Wandl the Invader by Ray Cummings (ereader ebook txt) 📕

"Come on, Gregg. Two segments from here."

We advanced at a run. At this hour of night, hardly a pedestrian was in evidence. It was an arched vaulted corridor, almost a tunnel, dimly blue-lit with short lengths of fluorescent tubes at intervals on the ceiling. For all the vaunted mechanisms of our time, the air here was heavy and fetid. Moisture dripped from the concrete roof. It lay on the metal pavement of the ground; the smell of it was dank, tomb-like.

There were frequent cross-tunnels. We turned eastward into one of them. For a segment there were the lower entrances to the cellars of the giant buildings overhead. We passed a place where the tunnel-corridor widened into a great underground plaza. The sewerage and wire-pipes lay like tangled pythons on its floor. Half across it, by the glow of temporary lights strung on a cable, a group of repairmen were working. We passed them, headed in to where the tunnel narrowed again and there were now occasional cubby entrances to underground dwellings.

It was a rabbit warren from here to the river, haunted by criminals and by miserable families, many of whom never saw the daylight for weeks at a time. The giant voices of the city hardly carried down here, so that an oppressive silence hung upon everything.

"That next crossing, Gregg. They said they'd wait for us there."

Occasional escalators led upward. In advance of us was a narrow intersection. There were a few lights in the bullseyes of the subterranean dwelling rooms, but most of them were dark.

"Easy, Snap. Not so fast."

I pulled Snap to a walk. We edged over against the tunnel side. We had passed a small lighted audiphone cubby, evidently the one from which Dud and Shac had paged us. They should have been here waiting; but there was nothing but the empty, gloomy tunnels.

"Something is coming!" Snap clutched at me; we drew our cloaks around us and waited in a shadowed recess. Down a side incline, a segment behind us, a small automatic food truck came lurching. It pulled up at an arcade entrance. Its driver slid the portals, deposited his cases of food, locked the panel[37] after him; and in a moment he and his truck were gone up the incline.

We heard, in the ensuing silence, a low groan near at hand; then abruptly it stopped. We saw, within twenty feet of us, two dark figures lying on the pavement grid in a black patch of shadow where the mailtube came down in a curve and disappeared into the tunnel wall.

We bent over the figures of two men. They lay together, one half upon the other, black-garbed figures with white, staring faces. One twitched a little and then lay still.

They were Shac and Dud Ardley.

"Murdered, Gregg! Good Lord!"

Both were dead, but we could see no marks on either of them.

I found my wits. "Snap, we can't stand like this wholly visible."

I pulled Snap away. We darted a few feet. The light of the tunnel intersection was directly over us. "Not here, Snap! Run!"

Under the curving vacuum tube a little further along, we found shelter. Snap murmured: "The girls went past here. But which way, Gregg?"

As though I knew!

I felt at that moment, under the shirt against my skin, the anode of my audiphone tingling. A receiving signal! In the gloom, I could see Snap's white face as he watched me bring it out.

We heard a tiny microphonic voice, Anita's voice.

"Colonel Halsey. Yes I have the location. Lafayette 4—East corridor, lowest level. A descending entrance. Don't you speak again; I've only a minute! Venza safe—but send help. Something we don't understand—a strange mechanism here."

Then Halsey's interrupting voice. "Anita, escape! You and Venza!"

"We can't. They've got us!"

"I'm sending men. They'll be there in ten minutes."

"Ten minutes will be too late. Molo is...."

It seemed that we heard her scream; then the waves blurred and died.[38]

Lafayette 4—East corridor, lowest level. "Snap, that's here! A descending entrance."

We stood back against the great curving side of the postal vacuum tube. Within it I heard the hiss and clank as a mail cylinder flashed past. Halsey's secret orders must be going out now. His men nearest this place would come in a rush. But Anita said that would be too late.

Snap and I were frantically searching. Somewhere here was an entrance to Molo's lair. It seemed in the silence that Anita's scream was still ringing in my ears. Had it been entirely from the instrument, or were we so close that we had heard its distant echoes?

"Gregg, help me." Snap was tugging at a horizontal door-slide, like a trap in the tunnel floor, partly under the vacuum tube. "Stuck!" he gasped.

It yielded with our efforts. It slid aside. Steps led downward into blackness. We plunged in, caution gone from us. The steps went down some twenty feet; we were in another smaller corridor. It was vaguely lighted by a glow from somewhere, and as my pupils expanded, I could see this was a shabby alley, opening ahead into a winding passage with the slide-port above us like its back gate. A warren of cubbies was here, a little sequestered segment of disreputable dwellings.

We stood peering, listening. "Shall I try the eavesdropper, Gregg?"

"Yes. No, wait!" I thought I heard distant sounds.

"Voices, Snap. Listen."

More than voices. A thud: footsteps running. A commotion, back in this warren, within a hundred feet of us.

"This way," I murmured.

We plunged into a black gash. There was a glow of light, a glassite pane in a house wall nearby. The commotion was louder, and under it now we heard a vague humming: something electrical. It was an indescribably weird sound, like nothing I had ever heard before.

Snap clutched at me. "In here, but where is the accursed door?"

There was a glassite pane, but we could find no door. In our hands we held small electronic bolt-cylinders, short-range weapons.

The hum and hissing was louder. It seemed to throb[39] within us, as though vibration were communicating to every fiber of our bodies.

