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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79049 ***
+
+
+
+
+                   The Storm That Had to be Stopped
+
+                          By MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+               _Sequel to "The Darkness on Fifth Avenue"
+                     and "The City of the Blind."_
+
+                         _Novelette--Complete_
+
+               _Preston, evil genius of Science, defies
+              America's war weapons as he hurls Nature's
+           malignant forces against his blinded attackers._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+               Argosy All-Story Weekly, March 1, 1930.]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I.
+
+                           WITHOUT WARNING.
+
+
+On the morning that saw the beginning of the Storm That Had to be
+Stopped, Police Inspector Hines had his life saved by an amateur
+driver who drove a second-hand flivver into his roadster. It was pure
+accident, of course. Hines's left mudguard, his left front wheel, and
+his front bumper were all wreckage when the amateur driver stared
+wildly about, assured himself that he was still alive, and then burst
+into tears.
+
+The amateur driver passed forthwith from history. He had nothing more
+to do with the affair. He merely kept Hines from driving up into the
+Catskills in the very early morning of August 5, when, as all the world
+knows, the Storm began.
+
+You will remember that morning. There had been a heat wave over all
+the Atlantic States for two weeks or more. The cities sweltered. The
+beaches were crowded. In New York, Central Park was opened to any one
+who chose to sleep in the open air instead of the stifling tenements.
+
+Those who could leave the city did so. The Catskill and Adirondack
+hotels were packed. The seashore resorts swarmed with people.
+
+Kathryn Bush was up in the Catskills, and Hines had started up to be
+with her until Monday. The fact that his car was wrecked in Yonkers
+almost certainly saved his life, and quite positively determined the
+events that followed. If he had been up in the storm-center, he would
+have been utterly helpless.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was curious that the storm seemed to start so gently. Kathryn Bush
+wrote an account of the beginning, for the New York _Star_. It was her
+vacation-time and she was staying in the house of Heracles Tribble, at
+Rosedale Farm, North Weddensdale, Greene County, New York. She expected
+Hines to come up, and had risen early. A room was reserved for him
+at the farmhouse, where there were four other boarders. She may have
+been sentimental, or she may have been restless. In any event she was
+looking out of her window when the sun rose.
+
+While birds began to sing abstractedly in the mountain-shadows, long
+streaks of golden light became visible on the flanks of monster hills.
+The invisible sun was gilding their sides. Later, a long time later,
+the red disk of the storm appeared.
+
+The sunlight was gratefully warm after the dawn-chill, though even in
+the first rays she thought regretfully of the blistering, terrific
+heat that would come at midday when this same sun would be a ball of
+intolerable fire, hanging overhead in a brazen sky. Irrelevantly, she
+remembered the weather forecast--fair and warmer.
+
+And then, quite suddenly, the warmth seemed to go out of the sun's rays.
+
+It was as sudden, as abrupt, as the turning off of a light, as the
+closing of a furnace door from which a fierce glare had poured forth.
+The sun was no darker, however. It seemed to shine as brightly as
+before. It did not give off heat.
+
+Kathryn stared about her. She looked back at the sun. It glowed
+vividly, but it seemed obscurely to have changed color. She held out
+her hand to it to catch the warmth of its rays. There was none.
+
+A cloud over its face? No. The sky was wholly clear. There was simply
+no more heat coming from the sun.
+
+Puzzled, but quite unalarmed, it seemed to Kathryn that the sun's ruddy
+tint had vanished very suddenly. It even seemed as if instead of a
+normal gold, the great disk had taken on a faint bluish or greenish
+tint. The change--if it was a change--was so slight that she could not
+be sure.
+
+The seeming lack of heat was so extraordinary that, instead of turning
+away, she gazed and gazed, and presently took a tiny reading-glass and
+focused it on a bit of paper. The paper should have turned brown and
+burned luridly. Nothing happened.
+
+More curious still, now, she focused the light upon her hand; then upon
+the sensitive skin of her forearm. A vivid spot of light formed at the
+focus of the lens. The speck of flesh seemed white-hot. But there was
+not the faintest, not the tiniest sensation of heat.
+
+It was at just this time she noticed that a wind was blowing far away.
+Where she stood at her window, looking eastward, the air was utterly
+calm. Her window, as a matter of fact, was open wide. But she suddenly
+saw trees, a long distance off, bending and tossing furiously as if
+in a gale of wind. There was a long straight stretch of white road
+reaching far away toward infinity. A cloud of dust was racing along it.
+
+"It's wind!" said Kathryn vaguely.
+
+Still she stared. Then she saw something rolling crazily across a
+distant pasture. It was a smother of dust and débris. But there was one
+gigantic, darker object that rolled and rolled. She saw suddenly that
+it was the top of a tree, sheared off from its trunk in some freak of
+wind-pressure, and rolling like a monster ball.
+
+The wind struck a farmhouse three miles down the valley. Kathryn saw a
+cowshed open and vanish. She saw a fence-line disappear. The dwelling
+leaned and leaned.
+
+It sank quite gently to a sloping mass of wreckage, save that its roof
+went ballooning off insanely and mowed down a lane of trees through a
+planted orchard before it crashed against an upward-jutting outcrop of
+granite and was torn to bits about it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the wind struck the house from which Kathryn had watched it, the
+windows were all down. She had shouted of a storm approaching. Clouds,
+too, began suddenly to appear in writhing, ominous masses. The house
+had been closed tightly by the agitated Mr. Heracles Tribble, who
+hastened out to his hen-houses to see to their security before the
+storm came, and did not come back.
+
+Kathryn watched from the window. The rolling cloud of dust that was the
+forefront of the wind drew nearer with incredible speed. As it drew
+close, the monstrous size of the disturbance became apparent. It was
+hundreds of feet high, and it was rolling over and over upon itself
+like a monstrous comber.
+
+There seemed even to be striations in it like those the stranding of
+a rope will make. But there were objects carried in the smoke-colored
+rolling cloud. Dark objects, of all shapes and sizes. Kathryn, staring
+and almost paralyzed by sheer astonishment, saw the tree-limbs and it
+seemed even whole trees caught up in the monstrous turmoil.
+
+Somehow her eyes swept to the hen-houses at the rear of the house.
+Mr. Heracles Tribble was standing in the open, peculiarly puny and
+ineffective, staring incredulously at the thing that bore down upon
+him. He was small, and rotund, and bald. He wore silver-rimmed
+spectacles, and he stared at a rolling wave of smoke and dust and utter
+destruction, hundreds of feet high, that swept toward him irresistibly.
+
+Mr. Heracles Tribble turned suddenly, and fled toward the house.
+Kathryn saw his mouth dropped open in horror. His fat little legs
+twinkled. He ran with incredible speed. But the rolling cloud of dust
+and débris had reached the pasture-lot. It touched the hen-houses and
+they vanished as if blown to atoms.
+
+Unpausing, the monstrous thing came rolling up. Its bellying edge was
+over the house while its base had still not yet touched the running
+little fat man. But then Kathryn saw smoke-like dust envelop him. She
+saw--or thought she saw--that he rose crazily from the ground. And then
+the wave of wind struck the house.
+
+It was absurd, but Kathryn was not frightened even the instant after
+she knew the wind had struck. Her first conscious thought was that the
+house had been lifted away from around her, leaving her untouched.
+
+Then she realized that the house still stood. There was no roof over
+her head, to be sure, but the walls remained intact. The feeling of
+being in the open air came from the fact that without warning or a
+sound that could be heard above the deafening uproar of the wind, the
+windows had ceased to be. The glass panes broke out of them with no
+more disturbance than so many breaking bubble-films would have made.
+
+Kathryn had been at one moment safely housed, behind glass panes. The
+next instant she was merely sheltered behind a thick brick wall while a
+dense fog of dust blotted out even the farther side of the room.
+
+[Illustration: _She crouched against the fragment of wall
+that still remained standing._]
+
+Something crashed into that farther wall and kicked feebly. It was a
+pig, picked up no one could guess where and carried no one can guess
+how far. Then a tree-trunk thrust itself through the brick wall,
+horribly splintered, and heaved upward, tearing the wall apart, and
+then somehow went reeling off into the thick dust-cloud.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kathryn put her hand to her throat. Sheer professional training alone
+saved her from panic. The newspaper woman's acquired instinct said:
+
+"What a story! I've got to get to safety. It will be a big story when
+the wind stops--and I saw it!"
+
+She dropped to the floor and began to crawl past the window toward the
+stairway. Once she ventured a little distance away from the wall, and a
+solid stream of air--as solid as a board--that came through a window,
+rolled her over and over until she struck with a crash against the
+leeward wall.
+
+It held her there, then she battled her way on hands and knees down the
+stairs. The wind beat at her terribly, trying to fling her up again. It
+came in through the smashed lower windows.
+
+She saw the dining room table flat against the wall. Its top covered
+a window and it was held in place by the wind-pressure. It was very
+probably that measure of protection which enabled her to pass so
+close to the leeward wall without being picked up and hurled off into
+nothingness.
+
+She heard a terrific crash upstairs, in the room she had just left.
+Fragments of brick came down the steps. She reached the cellar stairs,
+tumbled down them, and heard more terrific crashes still.
+
+Then there was darkness, while the wind roared by overhead. The noise
+the wind made was not a hum, not a whistle, not a shriek. It was a
+steady, a terrible, deep-toned roar. That roaring of the wind was
+characteristic, throughout, of the Storm That Had to be Stopped.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II.
+
+                            IN AN OPEN CAR.
+
+
+Hines had started out at five o'clock in the morning, in hopes of
+getting away from the city before the heavy traffic began. But, of
+course, he turned out to be only one of many thousands who had the same
+idea. The heat wave in New York had been terrific. It is recorded that
+the traffic had piled up as early as 3 A.M., and when Hines started at
+five he was promptly swallowed up in a long lane of cars going up-State
+at a bare crawl.
+
+His accident happened just out of Yonkers at a little after six, but it
+was nine before his wheel was replaced and a new mudguard in position.
+By that time the Storm had begun.
+
+Down there, quite sixty miles from the storm-center, its development
+was less spectacular. Up among the mountains it is fairly certain
+that the wind began at a very few minutes after six. Watches found
+on victims of the first terrific rush of wind were almost invariably
+stopped at that hour, and clocks in houses, overturned and crushed,
+corroborate the figures. But it was nearly half past six when a strong
+wind began to blow from Yonkers toward the mountains.
+
+The sun was just up. Hines was seething over the delay. He was engaged
+to Kathryn, and he resented anything that kept him away from her. The
+Catskills had been his suggestion in the first place. Kathryn, as a
+feature writer on the _Star_, didn't want to get too far from New York
+anyhow.
+
+Other matters aside, there was a man named Preston who was rather
+definitely dangerous and who was still at large. Not less than twice,
+with his artificial darkness, he had set the whole city of New York by
+the ears, to his own enormous profit.
+
+Hines, and Schaaf--now up in the Catskills, too, making some abstruse
+experiments with very short Hertzian waves for the research department
+of the American Electric Company--Hines and Schaaf had managed to
+checkmate him each time.
+
+Each time Kathryn had been in at the death, and each time the _Star_
+had scored a newspaper triumph. With Preston still at large, and both
+Hines and Schaaf convinced that sooner or later he would try to strike
+again, Kathryn had not wanted to get too far away even on her vacation.
+She wanted to handle the next battle with Preston for the _Star_ as she
+had the first two.
+
+Hines moved restlessly about the garage, or scowled at the never-ending
+but often pausing line of cars that went crawling, crawling, creeping
+away from the heat of the city.
+
+Those cars were leaving a sweltering city behind them, to steam upon
+sweltering roads in an atmosphere of exhaust-fumes, but at least they
+had hopes of reaching the hills and coolness. Instead, only too many of
+them reached the hills and disaster.
+
+Hines noticed a breeze at twenty after six. At half past it was a wind.
+At seven, it was half a gale, blowing under a clear sky with a brazen
+sun already sending down a blistering heat.
+
+Hines swore under his breath, but it was no use trying to hurry the
+mechanics. He was an inspector of police in the city of New York, but
+at a roadside garage he was merely a customer, and the traffic outside
+promised plenty of customers before the day was over.
+
+It was shortly after eight that Hines saw the top of an ancient touring
+car torn to ribbons by the wind. Before nine o'clock came, he had seen
+dozens of them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The traffic began to thin, abruptly. Cars headed for the mountains
+turned aside. They began to fight their way into storage garages,
+battling a terrific, solid mass of air.
+
+Some of them stopped where trees on a side-road promised some measure
+of protection from the wind. Others were wiser and parked themselves in
+swarming masses wherever deep cuts or valleys ran across the prevailing
+direction of the wind.
+
+The galvanized garage roof was a drumming tumult, now, rattling and
+booming from the wind that went sweeping across it. The mechanics
+finished Hines's car and very reluctantly opened the doors--closed a
+half hour before--to let him out.
+
+He came out into a rather incredible world. Trees were leaning toward
+the mountains. The roads were nearly clear. The traffic had lessened
+almost to nothing. The noise of the wind was a distinct deep booming
+sound, to which the tortured trees added shrill whistles and shriller
+screams, and now and then sharp cracking sounds as limbs or trunks gave
+way under the intolerable pressure.
+
+Hines turned toward the mountains and shifted gears. They clashed,
+horribly. It was seconds before he realized that the wind had pushed
+his car ahead of the motor-speed. He had to race the engine to get into
+second, and race it again to get into third.
+
+The car seemed to be possessed of unlimited power. It sped toward the
+mountains like a mad thing. Every man comes to know his motor, but
+Hines found his own car acting like a thing possessed. With his foot
+off the accelerator it made forty-five miles an hour. The barest touch
+on the gas-pedal sent it leaping to sixty, seventy miles.
+
+He saw an ancient flivver turned over, at the side of the road. There
+were no people near it. He braked, instinctively, and found his
+brakes nearly useless. His car flashed past, and he heard the brakes
+squealing, but felt hardly any diminution of his speed.
+
+There was a ripping sound behind him. His back curtain had blown in.
+The split upper half of the windshield opened out, and wind poured from
+behind him out over the front. Another wreck. Two more.
+
+He saw a car coming toward him and passed it with the speed of light,
+but in the instant of his passing saw the man at the wheel of that
+other vehicle working frantically at gas-lever and throttle, and it
+seemed to him that for the fraction of a second he heard the roaring of
+a motor laboring horribly in low gear, battling against the wind alone.
+
+The road shot into a deep cut, and the abnormal acceleration of the car
+diminished. Hines jammed on the brakes and stopped with difficulty. The
+ripped fragments of his back curtain were flapping about him and he got
+out his knife to cut them away.
+
+Now he felt the wind as a savage, gusty pressure. It was terrifically
+strong, even down here in a cut some thirty feet deep. Something was
+stirring in Hines's breast, just then, which he was grimly refusing to
+recognize. After all, there have been storms and storms. Kathryn, up in
+the mountains, would be safe enough.
+
+The thin tooting of a horn came to him. A car had drawn aside from the
+road, some fifty or sixty feet ahead. A man in it was waving to him
+to come on ahead. Hines merely released his brakes and his car moved
+sluggishly for twenty feet and stopped. He put it in gear for the rest
+of the distance.
+
+Here, remarkably, the air was calm. The man in the other car was
+smoking placidly. Overhead the wind rushed past with its deep, ominous
+roaring sound. At just this point between the sides of the cut there
+was a perfect lee, where no wind-currents of any sort were noticeable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I thought I'd tip yuh," said the man in the other car. "This is the
+best place I've hit yet. Pull over off the road an' you'll be all
+right. Better get off the road, though. A car come through here like a
+bat out o' hell. Turned over at the end of the cut, yonder. The wind's
+near cross-wise there."
+
+Instinct made Hines ask: "Anybody hurt?"
+
+The man spat.
+
+"Hell! They fell out an' the wind picked 'em up an' carried 'em off
+somewhere. Ain't it a wind, though? What y' call a hurricane, I guess."
+
+Hines was staring, oblivious. Far, far away, a cloud was forming, but
+unlike any cloud Hines had ever seen before. Something, the sheer
+distance of the formation perhaps, told him that it was higher than any
+cloud he had known. It rose as a vast, incredible column, and then it
+spread out as a mushroom might spread above its stalk.
+
+"Yeah," said the man in the other car. "It's been like that for
+half-an-hour, now. Looks like a volcano cloud, but it ain't. No earth
+shocks. Just wind. I reckon that's the storm-center. It's a peach, this
+storm. That cloud 'll be over the Catskills, somewheres."
+
+Hines started, and then he turned grimly to his car-top. He slashed at
+it, wrenching away the cloth and flinging it away.
+
+"I'm going on," he said, rather absurdly.
+
+The man in the other car shrugged.
+
+"I ain't stopping you," he observed. "But you better stay here. That
+wind is a hell-cat. If you want your car to stay on the road an' you're
+bound to go, load 'er down with rocks. Plenty of 'em. I mean that wind
+'Il blow you clean to hell and gone if you don't."
+
+Hines's brain was busy with a real, an acknowledged terror now, but
+something in the suggestion jerked at his mind.
+
+"Right," he said suddenly. "Thanks. I'll do it. I believe it's needed."
+
+The other man unfastened his car-door and stepped out.
+
+"I'll help," he said amiably.
+
+In silence they worked. The empty seat beside the driver was filled
+with bowlders and smaller rocks. All the floor-space filled up. Hines
+flung up the back of the rumble seat and they filled it with stones of
+smaller size.
+
+"One more tip," said the other man thoughtfully. "Some flat rocks
+alongside your hood 'll help."
+
+They found two huge stones, loosened by the dynamite that had made the
+cut. They wedged them in between the mudguards and the hood. Hines held
+out his hand. There was a bill in it.
+
+"Go to hell," said the other man cheerfully. "Me, I'm a socialist and
+a proletarian, an' judging by your car you're a damn' capitalist--a
+bourgeois anyways. But one guy can help out another one, can't he?"
+
+Hines put away the bill and shook hands instead.
+
+"My girl's up there in the mountains," he said briefly. "I'm going up
+to see if she's all right."
+
+"Good luck!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hines's car, with its top gone and its windshield laid flat before it,
+went into low gear with a vast groaning. It was burdened with over half
+a ton of stone. It went into second with a little difficulty. Then the
+wind began to make itself felt. Despite its added weight, the car went
+into high gear quite normally. It was rolling along at twenty miles an
+hour when it came out of the cut into the full blast of the wind again.
+
+Hines was flung against the side door. The car shuddered horribly.
+Gasping for breath, with his head bent over, his hat gone instantly,
+Hines fought to keep it on the road. There was a curve here, and for
+two hundred yards he went squarely across the wind. Without the rocks,
+no vehicle ever built would have stayed on the road in such a blast.
+
+Then the road turned again and the wind was behind him once more.
+Instantly the car picked up speed. Thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an
+hour. Forty-five miles--fifty--
+
+The landscape flashed past, a mass of wrecked trees and débris. Hines
+saw the body of a motor truck a full hundred yards from the road,
+smashed against a rocky hillside. He saw two, three, a dozen cars
+overturned--always on the side of the road to which the wind would have
+flung them. He came to a town which was nearly obliterated. Wreckage
+littered the streets. He jammed on the brakes, raced his motor, got it
+into second, and slowed by the braking action of the engine. He raced
+it again and got into first and turned off his switch.
+
+He was going no more than fifteen miles an hour when the car careened
+over a heap of rubbish which once had been part of a building, swung
+about insanely and crashed where splintered planks had piled up against
+a massive stone wall.
+
+It was part of a road-tunnel underneath a railroad track.
+
+Then Hines saw a man crawling on the pavement before him. The man
+had a rope about his waist, which was evidently tied to something. A
+paint-pot slopped white paint about as he pushed it ahead of him. He
+was painting huge letters on the concrete roadway.
+
+                              HINES STOP!
+
+                              HINES STOP!
+
+                               HINES STO
+
+That was as far as he had gone. He was painfully working on the last
+letter of the third "Stop" when Hines opened the side door of his car.
+Hines slid out, gasping for breath, and dropped flat on his belly on the
+road. He went crawling about the splintered planks to windward until
+the man saw him. Then he shouted, uselessly, while the man stared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not until Hines had pointed repeatedly to his name and then
+to himself that comprehension slowly dawned on the crawling man's
+face. The fellow waved and shouted an order across the ten feet of
+intervening space, then hauled himself along the rope in the very teeth
+of the wind to a doorway in the side of the road-tunnel. Seconds later
+he was out again with another rope. He flung it into the air, and the
+wind stretched it taut.
+
+Hines crawled, knotted it about his body, and felt himself hauled
+across the road.
+
+For the second time he was in a blessed calm. He stood up, panting. The
+man who had been painting on the road made a peculiarly absurd salute.
+
+"You're Police Inspector Hines, sir?" he asked woodenly.
+
+Hines nodded, still unable to speak.
+
+"Corporal Woodford of the State Police, sir," said the man who had
+pulled Hines across the road by a rope. "All wires are down, sir,
+but every broadcasting station that hasn't been wrecked has been
+broadcasting orders to every possible agency to stop you from going
+into the storm.
+
+"Professor Schaaf managed to get a message out by radio, sir, from a
+spot very near the storm-center. He says that the storm is caused by
+Preston's darkness-apparatus, and that you are the only man able to
+stop it. And the storm, sir, simply has to be stopped. Will you step
+inside and give your instructions?"
+
+Hines blinked, and then the meaning of the message came to him. Rage
+filled him, consumingly. And then he went sick with helplessness.
+Because, of course, he could have no instructions to give for the
+stopping of a storm.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III.
+
+                            DECLARING WAR.
+
+
+Under ordinary circumstances, it is probable that the little room in
+which Hines found himself would have seemed extraordinarily cramped and
+crowded.
+
+It was perhaps eight feet by ten, certainly no more, and it was inset
+in a railroad fill which here was pierced for a vehicular roadway. A
+door opened upon the curbstone, and from the narrow doorstep it was no
+more than ten feet to the painted white line which normally marked the
+center of the road.
+
+On the farther side of the railroad embankment there was another
+concrete highway, which explained the presence of the room. Here was a
+dangerous crossroad, and this little cubby-hole was a shelter for the
+State policemen.
+
+There was a tiny stove, and a bench along one side of the wall, and a
+cupboard and a table. There were nails, from which a slicker, a belt
+with a holster attached, and a patched motorcycle inner tube depended.
+On the table a tiny radio blared forth intermittent sounds from an even
+tinier loud-speaker.
+
+"To all authorities in New York State," said a voice crisply. "All
+traffic must be stopped where the wind has now reached a velocity of
+forty miles an hour. The storm is expected to increase in intensity
+until four o'clock this afternoon. Wherever possible the population
+must be warned of this fact. The storm will lessen markedly at about
+sunset and may have ceased entirely by morning.
+
+"It is imperative also that Inspector of Police Hines be reached and
+warned not to enter the storm area. Where practicable, signs should be
+painted on stone walls or the pavement. 'Hines Stop!' will be enough to
+cause Inspector Hines to stop and make inquiry. He will probably travel
+on one of the following roads--"
+
+Hines turned to his companion, who was busily raking together a heap of
+wires from the drawer of the table and twisting them together into a
+single long strand.
+
+"I'm getting a buzzer signal ready," said the State trooper woodenly,
+"to use the railroad rails overhead. The radio said half an hour ago
+that all State troopers were to use buzzer signals and railroad tracks
+where they couldn't report otherwise. Not many, of us left, sir, and
+very few of us can report, anyhow. I didn't bother with that until I'd
+put up signs to stop you, sir."
+
+The radio had finished a long list of highways. It began again,
+repeating the previous message word for word, while wind roared
+overhead in a deep-toned bellow which did not seem to vary by the
+fraction of a semitone. It was rising slowly in pitch, as a matter of
+fact, but so slowly that Hines's ears could not follow the change.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"This is an emergency means of communication, sir," said the trooper,
+joining wires together with painstaking care. "It's the old buzzer
+line that used to be used in the Army. I take an induction coil, the
+one from my motorcycle, sir, and put the secondary into the rail up
+overhead. The rail's iron, sir, and it isn't insulated, and it's not
+very efficient, but they can pick it up with amplifiers at the other
+end."
+
+He bent two wires and fastened them to the storage-battery which
+ran his radio. He was busy for a minute or more, improvising a
+make-and-break contact.
+
+The trooper put it down, satisfied, and tied a rope about himself.
+
+"We have ropes here, sir, for towing," he observed. "I'm going out with
+the wire, sir, and try to fasten this to the railroad rail. If I'm
+blown away, sir, will you try to haul me back?"
+
+"Wait a bit," said Hines shortly. "I'm going to do that. I don't
+know Morse code; and you're needed for signaling. I'll make the
+connection.... It's my order," he added sharply as the trooper shook
+his head.
+
+Reluctantly, the trooper gave him the rope-end.
