The Mole Pirate

II

Jack Hill was talking to reporters in the machine-shop section of the American Electric laboratories. The lathes and machine tools were covered over, for the moment, and there were a dozen or more of folding chairs in view. On the table before Jack there was a large sheet of white-painted metal, on which stood a block of brass and a small but intricate contrivance of radio tubes and the like. Behind him a wide curtain hid the farther wall.

'I'll give you a part of the idea now,' said Jack. 'Professor Eisenstein is late, but I don't want to start the apparatus until he gets here.'

'What's all this performance about, anyway?' demanded a man from the Mirror. 'Somebody said you had some kind of gadget that made you able to walk through walls.'

Td hate to tell you what I can do," returned Jack. 'You wouldn't believe me. I'd rather show you. I've been experimenting on a rather neglected aspect of the atom. You know, of course, that the atom is regarded today as a sort of miniature solar system, a nucleus like a sun with a greater or lesser number of electrons revolving around it like planets?'

'Yeah.' The Minor man had appointed himself spokesman. 'We know all that stuff.'

'Good!' said Jack. 'Then we can talk about magnets first. In ordinary iron the molecules have north and south poles, like all other molecules, but they point in every possible direction, helter-skelter. They have magnetism in them, but it isn't organized. Pointing haphazard, though each one is a miniature magnet, in the mass they neutralize each other. It's only when the whole mass of iron is magnetized that all the poles point in the same direction - or only when they all point in the same direction that it's magnetized. Is that clear, too?'

'Yeah! I hadda do an interview with Eisenstein once,' said the Mirror man. 'He said I had a brain for that stuff.'

'Kind of him,' observed Jack. 'Now I've been trying to carry the idea of organization a bit further. Not only molecules but atoms have poles, and they point helter-skelter in every direction, too. Suppose I got them all to point in one direction. What would happen then?'

'You could walk through walls?' hazarded the Mirror man.

Jack grinned. 'Not so fast! Let's think it over first. An atom is a miniature solar system. That means it's practically flat. But with such flatnesses pointing in every direction - well, an enlarged picture of any sort of matter would be just about like a dozen packs of cards being poured from one basket to another and back again. They'd be fluttering every which way. You couldn't swing a stick through those falling cards without hitting a lot of them.'

'Not unless you were pretty good,' conceded the Mirror man.

'But if you had the same number of cards falling, only in a neat and orderly fashion, every one parallel, so they'd stack up all face down in the bottom basket. It's a standard card trick to spring a pack of cards from one hand to the other like that. You could swing a stick through that bunch.'

'You might knock one of 'em away,' said the Mirror man cautiously, 'but you wouldn't mess up the whole works. They wouldn't block up the whole distance between the baskets.'

'Just so!' said Jack approvingly. 'Professor Eisenstein was right. You do have a head for this stuff. Now the object of my experiments has been to arrange the atoms in a solid object like the second bunch of cards. They're flat. And it turns out that when they're arranged that way, all parallel, they block so small a proportion of the space they ordinarily close up, that they will pass right through ordinary matter with only the slightest of resistance. And that resistance comes from just such accidental collisions as you suggested.'

There was a stirring at the door. The snow-white hair and bushy, sandy whiskers of Professor Eisenstein came into the room. He beamed at Jack and the reporters. He spoke separately to Gail Kennedy, bending over her hand. The girl looked at him queerly. She was here because she intended to marry Jack and wanted to share in this triumph.

Her father and half the higher-ups of American Electric came in after the professor. Gail's face stiffened when her father's eyes fell upon her. He did not approve of Jack Hill.

'Ach, my young friend!' said Professor Eisenstein blandly.

A flash bulb flared as he shook hands with Jack. A news photographer changed plates in his camera and abstractly envisioned the caption. It would be 'Eisenstein Congratulates Youthful American Scientist', if this demonstration came out all right, and 'Eisenstein Condoles' if it didn't.

'You go on with your explanation,' said Eisenstein cordially. 'I sit at your feet and listen. Presently I make an announcement which will surprise eferybody.'

