Chapter XVI

"S—O—S——S—O—S——" On the air over the whole nation the dread letters came through. Radio stations shut down abruptly, every broadcasting station cut off the air, and twenty million television sets went blank after the brief announcement.

Strangely, after the letters came through, there was no message to follow, and even more strangely, the call was heard on every broadcasting wavelength!

Perhaps station attendants wondered at that, but they did not wonder long, for the strong, clear signals suddenly stopped.

The Message of the Council of Five

"The air is clear. The message of the Council of Five will be delivered." A deep, powerful voice spoke, but no television disc signals came, no view of the man. Every wavelength gave the signals clearly. Every one of the still waiting radio sets resounded with the deep voice.

"The Council of Five declares the United States no longer a republic. The Council of Five shall hereafter rule this nation, and within the year, the nations of earth.

"The warships of the Council of Five will appear over New York City at ten o'clock to-morrow. Part of the fleet will appear over Washington at the same time. The financial and political capitals will be expected to signify their acceptance of the Council by the lowering of the conventional flag, and the raising of a flag whose field is bright blue, and on which appear five white stars, one in each corner and one in the center.

"Resistance is not advisable. The Council of Five has weapons beyond any known to the rest of mankind.

"The Council has spoken."

The air was silent. Perhaps many that night turned off their radios as they heard some part of an impossible play coming over the air, heard some lines from an author's flight of fancy.

But they began to believe soon, when they heard the cries of amazement and anger in a thousand towns and a hundred thousand villages.

Where Did the Message Come From?

Police and Army and Navy officials were busy now, intercommunicating, attempting to locate the center of the disturbance, whence that message came. It was hopeless. Their results were impossible. Apparently the message had started somewhere over Florida, and its sender had moved, during the course of the message, till it ended over south-western Washington. The thing was impossible. They gave it up in disgust, and perhaps in fear, and began sending orders. Troops began to move toward New York and Washington that night. Battleships started suddenly in the same directions. The Pacific fleet hurried toward San Francisco and Santa Monica, Seattle, and the other great west-coast cities.

Air forces moved swiftly, and before dawn a tremendous fleet of planes was congregated about the fields of Washington, D. C., and New York.

And high above both cities a dozen or so of the newest planes, the radio-guided and radio-powered ships swung back and forth. Noiseless—invisible in the blue——

Destruction of All Power

Restless mobs howled and cursed sleepless all night, the troops fell to disciplining them as they arrived, and the lights of the city blazed till dawn. At dawn, New York and Washington time, every light went out, every train stopped, every line of transportation was suddenly dead. In both cities the power was gone, and across the whole nation the electric power ceased to be. Trains stopped, subways suddenly were motionless.

Chaos in an hour. The mobs went mad; struggling people in the subways shrieked and howled and roared as their disposition might be. But at the end of an hour trains began to move cautiously, only sufficient to get the people from them safely, elevators that had left men and women trapped one hundred, or perhaps more stories above the ground, began to work to carry them down, never up.

The city was drawing on its giant batteries. The power batteries that were intended for emergency came into use. There were no men in the power plants, and no power came from other cities, from outside. Army engineers threw in the batteries, then as battleships steamed into the harbor, great cables from their dynamos carried a measure of power across to the paralyzed city.

Telephones had operated, for they were maintained by the emergency power generators, which every station contains. Radio had failed, save the army portable apparatus, for the great stations depended on the power lines.

The Council of Five had stricken the city, turned a howling, angry mob of vengeful men into a paralyzed, panicky crowd, struggling to escape something, they did not know what, that had completely disorganized their city, left them trapped in burrows under the streets, or in perches high above them. Here and there fires, and terrific explosions had broken out, for the radio controlled and powered planes had come down, uncontrolled and unpowered, when the power failed.

Further, power would not be restored, the meager output of three battleships could not sustain the city, the tremendous batteries were not to be wasted. And the power plants were hopelessly wrecked. A small plant had gone first, destroyed by a sudden reversal of its phase, and it was pumping power against the power-tide of a nation. From transformer to generators all was wrecked. A neighboring power plant suddenly got the double strain—it went the way of its predecessor. Like giant snowballs ever gaining volume, plant after plant went, till finally half a dozen of the greatest alone remained, and the power load of the United States was thrown on them suddenly.