+
+Hines knotted the rope tightly about his body and stepped out of the
+door. Wind struck him, and took his breath away. But that was the wind
+that blew through the relatively sheltered traffic way. He was crawling
+on his belly when he came out on the lee side of the railroad fill, and
+a monstrous eddy of wind lifted him six inches off the ground and flung
+him crashing ten feet away. He gasped, and began to crawl desperately
+up the incline toward the rails.
+
+The wind, here, had formed a monstrous whirl over the slight
+obstruction. The dried cinders, dust, and small stones which once had
+covered the side of the embankment had long since been sucked up and
+flung madly away. It was naked damp clay that smeared him as he crawled
+toward the tracks.
+
+He seemed to be weightless, as the wind-whirl tried to lift him upward.
+Hines had been in the European war, and he thought that he had learned
+to hug the ground, but never before in his life had he clung so
+desperately to the earth as he did now. He was blinded, strangled.
+
+There was a vast, malevolent force pulling and tugging at his body. And
+then quite suddenly his fingers scraped concrete, and he fought the
+wind that strove to push his exploring hand aside and found a steel
+signal-post that must be beside the track.
+
+It was that post that really made it possible for him to reach the
+rails. The blast that came over the top of the embankment was as
+fierce, as savage, as nearly irresistible as a flood of swiftly-flowing
+water. Nobody knows what velocity the wind ultimately attained in the
+Storm, but it had reached a hundred and forty miles an hour when the
+self-registering anemometer in the Burton observatory was wrecked.
+
+Hines faced that wind, and fought his way inch by inch by means of the
+steel bands connecting the signal-post to the rails. An outstretched
+arm caught the wind. The sleeve ballooned out and burst. A flapping end
+was seized by the wind and the rest of the garment was literally peeled
+from him.
+
+Here, of course, the wind was at its worst as far as Hines was
+concerned. He was protected by no more than the four-inch steel rail
+from its full force, and constantly there poured over him dust, smaller
+fragments of débris, and above all and over all the overpoweringly
+dense and solid wind itself.
+
+When the connection was made, Hines was sobbing with sheer exhaustion.
+He slid back down the incline, an inch at a time. And then suddenly
+the wind caught him, and he felt himself lifted up. The rope about his
+body tightened and hurt intolerably, and then he felt a crash and lost
+consciousness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he came back to himself he was lying on the floor in the little
+eight-by-ten room again, and the State trooper was working the buzzer
+signal steadily. He stopped, and came over to Hines.
+
+Hines stirred, and the trooper nodded to himself. He went back to the
+buzzer and worked it again.
+
+The radio broke off in the midst of its tediously repeated message.
+
+"Corporal Woodford!" said the loud-speaker crisply. "Since Inspector
+Hines has recovered consciousness, we will give him the message from
+Professor Schaaf. He is in communication with the American Electric
+Company by means of a short-wave set, and we will rebroadcast it to
+you."
+
+There were clickings. One or two curious crashing noises. Then a
+re-enforcement of the roaring of the storm, only this extra roaring
+came from the speaker. It was evident that wherever Schaaf was speaking
+into a microphone, the storm was there too.
+
+"Hello, Hines," said the placid voice of Schaaf. "This is a fery
+pleasant situation, I dondt think. Now I giff you der works, and you
+use your head. Here is what I haff found out.
+
+"At six this morning der sun changed color. From where I am, I obserfe
+with a spectroscope that der infra-red part of der sun spectrum is
+completely gone cuckoo. I haff examined electric lights in der same
+manner, and der infra-red spectrum is missing there, also.
+
+"Der air where I am no longer transmits radiant heat. Der air, in
+other words, is opaque to heat-wafes, as our friendt Breston has been
+able to make it opaque to light. I think he is up to some more of his
+deffilment. As you remember, he was able to make der air absorb and
+neutralize light, producing his infernal darkness.
+
+"I conclude that he has contrifed to make der air absorb heat instead
+of permitting it to come on down to der ground, and in consequence der
+air within range of his sending-apparatus is getting hot as der deffil
+because it is absorbing all der heat that should pass through it to
+warm the earth. Getting hot, it expands and rises. More cool air is
+rushing in underneath. That, in turn, is getting excited and rushing to
+der upper stratosphere.
+
+"Der result is der Storm, that is raising hell. From der communications
+I haff received from der American Electric Company, der storm-center is
+fifty miles across, which makes it a hell of a storm. Der aferage for a
+typhoon is ten to fifteen miles.
+
+"Der information I haff for you is that it is definitely Breston who is
+making this storm. He has a sending-apparatus with a range of twenty
+to thirty miles in efery direction. Where his _verdammt_ short wafes
+reach, der air is no longer transparent to heat-wafes and all der heat
+of der sun is being used to heat der atmosphere, instead of der earth.
+There is bractically a chimney fifty miles across, full of hot air
+which is rising toward heafen and raising hell.
+
+"You can locate der sending-station with apparatus like we used to
+line up der source of der darkness, before. I will be in communication
+with der Electric Company for some time to come. You can reach me, of
+course. But be careful as der deffil how you talk. Breston is no doubt
+listening in.
+
+"I don't know what you are going to do, or how you are going to do it,
+but you haff got to do something. Der chimney of hot air will stop
+working, of course, at sunset. But it will probably begin again at
+sunrise, and in der meantime there will be der deffil of a storm all
+night long because of der hell that was raised all day. Good luck,
+Hines. I sign off now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were more clickings and the storm-roar from the loud-speaker
+stopped. Then the crisp voice of the announcer came once more.
+
+"Mr. Hines! I hope you received Professor Schaaf's message. Woodford's
+communications are coming through quite clearly. It is not yet known
+just where you are. If you will send word, every effort will be made
+to reach you. In the meantime, will you give what orders you can about
+preparations for stopping 'this storm?"
+
+The trooper, with his improvised key poised, looked expectantly at
+Hines.
+
+"My messages are getting through, sir," he said woodenly. "And I
+imagine that they can't be read by anybody except at the other end of
+the rails. Before you recovered consciousness, the commissioner of
+police in New York City broadcast a message giving you full authority.
+The State authorities have done the same. What shall I tell them you
+want done?"
+
+Hines's hands were clenched tightly. Kathryn was up in the mountains
+somewhere, somewhere near the center of the storm which was Preston's
+work. Preston's work!
+
+She was probably dead by this time. Few buildings could stand the blast
+that blew outside. There was nothing to do, now, but get Preston.
+
+Preston was the one man on earth that Hines unfeignedly hated. He had
+seen the man once. He had fought him twice, with the scientist Schaaf's
+aid. Preston should have been one of the greatest scientific geniuses
+on earth, but instead had now made himself the most cold-blooded
+murderer in history.
+
+Preston found that certain short Hertzian waves produced a state of
+fluorescence in the air[1] so that the visible waves of light were
+absorbed by the ions of the atmosphere, and an utter darkness was
+produced.
+
+[Footnote 1: The fluorescence of atmospheric air under the influence
+of certain wave-lengths of radiation was described as long ago as
+1911 in a lecture before the Royal Institution of Great Britain by
+Professor R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University. The very short rays
+discovered by Schumann were demonstrated to produce fluorescence in
+air. The experiments and a photograph of the phenomenon may be found
+reprinted in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1911, which
+is available in many public libraries. See page 165 _et seg_.]
+
+Once, some months before, he had sent a beam of those waves down
+Fifth Avenue, in New York. In fifteen minutes of utter blackness the
+forewarned underworld of the city reaped a harvest of which Preston
+received his share.
+
+With every resource of science and courage, Hines and Schaaf had
+fought him then, and had won. His apparatus for producing darkness was
+destroyed, and he seemed to have been killed. It was that success that
+had won Hines promotion to an inspectorship of police.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Preston, however, was not dead. Three months since, he had reappeared
+with a new and larger apparatus for the broadcasting of his short
+waves. He filled the whole city with the unbelievably high-frequency
+broadcast, and the air above the whole metropolitan district absorbed
+all visible rays and transformed them into invisible heat. The whole
+city was immersed in an ocean of oblivion.
+
+Again Hines had fought him, with Schaaf's assistance. That bulky blond
+German scientist had invented instruments for locating the source
+of this radiation which had an almost catalytic effect in producing
+darkness. The effect of the waves was out of all proportion to the
+power used in producing them.
+
+By Schaaf's instruments and Hines's courage, again the menace to the
+city had been nullified; but Preston had gone scot-free, and had become
+a millionaire through the panic in the stock-market his horrible weapon
+had caused.
+
+He remained undiscovered and at large, and his captured apparatus had
+been destroyed by the explosion of an evidently prepared bomb before it
+could be examined.
+
+Now he was again at work. He had prepared apparatus which could send
+over a circle from fifty to sixty miles across. Wherever that station
+maintained a field of force of the extremely short radio waves, there
+the effects of the unholy radiation were evident.
+
+He seemed to be using now a slightly different wave-length than had
+caused all light radiation to be absorbed by the air. Now it was that
+all heat was arrested by the atmosphere. The warmth of the sun did not
+reach the earth. The air itself became heated instead. Heated, it rose,
+and created a cyclonic storm beyond all parallel.
+
+Preston, in the midst of that storm, was as safe from any danger save
+that of the storm as if he were protected by armies. No man could reach
+him, alive. He was invulnerable, protected by the sheer destruction he
+had invoked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hines clenched his hands in the cubby-hole dug in the railroad
+embankment. His eyes narrowed. Kathryn was very probably dead, and
+Preston still lived. Preston would have to be killed for the sake of
+humanity alone; yet Hines would kill him to avenge her only.
+
+"First," said Hines in a cold and utterly bitter tone, "I want
+everybody who's sold stocks short for a week past to be checked up.
+Preston will be operating in terms of millions. I suggest that the
+stock-market be closed, because when it's closed he can have no motive
+to continue the storm. And then--"
+
+He paused to marshal his thoughts, while rage pumped in every artery
+and an almost insane hatred maddened him.
+
+"Then," he said harshly, "I want the biggest tanks in the United States
+Army to be sent up here as soon as the wind dies down a little. They'll
+have to travel under their own power, because the roads and railroads
+alike are useless. I want the big forty-ton ones. I want at least two
+gun-carrier tanks with six-inch guns and a supply of gas and high
+explosive shell. And I want some bombs."
+
+He went on to list cables, more bombs, and airplane photo maps of all
+the Catskills.
+
+Meanwhile the Storm increased in force. It had been unbelievable
+before. Now the wind reached an intensity hitherto unknown upon the
+earth.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV.
+
+                         INTO THE DESOLATION.
+
+
+When sunset came and the Storm died down temporarily, it had left its
+marks all over a circle of territory a full thousand miles in diameter.
+The damage done ranged from a mere blowing-down of signs at the edge
+of that circle, to the absolutely unparalleled devastation of the
+territory immediately about the storm-center.
+
+In the center, of course, the damage was terrific. Forests, houses,
+hamlets, towns, all were leveled to the ground. Yet, there were
+survivors. Cellars protected some, as did valleys and hollows. Probably
+four or five thousand people lived through it.
+
+The fifty-mile circle of the storm-center was devastated, but it
+was not destroyed. And beyond the storm-center, where the wind had
+not reached its ultimate velocity, the amount of damage was neatly
+proportioned to the distance from the focus of the storm.
+
+But about the edge of that central area--the space Schaaf had spoken of
+as the chimney--there was a ringlike strip of utter desolation, five to
+fifteen miles wide.
+
+Every particle of vegetation had been swept away by the sheer force of
+the wind. The fields were bare even of grass. In spots apparently even
+the topsoil had dried to dust and gone sweeping away into oblivion in
+the storm-wind. The forests were shattered areas of splintered stumps.
+The houses had left as traces only small mounds of masonry, or else no
+signs at all.
+
+The storm died down at sunset and for half an hour there was almost
+peace. But the vast chimney of sun-heated air which shot upward for
+miles had acted as a vacuum, drawing to itself air from every direction
+with terrific speed. When the vacuum abruptly ceased to be, the winds
+continued to blow for a time from sheer momentum, and piled up a
+colossal high-pressure system which was as intolerable as the previous
+storm-center had been.
+
+Over all the North Atlantic States, then, there was atmospheric chaos.
+Dense clouds formed at nightfall. Rain in unexampled volume fell,
+while electric storms wrought havoc. In the Catskill section mountain
+streams, choked with the débris of the wind's creation, became flooded
+with falling water and abruptly turned to inundations.
+
+In that terrible strip of desolation about the storm-center itself, the
+bare, stripped earth turned to a vast morass of mud. And that morass
+claimed victims when survivors in the central area tried to cross it
+during the darkness and the rain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock, rain was falling in sheets, in columns, almost in
+solid masses. Lurid, unbelievable bolts of lightning leaped from one
+horizon to the other.
+
+There were no electric lights, of course, in two thousand square miles
+of New York State that night. Beneath monstrous clouds which poured
+floods upon the earth, there was only blackness, save at one spot.
+There, pencil-beams of light stabbed futilely at the falling rain,
+where twelve huge tanks rocked and lurched and slid on up toward the
+mountains.
+
+They had stopped in their advance and picked up Hines. He sat up in the
+control-room of the largest of all of them, and asked dreary questions
+and dully gave instructions which organized the attack.
+
+The tanks would go on up toward the site of the storm-center. They
+would gather, presently, and Hines would give instructions which would
+be final. Then they would scatter to their several strategic points.
+
+With dawn, when the Storm That Had to be Stopped began again,
+they would use the instruments Schaaf had originally designed for
+determining the point of origin of certain other short waves.
+They would find Preston's station. It would probably be a dugout,
+underground, for safety from the storm he could create at will. The
+tanks would bomb that station mercilessly. Or if he had intrenched
+himself upon a mountain peak, the gun-carrying caterpillars would come
+into action. Six-inch guns would assail a solitary man who essayed to
+devastate the earth.
+
+Only colossal things such as they were--weighing forty tons each--could
+hope to exist and move in the atmospheric turmoil that would begin with
+sunrise.
+
+The tanks rumbled and lurched as they made their way in a sedate
+long line toward the hills. Rain poured in rivulets from their steel
+sides. Sheets and masses of falling water scattered the beams from the
+searchlights mounted upon them. From the control-room it was possible
+to see perhaps twenty feet with some clarity, and dimly for thirty feet
+more. But after that even the searchlight glare was dissipated by the
+rain.
+
+Hines looked weary and worn and haggard. All day long he had been in
+communication with New York, giving orders which men leaped to obey.
+
+The State had given him full authority. He had shown his ability.
+Besides, the scale, the scope of this disaster was one to induce
+panic. The leadership of Hines, who had twice defeated Preston, would
+restore some confidence in a public otherwise more than inclined to be
+panic-stricken.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These were army tanks, shipped on flat-cars as far as the rails were
+undamaged, drawn by a locomotive that had crept on and on, as far as it
+dared, while the Storm still blew in the daytime. They had come at full
+speed immediately darkness fell.
+
+Now they went lurching and pounding up toward the hills. The clanking
+of their mighty treads was thunderous in their reverberating interiors.
+The roaring of their motors was deafening.
+
+They were full of the smell of hot oil and exhaust-gases and fuel,
+but up in the control-room the lightning and thunder blotted out all
+sights and sounds, and the sheer desert of mud over which they traveled
+toward the hills made it impossible for any man who saw it to think of
+anything else.
+
+Hines, alone, thought of Kathryn. The awful desolation over which the
+tanks traveled had been covered with farms and houses and forests only
+twelve hours before. People had lived here--people who now were torn
+and draggled corpses flung haphazard amid the other débris of the Storm.
+
+Hines had been cooped up for twelve hours knowing his helplessness,
+knowing that Kathryn was either dead or desperately in need of help.
+Now, he was sure, she was dead. The desert of mud over which the tanks
+passed was enough to convince him of her death.
+
+The radio had told them that over most of the United States the wind
+had reached gale intensity.
+
+The weather bureau in Washington was working like mad to predict the
+unpredictable, but from the one day's storm alone weeks of chaotic
+weather could be foreseen.
+
+Already meteorologists were speculating upon the effect of the Storm
+upon the climate of Europe. California, it was certain, would be
+visited by subsidiary hurricanes, and from Texas on north there would
+be cyclonic whirls of terrible intensity as the air of the earth moved
+to fill up the vacuum Preston could create at will.
+
+What news there was of the loss of life was so monstrous as to have
+lost all meaning. The record of towns destroyed, of villages wiped out,
+became monotonous. From the standpoint of property destroyed the Storm
+was one of the major catastrophes of history; and if the death toll
+was lighter than certain plagues and earthquakes, it was only because
+the larger cities were fortunately far from the circles of highest
+wind-velocity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The feel of slippery mud beneath the tanks' great treads changed
+subtly. The earth became curiously more solid. A great bowlder appeared
+not far from the leading tank's track, glistening and running with
+rain. The tank changed course to avoid it. Hines looked back. Despite
+the falling water, he could detect a long lane of white glows, which
+were the searchlights of the following tanks.
+
+The tanks still went on. They were in what seemed to be a semi-solid
+mass of water, intermittently made into a greenish universe of light
+by lightning-flashes which were blurred by the rain to mere indefinite
+illumination. In the periods of darkness between those flashes, the
+searchlights gleamed brightly ahead. And water poured from the tanks in
+floods.
+
+D bris appeared, water-soaked and shredded. The stumps of wind-whipped,
+obliterated Indian corn began suddenly to the left. The treads of
+the tanks clanked suddenly on concrete. There was a road beneath the
+leading tank.
+
+A speaking-tube whistled in the leading tank.
+
+"Headquarters," came up thinly to the control-room, "orders you to try
+to locate yourself by road signs or any other evidences of position."
+
+The officer in command of the tank snorted and made no answer.
+
+The tank went on. There was concrete under the left tread only. The
+tank wallowed around and climbed back on the road. It went rumbling
+blindly on in the rain. Presently bare concrete was visible. Mud had
+not washed across it here.
+
+"There!" said Hines sharply. "A road-sign bent over by the wind! It's
+in place!"
+
+An unearthly hooting set up. The tank stopped with a grinding noise.
+Hines peered out of the little vision-slits and saw a dripping man with
+a flash light bent over something by the side of the road. It was one
+of the cast-iron road signs one finds in the Catskills. They are set up
+on wrought-iron posts, which are fixed in concrete.
+
+Originally the sturdiness of construction was made necessary by the
+vandal habits of a motoring populace, but it served a useful purpose
+now. Set facing the wind, the cast-iron plate had caught the full
+blast. And the wrought-iron shaft had bent slowly but definitely until
+the sign lay nearly flat, facing upward.
+
+The dripping soldier came sprinting back into the tank. The
+speaking-tube whistled again,
+
+"The sign says 'North Weddensdale Corporate Limits,' sir."
+
+Hines clenched his hands. This was the village where Kathryn had been
+staying! He strained his eyes desperately through the rain.
+
+A rectangular hole to the left of the concrete caught his eye. It was
+a cellar. The house had been taken cleanly away from above it. Nothing
+was left. Nothing.
+
+"Go on," he said hoarsely.
+
+The tank ground into motion again. Rain poured from its sides. Its
+searchlight ray stabbed into the darkness and was dissipated by
+falling water.
+
+Then the searchlight ray went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Almost instantly thereafter the speaking-tube whistled. "All the tanks,
+sir, report their searchlights have gone out."
+
+The officer commanding the leading tank swore to himself. "All right.
+Everybody stop and repair them."
+
+Hines heard his voice speaking hoarsely:
+
+"It's the Darkness. The metal walls of the tank act as shields, so we
+can see inside, but it's the Darkness--the same darkness Preston turned
+on in New York. If you send a man outside to make sure, keep up a noise
+so he can find his way back."
+
+Hines went, himself, to the exit door of the tank. He heard two men
+moving about outside. The interior of the tank was brightly lighted,
+and the door was opened wide, but the light from inside did not strike
+upon the earth beneath the tank. It seemed to be absorbed by some
+solid black substance which surrounded the metal monster and stretched
+solidly almost with an inward bulge, across the open door.
+
+Thunder shook the earth. There was a crashing and crackling of
+electricity. From the violence of the report, the lightning-flash must
+have struck somewhere near by. But there was no faintest flickering of
+light.
+
+Then, in a peculiarly ghastly fashion, a groping hand came out of
+the solid wall of blackness across the tank's exit door. It seemed
+disembodied, detached from any body. It caught at the edge of the door.
+A man came, wild-eyed and staring, out of the apparently solid opacity.
+His teeth chattered as he swung into the illuminated tank.
+
+"The--the flash light don't work," he gasped. "I held it up to my eyes
+and it just glowed, but it don't give any light. See?"
+
+He pressed the button. A brilliant gleam shot from the flash light. His
+jaw dropped open. But Hines nodded his head very bitterly.
+
+The Storm had been made by the broadcasting of very short Hertzian
+waves which caused the atmosphere to be opaque to heat; a mere
+variation of a device that Preston had used before. Now he had gone
+back to the use of his first device again.
+
+Now, from somewhere within a thirty-mile radius, he was broadcasting
+short waves differing perhaps by the fraction of a millimeter in length
+from those that had produced the Storm. And these tiny ripples in the
+ether caused the absorption of all that band of frequencies which made
+visible light.
+
+There was darkness outside the tanks so dense as to be tangible, so
+complete as to constitute utter blindness, so thick that it caused the
+perfect absorption of even the ten thousand candle-power searchlight
+beams within a distance of three feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hines thought grimly, staring at the apparently solid wall of darkness
+without the door. The metal walls of the tanks, of course, absorbed
+and grounded the waves that impinged upon them. The darkness could not
+invade the tanks themselves. But it blinded the drivers beyond the
+possibility of a remedy.
+
+The engines of the tank stopped suddenly. The officer in command swung
+down from the control-room, his lips twisted wryly.
+
+"I reported to headquarters," he said briefly, "and received orders to
+stop my motors and wait for dawn. It is believed that the darkness will
+be lifted when the Storm is started up again."
+
+Hines did not hear him. He was listening with his ears strained to
+their utmost. In the near-silence that came with the engine's stopping,
+the sound of the rain and thunder outside seemed to redouble. The rain
+was invisible, the lightning unseen, but there was a tumult without the
+tank that was terrifying. Yet in the midst of that tumult Hines thought
+he heard a faint cry.
+
+It was repeated. Again, and again. And cold sweat came out upon Hines.
+He could not believe his ears, yet he dared not disbelieve them. Out
+there in a storm such as would have been called a tornado if the Storm
+itself had not given a new meaning to the word, he heard a voice which
+he could swear was that of Kathryn!
+
+The storm itself was violent enough to make venturing into it
+madness--and he would have to go into it as a blind man.
+
+The cry came once more. It was fainter, this time.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V.
+
+                               TRICKED.
+
+
+Two members of the crew of the tank volunteered to go with him. They
+went out as Alpine climbers travel, tied together with a long strand of
+wire that paid out behind them. It would insure that they returned to
+the tank, or would lead them to any of their number who was injured.
+
+Hines went first, groping over unfamiliar ground, unable to guess where
+his next step would bring him. He had broken out the glass of a pocket
+compass proffered by one of the tank's company and steered by the feel
+of its needle, with the tank hooting dismally behind him at regular
+intervals for his better orientation.
+
+He went on into the blackness which seemed almost familiar. His flash
+light bulb glowed dimly when three inches from his eyes. Farther away,
+its light was absorbed by the opaque air, and he seemed to swim through
+it as a diver might swim through a sea of ink.
+
+A fall into a ditch crammed with débris corrected the sensation of
+swimming, however, and he blundered on and gashed his leg against the
+splintered stump of a tree whose knife-edged fragments were in nowise
+softened by the rain.
+
+Rain pelted downward through the darkness. It poured from him in
+streams. He had to bend almost double to protect his open compass from
+the falling water while he felt of the needle.
+
+The tank hooted behind him. He went on. The wire attached to his waist
+dragged. It jerked, and he halted to allow the following man to move
+forward and give him slack. He shouted, and the beginning of his shout
+was loud, and the end of it was drowned out by thunder. He listened,
+and heard only the terrible drumming of miles of rain.
+
+Then a cry in answer. He shouted again, and plunged forward and
+stumbled ten feet on and gashed his forehead horribly, and went on
+again with warm blood mingling with the rain that beat down on his
+face. Suddenly he was sprawling on hands and knees on a monstrous heap
+of broken bricks and field-stone.
+
+A cry came up almost below him. He cursed the darkness then, and called
+once more; and Kathryn sobbed.
+
+"I--I'm all right, only some brick-work fell on me and I can't get up,"
+she said unsteadily a moment later.
+
+"I'm coming down to you," said Hines hoarsely.
+
+"Be careful! There's an open space just above me, where the floor broke
+in, but there's loose rock there. You may fall."
+
+Hines gritted his teeth and fumbled here and there with infinite
+caution. Loose rock above a hole over Kathryn's head meant not so much
+danger to him as to her.
+
+He tore his hand on splintered planks. A figure came blundering nearby.
+He heard it gasping, but he saw nothing, anywhere.
+
+"Fasy!" snapped Hines. "We're here! Stand still!"
