The Mole Pirate

IV

Sing Sing prison is forty miles from the Wedgewood Arsenal, and the Mole turned up there at eleven o'clock. Its speed was greater than that performance would indicate however, and it is probable that Durran stopped somewhere to rest and possibly to investigate the Mole's various mechanisms more thoroughly.

It is clear that he had made his plans in detail between four in the afternoon^ when he-stole the Mole, and eight at night when he raided the arsenal. To carry out his plans he needed help, and he knew where to get it, and he had to move fast to avoid being outguessed and having his men hidden away from him.

It was a bright, moonlit night. At eleven o'clock the high concrete walls of the prison glowed palely where the moonlight struck them and showed utterly black in shadow. White arc lights glittered within the prison enclosures making a misty white aura above the walls. The cell blocks of course were dark, save where corridors reached to windows and showed the faint illumination within. The lights of Ossining twinkled in the distance, and a river steamer floated upstream out in the middle of the Hudson River.

A guard, pacing the top of the wall, saw a vaguely moving thing outside. It was too dark for him to see it clearly3 but he watched curiously. Something was moving, past question, but the suspicion of Sing Sing guards is directed always toward the interior, not the outside, of the prison.

The guard could make out only motion. Its line was clear. The guard fixed his eyes upon a whitish stone on the ground and waited for it to be obscured. The moving thing, whatever it was, went smoothly up to that stone. The guard watched.

But the movement continued and it was past the whitish stone, and the stone was not hidden for even an instant. The guard grew doubtful and even more curious. The inexplicable thing was headed straight for the base of the wall. He saw or felt it reach a spot directly below him. Movement continued. Then there wasn't anything there at all. He called to the guard next to him.

'Somethin' funny,' he said uneasily. 'I saw somethin3 movin', down on the ground, an' then it wasn't there.'

The other guard looked down, but on the inside of the wall, because it is toward the inside that a prison guard bends all his alertness. He searched with his eyes.

'There it is!'

He pointed. From the height of the wall and in the glare of the bright arc lights a misty, phantomlike shape could be seen. But it could be looked through. The floor of the exercise yard was visible below it.

'What the hell!' said the second guard.

'Y'guess we oughta make a report? It looks like a ghost!'

The second guard continued to stare. The phantom swam smoothly across the open space. It reached the outer wall of a cell block. It vanished, apparently into that wall.

'Gosh!' said the second guard. 'That was a funny thing!'

'What was it? A ghost?'

"Hell, no!' said the second guard, without conviction. 'It was some mist, maybe. A speck of fog or somethin'. Y'want to be kidded to death?'

The first guard did not want to be kidded to death. He returned to his pacing back and forth.

Quietness again. A steamer out of sight on the river hooted dismally. Somewhere a motor car bummed along a distant road. Insects stridulated insistently. The crunch of feet on concrete. The wailing, plaintive cry of some night bird. One minute, two, five, ten minutes, with only such sounds as guards upon a tall concrete wall will normally hear.

Then a single, muted *pop* in a cell block. A small sound, but distinctive. Every guard in every watching post heard it and gripped his rifle more tightly. Every man turned to face the sound. Silence. Another muted *pop*. Then the sudden snarling roar of a machine gun, unmistakable even though it came from a cell block.

An instant later., there was the shattering concussion of a hand grenade. Glass in the cell block broke out and went tinkling down the stone sides of the building. A neat row of windows gaped glassless into the night. Then a man screamed, a high, shrill scream that was not less horrible from being distant. Another shattering explosion. Yet another.

Guards raced for the building. Then pandemonium broke loose. The guards on the wall stayed there. It was their job to check a break, if one came, on the outer defences. But they saw running men with rifles make for the cell block. They heard shouts, yells, howlings of terror and of exultation alike. The cell building became a madhouse.

And then a series of detonations began which were thunderous in intensity and deliberate in spacing, suggesting an inhumanly cold-blooded destructiveness at work. After each explosion came screams.

Then the men on the wall saw a phantom come out of the cell building. It was feet above the level of the exercise yard. It was unsubstantial and unreal. It was the wraith of a nightmare.

