A Thousand Degrees Below Zero by Murray Leinster (smart books to read .txt) 📖

A stream of explosive projectiles sped toward the menacing black shape. Teddy saw them strike the shining sides of the machine and explode with little bursts of flame. The biplane was rushing with incredible speed toward the other flyer. Teddy played his machine gun upon it as he might have played a hose, and apparently with as little effect. The tiny explosive shells struck and flashed futilely. The black flyer seemed to be unharmed. After a second's hesitation, it dropped again abruptly. The biplane shot toward the spot the other machine had occupied. The distance was too short to turn or swerve, quickly as it responded to the controls.

"Flares," gasped Davis, but before he spoke Teddy was pressing the small button that would set them off.

A burst of tiny lights shot out before the biplane, many-colored balls of fire driven forward from a tube below the fusilage. They illuminated the air for a short distance, entering the space from which the black flyer had just dropped. Teddy and Davis saw a small cloud of what seemed to be mist or fog hanging in the air. The tiny fire balls darted into it the fraction of a second before the biplane itself had to traverse the same space. As the first of the lights struck the fringe of the whitish cloud it flared up. The fire ball had touched a droplet of liquified gas and set it flaming. It burned fiercely and with incredible rapidity, setting fire to the remainder of the cloud. Teddy ducked his head as the aëroplane shot madly through a huge globe of blazing gas in mid-air.

"Great God!" gasped Davis. "Now where's Varrhus?"

The heavy masks the two aviators had worn had protected them from the flaming hydrogen, and their goggles had saved their eyes. Now Davis was only eager to make a second attempt upon the black machine. He swerved and circled. The searchlights below were waving frantically through the air. The flare aloft had been seen, and they concentrated upon the space below the spot. In a second the black flyer was once more outlined by half a dozen beams. Davis banked sharply and darted toward it again.

The pilot of the strange machine seemed to be quite confident that he had disposed of his antagonist, and was apparently busy with something inside the cabin. He was probably preparing to release his cold bomb, but was again interrupted. The biplane approached. Teddy saw his explosive bullets strike and flash. He knew they struck, but they seemed incapable of doing harm. The black flyer was clearly defined by the searchlights, and Teddy could see it distinctly. It was a long, needlelike body with a glass-inclosed cabin near the center. Above it four whirring disks of comparatively huge size showed the position of the vertical propellers that enabled it to rise and fall and to hang suspended motionless in the air. A fifth propeller spun slowly at the bow. That was evidently not running at full speed. Below the needlelike body hung a misshapen globe, like the bulging ovipositor of some strange insect.

Flash! Flash! The impact of the explosive bullets was marked by spiteful cracks as they burst. Teddy was aiming for the cabin of the machine.

"Got him!" he exclaimed.

The glass of the cabin windows had splintered into fragments. The aëroplane shot toward the motionless black flyer.

"Shall I ram?" asked Davis in a perfectly even voice. He was quite prepared to sacrifice both his and Teddy's lives to make absolutely certain of the destruction of the menacing helicopter with its more than dangerous occupant.

Teddy, with lips compressed, nodded. He had forgotten that in the darkness Davis could not see his movement. As the biplane sped forward the black machine dropped again. Again the whitish cloud was left behind it, clearly defined in the searchlight rays. Teddy had barely time to press the flare button before they reached the cloud. The mist of atomized liquid hydrogen seemed to burst into flame all about them. The aëroplane roared through hell-fire for a moment. Flame was before Teddy's aviator's goggles. He was in a veritable inferno. Then the aëroplane shot free again.

"Ram him!" panted Teddy. "Smash him! Do anything, only we've got to get him!"

They circled swiftly, searching for the black flyer. The searchlights were following him now, and they saw that he was rising straight up. He had not yet dropped his cold bomb. Davis put his machine at the ascent at as steep an angle as he dared. They climbed almost as rapidly as the helicopter. The black machine made its first aggressive move now. Davis was climbing in a jerky spiral, rising at an amazing speed. Teddy was busily fitting a new belt of cartridges into his machine gun. The pilot of the other machine darted to one side and a huge cloud of mist sprang into being just below him, darting downward like some pale-gray snake, unfolding itself in the sky. Davis zoomed sharply. Another second and he would have run into the whitish cloud. The biplane recovered and swerved to one side. Twelve thousand feet. Thirteen thousand feet. Fourteen thousand feet. Three miles in the air! Then the black flyer began to drop. The biplane dived after him, Teddy's machine-gun spitting fire and explosive bullets in a furious, well-directed blast. Once, twice, bursts of the little flashes that showed his bullets were striking served to reassure Teddy, but the biplane could not gain on the falling helicopter.

Down, down——There were half a dozen quick bursts of flame in the air. Anti-aircraft guns were firing. The black flyer dropped unharmed. Barely a thousand feet above the waters of the bay, the propeller at the bow seemed to be put into motion, for the straight descent changed into a graceful curve. The curve flattened out, and the black machine ceased to fall. It sped madly for the Narrows, with a bedlam of bursting shells all about it and the vengeful, spitting two-seater darting after it like an avenging Nemesis. Again and again spurts of flame against the body of the glistening helicopter showed that Teddy's fire was well directed, but the machine shot onward in a furious rush for the Narrows. Above the Narrows, without pausing, a black object that turned to white in the searchlight rays fell from the misshapen globe below the center of the black flyer's body. The thing that fell seemed to leave a mist of fog behind it as it dropped. Then, its mission accomplished, the dark machine fled toward the west.

