CHAPTER XIX
RED MADNESS STALKING THE EARTH
Days of grim activity in Graff's camp followed. I think Graff had no intimation of the reason for the earth's defiance; he seemed to feel that our governments were fool-hardy, stupid—stubborn beyond the point of human reason. He had been in a towering rage, but that passed. He moved about his tasks now with a cool, careful efficiency. But I could see a certain almost awed grimness about him for the diabolical nature of this thing he was doing.
His mood was reflected in all his men. And they changed toward me. Never more than contemptuously tolerant, they were now openly hostile. Gibing at me, the earthman.
I was passing one morning down the line of flimsy houses which was the main street of the camp. A woman leaped from a doorway and struck me in the face. My guard was at hand. Graff never let me move anywhere without an armed man to watch me. He said to protect me, especially from the giant insects which lurked about the camp, and which, in truth, I always feared; but I knew Graff's motive was to watch that I did not try to escape. The woman struck and reviled me until my guard pulled her away.
Graff had sent a globe at once to Africa, to order back his force operating there. It came in, crowding our camp. Near the north line of our barrage Graff built a small stone house. Within it the control globes were being erected. He would never let me or Zetta near it.
The barrage throughout its entire circumference was strengthened. All our projectors were in use, triple-banked in some places. Graff had built a chemical laboratory in the camp. His scientists had for weeks been working in it, endeavoring to produce the Reet current on earth for a renewal of the storage tanks which had been brought from Xenephrene. I was now barred from this building; they were working in it on the Control-globe mechanisms.
Above our camp a flying platform now constantly hovered at a ten-thousand foot altitude. It spread a thin, red barrage like a ceiling above us. Graff anticipated that he would be attacked more vigorously than ever before; he said so to me once, with his sardonic smile—and he had not forgotten that one aviator who had dropped a bomb upon us.
By August 14 our force had returned from Africa, our lines about our base were strengthened, the Control-globes were erected in the little house, and everything was ready. About the camp, and at intervals five miles out to the barrage line, small projectors the size of a man's hand had been erected; wires in conduits ran from them back to the laboratory. There must have been fifty or more.
On the afternoon of August 14 a current was turned into them. They hummed gently; when the twilight and night came, I saw them emitting a faint purple radiance. Within an hour it hung over the camp—over all the inside area of the barrage—like a purple haze. The haze I had seen in the air of Xenephrene. It was to protect us here, in our enclosed area, from the effects of this thing we were about to broadcast over the earth!
A week from that night over Miami when we were defied—and now Graff was ready. An anxious week for me. A thousand times I had thought of a thousand vague plans of something desperate I might do. But what? I was more closely guarded than ever before. A very pseudo-liberty was all that was permitted me.
Zetta, in a few snatches of talk I had alone with her, still seemed to think she might persuade Graff to stop. Futile hope! Her brave endeavors had from the first been futile. At last, she seemed convinced.
A wariness of manner, an alert, calculating look whenever she was with Graff, came upon her. I can only guess now, what thoughts and plans were behind that grim, masklike little face. She said nothing of her thoughts to me; there seemed suddenly an added estrangement between us.
During the evening of August 14, while I was watching the purple haze, Graff sought me. Zetta was near him.
"We are ready, Peter. I thought that you and Zetta would like to see these little globes that are so powerful to triumph for us."
"Walk out to the Control house?"
"Yes. I am going now to turn the current into the Red Globe."
I strove not to show my emotion; I thought he might dismiss my guard—and he, Zetta and I might take the walk alone. If I could watch my chance and spring upon him.
But he bade the guard follow close behind us. It was a dark, overcast night. Our little town by the dried river bank was almost in the center of the circular barrage lines. From here it was some five miles to the north of the barrage.
We walked over the slightly undulating dead-gray waste of what had been the Brazilian farm country. The ground was covered with a gray dust, like burned powder. Graff and Zetta and my guard could have leaped over the distance in a few minutes. Graff was impatient, contemptuous of my slow progress. He forced me forward at a trot.
We passed the occasional towers he had built; a few sailing platforms on the summits of the slopes. The purple projectors standing on the ground at intervals were all humming, casting up their purple haze into the still night air.
Ahead of us loomed the red curtain of the barrage. The night now was filled with its howl. A Braun appeared from the darkness—one of the interior ground guards. His white, half-naked body, with bullet head of clipped white hair, was edged, lurid with the reflected crimson glow. Goggles were on his eyes—thick glass cones projecting out grotesquely; his ears were muffled with small wire grids. He spoke to Graff, and stood deferentially aside to let us pass.