Shimmering, ghostly, impossible, it careened out of the wall and toppled to the ground. It seemed to bury itself- if a ghost can bury itself - before it came slowly into view again.

Not one shot was fired at it. It was impossible. It was a figment of the imagination. It simply could not be.

The phantom swam across the exercise yard of Sing Sing prison. It moved steadily toward the massive, monstrous outer wall of the prison. It reached that wall. It went into it. It vanished.

The guard who had first sensed movement outside now looked down again, shivering a little. He would not have known what the phantom of the Mole was, even if he could have seen it clearly.

But he saw nothing. He did sense that something was moving down on the ground below him, but that was all. A vague stirring moved soundlessly away from the prison walls and vanished into darkness. He did not shoot at it because he saw nothing to shoot at.

That was his story after the whole disturbance was ended, and he stuck to it. He wasn't believed, of course. There were four prisoners missing, twenty or thirty injured by explosions, three guards dead and others hurt, and nearly one floor of the northeast cell block so badly wrecked as practically to be destroyed. A guard who said he saw something moving, but nothing to shoot at, was not telling a plausible story. Four men, escaping, should have made a magnificent target in the arc-lighted exercise yard.

It was not until the next day that a reasonable two was put to an incredible two and an inevitable four was arrived at. The missing prisoners were pals of Durran's. The phantom seen by the guards, the explosives, the destruction, told all.

Taken with the raid on the Wedgewood Arsenal, the uproar at Sing Sing made it perfectly clear that Durran, in the Mole, was a criminal with an unparalleled opportunity to gratify his every impulse. And it seemed likely that he intended to use his opportunity.

For the next three days there was no word of Durran or the Mole or any of the four men he had raided Sing Sing to release.

Something had been pieced together of what he did, of course. On the fifth, a radio store in Newburgh, New York, was looted of practically all its material for radio repairs, wire, tubes, sockets, transformers, batteries - everything that goes into the making of a radio receiver was stolen. That same night, too, fancy groceries in considerable quantity were taken from the town's most expensive food shop.

Next day, on the 18th, police surveillance of the women formerly beloved by the released prisoners came to an abrupt end. The women vanished. From sheer habit the police instituted the customary search to find out who had taken them away from their usual haunts. They discovered nothing.

It is reasonable to assume that the first two thefts, of radio parts and food, were preparatory moves by Durran. The removal of the women was a part of the process of making the released prisoners contented.

Meanwhile Durran seems to have used all his intelligence in the examination of the Mole, and on the 19th he was probably busy. Certainly on the 20th he was prepared for action on a larger scale than before.

At nine thirty that night a thunderous, clanging uproar broke out in Newburgh. The outdoor alarm gong of the First National Bank went off with a tremendous noise. Simultaneously, the local police station received due warning of prowlers at work inside the bank. It was not a large bank, but even the little ones have more than one burglar-alarm system installed nowadays.

In less than five minutes from the sounding of the alarm, a patrol load of cops was on hand, prepared to do battle with bank robbers. The bank doors were closed and locked. They were opened from inside by a scared and bewildered watchman. He had heard the gongs, too. His own telltale registered a disturbance. But he could find no sign of anything wrong.

Then bank officials tore up in a motor car. A third alarm system had reported disturbance to the home of the cashier. They crowded into the bank, to be faced by puzzled cops and nearly deafened by the insistent, frantic clanging of the alarm gong outside.

Somebody managed to turn off the gong. It looked as if a freak accident had set off every protective device at once. The cops were rather sheepish, standing embattled in the bank with absolutely nothing to do. But there could be nothing wrong.

The vault was closed and locked and obviously untouched. There were no thieves to rout, it seemed, so the question became that of discovering and correcting the flaw in all the protective devices. The bank suddenly gleamed light everywhere. A master switch turned on every light in the place.

Then they saw the Mole. It was quite stationary. It was a huge, shimmering phantom, its bow end lost in the metal of the vault. Its tail, also, vanished into the side wall of the bank building. Standing still as it was, it could be examined with some detail, and presently it was observed that the four huge, vertical screws turned lazily, maintaining its position in spite of the gravity pull which tried to drag it down to the centre of the earth.