+
+Kathryn said steadily from below:
+
+"You're nearly above me. I think you're at the edge of the hole in the
+flooring."
+
+He found it, and called quietly to the other man.
+
+"Our belts," he said briefly. "We'll put 'em together and you lower me.
+Then you can haul her up, and after her, me."
+
+He went down, dangling in the blackness with no more knowledge of his
+whereabouts than a blind man would have had. He landed in a foot and a
+half of water.
+
+"Here," said Kathryn unsteadily. "B-but be careful of the m-masonry."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He stumbled against her shoulder before he realized that she was
+trapped near the floor. The cellar was filling with the drainage of the
+rain. Hines was two men then, for an instant. One felt coolly until
+he had located the mass of brick and mortar that pinned her down, and
+had envisioned its position and its size. The other man was sick with
+horror at the thought of the death that had awaited her as the cellar
+slowly filled with water.
+
+He had more than two men's strength as he wrenched at the mass of
+stone, though. It fell with a turgid splashing that was louder than the
+drumming of the rain and the constant splashing of water that came down
+into the stone-lined depression.
+
+He lifted her and held her close, there in the unbelievable blackness.
+He sent her up, by the linked belts. And he carried her himself, the
+long, stumbling, rather terrible way back to the hooting tank, which
+slowly hauled in the wire as he advanced. The other men blundered on
+ahead of him to take any falls there might be while he carried Kathryn.
+
+Her arm was broken, and she was badly bruised, but that was all. Hines
+set the arm himself, while she smiled at him gamely in the smelly,
+machinery-crowded war-engine.
+
+Then Hines turned to the commander of the tank with a new and more
+savage grimness. He had gained a new motive from Kathryn's injury.
+Oddly enough, he had felt defeated in advance while he believed her
+dead, but a new and throbbing rage swept over him because of her
+injury, a fiercer passion than the hopeless hatred her death would have
+caused.
+
+"Look here," he said savagely. "You've had orders to take directions
+from me. Preston's turned on the dark, outside. He thinks we're
+helpless. You radio headquarters and tell them I order you to go on. I
+take all responsibility."
+
+The officer grinned.
+
+The ordnance department maps of the Catskills leave some things to
+be desired, to be sure. There are errors, in spots, and they are not
+wholly up to date. But every road and bridle-path and every grade and
+hollow is shown upon them.
+
+With a concrete road under their treads and the North Weddensdale
+corporate limits sign for a position-sign, the tanks could very nearly
+go to any spot in all the mountains, blinded though they were.
+
+Men had walked about each of the tanks, with flash lights held close
+to their eyes. They discovered that for a short distance beyond the
+tank, in the direction away from the sending-station of the waves
+of darkness, there was a lee, a "shadow"--a relatively small and
+cone-shaped shielded area, in which the air was protected from the
+Hertzian waves that made it opaque to light. In those shielded areas
+lights could be seen. And those small spaces of transparent air gave a
+bearing--rough, to be sure, but still a bearing--on the station that
+was sending the short waves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The darkness was being transmitted from a spot nearly north-northeast
+of the steel monsters. A man swung up in top of each one with a flash
+light and a hammer. He worked himself around the central turret
+until he had the turret between himself and Preston's transmitter of
+darkness. His flash light gave him proof of his direction. He rapped on
+the turret-plates. One rap for each division of the compass to the east
+of north, and two for each division to the left, was the agreed signal.
+He would transmit the bearing of the source of darkness whenever the
+turret was pounded on from within.
+
+"One more thing," said Hines crisply. "Arrange with the other tanks to
+navigate by whistle-signals instead of radio. Preston will be listening
+in, you can be sure."
+
+Then through the sound of thunder and of rain, there came the
+multitudinous hoots of many whistles. There was a whirring and the
+roaring of engines. Then with a monstrous grinding, the tank set off.
+
+Hines and the tank-officer bent over the map of this locality. Kathryn
+looked on, though her eyes rested most often upon the haggard, draggled
+figure that was Hines.
+
+"The road curves here," said Hines quietly. "That will place us
+definitely."
+
+The officer laid his finger on a certain spot.
+
+"A bridge," he observed, "all of sixty feet high in the middle. We'll
+be crossing it--blind. And it may be blown out."
+
+Hines shrugged. The tank rumbled on, and on.... Its whistle hooted, and
+was answered from behind. Then a long line of blind monsters hooted one
+after the other as they swam through obscurity as black as the blackest
+ink.
+
+Concrete under the treads. They were steering the monster by compass,
+now, and the sound of the treads.
+
+Quite suddenly, the tank wallowed off the concrete. It lurched,
+careened, swung about and then found the way again.
+
+"That's the curve," said the officer. "We're located all right."
+
+From this time on the navigation of the monster vehicle was confident
+and crisp. A modern tank records its course and distance so accurately
+that even in the densest fog it can retrace its way for miles without a
+landmark.
+
+From the map a forecast of the course to be followed was being made and
+the tank lumbered on through oblivion. Utter darkness filled the world
+without its steel walls, save where one man sat in a terrific downpour
+in a triangular small space of transparent air, and watched a dripping
+compass by the light of a flash light.
+
+From time to time he pounded savagely on the steel deck with a hammer,
+signaling to those within. From time to time, too, there were vast
+hooting noises, feet only from his head, and there were other dismal
+hootings behind him in the utter blackness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The feel of the concrete underneath changed subtly. The forty-ton
+weight of the tank was making the huge bridge sway slightly. The tank's
+whistle howled, in a succession of long and short blasts.
+
+"They'll wait until we're across the bridge," said the officer shortly.
+"One at a time is load enough."
+
+The leading tank ground on. The bridge quivered and shook. Presently
+the earth was solid under it again. It halted and seemed to bellow into
+the surrounding bedlam of rain and wind and thunder. An answering hoot
+came faintly. There was stillness, and presently the earth-quivering
+that told of the near approach of another monster. More hootings of
+whistles. Another great tank, and another.
+
+The fifth tank was on its way across the narrow causeway which the
+map said spanned a ravine some sixty feet above the mountain stream.
+Suddenly, there was a wild screaming of its whistle, a terrific crash,
+and then a deafening detonation. The waiting tanks trembled from the
+concussion that ensued.
+
+"It fell off the bridge," said the officer of the tank in which Hines
+rode. He spoke very calmly. "I suppose the rest of us weakened the
+bridge in passing over it. Maybe the Storm helped, too. It gave way and
+the bombs went off when the tank crashed."
+
+He looked at Hines.
+
+"We'll go on with those that are here with us," said Hines grimly.
+"Signal the rest to hunt for shelter from to-morrow's wind."
+
+The hooting, dismal cavalcade of four tanks began again to fumble its
+way along the narrow ribbon of concrete that wound among the mountains.
+Twice the treads crunched shrieking metal beneath them. Cars, wrecked
+and, it was to be hoped, abandoned. Half a dozen times, in one
+relatively sheltered valley, the leading tank crushed a way through
+splintered masses of limbs and foliage that were heaped up in monster
+windrifts.
+
+The half-drowned men out in the flood of rain pounded regularly their
+signals of the source of the waves of darkness. The tanks had gone
+five miles in all in a little over an hour, when the poundings on the
+outside became frantic. A new signal of direction came through. Hines
+said shortly:
+
+"Stop the whole line. Check with all of them."
+
+The tanks had been boring their way through the blackness by map. The
+darkness-producing ether-waves demonstrably had been coming from the
+north-northeast. Now, abruptly, they were proved to be coming from a
+little south of west.
+
+Hines studied the map and the line that had been drawn to indicate the
+tank's ultimate destination. The sending-station was no longer there.
+It had changed position.
+
+"Either," said Hines harshly, "Preston's moved his sending-apparatus,
+or he has two or more of them. He turns one off and another one on. We
+haven't a burglar's chance of locating them if they turn off as we draw
+near them."
+
+They were playing a deadly game of blind-man's-buff with Preston. Now
+Preston showed an unexpected resource. He had more than one outfit
+for producing darkness. When the tanks drew near one, that ceased to
+operate and another took up its task.
+
+It seemed as if Preston had Hines beaten.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+
+                           SCIENTIST AT BAY.
+
+
+Heavily, laboriously, clumsily, the tanks crawled on through the
+darkness. They were blind and they were fumbling. They went clanking
+through a blackness as of the Abyss, with the peculiar confidence of
+things that have long been sightless, while rain beat upon them and
+thunder roared about them.
+
+Hines and the tank-officer were again bent over the map.
+
+"Schaaf's experiment-station was here," said Hines shortly, touching a
+spot on the engraved sheet. "It was more or less a secret, but he was
+trying to work out how to make these same darkness-producing waves. He
+was trying, in fact, to duplicate Preston's results in hopes of finding
+some way to neutralize them. That accounts for his short-wave set and
+the experimental license that enabled him to use it."
+
+The tank-officer received a cross-bearing from the tanks they had left
+behind at the wrecked bridge, and drew a line on his map.
+
+"This is the third darkness-transmitter Preston's brought into use," he
+said quietly.
+
+"And he's using underground a rials," said Hines shortly, "because
+anything above ground would have been blown away by the Storm. We
+can't locate the transmitters closer than within a quarter of a mile,
+by cross-bearings, and we can't count on destroying them even with
+explosives unless we locate them more closely than that. Poison-gas
+will be useless in the wind that will be blowing by dawn."
+
+"We're licked, then," said the tank-officer.
+
+"Not yet," said Hines grimly. "We've got the bearings now. Let's go on.
+I've still got one hope. Schaaf's a smart man."
+
+The tanks crawled on blindly, like gigantic eyeless slugs creeping
+along the bottom of the ocean's deepest deep, while within a vast
+irregular circle fifty miles across, the drenched, shivering,
+hysterical survivors of the Storm itself went closer to madness from
+the terror of the dark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At one o'clock in the morning, while all over the United States people
+sat up by their radios and listened fascinatedly to the never-ceasing
+broadcasts of news and orders, reports and fragmentary pleas for help,
+there was the first direct word from the man who had caused the Storm
+That Had to be Stopped.
+
+Radio broadcasting was, of course, the next most important factor,
+after Hines's activities in lessening the damage Preston did to the
+earth.
+
+All the first night of the storm a warning was broadcast to the
+isolated folk who hastily turned to the radio as their sole link
+with the outside, that the wind was to be expected to begin again at
+daybreak. By broadcasting the location of the few hamlets protected by
+fortuitously placed mountains, much good was done.
+
+Mostly, though, the radio served to make all the world realize the
+extent of the catastrophe. It is to the credit of the people of America
+that trains loaded down with supplies for the devastated area were
+already on their way while the Storm still raged on its second day.
+
+The radio enabled all the continent to share in the horror of the
+Storm, and also the radio was the means of communication with Hines and
+the blinded tanks in the storm-center, so that a hundred million people
+shared in his adventure, in his attempt to stop the Storm.
+
+Perhaps the most spectacular feat the radio performed that night was an
+accident. It was at one o'clock. The tank-officer in charge of Hines's
+tank was communicating with headquarters. The Red Cross had arranged
+for half a dozen sentences from him, describing the devastation the
+tank had passed through on its way to the mountains. If rehabilitation
+was to take place, vast sums would be needed, and money could best be
+got while the catastrophe was fresh in peoples' minds.
+
+The tank-officer spoke curtly into the microphone to headquarters. His
+words were amplified and rebroadcast and sent over the nation-wide
+chains of radio stations. A hundred million people heard his voice
+and even the noise of the machinery of the tank, crawling through the
+darkness where the Storm was made.
+
+But he had spoken no more than a dozen words when another voice cut
+in. This other voice was harsh, metallic; an abominally cocksure and
+arbitrary voice. It spoke with a studied insolence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"This is Preston speaking," said the voice arrogantly, and instantly
+folk all over the United States stiffened in their chairs as the
+unexpected tones came from their loudspreakers.
+
+"I have been much amused by the accounts of the efforts made to find
+and kill me. I have been listening in, of course, from my entirely
+secure retreat in the storm-center, and I am speaking on the same
+wave-length the tanks have been using. I hear my own voice in another
+speaker, being rebroadcast as the lieutenant's voice was supposed to
+be. I think it about time that the people of the United States should
+know with whom and what they deal."
+
+Preston's voice stopped, and millions of people waited breathlessly.
+Static interrupted his words, and whole phrases were sometimes
+obliterated by the crashings made by the lightning, but on the whole
+his message was clear.
+
+"I have made this storm for my own private purposes. I can continue it
+for days, for weeks, even for months. In one week, I am informed, I
+will have so deranged the normal atmospheric conditions in the United
+States that the crops of this fall will be practically ruined.
+
+"In two weeks, by drawing down the colder air from the Arctic Circle,
+I will have brought on winter in Canada. In three weeks there will
+be four feet of snow in London, Germany will be frozen in, and all
+the north of France will have a semi-arctic climate, while the United
+States will face a famine. I invite the meterological experts of the
+world to verify my statement.
+
+"I shall continue the storm I have created until the governments I have
+mentioned make it worth my while to stop it. In the meantime, I assure
+you that the tanks that are trying to locate me have no chance of
+success. The Storm will continue until I wish it to stop. I will stop
+it only when I am sufficiently paid for my trouble."
+
+The arrogant voice ceased. Announcers' voices, quivering with
+excitement, followed with a statement that radio compasses had picked
+up the message before its cessation and that it had actually come from
+the Catskills, from the storm-center.
+
+The United States began to be afraid. The Boards of Governors of the
+Stock Exchanges of New York and Chicago began to arrange, quietly, for
+the closing of those exchanges. Cables began to carry long messages in
+diplomatic code across the ocean-beds.
+
+Suddenly another broadcast, as widely distributed as the first,
+came from Schaaf, in his tiny laboratory set in a hillside. He had
+a national reputation, now, as an associate of Hines, and he was
+frantically called upon for a statement to nullify the panic that
+Preston's announcement would cause.
+
+Schaaf's speech, repeated in the same ten million receiving sets, was
+entirely characteristic of him.
+
+"I haff heard Breston's speech," he said dryly. "I remark that my
+friendt Hines is on the way to join me in a little _Schrecklichkeit_
+party, to be bractised on Breston. I consider that as imbortant as
+anything Breston has said. We will haff him in a matter of hours. As
+for his threats to mess up der weather of two continents, I say one
+thing: No matter how thin you slice it, it is still boloney."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Schaaf's speech had just the tone necessary to restore confidence
+without lessening the public's sense of the real urgency of the
+situation. There were speculators in food-stuffs and other necessities,
+of course, who immediately grasped the opportunity Preston's threats
+created. They, by the way, suffered considerable losses by their
+enterprise as things turned out.
+
+But on the whole the public reacted in highly favorable fashion to
+Schaaf's dry reassurance. Americans will always pay more for a good
+joke than a pathetic story, and Schaaf raised more money by the
+last line of his speech than all the tear-jerking efforts of radio
+spellbinders during the rest of the night.
+
+Schaaf did not listen in and hear himself eulogized on the ether-waves,
+the details of his scientific career sandwiched in between casualty
+lists and weather predictions. He was placidly unaware of his sudden
+celebrity.
+
+In fact, until the restored mail-services brought him sacks of admiring
+and begging letters, and an astounding number of proposals of marriage
+from female admirers, he was not aware that he had done anything out of
+the ordinary.
+
+He was busy. He turned from the microphone with a grunt of disgusted
+relief. His experiment-station was a tiny stone-walled building half
+sunk in a mountainside. It consisted of four rooms.
+
+The laboratory alone was of use to him now. Experimenting as he had
+been with short radio waves, he had needed a workshop in which the
+only etheric disturbances would be those he made himself. The walls of
+the workshop were lined with copper sheeting and the windows covered
+with heavy copper gauze, all of which was grounded. The interior was
+insulated from all Hertzian waves from without.
+
+Now that laboratory glowed brightly with electric light, though he
+had, only to open a door to see the apparently solid mass of no longer
+transparent air which resulted from Preston's devices.
+
+He took down a screen from a window. Instantly the blackness seemed
+to pour, to stab, into the brightly lighted laboratory. Through the
+opening in the grounded shielding, Preston's short-waves penetrated,
+depriving the air of its ability to permit light to pass through it.
+A long cone of darkness, so definite as to seem a solid substance,
+projected into the room--more powerful than the shielding because of
+the nearness to Preston's headquarters.
+
+Schaaf grumbled and measured it, carefully making his measurements from
+accurately marked points. He wrote down his figures and replaced the
+screen. The seemingly tangible cone vanished with much the effect of
+magic.
+
+Schaaf sat down at a little table and began to calculate absorbedly. He
+scowled as he worked, and mumbled irritatedly as he took down a book of
+logarithms and ran his fingers down its columns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The table trembled, from time to time, with the violence of the thunder
+without. There was a very slow leak in the roof over in one corner,
+and now and again a drop fell glittering to an enlarging puddle on the
+floor. The wind howled outside. The rain drummed on the roof.
+
+Schaaf finished his calculations, leaned back and absently combed out
+his luxuriant yellow whiskers with his fingers, then filled and lighted
+his pipe. Its poisonously strong odor filled the air.
+
+The thunder was deafening and nearly continuous. The shrieking of the
+wind was daunting. The drumming sound of the rain was unspeakably
+depressing. Schaaf smoked comfortably for a space, and picked up the
+remnant of a half-eaten sandwich. He bit into it, stopped, and listened
+keenly.
+
+There was a thin and dismal hooting above even the tumult from the
+skies. Schaaf beamed, and then growled impatiently, He swathed himself
+in oil-skins, muttering something about "Der _verdammt_ Breston!" and
+took a huge reel of cord from the wall. It looked like the extra-strong
+braided cord that is used for scientific kite-flying--or for getting
+a kite aloft that is to carry up a temporary a rial. He fastened the
+end inside the door, knotting and double-knotting it. He went out,
+unreeling the cord behind him, and fought the door shut again.
+
+There was no longer any movement or any activity in the laboratory.
+A loud-speaker made nasal noises in one corner, which the booming of
+thunder and of wind and rain drowned out to inarticulateness. The
+lights burned steadily.
+
+An open fire alternately leaped madly upward and died down to nothing
+beneath an improvised damper closing off most of the chimmey-space
+above it. Rain made rattling noises on the windows, and wind screamed
+overhead, and always, always, always, the thunder boomed and crashed.
+
+Then the door burst open and Schaaf came in again, fumbling his way
+back along the cord. He was soaked. Behind him, guiding themselves by
+the cord, came three other people. Hines was one of them, tattered
+and ragged and with a great gash on his forehead. He carried Kathryn
+lightly, in spite of the storm. She was wrapped in an oil-skin, one arm
+in improvised splints.
+
+Hines set her down carefully and blinked with the air of a man whose
+sight has suddenly been restored. The third person was the officer in
+command of the leading tank.
+
+Schaaf put his whole weight against the door and closed it.
+
+"It was not bad work," he observed comfortably. "You stopped on der
+concrete road where der big tree had blown down, as I told you by
+radio. I came down, blundered into you, and banged on der door. Here we
+are. Now, where is der map?"
+
+The tank-officer produced a sheet he had carried under his slicker.
+Schaaf began to unroll it.
+
+"I haff sworn--_Gott!_ How I haff sworn!--because I didt not haff a
+map of der locality. Miss Bush, go ofer by der fire and get warm. Now,
+Hines, show me my bresent location and tell me der scale of der map."
+
+The tank-officer, instead, obeyed both orders. Hines was settling
+Kathryn comfortably by the fire. And Schaaf took dividers and a
+pencil and calculated feverishly, grumbling in guttural German at
+the absurdity of calculating distances in feet and inches instead of
+meters. Eventually he measured with painstaking accuracy, drew six
+lines from the location of his laboratory to very precise and exact
+lengths, and put large dots at their ends.
+
+"There," he said decisively. "That is der best I can do. I have watched
+der _verdammt_ darkness. Look!" He pulled out a window-screen and
+a black cone of opacity stabbed across the brightly lighted room.
+He replaced the screen and it vanished. "Der wafes that destroy
+der transparency of der air," he said briskly, "can come in der
+window-opening when I remofe part of der copper insulation inside. They
+interfere with each other, dissipate, and generally lose der original
+effectifness. Which gifes me my information. By der shape of der cone
+of blackness, I haff calculated der direction and distance of six
+different points from which Breston has transmitted darkness. At these
+six spots he has sending-stations."
+
+The tank-officer said warmly:
+
+"Splendid, sir! We took bearings as we came along--see my pencil-lines,
+Sir?--and they intersect your lines at just the spots you indicate! It
+looks as if you are correct."
+
+"Of course I'm correct! And if I had had der intelligence of an
+angle-worm I would haff made der same measurements of der wafes that
+made der storm and we would know where Breston is. He is not at all of
+those places, certainly."
+
+"No," said Hines. "But what I'm hoping for, Schaaf, is some way to see
+in spite of the darkness. Once--"
+
+"_Gott in Himmel!_" cried Schaaf angrily. "Haff I not kicked myself
+forty-sefen times? Before, when we fought Breston in New York, his
+wafes made der air opaque to fisible light, but not to ultra-fiolet,
+and we did tricks with that to find our way about. But now, he has
+juggled his wafe-lengths to make der air absorb der ultra-fiolet rays
+also. I am as blind as a bat at der bottom of der sea, Hines, and I am
+mad! I am mad as der deffil, Hires!"
+
+Hines frowned at the map.
+
+"He'll keep the darkness on, even after daybreak," he said coldly.
+"He'll shoot the storm-producing waves out as an addition. And since he
+turns off his sending-stations when a tank draws near--"
+
+"Maybe he has microphones in der ground," said Schaaf gloomily. "Der
+sound of a tank is unmistakable. Or maybe he switches them on and off
+for der mere purpose of being confusing. In any efent I haff done all I
+can. I tell you abbroximately where his sending-stations are. But you
+cannot find them without seeing them or tracing der wafes home, and he
+turns them off when a tank comes near. It is like trying to catch a
+mouse that is in six holes at once."
+
+Hines smiled faintly.
+
+"But we have lots of cats," he observed, "Lieutenant, I want these
+orders given."
+
+Schaaf listened critically, then appreciatively, and then he beamed as
+Himnes's voice went on.
+
+"Hines," he said comfortably, "if your brains were dynamite and they
+went off, der report would be like Vesuvius. We got der son-of-a-gun!"
+
+Even the tank-officer grinned confidently as he prepared to make his
+way back to the tank by the guiding cord.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII.
+
+                        THE HEART OF THE STORM.
+
+
+Rain drummed on the roof and clattered on the windows. Wind shrieked
+outside the little stone building. A mountain-flank had protected it
+from the blast of air that Had blown all the day before, and the storm
+that raged during the night was merely a gale such as uproots trees and
+sinks ships at sea. But it was uncomfortable to listen to, with thunder
+making the tumult of a bombardment.
+
+The smoke of Schaaf's pipe floated about the room. The loud-speaker had
+been turned off, Hines turned it on with an air of impatience.
+
+"The lieutenant's been gone a long time. Do you suppose he was blown
+away?"
+
+Schaaf grunted.
+
+"Of course not, Hines. He is a smart young man. He got to his tank, and
+he has been gifing orders by radio to der other tanks that were left
+behind when der bridge gafe way. Breston will see that there is a cat
+at efery mouse-hole, in a little while."
+
+"Preston probably has more than the six you marked down," said Hines
+shortly, "but we have eleven tanks."
+
+He was worried, though. Abominably worried. All but four of the
+tank-force had been left behind early in the night, when one tank was
+destroyed as a bridge gave way under it. Those land-warships had now
+been ordered, separately, to make wide detours and somehow get to the
+six spots Schaaf had indicated.
+
+They would approach the stations from which Preston was transmitting
+his darkness-waves. If the station did not cease to transmit, the
+tank could ride it down and crush it, or bomb it with heavy bombs and
+destroy it utterly.
+
+Preston had undoubtedly planned to alternate in the use of his
+transmitters for the precise purpose of preventing their location. But
+if every station he had ready to transmit had a tank waiting to pounce
+upon it--It was exactly like the posting of a cat at every mouse-hole.
+If the mouse showed his head--if a known station emitted the waves that
+produced the opacity of the air--the tank would pounce. But Hines was
+worried. Preston was clever.
+
+"I am thinking, Hines," said Schaaf placidly, "that it should be near
+sunrise. I go and look."
+
+For the third time he unfastened and opened a screen. For the third
+time a seemingly solid mass of blackness stabbed into the room. Schaaf
+disappeared into the tangible darkness. The noises of the outer air
+were suddenly magnified as he opened a window.
+
+And the outer noises were changing markedly. Rain still fell and
+thunder still boomed. But the rain diminished. The drops became fewer
+and less regular. Then the thunder dwindled.
+
+The listeners in the laboratory realized that a steady, even wind was
+blowing. It was a strong wind when they first noticed it. It gave forth
+a low hum whose pitch rose in minutes. It became a scream, and then
+a whistle that grew more and more shrill until human ears could not
+detect it. And then a steady, regular roaring noise took its place. It
+was the wind of the Storm That Had to be Stopped. On the second day of
+the Storm it rose much more rapidly than on the first.
