Читать книгу Lords of 9016 - John Russell Fearn - Страница 3

Table of Contents

I have no guarantee that this manuscript will ever reach you. Frankly, I am not altogether concerned about it, but if it does you will gain the first clear idea of what really happened in that troublous year of 1953.

I landed in the whole business by the sheerest accident. In those days I was a salesman, covering the country from New York to California, but one summer evening found me stranded, out of gas, five miles from the town of Dornford. There was nothing for me to do but to trudge.

I remember the scene clearly. Dornford was one of those straggling little places, a conglomeration of back to front shacks, one postoffice and filling station.

Even as I came over the brow of the hill leading into Dornford I felt sure there was something wrong. I cannot explain why, but there was a conviction of strangeness in the air, a strong persuasion of unexpected things. The place didn’t look right somehow.

Have your ever seen a place desolated by an unexpected and ruthless foe? Seen it lying, strangely, indefinably quiet, in a western sun? If so, you can understand how I felt when I saw Dornford.

My puzzlement deepened as I advanced. It was not the first time I had seen this particular town by any means, but it was certainly the first time I had ever seen it utterly deserted. There was not a living thing moving. Here and there automobiles were standing idle; others had obviously collided with fences and buildings and overturned. On the main street the garage was open. I went across to it, but on looking inside beheld work unfinished. A tire lay on the floor, semi-inflated; in a far corner a car was slung in the air on ancient block and tackle—but of people there was no sign!

“Hey!” I yelled, cupping my hands. “Hello there! Everybody dead?”

But only my voice came back. Emerging again I stared out on the pasture fields. They were empty. A solitary hay-wagon, minus horse, had tipped forward with the animal’s sudden removal.

I think I spent the remaining time until night in scouring what few open houses I could find, but there wasn’t a trace of a living soul. It gave me the jitters, I must admit. Finally, I filled a can with gas, left payment on the bench, and returned to my car.

That, I say, is how the business started. I told police in the next village, Craytown, of what had occurred and they set off to investigate. Next morning the newspapers were full of the astounding occurrence. The mystery of Dornford had leaped into sudden and vivid prominence. The abrupt disappearance of some eight hundred people, together with animals, was undoubtedly front-page copy—and on arriving in New York two days later I found it was the main topic of conversation.

Had the Dornford mystery remained in its unsatisfactory condition it would probably have been relegated to the world’s unexplained mysteries.

But it wasn’t allowed to die, for not a week later the amazing news was flashed all over America that the people of Craytown had also utterly disappeared!

In consequence, law officials and scientists gathered in their legions in the deserted towns of Dornford and Craytown, but not a trace of anything did they find. One of the scientists was Moore Ladbrook, an old college chum of mine, so upon his return to New York I made it my business to find out his views. Not that I am, or ever was, very scientific, but being so closely connected with the Dornford riddle my curiosity was naturally aroused.

I found Ladbrook at his home. Still in his early thirties he had already earned an enviable position for himself in the sphere of science, but even so it had not caused him to lose touch with less interesting people like myself. I found him as cordial as ever.

“Thought you were traveling, Dick,” he said casually, offering me his cigarette case.

“Not at the moment,” I told him. “I’m off the road for another week yet—vacation, you know. Frankly, I want your opinion on Dornford and Craytown.”

“I wish I could give you one,” he answered slowly. “Our investigations revealed no sign of anything living in either village, nor for miles around. Not even a trace of a struggle or strange footprints. That those people melted into thin air is well nigh inconceivable. I have dared to toy around with the idea of visitors from another world—carnivorous visitors, perhaps, but in that theory I’m hampered by the absence of any space machine.

“No one ever saw a ship approach the Earth. The only solution is that the invaders, granting there are any, have solved the secret of invisibility. I’m not at all satisfied with the investigations myself; in two days’ time I’m examining the matter again, with special instruments. Maybe you’d care to join me?”

“Count me in,” I nodded promptly, and drew on my cigarette as he went on theorizing in his clipped, matter-of-fact voice.

That same night, just when I was returning from Ladbrook’s to my uptown apartment, the earthquake came. It arrived, if I remember rightly, at a quarter after eleven, the most unexpected occurrence New York had ever witnessed.

I had been heading for a subway entrance when the disaster happened. The sidewalk seemed to rise up suddenly and hit me! I was hurled into the gutter with numbing force, twisted round.

I directed my gaze to a sudden amazing scene of toppling destruction.

New York rocked to its very depths. The taller buildings overbalanced and hurled their masonry with the force of shattering tons into the canyons of streets below. Roadways split in twain, swallowing up the yelling, stampeding people. Cars reeled and skidded sideward into suddenly smoking gulfs. Amidst a rending and tearing of twisted, tortured steel an elevated hurtled clean off its riven track into the chaos beneath, turned itself into a mad, flaming ribbon of screaming death.

