The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER IV Demon Speed

Only a few hours after the strange explosion in the Montreal hospital and the death of the plainclothesman, a driver warmed up a car on one of the big Utah salt flats where speed runs are so often made.

These salt flats are a favorite place for speed runs. Level as floors in all directions, extending for miles, the ancient shallow lake bottoms seem to have been designed by a tolerant Nature just to let speed demons have their precarious way.

To the eye, the run about to be made, so soon after The Avenger had dashed a glass of water from a dying man’s lips, didn’t look as if it would be an epochal event. The car being warmed up was of the best commercial make but was still standard. It was no special job, weighing many tons, with enormous tires and wheels, and streamlined to the last possible gasp. It was merely a big sedan. It had been tuned to the finest point of efficiency, and its tires were brand new and of the best racing variety. But these things weren’t noticeable.

A man, goggled and crash-helmeted, stood next to the car with the door open. With him was another man with a rifle slung in the hollow of his arm.

“I don’t get the idea of the gun,” said the driver.

“To keep any guys with long noses from buttin’ in and watchin’ this run,” said the man with the rifle.

“You guys are all nuts,” snorted the driver. “You have a gun. The two guys roaming around here in the old truck have guns. ‘To keep anybody from watching the run,’ you say. But who wants to sneak in and risk his life to see a stock car go maybe a hundred and ten over a salt flat?”

“You’d be surprised,” said the man.

“I don’t think you’d really shoot,” the driver said. He was a youngster with a reckless grin and a happy eye. He made his living by courting death — and showed it.

“Maybe we wouldn’t,” shrugged the man with the gun. “Start the run, will you?”

“O.K. Though what you expect is more than I can figure out. You get me because I’m supposed to be the best driver in the West. You pay me double what anybody else has ever paid me. And for what? To test out an ordinary stock job. I know to a fraction what these boats’ll do. A hundred and five is theoretically possible, but I’ll bet half the dough you’re to pay me that this buggy won’t hit a hundred.”

“Motor’s geared up,” said the man phlegmatically.

“So the motor’s geared up,” shrugged the driver. “So maybe it’ll do thirty an hour better than that. So what? When you gear up a car you lose power, and at high wind resistance the motor won’t take it any more. Your top speed isn’t much higher with a geared-up job than with ordinary ratio, unless there’s a special motor. And there’s no special in this crate. I got a flash at it when you raised the hood awhile ago.”

“You saw—” began the other.

There was a sharp, hard bark of sound off in the distance.

“Hey!” exclaimed the driver. “That was a shot! If you guys have killed anybody—”

“Keep your shirt on,” said the man with the rifle. “Just because you heard a shot don’t mean somebody got hurt.”

“I’m not working for anybody that might be a murderer,” said the driver, tugging off his crash helmet.

Over the rim of the flat appeared a truck. It was a closed van, fairly large. It came toward them with a swift silence, indicating an expensive make.

The man next to the driver of the van had a gun in his hands, too. The fellow beside the test driver stared at him as the van slid to a stop beside the big sedan. Stared and winked a little toward the angry young driver.

“Hi, George,” he said. “Heard a shot back there. What’s it all about?”

“Oh, that.” The man beside the driver laughed easily. “Just took a pot at a jackrabbit to kill time. Why?”

“Just wondered,” said the other fellow.

The driver stared from one bland face to the other, looked a little sheepish and put the helmet back on. He climbed into the sedan.

“I’ll make three runs,” he said. “One to warm her up good; one back against this little west breeze, and the last as fast as she’ll take it.”

“O.K.,” said the man with the rifle.

The big sedan slid off. And the man stared from it to the men in the cab of the van.

“The jackrabbit,” said the fellow called George, “is inside.”

The jackrabbit lay on the floor of the closed track — a thin, youngish chap with a sardonic look. He was a reporter from a Salt Lake City paper. He had gotten wind of a mysterious assignment given the well-known kid at the wheel of the sedan. Some speed test to be kept a deep secret. He had followed the youngster out here. He might have a wasted trip; he might get a scoop.

It had looked like a wasted trip when he came close enough to see the car on the flat. An ordinary large sedan. No sensation here.

Suddenly he was staring into a gun muzzle, and then at a hard face above it.

“Well, buddy?”

The reporter had tried a feeble grin but it hadn’t come off. There was death in this man’s eyes!

“I’m walking overland,” he had said. “Hitchhiking. Lost my way. If you can direct me to the nearest main highway…”

He had stopped. The man was looking at his shoes, which had only a little dust on them, at his clothes, which were too good for a hitchhiker’s.

“For heaven’s sake!” the reporter said hoarsely, when the eyes swung up to meet his gaze again. “Don’t—”

That was when the test driver had heard the shot.

If the youngster had stayed around just a moment longer he would have seen the first red trickle begin to drip from a spot on the van’s floor near the tailboard. But he had started the car too fast for that.

