The darkness on Fifth Avenue

By Murray Leinster

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Title: The darkness on Fifth Avenue

Author: Murray Leinster

Illustrator: Lloyd Birmingham
        Virgil Finlay


        
Release date: October 28, 2026 [eBook #79873]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79873

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DARKNESS ON FIFTH AVENUE ***




                     The DARKNESS on Fifth Avenue

                          By MURRAY LEINSTER

                          Illustrator FINLAY


           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
             Fantastic Stories of Imagination, March 1962
         and was first published in Argosy, November 30, 1929.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                               CHAPTER I

                              Blotted Out


The moon was shining brightly in Central Park as Police Lieutenant
Hines went at a leisurely pace toward his home. He'd been at a party,
and it had been a tiresome one, as far as he was concerned.

The gravel under his feet crunched and crackled. He pulled a cigar out
of his pocket and lighted it. The path curved and recurved. It came out
at the edge of the lake and followed along its shore. And the moon
was rising high above the tall apartments that line Fifth Avenue. Its
light flickered and shimmered on the water in small, irregularly-shaped
lambent flames.

Hines slowed down and stopped, to look at it. Shrubbery on every hand,
silvered by the moonlight. The rising shores of the farther side of
the lake were made queerly glamourous. The throbbing, rumbling murmur
of the city all about him came as a curious incongruity. It seemed
particularly odd because the wavelets of the lake were running up on
the shore edge with small lapping noises, and it seemed that the city
should be thousands of miles away. And Hines could hear the heavy,
rather monotonous splashing of the huge fountain at the end of the
Mall, but it sounded like a waterfall.

"It is pretty, isn't it?" said a girl's voice behind him.

Hines turned around. A girl was sitting on a bench, quite alone. She
couldn't have been speaking to any one else.

She lifted her hand as if in a gesture for him to sit down beside her.
He couldn't make out her face, but the slim silken legs were shapely in
the moonlight, and the dress was fresh and cool.

Police Lieutenant Hines smiled to himself. Being attached to the
detective bureau, he never wore a uniform, and he was off duty anyhow.
He said unreproachfully:

"Sister, I'm a cop. You ought to be careful."

But the girl chuckled. She clasped her hands together and laughed; and
then she chuckled again.

"But, Mr. Hines, it isn't against police regulations to speak to an
acquaintance in the park, is it?"

Hines stared and suddenly flushed.

"I'm Kathryn Bush," said the girl on the bench, still amusedly.
"Remember me, now?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" said Hines.

"I'm not hunting copy to-night," she assured him, with a bare trace of
malice. "I came out to be by myself and look at the moon and be stupid
and romantic. The combination's necessary, isn't it--stupidity and
romance?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Hines puffed at his cigar.

"I was wondering myself," he admitted ruefully. "I just came from a
party. The girls were pretty and stupid, and the music was stupid and
pretty. And I didn't have a good time. I've been enjoying myself more,
just looking at the moonlight, than I did at the party."

There was a little pause.

"'Sentiment on the Police Force,'" murmured a soft voice. "'Police
Lieutenant Hines Discovered Moon-Gazing. Famous Vamp-Proof Detective
Prefers Chaste Luna to Chasing Flappers. Special to the _Star_!'"

Hines stiffened and groaned. That was the exact method Kathryn Bush
used in her column in the _Star_. She could make any man ridiculous;
and she could twist her column to the bitterest and most sardonic
tragedy when she chose.

"Don't!" said Hines desperately. "Please! I'd--"

"I wouldn't," said the girl. But she chuckled. "It wasn't even a
temptation. Don't worry. I like you much too well. You do play fair,
Mr. Hines, and you get fair play in the city rooms. I was sorry,
afterward, that I treated you as I did."

She'd served him up to her delighted readers after the Paulson murder
case, which he'd handled. On the whole she'd let him off easily. He
knew it. She'd been no worse than gently malicious about one or two of
his personal traits--enough to let people who knew him rag him.

There was another pause.

"I fibbed when I said I came out here to be alone," she said suddenly.
"I had a sort of hunch that something was going to happen. Intuition,
if you like. I don't know--I get hunches sometimes. When I saw you,
I knew I was right. You generally manage to be where things are
happening, too. What's going to happen?"

"Nothing that I know of," said Hines. He was relieved by her promise
not to use him again in her column. "I was just walking home. That's
all."

"Then," she said comfortably, "you'd better sit down. Something is
going to happen. It always does."

Hines sat down. The waves were lapping almost at their feet, on the
other side of the path. A park light glowed perhaps twenty yards away.
Now and again the soft purring of a motor car on one of the automobile
roads came to their ears.

"What do you think will happen?" asked Hines, mildly amused.

"I don't know," she admitted. "It's just a feeling."

The purring of a car came near. It was a heavy, powerful car, and the
singing of its tires was as loud as the noise of its motor. It was
moving slowly--very slowly. It went by the bench hardly more than fifty
feet away, on the other side of a planting of shrubbery. A voice came
suddenly from it, a trifle muted by the distance and the car's movement.

"Hell! How long's it goin' t' take yuh?"

Hines stiffened. He knew that voice, but couldn't place it. Some one
he'd had dealings with some time. A crook's voice.

"I'm ready now."

This second voice was clipped and precise. Hines frowned to himself. He
didn't know the second voice at all. But the first was--was--somebody
he knew, and somebody who was wanted.

"Jam on the brakes, Pete," ordered the voice he knew. "He's goin' to
try it now."

       *       *       *       *       *

Brakes squealed, thirty or forty yards away. The park was very quiet
indeed. It seemed as if the two on the bench could even hear movements
within the softly purring car.

Hines felt the girl looking up at him. He was listening, while he
racked his brains for a name.

"I think it must be happening," she said detachedly. "My hunches do
work out sometimes."

The harsh, precise voice reached them:

"Look at the moon."

Involuntarily the girl raised her eyes. The full moon was swimming in a
sea of stars. It was big and bright and smiling--

It went out.

Pitch darkness fell instantly. Hines was on his feet in a second. He
felt the girl's hand tighten convulsively on his arm. He unbuttoned his
coat unobtrusively, seized his service revolver.

But he was staring about into a blackness which was exactly that of a
moonless night with a sky full of thunder-clouds. The suddenness of
the fallen darkness was horrible. Its completeness was terrifying. The
silence all about became ghastly.

There was no noise except the lapping water and the sound of a powerful
motor idling at low speed a little way off, and a tiny sound which was
not even a whisper--the vagrant night breeze stirring the leaves of the
trees and shrubbery.

The silvery moonlight was cut off, absolutely. The moon had gone out.
The stars had ceased to exist. Yet, dimly--very dimly--the opposite
shore of the lake was visible. Its outline was sharp. And flickers of
what could only be moonlight came from there, bright and vivid and
scintillating. Hines flung his head back once more. The sky was blotted
out exactly as if some one had suddenly placed a roof over a part of
Central Park.

Then a voice came from forty or fifty yards away. The clipped, precise
voice of the second man in the car.

"Satisfied?" It was almost a snarl of triumph.

"Yeah!" came the first voice again. It was awed, and it was exultant
"Plenty! If y' c'n do the rest y' say, it's a cinch!"

The darkness lifted, exactly as if some one had turned on soft lights
with a switch. The moon shone down again, round and benign and placid,
swimming in a sea of stars. There was the minor roaring of a heavy car
going into first speed, second, and away.

Hines suddenly uttered an exclamation.

"Lefty Dunn!"

The girl beside him was shaken. Her grip on his sleeve showed that.
The abrupt and complete darkness and its equally complete and abrupt
removal, had unnerved her. But she shook herself a little and became
the newspaper woman again.

"It happened," she said coolly, in a voice that quavered only a little.
"But what was it?"

"That voice was Lefty Dunn," said Hines grimly. "I thought he was in
Chicago. He's wanted--for murder, among other things. If he'd known I
was sitting here, he'd have taken a chance on trying to plug me, with a
good car for a get-away. He has no particular reason to love me."

"But the darkness!" said the girl sharply. "What was that? And why was
it done?"

Hines looked at her blankly for an instant. Then he searched the sky.
From horizon to horizon the stars shone out through the smoky haze
which the city itself interposes between itself and heaven. There was
no trace of cloud, no trace of any mistiness which was not of the
city's own production.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I thought--" Hines knitted his brows, and then said impatiently: "I
don't know what it was, but I've got to get word in that Lefty Dunn's
in town. He's--Good Lord!" He stared at her. "Did you hear those voices
in that car, and what they said?"

"Of course!"

He took her elbow and began to march her along the path at a rate that
forced her to trot a little.

"Lefty said, 'When are you going to be ready?' and some one said they
were ready then. And that second voice said to look at the moon, and
the moon went out. And then somebody, the same voice, asked if Lefty
was satisfied." Hines was talking almost feverishly and increasing his
pace toward the Mall. "Do you see what it means?"

"I see," said the girl practically, "that to-morrow afternoon I have a
headline, 'Moon Turned Off in Central Park,' and some wise-cracks about
cruelty to petters in the city's recreation spaces."

Hines was hastening his pace almost to a run. The path they were
following branched. One branch led out to the smooth automobile
roadway. The other meandered on about the lake. Hines fairly dragged
the girl down the shorter branch, toward the nearest police phone.

"Please don't!" he said sharply. "It is too serious for that--much too
serious! Lefty Dunn's a dangerous man. He's one of the very few men
who can organize criminals into coöperation. Don't you see that if we
aren't crazy, both of us--"

Lights swept the ground before him. A horn honked in a startled
fashion. There was a swoop and a rush and a humming noise. Hines
grabbed the girl and jumped backward.

A huge car flashed by so swiftly that its back mudguard flicked at the
girl's sheer skirt.

A voice came back from it. "Get t' hell outer the way!"

The car was gone, and Hines was staring after it and reaching into his
pocket, his lips compressed.

"Things are happening," said the girl beside him. "Thanks. They weren't
a bit careful, were they?"

"That's Lefty Dunn's car again," said Hines grimly, "and I got its
license number which may mean nothing at all."

The car was speeding away, smoothly and silently, its headlight beams
visible through mist and dust-swirls.

Hines began to write swiftly; but the girl caught at his arm again.

"Look! Oh, look!" she gasped.

The automobile roadway branched, ahead, and there were two cars with
gleaming headlights coming down toward the intersection. Each one was
perhaps twenty yards from the point where they would be visible to each
other.

Lefty Dunn's car slowed down; and suddenly, before it there poured out
a dense cloud of blackness. It was not smoke. It was not dust. The
headlights of Lefty Dunn's own car bored into it and were smothered
instantly, without being dissipated or reflected. It did not waver, as
a mass of smoke or vapor would have done.

Dunn's car was going ahead still swiftly, though at less than its
former rate, and it did not run into the darkness. The darkness kept on
ahead! It seemed even to have a definite cone-shaped form.

Now the intersection of roads, and the traffic policeman at that
intersection, and the tall hillock of earth behind it which had been
brilliantly illuminated a moment before--everything was blotted out
utterly.

