Читать книгу The Dumb Gods Speak - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 3

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Seven men were seated around a table in a magnificently proportioned but plainly furnished room on the topmost floor of the famous Humberstone Building. That they were men of consequence was evident by their appearance and general bearing. That they were assembled for a serious purpose was clearly apparent from the general atmosphere of gravity and suspense. They appeared to be mostly between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, except for one who might have been a few years older, and who was dressed in the sombre garb of an ecclesiastic of high rank. They sat in silence save for an occasional uneasy observation. They had all moved their chairs to a slight angle as though to be able to face one side of the room, into the wall of which had been set two large sheets of some sort of metal, the top sheet smooth, the lower one honeycombed with small interstices. Suddenly the man at the end of the oval table raised his finger.

"Humberstone is coming," he announced.

They all turned towards the folding doors, which at that moment swung open. An invalid's couch on rubber-tyred wheels was pushed quietly into the room by a tall, well-built young man of athletic appearance, but with strongly chiselled features and the fine high forehead of a student. Everyone seated in the room rose for a moment. The man upon the couch, who was propped up into an al most sitting posture, raised his hand in salutation. The couch was wheeled to a convenient position, from which its occupant could see every one of the seven men. His hungry eyes, still bright and powerful, deep-set in his worn face, familiar to the world through the ceaseless efforts of decades of photographers, swept around the table. He ad dressed the man directly opposite him, a man of middle-age and dignified presence. He spoke slowly and his voice was thin. Nevertheless it was marvellously distinct.

"I must conserve my words," he said. "Digby Long, you are here to represent the President?"

"That is so, Mark," was the friendly reply. "As Vice President of the United States I am empowered to sign any papers you may present, or to come to any agreement with you which I may consider desirable."

"I must remind myself of the personality of each one of you," the man on the couch went on. "I must satisfy my self that you are all here, for my physicians, who are wait ing outside, have issued their last warning."

No one attempted any sort of conventional protest. There was, indeed, something grotesque in the idea of death venturing to lay its stranglehold upon a man who had defied and conquered so many of the elemental laws of nature. Words would have seemed utterly inadequate. They kept silent.

"You, General, I remember perfectly," he continued, indicating the Vice President's neighbour—a fine man of military appearance. "You are General Percheron, Commander in Chief of the Army."

"That is so, sir," was the quiet acknowledgment. "Glad you have not forgotten me."

"Next to you," Mark Humberstone proceeded, "I recognise Admiral Powers. You have just been appointed Admiral in Command of the entire Fleet."

"That is so, sir."

The speaker paused for a moment. He looked around at the others. There was no form of greeting in his gesture or speech. He seemed to recognise them, however, without difficulty.

"My fellow worker, Daniel Rathborne," he continued thoughtfully, addressing his immediate neighbour. "Yes, it is right that you should be here. The work is finished but it must be held together. Phineas Laythrop, you are here as Secretary of State, and you, Martin Clough, are the newly appointed Secretary of War. Finally, there is my old friend, Dr. Felton, Bishop of New York."

"You have named them all, sir," the young man who had wheeled in the couch announced, leaning a little forward.

"I have, alas, no words to spare to bid you greeting or farewell," Humberstone said, taking into his hand the black cylinder from the bracket attached to the side of the couch. "Will you please, the moment I touch this switch, turn towards the television receiver and listen to the loud speaker. Watch! Now, if you please."

There was a murmur from the table. Everyone was leaning forward. The young man had taken his father's wrist, the wrist of a child, into his hand. Upon the screen was suddenly depicted a river, and in the middle of the stream a huge man-of-war making apparently slow progress against a powerful tide.

"The battleship you see," the man on the couch went on, "is the old City of Washington. She is making her way down the Hudson. You have her visualised?"

There was an affirmative chorus. Mark Humberstone moved an inch or two in his place, white and ghastly in the strong light, his eyes apparently devouring the screen. He leaned slightly to one side and touched the switch attached to the cylinder. For a moment there was a flash of scarlet light which darted around the room like an escaped ray. The Bishop started in his chair. The Vice President rose involuntarily to his feet. There was a faint staccato murmur of amazement.

"Continue to watch, if you please," the still quiet voice from the couch insisted. "By this time I think you discover that the battleship is out of control. Watch. You see her swinging round in the tide? Already she is in process of disintegration...You observe the list?"

For the last time on earth, Mark Humberstone smiled as he watched their faces.

"She is helpless," he told them. "She is four hundred and fifty miles away. It would have made no difference if she had been four thousand. I touch a switch and every electrical appliance which she possesses is dumb and nerve less. Our friend the Admiral there knows what that means. She is finished."

There was a rumble of voices from around the table. Astonishment had given place to awe. Everyone was star ing at the tragedy depicted upon that shining plate of metal.

"Your whole attention, if you please, my friends," the great scientist begged, and it was noticeable that his voice had become a shade weaker. "What you have seen taking place, the powers which I am handing over can bring about at any time from a battleship, a fort, an observatory. We believed that the discovery of radium itself was the greatest thing that had happened to the world in centuries. Be sides this combination of forces which I present to you, this amplification and concentration of those electric cur rents with which our atmosphere is filled, radium is of no more account than the sands of the desert. I am handing over to you who sit around that table the gravest responsibility that was ever placed upon the shoulders of mankind. The control of these new powers, in collaboration with a staff who know the secret only in sections, will be yours to deal with on these terms: You will each put your signature to the document which the Vice President has already in his hand, and you will swear by the honour of your country that you will never consent to these powers being put into operation except for the holy purpose of proving to the world, by illustration, that war be tween the nations is no longer a possible enterprise. Only if at any time the United States should be attacked by a foreign enemy will you make use of these secret controls, which I have sometimes thought in a nightmare I must have dragged up out of hell. Each one of you will appoint a successor to himself, next in rank and capacity, who will succeed him in the case of his death. Seven you are now, and seven you are to remain till the time of wars is past. This is understood?"

There was a murmur of assent, but not one of them could look away from the screen. The voice of the man who had passed on to them that awful secret had ceased. They watched like men paralysed. Not one of them realised that the miracle worker of his generation, the man who had helped to make his country almighty, was already facing the one insoluble problem.

The date of the opening of this story is April the fourteenth, 1947, some years after the granting of independence to the Philippine Islands by the United States, and subsequent to the attempted seizure of these islands by Japan, a proceeding which was followed by the greatest naval débâcle in the world's history, when the Japanese Fleet, at its full strength, was totally destroyed in the Pacific Ocean by a single battleship of the United States Navy, equipped with the full range of the Humberstone discoveries.

The characters in this story are entirely imaginary and have no relation to any living person.