He sat down benignly. Gail looked at him, at her father, and back to Eisenstein. A moment later she appeared to be puzzled and uneasy. Her eyes remained on Eisenstein.

'I had just explained to these gentlemen,' said Jack, 'the object of my experimenting, the co-ordination of atom poles and what might be expected to result. I think all of you are familiar with the reasoning, since there's been a good deal of controversy about it. It was suggested that any co-ordinated matter would collapse into something like neutronium. Fortunately, it doesn't.'

He flung a switch and vacuum tubes glowed. A curious, ghostly light appeared above the white-painted sheet of metal on the table.

"The field of force,' he explained, 'which arranges the atoms in any substance so that they all point the same way.'

He switched off the tubes. The light died. He picked up the block of brass that was on the table. He placed it where the light had been.

'I am going to co-ordinate all the atom poles in this piece of brass,' he observed. 'Around the shop, here, the men say that a thing treated in this way is dematerialized. Watch!'

He flung the switch again and as the eerie white light flared on, the solid mass of brass seemed to glow of itself. Its surfaces ceased to reflect a brazen colour. They emitted the ghostly hue of the field light. Then it seemed that the block glowed within. The light seemed to come from inside the block as well as from its outer edge.

The whole thing took place in only the part of a second. A swift, smooth, soundless glowing of the block, which began at the outside and seemed to move inward - and cease. Then there was nothing visible at all but the queer glow itself.

Jack turned off the field. The light vanished. But the metal block did not spring back into view. Instead of a solid cube of polished brass there was the tenuous, misty outline of a cube. It looked unsubstantial, fragile. It looked like the ghost of a block of metal.

'It's still there,' said Jack, 'but you're looking past the edges of the atoms, so it's very nearly transparent. It's just as solid, in its way, as it ever was. It weighs as much. It conducts electricity just as well. But it's in a state that isn't usual in nature, just as megnetism isn't usual. The poles of its atoms all point the same way. Now look!'

He swept his hand through the misty block. He lighted a match and held it in the middle of the phantom. It burned, where Jack had claimed there was solid brass. A sceptical silence hung among the reporters.

Then the Mirror man said: 'That's a good trick, but if it wasn't phony -'

'What?'

'If that brass were still there, an' it would pass through anything else, it'd slide right through that sheet metal an' drop through the floor!'

'Radioactivity,' said Jack. 'The only exception. When coordinated matter is bombarded by radioactive particles, some of the atoms are knocked halfway back to normal. This paint has thorium oxide in it and it's slightly radioactive. Come here a moment.'

The Mirror man went sceptically forward. He suddenly reached out and passed his hands through the phantom block.

'It's a phony!' he said firmly. You're trying' to put somethin' over on us!'

'Put on these gloves,' said Jack. 'They've been painted with more of the same radioactive paint.'

The Mirror man incredulously obeyed. He reached again for the phantom block. And he gasped. Because his hands, encased in these gloves, touched something which was not only solid., but heavy. He picked it up, held it high; and his face was a study in stupefaction and unwilling belief. He staggered over to the nearest of his confreres.

'By cripesl' he said dazedly. 'It is real, even if you can't see it! Put y'hands on it!'

The other reporter, who was seated at the table, put his hands right through the object he could very dimly see. And to the Mirror man the brass block was solid. It was heavy. He gasped again and his hold relaxed. The phantom slipped from his fingers.

'Look out!'

The man gasped for the third time as the phantom object dropped. And it looked so utterly unsubstantial that the eye denied its weight. It should have floated down like gossamer, or so it seemed. But it did fall with the forthrightness of something very heavy indeed.

The man who had just put his hand through it now instinctively held them out to catch it. He cupped them, in anticipation of something very fragile and light. The phantom struck his hands. It went through them, and he could not feel it. It reached his knees and penetrated them. It dropped to the floor and through it, and did not as much as stir the cloth of the seated man's trousers.

'That's gone,' said Jack dryly, 'though I intended to reverse the process and bring it back to normal. It's felling down toward the centre of the earth,, now, encountering just about as much resistance from earth and stone as if it were falling through air. I don't think any of us are likely to see it again.'