Men shot at it. The bullets went harmlessly through. They hacked at it with fire axes from a case on the wall. The blows spent themselves on seemingly empty air. The men drew back, regarding the earth-ship helplessly. Then a minor official of the bank, desperately daring, plunged first his hand and then his whole body into the phantom.

He could feel no resistance to his movements. The Mole remained as transparent and as unsubstantial as before. But, from within, he could see wraiths about him - machinery like gossamer, even men, like ghosts.

One of those ghosts saw him and pointed at him. Another ghost rocked back and forth, laughing, and the bank clerk was tormented by the suspicion that he heard a whispering thread of that Homeric laughter. Then one of the ghosts made an elaborate, mocking gesture of lifting a phantom cap in greeting.

A roar of rage brought the clerk out of the phantom. Somebody had thought to put his ear to the vault. And there was movement within. Through the steel walls came thumpings, crashings, bumps. There were men at work within the monstrous sealed safe - methodical hangings, deliberate, purposeful thuds and clanks.

'They're looting it!' panted the president of the bank, purple with rage. 'Looting it! And the time lock's on, and we can't get in!'

Something like a dozen armed policement and half a dozen bank officials stood helplessly by, hearing the sounds from within the vault. They went on for half an hour. Then the Mole backed comfortably out of the vault wall, a ghost in being, went through the side wall of the bank, and swam off into the utter unreachability of its peculiar state of existence.

When the time locks permitted the vault to be opened, the worst fears of the bank's officers were realized. The contents of the vault had been leisurely sorted over. Currency, negotiable bonds, the contents of the safe-deposit boxes - everything was gone. And the furnishings of the vault were wreckage.

They went to Jack Hill next morning and found him haggard from four days and nights of work to cope with the catastrophe whose ultimate possibilities he foresaw. He was in the machine shop of the American Electronic laboratories again.

Gail Kennedy was with him, trying to persuade him to stop and rest. The visitors were an impressive lot. Police officials, banking potentates, and representatives of liability insurance companies. They regarded Jack with profound hostility.

'Mr. Hill,' said an eminent banker, in a voice that quivered with indignation, 'I suppose you realize what you have done?'

'Thoroughly!'

'Now what are you going to do about it? Every bank in the country is at the mercy of this Durran, through the hellish contrivance you made. No man's property is safe.'

'Rather more important,' observed Jack, 'no man's life is safe, either, if Durran wants to kill him.'

'But how can this menace, this pirate, be handled?' Again the eminent banker spoke. As if of old habit, his voice took on an oratorical intonation. 'When the arsenals of our government furnish him with explosives, our prisons with men, and the devil with ideas -'

'Oh, it's bad,' said Jack, 'It's very bad. But I'm working now to stop it. I'd like to know if he's changed the Mole about any, though. What's he done?'

They told him about the Newburgh robbery - more than fifty thousand dollars in currency gone, the contents of the safe deposit boxes -

'That doesn't help me!' insisted Jack. 'The Mole is pretty big. As I built it, that robbery would have been impossible. It couldn't be materialized inside a bank vault. There'd be no room.'

So far they'd told him only the results of the robbery. Now they told him the details of their helplessness while it went on.

Jack nodded in satisfaction. 'I see! He's improved the ship. But for those screws you saw revolve, the Mole would drop straight through the earth to its centre, as a block of brass did here. And, of course, if a man stepped out of the Mole while it was dematerialized, he'd drop too, without some device to hold him up.'

There were protests that men had been heard at work inside the vault.

'I know,' agreed Jack. 'But they weren't phantoms! Durran has fitted up an extra force-field apparatus. He can materialize a part of the Mole without materializing the whole. He drove the ship so its bow stuck out into clear space inside the vault. Then he materialized that part, and that part only.

'There were a couple of men in it. They got out, gathered up their loot, and stored it in that part of the ship, and then Durran dematerialized that part again so that it was like the rest of the ship. And then he swam away.'

'But what can we do to stop this - this ghastly performance? demanded the banker agitatedly. 'He can rob any bank in the country! He can steal any treasure, any security, any record!'