+
+Hines and Kathryn looked at each other. Kathryn was pale, but she
+smiled at Hines.
+
+"We've got to get out to the tank!" he said harshly.
+
+Schaaf popped magically out of the blackness.
+
+"Of all der double-barreled imbeciles!" he said bitterly. "We haff to
+reach der tank, and it is impossible! Der wind already is as strong as
+it was at its worst yesterday. Nobody could liff in it a second! Der
+laboratory nearly went yesterday! It will not stand another half hour
+if der wind increases!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wind did increase. Shielded though the laboratory was by a
+mountain-flank, and thick stone as its walls were, the beams that
+upheld the roof began to creak. The walls quivered. Plaster fell from
+the ceiling. Windows burst outward, suddenly, and all light and movable
+things leaped toward them and vanished. Hines seized Kathryn and bore
+her to the mountainward side of the laboratory.
+
+"We haff," said Schaaf calmly, "maybe fife minutes. Maybe less. I
+am sorry as der deffil, Hines, that we did not get that _verdammt_
+Breston."
+
+Then there was a vibration which seemed to shake the very flooring. And
+suddenly a wall reeled and caved in, and a section of roof tore out.
+Then, quite incredibly, the monstrous beak of a tank thrust its way
+delicately into the laboratory and stopped. A door slid aside and the
+tank-officer stood beckoning in the opening.
+
+"I figured it was the only thing to do," he shouted above the wind-roar
+as they struggled inside the tank. "The wind's unbelievable outside,
+and if you were kept from blowing away, you'd strangle."
+
+"As der poet says," observed Schaaf calmly, "you said a libraryfull.
+What do we do now?"
+
+"I've been getting reports from the other tanks," said the officer
+cheerfully. "Three of them have reached position. They know they're
+within a quarter of a mile of a darkness-transmitter, but each time it
+has turned off. The others are going on. We'll carry out the rest of
+the plan. All ready?"
+
+The tank lurched backward. The laboratory collapsed, and instantly
+there was a savage bombardment by the wind. Beams, sections of roofs,
+stones, articles of furniture--everything the wind could wrench from
+the shattered building it flung with maniacal fury upon the tank.
+
+The metal monster shuddered and clanged and reeled, and then turned
+about and slid on downhill with a ponderous clanking of its mighty
+treads. But the noise of the wind sounded even above the internal
+roaring of the tank's machinery.
+
+There were hootings, unbelievably faint, and the tank-officer shook his
+head. He spoke curtly into a speaking-tube, and turned apologetically
+to Hines.
+
+"Sound-signals are useless, sir. We are having to use radio again.
+We'll have quite a time of it anyhow. Better find seats of some sort.
+Or you can come up in the control-room."
+
+The control-room was a tiny cubby-hole. There was room for the man who
+steered the cumbersome war-engine, and normally there was bare space
+for the commander of the tank. Now Hines squeezed in between them
+for the second time, and there was only the light of the dimly-lit
+instrument-board and a curious fuzzy appearance about the vision-slits
+where the darkness came a little way into the tank's metal interior.
+
+"Six of the tanks are going to their posts. The other four are
+following us," said the officer in Hines's ear. "We're going to try to
+keep hundred-yard intervals, but we're all blind."
+
+And the tank went crawling on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The instruments gave their varying indications. The wind roared
+without. In the dead blackness the air had assumed not only the
+appearance but the solidity of a substance. It pressed upon the
+forty-ton tank with such force that even the monstrous engine was edged
+steadily to one side.
+
+The line of tanks, crawling through blackness, was following a concrete
+road by map and the feel of the treads.
+
+There was no one in the tanks who did not think in shuddering horror
+of what the blinded monsters might be doing as they lurched and swayed
+across a place that had been inhabited. There might be people yet
+living who would be crushed beneath the tanks' broad treads.
+
+But they went on. Their destination was a spot which Hines had chosen.
+The located transmitters of darkness formed an irregular circle,
+and Hines guessed that the form was not an accident. And if it were
+intentional, and if the transmitters were governed by remote control,
+then sheer efficiency would dictate that the controlling spot should be
+in the center of the circle. If anywhere, Preston would be at a spot
+nearly equidistant from all his transmitters.
+
+Hines watched the vision-slits of the control-room. They were narrow
+slits in a bullet-proof steel wall. Wind came in them so fiercely
+that it stung exploring fingers. And the darkness crept in. The
+walls near the vision-slits looked fuzzy on the side nearest the
+darkness-transmitter then in action. A man outside could have taken the
+station-bearing accurately, while this method was rough at best; and no
+man could live outside now.
+
+Hines craned his neck suddenly to look behind. The blurry little bands
+of darkness had vanished before him. Now they reappeared at the back of
+the control-room.
+
+Hines clutched at the tank-officer's arm.
+
+"A transmitter, behind us!" he barked in the officer's ear. "Have that
+last tank turn back and try to smash it!"
+
+A snapped order went down the speaking-tube. The trailing tank
+turned about. Its steersman had but little to do save keep a certain
+disgusting fuzzy appearance at vision-slits exactly before him. The
+tank went blundering into heaps of still-standing masonry where the
+town had been. It surmounted or destroyed them. It careened and
+teetered upon the edge of a cellar, plunged boldly into it, crashed
+blindly to the other side and reared upward clumsily to crawl out.
+
+The officer in command of the trailing tank saw that the fuzziness had
+vanished from the control-slits ahead. It had reappeared behind. As
+near as this, even the roughest of observations would serve. He yelled
+an order down below. A monstrous, misshapen egg went rolling down from
+the back of the tank. The monster went blundering on.
+
+Thirty seconds, forty. There was a concussion which drowned out even
+the roar of the storm. Vast fragments of masonry struck the tank.
+
+Suddenly there was a light outside the vision-slits. There had been a
+transmitter of darkness in the destroyed town. Deep in a sub-cellar,
+evidently, and sending out darkness from a buried a rial. Two hundred
+pounds of TNT had gone off above it. The transmitter might be
+destroyed, or it might be merely jammed. But for a space, there was
+light.
+
+Those in the tank could see that there was a valley all about, and
+hill-sides rearing up on either hand. Except for the inevitable motion
+of objects past the tank, and four slug-like monsters crawling up a
+ribbon of concrete road, the tank-officer's main impression was that of
+utter deadness and lack of motion.
+
+Wind blew upon his own machine with an unbearable, terrible force, but
+there was no sign of movement outside. There was no dust, no flying
+débris; there were no clouds. The wind blew with an awful force which
+had already demolished all things that could be destroyed, and now it
+kept up a horrible steady pressure that held all things immovable.
+
+The sun shone down from a brazen sky, giving forth no heat, and wind
+blew and blew and blew.
+
+Utter blackness fell again. Another transmitter of darkness had taken
+up the work of the one destroyed. And the wandering tank swung about
+and went crawling after the others on the now-blotted out concrete road.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII.
+
+                          PRESTON'S FORTRESS.
+
+
+Hines grinned savagely, up in the control-room.
+
+"We got one of them!" he said grimly. "We got it by accident, maybe,
+but we got one of them!"
+
+The speaking-tube whistled. The tank-officer answered, then turned to
+Hines.
+
+"Tank Number Four thinks it has located another station. It is going
+ahead. The moment of light helped."
+
+Grinding, pounding, roaring progress, with the wind a terrific pressure
+all about. One minute passed, two, three...
+
+Light again. The leading tank was at the crest of the hill-road.
+Desolation was all about. Far away--miles and miles away, it
+seemed--there was a smother of white which would be a lake, with a dark
+spot upon it which would be a rocky islet.
+
+Again the speaking-tube whistled.
+
+"Number Four reports it set off two bombs. Light came on after the
+second."
+
+Hines's jaws were clamped tightly.
+
+"Every one destroyed," he said coolly, "helps to get the others. That's
+two of them, and we've got cats at the mouse-holes now!"
+
+Again utter blackness. Mountains, the long straight stretch of white
+road descending, the frothing lake and the island at the end of the
+valley, all were blotted out. There was only the clanking of machinery
+and the bestial roar of the wind that thrust with a terrible force at
+the tanks.
+
+Down the long road which no man could see. Despite the wall of wind
+without, the green mountainsides had seemed strangely inviting. And the
+sunlight had seemed brighter than ever the sun had seemed before. The
+deadly blackness was the more intolerable because weary eyes had looked
+upon the light again.
+
+The machinery clanked and rumbled.
+
+"Number Three tank reports--Number Seven also, that they have located
+transmitting stations--"
+
+"One of them is wrong, maybe," said Hines coolly, "but let them both
+try."
+
+The man at the steering-bar said quietly:
+
+"We're nearly out of gas, Lieutenant. I just noticed it. Enough for two
+more miles, maybe."
+
+The speaking-tube again.
+
+"Number Three tank reports it exploded two bombs. Its station ceased
+to transmit, but the darkness still holds. Number Seven is letting go
+now.... Number Two has located a station.... Seven reports its station
+has ceased to transmit darkness. Number Two is bombing now.... Five has
+found its station."
+
+"That completes the list," said Hines steadily, "if none of them made a
+mistake."
+
+Again the voice from below.
+
+"Two has put its station out of action.... Five fell into some sort of
+excavation. Can't get out at the moment. Asks for orders."
+
+"If the ship can stand hand-grenades," said Hines savagely, "have them
+tossed out of all ports and see what happens."
+
+Darkness. The pressure of the wind and its terrible steady roar. The
+noise of the machinery of the tank--
+
+Light!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again sunlight. Again the mountains. Again the smother of white which
+was the lake ahead. The leading tanks advanced heavily until the
+concrete road divided into two, and one went along each shore-line.
+This lake had been a summer resort once, but now the trees were
+splintered and blown away. The houses were utterly destroyed. There was
+only the uncannily blue sky and the still-green grass carpet of the
+shores, and a rocky small island half-smothered in foam.
+
+The tank came to a cumbersome halt. Schaaf popped his whiskers through
+the companionway that led up to the control-room.
+
+"Ha!" he said exuberantly. "We haff der son-of-a-gun! Hines, I haff to
+take some observations! I think and I suspect, but I haff to be sure
+where der last of der excitement takes place."
+
+Hines-stared about, and then pointed. A stony cliff reared upward some
+hundreds of yards to the right. It was forty or fifty feet high, and a
+heap of débris beneath it was proof that it created a lee. He indicated
+it in silence. The tank crawled heavily, smashing a way into the
+heaped-up trash.
+
+Its engines coughed and stopped.
+
+"Out of gas, sir," reported some one from below.
+
+"It is no matter," said Schaaf blandly. "I haff a hunch. Der island
+ofer yonder is a charming place. One could establish a residence there
+and put in a power-house."
+
+"Get a range-finder reading on it," said Hines curtly. "Have all the
+tanks range it."
+
+Schaaf was cautiously opening the tank-door. He put one hand cautiously
+outside.
+
+"Me a rope around me," he said comfortably, "and I take a chance. There
+is a wind, but not such a hell of a wind. Der bank makes a lee."
+
+He stepped outside with an electric-light extension and a square sheet
+of iron. It seemed peculiar, even futile, to be carrying an electric
+bulb in the overpoweringly bright sunshine. Schaaf balanced himself
+precariously.
+
+Radiant heat could not be felt from the electric bulb; only in contact
+with the glass could its heat be detected. It was an exact parallel
+with the light-waves that Preston could neutralize, but with a metal
+plate between the bulb and the source of the neutralizing short waves.
+
+A gun went off not ten feet above his head. Schaaf swore and sat down
+violently. His necktie flopped about his face, blinding him for an
+instant. Then he heard the dull concussions of other guns. Every tank
+was firing madly with every gun it could bring to bear. And Schaaf
+swore bitterly as he saw what they were firing at.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a little rocky island out in the lake. The lake itself was a
+smother of white foam. But projecting upward above the water there was
+a mass of dark-brown rock some fifty or sixty feet high. There were
+traces of grass still upon it, but if there had been trees they were
+gone, and if there had been a summer residence that also had long since
+vanished in the Storm. But now, quite insolently, there was visible a
+signal of Preston's presence and of his defiance.
+
+A globular mass of darkness had formed about the islet's peak. It
+looked as if Preston had turned on a transmitter of darkness and had
+deliberately begun to transmit the short waves with an absolute minimum
+of power. The fraction of a watt, perhaps, was being put into a hidden
+or a buried antenna. An irregular, amoeba-like globule of darkness
+hovered about the islet's tip.
+
+Shells were bursting in and about it. A section of rock split outward
+from the island's side and fell into the foaming water. Instantly, it
+seemed, the globule of darkness expanded. From feet, its size could
+only be measured by hundreds of yards. The tanks were firing into a
+vast expanse of nothingness, and one by one they ceased to fire. There
+was nothing to aim at.
+
+Then, very swiftly, the darkness increased in size. Preston was putting
+more power into his transmitter. And quite suddenly the world was dark
+again.
+
+It had been a gesture of pure insolence. Tanks could not reach the
+island. He had seen the gray monsters gathered on the shore, and
+Preston had blanketed the world in darkness after showing the only men
+to reach his stronghold the utter futility of further effort to reach
+him.
+
+He was protected by the deep waters of a mountain lake from attack by
+tanks, by hills and the Storm from all other means of attack, and by
+the unthinkable blackness of his own creation even from assault by
+projectiles.
+
+Up in the control-room, the tank-officer swore bitterly and turned to
+Hines.
+
+"I think we're done, sir," he said savagely. "We can't wade out through
+the lake to him, and of course the Storm--"
+
+Hines's eyes were slits.
+
+"Let's look at the map," he said shortly. "We might as well get the
+other tanks alongside us, by the way. In the lee of this cliff, we can
+go from one to the other."
+
+He had taken figures from the map before Schaaf came back inside the
+tank, cursing mightily in German. Hines was asking curt questions and
+giving even curter orders, and when the other tanks came clanking into
+place men went out into the alleviated storm beneath the cliff and made
+demands of gasoline and wire cable and bombs.
+
+Two tanks only had fuel for a run of another two miles. The rest
+supplied cable and bombs, and men gingerly unscrewed the fuses of the
+monster bombs and emptied four of the huge cases of all their contents.
+Then they labored terrifically to bind four still-loaded cases to the
+emptied ones, and fastened wire cable to the clumsy mass.
+
+All this was done in darkness with the Storm roaring overhead, and
+while Schaaf was calculating feverishly at Hines's demand and the
+tank-officer was writing out his results in terms of formal orders,
+according to the customs and ordinances of the United States Army.
+
+Then the ground quivered as two huge tanks moved away from their
+fellows. Now was the moment of greatest tension. The bombs had to be
+dragged over soft earth, and if they exploded with their loads of two
+hundred pounds each of T. N. T.--eight hundred pounds in the four
+loaded bombs--then the tank-force would be wiped out and Preston would
+win his single-handed war against the world. But the fuses had been
+changed, and they had hopes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were still three people up in the control-room of the tank
+that had carried Hines. One was Hines, of course, and one was the
+tank-commander, and Kathryn was the third. Hines knew the chance he
+was taking. If the tanks were wiped out, he wanted to be near Kathryn
+when the end came. Schaaf was down by the wireless transmitter, biting
+at his nails and growling guttural profanity at the intervals between
+reports.
+
+"Both tanks have reached their first position," came the report up the
+speaking-tube. "They're reeling in the cable."
+
+Hines held Kathryn protectively close. But it was rather useless. They
+had combined four depth-bombs with four empty depth-bomb cases to make
+a monster floating bomb. They had fastened it in the center of a long,
+spliced-together steel cable, with a tank hauling at each end.
+
+Those tanks were now posted where the shores of the lake began to curve
+together. They were reeling in their lines. When the lines tightened,
+the bomb would be dragged away from the now fuelless remnant of the
+tank-force and out into the water of the lake. With luck, the bombs
+would not go off. But if luck were bad, and a purposely insensitized
+fuse struck a rock or stone or bit of débris--
+
+Long minutes went by. The speaking-tube whistle was a blessed sound.
+
+"Reeling completed, sir. The cable is taut."
+
+Two tanks now went crawling through the blackness down the opposite
+shores of the little lake. Between them stretched the cable with the
+monstrous floating bomb.
+
+It is well known that fifty pounds of T. N. T. will shatter the walls
+of a submarine, and that a torpedo carries a hundred and fifty, and
+that the effect of an explosion varies as the square of the amount of
+explosive present. Eight hundred pounds of T. N. T. in one blast would
+sink any ship or shatter any rock.
+
+But against the massive walls of even a small island--well, it would
+produce a concussion. It might shake down fifty tons or a hundred
+tons of rock. It might do impressive local damage, to be sure, but
+the damage would be strictly local, The rest of the island would feel
+nothing worse than a sharp concussion. And that was all Hines could
+hope for.
+
+Schaaf had assigned arbitrary coordinates and positions for the tanks'
+reports. When their treads had covered so much ground in such-and-such
+directions, the cable should be out so much....
+
+"Second position reached," said the speaking-tube briefly. "All figures
+are as anticipated."
+
+Hines's hands clenched fiercely. The range-finders had given the
+distance of the island. The map had given the outline of the lake.
+Down the center of the turmoil of frothing water a bomb of colossal
+destructive power was moving with two straining tanks towing it from
+the shore, and all for an absurdly trivial physical effect which was
+all that could be looked for.
+
+"Third position reached," said the speaking-tube. "All figures seem
+correct. The tanks await orders."
+
+"Tell them to go ahead," said Hines. His voice was hoarse. On this
+everything depended.
+
+There was no movement inside the tank. There was no sound except the
+deep, deep roaring of the Storm overhead. But then, quite suddenly,
+the tank quivered all over. It was as if the ground had slipped, had
+quivered suddenly; as if it had been struck an abrupt though far from
+dangerous blow. It was just enough to bring Hines's elbow sharply into
+contact with the steering-bar.
+
+But suddenly the tank-commander was snapping orders.
+
+"Open fire! All guns!"
+
+And the whole inside of the tank resounded with the sledge-hammer
+blows, the terrific impacts of guns firing at their highest rate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For perhaps the last time, it seemed to Hines, the island was again in
+view. It was already the center of a storm of bursting shells. There
+was a colossal wave of water yet subsiding from beside it, and a huge
+column of rock was topping soundlessly and very deliberately into the
+lake, and every tank on the lake-shore was pouring shell after shell
+after shell upon the mass of stone that remained.
+
+Hines had made his last gamble. The destruction of the other
+darkness-sending stations by concussions seemed to him to show one
+possible weakness in Preston's preparations.
+
+It was not likely that in every case the dropped time-bombs that had
+put the other darkness-transmitters out of action, had made direct hits
+upon the apparatus. It seemed most probable that Preston, like all
+other experimenters with radio waves, had used vacuum tubes for his
+oscillators. And vacuum tubes are made of glass, and they are thin,
+therefore concussion will break them.
+
+Hines had not expected the shock of the explosion against the island's
+rocky shore to destroy Preston's apparatus. Not at all. He had only
+hoped for a single sharp shock, a single smart snapping effect.
+
+As a matter of fact, on the island itself there had been exactly the
+impression of a sudden and terrific earth-shock. And it was sudden
+enough to make the glass vacuum tubes of the short-wave transmitter
+shiver to atoms in their sockets. The transmitter was quite unharmed,
+but it was thoroughly useless after that!
+
+Watching, with the flashes of high-explosive shells breaking about
+every portion of the island, Hines saw a sudden thick cloud of smoke
+arise. It was too dense, too thick, to be dissipated even by the wind
+which still blew madly. And great cracks appeared in the rocks of the
+island, and steam poured forth.
+
+Schaaf went out of the tank with his hands over his ears. He held
+up his face to the sun and abruptly began to dance with a wholly
+elephantine lack of grace. Because the sun's rays were warm!
+
+Gradually, slowly, the tanks ceased firing. They exhausted their
+ammunition upon their target, and the surface of the island was a mass
+of splintered rock and steam poured in dense clouds from its interior.
+
+Then it was possible to hear Schaaf bellowing.
+
+"Der storm-wafes are off! Der storm-wafes are off! We got der
+son-of-a-gun! We got him!"
+
+And very abruptly, it seemed, clouds were forming overhead, and the
+wind of the Storm began to change from a monstrous steady blast to
+something no worse than a mere tornado, and in an hour it was hardly
+more than a terrific gale.
+
+Before nightfall thunder was rolling over a circle two thousand miles
+across, and rain was falling in torrents only precedented by the night
+before. Two weeks or more of chaotic weather conditions were being
+predicted by the weather bureaus, but after that the air conditions
+would again become normal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Schaaf was the first man on the island, and his gloomiest predictions
+were verified. Preston's apparatus had been destroyed by explosions
+from below. Not only had explosives been placed by Preston to ruin
+the apparatus and prevent it from being examined, but great masses of
+thermit had been placed here and there to complete the destruction.
+Apparently, Preston had intended to destroy his devices when their use
+was completed, and so had been prepared, by accident, for the disaster
+that came upon his plans. No notes, no diagrams, no single article of
+any value to Schaaf was ever found, on which account he swore bitterly.
+But a human skeleton was found charred and half-consumed in the ruins
+of the underground workshop. It was assumed to be Preston, but Schaaf
+regarded even this hopeful thought with disfavor.
+
+He expressed his bitterness after a complete round of the six other
+transmitting-stations showed them all destroyed with thermit and
+explosive, apparently by some contrivance which would act automatically
+when they were no longer operable.
+
+"Der _verdammet_ scoundrel," he said bitterly to Hines. "He gifes me a
+pain in der duodenum. If I had der information he had, I would be der
+greatest benefactor of der world! I haff an idea, and if I can only
+find out how he did his tricks, I show you der Golden Age again! _Ach,
+Gott!_ Why is it that fillains haff der best brains?"
+
+He was smoking furiously in Hines's apartment when he made his plaint.
+The telephone rang. Hines spoke into it, smiling. When he had ended,
+Schaaf said suspiciously:
+
+"That was Miss Bush. She is clefer, Hines. But--is she too clefer?"
+
+"Did you see how she wrote up the whole business for the _Star_?"
+
+Schaaf nodded, and puffed at his pipe.
+
+"She made you a hero, and me a hero, and she threw enough flowers
+at der tank-men to make der worldt see how brafe and courageous and
+altogether der cat's-whiskers you are, Hines. Yes. She is clefer. But
+as your friend I ask it; is she too clefer?"
+
+Hines was standing up, now, and absently looking at his hat on a nearby
+chair.
+
+"Too clever?" he repeated abstractedly, but smiling nevertheless. "What
+is too clever?"
+
+"A woman," said Schaaf shrewdly, "that makes eferybody see how clefer
+der man she lofes is, is clefer. But when she sees that she has brains
+also, and that when she marries she will haff to take der back seat,
+and she sees that she is a darned fool to do it--then she is too
+clefer."
+
+"She's not," said Hines blithely. "She's going to marry me. In fact,
+we're going down town now to pick out some rings and such things." He
+added perfunctorily: "Want to come along?"
+
+"Nix," said Schaaf cynically. "You don't want me now. But I come in,
+Hines, _ach_, I come in when it is time to buy der teething-rings and
+der baby-mugs. Then I won't be in der way!"
+
+                                 END.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79049 ***
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79049 ***</div>
+
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<h1>The Storm That Had to be Stopped</h1>
+
+<p class="ph1">By MURRAY LEINSTER</p>
+
+<p><i>Sequel to "The Darkness on Fifth Avenue"<br>
+and "The City of the Blind."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Novelette—Complete</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Preston, evil genius of Science, defies<br>
+America's war weapons as he hurls Nature's<br>
+malignant forces against his blinded attackers.</i></p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br>
+Argosy All-Story Weekly, March 1, 1930.]</p>
+
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>WITHOUT WARNING.</h3>
+
+
+<p>On the morning that saw the beginning of the Storm That Had to be
+Stopped, Police Inspector Hines had his life saved by an amateur
+driver who drove a second-hand flivver into his roadster. It was pure
+accident, of course. Hines's left mudguard, his left front wheel, and
+his front bumper were all wreckage when the amateur driver stared
+wildly about, assured himself that he was still alive, and then burst
+into tears.</p>
+
+<p>The amateur driver passed forthwith from history. He had nothing more
+to do with the affair. He merely kept Hines from driving up into the
+Catskills in the very early morning of August 5, when, as all the world
+knows, the Storm began.</p>
+
+<p>You will remember that morning. There had been a heat wave over all
+the Atlantic States for two weeks or more. The cities sweltered. The
+beaches were crowded. In New York, Central Park was opened to any one
+who chose to sleep in the open air instead of the stifling tenements.</p>
+
+<p>Those who could leave the city did so. The Catskill and Adirondack
+hotels were packed. The seashore resorts swarmed with people.</p>
+
+<p>Kathryn Bush was up in the Catskills, and Hines had started up to be
+with her until Monday. The fact that his car was wrecked in Yonkers
+almost certainly saved his life, and quite positively determined the
+events that followed. If he had been up in the storm-center, he would
+have been utterly helpless.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was curious that the storm seemed to start so gently. Kathryn Bush
+wrote an account of the beginning, for the New York <i>Star</i>. It was her
+vacation-time and she was staying in the house of Heracles Tribble, at
+Rosedale Farm, North Weddensdale, Greene County, New York. She expected
+Hines to come up, and had risen early. A room was reserved for him
+at the farmhouse, where there were four other boarders. She may have
+been sentimental, or she may have been restless. In any event she was
+looking out of her window when the sun rose.</p>
+
+<p>While birds began to sing abstractedly in the mountain-shadows, long
+streaks of golden light became visible on the flanks of monster hills.