From that incredible oblivion came a terrific crashing noise. Instantly
thereafter the darkness vanished. The headlights of Lefty Dunn's car
shone pitilessly upon the scene. One car had its nose halfway into
the chauffeur's compartment of the other. Both of them had been slued
around by the shock.

A woman began to scream shrilly in one of the cars. A man dragged
himself out of the other. The traffic policeman ran to the spot,
blowing on his whistle.

Lefty Dunn's car swerved to avoid the wreckage, took the right-hand
road, and swept on out of sight.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was nothing in the least peculiar about the rest of it. It
was merely an automobile accident, and an ambulance arrived and
administered first aid, and a long time later two derrick-cars arrived
and towed the crippled machines away; and there was only a puddle
of oil and a few splinters of glass left to show that anything had
happened. The only thing at all odd was that the traffic cop and all
the occupants of both cars insisted that they had simultaneously been
stricken blind for a few seconds before the crash, and that that
blindness had been the cause of the collision.




                              CHAPTER II

                           A Terrible Weapon


Hines left the office of the commissioner of police next morning
with his jaw tightly set. In his own car, on the way back to his
office, he swore softly but luridly; and he went into his office
with an expression in which impatience was the least disagreeable
ingredient. The commissioner of police had been incredulous and at
the last impatient himself. The corroboration of the traffic cop had
been dismissed as a very clumsy alibi for carelessness. Even the park
policeman who had seen the moon go out for two minutes withered under
the commissioner's sarcasm. Hines sat down at his desk and swore
steadily, getting madder the longer he thought about it. He knew what
he had seen. Two other members of the police force backed him up.
A total of seven people in two cars which had been smashed up made
exactly the same statements. And the whole thing was dismissed as a
pipe dream.

It was only when disgust began to take the place of wrath that he
noticed a report on his desk. He'd given orders that the license number
he had noted down should be traced. The report was laconic, in the
usual form. The license had been traced to Oliver Wetmore of--Central
Park West. Mr. Wetmore was in Europe, and the car, a Pierce-Arrow, was
in storage. The reporting officer had examined the car in the storage
garage and found the license plates missing.

"Stolen," said Hines grimly. "Anybody who went to put a car in storage
or take one out could have taken them. Somebody did. It's a dead
end; but it proves, anyhow, that whoever was using 'em last night is
crooked."

He called headquarters and succinctly repeated the report, asking
that all officers on beat be ordered to look out for the number and
report it by police phone. Within half an hour every uniformed man on
the streets of New York would be watching for it, among other things.
Those other things would include twenty-seven small lost children;
five runaway girls, with descriptions attached; seventeen stolen
cars--license numbers given; anywhere from four to fourteen fugitives
from justice; and a philosophical anarchist.

It did not look especially promising. Hines knew it. But he also
knew that the famous police dragnet sometimes has its inexplicable
successes. Meantime he made some telephone calls.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Museum of Natural History referred him to the research bureau
of the American Electric Company. After twenty minutes of more or
less patient waiting he had an anonymous specialist in research
physics on the wire, who listened with amused patience to his account
and then told him tolerantly that what he had seen was impossible.
Light could be neutralized, to be sure. Monochromatic light could be
altered by another monochromatic wavelength to a non-visible color.
And interference would neutralize even sunlight, but only by the use
of partial reflection, which was only practicable under laboratory
conditions.

Hines thanked him politely and hung up.

"But, dammit, I saw it!" he growled.

The phone rang as he prepared to make still another call. It was
Kathryn Bush.

"Good morning." She seemed to be amused. "Have you been told you're
crazy?"

"I have!" said Hines grimly.

"So have I," she laughed. "But I have a news item for you. It wasn't
used anywhere, but it's news. Get a pencil and write it down."

Hines pulled a memo pad into place. "Ready."

       *       *       *       *       *

She read slowly. There is a vast amount of news that goes into
newspaper offices, and more especially into the press associations,
which is either unimportant or improbable and never sees print.

"'Edginton, New York. This town has heard a lot about freak weather,
but Elias Rowe, of Stony Mountain, makes the latest contribution. Mr.
Rowe drove over from Stony Mountain to-day to ship two calves and buy
supplies. He reports that Stony Mountain is getting the fanciest brand
of summer weather yet. He first noticed it a month ago, when as he was
plowing his north twenty field he noticed a grateful shade. He looked
up and saw the sun shining brightly, but with most of its heat missing,
and the sky much darker than usual. He went home and put on his coat.

"'Nearly every day since then he's been getting fancier weather. He
reports that yesterday it was pitch-dark for over half an hour in his
barnyard, so dark that even with a lantern he couldn't see to water his
horses at dinner time. He was inquiring how long these here eclipses
were going to keep up, but when assured that nothing of the sort had
been seen in Edginton, he drove home muttering about city wisecrackers.
Local wits assert that Stony Mountain has either an inferior brand of
sunshine or a very superior brand of moonshine.'"

"Got it," said Hines laconically. "What about it?"

"It's about a month old," came the voice over the wire.

"I was wondering if it didn't refer to some experiments with apparatus
that might--er--turn out the moon."

Hines stared. Then:

"It sounds like it," he admitted. "I'll look up Edginton--"

"I have," said the voice in the receiver, comfortably. "It's a little
hamlet of about three hundred people, away up-State. Stony Mountain
isn't a village. It's a mountain, with no more than two or three houses
within miles. A splendid place to do experiments of this sort in."

"Thanks. You ought to be on the force."

She laughed once more.

"Oh, this stuff is a bribe. I expect to be given the inside, when you
find out what's up."

"Something's up, all right," agreed Hines grimly. "Lefty Dunn had
those two cars smashed up just to see if he could, I'm thinking. The
moon business was a test, the wreck was an experiment."

She rang off, and Hines read the clipping over again.

This clipping had been discarded from the news because it was
impossible. And what Hines had seen had been termed impossible by
a scientific authority. And yet, if Hines wasn't crazy, he'd heard
Lefty Dunn ask somebody to give a demonstration of some sort, and the
demonstration had been the putting out of the moon.

Considering what had happened later, it seemed probable that some
piece of apparatus had been pointed upward into the air, from the
car in which Lefty Dunn was riding. Later the same car had shot out
a beam of darkness straight ahead of it instead of upward, and that
beam had blotted out its own headlights, the headlights of two other
cars, and a park light just over a traffic officer's head. It was at
least conceivable that the production of an accident had been another
demonstration.

But the question before Hines was, why had Lefty Dunn been chosen as
the person to be convinced that a certain apparatus could throw a beam
of darkness in any chosen direction from a car? What had he meant when
he said, "If y' can do the rest y' say, it's a cinch?" What else had
the man with the clipped, precise voice claimed he could do? Was the
beam of darkness ahead of the car the thing in question? Was--

       *       *       *       *       *

The phone rang sharply.

"Hello!"

"Lieutenant Hines, a report on the license number you queried."
Clickings, and the fainter voice of a patrolman on beat, making his
regular report at the box telephone. "The car with license J 41166,
sir, is parked just off Madison Avenue on Fifty-Eighth Street,
sir. It's been there two hours, sir, and I tied a ticket to the
steering-wheel and made a note of the number and recognized it as one
to look out for."

"Still there, eh?" asked Hines.

"Yes, sir."

"Keep an eye on it. Lefty Dunn was riding in it last night," said Hines
briskly. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

He hung up and instinctively felt beneath his coat for the regulation
revolver. Lefty Dunn would be a dangerous man to arrest. If the street
was crowded it wouldn't be wise to try it unless they could jump him so
he wouldn't have a chance to pull a gun.

The little police runabout had no outward indication of its official
status. But there is a certain sequence of numbers that you never see
on any but police cars. The letter designation on the license plates is
"C," and the next to the last two figures are three and six.

Honking impatiently, the little runabout threaded traffic, crossed
against traffic lights with a certain confident impunity, and went
streaking up Madison Avenue. Hines was driving, and he was in civilian
clothes, of course. His companion smoked languidly as the car darted
northward.

Its horn blew impatiently as the patrolman on beat dawdled past. He
looked unhurriedly, and made an inconspicuous motion with his hand.
Hines drew up to the curb, stepped out, and stopped the patrolman with
exactly the air of one asking for information.

"In front of the Blowbar Building, sir," said the uniformed man. "Been
there about two hours, now. The tag's on the steering-wheel."

"Right. Thanks."

Hines went leisurely to the corner. He saw it at once. The car of the
night before, powerful and gleaming and insolent, standing before one
of those incredibly slender eighteen-story buildings that spring up
on narrow frontages in New York. The building was new. Next to it an
old-fashioned, sedate brownstone house still stood blowsily, with a
"Furnished Rooms" sign visible in the front parlor window. There were
three other houses just like it, and then a massive building of six or
seven stories that went on to the end of the block and Park Avenue.

Hines went briskly across the street, turned into the office building,
and scrutinized the floor directory carefully, as if he were looking
for a name and was puzzled at its absence. Nothing. The lobby was
merely a golden-marble entryway to the building, and a means of
communication with its two elevators, both now aloft. There was no one
in sight at all. From inside, however, Hines could look the car over
thoroughly. It was a Packard, not a Pierce-Arrow, and he was justified
in making an arrest on account of the false license plates alone. The
street, too, was by no means crowded, and while gunplay would not be
desirable, it could be risked.

       *       *       *       *       *

He went out of the building and saw his companion from the roadster
strolling toward the corner. The patrolman idled negligently near by.
And then, quite suddenly, there was the clashing of elevator-doors from
the building he had just left, and four men came out. Hines looked
at them swiftly, recognized two of them. He thought he recognized a
third. The fourth was Lefty Dunn.

He signaled with his hand. His companion and the patrolman drifted
his way as the four men moved to the car and stood a moment, talking,
beside it. The door of the blowsy brownstone house opened and a man
came out of it. He was a tall, blond individual with flowing yellow
whiskers. He came down the steps to the pavement.

Hines saw a nod pass among the men beside the car. One of them climbed
into the chauffeur's seat and pressed on the starter. Hines unbuttoned
his coat. And suddenly his whistle shrilled.

It was not quite quick enough. He blew it instead of opening fire, but
even a shot would not have been quick enough. The three men beside
the car had jerked glittering things out of their pockets. The sharp
barking of automatic pistols cut through the shrilling of the whistle,
and the tall man shuddered suddenly and began to collapse slowly to the
pavement. The automatics barked.

Suddenly everything went dark. One instant Hines had been hurtling
himself toward the huddled group of three men who were pumping lead
at an evidently intended victim. The next instant he was careening
through a blackness that was utterly opaque. He could not see the
ground below him, or the sides of the street, or the sky. He felt the
pavement striking the soles of his feet, but otherwise he might have
been lost in the abyss of nothingness.

