The Mole Pirate

VI

It was stupidity, of course, that caused the destruction of the American Electric experimental laboratories. Durran made a thorough job of it. It seems that he stopped at a construction job in Schenectady and looted the powder house of explosives to have plenty for his purpose. And it is quite certain how he came to know of the need to blow up the laboratory.

Within an hour after Jack had reassured the committee of bankers and police officials, the newspapers had the whole story. To Jack the need of secrecy was so self evident that he had not thought of mentioning it. But to a banker the self evident necessity was to reassure the public so there would be no runs on banks.

To police officials the self evident necessity was to make a public statement meaning that they had a clue and an arrest would follow shortly. To the newspapers and the broadcasters there was no thought of anything but hot news, to be passed on at once.

In consequence, Jack's assurance and his description of a ship being built to hunt down and destroy the Mole was given to the whole world. And with the world it went to Durran, too.

He acted immediately. He destroyed the laboratory where the Nemesis of the Mole was preparing. And he did more. When Jack got to the scene of the disaster, fire roared among the ruins. The new ship was scrap iron. And plans, apparatus, formulas, everything the laboratories had contained, were gone.

Gail ran up to him as he surveyed the wreckage. 'I'm so sorry, Jack!'

'It is pretty,' returned Jack sardonically. "Those damned fools had to tip Durran to everything! And he'll be on the lookout now. My guess is that he'll try to bump me off, because with everything in the lab in flames, I'm the only one with all the stuff in my head to make another Mole possible. We've got to start building another one in secrecy. Better, half a dozen of them. He won't be able to destroy all of them before one's finished.'

Gail's father came up, scowling. 'This costs American Electric better than a million,' he said bitterly.

'I'll give it back to you,' said Jack harshly. 'Listen to me!'

Swiftly, tersely, he talked of a new transportation system which would be faster and safer than any the world had ever known before, and wholly independent of weather or storms. 'And if that doesn't make up for the damage,' he added savagely, 'here's another: We dig shafts for mines, now. We send men down underground. But Durran's found a way to materialise a part of the Mole while leaving the rest a phantom. If he can do that, so can we, and the other way about too. 'Why can't we lower a tank with a field of force in it? Dematerialize it and lower it through rock and stone to an ore bed as deep as we want to go - ten miles if necessary ? Then turn on the field force to dematerialize the ore that's inside that tank.

'The ore, being made phantom to the rest of the world, will be actual to the tank. And we can haul tank and ore up to the surface as easily as they'd drop to the centre of the earth. Once above ground we rematerialize both.'

Kennedy stared. Then his eyes flared triumphantly. 'That does it! You win, Jack! No matter how much damage Durran does, that one trick pays for it and more besides.'

Then Gail Kennedy screamed. A ghostly something - eerie and unbelievable in the red firelight - moved toward them. 'The Mole!'

In one instant Jack had Gail up in his arms. He sprinted toward the Mole. He had seen a curious ring of solidity, upheld in mid-air, silhouetted against the blazing laboratory. And that would be the tube he'd heard about, through which bombs were dropped to become 'real' as they emerged.

Jack plunged past that bomb tube and the ghostly Mole. Once past. Durran would have to turn the earth-ship to bring the tube to bear, and that would take time. In a straightaway pursuit it could run him down on foot. But now it -

A hand grenade went off behind him. Earth spattered him. Something stung his leg, numbing it. Warm stuff flowed down it. Then he was at a car. He flung Gail inside, jammed on the starter, and jerked it into first. The phantom of the Mole was turning. It came toward him again. And he shot away at forty-five miles an hour which became fifty and then sixty as he got on to a dear straight road.

'Your father,' said Jack coolly, as he pushed the car to a higher speed yet, 'may think I'm a coward. But Durran has destroyed nearly or quite every record of how the Mole was built. I'm the only man who can build another force-field generator without those destroyed drawings and figures. I simply have to save that knowledge until I can get it down on paper.'

Then Gail said in a rather choked voice: 'I'm wondering about my father.'

For answer, Jack swung right, left, right again. He drew to a stop before a drug store. He called the gate watchman at the laboratory from the phone booth. In seconds, Gail was talking to her father.

'He says you did the right thing,' she reported an instant later. 'Durran did intend to get you. But - my father thinks that if he saw that you picked me up, he may think that the best way to handle you is to be able to threaten me. So I'm forbidden to go home. Dad's going to get a fast car and meet us. He's going to send me away. You, too, most likely. You're important.'

