THE BATTLE OF VIBRATIONS
Two, five, a dozen, now a score of tiny specks dotted the mist, some moving right across the broadening face of the sun itself. As Nissr's flight stormed eastward, and these gnats drove to the west, their total rate of approach must have been tremendous; for even as the men watched, they seemed to find the attackers growing in bulk. And now more and ever more appeared, transpiring from the bleeding vapors of dawn.
"Looks like business, sir!" exclaimed the Celt, his jaw hard.
"Business, yes."
"Bad business for us, eh?"
"It might be, if we had only the usual means of defense. Under ordinary circumstances, our only game would be to turn tail and run for it, or cut away far to the south—or else break out a white flag and surrender. But—"
"That must be the Azores air-fleet," judged Bohannan. "The others couldn't have made so much westing, in this time. Faith, what a buzzing swarm of mosquitoes! I had no idea there were that many planes on the Azores International Air Board station!"
"There are many things you have no idea of, Major," replied the Master, sharply. "That, however, is immaterial. Yes, here come the fringes of attack, all right enough. I estimate forty or fifty in sight, already; and there must be a few hundred back of those, between here and land, north and south. Technically, we're pirates, you know."
"Pirates?" demanded the major, lowering his glass.
The Master nodded.
"Yes," he answered. "That's what the wireless tells us. We'll get short shrift if—my apparatus fails."
"How do they make us out pirates?" Bohannan ejaculated. It was not fear that looked from his blue eyes, but a vast astonishment. His ruddy face, amazed under the now strengthening light of day, brought a smile to the Master's lips.
"What else are we, my dear fellow?" the Master queried. "To seize a ship—a water-ship or one of the air matters nothing—and to overpower the crew, kill or wound a few, throw them outboard and sail away, comes pretty near constituting piracy. Of course the air-rules and laws aren't wholly settled yet; but we're in a fair way of giving the big-wigs a whacking precedent to govern the future. I fancy a good many cases will be judged as per the outcome of this expedition.
"We're pirates all right—if they catch us. And they will catch us if they get within gunshot. The next few minutes will settle that question of whether they're going to, or not!"
"Nice, comforting prospect!" muttered the Celt. "What do they do with pirates, anyhow, these days? They can't hang us at the yard-arm, because airships don't have 'em. Of course they might stage a hanging-bee with this Legion dangling from the wings, but that would be pretty hard to manage. It'll be shooting, eh?"
"Probably, if my neutralizer fails."
"You're cheerful about it! The neutralizer may be all right, in its way, but personally I'm rather strong for these!" He laid a hand on the breech of the Lewis machine-gun mounted in the gallery, its grim muzzle pointed out through a slit in the colloid screen. "The six guns we've got aboard, in strategic positions, look like good medicine to me! Wouldn't it be the correct thing to call the gun-crews and limber up a little? These chaps aren't going to be all day in getting here, and when they do—"
"I admire your spirit, Major," interrupted the other, with undertones of mockery, "but it's of the quality that, after all, can't accomplish anything. It's the kind that goes against artillery with rifles. Six guns against perhaps six hundred—and we're not built for rapid maneuvering. That swarm could sting us a thousand times while we were giving them the first round. No, no, there's nothing for it now, but the neutralizer!"
"My will is made, anyhow," growled Bohannan. "Faith, I'm glad it is!"
The Master gave no reply, but took from the rail the little phone that hung there, and pressed a button, four times. He cupped the receiver at his ear.
"You, Enemark?" asked he, of the man at the neutralizer far down in the penetralia of the giant air-liner. "Throw in the first control. Half-voltage, for three minutes. Then three-quarters, for two; and then full, with all controls. Understand?"
"Yes, sir!" came the crisp voice of Enemark. "Perfectly!"
The Master hung up the receiver, and for a moment stood brooding. An intruding thought had once more forced itself into his brain—a thought of "Captain Alden." In case of capture or destruction, what of the woman? Something very like a pang of human emotion pierced his heart. Impatiently he thrust the thought aside, and turned with a quiet smile to Bohannan.
The major, red with excitement and impatience, still had a hand on the machine-gun. He was patting it slightly, his face eloquent of longing and regret.
"Still pinning your faith to steel-jacketed streams of bullets, are you, as against ion-jacketed streams of vibrations?" the Master rallied him. "We shall see, immediately, whether you're right or I am! Bullets are all well enough in their place, Major, but electrons are sometimes necessary. Vibrations, Major—I pin my faith to vibrations."
"Vibrate all you want to!" exclaimed the Celt, irefully, his eyes on the thickening swarm of flyers, some of them now plainly visible in detail against the aching smears of color flung across the eastern reaches of cloudland. "Vibrate away; but give me this!" He fondled the gleaming gun as if it had been a pet. "I tell you frankly, if I were in charge here, I'd let the vibrations go to Hell and begin pumping lead. I'd have all gun-crews at stations, and the second we got in range I'd open with all six Lewises!"
"Yes, and Nissr would go crumpling down, a minute later, a blazing sieve fore-and-aft—wings, tanks, fuselage, everything riddled with thousands of bullets. Vibration is the trick, I tell you. It's everything.