Professor Eisenstein beamed. The Mirror man put his head in his hands. The other reporters babbled together. Gail Kennedy looked, frequently and uneasily at Professor Eisenstein. 'A telephone rang stridently somewhere. Somebody answered it, out of sight.

'Have I gone nuts ?' the Mirror man exclaimed.

'I don't think so.' Jack assured him. 'If you have, all the rest of us will be nuts, tooa in just a moment. Because what I've showed you is just a preparation for this.'

He turned and pushed aside a curtain. It took nearly a minute to clear the tiling behind it, because the curtain hid a space all of forty feet long, and most of that space was filled with an altogether-extraordinary object.

While Jack thrust at the curtain a distant voice said, evidently into a telephone: 'Professor Eisenstein's secretary? Yes, the prof-'

Noise cut out the rest of it. Gail Kennedy looked puzzledly at Professor Eisenstein. He was abruptly alert and feral. He was listening. His eyes, which had been benign, became quite otherwise. And Gail Kennedy suddenly looked as if she could not believe a thought which had come to her and which she could not dismiss. She stared at Professor Eisenstein in something approaching horror.

Jack turned again to his audience. He had cleared the Mole to view. It was a vessel of riveted steel plates quite ten yards in length and about three yards high. There was a rough approximation to torpedo shape, but the likeness was not carried far enough to keep it from looking more like a military tank than anything else.

Yet even that wasn't a fair description. There were neither tractor treads nor wheels. Instead there was a marine screw propeller in the back and four others mounted vertically where wheels should have been. They made the Mole into something it was quite impossible to classify.

It was plainly designed for travel, but in what medium was not clear. It did not seem fitted for travel in any medium at all. Yet the heavy glass windows and a carefully curved and fitted door which opened inward seemed to imply that the medium was one in which a supply of air for breathing would need to be carried along,

'Here's the ship,' said Jack curtly. In it the field of force I just generated is made use of. There's a generator of that field inside the ship, also a means of alternating the gradually weakening field to restore it to its normal condition. The process is the same as demagnetization.

'I go inside the ship. I start the motors, and these screws try to revolve. They can't. I turn on the force field and the ship becomes like that block of brass. It tries to drop down to the centre of the earth as that block of brass did. But the screws revolve then. And they are coated with a film of radioactive matter somewhat thinner than the paint on this sheet of metal.

It's not radioactive enough to keep them "solid". It's just enough so that they seem to work in a medium about like - like -'

'Mashed potatoes,' put in Professor Eisenstein unexpectedly. 'Much better than water for der screws to work in.'

'Just so,' agreed Jack. 'And now, to save a lot of talk, I'll show you how it works.'

He opened the curved door.

Professor Eisenstein got up and said blandly: 'May I come ? I haff der most implicit confidence.'

Jack stared. Then he said gratefully: 'Thanks! Of course you can come'. To the others he added: I'll put the ship through the same process as the block of brass, only I'll rematerialize it. Please don't stand where I'm going to bring it back. The results would be very unpleasant.'

He ushered the white-haired scientist into the door. Gail Kennedy stood up and opened her mouth, her features queerly twisted. But before she could speak Jack was inside the Mole and the door had closed behind him.

There was a queer roaring noise out-of-doors. It sounded like the popping of many motorcycles. "But those in the machine shop of the American Electric Co. paid no heed. They were giving strict and exclusive attention to the ungainly metal shape before them.

Something rumbled inside it. The screws stirred. Then a ghostly eerie light seemed to envelop it. And in the fraction of a second the solid mass of metal shimmered into insubstantiality. It was transparent - more transparent than any glass. Only its outline could be seen, ghostly and improbable.

The screws, for an instant, seemed somehow more 'solid than the rest. They swept swiftly into motion, into a blur which was like the most airy of froth. The whole ship settled with a speed which suggested falling, until those screws took hold in the solid concrete of the floor.

It was a phantom, then, which remained steady for an instant. Then the tail propeller began to revolve. And slowly, slowly, the apparition, the ghost, the utterly unreal outline, began to move. The tail propeller swept through the concrete of the floor. The whole thing moved forward with a quick gathering of speed which was exactly like a ship getting under way. It reached the wall it went through it. And not one brick, not one grain of mortar, was disturbed. Stunned silence. Then a startled babbling.