Jack grunted. 'Where do we meet your father ?' he demanded.

When she told him, he swung the car and headed that way.

They were three hundred miles away by dawn, and Jack flung himself headlong into the tedious, exacting work of drafting new plans from memory, building a new force-field generator also from memory, and of necessity for its construction determining all over again the constants needed for the calculation of certain of its parts.

He barely took time to eat and sleep, but in seven days he was ready to install new force-field generators as fast as they could be built in the new and faster earth-ships already taking shape in a dozen widely separated machine shops.

Three of those days were taken up by the need to repeat work already done, the results of which had been destroyed with the American Electric laboratory.

During that week, however, Durran progressed from the status of front-page news to a point where he was practically all the news there was. For one day after the American Electric fire, there was no report of his activity anywhere.

No authentic report, that is. A hysterical public reported the presence of the Mole from something like one hundred and fifty different points within a three-hundred-mile radius of its last appearance, and declared Durran busy at crimes ranging from the setting of forest fires and wholesale kidnappings to the robbery of a chicken coop in East Orange, New Jersey.

Actually Durran was still trying to reach and kill Jack Hill, as his solitary dangerous opponent. He had materialized a part of the Mole in the cellar of the house next to Jack's home. He hoped that Jack would return to his home, if only momentarily, to secure personal possessions or records. With the Mole part phantom and part real in the cellar of the house next door, his followers seized and bound and gagged the occupants of that house and watched comfortably for Jack's return.

He did not appear, though Durran waited for him for twelve hours. At the end of that time he took on board the men who had been watching, dematerialized the Mole, and moved away. But he left an incendiary bomb under Jack's house, and the firemen who vainly fought the blaze it started discovered the helplessness and the sufferings of the people next door.

Then the Mole began its career - the part for which it is remembered, at any rate. At dawn it was sighted in Troy, crawling deliberately out of a national bank building. A policeman shot at it and blew his whistle frantically. It swam indifferently for two blocks along the trolley tracks of Troy's main street.

While twenty police made frantic, helpless gestures, it crawled into another bank. It remained there for half an hour, its blunt nose thrust through the solid metal of a vault and its sustaining screws turning lazily. Then it sank abruptly into the ground. Its exit from town was unobserved. Both banks were looted.

At nine o'clock the Merchants' National Bank in Albany was open for business. There were a few more than the normal number of customers inside. The Mole swam through the walls and came into view. A stenographer saw it and screamed. There was a sudden glow of eerie whitish light at its snout.

A round ring of solid matter appeared, incredibly floating in mid-air at the forefront of a monster which seemed made of the most tenuous of fog. Something hard and round and quite solid dribbled out of that ring. It fell to the floor and exploded into a blinding haze of tear gas. More flares of eerie whitish light. More solidity appeared. Men got out and worked swiftly.

Police charged in from the street and were met by machine-gun fire. A hand grenade followed. The list of dead and injured was horrifying. Presently the Mole swam deliberately out into the street. It passed through a trolley-car, in which women fainted. It turned into the town's greatest jewellery store. Another tear-gas bomb. Ten minutes, and it came out again. Crowds swarmed about the scene of excitement. The Mole insolently moved upon and through the helpless police.

And in Albany Durran or one of his men committed a wholly causeless atrocity. A hand grenade dropped from the solidifying ring where the crowd was thickest. There was no reason or excuse for it. The hospitals of Albany were crowded with injured, alike those directly mangled by the grenade and in the panic which followed its explosion.

The Mole went on, insolently and deliberately looting bank after bank before the eyes of the police. There was no defence against it. Treasure locked in the bank vaults was but made more convenient for Durran's men. Left elsewhere, they drove out or blinded would-be defenders with tear-gas and machine-gun fire, with hand grenades always in reserve.

The Mole stayed two hours and a half in Albany. Its loot was something over three-quarters of a million dollars.

It reached Poughkeepsie at dusk. But here it was expected. A radium paint concern supplied the police with radioactive material. Daubed on bullets, the paint did all that Jack Hill had promised. A storm of paint-smeared lead poured upon the misty monster at its first sighting. Direct hits, instead of going harmlessly through a phantom, seemed to encounter resistance. Some punctured the nearly invisible steel plates when fired at sufficiently close range. Glancing hits - glanced. Several police were injured by ricochets.

