Читать книгу The Green Ray - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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"YOU'VE been working too hard, Greg," Dean Thorkel, chief editor of New York Newscast Central said. "This Paris trip will set you on your feet."

Professor Gregory Vance stared at his friend out of glowing eyes.

"I'm not going to Paris, Dean," he said quietly. "Maybe by tomorrow I won't be able to go anywhere."

The atmosphere of the white-tiled laboratory was suddenly heatless with the chill of some brooding dread.

"Not going!" The newsman gasped. "Passing up the Einstein Award Convocation! Hell, man! When it was announced in nineteen ninety-six you told Cliff Hoskins and me you would devote your life to winning it. That's why you've been slaving here at National U. for seven years while I've been keeping an eye on seven seas and five continents, and Cliff's been risking his life in the Military Intelligence. You?"

"Risking his life." The words trickled from between the scientist's white lips. "Risking—" A sharp burr cut him off, the attention call of the wireless teleautograph in a corner of the lab. He twisted—and then his voice was a thin thread, wire-edged with terror. "There it is again!"

Thorkel leaped to the machine whose silver pencil danced eerily across white, unrolling paper. "Vance!" The salutation was abrupt. "Final warning. You speak before you reach Paris, willingly or—unwillingly."

The newsman, his massively sculptured countenance chalky, whirled to the disc of a verbal communications transmitter, but Vance's hand closed on his shoulder.

"No use, Dean," the physicist whispered. "I've tried to trace those messages before. He taps in from some unauthorized station of his own, and it can't be located."

"But—but—who?"

"Ho-Lung."

"Good Lord!" Thorkel breathed the exclamation. "He?"

Vance's thin lips quirked in a humorless smile.

"You've heard of him?"

"Who hasn't. He's the lone-wolf ace of the Asiatic Secret Service. He's got ears and eyes everywhere. He's killed more enemies of the Yellow Coalition than their armies. But no one knows who or what he is. Sometimes I think he's a myth. But you're no soldier or diplomat. What can he want of you?"

"Want of me?" Gregory Vance's slim white hands curled into curiously ineffectual looking fists. "I'll show you."

He moved to the lab table, lifted a cylindrical graduate from the stone slab of the laboratory table. From shelves on which hundreds of bottles were ranged, each labeled with a number only, he selected a half dozen vials. He carefully measured their contents into the etched glass until he had a liquid compound that was purplish and fuming. Somehow it seemed alive in the cold light of the beta-argon bulb in the ceiling.

The physicist picked up a lens-shaped but hollow crystal, dripped the solution he had concocted through a tiny opening until it filled the cavity. Then he fitted the lens he had made over the miniature bulb of an ordinary flash-light.

"Get down one of those cages with a white mouse in it, and place it on the table." Thorkel obeyed.

"Watch!" Vance aimed the flashlight at the cage, pressed the button. A green beam flashed out, uncannily bright even in the mock daylight of the windowless room. It struck the mouse. An exclamation of horror escaped from the newsman.

An instant before the tiny animal had been there, instinct with life. Now—a glittering, viscid pool of iridescent oil glittered at the bottom of the cage!

THE virescent light clicked out. Vance extracted the lens that had converted an ordinary flashlight into an instrument of annihilation, smashed the glass in the sink, watched the purple liquid disappear, fuming, down the drain.

"Imagine searchlight beams fanning that green ray through the skies and over the seas, trapping the oncoming hosts of an enemy and melting them, melting human beings into oily nothingness as that mouse was melted.

"Imagine their rocket-ships dropping uncontrolled from the heavens, their surface craft colliding, sinking into a boiling sea. What price invasion then?

"And all that is needed to make the weapon ready is the compound to fill the hollow lenses. Every glass factory in the country is now busy casting for the searchlights with which our coasts are lined, for the aircraft beacons which dot the continent.

"But—but how can mere light produce such an effect?"

"It's simple. You know that matter is the result of a disturbance in the sub-ether, just as light is a vibration of the ether. And that ether and sub-ether are intimately interconnected. I have discovered a light vibration that steps up the vibrations of material atoms one micron. It transmutes elements, in other words. It acts only on organic matter, so far—transmutes the elements of any living body to others a little higher in the scale. And that?"—Vance nodded at the oily pool that had been a living thing moments before—"Is the result of the transmutation. Now do you know why Ho-Lung has been after me for weeks?"

"For weeks!" Thorkel exclaimed in surprise. "But—your life hasn't already been attempted. Surely I should have heard."

"No," the other replied. "He wants the secret for his country. The ray is as formidable a weapon of offense as of defense. His messages have taken me up on high mountains and offered me the earth and the fullness thereof. He has resorted to threats only in the past week, as I neared perfection."

"Neared perfection! It looks pretty damn perfect to me."

"The effects, yes. But adjustments are necessary so that the target of the ray may not be shielded. My ray will penetrate any material except a certain ferro-beryllium alloy. Unfortunately, that alloy is the very one used to armor the Oriental rocket ships. I am on the track of the solution. In a few days I hope to have it. Otherwise—the thing is useless."

"But the Army laboratories! Surely they must be helping you on this. You must have given them some idea of the thing, so that they should be able to proceed if anything should happen to you."

"No. The War Department has ordered the hollow lenses purely on blind faith in me. The basic principle of the ray is known by myself alone. Our service is honeycombed with spies.

"Cliff Hoskins flew in from Manchukuo six months ago. Just a week before that I had got in touch with the War Secretary and given him in strictest confidence the barest outline of what I was working on. Three days later, Hoskins, eavesdropping on a conference of the Asiatic General Staff, had heard a full report of every detail of my talk!"

"Then if you are killed the whole thing is lost."

"Wiped out!" Vance's hand erased a chalk mark on the table-top. "Like that. If they can get the formula from me, well and good. But as soon as they are convinced that I will not yield it to them they will make sure the American Government does not get it either. That is why I cannot go to Paris, why I must hide. I have a place prepared, and I can get there unobserved. I shall show you how later. There is only one chance in a hundred of their getting me, once I'm away, but I want to guard against that one chance."

Vance pulled a paper from his pocket, handed it to Thorkel. The other saw figures at the top, map co-ordinates of some point in the Far North. Then there was a long line of curious symbols, symbols that were vaguely familiar.

"The location of my hiding place," Vance explained. "And the formula, in our old code."

Thorkel remembered. How clearly that brought back the old student days, when he, Greg, and Cliff Hoskins had been inseparable. Hoskins had been reading treatises on cryptography and had challenged the other two to devise a code he could not decipher. They had accepted, and won. Hoskins had accused them of being unfair when he learned that three keywords were necessary to the solution.

"The keywords are these." Vance wrote three words on a bit of paper, displayed them to Thorkel, then tore the scrap of paper into tiny fragments. "You know how much depends on the safety of that formula. If you don't hear from me within a week, take it to the Secretary of War—to no one else." Greg gripped Thorkel's arm, his fingers digging deep in emphasis. "Remember, Dean, give the formula to no one else, whoever he is, no matter what the circumstances."

Vance turned to the door. "Now come out to the hangar with me and I shall show you how I shall get away, literally unseen."