Raiders Invisible Page 5
But as he lay there, apparently still senseless, Chris was grapplingwith the seemingly hopeless problem. So, even when he felt thetingling coldness of a spray of water on his cheeks, not one line ofhis face moved, nor did the tiniest flutter of eyelids betray him.
Although the fumbled landing in the jungle had been a catastrophe, ithad granted him his only weapon. He was believed to be genuinelyunconscious.
"Another--he iss stubborn," hissed the voice of the man calledIstafiev. "His senses will soon come. I can bring them back--oh,yess!"
"Enough of this!" complained the suave, beautifully modulated voice."Darkness is coming; there's a lot to be done. Shoot him and throw himout!"
"It iss I who am in command here, comrade Kashtanov. Remember that. Idesire to speak to this man. There! No? No sign yet? Well! We willsee if this helps those eyes of yours to open, my American!"
Then began sheer torture.
* * * * *
It was an ordeal of silence. By no motion, sound or slightest sign ofconsciousness could he seek relief. Inanimate Chris Travers lay,holding his pose sturdily, although it seemed that the sweat wasspurting from the pores, while a thin, cruel knife-blade drove intothe quivering nerves beneath his left thumb-nail.
Deeper and deeper it inched, accompanied by the soft breathing of theman who guided it, until Chris felt one great sob of pain welling upinside him, struggling to break past his lips; felt a tremendous urgeto writhe, to break away from the digging steel. His tongue seemed tobe trembling, shivering; but no other part of his body, not even thesmallest flicker of eyelash, betrayed him. At long last there came avoice, sounding as if from miles away, and the disgust in it was verygood to Lieutenant Christopher Travers.
"Bah! It iss no use. His thick skull must be fractured. I could cuthim open and he would not awake. He might be conscious for minutesafter some hours--no, do not shoot him. I shall learn a few detailsfrom him then. Throw him over there. Now--Zenalishin iss dead, but themask and cylinder on him should be returned to visibility. Well, wewill return him, too. Then, Kashtanov, to your instructions and yourwork."
Hands gripped Chris's body. He felt himself thud against a wall, andslumped into a heap, head lolling over. The cessation of pain wassweet, though his thumb was raw, but sweeter still was the knowledgethat he had won the first tussle: that he was deemed to be harmlesslyunconscious for hours.
And carefully, through his lashes, he permitted himself a glimpse ofthe room he lay in, and the men whom he had heard and felt but not yetseen.
* * * * *
It seemed more like the belly of a submarine than a room, that maze oftubes, levers, wheels, switchboards and queer metallic shapes; and theblur cast upon his vision by barely raised eyelashes made it appeardoubly unreal and grotesque. It might have been another world.
Some of it was recognizable. A massive radio-telephone set, by which,he judged, all communications between the fleets in the Pacific wereoverheard; a squat dynamo; a set of huge cylinders, from which,probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out thecrews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things--strange,monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up tothe hut's ceiling, its base a mass of wheels and dials and tubing, wasevidently the weapon of the ray that had struck the scout down.
There were three men visible in the room, and Chris switched hisattention now to them.
Two were standing by a table in the center of the room, directly undera shaft of light from a powerful electric bulb. The shorter of themwas saying to a third man, who knelt in front of the dynamo:
"On full." Then, as a full-throated drone pulsed from it: "Zenalishiniss there? Yess. Put him in."
The voice of the hissing s's--that was Istafiev. Short, stocky,black-haired, he was a direct contrast to the tall figure next him ofone whose pointed black beard gave elegance to sharp, thin features.He carried a gun at his waist, and he identified himself as Kashtanovby saying languidly:
"Better strap him in. He'll fall, otherwise. Get some cord; I'll lifthim."
The other man, by the dynamo, apparently a subordinate mechanic,dull-faced, drew a loop of cord from a box nearby, while Kashtanovwent through actions that seemed fantastic. He stooped, groped alongthe floor, and then gripped what looked like thin air with his fingersand lifted upwards. But it wasn't air, Chris knew; it was theinvisible body of a man--the man who had destroyed the ZX-2, the manwhom he had shot at in the cubby of the ZX-1--whose invisibility wasnow to be stripped from him.