A news photographer wailed: 'I didn't flash it! I didn't flash it!'

And then there was a sudden rush of figures at the doors - dark blue-clad figures with service revolvers out and ready.

'Where's the man who calls himself Professor Eisenstein?' barked a police lieutenant, staring around. 'We want him!'

The president of American Electric, no less, stood up indignantly. 'What's all this about ?' he demanded furiously. 'What the devil -'

'Durran!' snapped the cop. 'He knocked Professor Eisenstein on the head an hour ago. Stole his car. One of your men here said Professor Eisenstein was right in here. That must be Durran himself! Where is he?'

Then Gail Kennedy gave a little choked cry. And as she uttered the cry the shimmering, ghostly outline of the Mole rose up through the floor. Somebody leaped to be away from it. It went to the end of the room and out through the wall beyond. And again there was not a brick or a grain of mortar disturbed.

'He's - in that!' said Gail, her throat constricted. 'With Jack! Hide! You policemen! Hide, quickly!'

And for long minutes there was incoherent argument with the police before the ghostly Mok appeared again. Its pointed beak came through the wall to the right. It was a wraith. It was unreal. It was not substance, as we know substance. It came, slowing as it -came, and checked itself by a reversal of its tail propeller. It was still, a hair-raising spectacle to the policemen who had not been prepared for such a sight.

And suddenly an eerie light seemed to envelop it and fade, and its substance thickened and thickened. Its vertical screws, revolving freely in the concrete, found resistance to their movement. They climbed upward, lifting the whole Mole.

And then, as the eerie light grew very faint and died, the Mok became actually solid. It became real, and it was a massive construction of riveted steel plates, unlike anything else that had ever existed on earth. Its solidity came as a shock. The clang of its door as it opened broke a silence of almost superstitious intensity.

Jack Hill came out. 'As you see.' he said quietly, 'it works.' Gail darted forward to him, clutching him convulsively. 'Jack!' she gasped. 'Professor Eisenstein! He's Durran! I thought he'd kill you and take the Mole.

Then a bland voice came from the open door of the earthship. 'In that case, I can drop both my accent and my whiskers."

The man who had been taken for Eisenstein tugged at his face. The identifying sandy whiskers came off. He flung away the white wig. He grinned at the men in the machine shop.

'As Professor Eisenstein,' he said amusedly, 'I promised an announcement that would surprise everybody; I make it now. I'm Durran.'

A pistol barked savagely. He jerked backward and almost closed the door. Through the remaining crack he said more amusedly still: 'I add that my mission here to-day was much more successful than I expected. I hoped to gain useful information. I've got something much better, this contrivance and instruction in its use gained on a trial trip. Au'voir!'

The door slammed. Almost instantly a fusillade of shots poured upon the machine. But the eerie white light enveloped it. It shimmered into a phantom which fell with a jerk. Then the vertical screws caught it again and raised it back into view. It did not come all the way above the surface of the ground, now. Only half its bulk appeared above the surface. Only the tip of the phantom tail screw appeared above the concrete in which it suddenly began to revolve with a quite impossible freedom. It moved forward - through the wall. It vanished.

'And I showed him all about the thing!' said Jack Hill. 'I even let him steer it!'

There were policemen outside the laboratory. Durran was America's Public Enemy No. i. When a force of uniformed men swarmed inside the laboratory, another force took position outside, to surround him in case he evaded the others momentarily. These men outside saw what looked like the ghost of a prehistoric monster swimming across solid ground toward them. Superstitious terror afflicted some. Others did not believe their eyes. But a hoarse and raging voice from the laboratory shouted for them to shoot it.

They did. Their bullets went through it without affecting it in the least. It was not substance of a sort that bullets could harm. But as if they were annoying, like pin pricks, the phantom dived. It sank out of sight in the solid earth underfoot, still moving forward. Some of the policemen thought they could feel a slight vibration, as if of engines underground.