Light was streaming through the glassite pane, and we glimpsed the interior of the room. The light now came from a strange mechanism set in the center of the metal cubby. I caught only an instant's glimpse of it, a round thing of coils and wires. The metal floor of the room was cut away, exposing the gray rock of Manhattan Island. And against the rock, in a ten-foot circle, a series of discs were contacted, with wires leading from them to the central coils.

The whole was glowing with opalescent light. It was dazzling, blinding. Within in it the goggled figure of Molo was moving, adjusting the contacts. He stooped. He straightened, drew back from the light.

Only an instant's glimpse, but we saw the girls, crouching with black bandages on their eyes. Meka, goggled like her brother, was holding them. A tall shape carrying a round black box darted through the light and ran. Molo leaped for the girls; the hum had mounted to a wild electrical scream. Molo flung his sister back out of the light.

They all vanished. There was nothing but the light, and the mounting dynamic scream.

Beside me, Snap was pounding on the glassite panel. I joined him. Everything was dreamlike, blurring as though unconsciousness was upon me.

Where was Snap? Gone? Then I saw him nearby. He had found a door, but it wouldn't yield. I saw his arm go up in a gesture to me.

He ran; I found myself running after him, but I stumbled and fell. Then over me the scream burst into a great roar of sound. It seemed so intense, so gigantic a sound that it must ring around the world.

And the light burst with an exploding puff. The black metal cubby walls seemed to melt like phantoms in a dream. A titan's blowtorch, the opalescent light shot upward, a circular ten-foot beam, eating its way through all the city levels as though they were paper, up through the city roof.

Molo's cubby was gone. His mechanism was eaten by the light and destroyed. There was only this motionless, upstanding beam, contacted here with the Earth, streaming like an opalescent sword into the starry sky.[40]

I must paint now upon a broader canvas to depict the utter chaos of this most memorable night in the history of the Earth, Venus and Mars.

From that point in the bowels of Greater New York, near the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the mysterious light-beam shot up. It screamed with its weird electrical voice for an hour, so penetrating a sound that it was heard with the unaided ears as far away as Philadelphia. A titan voice it was, shrill as if with triumph. There were millions of people awakened by it this night; awakened and struck with a chill of fear at this nameless siren shrilling its note of danger. The sound gradually subsided; it seemed to reach its peak within a few minutes of the appearance of the light, and within an hour it had ceased.

But the light beam remained. Those who inspected it closely have given a clear description of its aspect; but to this day its real nature has never been determined.

It was a circular beam of about a ten-foot diameter. In color it was vaguely opalescent, rather more brilliant at night than in the day. With the coming of the sun it did not fade, but remained clearly visible, with a spectrum sheen when the sunlight hit it so that it had somewhat the appearance of a titanic, straightened rainbow.

From that contact point with our Earth, the inexplicable beam stood vertically upward. It ate a vertical hole like a chimney up through all the city levels, through the roof and into the sky. It had a tremendous heat, communicable by contact so that it melted the city above it with a clean round hole. But the heat was non-radiant.

I was found lying within fifty feet of the base of the beam. There had been an explosion, so that Molo's metal room was gone; but from where I lay there was only a warmth to be felt from the light.[41]

Halsey's men found me within half an hour. I was unconscious but not injured. I think now that the sound and not the light overcame me. I presently recovered consciousness; for another hour I was blind and deaf, but that quickly wore off. They rushed me through the chaos of the city to the Tappan Headquarters. Grantline was there, but not Snap. I sent them back when once I was fully conscious. They searched all the vicinity at the base of the light. Snap, alive or dead, was not to be found.

Anita and Venza were gone. I had seen Molo and Meka plunge away with them as the light-beam burst forth. They were gone, and Snap was gone.

There was, by now, a turmoil unprecedented throughout all the metropolitan area. The motionless light-beam itself had done little damage, but its appearance brought instant chaos. Within a radius of five miles of its base, the city was plunged into darkness. All power was cut off. Every vehicle, even the aeros passing overhead, and, the ventilating system stopped. Audiphones were wrecked; it subsided within an hour, though, and after that, lights and instruments brought into the area were not affected.

But during that hour, south Manhattan was in panic. A multitude of terrified people awakened in the night to find blackness and that screaming sound. The streets and corridors and traffic levels were jammed with throngs trampling and killing one another in their efforts to escape.

This was in the stricken area; but everywhere else the panic was spreading. Transportation systems were almost all out of commission. The panic spread until by dawn there was a wild exodus of refugees jamming the bridges and viaducts and tunnels, streaming from all the city exits.

This was Greater New York. But from Venus and Mars came similar reports. In Grebhar and in Ferrok-Shahn, doubtless almost simultaneous with Greater New York, similar light-beams appeared.

"But what can it be?" I demanded of Grantline. "Something Molo contacted there? He did it. That was what he was working for, and he accomplished his purpose. But what will the beam do to us?"

"It's doing plenty," said Grantline grimly.

"He didn't intend that. There was something else."[42]

But what? As yet, no one knew. I had already told the authorities what I had seen. I was the only eye-witness to Molo's activities; and heaven knows I had but a brief, confused glimpse.

The beam remained; it streamed upward from the rock. They thought, this night, that Molo's strange current had set up a disintegration of the atoms, and that electronic particles from them were streaming into space.

The light-beam