The whistle went on shrilling eerily in the darkness. In that absolute
opacity before him a man cursed, and some one began to shoot at
random. A bullet stung the skin of Hines' arm. He shot savagely at the
sound. There was no flash to shoot at. He stumbled on the curbstone as
someone squealed. A voice was roaring orders, and the exhaust of the
big Packard boomed. Caroming wildly on, Hines struck a man. He fell
on him savagely, striking viciously as the man collapsed, twisting an
automatic from the unseen fingers and flinging it away. The man writhed
and was still.

The voices were almost on top of him. Hines shot furiously at the space
below them. Then a clash of gears, so near that he put out his hand.
Something brushed against it and was gone. He knew the feel. He had
reached out and touched the moving tire of the car at the curbing. He
had been so close that but for the blackness he could have leaped into
it. It roared away, sharply, swiftly--

There was silence except for the traffic noises, and startled, excited
exclamations. The patrolman was blundering about.

"Lieutenant! Lieutenant Hines!"

"Here!" snapped Hines. "See how far this damned darkness extends. I've
killed a man, I think, and they killed another one first."

"It stopped at the corner," said the plain-clothes man dazedly,
blundering toward Hines in the blackness. "I came into it because I
heard you shooting, sir. What--"

Hines swore again. He'd struck a match, which had not seemed to light,
and he'd burned his finger on the invisible flame. He struck another,
now, and held it carefully closer and closer to his eyes. At four
inches he could just distinguish it. At two inches its flame was clear.
He thought he could see his finger in the light.

But he began to feel the man underneath him. His victim, no doubt. A
sickish feeling came over him as he felt something warm and wet on his
fingers. He felt unspeakably ghoulish, squatting there in the darkness.
The hair rose at the back of his neck.

       *       *       *       *       *

With an infinitely slight sensation of flickering, the darkness
vanished. The street, the sky, the buildings on every hand flashed into
view. There was a dead man under him, and his hand was stained red,
and there was another man lying quite still on the pavement a few yards
away, and the patrolman was in the act of blundering against a brick
wall. The plain-clothes man was fumbling his way with outstretched
hands through broad daylight.

Hines stood up. He wanted to be sick, and he was filled with a vast and
incredible rage. Two other uniformed men were running toward the spot.

"Get an ambulance," snapped Hines savagely. He looked in the
direction in which the big car had disappeared. It was no longer in
sight, of course. It had turned into Park Avenue and was mingled
indistinguishably with the other traffic. "Take a look at that man
there. See who he is. I'm going to look in this building."

He turned into the office building. An elevator was coming down. The
doors slid open as he reached out his hand to touch the summonsing
button. A broad-shouldered man with a professional Vandyke and a
professional-looking bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, stepped
out.

"Can you tell me what that shooting was?" he asked harshly. "I'm a
doctor, and I thought I might be needed. You're hurt! Here, let me fix
it."

"It's not my blood," snapped Hines. "There are two men out in the
street who need looking after. I'm a police officer."

He dismissed the elevator-passenger summarily and fixed the colored
elevator-boy with his eye.

"Y-yes, suh!" gasped the elevator-boy. He turned several shades lighter
when he saw a glistening reddish stain on the hand that pointed a grim
finger at him. "Y-yass, suh!"

"You know the clients of this building. How many offices have been
rented lately--within a week or two, or a day or so?"

"A-ain't but one, suh."

"Take me there, in a hurry," said Hines savagely. "Speed!"

It was clear enough. The four men who had come out of the building had
timed their exit for the emergence of the man they'd shot. They must
have been in some office in the building from which they could see the
brownstone rooming house, and possibly even into, say, a skylight room.
When the man they intended to kill put on his hat and approached his
door, they had started for the street.

Moreover, Hines had been able to look into the Packard fairly
thoroughly, and it had contained nothing but the cushions. There was no
sign of any complicated apparatus for the production or a direction of
a beam of any sort. The darkness must have been sent down from some
point in this building.

The elevator-boy was trembling visibly, but the doors swept shut
with a swift hissing sound and the car abruptly shot upward. If the
stopping-point of the elevator had not been automatically controlled,
it is certain that the operator could never have made a reasonably
accurate landing. The glass doors slid aside.

"Th-there y' are, suh."

"Which door? Wait here!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The pebbled glass of the indicated door was unmarked and plain. Hines
tried it, standing behind the solid wall. No sign. The door was
unlocked. He flung it wide and stepped within.

The office was small and empty of all furniture, and was dusty as if it
had been left unoccupied for a long time. One or two nails in the wall,
and a few untidy smudges upon the paint were evidences of some previous
occupant, but the only sign of its last inhabitant was a half dozen
radio B batteries near the window with wire terminals still affixed.
The red sealing-compound tops were bright and shiny and untouched by
the dust which lay heavily upon the floor. And there was a smell of
tobacco in the air. More, it was tobacco which had not had time to
stale.

Hines jumped to a conclusion. He put his head out of the window. A
short blast on his whistle made the patrolman's head swing back.
Two other uniformed men had arrived at the spot where shots and a
police-whistle blowing indicated something wrong.

"Nobody to leave this building!" shouted Hines through cupped hands.
"Hold the doors until I get down!"

He went swiftly back to the elevator. The operator trembled again.

"Who rented that office?" he snapped, "and how long had he had it?"

"M-mistuh Preston, suh," said the trembling colored man. "He--uh--he
rented it las' week, suh. Sayd he was a doctuh, suh, but his furniture
ain't come in yet. He was in heah a coupla hours to-day, suh, an' some
frien's of hisn, suh, jus' went out 'bout five minutes ago."

The elevator began to sink rapidly toward the ground floor.

"What does he look like?" demanded Hines. "When did you see him last?"

"Uh--you, suh," quavered the operator, "you seen him, suh. He got outer
the car an' spoke t' you, suh, when you got in."

Hines clenched his hands and ground his teeth. Memory came to him
enragingly. The voice that had asked what had caused the shooting, and
that had offered to bind up his supposed wound--it had been the same
voice that had spoken in the car with Lefty Dunn the night before.

The instant the elevator-doors opened, he knew the futility of pursuit.
The shots had been fired all of three or four minutes before. A crowd
had already gathered and was surging closer and closer about the
uniformed men who now struggled to keep the two dead men from being
trampled on by the merely curious crowd. The square-shouldered young
man with the Vandyke and suitcase had walked out into that crowd and
vanished. There were plenty of taxicabs about. He was undoubtedly
sitting comfortably in one of them and being driven to a destination
which might be any of the million homes in Greater New York.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hines nodded despairingly to the plain-clothes man who had essayed to
guard the door and keep the occupants of the building from leaving
until Hines' arrival.

"That darkness was made by a man in an office on the fourth floor,"
said Hines bitterly. "He was working with Lefty Dunn to kill that other
man, and he's got away. Oh, my God! What a fool I am!"




                              CHAPTER III

                             Boldness Wins


Hines's self-disgust held until the ambulance left and the crowd
had dwindled to a mere sprinkling of sightseers who pointed out
to each other where the two men had been standing when shot, and
other argumentative persons who debated with much vehemence and no
information whatever on whether or not the reported cloud of darkness
had actually been present.

The man with the yellow whiskers was breathing, but that was all. He
needed surgical attention in a hurry. He was rushed to a hospital. The
same ambulance took away a huddled figure in very natty clothing and a
sporty cap to whom surgical attention would be of no use at all.

There would be only commendation for Hines for shooting that second
man. He was Micky the Dope, wanted by several States and by the Federal
government in addition. Decidedly, Hines had come out of the affair
with credit.

But he was bitterly disgusted with himself. He had more than a hunch,
now, that there was much more at stake than merely the shooting down of
a still unidentified man. There was, it was very clear to Hines, more
involved than the capture of Lefty Dunn.

Hines was the only man in New York who saw the possibilities inherent
in the settlement of darkness down upon parts of Central Park the night
before. He was the only man in New York who could have nipped those
possibilities in the bud. And he had let the man with the clipped,
precise voice walk right past him after speaking to him.

"There's going to be hell to pay before we get him," he groaned, "if I
know Lefty Dunn and if I guess right what that man's got."

He waited impatiently for the fingerprint wagon and rushed the
photographer and the fingerprint technician up to the deserted office
with the radio batteries on the floor.

"There'll be fingerprints on those batteries," he announced. "At least
two sets--the man who sold them and the man who handled them in here. I
want to know which is which, and the best set of prints you can cook up
of that second man. And here, by the window." He pointed. "Here on the
sill, and right here where a man'd steady himself when he looked out to
get a good sight of that house next door. There were five men up here,
I think, and they were watching and waiting for a man to get ready to
go out."

"Yes?" said the fingerprint man. He yawned. "Anything else you want?"

Hines managed to grin.

"Plenty," he admitted. "The commissioner thinks I'm crazy. If he finds
out I dragged you up here--when the shooting happened down in the
street--he'll be sure of it. I want proof that Lefty Dunn was here this
morning, and Micky the Dope--that's the man I plugged--and Joe the
Greek, and I think Pete Lazzarini. The last two have records, but they
aren't being looked for. Lefty and Micky were supposed to be out of
town. Now, will you find those prints for me?"

"If they're there," said the fingerprint man.

       *       *       *       *       *

He got right to work. First he dusted a little of his grayish powder
about the B batteries and blew very gently. He surveyed the result with
satisfaction.

"Pretty," he said pleasantly. He went over to the window and went
through a slightly more involved process on a small area.

"Plenty of prints here," he said boredly. "All right, lieutenant. These
prints are new ones, and some of them are very nice ones. I'll have
photos ready in two or three hours, but I can't promise they'll be
untangled right away. That'll take time."

With a sigh of relief, Hines left. He debated an instant down in the
lobby of the building. He ought to--But the man in the hospital might
recover consciousness. It was most important of all that he tell who
had wanted him out of the way.

Trace down the man with the motive, and sooner or later Hines would
trace down the gunmen themselves. And if he traced down the gunmen,
sooner or later he'd find out who had flung on a curtain of darkness at
a remarkably convenient moment. And if he caught that man, he'd have
forestalled a number of undesirable happenings he began to feel more
and more sure were in the wind.

At the hospital the blond man was still unconscious and Hines was
impatient.

"But he may come to any moment," the surgeon told him comfortably. "I
took a chance. Unconscious, no response to stimuli, severe shock. No
need to give him anæsthetic, shock besides. I had an ether-cone handy,
but he didn't murmur while I worked on him. Much better off. He can
talk as soon as he comes to, instead of your having to wait an hour."

Hines was thinking busily. His eyes hardened.

"Any chance of his living a few days?" he demanded. "Long enough to do
some identifying if I catch a man I'm looking for?"

"He should live ten years," the surgeon said placidly. "A bullet
glanced off his skull, and there's not even concussion. Another went
through the fleshy part of his shoulder. A third just missed his
knee-tendons--a narrow thing, that. He'll be able to walk out of here
in three or four days, most likely. He was lucky. Why was he shot at?"

"That's what I want to find out," said Hines.

"Go up to his bed, then," said the surgeon.

Hines was pacing impatiently up and down the corridor outside the ward
when an idea struck him. He examined it warily. Then he called a nurse.
In five minutes the still unconscious man was shifted to a private
room, and his clothes were brought in.