+The invisible sun was gilding their sides. Later, a long time later,
+the red disk of the storm appeared.</p>
+
+<p>The sunlight was gratefully warm after the dawn-chill, though even in
+the first rays she thought regretfully of the blistering, terrific
+heat that would come at midday when this same sun would be a ball of
+intolerable fire, hanging overhead in a brazen sky. Irrelevantly, she
+remembered the weather forecast—fair and warmer.</p>
+
+<p>And then, quite suddenly, the warmth seemed to go out of the sun's rays.</p>
+
+<p>It was as sudden, as abrupt, as the turning off of a light, as the
+closing of a furnace door from which a fierce glare had poured forth.
+The sun was no darker, however. It seemed to shine as brightly as
+before. It did not give off heat.</p>
+
+<p>Kathryn stared about her. She looked back at the sun. It glowed
+vividly, but it seemed obscurely to have changed color. She held out
+her hand to it to catch the warmth of its rays. There was none.</p>
+
+<p>A cloud over its face? No. The sky was wholly clear. There was simply
+no more heat coming from the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Puzzled, but quite unalarmed, it seemed to Kathryn that the sun's ruddy
+tint had vanished very suddenly. It even seemed as if instead of a
+normal gold, the great disk had taken on a faint bluish or greenish
+tint. The change—if it was a change—was so slight that she could not
+be sure.</p>
+
+<p>The seeming lack of heat was so extraordinary that, instead of turning
+away, she gazed and gazed, and presently took a tiny reading-glass and
+focused it on a bit of paper. The paper should have turned brown and
+burned luridly. Nothing happened.</p>
+
+<p>More curious still, now, she focused the light upon her hand; then upon
+the sensitive skin of her forearm. A vivid spot of light formed at the
+focus of the lens. The speck of flesh seemed white-hot. But there was
+not the faintest, not the tiniest sensation of heat.</p>
+
+<p>It was at just this time she noticed that a wind was blowing far away.
+Where she stood at her window, looking eastward, the air was utterly
+calm. Her window, as a matter of fact, was open wide. But she suddenly
+saw trees, a long distance off, bending and tossing furiously as if
+in a gale of wind. There was a long straight stretch of white road
+reaching far away toward infinity. A cloud of dust was racing along it.</p>
+
+<p>"It's wind!" said Kathryn vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>Still she stared. Then she saw something rolling crazily across a
+distant pasture. It was a smother of dust and débris. But there was one
+gigantic, darker object that rolled and rolled. She saw suddenly that
+it was the top of a tree, sheared off from its trunk in some freak of
+wind-pressure, and rolling like a monster ball.</p>
+
+<p>The wind struck a farmhouse three miles down the valley. Kathryn saw a
+cowshed open and vanish. She saw a fence-line disappear. The dwelling
+leaned and leaned.</p>
+
+<p>It sank quite gently to a sloping mass of wreckage, save that its roof
+went ballooning off insanely and mowed down a lane of trees through a
+planted orchard before it crashed against an upward-jutting outcrop of
+granite and was torn to bits about it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When the wind struck the house from which Kathryn had watched it, the
+windows were all down. She had shouted of a storm approaching. Clouds,
+too, began suddenly to appear in writhing, ominous masses. The house
+had been closed tightly by the agitated Mr. Heracles Tribble, who
+hastened out to his hen-houses to see to their security before the
+storm came, and did not come back.</p>
+
+<p>Kathryn watched from the window. The rolling cloud of dust that was the
+forefront of the wind drew nearer with incredible speed. As it drew
+close, the monstrous size of the disturbance became apparent. It was
+hundreds of feet high, and it was rolling over and over upon itself
+like a monstrous comber.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed even to be striations in it like those the stranding of
+a rope will make. But there were objects carried in the smoke-colored
+rolling cloud. Dark objects, of all shapes and sizes. Kathryn, staring
+and almost paralyzed by sheer astonishment, saw the tree-limbs and it
+seemed even whole trees caught up in the monstrous turmoil.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow her eyes swept to the hen-houses at the rear of the house.
+Mr. Heracles Tribble was standing in the open, peculiarly puny and
+ineffective, staring incredulously at the thing that bore down upon
+him. He was small, and rotund, and bald. He wore silver-rimmed
+spectacles, and he stared at a rolling wave of smoke and dust and utter
+destruction, hundreds of feet high, that swept toward him irresistibly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Heracles Tribble turned suddenly, and fled toward the house.
+Kathryn saw his mouth dropped open in horror. His fat little legs
+twinkled. He ran with incredible speed. But the rolling cloud of dust
+and débris had reached the pasture-lot. It touched the hen-houses and
+they vanished as if blown to atoms.</p>
+
+<p>Unpausing, the monstrous thing came rolling up. Its bellying edge was
+over the house while its base had still not yet touched the running
+little fat man. But then Kathryn saw smoke-like dust envelop him. She
+saw—or thought she saw—that he rose crazily from the ground. And then
+the wave of wind struck the house.</p>
+
+<p>It was absurd, but Kathryn was not frightened even the instant after
+she knew the wind had struck. Her first conscious thought was that the
+house had been lifted away from around her, leaving her untouched.</p>
+
+<p>Then she realized that the house still stood. There was no roof over
+her head, to be sure, but the walls remained intact. The feeling of
+being in the open air came from the fact that without warning or a
+sound that could be heard above the deafening uproar of the wind, the
+windows had ceased to be. The glass panes broke out of them with no
+more disturbance than so many breaking bubble-films would have made.</p>
+
+<p>Kathryn had been at one moment safely housed, behind glass panes. The
+next instant she was merely sheltered behind a thick brick wall while a
+dense fog of dust blotted out even the farther side of the room.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt="">
+  <div class="caption">
+    <p><i>She crouched against the fragment of wall that still remained standing.</i></p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap">
+
+<p>Something crashed into that farther wall and kicked feebly. It was a
+pig, picked up no one could guess where and carried no one can guess
+how far. Then a tree-trunk thrust itself through the brick wall,
+horribly splintered, and heaved upward, tearing the wall apart, and
+then somehow went reeling off into the thick dust-cloud.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Kathryn put her hand to her throat. Sheer professional training alone
+saved her from panic. The newspaper woman's acquired instinct said:</p>
+
+<p>"What a story! I've got to get to safety. It will be a big story when
+the wind stops—and I saw it!"</p>
+
+<p>She dropped to the floor and began to crawl past the window toward the
+stairway. Once she ventured a little distance away from the wall, and a
+solid stream of air—as solid as a board—that came through a window,
+rolled her over and over until she struck with a crash against the
+leeward wall.</p>
+
+<p>It held her there, then she battled her way on hands and knees down the
+stairs. The wind beat at her terribly, trying to fling her up again. It
+came in through the smashed lower windows.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the dining room table flat against the wall. Its top covered
+a window and it was held in place by the wind-pressure. It was very
+probably that measure of protection which enabled her to pass so
+close to the leeward wall without being picked up and hurled off into
+nothingness.</p>
+
+<p>She heard a terrific crash upstairs, in the room she had just left.
+Fragments of brick came down the steps. She reached the cellar stairs,
+tumbled down them, and heard more terrific crashes still.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was darkness, while the wind roared by overhead. The noise
+the wind made was not a hum, not a whistle, not a shriek. It was a
+steady, a terrible, deep-toned roar. That roaring of the wind was
+characteristic, throughout, of the Storm That Had to be Stopped.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>IN AN OPEN CAR.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Hines had started out at five o'clock in the morning, in hopes of
+getting away from the city before the heavy traffic began. But, of
+course, he turned out to be only one of many thousands who had the same
+idea. The heat wave in New York had been terrific. It is recorded that
+the traffic had piled up as early as 3 A.M., and when Hines started at
+five he was promptly swallowed up in a long lane of cars going up-State
+at a bare crawl.</p>
+
+<p>His accident happened just out of Yonkers at a little after six, but it
+was nine before his wheel was replaced and a new mudguard in position.
+By that time the Storm had begun.</p>
+
+<p>Down there, quite sixty miles from the storm-center, its development
+was less spectacular. Up among the mountains it is fairly certain
+that the wind began at a very few minutes after six. Watches found
+on victims of the first terrific rush of wind were almost invariably
+stopped at that hour, and clocks in houses, overturned and crushed,
+corroborate the figures. But it was nearly half past six when a strong
+wind began to blow from Yonkers toward the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was just up. Hines was seething over the delay. He was engaged
+to Kathryn, and he resented anything that kept him away from her. The
+Catskills had been his suggestion in the first place. Kathryn, as a
+feature writer on the <i>Star</i>, didn't want to get too far from New York
+anyhow.</p>
+
+<p>Other matters aside, there was a man named Preston who was rather
+definitely dangerous and who was still at large. Not less than twice,
+with his artificial darkness, he had set the whole city of New York by
+the ears, to his own enormous profit.</p>
+
+<p>Hines, and Schaaf—now up in the Catskills, too, making some abstruse
+experiments with very short Hertzian waves for the research department
+of the American Electric Company—Hines and Schaaf had managed to
+checkmate him each time.</p>
+
+<p>Each time Kathryn had been in at the death, and each time the <i>Star</i>
+had scored a newspaper triumph. With Preston still at large, and both
+Hines and Schaaf convinced that sooner or later he would try to strike
+again, Kathryn had not wanted to get too far away even on her vacation.
+She wanted to handle the next battle with Preston for the <i>Star</i> as she
+had the first two.</p>
+
+<p>Hines moved restlessly about the garage, or scowled at the never-ending
+but often pausing line of cars that went crawling, crawling, creeping
+away from the heat of the city.</p>
+
+<p>Those cars were leaving a sweltering city behind them, to steam upon
+sweltering roads in an atmosphere of exhaust-fumes, but at least they
+had hopes of reaching the hills and coolness. Instead, only too many of
+them reached the hills and disaster.</p>
+
+<p>Hines noticed a breeze at twenty after six. At half past it was a wind.
+At seven, it was half a gale, blowing under a clear sky with a brazen
+sun already sending down a blistering heat.</p>
+
+<p>Hines swore under his breath, but it was no use trying to hurry the
+mechanics. He was an inspector of police in the city of New York, but
+at a roadside garage he was merely a customer, and the traffic outside
+promised plenty of customers before the day was over.</p>
+
+<p>It was shortly after eight that Hines saw the top of an ancient touring
+car torn to ribbons by the wind. Before nine o'clock came, he had seen
+dozens of them.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The traffic began to thin, abruptly. Cars headed for the mountains
+turned aside. They began to fight their way into storage garages,
+battling a terrific, solid mass of air.</p>
+
+<p>Some of them stopped where trees on a side-road promised some measure
+of protection from the wind. Others were wiser and parked themselves in
+swarming masses wherever deep cuts or valleys ran across the prevailing
+direction of the wind.</p>
+
+<p>The galvanized garage roof was a drumming tumult, now, rattling and
+booming from the wind that went sweeping across it. The mechanics
+finished Hines's car and very reluctantly opened the doors—closed a
+half hour before—to let him out.</p>
+
+<p>He came out into a rather incredible world. Trees were leaning toward
+the mountains. The roads were nearly clear. The traffic had lessened
+almost to nothing. The noise of the wind was a distinct deep booming
+sound, to which the tortured trees added shrill whistles and shriller
+screams, and now and then sharp cracking sounds as limbs or trunks gave
+way under the intolerable pressure.</p>
+
+<p>Hines turned toward the mountains and shifted gears. They clashed,
+horribly. It was seconds before he realized that the wind had pushed
+his car ahead of the motor-speed. He had to race the engine to get into
+second, and race it again to get into third.</p>
+
+<p>The car seemed to be possessed of unlimited power. It sped toward the
+mountains like a mad thing. Every man comes to know his motor, but
+Hines found his own car acting like a thing possessed. With his foot
+off the accelerator it made forty-five miles an hour. The barest touch
+on the gas-pedal sent it leaping to sixty, seventy miles.</p>
+
+<p>He saw an ancient flivver turned over, at the side of the road. There
+were no people near it. He braked, instinctively, and found his
+brakes nearly useless. His car flashed past, and he heard the brakes
+squealing, but felt hardly any diminution of his speed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a ripping sound behind him. His back curtain had blown in.
+The split upper half of the windshield opened out, and wind poured from
+behind him out over the front. Another wreck. Two more.</p>
+
+<p>He saw a car coming toward him and passed it with the speed of light,
+but in the instant of his passing saw the man at the wheel of that
+other vehicle working frantically at gas-lever and throttle, and it
+seemed to him that for the fraction of a second he heard the roaring of
+a motor laboring horribly in low gear, battling against the wind alone.</p>
+
+<p>The road shot into a deep cut, and the abnormal acceleration of the car
+diminished. Hines jammed on the brakes and stopped with difficulty. The
+ripped fragments of his back curtain were flapping about him and he got
+out his knife to cut them away.</p>
+
+<p>Now he felt the wind as a savage, gusty pressure. It was terrifically
+strong, even down here in a cut some thirty feet deep. Something was
+stirring in Hines's breast, just then, which he was grimly refusing to
+recognize. After all, there have been storms and storms. Kathryn, up in
+the mountains, would be safe enough.</p>
+
+<p>The thin tooting of a horn came to him. A car had drawn aside from the
+road, some fifty or sixty feet ahead. A man in it was waving to him
+to come on ahead. Hines merely released his brakes and his car moved
+sluggishly for twenty feet and stopped. He put it in gear for the rest
+of the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Here, remarkably, the air was calm. The man in the other car was
+smoking placidly. Overhead the wind rushed past with its deep, ominous
+roaring sound. At just this point between the sides of the cut there
+was a perfect lee, where no wind-currents of any sort were noticeable.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>"I thought I'd tip yuh," said the man in the other car. "This is the
+best place I've hit yet. Pull over off the road an' you'll be all
+right. Better get off the road, though. A car come through here like a
+bat out o' hell. Turned over at the end of the cut, yonder. The wind's
+near cross-wise there."</p>
+
+<p>Instinct made Hines ask: "Anybody hurt?"</p>
+
+<p>The man spat.</p>
+
+<p>"Hell! They fell out an' the wind picked 'em up an' carried 'em off
+somewhere. Ain't it a wind, though? What y' call a hurricane, I guess."</p>
+
+<p>Hines was staring, oblivious. Far, far away, a cloud was forming, but
+unlike any cloud Hines had ever seen before. Something, the sheer
+distance of the formation perhaps, told him that it was higher than any
+cloud he had known. It rose as a vast, incredible column, and then it
+spread out as a mushroom might spread above its stalk.</p>
+
+<p>"Yeah," said the man in the other car. "It's been like that for
+half-an-hour, now. Looks like a volcano cloud, but it ain't. No earth
+shocks. Just wind. I reckon that's the storm-center. It's a peach, this
+storm. That cloud 'll be over the Catskills, somewheres."</p>
+
+<p>Hines started, and then he turned grimly to his car-top. He slashed at
+it, wrenching away the cloth and flinging it away.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going on," he said, rather absurdly.</p>
+
+<p>The man in the other car shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't stopping you," he observed. "But you better stay here. That
+wind is a hell-cat. If you want your car to stay on the road an' you're
+bound to go, load 'er down with rocks. Plenty of 'em. I mean that wind
+'Il blow you clean to hell and gone if you don't."</p>
+
+<p>Hines's brain was busy with a real, an acknowledged terror now, but
+something in the suggestion jerked at his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Right," he said suddenly. "Thanks. I'll do it. I believe it's needed."</p>
+
+<p>The other man unfastened his car-door and stepped out.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll help," he said amiably.</p>
+
+<p>In silence they worked. The empty seat beside the driver was filled
+with bowlders and smaller rocks. All the floor-space filled up. Hines
+flung up the back of the rumble seat and they filled it with stones of
+smaller size.</p>
+
+<p>"One more tip," said the other man thoughtfully. "Some flat rocks
+alongside your hood 'll help."</p>
+
+<p>They found two huge stones, loosened by the dynamite that had made the
+cut. They wedged them in between the mudguards and the hood. Hines held
+out his hand. There was a bill in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to hell," said the other man cheerfully. "Me, I'm a socialist and
+a proletarian, an' judging by your car you're a damn' capitalist—a
+bourgeois anyways. But one guy can help out another one, can't he?"</p>
+
+<p>Hines put away the bill and shook hands instead.</p>
+
+<p>"My girl's up there in the mountains," he said briefly. "I'm going up
+to see if she's all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Good luck!"</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Hines's car, with its top gone and its windshield laid flat before it,
+went into low gear with a vast groaning. It was burdened with over half
+a ton of stone. It went into second with a little difficulty. Then the
+wind began to make itself felt. Despite its added weight, the car went
+into high gear quite normally. It was rolling along at twenty miles an
+hour when it came out of the cut into the full blast of the wind again.</p>
+
+<p>Hines was flung against the side door. The car shuddered horribly.
+Gasping for breath, with his head bent over, his hat gone instantly,
+Hines fought to keep it on the road. There was a curve here, and for
+two hundred yards he went squarely across the wind. Without the rocks,
+no vehicle ever built would have stayed on the road in such a blast.</p>
+
+<p>Then the road turned again and the wind was behind him once more.
+Instantly the car picked up speed. Thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an
+hour. Forty-five miles—fifty—</p>
+
+<p>The landscape flashed past, a mass of wrecked trees and débris. Hines
+saw the body of a motor truck a full hundred yards from the road,
+smashed against a rocky hillside. He saw two, three, a dozen cars
+overturned—always on the side of the road to which the wind would have
+flung them. He came to a town which was nearly obliterated. Wreckage
+littered the streets. He jammed on the brakes, raced his motor, got it
+into second, and slowed by the braking action of the engine. He raced
+it again and got into first and turned off his switch.</p>
+
+<p>He was going no more than fifteen miles an hour when the car careened
+over a heap of rubbish which once had been part of a building, swung
+about insanely and crashed where splintered planks had piled up against
+a massive stone wall.</p>
+
+<p>It was part of a road-tunnel underneath a railroad track.</p>
+
+<p>Then Hines saw a man crawling on the pavement before him. The man
+had a rope about his waist, which was evidently tied to something. A
+paint-pot slopped white paint about as he pushed it ahead of him. He
+was painting huge letters on the concrete roadway.</p>
+
+<p class="ph2">HINES STOP!</p>
+
+<p class="ph2">HINES STOP!</p>
+
+<p class="ph2">HINES STO</p>
+
+<p>That was as far as he had gone. He was painfully working on the last
+letter of the third "Stop" when Hines opened the side door of his car.
+Hines slid out, gasping for breath, and dropped flat on his belly on the
+road. He went crawling about the splintered planks to windward until
+the man saw him. Then he shouted, uselessly, while the man stared.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was not until Hines had pointed repeatedly to his name and then
+to himself that comprehension slowly dawned on the crawling man's
+face. The fellow waved and shouted an order across the ten feet of
+intervening space, then hauled himself along the rope in the very teeth
+of the wind to a doorway in the side of the road-tunnel. Seconds later
+he was out again with another rope. He flung it into the air, and the
+wind stretched it taut.</p>
+
+<p>Hines crawled, knotted it about his body, and felt himself hauled
+across the road.</p>
+
+<p>For the second time he was in a blessed calm. He stood up, panting. The
+man who had been painting on the road made a peculiarly absurd salute.</p>
+
+<p>"You're Police Inspector Hines, sir?" he asked woodenly.</p>
+
+<p>Hines nodded, still unable to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"Corporal Woodford of the State Police, sir," said the man who had
+pulled Hines across the road by a rope. "All wires are down, sir,
+but every broadcasting station that hasn't been wrecked has been
+broadcasting orders to every possible agency to stop you from going
+into the storm.</p>
+
+<p>"Professor Schaaf managed to get a message out by radio, sir, from a
+spot very near the storm-center. He says that the storm is caused by
+Preston's darkness-apparatus, and that you are the only man able to
+stop it. And the storm, sir, simply has to be stopped. Will you step
+inside and give your instructions?"</p>
+
+<p>Hines blinked, and then the meaning of the message came to him. Rage
+filled him, consumingly. And then he went sick with helplessness.
+Because, of course, he could have no instructions to give for the
+stopping of a storm.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>DECLARING WAR.</h3>
+
+<p>Under ordinary circumstances, it is probable that the little room in
+which Hines found himself would have seemed extraordinarily cramped and
+crowded.</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps eight feet by ten, certainly no more, and it was inset
+in a railroad fill which here was pierced for a vehicular roadway. A
+door opened upon the curbstone, and from the narrow doorstep it was no
+more than ten feet to the painted white line which normally marked the
+center of the road.</p>
+
+<p>On the farther side of the railroad embankment there was another
+concrete highway, which explained the presence of the room. Here was a
+dangerous crossroad, and this little cubby-hole was a shelter for the
+State policemen.</p>
+
+<p>There was a tiny stove, and a bench along one side of the wall, and a
+cupboard and a table. There were nails, from which a slicker, a belt
+with a holster attached, and a patched motorcycle inner tube depended.
+On the table a tiny radio blared forth intermittent sounds from an even
+tinier loud-speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"To all authorities in New York State," said a voice crisply. "All
+traffic must be stopped where the wind has now reached a velocity of
+forty miles an hour. The storm is expected to increase in intensity
+until four o'clock this afternoon. Wherever possible the population
+must be warned of this fact. The storm will lessen markedly at about
+sunset and may have ceased entirely by morning.</p>
+
+<p>"It is imperative also that Inspector of Police Hines be reached and
+warned not to enter the storm area. Where practicable, signs should be
+painted on stone walls or the pavement. 'Hines Stop!' will be enough to
+cause Inspector Hines to stop and make inquiry. He will probably travel
+on one of the following roads—"</p>
+
+<p>Hines turned to his companion, who was busily raking together a heap of
+wires from the drawer of the table and twisting them together into a
+single long strand.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm getting a buzzer signal ready," said the State trooper woodenly,
+"to use the railroad rails overhead. The radio said half an hour ago
+that all State troopers were to use buzzer signals and railroad tracks
+where they couldn't report otherwise. Not many, of us left, sir, and
+very few of us can report, anyhow. I didn't bother with that until I'd
+put up signs to stop you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>The radio had finished a long list of highways. It began again,
+repeating the previous message word for word, while wind roared
+overhead in a deep-toned bellow which did not seem to vary by the
+fraction of a semitone. It was rising slowly in pitch, as a matter of
+fact, but so slowly that Hines's ears could not follow the change.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>"This is an emergency means of communication, sir," said the trooper,
+joining wires together with painstaking care. "It's the old buzzer
+line that used to be used in the Army. I take an induction coil, the
+one from my motorcycle, sir, and put the secondary into the rail up
+overhead. The rail's iron, sir, and it isn't insulated, and it's not
+very efficient, but they can pick it up with amplifiers at the other
+end."</p>
+
+<p>He bent two wires and fastened them to the storage-battery which
+ran his radio. He was busy for a minute or more, improvising a
+make-and-break contact.</p>
+
+<p>The trooper put it down, satisfied, and tied a rope about himself.</p>
+
+<p>"We have ropes here, sir, for towing," he observed. "I'm going out with
+the wire, sir, and try to fasten this to the railroad rail. If I'm
+blown away, sir, will you try to haul me back?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a bit," said Hines shortly. "I'm going to do that. I don't
+know Morse code; and you're needed for signaling. I'll make the
+connection.... It's my order," he added sharply as the trooper shook
+his head.</p>
+
+<p>Reluctantly, the trooper gave him the rope-end.</p>
+
+<p>Hines knotted the rope tightly about his body and stepped out of the
+door. Wind struck him, and took his breath away. But that was the wind
+that blew through the relatively sheltered traffic way. He was crawling
+on his belly when he came out on the lee side of the railroad fill, and
+a monstrous eddy of wind lifted him six inches off the ground and flung
+him crashing ten feet away. He gasped, and began to crawl desperately
+up the incline toward the rails.</p>
+
+<p>The wind, here, had formed a monstrous whirl over the slight
+obstruction. The dried cinders, dust, and small stones which once had
+covered the side of the embankment had long since been sucked up and
+flung madly away. It was naked damp clay that smeared him as he crawled
+toward the tracks.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be weightless, as the wind-whirl tried to lift him upward.