'You can hide your treasures,' replied Jack meditatively. 'Until he starts kidnapping people and forcing them to tell where valuables are, he'll be stopped. And - well - the screws of the ship are coated with a thin film of thorium alloy. That is partly real in both states of existence. You can make bullets and bombs of radioactive substances. Anything that's radioactive will find the Mole substantial You can puncture it with radioactive bullets or shatter it with bomb fragments, if they happen to be radioactive, too.'

'You suggest,' said the banker in almost hysterical indignation, 'that we shoot Durran with radium bullets? Think of the cost!'

'It's more important to think of results, just now,' said Jack dryly. 'But thorium will do instead of radium, and that isn't too expensive to use in gas mantles. It'll be cheap enough.

'I have, though, one really comforting thing to tell you. The Mole was built for underground exploration, to find veins of mineral and for geological study generally. It isn't designed for the use to which Durran is putting it.

'And the entire resources of American Electric are now put into the building of a new Mole which will be designed for offensive warfare underground. As soon as our new ship is complete - and it should not be long, working as we are -we'll find the original Mole and destroy it.'

Gail Kennedy said something to him in a low tone.

Jack nodded wearily. 'Something to keep Durran from materializing his ship even in part? Why, yes! My head's tired, Gail. I should have thought of that.'

He turned to the others. 'I have one promising suggestion, due to Miss Kennedy. I've proved that two solid bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. But they can't, in the same state. If there is any matter more solid than air where the Mole materializes, the sudden appearance of extra material in the same space will cause an explosion. So you can stack bars of iron, and grilles, and string wires inside your vaults. Make it impossible for any part of the Mole big enough to hold a man and loot to materialize without including some such extra matter. If Durran tries, he'll blow up the Mole! It's worth trying, anyhow.'

He passed his hand wearily over his forehead when the indignation party went out of the laboratory. Gail smiled anxiously up at him.

'I was stupid,' said Jack tiredly. 'I guess you're right, Gail. The new ship is taking form very nicely. The others can carry on without me. And my head's so tired I'll do better work if I rest.'

Jack took a last look at the partly completed ship that was to take the place of the Mole, in the very spot where the Mole had been. There was a great deal yet to be done to this new ship, but to Jack it already looked promising. He saw past the incomplete framing, the only partly assembled machinery. He visualized the streamlined vessel of the new design, more heavily powered than the Mole.

Its sustaining screws worked on swivels and at full speed would not only sustain but help to propel it. And there was armament. A two-pounder gun with a spotter searchlight. When this ship was dematerialized, it would fire shells that would be utterly unsubstantial to anything but the Mole or radioactive minerals.

The spotter searchlight would emit extraordinarily polarized light, capable of penetrating stone and rock in the state of matter Jack had discovered. This ship should have no trouble overtaking and destroying the Mole.

'Funny,' said Jack suddenly. 'I never thought of it before. This ship's going to be fast. And we could build faster ones yet. Planes, in fact. Earth-planes! They'd carry passengers. No storms. No wind currents. Earth-plane ports in the centre of our biggest cities. Climb in an earth-plane and fly through the earth's core, beneath or through mountains and oceans. And they'd be fast!'

Gail smiled at him. 'Good! You think about that instead of Durran for a while. But I'm going to take you home and make you go to sleep.'

She did take him home. She made him promise to rest at once. But, tired as he was, this new vision of a medium in which the commerce of the world would be carried on in the future, kept him awake for a long time.

It seemed that Jack had just dropped off to sleep when the strident ringing of a telephone beside his bed got him heavily awake. He glanced at a clock. It was after midnight - one o'clock. He picked up the phone.

'Hello?'

'Mr. Hill!' panted a voice at the other end of the wire. 'This's the gate watchman at the lab. There's all hell loose inside! Explosions! I sent for the cops, but it sounds like Durran's back! Listen!'

Over the wire came dull concussions. Then, the extraordinarily distinct sound of running feet, a slamming door. A voice panted, and Jack caught the message before the watchman repeated it:

"The Mole's in there an' Durran is flinging bombs outta a tube in front. They turn to real as they come out. He's blown the new Mole to hell an' he's smashin' the lab!'

A terrific detonation seemed almost to smash the telephone instrument at the other end of the wire.