"All life is vibration. When it ceases, that is death—and even dead matter vibrates. All our senses depend on vibration. Everything we feel, see, hear, taste, comes to our knowledge through vibrations. And the receptive force in us is vibration, too. The brain is just one great, central ganglion for the taking in of vibrations.
"The secret of life, of the universe itself, is vibration. If we understood all about that, the cosmos would have no secrets from us. So now—ah, see there, will you? See, Major, and be convinced!"
He pointed eastward, into the blazing sunrise. The out-fling of his arm betrayed more human emotion than he had yet shown. Exultation leaped to his usually impassive eyes. Surely, had not this expedition—which he had hoped would give surcease from ennui and stir the pulses—had it not already yielded dividends? Had it not already very richly repaid him?
"See there, now!" he cried again, and gripped the rail with nervous hands.
"Lord above!" ejaculated the major, squinting through his binoculars.
"Astonished, eh?" demanded the Master, smiling with malice. "Didn't think it would work, did you? Well, which do you choose now, Major—bullets or vibrations?"
"This—this is extraordinary!" exclaimed Bohannan. His glasses traveled to and fro, sweeping the fringelike fan of the attackers, still five or six miles away. "Faith, but this is—"
The binoculars lowered slowly, as Bohannan watched a falling plane. Everywhere ahead there in the brazier of the dawn, as the two men stood watching from the wind-lashed gallery of the on-roaring liner, attackers were dropping. All along the line they had begun to fall, like ripe fruit in a hurricane.
Not in bursts of flame did they go plunging down the depths, gyrating like mad comets with long smoke-trailers and redly licking manes of fire. Not in shattered fragments did they burst and plumb the abyss. No; quite intact, unharmed, but utterly powerless they fell.
Some spiraled down, like dead leaves twirling in autumnal breezes, with drunken yaws and pitches. Others in long slants volplaned toward the hidden sea, miles below the cloud-plain. A few pitched over and over, or slid away in nose-dives and tail-spins. But one and all, as they crossed what seemed an invisible line drawn out there ahead of the onrushing Eagle of the Sky, bowed to some mysterious force.
It seemed almost as if Nissr were the center of a vast sphere that moved with her—a sphere through which no enemy could pass—a sphere against the intangible surface of which even the most powerful engines of the air dashed themselves in vain.
And still, as others and still others came charging up to the attack like knights in joust, they fell. One by one the white wool cushions of the cloud, gold-broidered by the magic needles of the sun, received them. One by one they faded, vanished, were no more.
So, all disappeared. Between a hundred and a hundred and twenty-five planes were silently, swiftly, resistlessly sent down in no more than twenty minutes, while the watchers stood there in the gallery, fascinated by the wondrous precision and power of this new and far-outflung globe of protection.
And again the blood-red morning sky grew clear of attackers. Again, between high heaven's black vault and the fantastic continent of cloud below, nothing remained but free vacancy. The Master smiled.
"Vibrations, my dear Major!" said he. "Neutralize the currents delivered by the magnetos of hostile planes to their spark-plugs, and you transform the most powerful engines into inert matter. Not all the finely adjusted mechanism in the world, nor the best of petrol, nor yet the most perfect skill is worth that," with a snap of the strong fingers, "when the spark dies.
"My device is the absolute ruler of whatever spark I direct it against. Our own ignition is screened; but all others within the critical radius become impotent. So you recognize, do you not, the uselessness of machine-guns? The groundlessness of any fears about the Air Patrol's forces?"
"Lord, but this is wonderful!" Bohannan ejaculated. "If we'd only had this in the Great War, the Hun would have been wiped out in a month!"
"Yes, but we didn't have it," the Master smiled. "I've just finished perfecting it. Put the last touches on it hardly twenty-four hours ago. If there's ever another war, though—ah, see there, now! Here comes one lone, last attacker!"
He pointed. Far at the edge of empty cloudland, now less blood-stained and becoming a ruddy pink under the risen sun, a solitary aerial jouster had grown visible.
The last attacker appeared a feeble gnat to dance thus alone in the eye of morning. That one plane should, unaided, drive on at Nissr's huge, rushing bulk, seemed as preposterous as a mosquito trying to lance a rhinoceros. The major directed a careful lens at this survivor.
"He has his nerve right in his baggage with him," announced the Celt.
"Sure, he's 'there.' There can be no doubt he's seen the others fall.
Yet—what now? He's turning tail, eh? He's on the run?"
"Not a bit of it! He's driving straight ahead. That was only a dip and turn, for better air. Ah, but he's good, that fellow! There's a man after my own heart, Major. Maybe there's more than one, aboard that plane. But there's one, anyhow, that's a real man!"
The Master pondered a moment, then again picked up the phone.
"Enemark?" he called. "That you?"
"Hello! Yes, sir! What orders, sir?"
"Cut off the ray! Quick, there!"
"Yes, sir!" And through the phone the Master heard the snick of a switch being hastily thrown.
"What's the idea, now?" demanded the major, astonished. "Going to let that plane close in on us, and maybe riddle us?"
The Master smiled, as he made answer:
"I'll chance the bullets, this time. There's a man on board that plane. A man! And we—need men!"
The Master smiled, as he made answer:
"I'll chance the bullets, this time. There's a man on board that plane. A man! And we—need men!"