Hines was going busily through the pockets and frowning savagely at the
lack of identifying data when there was a knock on the door. A nurse
put her head in and said:

"The young lady you were expecting."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hines' face was blank when Kathryn Bush came in.

"You're not playing fair!" she said, her eyes stormy. "I had to fib to
get in. But the press must be served. I told them you were expecting
me. I guessed you'd be here. How is he?"

"Knocked cold," said Hines. "That's all." Then he added exasperatingly,
"But look here--"

"Look here?" she echoed reproachfully. "I'm responsible for your
getting the leads in this affair from the beginning. If I hadn't had a
hunch and gone to the park, and if I hadn't risked arrest by speaking
to a police officer who happened to be moon-gazing, and if I hadn't
kept him talking to me, he'd never have known a darned thing was out of
the way! And I gave you some important stuff this morning. It wasn't
fair to hedge."

"Good Lord!" said Hines irritably. "It came too fast. I didn't have
time to do anything. Certainly not to telephone you--"

"Oh!" She seemed mollified. "You would have phoned me if you could?
That's all right. Now, what happened? A wild account of mysterious
shootings, and darkness in broad daylight, was phoned in, and I grabbed
the assignment. Threatened to weep all over the city editor's desk
if he didn't give it to me. So I'm handling this for the _Star_. It
sounded too insane to be true, but I knew better, especially when I
heard you were in it. What really did happen?"

Hines went back to his investigation of the clothing, while he told her
jerkily about the whole thing.

"The city editor wouldn't believe it," she said placidly. "As an
assignment it is a dud. I told him about the moon and the accident last
night and he looked at me as if he expected me to say I was Mary, Queen
of Scots in one minute more. I blushed. Actually, I blushed! I felt
proud of that blush afterward. Something of youth has survived even the
city room."

Kathryn was possibly twenty-two or three, but whatever Hines might have
intended to say, it was interrupted by a nurse. She came in, bent over
the bed, and glanced up.

"He's conscious."

Hines moved swiftly to the bedside. Bland, clear blue eyes looked up at
him above the rather incredible yellow whiskers. A booming voice said
without emotion:

"I have been conscious for some time. _Verdamm!_ Is that what happened?"

There was a distinct accent in his speech, but his sentence-structure
was the careful accuracy of the educated European, tinged, presently,
with exotic colloquialisms.

"If you heard me talking," said Hines, "you heard what happened. Yes.
I'm Police Lieutenant Hines, and I want to know some things. Please try
to tell me who you are and who you think wanted to have you killed."

"In spite of the very deffil of a headache," said the booming voice
from the bed, "I have been trying to think of the answers to those
questions for at least fife minutes. I saw the gentlemen who shot at
me, yes. You, Herr Hines, were running toward them when I fell. But I
nefer saw any of them before at any time. And I am _verdammt_ if I know
why they should shoot me. I am being calm, howefer. I shall give it my
attention. Maybe I shall think it out. How much am I hurt?"

"Not badly," Hines assured him. He was biting at his lips and frowning
in thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Tell me," said Kathryn suddenly, smiling down at the bandaged man on
the bed. "Were you ever in a place called Edginton, New York, or a
place called Stony Mountain?"

The candid blue eyes turned to her, but they were wide with
astonishment.

"Young lady," said the booming voice plaintively, "as a scientist I
haff refused to admit magic into my considerations. But how in der name
of forty-sefen deffils do you know that I came from there only a short
time ago?"

Kathryn was twinkling triumphantly at Hines. He grunted.

"You win," he said briefly. "Go on."

"Who worked with you up there?" she asked. "I think he had you shot."

"Breston? No. He is a scoundrel in his way, and I do not like him. But
he is a good scientist, and I haff no quarrel with him."

Hines grunted at the name. "Preston: he's about thirty-five," the
detective said shortly, "very broad-shouldered, and he affects a
Vandyke beard. His voice is rather harsh, and he speaks very precisely."

The wide blue eyes swung blankly to him.

"I think I will haff to call on more than forty-sefen deffils,"
the booming voice said more plaintively still. "_Himmel!_ You know
eferything. That is him. Do I need to say that my name is Schaaf--"

Kathryn looked up.

"Oh! You made the direct measurements of the size of a molecule."

The patient blinked.

"I nearly starff to death," he observed, "because there is in America
no way for a theoretic physicist to earn a lifing. Nobody has efer
heard of me. And I am shot at by utter strangers, I wake up in
hospital--I must be in a hospital--and a young lady tells me where I
haff been, a gentleman describes to me a man I most prifately dislike,
and then I am reminded of a relatifely unimportant mistake I made six
years ago."

Hines grunted impatiently.

"Preston's the man who had you shot, all right. And I think I know why.
Professor Schaaf, it all works down to this. Up in Edginton you were
working on the production of darkness, the neutralization of light--"

"No. Not I. I merely did measurements for Breston. He offered to gife
me passage-money back to Europe if I did them. He got them cheap.
Measurements of der mass and dimensions of der atmospheric ion, and
changes in der mass and volume of der molecule when der allotropy of
ionization took place."

"Well, then, Breston, or Preston, he was working on the neutralization
of light--"

"_Ach_, no! On der production of fluorescence in ionized bodies under
der influence of short Hertzian wafes. Wait--yes, I suppose you could
say that. It is not scientific, but you might say that. When his
apparatus finally got working it gafe off darkness that was like der
bottom of hell."

Hines emitted a grunt that was almost explosive.

"Ha! Now we're getting somewhere! He has an outfit that makes darkness.
It was used to help his gunmen escape when you were shot at, and I
have excellent reason to think it's going to be used for more criminal
purposes still."

"Criminal? It was pure science. Theoretic science. Der fluorescence of
ionized substances under der influence of short Hertzian wafes. Does
that sound like a help to safe-blowers?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Hines drew a deep breath and began to talk. When he mentioned the
shutting off of moonlight in Central Park, Schaaf nodded rapidly. He
seemed to have lost surprisingly little strength.

"Yes. He could do that. He was working on a beam apparatus when I left,
so that der darkness would be gifen off on one side only. He could not
read der instruments before."

The account of the automobile accident that seemed to have been
deliberately produced made the yellow-bearded man frown angrily. When
Hines had given a succinct account of Lefty Dunn's police record and
the ambitions he might be expected to cherish, Schaaf was rumbling in
his beard.

"Hm--I see. I see. Maybe I can help you. Maybe I can't. I try, anyhow.
I did not like Breston. He made me mad. When I saw der success of
his experiments come about I said, 'Breston, I congratulate you. Der
Atchison medal is der same as yours. If you carry on your work as
splendidly as this, it may be efen that I shall yet read of you as a
Nobel Prize man. You haff der disposition of a dyspeptic crab, but
you are a great scientist and I congratulate you from der bottom of my
heart.' I said that to him, in spite of der fact that he had made me
mad. And he laughed at me. 'Atchison medal?' he said in a sneering sort
of way, 'Nobel Prize! Schaaf, you are a damned fool. I am for bigger
things than that.' And I turned around and left him. I thought he must
be crazy."

Hines said curtly:

"With Lefty Dunn's organizing ability, he might pick up anywhere from a
hundred thousand dollars to half a million within the next week, in New
York City alone."

"Maybe, then, he is not crazy. You tell me, anyhow, he tried to get
me killed. Hm--Lieutenant Hines, you send somebody to my room at that
abominable house where I liff. Get eferything out of it. Eferything. I
have papers of my own, and there are some memoranda of his that I took
by mistake. I had intended to send them back to him. It was by accident
that I took them. We will begin to see what we see. I haff an idea. And
I will need all that I can findt about his figures."

Hines looked at the girl. She had been listening. But a good reporter,
these days, does not go about with a pencil and a pad of paper. With
soft shirts and soft cuffs in vogue, he does not even write on his
cuffs. And Kathryn had no cuffs, anyhow.

"I'll go myself," said Hines briefly. "I'm going to post a guard at
your door in case anybody has heard that you're still alive. My own
opinion is that it would be wisest for you to die."

Schaaf blinked, and then smiled wryly.

"_Ach_, yes. It is better that I die. For der sake of my health, let us
say. Fery well, I haff expired, and while you go get der things from my
room I will think der wise deep thoughts of der defunct."

Kathryn smiled at the man in the bed and followed Hines from the room.

"I'm coming, too, if you don't mind," she announced, in the hall
outside. "As a news story, this is a dud. Even if the _Star_ printed
it, the other papers would laugh. But I want to follow up what happens,
because if Lefty Dunn and his friend Preston do use that darkness, I'll
have the whole story for the _Star_ while the other papers are just
guessing. You see?"

"I do," said Hines, relieved. "It shouldn't be printed just now. I
was trying to think of some way to persuade you to kill it, as far as
publication."

       *       *       *       *       *

It took less than five minutes to get two uniformed men on guard
outside the yellow-bearded man's door, but it took ten to arrange that
if any inquiries were made, by telephone or otherwise, the answer would
be given that the bearded man shot on Fifty-Eighth Street had died
without regaining consciousness.

"Schaaf knows too much about what Preston has developed," said Hines
dryly. "Of course Preston wants him killed."

Then the little police runabout went sliding through traffic down
town again. The fingerprint car had vanished from before the Blowbar
Building. Hines let his mind linger hopefully on the possibilities
fingerprints might offer if they turned out well. He went up the steps
of the blowsy brownstone house. An angular woman with her head in a
towel opened the door.

"I'm Police Lieutenant Hines," said Hines briefly. "A lodger here was
shot about two hours ago and taken to the hospital. I've come to take
charge of his effects."

He displayed his badge. The woman wiped her hands nervously.

"O' course you can go up," she said uneasily. "O' course! But his
things have been took. A friend of his came an' said he'd helped put
Mr. Schaaf in the ambulance, an' Mr. Schaaf was very likely hurt bad,
an' he paid the room rent that was due an' packed the things up, an'
'bout half an hour ago he sent a taxi for the things that were left. He
said Mr. Schaaf would be in the hospital for a long time an' he'd take
care of them for him."

Hines's jaws snapped shut.

"He was a broad-shouldered man," he said grimly, "with a beard like a
doctor."

The woman nodded, relieved.

"Yes, sir. He'd been to see Mr. Schaaf before, sir, but he missed him."

"When did he come in, to-day?" demanded Hines.

"Why, right after the ambulance left, sir."

Hines ground his teeth.

"I'll look at the room," he said savagely, "but it's no use."

It was very clearly useless to look in the room. It had been stripped
clean of everything but the furnishings plainly provided by the house
itself. The bureau drawers were emptied. The suitcase one would expect
any transient to possess were gone.

"That was Preston," said Hines to Kathryn Bush with a savage calmness.
"He was in here, packing up papers and such things, while I was in the
building next door. He was probably in this room when I stopped on the
sidewalk, not certain whether to come here or go first to the hospital.
Nerve? That man has it!"

"And you think--"

"He'll bleed New York dry," snapped Hines. "He'll make the police force
a laughing-stock."