Teddy and Davis, in the biplane, sped after it at the topmost speed of which their aëroplane was capable. Teddy was nearly insane with baffled rage and disappointment. He knew that he had failed. Another cold bomb had been dropped in the Narrows, and any attempt to destroy it would only result in the death of those who made the attempt.

"Faster, faster!" he pleaded to Davis. "If it gets far ahead of us we'll lose it in the darkness."

Davis pressed his lips together and used every artifice he knew of to increase the speed of his machine, but the glistening black body ahead of them drew steadily farther away. At last it could barely be seen. Then, as if in derision, a light appeared in the cabin of the black flyer. It winked oddly. Dot-dash, dot-dash——

"He's signaling," said Davis.

Dot-dash, dot-dash——

"W-a-t-c-h," spelled Davis, "t-h-e M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i.—V-a-r-r-h-u-s."

"Watch the Mississippi, Varrhus," repeated Teddy. "He's getting away! He's getting away!"

The light ahead of them winked and disappeared. The sky was empty except for the biplane roaring after a vanished enemy.

"He's gotten away," half sobbed Davis. "Damn him! He killed Curtiss, and he's gotten away!"

Teddy stared into the empty night with something of Davis' disappointment and despair.

CHAPTER IX.

Next morning the world read at its breakfast table that the Mississippi River had frozen over just below St. Louis, and that the water was rising rapidly. The river had frozen solidly up to the surface. The level rose, and the water started to flow over the top of the ice cake, only to be turned into ice as it did so. Hour by hour the level rose, and hour by hour the solid ice barrier rose with the water level. Men had tried to blast a way through for the rushing waters, but without effect. As fast as the water tried to flow through the opening made by a charge of dynamite it froze again and plugged the hole through which it was attempting to escape.

Hastily improvised levees were thrown up, but the water outstripped the efforts of the builders. The lower part of St. Louis was flooded, and a great part of the population made homeless. Then low-lying lands beside the river were gradually submerged. In twenty-four hours there were calls for help all along the upper part of the Mississippi Valley. The rising water had flooded immense areas of cultivated land, and even larger areas were threatened. In another day a thousand square miles of crops were under water, and the loss in live stock was assuming formidable proportions. The new cold bomb in New York harbor had crept up to the Battery, as Teddy had foreseen. The Norfolk cold bomb had exploded, fortunately without loss of life. Gibraltar had witnessed three almost simultaneous blasts, and was again free of ice, but the whole world knew that it was at the mercy of Varrhus.

Davis, Evelyn, and Teddy were discussing the matter dolefully. Davis had been coming to the laboratory daily in the hopes of hearing that Teddy had devised some plan for the frustration of Varrhus' ambitious schemes. Teddy found himself liking Davis immensely, but with a peculiarly illogical annoyance that Evelyn seemed to like him quite as well. When he had phoned her of his safety after the fight with Varrhus he could hear a flood of thankfulness in her voice, but when he saw her the next day she was almost distant. He saw traces of real anxiety on her face, but she had not been really natural until they had worked nearly all day on the silver bracelet, trying to find what had been done to the surface to give it its peculiar property of allowing heat to pass in one direction, but not in the other. They were as far as ever from the solution. Davis was quite ignorant of abstract chemistry or physics and could not join in their discussions, but Teddy fancied that he was much more interested in Evelyn than was necessary. He was annoyed to find that he resented it. He had always looked on Evelyn as a comrade, and he could not understand this feeling that took possession of him. It did not occur to him to speculate upon the fact that he found ideas coming to him much more readily when working by Evelyn's side, or that he rarely attempted anything without asking her opinion. Teddy had never thought much of romance, and he did not suspect how much Evelyn's companionship meant to him.

Davis was reiterating for the fortieth time his disappointment at Varrhus' getting away.

"We almost had him," he said disgustedly. "Our explosive bullets were playing all over his infernal flying machine. We'd have landed one in that little glass cabin of his and smashed him nicely in another minute, when he skipped off like that. And I'll swear to it we were doing a hundred and eighty miles an hour."

"He ran away from us pretty easily," said Teddy dismally. "Isn't there a faster machine than yours we could get hold of?"

"Nothing but a single-seater, and not so much faster at that," said Davis. "A hundred and ninety-five is the best even the latest single-seater combat planes will do at a low altitude."

"Even for a short burst of speed?" asked Evelyn.

"Diving, you'll run up faster than that," Davis explained. "When we went straight down after Varrhus, we must have gone over two hundred, but for straightaway work we've nothing that will catch Varrhus."

"What's the official speed record?" asked Evelyn, toying with a test tube. She looked singularly pretty in the long white apron she wore in the laboratory.

"Two hundred and fifteen, I think," said Davis. "Some Spanish aviator made it. He'd doped his gas with picric acid, though."

"What does that do?" asked Teddy quickly.

"It's explosive, and about doubles the force of your explosions. It eats your engines right up, though. They used to use it in motor-boat races until a rule was made against it. You see, an engine is ruined after twenty minutes or so, and it made the racing unfair for people who couldn't buy a new engine for every race."

Teddy's face grew thoughtful.

"Picric acid," he said meditatively. "Suppose we used it in the gas of your plane. Would we have a chance of catching Varrhus?"

"I don't know," Davis said thoughtfully. "I hardly think so. It would make our speed better, but if it were anything of a chase our motors would be ruined before we'd