Читать книгу Flight of the Silver Eagle - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3
ОглавлениеI. — THE EMPTY STRATOCAR
AGAINST a sky glorious with flung streamers of scarlet and purple, New York's leaping towers and arching aerial streetways traced a prismatic arabesque epitomizing the wonder and the beauty of the Twenty-first Century. But Don Atkins, his lithe, compact body poised on big-thewed legs widespread and firmly planted, was as oblivious to that far-off glory as to the bustle of the Federal Skyport all about him.
He stood beneath the high loom of the landing trap, squinting into the west out of slitted eyes from whose corners weather wrinkles rayed threadlike, and he was conscious of only two things.
Under the yellow silk of his airman's tunic a small, hard lump was cold against his breast. It was the talisman of the Silver Eagle, the throbbing pulse in his temples reminded him, symbol of the gallant fellowship into whose fold he had been inducted at last. The secret that for months had lain prickling between him and his one close friend, Bart Thomas, was a secret no longer. Bart himself, darting from the distant Pacific, would be here in minutes now to receive from him the twisting handgrip of the order. In minutes—in seconds—now—
A siren howled across the field. A black speck notched the low sun's upper rim. "On time to the dot!" Atkins exclaimed. A white blur in the air was suddenly a silver, tear-drop shape caught in the high-reaching fingers of the landing trap's gaunt girders, a thousand feet above him. The gigantic beam surged down, pivoting on its huge hinge, perilously fast at first, then more and more slowly as its hydraulic shock-absorbers sapped the stratocar's incredible momentum.
Atkins dashed for the spot where the duraluminum-skinned, man-carrying projectile would ground to end Thomas' half-hour flight from 'Frisco Skyport.
A knot of brown-garbed mechanics clotted around the tiny car. Their wrenches clanged against the bolt-heads that had clamped tight the hatch cover against the airlessness of upper space. Twirling metal rasped against metal. The shining oval door swung back. With eager impatience Atkins shoved past the mechanics, thrust head and shoulders into the aperture.
"Happy landing, old sock," he shouted. "Welcome to—"
The greeting froze on his lips. The tiny cubicle was unoccupied; was starkly, staringly vacant. In the heatless light of the ceiling tube the teleview screen mirrored the Skyport tarmac, glimmered from the glossy leather of the cushion on which Thomas should have lain outstretched. But Thomas wasn't there—
Atkins' skin was a tight, prickling sheath for his body. The thing was grotesquely, weirdly impossible! Impossible for his chum to have got out of the stratocar unless someone had unbolted the hatch from outside. Impossible for it to have landed somewhere so that that might have been done. To have arrived on the dot of its schedule the stratocar must never have relented from the uttermost limit of its speed. Time lost in any halt could not have been made up.
Impossible for there to have been any halt; the device was propelled by the blast of an electrostatic catapult at its starting point and had no power of its own. Once stopped it could not have taken up its flight again. And it had come straight as an arrow to the landing-trap's hooks at which 'Frisco had aimed it.
A fleck of white on the cushion caught Atkins' eye. He reached in, snatched it up. It was a bit of paper, and on it—
"Mr. Atkins," a peremptory voice battered at his giddy brain, "Conceal that and bring it to me at once."
The airman thrust the scrap into his pocket, whirled. The groundmen were crowding in around him, their swarthy countenances curious, but it was evident that none of them had spoken. Then he recalled the tiny receiver clamped against the bone behind his ear, and he knew whence the summons had come.
"This device hasn't been perfected yet," the grey man in the hidden room had said, "but within the limits of the field I can speak to you through it secretly and at will." There had been a view-screen before him, too, whose cosmic-ray eye could scan anything within fifty miles.
"Close it up," Don Atkins snapped, "and say nothing to anybody." Then he was running across the long, level tarmac, was dashing up the broad steps of Flight Headquarters Building, was hurrying through the interminable maze of corridors within.
The chaos within his skull took on a pattern as the amazing revelations of his initiation came back to him. The nation dreamed itself at peace with all the world. The Asafrican Alliance, Americans fatuously thought, having driven out the white races from the continents they had so long dominated, wanted nothing but to be left alone.
* * * * *
THEY reckoned without the driving ambition of Hung-Chen, the new Genghis Khan, who had forged an irresistible war machine behind the inscrutable mask of the East and awaited the auspicious moment to launch it against the Occident and the Americas. If he could not be stopped, war, rapine, slaughter, must inevitably destroy the Golden Age to which civilization had at last attained.
But here was the wall-panel, in a guarded corridor, whose curious quality he had been taught less than an hour before. Atkins halted, glanced cautiously left and right. He was unobserved. He bent to get his lips close against a certain whorl in the blue tracings with which the marble was figured, whispered a password. A whirring sound, seeming to come from the very stone itself, told him that the impact of his voice had set in motion the sound-lock within. The apparently solid marble slid open and the airman went through.
The wall thudded shut behind him. In the windowless room he entered a short, grave-faced man, mouse-like in grey silk, looked up from his desk.
"Let me see what you found," he said without preamble.
Atkins fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers, pushed the paper across the desk to the chief of the Silver Eagle. The red lines on it leered at him again, the ominous design that had pronged him with knowledge of the catastrophe that had overtaken Thomas. A deftly drawn dragon was coiled around the orb of Earth, one taloned claw sprawling triumphantly to obliterate the double triangles of the Americas.
The chief's grey face was almost expressionless as he touched the thing with a fingertip, but under his pale, inscrutable eyes little muscles twitched uncontrollably.
"The token of Hung-Chen," he said. "Like him to let us know that he's defeated our last device against his spies."
"What does it mean?" Atkins groaned, mental agony making him forget rank for the moment. "What does it mean?"
The other's tones were very calm—only the vaguest flatting betrayed the despair that must be closing in on him like a pall.
"It means that the key to the gaps in the West Coast electro-barrage is in his hands, the only thing he needed to enable him to strike. Thomas was bringing the plan to Army Headquarters, and he's got Thomas."
"But—but you said that the Silver Eagle memorizes all its messages. You said that Hung-Chen's spies had tapped every means of secret communication we've had and that's why the Sliver Eagle was organized—"
"Correct. We thought that a band of glorified couriers, shot across the continent at a speed greater than any yet known, would circumvent him. But we've failed. This lets us know that we have failed. They will get it out of Thomas—"
"No!" Atkins' fist pounded down on the desk. "Bart will never tell. He'll die before he tells."
"He won't die until they know. They'll strip his brain—" The chief broke off. "But that may take time. If we can find him before—" He ripped a long tape from a machine on his desk. A straight purple line traced on it wavered at a single point. "Look here. This deflection in the flight-graph shows that an extra amount of power was being absorbed between three minutes, twelve seconds out of 'Frisco and seven minutes, forty-six seconds after the start. I noticed it and thought that the projectile had swerved slightly from its course, was taking additional energy to straighten it out. But it occurs to me—"
"What, sir?" Atkins demanded, excitedly. "What?"
"That something may have come into the field, there between three hundred and twenty and seven hundred and seventy miles from the Pacific, on the great circle course. We might look that region over."
"I'm going, sir!"
Grey eyes stabbed keenly at the trembling airman.
"You're new, Atkins. I don't know—"
"Bart Thomas is my friend, Chief. More than a brother—"
"Very well," the grey man made his decision. "You may go. And God help you if you are caught. Listen—"