                              CHAPTER IV

                             Black Horror


The shooting of an unknown man who died without regaining consciousness
was not big-time news. The curtain of sheer darkness which
eye-witnesses swore had blocked the whole of Fifty-Eighth Street for
nearly five minutes would have been big-time news had anybody believed
in it.

Reporters who questioned Hines got noncommittal answers, found out that
of the two men killed one was a well-known gunman previously supposed
to be in Chicago, and let it go at that.

The fingerprints satisfied Hines completely and convinced the
commissioner finally, but that bit of evidence was not made public.
So the killing got an average of a quarter-column on an inside page
in that afternoon's papers; the curtain of darkness was either
not mentioned or was referred to as a smoke screen left behind by
the fleeing car, and the whole affair was summed up as a New York
reflection of a probable Chicago gang-war.

Schaaf grimaced when he re-read the accounts three days later. Hines
had moved him from the hospital to his own apartment, and the big
German was recovering rapidly. And as his strength came back a certain
grimness came with it.

"Breston," he explained firmly, "is a scoundrel. He stole my records,
which I had intended to publish. Those records are important. _Himmel!_
I had an entirely new method of measuring. Der amplitude of der
Brownian mofement in a dilute electrolyte enabled me to calculate der
ion-masses perfectly. I had proof of der multiatomic nature of der
molecule of six supposedly simple substances, by der demonstrable extra
weight of der ions. Sooner or later I shall find Breston, and I shall
exterminate him! I haff all my work to do ofer again, and right now if
somebody offered to sell me der whole city of New York for six cents, I
couldn't buy enough dirt to stop a watch."

Kathryn chuckled.

"I've an idea, Professor Schaaf," she said encouragingly. "When this
thing breaks, you're going to get publicity. You're dead right now, of
course, but when you're resurrected you'll be famous. And when you are
famous--"

"When you are famous, efen if you are a fake," said Schaaf
pessimistically, "der laboratories fall ofer themselfs to offer you a
salary. All right. You make me famous, Miss Bush, and you, Mr. Hines,
giff me a chance to practice _Schrecklichkeit_ on that _verdammt_
Breston."

He retired behind a cloud of smoke with every appearance of gloom. But
presently he was explaining, in answer to Kathryn's questions:

"Breston does not make darkness. Not directly. He has found that
ionized particles are fluorescent under der influence of certain short
Hertzian wafes. And there are ionized particles eferywhere. Especially
where there is dust. Fluorescence is der property of absorbing light
of one wafe-length--one color--and radiating out light of a longer
wafe-length, another color.

"You take rhodamine dye, for instance. You throw ultra-violet rays
upon it. Der ultra-violet rays are a color so far past der blue end of
der spectrum that it is infisible. But when they strike der rhodamine,
they are absorbed and radiated away again as light of der most fifid of
scarlet. Well, under der influence of Breston's short Hertzian wafes,
der ions on dust-particles and in der air absorb all der colors of
fisible light. And they radiate it away again as infisible colors we
call heat, which is so far past der red end of der spectrum that you
can't see it.

"Ordinary air contains enough ions to cause der absorption of
practically all der light in der room. A laboratory with Breston's
apparatus in it gets as dark as der bottom of hell, and after awhile it
is as hot as hell's chimney."

       *       *       *       *       *

Kathryn rose.

"I'll call on you," she said soberly, though her eyes had devils
of mischief in them, "to give me a special interview. 'Thermometry
in Hades. Famous Savant Measures Ultimates in Heat and Discusses
Refrigerating Rooms for Red-Hot Mammas.'"

"Laugh," said Schaaf pessimistically, "but laugh in print, Miss Bush,
and I won't complain."

He lapsed into a depressed silence as Hines and Kathryn went out.

"He takes the loss of his notes pretty seriously," said Hines,
frowning. "So do I. He might have been able to work out something to
neutralize the infernal thing."

"It's still hanging fire?"

Hines opened the car door for her. "Still," he said grimly. "We
can't locate Lefty Dunn, but we do know that half a dozen of our
most prominent gunmen and gangster-leaders have met him. We offered
one of them, in particular, to forget about two of his most useful
murderers if he'd come across with information that would enable us
to nab Preston and Dunn. But he insisted he didn't know what we were
talking about. The commissioner soft-pedaled the newspapers, but he's
convinced. There were too many eye-witnesses to the last stunt."

"And so?"

"We're passing out word to all the big jewelers to put paste in their
shop windows, and the banks especially have been warned to take extra
care."

The little runabout was running swiftly down upper Broadway. The parked
center-spaces with the air-ducts for the subway beneath were flowing by
at an even, regular rate. Columbus Circle appeared dead. The façade and
canopy of an uptown motion-picture palace swept by to the right.

A heavy gray car jerked suddenly out into the traffic and came purring
up to a space no more than ten yards behind the runabout.

Quite silently and quite suddenly everything was blotted out.
One instant the runabout was speeding along with Hines frowning
abstractedly at the wheel; the next it was rolling through an opaque
blackness that was so sudden that it stung the eyes. The girl gasped in
her seat beside Hines. All the world was obliterated. The girl beside
him ceased to exist; the wheel in his hands and his hands themselves
could not be seen.

For perhaps three seconds there was stunned silence everywhere; then a
multitudinous squealing of brakes, a scared squawking of horns.

The runabout shuddered as Hines jammed his foot down hard on the
accelerator. It shot ahead through nothingness. There was a peculiar
little lurch. He had swung imperceptibly to the left, and his left-hand
tire had just slipped down the tiny drop of the surface-car rail
exposed by road repairs.

"We're all right for a block or more," he snapped into the blackness
all about him. "I'm following the car track, and all's clear for at
least that distance."

He drove on and on. Brayings and bellowings arose on every hand. Every
car in motion had stopped stock-still and its driver was sounding his
horn desperately. Every man, it may be, believed he had been stricken
blind. Certainly no man dared attempt to drive.

Hines eased the car to a stop.

"Get down in the bottom of the car," he said quietly into the
nothingness that surrounded him. "I don't think they'll risk coming
this far in the dark, but get down."

He felt the little car responding to her movement. Then there was a
wait of seconds--minutes. Then, with a sudden flickering, the light
went on again.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pedestrians, groping hysterically for something solid to hold on to
in their inexplicable blindness, grew dizzy and dazed at the sudden
restoration of their sight. Drivers of many cars burst into speech
which varied from the ludicrously prayerful to the grotesquely profane.

But Hines had whirled about in his seat and his service revolver
was out and ready. The sudden return of light dazzled his eyes for
a moment, but he saw a big gray car that had not quite stopped turn
abruptly and dart off into a side street. It was crowded with men. It
was the car that had pulled out from the curb and followed along some
ten yards behind him.

With a grimace that was not in the least mirthful, Hines put his
revolver away.

"Fooled 'em," he said harshly. "But I think hell's to pay to-day. This
was half an accident."

Kathryn scrambled to her seat.

"I was s-scared," she said quietly.

"They saw me drive by," said Hines grimly. "Lefty Dunn has reason
to dislike me. And I killed one of his men the other day, when they
shot Professor Schaaf. So when they saw me they pulled out into the
traffic behind me. They figured I'd do what everybody else would do
when the blackness fell--jam on my brakes and blow my horn. And they'd
come up to the car, turn off the darkness, fill me full of holes, and
turn on the darkness again when they moved to a corner and turned down
it. They could have sighted their way easily enough in two seconds of
brightness. But I stepped on the accelerator instead."

The traffic was a nerve-racked, hopelessly disorganized mass of shaky
drivers. Drug stores were being packed with clamorous people demanding
a doctor's attention. Women had either fainted or were fainting all
about. Because of the incredibility and consequent non-publication of
the three previous uses of the darkness-producing device, every person
who had been in the darkness considered that he had suddenly gone blind.

Hines jammed on his brakes again and fought his way into a drug store.
He made two calls--using his police badge to force a way into the phone
booths--and fought his way out again. The first strictly individual
panic began to give way to a stunned amazement as people discovered
that not only themselves but every one else had been blinded at the
same instant.

The runabout circled Columbus' statue and went streaking down Seventh
Avenue.

"I called headquarters," said Hines savagely, "and reported that I
thought the whole works would come off within an hour or so. I admitted
it was a guess, but Dunn and Preston are in a car fitted up to make
darkness, and they aren't taking chances for fun."

"Please!" said Kathryn imploringly. "Please don't put me out of the car
to make room for a detective. Please don't! If you're right I'm going
to realize my life's ambition and scoop the town. The first things I
learned in newspaper work were that there isn't any Santa Claus, and
scoops don't happen any more. But please let me stay in this car!"

Hines shot on down town.

"Headquarters said the Merchants' National is moving three-quarters of
a million in currency some time this morning. That will be Lefty Dunn's
meat, if he can make it. When I stop the car you find a place to take
cover."

A small, firm hand closed over his arm ecstatically.

"You're a darling!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The runabout swung east at Thirty-Ninth Street.

"I phoned Schaaf, too," said Hines jerkily. "Told him I thought the
darkness just now was intended to get me, but that I didn't believe it
was planned. Just that they'd caught sight of me. He agreed, and said
if things went dark there he'd crawl under a bed. They'd have to turn
off the darkness to find him, and he'd have a chance to get some of
them. He's enthusiastic and hopeful."

"He's rather a dear," said Kathryn exuberantly.

There were a series of staccato poppings to right and left. Half a
dozen motorcycle police dived through the traffic and shot ahead,
weaving in and out, in a dead run for Fifth Avenue.

"There's proof the commissioner's convinced," said Hines dryly. "He's
afraid not to be."

He grunted in annoyance and swung in to the curb again.

"What's the matter?"

"I proposed that patrols of four or five men be put at strategic points
down town, wherever being able to turn on the darkness would offer a
killing. The darkness is shot out in a beam ahead of the car. The back
part of the car that makes the darkness will be visible, as we saw in
the park. And if we have a patrol closing in on the edge of darkness,
wherever it may be, they'll spot that car."

He had dived out of the runabout and was plunging in to use a telephone
again. Kathryn remained seated, her eyes shining. She began to
visualize headlines, a by-line on the first page, photographs.

Then, quite suddenly, she realized that the headlines she had imagined
were hopelessly bad, from a newspaper standpoint. Police Lieutenant
Hines would be featured in the story, of course, but his name and
title would not--would definitely not by any chance be set in
hundred-and-twenty-point type across eight columns.

He came out, frowning.

"They'd forgotten it. It seems certain to be Fifth Avenue. They're
going to post men now."

He shoved in the clutch and put the car in first. Fifth Avenue was only
half a block away.

And there was a sudden flickering in the air, and then an obscure
duskiness everywhere, and suddenly Thirty-Ninth Street ceased to exist
about a hundred feet ahead of the car. There was a huge, thick wall
of darkness that rose out of the earth and towered upward. For three
seconds it loomed far above the tiny vehicles in the street, and
suddenly it broke, and for three seconds more the light showed again,
and then the cylinder of darkness abruptly formed once more and held.