The stone house was set close behind the barrage, bathed in the crimson—a small, one-storied house with a single door and no windows. At the door two guards stopped us. My personal guards waited outside. The room we entered was tiny, with one small white light. Evidently the sleeping room of these two interior guards. They wore goggles and ear-grids, and tight trousers and smock of black, insulating fabric; a cap with a black mask, now raised; and black gloves. Here, near the broadcasting of the Infra-red Control, exposed to its nearness over a long period, the men needed utter protection. A rack on the wall held other similar protecting garments, masks, goggles and ear-grids. "We will not need them," said Graff. "We will be here but a moment. Jus' a moment—but long enough!"
The room had one interior doorway—a small, round opening with a heavy bull's-eye door. We stooped to pass through; emerging into a low, black-vaulted room. On a small railed platform stood the two little globes. Another man was here, robed in the tight-fitting black garments; gloved, masked and goggled. Grotesque executioner! He murmured to Graff, and stood aside.
There was a tense moment. The room was dim, and dead silent. No windows. No opening save the round doorway into the room through which we had entered.
Graff said slowly: "We will give them a few hours of the Red vibrations—to-night and to-morrow perhaps, and then broadcast from the purple globe—restore normality." He added grimly: "We will see then what they say, Peter."
The two globes were white, opaque and silent. Graff turned to a switch. For the first time that evening Zetta spoke; an involuntary cry of protest.
"No! Graff—no!" She gripped him, but he thrust her roughly aside. I was tense; I think then I was about to leap upon Graff. But from the hand of the black-robed man a weapon was pointing quietly, menacingly at me.
Graff's face was grimly inscrutable. He reached up suddenly and threw the switch. The dim light from somewhere in the room faded and vanished. A crimson glow from one of the globes took its place; the other globe stood milk-white, silent, alert.
A humming. From the grid over the active globe a faint red beam was streaming. It spread; it deepened; it streamed out through the solid black wall of the room. I stared after it. Sidewise—upward; I seemed to be gazing out into a black illimitable distance, red-tinted. Long unearthly vibrations, broadcast now around our world! They were already around and back again and starting anew.
"Come," said Graff's voice abruptly. "That's all."
The black-masked operator was seated at his little table, watching his dials. The red globe had settled to its steady hum as we left the room. Strangely brief, undramatic scene! I sensed that Graff had made it so—a cloak to hide what emotions sweeping him, only he would ever know. A matter-of-fact casualness.
Yet I have never witnessed a scene of such potential horror. A small stone house, black-vaulted room with its lone, black-garbed man. Just a single small globe, faintly humming, glowing crimson. But I knew that within a day or so our great earth would be at its mercy!
Back on Xenephrene, in Garla that evening at the Stadium, there had followed a night of confusion. With the Infra-red Control stolen, the Garlands were in a panic. The frightened people had rushed for the grottos; by the time the authorities were able to bring order, the night had passed. At dawn, pursuit had started for the Braun city. Too late. Graff's expedition had left for earth. The Brauns remaining on Xenephrene learned now their leader's duplicity. They, too, were stricken with fear and horror.
There is an old saying on earth, "When the devil is sick, the devil a monk would be!" The Garland authorities were very ready to listen to father now! They sent at once for him and Dan and Freddie. They begged his advice; there was nothing they would not do to help him, if only he could suggest a way to get back the Control.
Their scientists had spent years refining by slow process the vital elements necessary to its construction. The work had started when Xenephrene came within the first faint rays of our sunlight. There was no time now to repeat that process. Unless they could remove the Control, within a few months, at most, they were doomed.
They had been truthful in telling father that there was no interplanetary vehicle ready in Garla. And Graff had left none in his Braun city. There was only the small vehicle in which Dan, Freddie and I had arrived. It was decided that father and his earth people were to return in this globe to earth at once, taking Kean with them. Kean could be taught by father how to navigate the vehicle. If on earth the Control were recovered from Graff, Kean would bring it back to Garla.
They waited about a week, gathering weapons and equipment with which to fight Graff on earth.
The globe was too small to take very much. They brought to earth four giant projectors of the purple ray with which to stab neutral openings in Graff's barrage; a projector of the crimson barrage itself; and the insulating equipment for some four hundred persons—black-hooded suits, masks, gloves, Infra-red goggles and ear-grids.
It seemed very little, but the best that could be done. The Garlands promised to rush another vehicle to earth with other weapons. But the vehicle would be some weeks yet in construction, and the distance between the worlds was daily lengthening.
