandant.

"Almost any one could find it," Teddy remarked, "but there are going to be some queer difficulties when you get near the cold bomb. If you'll allow me, I'd like to be at hand when it is broken up. I may really be of use there."

He began to pick out instruments he thought he might need. Among other things he took what seemed to be two silvered globes with small necks. They were Dewey bulbs. Several low-temperature thermometers and a thermocouple connected with a delicate galvanometer completed his preparations.

The two men left the house and started for the launch that would take them to the forts. On the way Teddy was asking crisp questions about the explosives he could have placed at his disposal, quite ignorant of what was happening at that moment in Jacksonville.

The river there was a mass of ice from one shore to the other. All the little reedy islands and the swampy shores were frozen solidly. To see the slender palm trees rising from icy shores, their reflections visible on the narrow strip of mist-free ice that ran along the shores of the river was an anomaly. To see fur-clad tourists stepping out of the tropical foliage to step gingerly out on the ice "just to say they'd done it" was even more strange. At the moment, however, interest centered on a little group of soldiers out in the central clearing in the cloud of mist. They were bundled in furs and swathed in numberless garments until they looked like fat penguins or some strange arctic animals. A major of engineers was waving them to the right and left, forward and back until they stood at equal distance around the clearing. Each man moved backward until the mist that rose gradually from the ice reached his waist. Then, at a whistle signal from the major, they began to move forward toward a common center. The major had reasoned that the cold bomb must be precisely underneath the exact center of the clearing, and this was a rough-and-ready means of finding that center. They advanced toward each other, and as they went nearer the center of the clearing the cold grew more intense. Infinitesimal ice crystals glittered in little clouds where the moisture of their breath froze instantly in the terrific cold. At a second whistle from the major they halted. They formed a fairly even circle about forty yards across. Each man began to stamp and fling his arms about to keep from freezing in that more than frigid atmosphere. No man could have stood that cold, no matter how hardy he might be, for more than a very few moments. The major trotted around the circle, marking the place where each man stood. Four small sledge loads of explosives stood out in the clearing. The major intended to blast down toward the cold bomb with them.

The major was marking the position of the last man, completing his circle under which the cold bomb must lie, when a peculiar tremor was felt by every man there. It was not like the shiver of an earthquake or the reverberation of an explosion. It was an infinitely shrill vibration that a moment later was followed by a creaking sound that seemed to come from the center of the ice cake. The men on the ice stopped their stamping and swinging of arms to listen in instinctive apprehension.

The center of the circle around which they stood seemed to rise in the air. The ice on which they stood was shivered into tiny fragments. A colossal and implacable roar filled the air, and a great sheet of flame of the unearthly tint of a vaporized metal rose to the heavens. The swathed and bundled soldiers were annihilated by the blast. A great hole five hundred feet across gaped in the center of the ice cake. Jacksonville shook from the concussion, and the plate-glass windows of its stores and office buildings splintered into a myriad tiny bits that sprinkled all its streets with sharp-edged, jagged pieces.

Teddy Gerrod, all unconscious of the fate of those who had attempted to meddle with the Jacksonville ice cake, went on out to bare and blast open the cold bomb that blocked New York harbor.

CHAPTER VI.

Teddy Gerrod straightened up and beat his hands together.

"Forty-seven below," he said to the soldier behind him. "Put a marker here."

He moved off to the right. Already a dozen little flags showed where the temperature reached that degree. Teddy was drawing what he would have termed an isothermal line—a line where the temperature was the same. He was making a circle about a large part of the open clearing on the ice floe. Other flags led back into the mist, marking a path, and from time to time a party of four or five fur-clad soldiers arrived from the fort, dragging a loaded sledge behind them. They emptied the load from the sled, turned, and vanished into the mist again. A small pile of drills, explosives, and two of the squat trench mortars had already been made.

When the circle of little red flags had been completed, two signal-corps men set up their instruments and accurately located the center. Directly under that spot, if Teddy's reasoning was correct, the new cold bomb was resting. The sledge from the fort arrived again, bearing a curious trench catapult for flinging bombs. Four long strips of black cloth were unrolled, under direction of the signal-corps men, pointing accurately to the center of the circle. No one had been able to approach nearer, thus far, than thirty yards from the center. At that distance Teddy's thermocouple indicated a temperature of more than seventy-two degrees below zero, and flesh exposed to the air was frostbitten on the instant. What the temperature of the air might be directly above the cold bomb could only be conjectured.

One of the infantry men from the fort, the best grenade man in the garrison, now picked up a Mills grenade, and after carefully picking out the target with his eye, aided by the strips of black cloth, flung the small missile. A hole perhaps four feet deep and twice as much across was blasted in the brittle ice. A second, third, and fourth grenade followed. At the end of that time the size and depth of the hole had been doubled.

The trench catapult was set up. Half a dozen grenades were bundled together and flung into the now much enlarged opening in the surface of the ice. There was no explosion. One automatically braced oneself for the report, and the utter silence that succeeded the disappearance of the grenades came as a peculiar shock.

"Too cold," remarked Teddy to the young lieutenant in charge.

The lieutenant nodded stiffly.

"We'll try again."

A second batch of grenades was flung into the hole, and the same quiet resulted.

"I would suggest——" Teddy begin.

"We'll fire a trench-mortar bomb," said the young lieutenant.

The heavy winged projectile flew up into the air, and then descended squarely into the opening in the ice. Those standing fifty yards away could hear the crash as it struck, and then a sound as of musical splintering. The young lieutenant swore.

"The fuses are no good. Try once more."

"You can shoot all day and they won't go off," said Teddy mildly. "It's too cold down there."

The officer said nothing, but supervised the firing of a second mortar bomb with precisely the same result. He swore again.

"It's probably quite as cold as liquid air down there," said Teddy. "In fact, there's quite possibly a pool of liquified air at the bottom of the hole. Your bombs fall into that air and are frozen so solidly before they strike that the metal gets brittle and simply falls to powder from the shock. You can't do anything going on this way."

The young lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Teddy somewhat sulkily.

"What do you suggest, then?"

"We'd better enlarge the hole first. Blast down the walls of the present cavity, then use wrapped dynamite until we have a shallow crater. Then we'll place our explosives by long poles, keeping them warm by running resistance wires around them and heating them electrically."

The young lieutenant considered and agreed. Teddy went back to the fort to arrange for the heated bombs and the long poles. When he returned there was only a saucerlike depression in the ice clearing. It was quite fifty yards across, but no more than twenty deep. Standing near the edge, one