The Great Defensive Tubes

It would be months before effective power was available. Army engineers were rushing about in wild anxiety. There were guns, there were planes, but the thing they had greatest hope for had been the great, sleek tubes that had been mounted in a dozen places about the city. Fifteen feet long, their thick, glassy walls glowed red as the rising sun painted them. Inside the outer tube, an inner tube of copper reached up ten feet of the length, to end in a crystal glass tube. Great power-elements inside the glass, and a huge bowl of copper screening just below this juncture point told its purpose. These Harrell tubes were new, tremendous tubes that were simply radio tubes and sending sets in one combination, but they could handle a hundred thousand horsepower, and all that power was reflected from that curiously light, and ineffective-seeming copper screening, and it went out as a beam that was absolutely deadly to any man or animal and destructive to any piece of metal in its path.

But—to send one hundred thousand horsepower of radio energy, two hundred and fifteen thousand horsepower of electrical energy was needed. The three ships in the harbor could not quite supply the energy for one of these tubes. They had planned to use a dozen. The batteries would supply them, run them for ten minutes, perhaps. And if those ships the Council of Five had spoken of could move as they seemed to have moved last evening, no shell would ever catch them, only these beams, traveling at the Ultimate Speed, the speed of light.

Commander Gilbert C. Coache gave his orders very energetically, and very hopelessly. Secretly, he felt sure that the losses would be heavy. Guns could not cope with any ship that could display that speed—some rocket ship of undreamed of power.

He was very angry, and very nervous. He had been working now since the previous morning, and working desperately since the previous evening, when he had been given the command of the defenses of New York City.

"Power—power—damn it, that's all I want, Major. I can't do anything if you can't give me power."

"I'm sorry sir, but the only form of electric power in the city are the indispensable telephone generators, three-quarter-full batteries, and the power from the ships. Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Newark, why every city about has batteries that would give us all the power we need, but Lord, the damn things won't pump power through a transformer, and these lines are all A. C. lines. I'm as anxious as you—but I can't do anything. There've been at least six thousand nuts pestering me with bright ideas since I came here. One man wanted us to commandeer all the automobile batteries, and use them. But——"

Commander Coache Wants Power

"I said power!" Commander Coache hung up. He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, and was reminded he hadn't eaten in hours. He threw it away. He was so hungry he couldn't smoke, so tired he couldn't see straight, and so busy he couldn't sleep. Ten o'clock. Four hours more.

He shook his head, and pushed a button for his next visitor. He jumped as the window behind him crashed to the floor in splinters, and a hole a foot across appeared miraculously in the plaster of the wall opposite him. A dum-dum bullet had come through the window, and missed him widely. The Commander dropped below the window level, and crawled hurriedly beneath the sill of the broken window. He let out a roar to the men outside his office.

"Who did that?" he demanded.

The Commander had been working on the second floor of an office building in the heart of New York. Across the street, in a second story window, a man was jumping up and down, and heaving a rifle. He paused to direct a bullet at the Commander's window, and continued his performance.

"Bring that man over here!" snapped the Commander. The half-dozen officers and orderlies who had tumbled in, tumbled out, and raced across to that other building. The Commander's personal dignity and personal safety had been touched, also the Commander hoped that anyone, firing at him, must be connected in some way with the Council of Five.

Three officers returned shortly, bringing a man none too gently. His hair was mussed, his clothes much awry, but he was smiling. He was tall, powerfully built, with a keen intelligent face.

"Hello, Commander. I met you at last," he grinned.

"Who the hell are you, and what's the idea of trying to snipe me?"

"Oh, you misunderstand me, Commander. I was merely trying to snipe your attention. For the last three hours I have been throwing myself in the way of Major Kendrill, but didn't succeed in seeing him. I tried here for about half an hour, then went across the street and tried that way. I at least attracted your attention."

The Commander glared at him. "What do you want?" he snapped.

The smile disappeared abruptly from the man's face. He was suddenly serious, intent. "Commander, what do you want most right now?"

The Commander Wants Power

"Power, damn it, power to run my Harrell tubes," replied the Commander with a groan.

"And that's what I've spent three hours trying to give you. Kendrill didn't have time for me, he was busy talking to some nut who wanted him to use automobile generators for power. He'd never heard of James Atkill, and wouldn't see me, too busy with those nuts.

"Anyway, how much power do you want?"

The Commander looked at him sharply. "James Atkill. Are you he?"

"Right." The smile was back.

"I want at least four million horsepower."

"Make it five. Can you handle it, if I put it on your lines all in one place?"

"Yes. I think so. Where do you get it, Canada?"

"No. Generate it. Come on, and call Kendrill. I'll demonstrate."

The Commander followed without a word. Three dazed officers watched him go with the lunatic that first shot at him, then made him follow him.

The Commander followed half a block to a public hangar, where a small cabin autogyro was parked in Atkill's name. From it, Atkill, with the aid of two men, took a small, very heavy packing case, and a second box of black bakelite, surmounted by a glass globe, under which burned a flame of steady, unwinking white light. It seemed frozen flame, motionless, undisturbed by position.