It was, even now, a long voyage for father's party. They arrived—dropped into the Everglades on the evening of August 7—as I have told. Father, at the conference, would have none of the idea of surrender. And the delegates from the World Powers, heartened with the weapons now at hand, with Freddie and Dan vigorously stating that they knew how to use them—reversed their decision. The searchlight beam held steady with its defiance.
Both Dan and Freddie have since told me how forcefully father spoke in Miami that night. On Xenephrene an ineffectiveness had seemed to be upon him. I had noticed it. A strange world, among strange people where he had lived and worried all those months, had beaten him down. He had seemed years older; an almost querulous, ineffectual old man.
Subconsciously realizing this, Dan, Freddie and I had discarded him from all our planning. But back on earth, among his own people, his own environment, his forceful character returned.
He told them, that night at the conference, about the Control. It was disturbing news. But Graff obviously had not used the Control as yet. Perhaps on earth it would not operate.
There was much to do before Graff could be seriously attacked. Four Arctic A warplanes were to be equipped with the four purple ray projectors. They were to be armed with long-range Essen-Bloc guns. These guns, developed in the early fifties, just before the Great Change, were for aircraft use in war.
They fired a peculiarly destructive shell which, it was thought, would be most effective against the light Xenephrene structures—Graff's space-vehicles and his flying platforms. There also was the crimson barrage projector to be assembled and mounted. And a fighting force of some two hundred planes, whose pilots and gunners were all to be black-garbed and goggled.
It would take a week or two for these preparations. The attack would be made against Graff's Brazilian base; it was found now that his mid-African force had withdrawn and returned to Brazil. All the Xenephrenes were concentrated there; it was exactly what the earth leaders most desired.
There was a week of complete inactivity from Graff. Scouting planes, ordered not to approach too close, reported that his barrage seemed deepening in color and sound; and he had placed a red radiance overhead. His inactivity seemed threatening to the Miami authorities. All the earth preparations were going hurriedly forward in Miami.
It seemed an ominous lull, while both sides were preparing. Graff, it was hoped, did not know what the earth was planning. He would be taken completely by surprise. One great surprise rush, by night. They believed in Miami that they would be ready by about August 20.
The world publics waited, expectant. The news of the arrival of weapons from Garla was hushed and suppressed lest by some chance it get to Graff. The world public was fed with radio propaganda; the invaders had withdrawn from Africa because they feared the earth's attack; they were concentrated in Brazil—their power to harm earth was lessening; soon the earth forces would fall upon them; destroy them. Or perhaps even now, the Xenephrenes were planning to withdraw from earth, as they had before.
Upon such opiate as this the public was fed. It is always so in times of war! Newspapers printed pages of learned technical explanation of what would happen, by all the laws of mathematics and logic, when once the world powers went into battle. Newspaper experts analyzed the scientific facts from every angle, reaching always the same triumphant solution—experts who knew no more of the real facts than did their readers. And the public waited expectant.
Freddie and Dan, chafing at their forced inactivity, persuaded the Miami authorities to let them try Freddie's heat ray, in advance of the main earth attack. It was Freddie's plan, and father also agreed to its merit. Graff would be suspicious at this long silence from his enemy—just as Miami was daily growing more suspicious of him.
Freddie's projector could create, with a two-mile range, a heat of some three hundred degrees Fahrenheit; it had a three-mile range, if the heat were concentrated to a six-foot striking area. Graff's barrage was vertical. Its horizontal area of danger was no more than five or six hundred feet.
In a muffled, unlighted plane, selecting a dark night, Freddie and Dan could get within a few miles of the barrage; the heat might wreck some of the barrage mechanism. There was no one to say whether these heat vibrations would penetrate the crimson glow or not. It had never been tried. And at least it would create a diversion which Graff would think a normal earth attack. He would expect none other for a time.
Freddie and Dan planned to start on the night of August 15. By evening of August 14 they were in the Miami War Department, receiving last admonitions. The official radio was droning its routine messages.
There was a sudden interference. A chaos of weird voices such as only the radio—particularly in the old pioneer days—could produce. The interference grew worse; then the radio went dead. The telegraphs, telephones and undersea cables all had sudden interference, but they kept in operation. The new "Invisible light-beam" phones, as they were popularly called, withstood it, but service was maintained under difficulty. The electric lights went dim, almost out; then brightened suddenly; and dimmed again.
This, all within a few minutes, that evening of August 14. In Miami, and all over the world it was the same. And then, almost unnoticed at first, slowly, insidiously, inexorably, the reign of the Red Madness began. The great mass of people throughout the world did not understand it, had no idea what was happening to them. They called it, they still call it, the Red Madness.