Hines jammed on the brakes. He stared at the impalpable barrier of
opacity that rose a hundred feet in the air.

"It's turned on," he said grimly.

Kathryn stared. The blackness looked almost exactly like the section
of a monster cylinder of black velvet. There was not a particle of
flickering or wavering about it. It was steady enough to seem tangible.
A touring car with the top down was exactly halfway into it, and a
woman in the back seat began to scream. The car began to back, slowly,
and emerged from the apparently solid mass of darkness. The chauffeur
stared up at it, his face a sickly gray. He backed and backed,
senselessly, until his car crashed into a parked car behind him.

The black cylinder curved gently, and up aloft it could be seen to have
a less definite edge. Four stories up on the Lord & Taylor Building
one could see a cob-webby darkness begin at the edge of a window, and
deepen to the complete opaqueness of a solid barrier only at the other
side of the glass.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then a monstrous, muffled uproar began on Fifth Avenue. It was the
horns of many, many thousand cars being sounded by panic-stricken
drivers to prevent their being run into while they could not see to
drive. That moaning, discordant uproar began far down town. It extended
far uptown again. It seemed to reach from one horizon to the other.
And a vast column of implacable darkness lay athwart the city. It
seemed to grow in size as it went uptown. At Forty-Second Street it was
definitely over a hundred feet in height. At Fifty-Seventh it was two
hundred, but seemed less tangible. It was thinner at the edges. In the
Eighties it seemed hardly more than a thick, dense smoke that made all
drivers slow down to a crawl and careful drivers stop altogether. At
One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street it was a shadow only. Beyond the
Bronx it was not noticed.

But from Madison Square to the Sixties a deep, discordant bedlam rose
to the skies. The horns of thousands of helpless, stationary cars arose
in a vast bellowing sound that seemed like a million-tongued cry of
agony.




                               CHAPTER V

                          Wolves To The Hunt


Fifteen minutes before, Fifth Avenue had been entirely normal, which
is to say that it was crowded and picturesque. From curb to curb the
asphalt was a solid stream of vehicles, going swiftly north and south
in parallel lines, then halting abruptly for a space, and darting into
swift motion again. The sidewalks contained their diverse populations.

About Madison Square, north of that small and isolated parking space
the city fathers permit, there were openings in the wheeled traffic.
And people could walk comfortably on the sidewalks, pausing to gaze
into windows without being jostled, or they could hasten if they chose
without jostling others.

Whistling young men in their later teens pushed wheeled boxes with a
self-admiring dexterity from the location of one wholesale firm to the
location of another wholesale firm. The occupants of the sidewalks were
mostly men going from one place to another place.

Around Thirty-Fourth Street the character of the pedestrians had
changed entirely. At least half the crowds on the sidewalks were women,
and in consequence there was vast confusion and more than a little
obstruction to anybody who had a definite destination. The wheeled
traffic was a solid mass of gleaming vehicles, and a swift mechanical
purring came from the space between the curbings whenever certain
colored lights showed appropriate tints in suitable directions.

At Thirty-Ninth Street the pedestrian traffic was almost exclusively
female, and most men moved west to Sixth Avenue if they were in a
hurry. And a surging, solid mass of motors rolled north and south in
mechanical obedience to lights and whistles in their five-block units.

This was fifteen minutes before the event that made women who could
afford it have nervous breakdowns, and gave other women less luxurious
nightmares for weeks afterward.

At about that time taxicabs began to appear here and there on the side
streets leading to the avenue. The taxis stopped anywhere within a
block of Fifth Avenue and disgorged their fares.

Most of those passengers were youngish men, and nearly all were
impeccably dressed, and a few of them had that curious bluntness of
features that comes of many batterings in many battles. Some, however,
were distinctly shabby and furtive-eyed. And there were a few figures
who were not young at all, but old and bent and broken. But in all
these anomalous newcomers to the avenue one common feature could be
observed. All were eagerly expectant, and all were more or less uneasy,
or at least in doubt.

But for the most part the arrivals passed unnoticed. A patrolman at
Thirty-Seventh Street widened his eyes at sight of one little group of
amiably chattering young men who smiled and talked and very curiously
did not move their lips at all. That patrolman turned deliberately
about and strolled in their wake, swinging his night-stick and
privately cursing the fact that so many women had not stayed at home
that day, and that a policeman has so many duties entirely unconnected
with the basic duty of his profession, and that he might lose sight
of those young men if some fool woman stopped him to ask an idiotic
question.

A traffic cop stepped over to a motorcycle patrolman resting on a still
but chugging mount beside the curb.

"Better keep an eye on that car, Pete. I think I know the guy that's
drivin' it."

And the motorcycle sputtered loudly and drifted off into the stream of
vehicles.

A doorman outside a particularly exclusive store cocked a wise eye at a
bent, white-bewhiskered figure trudging rather pathetically through the
crowd, buffeted about by chattering women. The doorman was an ex-cop,
and reflected inaudibly:

"There's old Schmeel, out of stir again. He'll be gettin' in trouble if
he tries his old dip tricks in this crowd."

       *       *       *       *       *

These observations were made, it is true. But the vast majority of the
new arrivals slipped unnoticed into the throng. Even the fact that a
great many of them looked now and then at their watches passed without
comment.

Of course, no one could have been expected to observe a gentleman who
had rented desk-space three days before, in a front office overlooking
the façade of the Merchants' National Bank. He was gazing intently out
of the front office window, and he held an office telephone in his hand.

No one could have guessed that he was talking to a man in another
office fronting on Madison Square. Nor would any one guess that the man
next to him with another telephone instrument in his hand was similarly
connected with a telephone booth in a confectionery store just around
the corner from Fifth Avenue.

A big gray car parked in the triangular parking space where Broadway
crosses Fifth; it was not particularly observed, even though it was not
empty of people like the other parked cars. And nobody at all noticed
that the man at the driver's wheel was a broad-shouldered man with a
professional-looking Vandyke beard, or that he was looking intently up
at a window in which a man stood with a desk telephone in his hand.

Fifth Avenue for its whole length was a picture of swift and colorful
movement in the bright sunshine. From the sidewalks where women
predominated a babble of voices arose with the shuffling sound of many
feet in movement. From the roadway came the booming, purring noise
of many motors and the singing of innumerable tires. It was a highly
picturesque and wholly normal sight.

But suddenly, one of the two men in the office facing the Merchants'
National Bank said sharply:

"It's in sight."

The other man spoke into his transmitter. A clumsy gray object had
appeared in the flood of wheeled things flowing below. New Yorkers gave
it no second glance. Armored cars, equipped with bullet-proof walls and
tires, and armed with machine guns and hand-grenades, move regularly
through the streets of New York. It is, you see, the most civilized
city in the world, and therefore land battleships are necessary for the
movement of valuables about its thoroughfares.

"Get movin'," snapped the man whose phone communicated with the
phone-booth around the corner. "The cops are comin' out now. They'
goin' to rush it."

He listened, hung up the receiver, and lit a cigarette. His hands
trembled a little. Four policemen were issuing suddenly from the bank.
But six young men were rounding the corner, five of them having just
ceased a cordial conversation in a candy store lobby on having been
joined by the sixth from within. The policemen more or less efficiently
checked the flow of pedestrians. They had a clear path made from the
bank doorway to the curbing at the exact instant that the armored car
came to a complete stop. It was excellent, neatly timed work.

"It's stopped. Get set!" The man at the telephone to Madison Square was
tense. He'd seen, too, the six young men among the milling, curious
crowd that had been checked by the police guard.

The door of the armored car opened. Simultaneously, two men appeared
in the doorway of the bank, carrying apparently heavy bags. They came
quickly down the steps.

"Shoot the works!" snapped the man at the telephone. His voice was
strained to the breaking point.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a breath-taking pause, just about long enough for a man in a
window on Madison Square to make a signal with his hand, and for that
signal to be acted upon by a man in a parked car. Then, quite suddenly,
darkness--tangible, blank, and absolute--fell upon the earth. All
visible objects were blotted out.

It held for three seconds. Then unbearable and unbelievable daylight
flooded the world once more. A shot, two, three--Then darkness fell
again in the same incredible quietness and with the same unbelievable
intensity.

From the darkness there arose the sound of firearms crashing savagely.
There were screams. And then from south to north, as far as the ear
could range, came the discordant, throaty bellowing of automobile
horns. Men, struck blind, jammed on their brakes and set their horns
to bellowing. The tumult that arose was horrible and insane; it was
insistent and terrifying.

The crashing of guns ceased. The crowded, stunned mass of people before
the Merchants' National heard panting snarls, heard a voice gasp
triumphantly, "Got it!" and then many of the blinded, staggered people
were hurled aside.

The bellowing horns of the cars were enough for orientation. Men and
women who had stopped stock-still with their hearts in their throats at
the sudden feeling of hopeless blindness upon them, were hurled to the
ground.

A compact group of panting figures was heading swiftly and ruthlessly
northward, and battered its way through the dazed crowd until a shrill
whistling sound was audible through the deeper toned bellowing of
the horns. Those figures turned in their savage progress, then, and
clutched at the man who blew that whistle. He chuckled. A blind man is
a good guide in darkness. He went before them, tapping, down a side
street.

Unbelieving people who stared from bright sunlight at a monster
cylinder of darkness that seemed to have engulfed Fifth Avenue saw six
hatless young men come panting out of that darkness, dragging two heavy
bags, saw them pile themselves into a waiting car, and saw that car
plunge madly away from the darkness and the uproar that issued from
it. And a blind man chuckled and went tapping his way back into the
darkness.

That, though, was not the only occurrence which later showed that the
darkness had not been unexpected. An old, bent blind man, returned
from guiding panting gangsters to the light, went zestfully about his
ancient trade. A dip, of all men, needs his eyesight second only to his
nimble fingers. But here all men were blind.

[Illustration]

There was the cushioned tapping of a stick amid all the tumult of
blaring horns, and figures felt one brush accustomedly against them,
and were too dazed to feel gentle but nimble old fingers abstracting
here a wallet, there a watch.

Proprietors and clerks in jewelry stores fronting on the avenue heard
the tremendous crashings of their plate-glass windows, and burglar
alarms rang resoundingly, clanging clamorously even through the bedlam
from without. Those clerks and those proprietors were entirely helpless
to stop the clutching fingers that reached in and groped, and left
empty traps where treasures had been on view before.

One man was found dead with a knife wound in his back, when the
darkness lifted, and he was known to be a person who had acquired a
certain amount of wealth by very dubious means, but nobody ever found
out who had preferred the opportunity of a safe revenge to the chance
of robbing with impunity.

       *       *       *       *       *

For fifteen minutes Fifth Avenue was in darkness, darkness that was
tangible and blank and absolute, and in that fifteen minutes forewarned
persons of the underworld reaped a harvest. Each to his specialty, they
sprang like wolves in the blackness whose duration they foreknew.

The list of thefts alone filled two columns in the next morning's
papers, and there were some persons badly hurt--mostly women, who
clutched hysterically at hands that groped about them. The list of
smashed cars and traffic accidents was impressive. There had been three
or four drivers who lost their heads and plunged madly through the
blackness until brought up by insurmountable obstacles.