Windows cracked, fire leaped from warping, crumbling façades; subways sloughed and gulped downward in whirling vortices of sulphuric smoke. Trains themselves were smothered in the maw of inwardly hurtling rock and earth.

Ships in the harbor, seized in a smashing, inrushing tidal wave, splintered themselves to matchwood.

This ripple, this stupendous fault—as we then considered it—engulfed the entire continent, repatterned whole mountains, gave birth to new rivers and valleys, changed the entire topography of the United States in one overwhelming sweep. In twenty minutes of inconceivable convulsion America was reformed, recreated out of the shattering ear-splitting thunder of changing land.

I was caught up in the midst of a whirling mob of humanity, was punched and pounded helplessly before a battling, screaming flood. My ears were filled with the din of collapsing buildings, and subsiding earth; my eyes were blurred with clouds of dust and thickly rolling smoke.

Somehow, by an unknown mercy, I survived without undue mishap, found myself eventually in ruined, flaming Broadway, lending a hand in rescue work.

Throughout the long, hideous night I labored, carrying the dead and dying, moving wreckage, delving into smoky, scorching cavities, until at last a ragged dawn crept over the subsiding chaos and the survivors began to take stock of their infinitely changed and battered surroundings.

I need hardly record the fact that the almost total destruction of the American continent wrought worldwide havoc and repercussions, both elemental and financial. Everyone was alarmed, gravely concerned for his safety, so much so that the scientists suddenly came into public demand. Their investigations on the mystery of Dornford and Craytown were shelved—but not by Moore Ladbrook.

A week after the disaster I managed to trace him again. He had sought refuge with other scientists in the half demolished research offices of the Science Institute.

When I did find him he was in a grimly determined mood.

“Fools—all of them!” he declared flatly, pacing up and down the dust-smothered laboratory. “The other scientists are out searching for the cause of the fault that’s ruined this continent. A fault, mind you! Good God, anybody with a grain of sense could see it was caused by some tremendous internal upheaval—the sudden removal of thousands of tons of solid matter; a repatterning of structure.”

“But what caused it?” I insisted.

“Something living, something breathing—down below. People perhaps. Beasts of some sort.” He came to a sudden halt, swung about on me. “In any case I’m going to find out while the others are fooling around with their earthquake equipment. You know perhaps that, two miles south of Dornford, there’s a hole—a veritable crater—two miles across and of unknown depth?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I nodded.

“Well, I’m going there—right now. Fortunately I’ve managed to secure a helicopter, have had it loaded with instruments and fitted with searchlights. I’m going down that hole, Dick! The others think I’m crazy. Perhaps they’re right, but I’m going just the same. Care to come?”

I looked dubious.

“It’s only a mile to the airport,” he went on. “Either I’m crazy, or else I’m scientist enough to realize that some new form of life is at work under our very feet. You don’t have to come—but I’d be glad to have you.”

“I’ll come,” I said, not because I’m a brave man but because the idea gripped me with sudden fascination. Ladbrook merely nodded in that cursory way of his, snatched up his hat, and we set off together through crumbled, riven streets to the airport.

Half an hour later saw us streaking westward in that powerful machine, Ladbrook the pilot. I noticed, with some doubts as to the future, that it was an entirely enclosed machine, hermetically sealed, air being supplied from some slightly hissing tanks in the rear.

“Never can tell what sort of poison gas is escaping out of that hell hole westward,” he explained curtly, when I drew his attention to the matter. “It’s emitting poisonous fumes same as all the rest of the volcanic craters. We’ll be okay. We’ve gas helmets as well if necessary.”

He was damnably cheerful in the face of what looked like certain death to me.

I didn’t say anything. I began to think I was a darned fool for agreeing with the idea anyhow.

I turned my eyes to the speeding landscape a thousand feet below, took in the twisted ground, the changed rivers, the flooded areas, the disrupted and toppled towns. The earthquake had certainly been a thorough and devastating piece of work. Sometimes we passed over scientific units, complete with equipment.

Invariably they drew snorts of rage from my friend.

“Fools! They imagine they can find the cause of an earthquake that’s countrywide! If they’d consider the idea of unknown beings they’d get somewhere perhaps.”

“Beings that sort of arrived from nowhere and cleaned up the inner surface?” I suggested acidly.

“They didn’t arrive from nowhere; that’s illogical. They came from somewhere very definite. We’ll be seeing for ourselves before long.”

He relapsed into silence again and nearly an hour later we beheld the smoking streak on the horizon that denoted our goal. My nerves began to tighten; I felt oddly like a man suddenly summoned to the electric chair. Casting a quick glance at Ladbrook I beheld his face set and carven, his eyes gazing steadily at his destination.

His fingers gently eased the controls that sent the fast moving plane down toward the disturbance.