But an hour later, Danny saw the giant furnish his own ending to the incompleted order. He had left the Director's room. Across the street was the gray stone building where prisoners were held for disposition by the courts. And once more Danny O'Rourke's jaw dropped in open-mouthed, unbelieving amazement as he saw a section of gray stone wall fall outward where the edge of it was sharply outlined in white-hot, dripping stone.
A great figure stepped forth. In his hand was a rod like an elongated pencil attached to a heavy butt. And though nothing visible came from the rod, Danny saw it pointed back at the building where iron bars softened till they sent rivulets of molten steel splashing upon the pavement.
A squad of soldiers in the blood-red color of their service stood nearby. One gave an order, and a dozen rifles were swung toward their shoulders. But the rifles never came to rest.
Danny saw the quick swing of the slender rod. And he saw the men's mouths opened in screams that were never uttered. For, quicker than nerves could send their message to human brain and muscles, some unseen force had slashed their bodies in two as if a fiery sword had been swung by invisible hands.
The pointing rod lingered upon the huddled bodies for an instant, while that which had been human flesh vanished in a bursting cloud of smoke; while the stones beneath turned to a seething pool of molten rock.... Then the rod moved slowly toward the frozen figure of Danny O'Rourke.
Did the strange being sense that Danny had not been disbelieving like the rest? Danny could never know. He knew only that he stood rigid with horror, entirely unable to move, while that rod swung upon him; he knew that the hand that held it released something that clicked, wherefore his life had been spared; and he knew that the savage face above wrinkled into something resembling a snarling, triumphant smile, as the rod was returned to its hiding place under the garment of shimmering blue, and the mysterious figure turned and strode savagely down the Avenue Stalin in the city of Stobolsk.
Danny O'Rourke was to carry that picture clearly in his mind—the figure that moved unhurriedly on, towering above the others, men and women, who scurried fearfully from his path. But he was to retain yet more vividly the recollection of a group of red-clad bodies that were severed at their waists as a slim tube swung—then a bursting cloud of oily smoke, and a pool of molten rock where they had been.
Something of this, perhaps, was clouding the eyes of Danny O'Rourke, Pilot of the A.F.F. a month and more later, as he sat at lookout duty in a gleaming white tower on a high peak of the Sierras. Not that the job of lookout was part of O'Rourke's duty, now that he was back in the U. S. A., but a cylinder of scarlet rested on a great rack at the base of the tower, and Danny had no wish to hear the roar of that cylinder's stern exhaust for a time.