And since the underworld is the resort of people of all grades of
mental distortion, there were one or two crimes that were quite too
horrible to be reported in full.

But at the end of that fifteen minutes, with the barest possible trace
of flickering, the darkness vanished as suddenly and as silently as
it had come. The sunlight shone again upon hordes of motors, blaring
frantically, and upon streets full of people who abruptly charged
frenziedly here and there the instant they could see to flee. There
were small crumpled figures which were women who had fainted, and who
were, quite frequently, inconspicuously robbed of purses and trinkets
while the hysteria of the light returned still held.

In all this uproar a gray car moved quietly out of the parking space
the city fathers still permit in that vast triangle of asphalt where
roadway crosses Fifth Avenue. The columnar--later it was proved to be
the cone-shaped--beam of darkness that had been sent north from Madison
Square had widened out at that spot.

For nearly two blocks in every direction the darkness had held about
Madison Square. So that the gray car moved undisturbedly out of the
parking space, and turned, and went down the nearly emptied lower
Fifth Avenue to Ninth Street, and there turned east and vanished.

And nobody seemed to notice that it was driven by a broad-shouldered
man with a Vandyke beard.




                              CHAPTER VI

                        Waiting In The Darkness


The street lamps glowed with a peculiar glitter upon pavements still
wet from a recent rain. The rumbling of the city, which never ceases,
had died down to that partially discordant muttering which is the
city's voice in the small hours.

Kathryn came out of the doorway and shivered a little at the damp
chilliness of the night air. But she smiled warmly when Hines held open
the car door for her.

"It's decent of you," she said gratefully, as she stepped in and when
the car started off. "I almost refused to get up when the telephone
call came, but I'm glad I didn't. You think something's going to
happen?"

Hines nodded. The little car was purring toward Broadway and swung into
the nearly deserted but brilliantly lighted way. It began to shoot on
down town with a singing of tires.

"Either we get him," he said tiredly, "or we'll have to throw up the
sponge. I've never worked so hard in my life as I've done this last two
weeks."

It was two weeks since a cone of darkness had lain along Fifth Avenue's
length for fifteen minutes and left New York panic-stricken. In those
two weeks Hines had been doing the work of at least six men. He was the
only man in New York, aside from Schaaf, who would recognize the man
Preston. And Preston had to be found.

"Crooks are fools," said Hines drearily. "You'd think those yeggs
that were tipped off about the darkness would have known how to take
advantage of it. But we picked up six more men to-day that we'll be
able to send away for long stretches. Fingerprints, of course. You'd
think a man who was going to smash a jewelry store window, knowing he
couldn't be interfered with, would have the sense to wear gloves. We've
got the men who robbed Blakes', and Houton's, and a couple of others.
Their fingerprints were on glass fragments inside the windows. They'd
cut their fingers on them and flung them out of the way as they groped
for the stuff on the trays."

"But no trace of Preston?"

"None. Oh, we've done what we could. We've third-degreed and sweated
every man we've picked up. We've had the station houses full, too. And
we've worked. We've caught a bunch of the little ones, and recovered
a good bit of property, and we have the goods on half a dozen fences
we've been trying to get for a long time; but Lefty Dunn and his mob
got away clean, and Preston with them--and they got three-quarters of a
million from the Merchants' National. In currency."

There was silence as the car sped on down the nearly deserted street,
passing no vehicles except occasional brilliantly lighted taxicabs. It
passed Columbus Circle, and a little later it passed Times Square, and
still went on down town.

"I--I feel almost ashamed of myself," said Kathryn soberly. "I tried
to help all I could, when you were working to forestall Preston, but
secretly I was almost hoping you'd fail. It would let me scoop the
town. And it did. My salary was raised because I had all the story and
Professor Schaaf's explanation of what the darkness was. But--it was
terrible. And people are still afraid it will happen again."

"Why not?" asked Hines tiredly. "It can. We haven't a thing to go on.
Schaaf's had the American Electric laboratories put at his disposal,
and he's buzzing about there blissfully, talking about the possibility
of heterodyning '_die verdammte_ short Hertzian wafes that cause der
trouble.' But he's got to duplicate Preston's results before he can
try to neutralize them. And so far there's been no reason why Preston
shouldn't turn on his darkness anywhere in the whole city and make
another clean-up at any minute."

       *       *       *       *       *

"But there've been precautions--"

"Oh, yes. Sternutatory gases--sneezing gas bombs--in show windows,
ready to be set off. Half-million-candle-power flares that will burn
five minutes in every bank. That much light probably won't be absorbed
by those ions Schaaf talks about. And guns. Most of all, there's the
fact that people know what they're up against, and will fight back even
in the dark. But I'm putting a lot of hope in to-night's work."

"What's happening to-night?" asked Kathryn.

"The banks have been working by non-negotiable paper more than ever,"
said Hines uninterestedly. "Wall Street went into spasms for awhile,
but took to issuing certificates for its negotiable securities. Short
of getting currency out of the Reserve Bank down there, it would be
pretty difficult for Preston to make much of a killing where most of
the money is. But money has to be shifted now and then.

"There's four millions in money and securities that has to be shifted
to-night. It was intended to do it secretly, but we found the news had
leaked. We think it leaked, anyway. And if it did, it leaked to Lefty
Dunn, and he'll make a try for it with Preston's help. We're going
to try to step on it. I've helped with the preparations, Schaaf's
helped more. He saw Preston's outfit up-State, you know, and he made a
suggestion or two that looks promising. I'm going to park you with him,
if you don't mind."

The car was far down town indeed now. Kathryn saw "Broome Street"
brightly illuminated on a corner signpost. But the runabout went on and
on, and the buildings grew taller and taller until the thin thread of
sky overhead was almost lost between the desolate lean flanks of the
structures on either hand.

Hines turned off to the right, stopped the car, and switched off the
lights.

"We'll walk from here." He looked at his watch. "Half past three. Two
hours to daybreak. You'll lose a lot of rest."

"I got some sleep," she said.

They walked on toward the Battery. Their pace seemed a crawl, after the
swift flight of the little car, and they seemed rather to be moving
through a cavern than any inhabited city, and the desolation of dead
buildings seemed to press down upon them and appall them.

It was a long, long walk through a desert of brick and steel. Suddenly
Hines turned in to a deserted doorway, and a voice spoke softly, and
they followed a hall to where a shaded electric bulb burned dimly, and
Kathryn saw figures sitting in readiness for something. She could not
know what.

There were one or two uniformed men among them, but the others looked
strange indeed, and Kathryn could not distinguish the cause of their
oddity. She was hustled into a tiny elevator that promptly began
to rise to the steady humming of a hidden motor, through dark and
unoccupied floors with the smell of emptiness.

The elevator stopped. A walk along a dark hallway to an open door. Into
an unlighted room in which a pipe glowed and in which there was the
sound of movement.

"Hines?"

"Right," said Hines briefly. "I've brought Miss Bush. She gave enough
information before that affair of two weeks ago to have given us a
chance to stop it. She's entitled to a front seat."

       *       *       *       *       *

A voice growled. Kathryn smiled wickedly in the darkness. That was the
commissioner, sitting up here in a darkened room.

"Ah, Miss Bush," Schaaf spoke amiably from the darkness. "You did not
giff me der chance to thank you for making me famous. Come and share my
window. Hines is going down into der street again."

She moved hesitantly through the darkness until he took her hand and
pressed it. He led her to the square of grayish light that was the
window.

"We are ten stories up," he told her. "If you do not mind der height,
look down."

She saw the street far below her, empty and gray and desolate, but
peculiarly clear by reason of the shaded street-lights.

"Der bank is opposite us," said Schaaf softly, as if afraid of
betraying the presence of an ambush by normal speech. "You see der
little lights inside. They haff four millions of dollars ready to be
mofed in an armored car, when it comes. They feel, Miss Bush, about
that four millions of dollars as I felt about my notes on der proof
of der multiatomic nature of der sodium chloride molecule. That four
millions is fery precious to them, Miss Bush, though they will nefer
spend a cent of it. Just as my notes were fery precious, though I could
not spend them."

He craned his neck. Far away, down the deep and narrow chasm below
the window, a brightly lighted taxicab came in a peculiar silence. It
seemed to roll noiselessly down the deserted street, and red and green
and yellow lights glittered upon it, and the white paint of its hood
glowed brightly as it passed close by a street lamp. It came on, and
maudlin song arose faintly from it. It sounded like a drunken group of
revelers, moved by some whim to invade the financial district at night.

It passed below and went on.

There was a muted whirring. The commissioner's guarded "Hello!" Then
gruntings. He hung up the receiver.

"Their lookouts, most likely, in that taxi. They don't know we know
about the leak, but they're scouting, anyway."

There was the movement of other bodies in the room. Kathryn suddenly
realized that there were probably four or five other men in there,
silent and waiting. One of them snapped a lighter and shielded the
flame with his hand while he puffed a cigar into a glow.

Kathryn caught a sudden glimpse of a curious collar about his neck. It
was a telephone transmitter hung in place, and there were headphones
over his ears. This was an office already fitted with several
phones, evidently, which had been taken over for use as a temporary
headquarters for the night.

"Er--hadn't we better--" began the commissioner uneasily.

"Shush," said Schaaf placidly. "Lieutenant Hines told me how it should
be done. Shush for awhile now."

Kathryn wanted to giggle. She felt very nervous and very much thrilled,
and more than a little apprehensive; and her muscles were uncomfortably
tense.

A man came out of the bank, far below. He looked up the street and then
went back inside again. The bank became black and blank and dark again.

"They expect der armored car," observed Schaaf. "Now we can haff a
little smoke. You might tell them."

He was talking toward the back of the room. A man spoke quietly into a
transmitter.

Kathryn gazed about and saw nothing. Schaaf felt the movement.

"Wait. Der performance will be intricate," he said, and chuckled.

       *       *       *       *       *

A minute. Two. Then there was a brittle little tinkling of glass
somewhere. The scraping, musical sound of glass falling down the stone
side of a building. Kathryn started.

"That--that's a fire over there. It must be!"

Smoke was welling hazily out of a broken window in a building on the
opposite side of the street and a half block away. A wavering reddish
glow became visible.

"To be sure," said Schaaf tranquilly. "It is an excellent effect."

He glanced once at it and stared down, looking far uptown and ignoring
the gradual accumulation of a vast mass of whitish vapor curling up the
sides of the buildings across the way. A second window broke with a
second brittle tinkling. A fresh billowing of smoke came out.

"Here is der armored car coming," said Schaaf.

A man spoke quietly into a transmitter. Kathryn looked down.

Far away, coming sturdily down the deserted street, one of the squat
gray armored cars which carry valuables from place to place in New York
was speeding noiselessly. Four motorcycle policemen ringed it about.

It swept up to the bank and stopped. One of the motorcycle policemen
suddenly pointed upward. There was an intensification of the red glow
back of the thick smoke. The motorcycle cop had stopped his machine.
He now ran swiftly to the nearest corner and worked busily at a little
signal box.