+Hines had been in the European war, and he thought that he had learned
+to hug the ground, but never before in his life had he clung so
+desperately to the earth as he did now. He was blinded, strangled.</p>
+
+<p>There was a vast, malevolent force pulling and tugging at his body. And
+then quite suddenly his fingers scraped concrete, and he fought the
+wind that strove to push his exploring hand aside and found a steel
+signal-post that must be beside the track.</p>
+
+<p>It was that post that really made it possible for him to reach the
+rails. The blast that came over the top of the embankment was as
+fierce, as savage, as nearly irresistible as a flood of swiftly-flowing
+water. Nobody knows what velocity the wind ultimately attained in the
+Storm, but it had reached a hundred and forty miles an hour when the
+self-registering anemometer in the Burton observatory was wrecked.</p>
+
+<p>Hines faced that wind, and fought his way inch by inch by means of the
+steel bands connecting the signal-post to the rails. An outstretched
+arm caught the wind. The sleeve ballooned out and burst. A flapping end
+was seized by the wind and the rest of the garment was literally peeled
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>Here, of course, the wind was at its worst as far as Hines was
+concerned. He was protected by no more than the four-inch steel rail
+from its full force, and constantly there poured over him dust, smaller
+fragments of débris, and above all and over all the overpoweringly
+dense and solid wind itself.</p>
+
+<p>When the connection was made, Hines was sobbing with sheer exhaustion.
+He slid back down the incline, an inch at a time. And then suddenly
+the wind caught him, and he felt himself lifted up. The rope about his
+body tightened and hurt intolerably, and then he felt a crash and lost
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When he came back to himself he was lying on the floor in the little
+eight-by-ten room again, and the State trooper was working the buzzer
+signal steadily. He stopped, and came over to Hines.</p>
+
+<p>Hines stirred, and the trooper nodded to himself. He went back to the
+buzzer and worked it again.</p>
+
+<p>The radio broke off in the midst of its tediously repeated message.</p>
+
+<p>"Corporal Woodford!" said the loud-speaker crisply. "Since Inspector
+Hines has recovered consciousness, we will give him the message from
+Professor Schaaf. He is in communication with the American Electric
+Company by means of a short-wave set, and we will rebroadcast it to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>There were clickings. One or two curious crashing noises. Then a
+re-enforcement of the roaring of the storm, only this extra roaring
+came from the speaker. It was evident that wherever Schaaf was speaking
+into a microphone, the storm was there too.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Hines," said the placid voice of Schaaf. "This is a fery
+pleasant situation, I dondt think. Now I giff you der works, and you
+use your head. Here is what I haff found out.</p>
+
+<p>"At six this morning der sun changed color. From where I am, I obserfe
+with a spectroscope that der infra-red part of der sun spectrum is
+completely gone cuckoo. I haff examined electric lights in der same
+manner, and der infra-red spectrum is missing there, also.</p>
+
+<p>"Der air where I am no longer transmits radiant heat. Der air, in
+other words, is opaque to heat-wafes, as our friendt Breston has been
+able to make it opaque to light. I think he is up to some more of his
+deffilment. As you remember, he was able to make der air absorb and
+neutralize light, producing his infernal darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"I conclude that he has contrifed to make der air absorb heat instead
+of permitting it to come on down to der ground, and in consequence der
+air within range of his sending-apparatus is getting hot as der deffil
+because it is absorbing all der heat that should pass through it to
+warm the earth. Getting hot, it expands and rises. More cool air is
+rushing in underneath. That, in turn, is getting excited and rushing to
+der upper stratosphere.</p>
+
+<p>"Der result is der Storm, that is raising hell. From der communications
+I haff received from der American Electric Company, der storm-center is
+fifty miles across, which makes it a hell of a storm. Der aferage for a
+typhoon is ten to fifteen miles.</p>
+
+<p>"Der information I haff for you is that it is definitely Breston who is
+making this storm. He has a sending-apparatus with a range of twenty
+to thirty miles in efery direction. Where his <i>verdammt</i> short wafes
+reach, der air is no longer transparent to heat-wafes and all der heat
+of der sun is being used to heat der atmosphere, instead of der earth.
+There is bractically a chimney fifty miles across, full of hot air
+which is rising toward heafen and raising hell.</p>
+
+<p>"You can locate der sending-station with apparatus like we used to
+line up der source of der darkness, before. I will be in communication
+with der Electric Company for some time to come. You can reach me, of
+course. But be careful as der deffil how you talk. Breston is no doubt
+listening in.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you are going to do, or how you are going to do it,
+but you haff got to do something. Der chimney of hot air will stop
+working, of course, at sunset. But it will probably begin again at
+sunrise, and in der meantime there will be der deffil of a storm all
+night long because of der hell that was raised all day. Good luck,
+Hines. I sign off now."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There were more clickings and the storm-roar from the loud-speaker
+stopped. Then the crisp voice of the announcer came once more.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Hines! I hope you received Professor Schaaf's message. Woodford's
+communications are coming through quite clearly. It is not yet known
+just where you are. If you will send word, every effort will be made
+to reach you. In the meantime, will you give what orders you can about
+preparations for stopping 'this storm?"</p>
+
+<p>The trooper, with his improvised key poised, looked expectantly at
+Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"My messages are getting through, sir," he said woodenly. "And I
+imagine that they can't be read by anybody except at the other end of
+the rails. Before you recovered consciousness, the commissioner of
+police in New York City broadcast a message giving you full authority.
+The State authorities have done the same. What shall I tell them you
+want done?"</p>
+
+<p>Hines's hands were clenched tightly. Kathryn was up in the mountains
+somewhere, somewhere near the center of the storm which was Preston's
+work. Preston's work!</p>
+
+<p>She was probably dead by this time. Few buildings could stand the blast
+that blew outside. There was nothing to do, now, but get Preston.</p>
+
+<p>Preston was the one man on earth that Hines unfeignedly hated. He had
+seen the man once. He had fought him twice, with the scientist Schaaf's
+aid. Preston should have been one of the greatest scientific geniuses
+on earth, but instead had now made himself the most cold-blooded
+murderer in history.</p>
+
+<p>Preston found that certain short Hertzian waves produced a state of
+fluorescence in the air<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> so that the visible waves of light were
+absorbed by the ions of the atmosphere, and an utter darkness was
+produced.</p>
+
+<p>Once, some months before, he had sent a beam of those waves down
+Fifth Avenue, in New York. In fifteen minutes of utter blackness the
+forewarned underworld of the city reaped a harvest of which Preston
+received his share.</p>
+
+<p>With every resource of science and courage, Hines and Schaaf had
+fought him then, and had won. His apparatus for producing darkness was
+destroyed, and he seemed to have been killed. It was that success that
+had won Hines promotion to an inspectorship of police.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Preston, however, was not dead. Three months since, he had reappeared
+with a new and larger apparatus for the broadcasting of his short
+waves. He filled the whole city with the unbelievably high-frequency
+broadcast, and the air above the whole metropolitan district absorbed
+all visible rays and transformed them into invisible heat. The whole
+city was immersed in an ocean of oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>Again Hines had fought him, with Schaaf's assistance. That bulky blond
+German scientist had invented instruments for locating the source
+of this radiation which had an almost catalytic effect in producing
+darkness. The effect of the waves was out of all proportion to the
+power used in producing them.</p>
+
+<p>By Schaaf's instruments and Hines's courage, again the menace to the
+city had been nullified; but Preston had gone scot-free, and had become
+a millionaire through the panic in the stock-market his horrible weapon
+had caused.</p>
+
+<p>He remained undiscovered and at large, and his captured apparatus had
+been destroyed by the explosion of an evidently prepared bomb before it
+could be examined.</p>
+
+<p>Now he was again at work. He had prepared apparatus which could send
+over a circle from fifty to sixty miles across. Wherever that station
+maintained a field of force of the extremely short radio waves, there
+the effects of the unholy radiation were evident.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be using now a slightly different wave-length than had
+caused all light radiation to be absorbed by the air. Now it was that
+all heat was arrested by the atmosphere. The warmth of the sun did not
+reach the earth. The air itself became heated instead. Heated, it rose,
+and created a cyclonic storm beyond all parallel.</p>
+
+<p>Preston, in the midst of that storm, was as safe from any danger save
+that of the storm as if he were protected by armies. No man could reach
+him, alive. He was invulnerable, protected by the sheer destruction he
+had invoked.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Hines clenched his hands in the cubby-hole dug in the railroad
+embankment. His eyes narrowed. Kathryn was very probably dead, and
+Preston still lived. Preston would have to be killed for the sake of
+humanity alone; yet Hines would kill him to avenge her only.</p>
+
+<p>"First," said Hines in a cold and utterly bitter tone, "I want
+everybody who's sold stocks short for a week past to be checked up.
+Preston will be operating in terms of millions. I suggest that the
+stock-market be closed, because when it's closed he can have no motive
+to continue the storm. And then—"</p>
+
+<p>He paused to marshal his thoughts, while rage pumped in every artery
+and an almost insane hatred maddened him.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," he said harshly, "I want the biggest tanks in the United States
+Army to be sent up here as soon as the wind dies down a little. They'll
+have to travel under their own power, because the roads and railroads
+alike are useless. I want the big forty-ton ones. I want at least two
+gun-carrier tanks with six-inch guns and a supply of gas and high
+explosive shell. And I want some bombs."</p>
+
+<p>He went on to list cables, more bombs, and airplane photo maps of all
+the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Storm increased in force. It had been unbelievable
+before. Now the wind reached an intensity hitherto unknown upon the
+earth.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>INTO THE DESOLATION.</h3>
+
+
+<p>When sunset came and the Storm died down temporarily, it had left its
+marks all over a circle of territory a full thousand miles in diameter.
+The damage done ranged from a mere blowing-down of signs at the edge
+of that circle, to the absolutely unparalleled devastation of the
+territory immediately about the storm-center.</p>
+
+<p>In the center, of course, the damage was terrific. Forests, houses,
+hamlets, towns, all were leveled to the ground. Yet, there were
+survivors. Cellars protected some, as did valleys and hollows. Probably
+four or five thousand people lived through it.</p>
+
+<p>The fifty-mile circle of the storm-center was devastated, but it
+was not destroyed. And beyond the storm-center, where the wind had
+not reached its ultimate velocity, the amount of damage was neatly
+proportioned to the distance from the focus of the storm.</p>
+
+<p>But about the edge of that central area—the space Schaaf had spoken of
+as the chimney—there was a ringlike strip of utter desolation, five to
+fifteen miles wide.</p>
+
+<p>Every particle of vegetation had been swept away by the sheer force of
+the wind. The fields were bare even of grass. In spots apparently even
+the topsoil had dried to dust and gone sweeping away into oblivion in
+the storm-wind. The forests were shattered areas of splintered stumps.
+The houses had left as traces only small mounds of masonry, or else no
+signs at all.</p>
+
+<p>The storm died down at sunset and for half an hour there was almost
+peace. But the vast chimney of sun-heated air which shot upward for
+miles had acted as a vacuum, drawing to itself air from every direction
+with terrific speed. When the vacuum abruptly ceased to be, the winds
+continued to blow for a time from sheer momentum, and piled up a
+colossal high-pressure system which was as intolerable as the previous
+storm-center had been.</p>
+
+<p>Over all the North Atlantic States, then, there was atmospheric chaos.
+Dense clouds formed at nightfall. Rain in unexampled volume fell,
+while electric storms wrought havoc. In the Catskill section mountain
+streams, choked with the débris of the wind's creation, became flooded
+with falling water and abruptly turned to inundations.</p>
+
+<p>In that terrible strip of desolation about the storm-center itself, the
+bare, stripped earth turned to a vast morass of mud. And that morass
+claimed victims when survivors in the central area tried to cross it
+during the darkness and the rain.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At nine o'clock, rain was falling in sheets, in columns, almost in
+solid masses. Lurid, unbelievable bolts of lightning leaped from one
+horizon to the other.</p>
+
+<p>There were no electric lights, of course, in two thousand square miles
+of New York State that night. Beneath monstrous clouds which poured
+floods upon the earth, there was only blackness, save at one spot.
+There, pencil-beams of light stabbed futilely at the falling rain,
+where twelve huge tanks rocked and lurched and slid on up toward the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<p>They had stopped in their advance and picked up Hines. He sat up in the
+control-room of the largest of all of them, and asked dreary questions
+and dully gave instructions which organized the attack.</p>
+
+<p>The tanks would go on up toward the site of the storm-center. They
+would gather, presently, and Hines would give instructions which would
+be final. Then they would scatter to their several strategic points.</p>
+
+<p>With dawn, when the Storm That Had to be Stopped began again,
+they would use the instruments Schaaf had originally designed for
+determining the point of origin of certain other short waves.
+They would find Preston's station. It would probably be a dugout,
+underground, for safety from the storm he could create at will. The
+tanks would bomb that station mercilessly. Or if he had intrenched
+himself upon a mountain peak, the gun-carrying caterpillars would come
+into action. Six-inch guns would assail a solitary man who essayed to
+devastate the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Only colossal things such as they were—weighing forty tons each—could
+hope to exist and move in the atmospheric turmoil that would begin with
+sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>The tanks rumbled and lurched as they made their way in a sedate
+long line toward the hills. Rain poured in rivulets from their steel
+sides. Sheets and masses of falling water scattered the beams from the
+searchlights mounted upon them. From the control-room it was possible
+to see perhaps twenty feet with some clarity, and dimly for thirty feet
+more. But after that even the searchlight glare was dissipated by the
+rain.</p>
+
+<p>Hines looked weary and worn and haggard. All day long he had been in
+communication with New York, giving orders which men leaped to obey.</p>
+
+<p>The State had given him full authority. He had shown his ability.
+Besides, the scale, the scope of this disaster was one to induce
+panic. The leadership of Hines, who had twice defeated Preston, would
+restore some confidence in a public otherwise more than inclined to be
+panic-stricken.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>These were army tanks, shipped on flat-cars as far as the rails were
+undamaged, drawn by a locomotive that had crept on and on, as far as it
+dared, while the Storm still blew in the daytime. They had come at full
+speed immediately darkness fell.</p>
+
+<p>Now they went lurching and pounding up toward the hills. The clanking
+of their mighty treads was thunderous in their reverberating interiors.
+The roaring of their motors was deafening.</p>
+
+<p>They were full of the smell of hot oil and exhaust-gases and fuel,
+but up in the control-room the lightning and thunder blotted out all
+sights and sounds, and the sheer desert of mud over which they traveled
+toward the hills made it impossible for any man who saw it to think of
+anything else.</p>
+
+<p>Hines, alone, thought of Kathryn. The awful desolation over which the
+tanks traveled had been covered with farms and houses and forests only
+twelve hours before. People had lived here—people who now were torn
+and draggled corpses flung haphazard amid the other débris of the Storm.</p>
+
+<p>Hines had been cooped up for twelve hours knowing his helplessness,
+knowing that Kathryn was either dead or desperately in need of help.
+Now, he was sure, she was dead. The desert of mud over which the tanks
+passed was enough to convince him of her death.</p>
+
+<p>The radio had told them that over most of the United States the wind
+had reached gale intensity.</p>
+
+<p>The weather bureau in Washington was working like mad to predict the
+unpredictable, but from the one day's storm alone weeks of chaotic
+weather could be foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>Already meteorologists were speculating upon the effect of the Storm
+upon the climate of Europe. California, it was certain, would be
+visited by subsidiary hurricanes, and from Texas on north there would
+be cyclonic whirls of terrible intensity as the air of the earth moved
+to fill up the vacuum Preston could create at will.</p>
+
+<p>What news there was of the loss of life was so monstrous as to have
+lost all meaning. The record of towns destroyed, of villages wiped out,
+became monotonous. From the standpoint of property destroyed the Storm
+was one of the major catastrophes of history; and if the death toll
+was lighter than certain plagues and earthquakes, it was only because
+the larger cities were fortunately far from the circles of highest
+wind-velocity.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The feel of slippery mud beneath the tanks' great treads changed
+subtly. The earth became curiously more solid. A great bowlder appeared
+not far from the leading tank's track, glistening and running with
+rain. The tank changed course to avoid it. Hines looked back. Despite
+the falling water, he could detect a long lane of white glows, which
+were the searchlights of the following tanks.</p>
+
+<p>The tanks still went on. They were in what seemed to be a semi-solid
+mass of water, intermittently made into a greenish universe of light
+by lightning-flashes which were blurred by the rain to mere indefinite
+illumination. In the periods of darkness between those flashes, the
+searchlights gleamed brightly ahead. And water poured from the tanks in
+floods.</p>
+
+<p>D bris appeared, water-soaked and shredded. The stumps of wind-whipped,
+obliterated Indian corn began suddenly to the left. The treads of
+the tanks clanked suddenly on concrete. There was a road beneath the
+leading tank.</p>
+
+<p>A speaking-tube whistled in the leading tank.</p>
+
+<p>"Headquarters," came up thinly to the control-room, "orders you to try
+to locate yourself by road signs or any other evidences of position."</p>
+
+<p>The officer in command of the tank snorted and made no answer.</p>
+
+<p>The tank went on. There was concrete under the left tread only. The
+tank wallowed around and climbed back on the road. It went rumbling
+blindly on in the rain. Presently bare concrete was visible. Mud had
+not washed across it here.</p>
+
+<p>"There!" said Hines sharply. "A road-sign bent over by the wind! It's
+in place!"</p>
+
+<p>An unearthly hooting set up. The tank stopped with a grinding noise.
+Hines peered out of the little vision-slits and saw a dripping man with
+a flash light bent over something by the side of the road. It was one
+of the cast-iron road signs one finds in the Catskills. They are set up
+on wrought-iron posts, which are fixed in concrete.</p>
+
+<p>Originally the sturdiness of construction was made necessary by the
+vandal habits of a motoring populace, but it served a useful purpose
+now. Set facing the wind, the cast-iron plate had caught the full
+blast. And the wrought-iron shaft had bent slowly but definitely until
+the sign lay nearly flat, facing upward.</p>
+
+<p>The dripping soldier came sprinting back into the tank. The
+speaking-tube whistled again,</p>
+
+<p>"The sign says 'North Weddensdale Corporate Limits,' sir."</p>
+
+<p>Hines clenched his hands. This was the village where Kathryn had been
+staying! He strained his eyes desperately through the rain.</p>
+
+<p>A rectangular hole to the left of the concrete caught his eye. It was
+a cellar. The house had been taken cleanly away from above it. Nothing
+was left. Nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," he said hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>The tank ground into motion again. Rain poured from its sides. Its
+searchlight ray stabbed into the darkness and was dissipated by
+falling water.</p>
+
+<p>Then the searchlight ray went out.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Almost instantly thereafter the speaking-tube whistled. "All the tanks,
+sir, report their searchlights have gone out."</p>
+
+<p>The officer commanding the leading tank swore to himself. "All right.
+Everybody stop and repair them."</p>
+
+<p>Hines heard his voice speaking hoarsely:</p>
+
+<p>"It's the Darkness. The metal walls of the tank act as shields, so we
+can see inside, but it's the Darkness—the same darkness Preston turned
+on in New York. If you send a man outside to make sure, keep up a noise
+so he can find his way back."</p>
+
+<p>Hines went, himself, to the exit door of the tank. He heard two men
+moving about outside. The interior of the tank was brightly lighted,
+and the door was opened wide, but the light from inside did not strike
+upon the earth beneath the tank. It seemed to be absorbed by some
+solid black substance which surrounded the metal monster and stretched
+solidly almost with an inward bulge, across the open door.</p>
+
+<p>Thunder shook the earth. There was a crashing and crackling of
+electricity. From the violence of the report, the lightning-flash must
+have struck somewhere near by. But there was no faintest flickering of
+light.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in a peculiarly ghastly fashion, a groping hand came out of
+the solid wall of blackness across the tank's exit door. It seemed
+disembodied, detached from any body. It caught at the edge of the door.
+A man came, wild-eyed and staring, out of the apparently solid opacity.
+His teeth chattered as he swung into the illuminated tank.</p>
+
+<p>"The—the flash light don't work," he gasped. "I held it up to my eyes
+and it just glowed, but it don't give any light. See?"</p>
+
+<p>He pressed the button. A brilliant gleam shot from the flash light. His
+jaw dropped open. But Hines nodded his head very bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>The Storm had been made by the broadcasting of very short Hertzian
+waves which caused the atmosphere to be opaque to heat; a mere
+variation of a device that Preston had used before. Now he had gone
+back to the use of his first device again.</p>
+
+<p>Now, from somewhere within a thirty-mile radius, he was broadcasting
+short waves differing perhaps by the fraction of a millimeter in length
+from those that had produced the Storm. And these tiny ripples in the
+ether caused the absorption of all that band of frequencies which made
+visible light.</p>
+
+<p>There was darkness outside the tanks so dense as to be tangible, so
+complete as to constitute utter blindness, so thick that it caused the
+perfect absorption of even the ten thousand candle-power searchlight
+beams within a distance of three feet.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Hines thought grimly, staring at the apparently solid wall of darkness
+without the door. The metal walls of the tanks, of course, absorbed
+and grounded the waves that impinged upon them. The darkness could not
+invade the tanks themselves. But it blinded the drivers beyond the
+possibility of a remedy.</p>
+
+<p>The engines of the tank stopped suddenly. The officer in command swung
+down from the control-room, his lips twisted wryly.</p>
+
+<p>"I reported to headquarters," he said briefly, "and received orders to
+stop my motors and wait for dawn. It is believed that the darkness will
+be lifted when the Storm is started up again."</p>
+
+<p>Hines did not hear him. He was listening with his ears strained to
+their utmost. In the near-silence that came with the engine's stopping,
+the sound of the rain and thunder outside seemed to redouble. The rain
+was invisible, the lightning unseen, but there was a tumult without the
+tank that was terrifying. Yet in the midst of that tumult Hines thought
+he heard a faint cry.</p>
+
+<p>It was repeated. Again, and again. And cold sweat came out upon Hines.
+He could not believe his ears, yet he dared not disbelieve them. Out
+there in a storm such as would have been called a tornado if the Storm
+itself had not given a new meaning to the word, he heard a voice which
+he could swear was that of Kathryn!</p>
+
+<p>The storm itself was violent enough to make venturing into it
+madness—and he would have to go into it as a blind man.</p>
+
+<p>The cry came once more. It was fainter, this time.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>TRICKED.</h3>
+
+<p>Two members of the crew of the tank volunteered to go with him. They
+went out as Alpine climbers travel, tied together with a long strand of
+wire that paid out behind them. It would insure that they returned to
+the tank, or would lead them to any of their number who was injured.</p>
+
+<p>Hines went first, groping over unfamiliar ground, unable to guess where
+his next step would bring him. He had broken out the glass of a pocket
+compass proffered by one of the tank's company and steered by the feel
+of its needle, with the tank hooting dismally behind him at regular
+intervals for his better orientation.</p>
+
+<p>He went on into the blackness which seemed almost familiar. His flash
+light bulb glowed dimly when three inches from his eyes. Farther away,
+its light was absorbed by the opaque air, and he seemed to swim through
+it as a diver might swim through a sea of ink.</p>
+
+<p>A fall into a ditch crammed with débris corrected the sensation of
+swimming, however, and he blundered on and gashed his leg against the
+splintered stump of a tree whose knife-edged fragments were in nowise
+softened by the rain.</p>
+
+<p>Rain pelted downward through the darkness. It poured from him in
+streams. He had to bend almost double to protect his open compass from
+the falling water while he felt of the needle.</p>
+
+<p>The tank hooted behind him. He went on. The wire attached to his waist
+dragged. It jerked, and he halted to allow the following man to move
+forward and give him slack. He shouted, and the beginning of his shout
+was loud, and the end of it was drowned out by thunder. He listened,
+and heard only the terrible drumming of miles of rain.</p>
+
+<p>Then a cry in answer. He shouted again, and plunged forward and
+stumbled ten feet on and gashed his forehead horribly, and went on
+again with warm blood mingling with the rain that beat down on his
+face. Suddenly he was sprawling on hands and knees on a monstrous heap
+of broken bricks and field-stone.</p>
+
+<p>A cry came up almost below him. He cursed the darkness then, and called
+once more; and Kathryn sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>"I—I'm all right, only some brick-work fell on me and I can't get up,"
+she said unsteadily a moment later.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming down to you," said Hines hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>"Be careful! There's an open space just above me, where the floor broke
+in, but there's loose rock there. You may fall."</p>
+
+<p>Hines gritted his teeth and fumbled here and there with infinite
+caution. Loose rock above a hole over Kathryn's head meant not so much
+danger to him as to her.</p>
+
+<p>He tore his hand on splintered planks. A figure came blundering nearby.
+He heard it gasping, but he saw nothing, anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>"Fasy!" snapped Hines. "We're here! Stand still!"</p>
+
+<p>Kathryn said steadily from below:</p>
+
+<p>"You're nearly above me. I think you're at the edge of the hole in the
+flooring."</p>
+
+<p>He found it, and called quietly to the other man.</p>
+
+<p>"Our belts," he said briefly. "We'll put 'em together and you lower me.
