The Mole Pirate

III

Durran vanished in and with the Mole at something after four o'clock. At five, a motorist drove shakenly to the home of his family physician. His nerves were badly frayed.

He had seen something like a turtle, he said, swimming in the solid earth. It was larger than his car, and it swam across a concrete road, in the concrete, directly before him. It was a ghost, and there were no ghosts. His nerves were upset, and he wanted treatment which would keep him from seeing anything like that again.

At five thirty, a motorist stopped at a filling station for gas and heard screams coming from inside it. The proprietor was dead on the floor, shot. A coloured helper was having hysterics beside his body.

The helper told what ought to have been a wholly improbable story of a monstrous engine which appeared out of thin air, from which a man emerged and shot the filling-station proprietor. He then took gas and lubricating oil, got back inside the monstrous thing of steel plates, and it melted into thin air again and its ghost swam away.

These two stories were accidents. Durran's real intentions began to be outlined later on - at eight o'clock, to be exact.

At that time - eight o'clock, p.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time of June i6th - there were extra editions of practically all newspapers on the streets, screaming in headlines of Durran's latest exploit. 'Durran Steals Mystery Invention.' 'Durran Escapes Under Fire." 'Durran Scores On Cops Again.' 'Scientist-Criminal Turns Phantom.'

But on the whole, the theft of the Mole was played down. The story of what the Mole could do was too improbable to go in a news story. It was held over for the Sunday editions, when feature writers could take space to expound it - if it were still true.

Most of the papers did not really believe in the Mole, despite the impassioned assertions of the reporters who had been on the spot. And in a thousand police stations the official report of Durran's latest exploit and the contrivance he now had at his disposal were subjects for argument. Mostly, the report was regarded with extreme scepticism.

More than one inquiry came to the originating office of that report, demanding confirmation. And more than one hard-headed police official did not bother to inquire, but indignantly reported that a hoax was being put over by somebody. The New York State Police - and half of them, even, did not quite believe it - were spending as much effort trying to get the facts accepted as they were in trying to devise some method of coping with the menace the Mole now represented.

But none of this uncertainty and none of this indignation was to be found in the Wedgewood Arsenal, in Connecticut. Durran simply wasn't thought of there. It was a semi-Federal, semi-State, arsenal which did not manufacture arms. It was a storage place with a stout captain of regulars assigned to duty in it, and a small detail of soldiers who served practically as watchmen. It was an emergency depot of weapons and ammunition, and the duty of its official caretaker was mainly that of making out documents in triplicate for some purpose unknown.

In that arsenal, at eight p.m., there was peace. The captain hi charge was seated at a desk in a corner of the vast hall which had once been used for indoor close-order drill by a National Guard organization. He was making out a document in triplicate. His pen scratched. He smoked languidly on a fat cigar. From time to time he mopped his forehead, because it was hot.

There was utter quietness, utter peace. It was so still that it seemed even the scratching of the captain's pen aroused murmurous echoes. The captain sighed heavily. His chair squeaked. That did arouse echoes, which rang about the huge hall for seconds before they died away reluctantly.

Then there was another sound - the very ghost of a sound. Something impalpable and tenuous rose out of the floor. First a round snout, which was quite transparent After it a misshapen huge bulk, all of thirty feet long.

The whole thing was unsubstantial, was unreal. It came to a stop in the middle of the vast open space. It flared brightly and the glare against the walls made the captain start. He whirled in his chair. Then his eyes widened. His mouth dropped open.

The light was fading, and as it faded the ghost in the middle of the ex-armoury grew solid. Noises came from it, which became louder and more real. Then the light died away completely and there was a huge thing of entirely substantial steel plates at rest. Huge steel screws beneath it turned for a space, and wooden planks splintered and cracked. Then all was still.

Dazedly, blankly like an automaton, the army captain got up and walked stiffly toward the thing that had appeared before him. Perhaps he had some wild thought of visitors from another world or another dimension. As a curved steel door clanked open he went rigid. But the figure which stepped out was a man, a tall man with a merciless sort of amusement on his face. He brought up a pistol. He fired it, quite ruthlessly and quite coolly.

The explosion echoed thunderously. It made a drum roll of sound as the echoes played about between the walls and among the rafters. The captain choked and made absurd motions with his hands. He collapsed on the floor.

Then the man from the solidified phantom set to work, very coolly and very swiftly.

When a corporal of the guard detail came in anxiously some few minutes later, he saw a shimmering something sinking through the floor. He thought it was an optical illusion. It made Ms hair stand on end for an instant, but he forgot it when he saw his commanding officer lying dead on the floor.

He, and the other men of the guard, and later on the local police, too, found no sign of any way by which an assassin could have got into the arsenal. They found the captain stretched on the floor with a bullet in his heart and an expression of blank amazement on his face.

They found a case of loaded hand grenades gone, several light machine guns missing, with drums of ammunition for them, and an assortment of tear gas and a few lethal gas bombs. Also a certain amount of engineers' stores had been taken, notably blocks of compressed guncotton intended to be used for demolition purposes.