The Mole dived at the first sign of injury. In seconds its shimmering, unreal rounded back was sinking into the pavement, which stopped what bullets seemed to penetrate rather than pass harmlessly through its impalpable armour. Rather quaintly, too, the painted bullets seemed likely to be effective in an unexpected way.

Once having punctured the Mole's hull, it was of course as difficult for them to get out as to get in. And they were 'real' in both the actual world and the strange universe of the Mole. They caught at once in the pavement and the hull and prevented the Mole from sinking out of sight. For minutes, the Mole seemed to be held fast. Then a terrific explosion underground flung up the street. A second, a third.

Otherwise unable to escape, Durran had materialized high explosives in the solid earth and set them off. He blasted away the roadway in which the bullets were caught. They undoubtedly remained inside the hull, but when no longer held fast by real matter, they could be gathered up and thrown outside one of the Mole's phantom ports. The Mole went on, still underground.

For a time, despite the terrific losses from those blasts, the police of Poughkeepsie were almost jubilant. Remembering Jack Hill's statement that violent explosions would come of the materialization of one solid body inside of another, it was thought that the explosions came from some such occurrence.

But they were undeceived. A quarter of a mile away, the earth heaved up. Further, it heaved up again. Durran took a terrible revenge for the attempt at resistance. When he left Poughkeepsie the shattered rains behind him were a guarantee that no other city would ever attempt the use of radioactive bullets against the Mole. The casualty list in Poughkeepsie was six times as large as that in Albany. It shocked the world.

Next day, the Mole made no foray. And it was a strange fact that since the complete ruthlessness of the earth-ship's crew had been demonstrated, fewer hysterical reports of its presence were made. At first, perhaps, those who fancied they saw it made haste to tell the police in hopes of its capture. Now, they simply fled. But there is no verified report of any activity on Durran's part the day after the Poughkeepsie tragedy.

The day after, it struck Peekskill and Yonkers. It was plainly heading for New York and such an orgy of looting as no five men in the world had ever before engaged in. Another day of peace.

Then it invaded Brooklyn by way of Harlem, evidently passing under the East River in its progress. A night and day of wholesale looting, with the police standing helplessly by and as their only effort at defence preventing crowds from gathering where they could be slaughtered.

That was an ironic touch; that the police were so far from being able to counter Durran's criminal actions that the utmost they could do was prevent him from being annoyed while engaged in robbery.

New York was still untouched. And then, after a day and a night of looting in Brooklyn, the motorman of a rush-hour Brooklyn subway express, slowing to a block signal in a tube under the river, saw the phantom, impossible apparition of the Mole lying across the tunnel. The only solid thing about it was the materializing tube Durran had invented and installed.

The motorman jammed on the air brakes and the cars behind him rilled with noise as the standing passengers piled up in heaps. Then something came out of the round ring of solidity held upright by the phantom Mole. Something which looked white and flat, with a long ribbon attached to it. A light glowed in the materializing ring and shone down upon the dropped object. It was an envelope, a letter.

A guard, his teeth chattering, climbed out of the front door and picked it up. It was addressed to the mayor of Greater New York. Shivering, he climbed back into the subway train.

The Mole stirred. The motorman and those crowded to the front windows of the train could see through it, beyond it. A round thing dribbled out of the materializing tube and fell between the rails. Then there was a little flare of eerie light and the materializing tube vanished. The Mole swam serenely away through the solid walls of the tunnel. It was lost in the unexplored solidity beneath the bed of the river.

Then the round thing on the track flashed up. Tear gas filled all the tunnel. But the subway train had to go forward. It could not go back. Filled with blinded, hysterical passengers, it pulled into the first station on the Brooklyn side and its motorman made a ragged stop, judging only by the glare that a station was at hand.

The newspapers published extras, after that. The letter was a bland communication from Durran. He was holding New York to ransom. He would smash the subways and bridges, blast down the tall buildings by planting explosives at their bases, and wreck the water and power supply of the city if his terms were not met. And his terms were staggering. He gave the city forty-eight hours in which to agree to them. And as if to give point to his threat, within an hour an alarm came from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Mole was there. When it left, it had seized enough high explosives to blast down half of New York.

It was not especially comforting to receive a reassuring broadcast from the American Electric Co. saying that a full dozen earth-ships, each faster, more powerful, and more heavily armed than the original Mole, would be completed in ten days more. In that ten days, Durran would have ruined the city.