It began with a feeling of uneasiness. An oppression. The feeling one has sometimes when the barometer falls in the lull before a coming storm; the feel, as they would say, of electricity in the air. Thousands said that, undoubtedly. A growing uneasiness. The countries in the daylight felt it most.
The sick, the weak, the nervous, were most quickly affected. In hospitals there was a sudden hysteria among the patients. In a Miami hospital early that evening an old woman patient ran screaming and laughing, screaming that red demons were after her. Perhaps, of all the millions, she was the first.
She leaped into the street; Freddie and Dan recall her shuddering scream and eerie laughter as it floated into the open windows of the War Department.
At the War Department the reports from abroad were increasingly alarming. Within an hour every official channel of communication was cluttered with news. A diversity impossible to picture! At first, abnormality in the sick, the old, and the very young. Infants wailing, unable to sleep; old people stricken with hysteria, a morbid, weeping melancholia, or a wild frenzy of madness.
A lone old man suddenly gone mad; then, not only old people—a mob rushing screaming down a city street; a great airliner very nearly plunging into the China Sea because its pilot was laughing uncontrollably, and then weeping with realization of the tragedy he had so nearly caused.
People in crowded Oriental villages running amok, shot down by the police. A Miami surgeon at an operation killed his patient with a sudden vicious stroke and cried like a child that he had done it. A thousand incongruous, horrible incidents.
From every quarter of the earth, medical authorities, scientific bodies and governments were demanding an explanation of Miami. And then the world of the Infra-red began showing. Not only to the infirm—to every one. The strongest man was frightened—terrified, sometimes, at his own mad desire to laugh. Vague red shapes were in the air, murmuring, chattering.
I personally did not experience any of this. Father and the others say it was at first like the sensations we had felt on Xenephrene. The red things were not so tangible or visible—nor so clearly audible, perhaps. Not at first. But every hour, every moment, they were intensifying. Soon, it was far worse.
The world could not understand, but the authorities in Miami knew at once what was happening—that Graff was using the Red Control. It promised disaster; worse, a fate unspeakable—the world gone mad.
The confusion of the Miami authorities now hastily assembled again in conference, was intensified by the red hysteria which was affecting them, as every one else.
Hulda was there; she says it was a bedlam within an hour. She sat quietly watching and listening to the red things coming out from their invisible world. She sat there terrified, not of them so much, for to her they were familiar things—terrified at what they were doing to our world.
A bedlam surged around her, in which father, Freddie and Dan strove to hold a sanity. The President of our United States, listening to what was being reported from abroad, burst into tears. He had never been in robust health; the strain of the past few days had worn his nerves nearly to the breaking point. They took him away, and by then he was laughing and raging alternately.
Out at the beach some one had given orders for the searchlight to signal a world surrender. There was no enemy to see it; but no one thought of that. It was wavering up into the sky; but no one in the War Department heeded it. Then it held steady. Then a shouting throng of people rushed it; smashed it.
Father, Freddie and Dan were busy getting the equipment they had brought from Xenephrene into hasty use. The insulated suits were unnecessary. The Infra-red glasses and ear-grids were able to bar out this storming red world. The officials donned them. With normality regained they sat together trying sanely to determine what should be done. A world going mad around them.
Even as they sat, news of the glasses and ear-grids had spread into the city; a mob was surging around the building, shouting demands that the glasses be distributed to them. A few hundred glasses and ear-grids, needed by our fighting aviators, and now the hundreds of millions of people would be demanding them!
An official at the conference seized his telephone to call the head of the Government Research laboratories, demanding that this necessary equipment be manufactured in quantity at once, for world distribution. The very madness in the air made the conference burst into gibing laughter at the futility of it.
Freddie and Dan had had the heat-projector hastily transferred to a Nungess monoplane-type flyer. A tiny affair—nothing, for their purpose, like the huge Arctic A. But it was capable of some four hundred miles an hour under favorable conditions. They donned suits of the black insulated fabric; they had the glasses and ear-grids; the heat-projector, and a small Essen-Bloc airplane gun.
Within two hours they left the chaos of the War Department, took off from an adjacent stage for Graff's Brazilian encampment. This now was no mere test attack to create a diversion! They were determined, by whatever desperate means, to stop the Red Control.
They left with the assurance that the earth's main attack would follow them in a few days. A few days! If the workmen assembling the weapons could hold their reason. The War Secretary laughed a little wildly as he said it. White-faced Hulda flung her arms around Dan, and wept. There was in her mind no other belief but that she would never see him again.