+Then you can haul her up, and after her, me."</p>
+
+<p>He went down, dangling in the blackness with no more knowledge of his
+whereabouts than a blind man would have had. He landed in a foot and a
+half of water.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," said Kathryn unsteadily. "B-but be careful of the m-masonry."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He stumbled against her shoulder before he realized that she was
+trapped near the floor. The cellar was filling with the drainage of the
+rain. Hines was two men then, for an instant. One felt coolly until
+he had located the mass of brick and mortar that pinned her down, and
+had envisioned its position and its size. The other man was sick with
+horror at the thought of the death that had awaited her as the cellar
+slowly filled with water.</p>
+
+<p>He had more than two men's strength as he wrenched at the mass of
+stone, though. It fell with a turgid splashing that was louder than the
+drumming of the rain and the constant splashing of water that came down
+into the stone-lined depression.</p>
+
+<p>He lifted her and held her close, there in the unbelievable blackness.
+He sent her up, by the linked belts. And he carried her himself, the
+long, stumbling, rather terrible way back to the hooting tank, which
+slowly hauled in the wire as he advanced. The other men blundered on
+ahead of him to take any falls there might be while he carried Kathryn.</p>
+
+<p>Her arm was broken, and she was badly bruised, but that was all. Hines
+set the arm himself, while she smiled at him gamely in the smelly,
+machinery-crowded war-engine.</p>
+
+<p>Then Hines turned to the commander of the tank with a new and more
+savage grimness. He had gained a new motive from Kathryn's injury.
+Oddly enough, he had felt defeated in advance while he believed her
+dead, but a new and throbbing rage swept over him because of her
+injury, a fiercer passion than the hopeless hatred her death would have
+caused.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," he said savagely. "You've had orders to take directions
+from me. Preston's turned on the dark, outside. He thinks we're
+helpless. You radio headquarters and tell them I order you to go on. I
+take all responsibility."</p>
+
+<p>The officer grinned.</p>
+
+<p>The ordnance department maps of the Catskills leave some things to
+be desired, to be sure. There are errors, in spots, and they are not
+wholly up to date. But every road and bridle-path and every grade and
+hollow is shown upon them.</p>
+
+<p>With a concrete road under their treads and the North Weddensdale
+corporate limits sign for a position-sign, the tanks could very nearly
+go to any spot in all the mountains, blinded though they were.</p>
+
+<p>Men had walked about each of the tanks, with flash lights held close
+to their eyes. They discovered that for a short distance beyond the
+tank, in the direction away from the sending-station of the waves
+of darkness, there was a lee, a "shadow"—a relatively small and
+cone-shaped shielded area, in which the air was protected from the
+Hertzian waves that made it opaque to light. In those shielded areas
+lights could be seen. And those small spaces of transparent air gave a
+bearing—rough, to be sure, but still a bearing—on the station that
+was sending the short waves.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The darkness was being transmitted from a spot nearly north-northeast
+of the steel monsters. A man swung up in top of each one with a flash
+light and a hammer. He worked himself around the central turret
+until he had the turret between himself and Preston's transmitter of
+darkness. His flash light gave him proof of his direction. He rapped on
+the turret-plates. One rap for each division of the compass to the east
+of north, and two for each division to the left, was the agreed signal.
+He would transmit the bearing of the source of darkness whenever the
+turret was pounded on from within.</p>
+
+<p>"One more thing," said Hines crisply. "Arrange with the other tanks to
+navigate by whistle-signals instead of radio. Preston will be listening
+in, you can be sure."</p>
+
+<p>Then through the sound of thunder and of rain, there came the
+multitudinous hoots of many whistles. There was a whirring and the
+roaring of engines. Then with a monstrous grinding, the tank set off.</p>
+
+<p>Hines and the tank-officer bent over the map of this locality. Kathryn
+looked on, though her eyes rested most often upon the haggard, draggled
+figure that was Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"The road curves here," said Hines quietly. "That will place us
+definitely."</p>
+
+<p>The officer laid his finger on a certain spot.</p>
+
+<p>"A bridge," he observed, "all of sixty feet high in the middle. We'll
+be crossing it—blind. And it may be blown out."</p>
+
+<p>Hines shrugged. The tank rumbled on, and on.... Its whistle hooted, and
+was answered from behind. Then a long line of blind monsters hooted one
+after the other as they swam through obscurity as black as the blackest
+ink.</p>
+
+<p>Concrete under the treads. They were steering the monster by compass,
+now, and the sound of the treads.</p>
+
+<p>Quite suddenly, the tank wallowed off the concrete. It lurched,
+careened, swung about and then found the way again.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the curve," said the officer. "We're located all right."</p>
+
+<p>From this time on the navigation of the monster vehicle was confident
+and crisp. A modern tank records its course and distance so accurately
+that even in the densest fog it can retrace its way for miles without a
+landmark.</p>
+
+<p>From the map a forecast of the course to be followed was being made and
+the tank lumbered on through oblivion. Utter darkness filled the world
+without its steel walls, save where one man sat in a terrific downpour
+in a triangular small space of transparent air, and watched a dripping
+compass by the light of a flash light.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time he pounded savagely on the steel deck with a hammer,
+signaling to those within. From time to time, too, there were vast
+hooting noises, feet only from his head, and there were other dismal
+hootings behind him in the utter blackness.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The feel of the concrete underneath changed subtly. The forty-ton
+weight of the tank was making the huge bridge sway slightly. The tank's
+whistle howled, in a succession of long and short blasts.</p>
+
+<p>"They'll wait until we're across the bridge," said the officer shortly.
+"One at a time is load enough."</p>
+
+<p>The leading tank ground on. The bridge quivered and shook. Presently
+the earth was solid under it again. It halted and seemed to bellow into
+the surrounding bedlam of rain and wind and thunder. An answering hoot
+came faintly. There was stillness, and presently the earth-quivering
+that told of the near approach of another monster. More hootings of
+whistles. Another great tank, and another.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth tank was on its way across the narrow causeway which the
+map said spanned a ravine some sixty feet above the mountain stream.
+Suddenly, there was a wild screaming of its whistle, a terrific crash,
+and then a deafening detonation. The waiting tanks trembled from the
+concussion that ensued.</p>
+
+<p>"It fell off the bridge," said the officer of the tank in which Hines
+rode. He spoke very calmly. "I suppose the rest of us weakened the
+bridge in passing over it. Maybe the Storm helped, too. It gave way and
+the bombs went off when the tank crashed."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go on with those that are here with us," said Hines grimly.
+"Signal the rest to hunt for shelter from to-morrow's wind."</p>
+
+<p>The hooting, dismal cavalcade of four tanks began again to fumble its
+way along the narrow ribbon of concrete that wound among the mountains.
+Twice the treads crunched shrieking metal beneath them. Cars, wrecked
+and, it was to be hoped, abandoned. Half a dozen times, in one
+relatively sheltered valley, the leading tank crushed a way through
+splintered masses of limbs and foliage that were heaped up in monster
+windrifts.</p>
+
+<p>The half-drowned men out in the flood of rain pounded regularly their
+signals of the source of the waves of darkness. The tanks had gone
+five miles in all in a little over an hour, when the poundings on the
+outside became frantic. A new signal of direction came through. Hines
+said shortly:</p>
+
+<p>"Stop the whole line. Check with all of them."</p>
+
+<p>The tanks had been boring their way through the blackness by map. The
+darkness-producing ether-waves demonstrably had been coming from the
+north-northeast. Now, abruptly, they were proved to be coming from a
+little south of west.</p>
+
+<p>Hines studied the map and the line that had been drawn to indicate the
+tank's ultimate destination. The sending-station was no longer there.
+It had changed position.</p>
+
+<p>"Either," said Hines harshly, "Preston's moved his sending-apparatus,
+or he has two or more of them. He turns one off and another one on. We
+haven't a burglar's chance of locating them if they turn off as we draw
+near them."</p>
+
+<p>They were playing a deadly game of blind-man's-buff with Preston. Now
+Preston showed an unexpected resource. He had more than one outfit
+for producing darkness. When the tanks drew near one, that ceased to
+operate and another took up its task.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed as if Preston had Hines beaten.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>SCIENTIST AT BAY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Heavily, laboriously, clumsily, the tanks crawled on through the
+darkness. They were blind and they were fumbling. They went clanking
+through a blackness as of the Abyss, with the peculiar confidence of
+things that have long been sightless, while rain beat upon them and
+thunder roared about them.</p>
+
+<p>Hines and the tank-officer were again bent over the map.</p>
+
+<p>"Schaaf's experiment-station was here," said Hines shortly, touching a
+spot on the engraved sheet. "It was more or less a secret, but he was
+trying to work out how to make these same darkness-producing waves. He
+was trying, in fact, to duplicate Preston's results in hopes of finding
+some way to neutralize them. That accounts for his short-wave set and
+the experimental license that enabled him to use it."</p>
+
+<p>The tank-officer received a cross-bearing from the tanks they had left
+behind at the wrecked bridge, and drew a line on his map.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the third darkness-transmitter Preston's brought into use," he
+said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"And he's using underground a rials," said Hines shortly, "because
+anything above ground would have been blown away by the Storm. We
+can't locate the transmitters closer than within a quarter of a mile,
+by cross-bearings, and we can't count on destroying them even with
+explosives unless we locate them more closely than that. Poison-gas
+will be useless in the wind that will be blowing by dawn."</p>
+
+<p>"We're licked, then," said the tank-officer.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet," said Hines grimly. "We've got the bearings now. Let's go on.
+I've still got one hope. Schaaf's a smart man."</p>
+
+<p>The tanks crawled on blindly, like gigantic eyeless slugs creeping
+along the bottom of the ocean's deepest deep, while within a vast
+irregular circle fifty miles across, the drenched, shivering,
+hysterical survivors of the Storm itself went closer to madness from
+the terror of the dark.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>At one o'clock in the morning, while all over the United States people
+sat up by their radios and listened fascinatedly to the never-ceasing
+broadcasts of news and orders, reports and fragmentary pleas for help,
+there was the first direct word from the man who had caused the Storm
+That Had to be Stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Radio broadcasting was, of course, the next most important factor,
+after Hines's activities in lessening the damage Preston did to the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>All the first night of the storm a warning was broadcast to the
+isolated folk who hastily turned to the radio as their sole link
+with the outside, that the wind was to be expected to begin again at
+daybreak. By broadcasting the location of the few hamlets protected by
+fortuitously placed mountains, much good was done.</p>
+
+<p>Mostly, though, the radio served to make all the world realize the
+extent of the catastrophe. It is to the credit of the people of America
+that trains loaded down with supplies for the devastated area were
+already on their way while the Storm still raged on its second day.</p>
+
+<p>The radio enabled all the continent to share in the horror of the
+Storm, and also the radio was the means of communication with Hines and
+the blinded tanks in the storm-center, so that a hundred million people
+shared in his adventure, in his attempt to stop the Storm.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most spectacular feat the radio performed that night was an
+accident. It was at one o'clock. The tank-officer in charge of Hines's
+tank was communicating with headquarters. The Red Cross had arranged
+for half a dozen sentences from him, describing the devastation the
+tank had passed through on its way to the mountains. If rehabilitation
+was to take place, vast sums would be needed, and money could best be
+got while the catastrophe was fresh in peoples' minds.</p>
+
+<p>The tank-officer spoke curtly into the microphone to headquarters. His
+words were amplified and rebroadcast and sent over the nation-wide
+chains of radio stations. A hundred million people heard his voice
+and even the noise of the machinery of the tank, crawling through the
+darkness where the Storm was made.</p>
+
+<p>But he had spoken no more than a dozen words when another voice cut
+in. This other voice was harsh, metallic; an abominally cocksure and
+arbitrary voice. It spoke with a studied insolence.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>"This is Preston speaking," said the voice arrogantly, and instantly
+folk all over the United States stiffened in their chairs as the
+unexpected tones came from their loudspreakers.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been much amused by the accounts of the efforts made to find
+and kill me. I have been listening in, of course, from my entirely
+secure retreat in the storm-center, and I am speaking on the same
+wave-length the tanks have been using. I hear my own voice in another
+speaker, being rebroadcast as the lieutenant's voice was supposed to
+be. I think it about time that the people of the United States should
+know with whom and what they deal."</p>
+
+<p>Preston's voice stopped, and millions of people waited breathlessly.
+Static interrupted his words, and whole phrases were sometimes
+obliterated by the crashings made by the lightning, but on the whole
+his message was clear.</p>
+
+<p>"I have made this storm for my own private purposes. I can continue it
+for days, for weeks, even for months. In one week, I am informed, I
+will have so deranged the normal atmospheric conditions in the United
+States that the crops of this fall will be practically ruined.</p>
+
+<p>"In two weeks, by drawing down the colder air from the Arctic Circle,
+I will have brought on winter in Canada. In three weeks there will
+be four feet of snow in London, Germany will be frozen in, and all
+the north of France will have a semi-arctic climate, while the United
+States will face a famine. I invite the meterological experts of the
+world to verify my statement.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall continue the storm I have created until the governments I have
+mentioned make it worth my while to stop it. In the meantime, I assure
+you that the tanks that are trying to locate me have no chance of
+success. The Storm will continue until I wish it to stop. I will stop
+it only when I am sufficiently paid for my trouble."</p>
+
+<p>The arrogant voice ceased. Announcers' voices, quivering with
+excitement, followed with a statement that radio compasses had picked
+up the message before its cessation and that it had actually come from
+the Catskills, from the storm-center.</p>
+
+<p>The United States began to be afraid. The Boards of Governors of the
+Stock Exchanges of New York and Chicago began to arrange, quietly, for
+the closing of those exchanges. Cables began to carry long messages in
+diplomatic code across the ocean-beds.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly another broadcast, as widely distributed as the first,
+came from Schaaf, in his tiny laboratory set in a hillside. He had
+a national reputation, now, as an associate of Hines, and he was
+frantically called upon for a statement to nullify the panic that
+Preston's announcement would cause.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf's speech, repeated in the same ten million receiving sets, was
+entirely characteristic of him.</p>
+
+<p>"I haff heard Breston's speech," he said dryly. "I remark that my
+friendt Hines is on the way to join me in a little <i>Schrecklichkeit</i>
+party, to be bractised on Breston. I consider that as imbortant as
+anything Breston has said. We will haff him in a matter of hours. As
+for his threats to mess up der weather of two continents, I say one
+thing: No matter how thin you slice it, it is still boloney."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Schaaf's speech had just the tone necessary to restore confidence
+without lessening the public's sense of the real urgency of the
+situation. There were speculators in food-stuffs and other necessities,
+of course, who immediately grasped the opportunity Preston's threats
+created. They, by the way, suffered considerable losses by their
+enterprise as things turned out.</p>
+
+<p>But on the whole the public reacted in highly favorable fashion to
+Schaaf's dry reassurance. Americans will always pay more for a good
+joke than a pathetic story, and Schaaf raised more money by the
+last line of his speech than all the tear-jerking efforts of radio
+spellbinders during the rest of the night.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf did not listen in and hear himself eulogized on the ether-waves,
+the details of his scientific career sandwiched in between casualty
+lists and weather predictions. He was placidly unaware of his sudden
+celebrity.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, until the restored mail-services brought him sacks of admiring
+and begging letters, and an astounding number of proposals of marriage
+from female admirers, he was not aware that he had done anything out of
+the ordinary.</p>
+
+<p>He was busy. He turned from the microphone with a grunt of disgusted
+relief. His experiment-station was a tiny stone-walled building half
+sunk in a mountainside. It consisted of four rooms.</p>
+
+<p>The laboratory alone was of use to him now. Experimenting as he had
+been with short radio waves, he had needed a workshop in which the
+only etheric disturbances would be those he made himself. The walls of
+the workshop were lined with copper sheeting and the windows covered
+with heavy copper gauze, all of which was grounded. The interior was
+insulated from all Hertzian waves from without.</p>
+
+<p>Now that laboratory glowed brightly with electric light, though he
+had, only to open a door to see the apparently solid mass of no longer
+transparent air which resulted from Preston's devices.</p>
+
+<p>He took down a screen from a window. Instantly the blackness seemed
+to pour, to stab, into the brightly lighted laboratory. Through the
+opening in the grounded shielding, Preston's short-waves penetrated,
+depriving the air of its ability to permit light to pass through it.
+A long cone of darkness, so definite as to seem a solid substance,
+projected into the room—more powerful than the shielding because of
+the nearness to Preston's headquarters.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf grumbled and measured it, carefully making his measurements from
+accurately marked points. He wrote down his figures and replaced the
+screen. The seemingly tangible cone vanished with much the effect of
+magic.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf sat down at a little table and began to calculate absorbedly. He
+scowled as he worked, and mumbled irritatedly as he took down a book of
+logarithms and ran his fingers down its columns.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The table trembled, from time to time, with the violence of the thunder
+without. There was a very slow leak in the roof over in one corner,
+and now and again a drop fell glittering to an enlarging puddle on the
+floor. The wind howled outside. The rain drummed on the roof.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf finished his calculations, leaned back and absently combed out
+his luxuriant yellow whiskers with his fingers, then filled and lighted
+his pipe. Its poisonously strong odor filled the air.</p>
+
+<p>The thunder was deafening and nearly continuous. The shrieking of the
+wind was daunting. The drumming sound of the rain was unspeakably
+depressing. Schaaf smoked comfortably for a space, and picked up the
+remnant of a half-eaten sandwich. He bit into it, stopped, and listened
+keenly.</p>
+
+<p>There was a thin and dismal hooting above even the tumult from the
+skies. Schaaf beamed, and then growled impatiently, He swathed himself
+in oil-skins, muttering something about "Der <i>verdammt</i> Breston!" and
+took a huge reel of cord from the wall. It looked like the extra-strong
+braided cord that is used for scientific kite-flying—or for getting
+a kite aloft that is to carry up a temporary a rial. He fastened the
+end inside the door, knotting and double-knotting it. He went out,
+unreeling the cord behind him, and fought the door shut again.</p>
+
+<p>There was no longer any movement or any activity in the laboratory.
+A loud-speaker made nasal noises in one corner, which the booming of
+thunder and of wind and rain drowned out to inarticulateness. The
+lights burned steadily.</p>
+
+<p>An open fire alternately leaped madly upward and died down to nothing
+beneath an improvised damper closing off most of the chimmey-space
+above it. Rain made rattling noises on the windows, and wind screamed
+overhead, and always, always, always, the thunder boomed and crashed.</p>
+
+<p>Then the door burst open and Schaaf came in again, fumbling his way
+back along the cord. He was soaked. Behind him, guiding themselves by
+the cord, came three other people. Hines was one of them, tattered
+and ragged and with a great gash on his forehead. He carried Kathryn
+lightly, in spite of the storm. She was wrapped in an oil-skin, one arm
+in improvised splints.</p>
+
+<p>Hines set her down carefully and blinked with the air of a man whose
+sight has suddenly been restored. The third person was the officer in
+command of the leading tank.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf put his whole weight against the door and closed it.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not bad work," he observed comfortably. "You stopped on der
+concrete road where der big tree had blown down, as I told you by
+radio. I came down, blundered into you, and banged on der door. Here we
+are. Now, where is der map?"</p>
+
+<p>The tank-officer produced a sheet he had carried under his slicker.
+Schaaf began to unroll it.</p>
+
+<p>"I haff sworn—<i>Gott!</i> How I haff sworn!—because I didt not haff a
+map of der locality. Miss Bush, go ofer by der fire and get warm. Now,
+Hines, show me my bresent location and tell me der scale of der map."</p>
+
+<p>The tank-officer, instead, obeyed both orders. Hines was settling
+Kathryn comfortably by the fire. And Schaaf took dividers and a
+pencil and calculated feverishly, grumbling in guttural German at
+the absurdity of calculating distances in feet and inches instead of
+meters. Eventually he measured with painstaking accuracy, drew six
+lines from the location of his laboratory to very precise and exact
+lengths, and put large dots at their ends.</p>
+
+<p>"There," he said decisively. "That is der best I can do. I have watched
+der <i>verdammt</i> darkness. Look!" He pulled out a window-screen and
+a black cone of opacity stabbed across the brightly lighted room.
+He replaced the screen and it vanished. "Der wafes that destroy
+der transparency of der air," he said briskly, "can come in der
+window-opening when I remofe part of der copper insulation inside. They
+interfere with each other, dissipate, and generally lose der original
+effectifness. Which gifes me my information. By der shape of der cone
+of blackness, I haff calculated der direction and distance of six
+different points from which Breston has transmitted darkness. At these
+six spots he has sending-stations."</p>
+
+<p>The tank-officer said warmly:</p>
+
+<p>"Splendid, sir! We took bearings as we came along—see my pencil-lines,
+Sir?—and they intersect your lines at just the spots you indicate! It
+looks as if you are correct."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I'm correct! And if I had had der intelligence of an
+angle-worm I would haff made der same measurements of der wafes that
+made der storm and we would know where Breston is. He is not at all of
+those places, certainly."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Hines. "But what I'm hoping for, Schaaf, is some way to see
+in spite of the darkness. Once—"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Gott in Himmel!</i>" cried Schaaf angrily. "Haff I not kicked myself
+forty-sefen times? Before, when we fought Breston in New York, his
+wafes made der air opaque to fisible light, but not to ultra-fiolet,
+and we did tricks with that to find our way about. But now, he has
+juggled his wafe-lengths to make der air absorb der ultra-fiolet rays
+also. I am as blind as a bat at der bottom of der sea, Hines, and I am
+mad! I am mad as der deffil, Hires!"</p>
+
+<p>Hines frowned at the map.</p>
+
+<p>"He'll keep the darkness on, even after daybreak," he said coldly.
+"He'll shoot the storm-producing waves out as an addition. And since he
+turns off his sending-stations when a tank draws near—"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe he has microphones in der ground," said Schaaf gloomily. "Der
+sound of a tank is unmistakable. Or maybe he switches them on and off
+for der mere purpose of being confusing. In any efent I haff done all I
+can. I tell you abbroximately where his sending-stations are. But you
+cannot find them without seeing them or tracing der wafes home, and he
+turns them off when a tank comes near. It is like trying to catch a
+mouse that is in six holes at once."</p>
+
+<p>Hines smiled faintly.</p>
+
+<p>"But we have lots of cats," he observed, "Lieutenant, I want these
+orders given."</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf listened critically, then appreciatively, and then he beamed as
+Himnes's voice went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Hines," he said comfortably, "if your brains were dynamite and they
+went off, der report would be like Vesuvius. We got der son-of-a-gun!"</p>
+
+<p>Even the tank-officer grinned confidently as he prepared to make his
+way back to the tank by the guiding cord.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>THE HEART OF THE STORM.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Rain drummed on the roof and clattered on the windows. Wind shrieked
+outside the little stone building. A mountain-flank had protected it
+from the blast of air that Had blown all the day before, and the storm
+that raged during the night was merely a gale such as uproots trees and
+sinks ships at sea. But it was uncomfortable to listen to, with thunder
+making the tumult of a bombardment.</p>
+
+<p>The smoke of Schaaf's pipe floated about the room. The loud-speaker had
+been turned off, Hines turned it on with an air of impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"The lieutenant's been gone a long time. Do you suppose he was blown
+away?"</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf grunted.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not, Hines. He is a smart young man. He got to his tank, and
+he has been gifing orders by radio to der other tanks that were left
+behind when der bridge gafe way. Breston will see that there is a cat
+at efery mouse-hole, in a little while."</p>
+
+<p>"Preston probably has more than the six you marked down," said Hines
+shortly, "but we have eleven tanks."</p>
+
+<p>He was worried, though. Abominably worried. All but four of the
+tank-force had been left behind early in the night, when one tank was
+destroyed as a bridge gave way under it. Those land-warships had now
+been ordered, separately, to make wide detours and somehow get to the
+six spots Schaaf had indicated.</p>
+
+<p>They would approach the stations from which Preston was transmitting
+his darkness-waves. If the station did not cease to transmit, the
+tank could ride it down and crush it, or bomb it with heavy bombs and
+destroy it utterly.</p>
+
+<p>Preston had undoubtedly planned to alternate in the use of his
+transmitters for the precise purpose of preventing their location. But
+if every station he had ready to transmit had a tank waiting to pounce
+upon it—It was exactly like the posting of a cat at every mouse-hole.