Behind the wheel, the first thing the kid noticed was the speedometer.

It could register up to four hundred miles an hour.

The next thing he noticed was the gear ratio.

The man with the rifle had said the car was geared up, but the test driver hadn’t expected anything like this. The lowest he could idle, even in first gear, was fourteen miles an hour. At that speed the car buckled gently with each slow beat of the motor.

At ninety, he stopped going in second speed simply because there didn’t seem any sense in going faster before shifting to high. But at ninety, in second, the motor under that standard hood was just beginning to turn over nicely. He could feel that.

“O.K.,” he said. “They’ve geared the living hell out of her. But wait till a hundred and fifty mile breeze pushes against her. The motor’ll stall then. It just can’t have the guts, at this ratio.”

So he stepped her up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour — and had a pickup left that threw him back in the seat. A pickup that slipped the car up to two hundred before he knew what had happened.

The test driver’s face began to take on an almost frightened look. Knowing cars and motors, he knew that this simply could not be. There was something of the supernatural about it!

He turned at the end of the flat, and came back. He stepped on it a bit more. The car hit two hundred and thirty.

The test driver had never before eased up on an accelerator. But at that speed, against the breeze he anticipated, he did now. This was a fine car but, after all, it was standard; and standard wheel-bearings aren’t made to take such speeds.

So he eased up and was angered beyond his fears when he passed the man with the rifle. The man was just a blur. But he could see the blur imperiously wave its hand for still more speed.

“Maybe he thinks I haven’t the guts,” gritted the test driver.

He turned at the opposite end of the flat. And on the last lap he really tramped down.

Two hundred and forty, two sixty, two ninety! With sweat-drenched white face he fought the wheel. Three—

The man screamed and slowly eased up on the acclerator. The car, skipping around like a bug on a pond, gradually slowed. Then it screeched to a stop near the man with the rifle. And the right front bearing made a sound like a bagful of gravel. One more second at that last speed…

“In Lucifer’s own name,” panted the driver to the man with the rifle, “what have you done to her? The way that motor’s geared, it oughtn’t to have the power to pull a kiddy car up a one per cent grade.”

“How fast?” said the man.

“I think I touched three hundred. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t dare look…”

There was a second shot down by the salt flat. The driver’s reckless young eyes began to film. He stood upright for almost ten seconds, with a hole in his heart; then he fell!

The men came from the van. And the driver took out an automatic and fired at the hood of the test car.

There was a soft roar, like that of a volcano far underground. Then the car was the disappearing black heart of a white flame that blossomed like a great rose around it.

The men waited till the warped, fused chassis and motor block had cooled, then loaded them into the van. With them — and the body of the test driver and the “jack-rabbit”—the closed truck rumbled leisurely toward the distant city.

Hardly out of sight of the truck, over the rim of the horizon, another man-made thing of speed was hurtling through space.

This time it was a plane.

At four thousand feet, and against the same west breeze that the sedan driver thought would slow up his car, the plane streaked like a flash of light. Then it banked, dipped, headed up, and went through maneuvers no one ever saw a plane go through before.

To begin with, it didn’t look like much of a ship. It was a three-year-old small cabin ship with a single motor. It had just one feature that would have surprised a pilot, had one been around to be curious.

The single propeller was about three times too big for the motor, a pilot would have said. And it had a sharper pitch than any propeller ever had before.

The plane stopped its stunting and straightened out again. It went fast, faster. It began to look like a line in the sky instead of a plane. It was going — what? Five hundred miles an hour? Six? There was no way of knowing, save that the ship kept on disappearing into a dark streak in the sky.

The pilot eased up, face as white, bewildered and fearful as had been the face of the sedan’s driver at the car’s unbelievable speed. A little more, and the motor would be torn right out of this old crate.

He banked, whirled, headed up.

The plane began going almost straight up into the sky. It was a fantastic angle of climb. It simply couldn’t be done. Yet this plane, in no way remarkable, was doing it — and not stalling.

The pilot leveled out once more; then he saw the small dirigible far off to the east.

The dirigible was cleverly painted. Blue-gray, it blended with the sky so that only because of a flash of the sun was the plane pilot able to glimpse it at all. And of course, in those last seconds of his life, he wasn’t able to see the occupants of the dirigible.

A man in the small hanging cabin was watching the plane through a telescope. A little earlier, he had watched the car go at its terrific pace over the salt flat. He nodded now, hat far down over his face so that only his eyes could be seen.

“That’s enough,” he said.

At the words, a man near him, sitting at a small table on which was what appeared to be a telegraph key, pressed that key. It was a radio-control button.

And eleven miles off, the incredible plane suddenly was no more!

A blinding flash of light appeared where the plane had been. Seconds later the sound of an explosion was heard in the dirigible.

And that was all!