"What voltage here?" he demanded of the hangar attendant, indicating the lights.

"One-ten."

Atkill set something, plugged a wire into the wall socket—the lights suddenly blazed up, the lights on the streets winked once, and died instantly. "Fuse blew out. Current going the wrong way now." But the hangar lights still burned.

"What is that?" demanded the Commander.

"This is a Warren atomic generator. Ever hear of 'em?"

"NO—let's see, wasn't Warren that scientist that was blown up by something he was working on?"

"Nope—he was blown up, but he was blown up by our mutual friend Thaddeus Nestor, head of the Council of Five," replied Atkill. "I know. He wanted me to do it for him, and I backed out. Principally because I thought too much of Warren, and too little of Nestor. Warren's a better man than I am I guess—or was. The man was clever to make this. That thing is patented—the patents are in Washington, and nobody ever took the trouble to investigate them after Warren died, except Nestor. He bought the patents. I'm bootlegging this thing, liable to infringement of the patent laws." Atkill grinned ingratiatingly. "Goin' to prosecute?"

"Nestor! Council of Five! Who the hell are the others?" demanded the Commander.

Who Are the Others?

"Not that that'll do you any good, but the others are William J. Fordham, Arthur Benholt, Thomas Ringman and one 'Burt' Hillen."

"Fordham, Benholt and Ringman—the power-men. That's why the power plants all went up. They're in on this, eh? But who's Hillen? Never heard of him."

"Huh—probably not. He was a secondary gang leader in New York here. He supplied the men who run the air ships. I stole one of the ships with the aid of Joe Keller and his gang. We had quite a shooting scrap up-state. Nobody made any complaints, so you didn't hear. Our ship is painted with a huge American flag, so don't fire on it when we come. We may be able to help, you know. I would have come to the government sooner, but I'd simply have gotten kicked out for my pains. I had to almost assassinate you before I could see you now.

"If Nestor wins, there will be a Council of Four. Hillen and Company, having served their purpose, will be wiped out by an ingenious little radio-controlled gas arrangement in each ship. We stole the flagship, and found the controls for the device in it. They'll have changed the controls of course, but I'm going to try it when the battle starts, anyway.

"Now if you will show me where you want this power delivered, I'll put the generator in."

"How much power?"

"This, my dear sir, is the energy of annihilated matter. I could produce enough energy with this small machine here to fuse New York State in about ten seconds. I've been too busy with that captured ship—it wasn't finished—to make weapons, but just call for all the power you want."

"Come on. Damn Kendrill. The batteries are in the New York Edison plant, and that's the best distributing point," said the Commander.

Half an hour later a group of men watched Atkill kindle the release-flame on the top of a two-hundred pound block of soft, grey iron. It burned steady and white and cold, and the meters on the wall jumped into life. Direct current he was using, direct current that poured into the giant batteries now, and into the mains that led across the city. A million lights blazed suddenly into life, a thousand trains started throbbing as the electric pumps automatically compressed air into the tanks. A sudden hush came over the city, noise died suddenly. The great mobs that had been struggling, shouting, panic-stricken nearly, were filled with a sudden hope as the familiar, comforting power came back. The meters on the walls rose to undreamt of heights, as toasters, coffee pots, waffle irons, lights, motors, a thousand and one things about the city came to life. And too, the giant batteries were drinking deep of the power-flood.

A group of bewildered engineers stared at a neat black cabinet, a rough, grey mass, and a clear, cold white flame that burned unwinking and unmoving on the block of metal.

"Good God, man, how long can that last?" asked the army engineer standing beside Atkill.

"That," replied Atkill with a faint smile, "will last about a century and a half at the present rate of consumption, thanks to the genius of the greatest physicist that ever lived, Randolph Warren. I used to think I was good, but there are things about these generators even I can't see the why of, and though I know there are a thousand other things to learn, I can learn but a few. The field of absolute zero Warren had, I can't find. A field that will extinguish that flame before the fuel runs out Warren had, from some of his statements in the patents, yet I can't find it.

"But that will last far longer than you will."

The men looked up at the clock by common impulse. It was fifteen minutes of ten o'clock.

"I'll have to go," said Atkill. On the roof of the powerhouse he entered his autogyro, and flashed away to the southwest.

Power at Last

The men in the power house looked at the steady white flame, at the meters, and followed Atkill's simple instructions.

"Leave it alone," he had said, "Leave it alone, and draw all the power you need. If I am killed, just draw on it till the fuel is gone, and then the flame will go out automatically. Before that time you cannot change it in the slightest."

And it would be a century and a half before that fuel was gone!