+If the mouse showed his head—if a known station emitted the waves that
+produced the opacity of the air—the tank would pounce. But Hines was
+worried. Preston was clever.</p>
+
+<p>"I am thinking, Hines," said Schaaf placidly, "that it should be near
+sunrise. I go and look."</p>
+
+<p>For the third time he unfastened and opened a screen. For the third
+time a seemingly solid mass of blackness stabbed into the room. Schaaf
+disappeared into the tangible darkness. The noises of the outer air
+were suddenly magnified as he opened a window.</p>
+
+<p>And the outer noises were changing markedly. Rain still fell and
+thunder still boomed. But the rain diminished. The drops became fewer
+and less regular. Then the thunder dwindled.</p>
+
+<p>The listeners in the laboratory realized that a steady, even wind was
+blowing. It was a strong wind when they first noticed it. It gave forth
+a low hum whose pitch rose in minutes. It became a scream, and then
+a whistle that grew more and more shrill until human ears could not
+detect it. And then a steady, regular roaring noise took its place. It
+was the wind of the Storm That Had to be Stopped. On the second day of
+the Storm it rose much more rapidly than on the first.</p>
+
+<p>Hines and Kathryn looked at each other. Kathryn was pale, but she
+smiled at Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got to get out to the tank!" he said harshly.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf popped magically out of the blackness.</p>
+
+<p>"Of all der double-barreled imbeciles!" he said bitterly. "We haff to
+reach der tank, and it is impossible! Der wind already is as strong as
+it was at its worst yesterday. Nobody could liff in it a second! Der
+laboratory nearly went yesterday! It will not stand another half hour
+if der wind increases!"</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The wind did increase. Shielded though the laboratory was by a
+mountain-flank, and thick stone as its walls were, the beams that
+upheld the roof began to creak. The walls quivered. Plaster fell from
+the ceiling. Windows burst outward, suddenly, and all light and movable
+things leaped toward them and vanished. Hines seized Kathryn and bore
+her to the mountainward side of the laboratory.</p>
+
+<p>"We haff," said Schaaf calmly, "maybe fife minutes. Maybe less. I
+am sorry as der deffil, Hines, that we did not get that <i>verdammt</i>
+Breston."</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a vibration which seemed to shake the very flooring. And
+suddenly a wall reeled and caved in, and a section of roof tore out.
+Then, quite incredibly, the monstrous beak of a tank thrust its way
+delicately into the laboratory and stopped. A door slid aside and the
+tank-officer stood beckoning in the opening.</p>
+
+<p>"I figured it was the only thing to do," he shouted above the wind-roar
+as they struggled inside the tank. "The wind's unbelievable outside,
+and if you were kept from blowing away, you'd strangle."</p>
+
+<p>"As der poet says," observed Schaaf calmly, "you said a libraryfull.
+What do we do now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been getting reports from the other tanks," said the officer
+cheerfully. "Three of them have reached position. They know they're
+within a quarter of a mile of a darkness-transmitter, but each time it
+has turned off. The others are going on. We'll carry out the rest of
+the plan. All ready?"</p>
+
+<p>The tank lurched backward. The laboratory collapsed, and instantly
+there was a savage bombardment by the wind. Beams, sections of roofs,
+stones, articles of furniture—everything the wind could wrench from
+the shattered building it flung with maniacal fury upon the tank.</p>
+
+<p>The metal monster shuddered and clanged and reeled, and then turned
+about and slid on downhill with a ponderous clanking of its mighty
+treads. But the noise of the wind sounded even above the internal
+roaring of the tank's machinery.</p>
+
+<p>There were hootings, unbelievably faint, and the tank-officer shook his
+head. He spoke curtly into a speaking-tube, and turned apologetically
+to Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"Sound-signals are useless, sir. We are having to use radio again.
+We'll have quite a time of it anyhow. Better find seats of some sort.
+Or you can come up in the control-room."</p>
+
+<p>The control-room was a tiny cubby-hole. There was room for the man who
+steered the cumbersome war-engine, and normally there was bare space
+for the commander of the tank. Now Hines squeezed in between them
+for the second time, and there was only the light of the dimly-lit
+instrument-board and a curious fuzzy appearance about the vision-slits
+where the darkness came a little way into the tank's metal interior.</p>
+
+<p>"Six of the tanks are going to their posts. The other four are
+following us," said the officer in Hines's ear. "We're going to try to
+keep hundred-yard intervals, but we're all blind."</p>
+
+<p>And the tank went crawling on.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The instruments gave their varying indications. The wind roared
+without. In the dead blackness the air had assumed not only the
+appearance but the solidity of a substance. It pressed upon the
+forty-ton tank with such force that even the monstrous engine was edged
+steadily to one side.</p>
+
+<p>The line of tanks, crawling through blackness, was following a concrete
+road by map and the feel of the treads.</p>
+
+<p>There was no one in the tanks who did not think in shuddering horror
+of what the blinded monsters might be doing as they lurched and swayed
+across a place that had been inhabited. There might be people yet
+living who would be crushed beneath the tanks' broad treads.</p>
+
+<p>But they went on. Their destination was a spot which Hines had chosen.
+The located transmitters of darkness formed an irregular circle,
+and Hines guessed that the form was not an accident. And if it were
+intentional, and if the transmitters were governed by remote control,
+then sheer efficiency would dictate that the controlling spot should be
+in the center of the circle. If anywhere, Preston would be at a spot
+nearly equidistant from all his transmitters.</p>
+
+<p>Hines watched the vision-slits of the control-room. They were narrow
+slits in a bullet-proof steel wall. Wind came in them so fiercely
+that it stung exploring fingers. And the darkness crept in. The
+walls near the vision-slits looked fuzzy on the side nearest the
+darkness-transmitter then in action. A man outside could have taken the
+station-bearing accurately, while this method was rough at best; and no
+man could live outside now.</p>
+
+<p>Hines craned his neck suddenly to look behind. The blurry little bands
+of darkness had vanished before him. Now they reappeared at the back of
+the control-room.</p>
+
+<p>Hines clutched at the tank-officer's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"A transmitter, behind us!" he barked in the officer's ear. "Have that
+last tank turn back and try to smash it!"</p>
+
+<p>A snapped order went down the speaking-tube. The trailing tank
+turned about. Its steersman had but little to do save keep a certain
+disgusting fuzzy appearance at vision-slits exactly before him. The
+tank went blundering into heaps of still-standing masonry where the
+town had been. It surmounted or destroyed them. It careened and
+teetered upon the edge of a cellar, plunged boldly into it, crashed
+blindly to the other side and reared upward clumsily to crawl out.</p>
+
+<p>The officer in command of the trailing tank saw that the fuzziness had
+vanished from the control-slits ahead. It had reappeared behind. As
+near as this, even the roughest of observations would serve. He yelled
+an order down below. A monstrous, misshapen egg went rolling down from
+the back of the tank. The monster went blundering on.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty seconds, forty. There was a concussion which drowned out even
+the roar of the storm. Vast fragments of masonry struck the tank.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly there was a light outside the vision-slits. There had been a
+transmitter of darkness in the destroyed town. Deep in a sub-cellar,
+evidently, and sending out darkness from a buried a rial. Two hundred
+pounds of TNT had gone off above it. The transmitter might be
+destroyed, or it might be merely jammed. But for a space, there was
+light.</p>
+
+<p>Those in the tank could see that there was a valley all about, and
+hill-sides rearing up on either hand. Except for the inevitable motion
+of objects past the tank, and four slug-like monsters crawling up a
+ribbon of concrete road, the tank-officer's main impression was that of
+utter deadness and lack of motion.</p>
+
+<p>Wind blew upon his own machine with an unbearable, terrible force, but
+there was no sign of movement outside. There was no dust, no flying
+débris; there were no clouds. The wind blew with an awful force which
+had already demolished all things that could be destroyed, and now it
+kept up a horrible steady pressure that held all things immovable.</p>
+
+<p>The sun shone down from a brazen sky, giving forth no heat, and wind
+blew and blew and blew.</p>
+
+<p>Utter blackness fell again. Another transmitter of darkness had taken
+up the work of the one destroyed. And the wandering tank swung about
+and went crawling after the others on the now-blotted out concrete road.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PRESTON'S FORTRESS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Hines grinned savagely, up in the control-room.</p>
+
+<p>"We got one of them!" he said grimly. "We got it by accident, maybe,
+but we got one of them!"</p>
+
+<p>The speaking-tube whistled. The tank-officer answered, then turned to
+Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"Tank Number Four thinks it has located another station. It is going
+ahead. The moment of light helped."</p>
+
+<p>Grinding, pounding, roaring progress, with the wind a terrific pressure
+all about. One minute passed, two, three...</p>
+
+<p>Light again. The leading tank was at the crest of the hill-road.
+Desolation was all about. Far away—miles and miles away, it
+seemed—there was a smother of white which would be a lake, with a dark
+spot upon it which would be a rocky islet.</p>
+
+<p>Again the speaking-tube whistled.</p>
+
+<p>"Number Four reports it set off two bombs. Light came on after the
+second."</p>
+
+<p>Hines's jaws were clamped tightly.</p>
+
+<p>"Every one destroyed," he said coolly, "helps to get the others. That's
+two of them, and we've got cats at the mouse-holes now!"</p>
+
+<p>Again utter blackness. Mountains, the long straight stretch of white
+road descending, the frothing lake and the island at the end of the
+valley, all were blotted out. There was only the clanking of machinery
+and the bestial roar of the wind that thrust with a terrible force at
+the tanks.</p>
+
+<p>Down the long road which no man could see. Despite the wall of wind
+without, the green mountainsides had seemed strangely inviting. And the
+sunlight had seemed brighter than ever the sun had seemed before. The
+deadly blackness was the more intolerable because weary eyes had looked
+upon the light again.</p>
+
+<p>The machinery clanked and rumbled.</p>
+
+<p>"Number Three tank reports—Number Seven also, that they have located
+transmitting stations—"</p>
+
+<p>"One of them is wrong, maybe," said Hines coolly, "but let them both
+try."</p>
+
+<p>The man at the steering-bar said quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"We're nearly out of gas, Lieutenant. I just noticed it. Enough for two
+more miles, maybe."</p>
+
+<p>The speaking-tube again.</p>
+
+<p>"Number Three tank reports it exploded two bombs. Its station ceased
+to transmit, but the darkness still holds. Number Seven is letting go
+now.... Number Two has located a station.... Seven reports its station
+has ceased to transmit darkness. Number Two is bombing now.... Five has
+found its station."</p>
+
+<p>"That completes the list," said Hines steadily, "if none of them made a
+mistake."</p>
+
+<p>Again the voice from below.</p>
+
+<p>"Two has put its station out of action.... Five fell into some sort of
+excavation. Can't get out at the moment. Asks for orders."</p>
+
+<p>"If the ship can stand hand-grenades," said Hines savagely, "have them
+tossed out of all ports and see what happens."</p>
+
+<p>Darkness. The pressure of the wind and its terrible steady roar. The
+noise of the machinery of the tank—</p>
+
+<p>Light!</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Again sunlight. Again the mountains. Again the smother of white which
+was the lake ahead. The leading tanks advanced heavily until the
+concrete road divided into two, and one went along each shore-line.
+This lake had been a summer resort once, but now the trees were
+splintered and blown away. The houses were utterly destroyed. There was
+only the uncannily blue sky and the still-green grass carpet of the
+shores, and a rocky small island half-smothered in foam.</p>
+
+<p>The tank came to a cumbersome halt. Schaaf popped his whiskers through
+the companionway that led up to the control-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha!" he said exuberantly. "We haff der son-of-a-gun! Hines, I haff to
+take some observations! I think and I suspect, but I haff to be sure
+where der last of der excitement takes place."</p>
+
+<p>Hines-stared about, and then pointed. A stony cliff reared upward some
+hundreds of yards to the right. It was forty or fifty feet high, and a
+heap of débris beneath it was proof that it created a lee. He indicated
+it in silence. The tank crawled heavily, smashing a way into the
+heaped-up trash.</p>
+
+<p>Its engines coughed and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of gas, sir," reported some one from below.</p>
+
+<p>"It is no matter," said Schaaf blandly. "I haff a hunch. Der island
+ofer yonder is a charming place. One could establish a residence there
+and put in a power-house."</p>
+
+<p>"Get a range-finder reading on it," said Hines curtly. "Have all the
+tanks range it."</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf was cautiously opening the tank-door. He put one hand cautiously
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>"Me a rope around me," he said comfortably, "and I take a chance. There
+is a wind, but not such a hell of a wind. Der bank makes a lee."</p>
+
+<p>He stepped outside with an electric-light extension and a square sheet
+of iron. It seemed peculiar, even futile, to be carrying an electric
+bulb in the overpoweringly bright sunshine. Schaaf balanced himself
+precariously.</p>
+
+<p>Radiant heat could not be felt from the electric bulb; only in contact
+with the glass could its heat be detected. It was an exact parallel
+with the light-waves that Preston could neutralize, but with a metal
+plate between the bulb and the source of the neutralizing short waves.</p>
+
+<p>A gun went off not ten feet above his head. Schaaf swore and sat down
+violently. His necktie flopped about his face, blinding him for an
+instant. Then he heard the dull concussions of other guns. Every tank
+was firing madly with every gun it could bring to bear. And Schaaf
+swore bitterly as he saw what they were firing at.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There was a little rocky island out in the lake. The lake itself was a
+smother of white foam. But projecting upward above the water there was
+a mass of dark-brown rock some fifty or sixty feet high. There were
+traces of grass still upon it, but if there had been trees they were
+gone, and if there had been a summer residence that also had long since
+vanished in the Storm. But now, quite insolently, there was visible a
+signal of Preston's presence and of his defiance.</p>
+
+<p>A globular mass of darkness had formed about the islet's peak. It
+looked as if Preston had turned on a transmitter of darkness and had
+deliberately begun to transmit the short waves with an absolute minimum
+of power. The fraction of a watt, perhaps, was being put into a hidden
+or a buried antenna. An irregular, amoeba-like globule of darkness
+hovered about the islet's tip.</p>
+
+<p>Shells were bursting in and about it. A section of rock split outward
+from the island's side and fell into the foaming water. Instantly, it
+seemed, the globule of darkness expanded. From feet, its size could
+only be measured by hundreds of yards. The tanks were firing into a
+vast expanse of nothingness, and one by one they ceased to fire. There
+was nothing to aim at.</p>
+
+<p>Then, very swiftly, the darkness increased in size. Preston was putting
+more power into his transmitter. And quite suddenly the world was dark
+again.</p>
+
+<p>It had been a gesture of pure insolence. Tanks could not reach the
+island. He had seen the gray monsters gathered on the shore, and
+Preston had blanketed the world in darkness after showing the only men
+to reach his stronghold the utter futility of further effort to reach
+him.</p>
+
+<p>He was protected by the deep waters of a mountain lake from attack by
+tanks, by hills and the Storm from all other means of attack, and by
+the unthinkable blackness of his own creation even from assault by
+projectiles.</p>
+
+<p>Up in the control-room, the tank-officer swore bitterly and turned to
+Hines.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we're done, sir," he said savagely. "We can't wade out through
+the lake to him, and of course the Storm—"</p>
+
+<p>Hines's eyes were slits.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's look at the map," he said shortly. "We might as well get the
+other tanks alongside us, by the way. In the lee of this cliff, we can
+go from one to the other."</p>
+
+<p>He had taken figures from the map before Schaaf came back inside the
+tank, cursing mightily in German. Hines was asking curt questions and
+giving even curter orders, and when the other tanks came clanking into
+place men went out into the alleviated storm beneath the cliff and made
+demands of gasoline and wire cable and bombs.</p>
+
+<p>Two tanks only had fuel for a run of another two miles. The rest
+supplied cable and bombs, and men gingerly unscrewed the fuses of the
+monster bombs and emptied four of the huge cases of all their contents.
+Then they labored terrifically to bind four still-loaded cases to the
+emptied ones, and fastened wire cable to the clumsy mass.</p>
+
+<p>All this was done in darkness with the Storm roaring overhead, and
+while Schaaf was calculating feverishly at Hines's demand and the
+tank-officer was writing out his results in terms of formal orders,
+according to the customs and ordinances of the United States Army.</p>
+
+<p>Then the ground quivered as two huge tanks moved away from their
+fellows. Now was the moment of greatest tension. The bombs had to be
+dragged over soft earth, and if they exploded with their loads of two
+hundred pounds each of T. N. T.—eight hundred pounds in the four
+loaded bombs—then the tank-force would be wiped out and Preston would
+win his single-handed war against the world. But the fuses had been
+changed, and they had hopes.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>There were still three people up in the control-room of the tank
+that had carried Hines. One was Hines, of course, and one was the
+tank-commander, and Kathryn was the third. Hines knew the chance he
+was taking. If the tanks were wiped out, he wanted to be near Kathryn
+when the end came. Schaaf was down by the wireless transmitter, biting
+at his nails and growling guttural profanity at the intervals between
+reports.</p>
+
+<p>"Both tanks have reached their first position," came the report up the
+speaking-tube. "They're reeling in the cable."</p>
+
+<p>Hines held Kathryn protectively close. But it was rather useless. They
+had combined four depth-bombs with four empty depth-bomb cases to make
+a monster floating bomb. They had fastened it in the center of a long,
+spliced-together steel cable, with a tank hauling at each end.</p>
+
+<p>Those tanks were now posted where the shores of the lake began to curve
+together. They were reeling in their lines. When the lines tightened,
+the bomb would be dragged away from the now fuelless remnant of the
+tank-force and out into the water of the lake. With luck, the bombs
+would not go off. But if luck were bad, and a purposely insensitized
+fuse struck a rock or stone or bit of débris—</p>
+
+<p>Long minutes went by. The speaking-tube whistle was a blessed sound.</p>
+
+<p>"Reeling completed, sir. The cable is taut."</p>
+
+<p>Two tanks now went crawling through the blackness down the opposite
+shores of the little lake. Between them stretched the cable with the
+monstrous floating bomb.</p>
+
+<p>It is well known that fifty pounds of T. N. T. will shatter the walls
+of a submarine, and that a torpedo carries a hundred and fifty, and
+that the effect of an explosion varies as the square of the amount of
+explosive present. Eight hundred pounds of T. N. T. in one blast would
+sink any ship or shatter any rock.</p>
+
+<p>But against the massive walls of even a small island—well, it would
+produce a concussion. It might shake down fifty tons or a hundred
+tons of rock. It might do impressive local damage, to be sure, but
+the damage would be strictly local, The rest of the island would feel
+nothing worse than a sharp concussion. And that was all Hines could
+hope for.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf had assigned arbitrary coordinates and positions for the tanks'
+reports. When their treads had covered so much ground in such-and-such
+directions, the cable should be out so much....</p>
+
+<p>"Second position reached," said the speaking-tube briefly. "All figures
+are as anticipated."</p>
+
+<p>Hines's hands clenched fiercely. The range-finders had given the
+distance of the island. The map had given the outline of the lake.
+Down the center of the turmoil of frothing water a bomb of colossal
+destructive power was moving with two straining tanks towing it from
+the shore, and all for an absurdly trivial physical effect which was
+all that could be looked for.</p>
+
+<p>"Third position reached," said the speaking-tube. "All figures seem
+correct. The tanks await orders."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell them to go ahead," said Hines. His voice was hoarse. On this
+everything depended.</p>
+
+<p>There was no movement inside the tank. There was no sound except the
+deep, deep roaring of the Storm overhead. But then, quite suddenly,
+the tank quivered all over. It was as if the ground had slipped, had
+quivered suddenly; as if it had been struck an abrupt though far from
+dangerous blow. It was just enough to bring Hines's elbow sharply into
+contact with the steering-bar.</p>
+
+<p>But suddenly the tank-commander was snapping orders.</p>
+
+<p>"Open fire! All guns!"</p>
+
+<p>And the whole inside of the tank resounded with the sledge-hammer
+blows, the terrific impacts of guns firing at their highest rate.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>For perhaps the last time, it seemed to Hines, the island was again in
+view. It was already the center of a storm of bursting shells. There
+was a colossal wave of water yet subsiding from beside it, and a huge
+column of rock was topping soundlessly and very deliberately into the
+lake, and every tank on the lake-shore was pouring shell after shell
+after shell upon the mass of stone that remained.</p>
+
+<p>Hines had made his last gamble. The destruction of the other
+darkness-sending stations by concussions seemed to him to show one
+possible weakness in Preston's preparations.</p>
+
+<p>It was not likely that in every case the dropped time-bombs that had
+put the other darkness-transmitters out of action, had made direct hits
+upon the apparatus. It seemed most probable that Preston, like all
+other experimenters with radio waves, had used vacuum tubes for his
+oscillators. And vacuum tubes are made of glass, and they are thin,
+therefore concussion will break them.</p>
+
+<p>Hines had not expected the shock of the explosion against the island's
+rocky shore to destroy Preston's apparatus. Not at all. He had only
+hoped for a single sharp shock, a single smart snapping effect.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, on the island itself there had been exactly the
+impression of a sudden and terrific earth-shock. And it was sudden
+enough to make the glass vacuum tubes of the short-wave transmitter
+shiver to atoms in their sockets. The transmitter was quite unharmed,
+but it was thoroughly useless after that!</p>
+
+<p>Watching, with the flashes of high-explosive shells breaking about
+every portion of the island, Hines saw a sudden thick cloud of smoke
+arise. It was too dense, too thick, to be dissipated even by the wind
+which still blew madly. And great cracks appeared in the rocks of the
+island, and steam poured forth.</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf went out of the tank with his hands over his ears. He held
+up his face to the sun and abruptly began to dance with a wholly
+elephantine lack of grace. Because the sun's rays were warm!</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, slowly, the tanks ceased firing. They exhausted their
+ammunition upon their target, and the surface of the island was a mass
+of splintered rock and steam poured in dense clouds from its interior.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was possible to hear Schaaf bellowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Der storm-wafes are off! Der storm-wafes are off! We got der
+son-of-a-gun! We got him!"</p>
+
+<p>And very abruptly, it seemed, clouds were forming overhead, and the
+wind of the Storm began to change from a monstrous steady blast to
+something no worse than a mere tornado, and in an hour it was hardly
+more than a terrific gale.</p>
+
+<p>Before nightfall thunder was rolling over a circle two thousand miles
+across, and rain was falling in torrents only precedented by the night
+before. Two weeks or more of chaotic weather conditions were being
+predicted by the weather bureaus, but after that the air conditions
+would again become normal.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Schaaf was the first man on the island, and his gloomiest predictions
+were verified. Preston's apparatus had been destroyed by explosions
+from below. Not only had explosives been placed by Preston to ruin
+the apparatus and prevent it from being examined, but great masses of
+thermit had been placed here and there to complete the destruction.
+Apparently, Preston had intended to destroy his devices when their use
+was completed, and so had been prepared, by accident, for the disaster
+that came upon his plans. No notes, no diagrams, no single article of
+any value to Schaaf was ever found, on which account he swore bitterly.
+But a human skeleton was found charred and half-consumed in the ruins
+of the underground workshop. It was assumed to be Preston, but Schaaf
+regarded even this hopeful thought with disfavor.</p>
+
+<p>He expressed his bitterness after a complete round of the six other
+transmitting-stations showed them all destroyed with thermit and
+explosive, apparently by some contrivance which would act automatically
+when they were no longer operable.</p>
+
+<p>"Der <i>verdammet</i> scoundrel," he said bitterly to Hines. "He gifes me a
+pain in der duodenum. If I had der information he had, I would be der
+greatest benefactor of der world! I haff an idea, and if I can only
+find out how he did his tricks, I show you der Golden Age again! <i>Ach,
+Gott!</i> Why is it that fillains haff der best brains?"</p>
+
+<p>He was smoking furiously in Hines's apartment when he made his plaint.
+The telephone rang. Hines spoke into it, smiling. When he had ended,
+Schaaf said suspiciously:</p>
+
+<p>"That was Miss Bush. She is clefer, Hines. But—is she too clefer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see how she wrote up the whole business for the <i>Star</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>Schaaf nodded, and puffed at his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"She made you a hero, and me a hero, and she threw enough flowers
+at der tank-men to make der worldt see how brafe and courageous and
+altogether der cat's-whiskers you are, Hines. Yes. She is clefer. But
+as your friend I ask it; is she too clefer?"</p>
+
+<p>Hines was standing up, now, and absently looking at his hat on a nearby
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Too clever?" he repeated abstractedly, but smiling nevertheless. "What
+is too clever?"</p>
+
+<p>"A woman," said Schaaf shrewdly, "that makes eferybody see how clefer
+der man she lofes is, is clefer. But when she sees that she has brains
+also, and that when she marries she will haff to take der back seat,
+and she sees that she is a darned fool to do it—then she is too
+clefer."</p>
+
+<p>"She's not," said Hines blithely. "She's going to marry me. In fact,
+we're going down town now to pick out some rings and such things." He
+added perfunctorily: "Want to come along?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nix," said Schaaf cynically. "You don't want me now. But I come in,
+Hines, <i>ach</i>, I come in when it is time to buy der teething-rings and
+der baby-mugs. Then I won't be in der way!"</p>
+
+<p class="ph2">END.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> The fluorescence of atmospheric air under the influence
+of certain wave-lengths of radiation was described as long ago as
+1911 in a lecture before the Royal Institution of Great Britain by
+Professor R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University. The very short rays
+discovered by Schumann were demonstrated to produce fluorescence in
+air. The experiments and a photograph of the phenomenon may be found
+reprinted in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1911, which
+is available in many public libraries. See page 165 <i>et seg</i>.</p>
+
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79049 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+[Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook [#79049](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79049)