By what? Carefully Chris swivelled his gaze around until it caught onan object which dwarfed Istafiev, now waiting by its side with onehand on the small panel of a switchboard.
* * * * *
A strange thing, truly, to find in a little hut on Azuero Peninsula!Row upon row of slender curved tubes, describing a three-quarter ovoidso that there was an opening for entrance in front, rose to a heightof some eight feet, the whole topped by a curious glassy dome whichwas filled with creamy substance. There was room inside the layers oftubes for a man's body to stand upright--and a man's body was uprightin it now, held by cords strapped to his unseen arms.
Invisibility! The dream of scientists for years! Here created, heretaken away--by the simple manipulation of two levers on the controlpanel.
Intently Chris watched Istafiev pull down the right-side lever.
As it came down, the creamy liquid in the dome above the cage began toswirl slowly, then to froth and boil and whip round and round, whilethick, dropsical bubbles slid up from its heaving surface and burst,discharging a kind of grayish mist, under which the white substancesank, until there was nothing left in the dome but drab-colored vapor.On the completion of this stage, the layers of tubes below warmedinto life. They glowed with a soft vari-colored brightness that filledthe cage with a golden splendor and seemed to rim each one of thewatching men with fire.
"See you, Kashtanov," came Istafiev's voice. "The refractive index,lowered to that of air to produce invisibility, iss being raisedagain--all through a simple adaptation of Roentgen's theories! Thesubstance above, mark, in the dome, which this morning you saw affectZenalishin's blood and the pigment of his hair so that the vibrationswould render his colorless tissues transparent, iss now reversing.Soon--see!--already he becomes visible!"
Something was growing in the heart of the ribbons of color, and Chrisstrained his shrouded eyes to discern what it was.
Black lines, standing out in the dazzling welter of light--lines thatgrew and became more solid as he peered at them--lines that wereshaping into a recognizable form, the form of a man's skeleton!
The effect was that of an X-ray. A skeleton hung in the cage, heldsteady by the cords around its arms, its naked skull with yawningeye-pits grinning out at the four men in the room. Soon other detailsbecame visible: black lumps that were organs, the web of fine thinlines that were veins; and then a hazy, ghostly outline of flesh thatquickly assumed solidity, burying the bones and veins and organs whichhad been first apparent.
* * * * *
And all the time the dynamo was filling the hut with its sweepingdrone, and the million points of light flung from the intercrossingflame-tongues inside the cage were dancing madly on the walls andfloor and ceiling, making the whole scene unreal, fantastic, as from adream....
"There! That iss enough," said Istafiev.
The lever went back. The streaks of blue-white that threaded the cagedied; the grayish vapor in the dome above faded away, leaving more ofthe creamy, bleaching substance than had been there originally; thedynamo was shut off, and silence fell in the room. A naked man with avery white, peaked face and a blotch of blood encrimsoning his neckhung inside the cage, his head pitched over lifelessly to one side.
Chris stared, almost forgetting the pose of unconsciousness in hisbewilderment. A queer
mechanism shaped in the form of a cylinder fromsome oddly sparkling, almost transparent material, was clasped to thenude body's chest: over the nose and mouth was another smallattachment of the same substance. A nozzle midway in the largecylinder's front side gave him the clue: from it, obviously, had comethe gas which had strangled the crews of the dirigibles, and thecovering over nose and mouth was a novel gas mask. The material theywere made of could, obviously, be rendered invisible--a virtue notpossessed by ordinary inorganic substances. Invisible death from aninvisible container, carried by an invisible man!
"Yess, dead," hissed Istafiev, probing the motionless, naked body. "Hejust got here, told what had happened, and died. He was hurt too badlyto think of taking off the gas cylinder or putting on a coat. Well, itmakes no difference.... Here, Grigory, take off the mask and cylinderand bury him. And you, Kashtanov, look well at this."
From the table, he