"Eferything according to schedule," said Schaaf. "He is turning in der
alarm."

A muted whirring. It was a telephone bell, muted. A man answered, and
said quietly:

"Two cars are coming down Church Street at forty m.p.h."

Kathryn felt a little electric thrill running over her. The
commissioner stood up and came over to one of the windows, gazing down
nervously.

Schaaf said meditatively: "I do not hear der engines. Tell der bank not
to hurry. And tell them of der two cars."

A man murmured at the back of the room. Kathryn was staring at the
fire. The smoke coming out halfway up the building across the way was
thick and dense, and the red glow behind it was fiercer. Then she heard
a faint clatter and clanging.

"Hines," said Schaaf in her ear, "he is a smart man. He thinks that
somewhere in der buildings all about there are men watching who can
report by der telephones, and can signal that der beans are spilled.
That is der reason for der verisimilitude."

The clanging and hooting grew louder. Making a monstrous tumult,
building up a tremendous uproar, fire-engines came racing down the
street. A steamer clanged to a stop and coupled swiftly to a hydrant. A
hook-and-ladder came racing. A hose-tower after it.

The bank doors opened, and men made ready to come out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Around the corner of the nearest street two heavy cars came hurtling.
A machine gun began to spit, and filled the cañon-like space between
the tall buildings with a snarling uproar. Water geysered upward for an
instant and swung sharply toward earth.

Kathryn, staring down, saw the four-inch stream from a hose strike the
foremost car and crash in its windows like so much wet paper. Then,
abruptly, the street and the lights and the armored car and all the
puffing fire-engines ceased to exist. And at the same instant something
flared intolerably overhead and the buildings on either side of the
street for many blocks to north and south began to gleam brightly.

"Breston," said Schaaf, very calmly indeed, "he has turned on der dark.
I guessed right about der probable height of der phenomenon. Now, we
shoot der works!"

A river of darkness seemed to have filled the street below. A dull
black substance seemed to have welled up instantly and to flow silently
and without disturbance between the tall rows of buildings, as the Styx
itself must flow between its banks. Flares, the huge magnesium torches
that are used by aircraft for landing at night, were burning atop
buildings for blocks on either hand.

From the motionless surface of the darkness the smoke and steam of the
fire-engines coiled upward into the glare above. The fire which had
been the excuse for calling the fire-engines had abruptly gone out,
and the welling smoke from the windows had ceased. The watchers in the
tenth-floor office looked down upon a surface of blackness imprisoned
between the walls of office-buildings. And submerged in that abysmal
dark there were men.

Dull, thudding concussions sounded from below. Windows quivered.

"Bombs," said Schaaf calmly. "They were ready to smash open der armored
car if they were too late to nab der shipment before it got in. Now
they use der bombs because they are scared. I will bet anybody that
Breston is shaking in his shoes."

The horrible shrill scream of a man in agony came echoing cavernously
from the impenetrable blackness below.




                              CHAPTER VII

                        Fighting The Invisible


A man spoke quietly at the back of the office.

"The bank doors are closed and the money's safe. They want to know if
they can turn the juice into the doors."

"_Himmel!_ No!" snapped Schaaf, as the commissioner rumbled an assent.
"Firemen are sweeping der hoses all about. Do they want to electrocute
them if a stream of water hits der doors?"

The commissioner hastily made his assent into a negative, and returned
to his study of the incredible scene. The buildings rose out of
nothingness, and their sides were apparently incandescent from the
flames burning above.

Down there under the surface of the blackness, the fire-engines swept
their streams of water to right and left and up and down. They were
working blindly, of course, but whatever those streams of water struck
would go down. Plate-glass, cars, men.

"_Verdamm!_" said Schaaf presently, though without dismay. "Hines is
a smart man. He don't take chances. We were hoping, Miss Bush, that
a stream of water would smash into der car where Breston had his
apparatus working. If it got into der coils it would short-circuit them
and der apparatus would work no longer. We could take a look at _die
Schweine_ then. But der engines are still working, judging by der steam
that comes up, and still der darkness holds. Hm--Ah, here comes der
first flare down."

A ball of fire, incredibly white and unbelievably fierce, descended
before Kathryn's eyes. It was swinging down swiftly by a dangling steel
cable. It went down in swift swoops of fifteen and twenty feet at a
time.

"A magnesium flare," said Schaaf softly. "It has half a million
candle-power. We try him on der dog. Ha!"

The flare reached the definite surface of the blackness. It seemed
incredible that no glitter came from that surface. It dived into
the flood of darkness. Its white light turned to red. Down and
down--Fifteen feet in the black flood and it could be seen as a dully
glowing red ball, no more.

"No more flares," said Schaaf quietly over his shoulder. "They don't
work. Der darkness absorbs all der light. But keep der other flares
going on der roofs. Now we try."

A voice spoke quietly from the row of telephone instruments.

"Lieutenant Hines reports that the street is full of gas. Sneeze-gas."

"No. 3 expedient gone to hell," said Schaaf calmly. "We hoped from
der water, and we hoped from der flares. And we had sneeze-gas and
tear gas bombs ready to smash in der street. But they intended to use
it themselves to disable der armored-car crew and der bank people, I
suppose, and they must haff masks. It is der deffil that Breston got so
much money two weeks ago. He has capital to supply his friends with all
modern improfements. Hm. All right. Tell that fire-eater Hines to get
ready to go out with his mopping-up party and raise hell. Set der gongs
going."

A man spoke quietly at the back of the room, and to the chatter and
chuffing of engines in the street there now was added the heavy
measured clanging of monster gongs. The engines shut off abruptly.

"Der gongs are signals," said Schaaf quietly. "It is Hines' idea. They
signal to der firemen to cut off der water, and he and his gang go
out hand and hand to sweep der street and grab anybody that has not a
rubber suit on and smash him behind der ear. He and all his men are
ex-soldiers, and they pretend it is a patrol between trenches. Also,
der gongs keep them oriented so they know which way is which. Those
motorcycle cops had orders to duck in der armored car if der darkness
fell. I hope they remembered, or somebody is likely to sock them in der
jaw."

       *       *       *       *       *

The commissioner growled from the next window. There had been a sudden
silence. The firemen had fumbled their way to their engines and climbed
up on them. The street below should be empty of all living creatures
except Lefty Dunn and his gangsters, desperate and at abay, and the
sinister figure of the man who, allied with the underworld, seemed to
have had the city at his mercy. Shots sounded suddenly from below.

"Somebody is going to get scared, now," said Schaaf. "Herr
Commissioner, our Lieutenant Hines is out and fighting like der deffil.
Der gentlemen for whom we are gifing this party will try to run away
now. If you will giff orders--"

"I've got a cordon all about the darkness," growled the commissioner.

"Der idea is," said Schaaf patiently, "that Breston has not a
full-power darkness-producing outfit with him, or else maybe der water
got to some of his batteries and cut down his power. He can't drife
a car in der darkness. He will try to walk, carrying that suitcase
apparatus with him. Tip off der cordon of reserfs to leafe one man at
efery corner, especially der corners where there are police telephones.
Maybe they can tip us exactly where he arrifes."

The commissioner coughed, and swore privately to himself for not having
issued the orders on his own initiative. He gave them.

"That, also, was Hines' idea," said Schaaf placidly.

He looked at his watch in the glare that came in the window. Another
shot below. Three more. A shriek.

"It should be sunrise in half an hour more, maybe less," he observed.
"I hope der _verdammt_ fool is caught before der people try to come
down this way to work. Otherwise we will haff to stop der subways."

He looked sharply at the girl beside him. She was shaking peculiarly.
Her lips were caught between her teeth and her eyes glistened
suspiciously.

"Shush!" said Schaaf in her ear. "I know. I am scared to der bottom of
my marrow, too, but that fighting fool Hines is all right. He has to
be! And if you cry now, I will tell him about it afterward! That is a
threat! Shush!"

She caught her breath, struggling to fight down sobs of nervousness.

A man said briskly from the row of telephones:

"The cordon, sir, reports that the blackness is moving. It's moving on
down town. It is three blocks long and three wide, and it has moved
half a block south."

Schaaf grimaced, and then grinned.

"Haff somebody yell that out in der street to Hines. He will know
what to do. Are members of der cordon posting themselfs in der high
buildings and smashing in doors to get at telephones so they can watch
der darkness and tell us? I suspect Breston will switch it off for an
instant to try and see where he is, after he mofes a block or two."

A man spoke briskly into a telephone. And Schaaf said pleasantly:

"Hines efen thought of that, in case all der other things did not work.
I told him he was a pessimist, but I admit now that he is smart."

Silence. There were no more shots. The lights flared brilliantly
outside. One dimmed, and another took its place. The unwavering,
opaque blackness below--it was almost impossible to look at it without
believing that it was a solid substance--seemed to flow noiselessly
like a river of death between the starkly illuminated buildings on
either side, but Schaaf said suddenly:

"It is going down! He has mofed a block or more with his apparatus!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kathryn stared. The upper limit of the blackness had receded. It was
hardly more than three stories above the street, now. As she watched,
very, very slowly it went down still more.

"He is going south. On foot," said Schaaf, "as Hines predicted."

Five minutes later the street itself was dimly visible. The
street-lights appeared as dull red glows, which grew brighter and
turned white. The squat gray armored car appeared. There were two
figures moving spasmodically on the pavement beside it. The darkness
drew on toward the south. Two more figures, crumpled up and still. A
car, slued around with its windows smashed and the hood torn off its
engine by the force of a stream of water. Minutes later another car
appeared dimly as the darkness became merely murkiness. It, too, was
washed clear of windows.

"I bet," said Schaaf intently, "Breston almost got caught by a stream
of water, and hid behind his car for protection from der hoses until
they were turned off."

"Is--is _he_ safe?" asked Kathryn in a strained voice. She was not, one
gathered, asking about Preston.

One of the men at the telephones said quietly:

"Lieutenant Hines asked just now for the position of the center of the
darkness. I gave it to him from the reports of the cordon around its
outer edge."

Kathryn gasped in relief.

One of the other men at the telephones said swiftly:

"Report. The darkness was turned off for about two seconds. Preston was
seen, carrying two heavy suitcases and staring about him. There were
two other men with him. Lieutenant Hines fired on them and saw one of
them fall."

Silence. Looking down from the windows now, the street was clear. But
to the south the darkness rose from the pavement and filled the space
between the buildings.

"It seems cruel," said Schaaf gently, "for all der whole police force
to be hunting down three men as if they were mad dogs, but they are
mad dogs. Der newspapers did not print all der crimes that happened on
Fifth Afenue the other day. They could not. And Breston permitted those
crimes deliberately. He arranged to turn der underworld loose for a
share in der profits. He got that share. And he will do it again if we
do not catch him."

The commissioner coughed, and said suddenly:

"See if the gas has cleared down in the street enough for us to go
down."

A quiet inquiry.

"It is reasonably safe, sir."

The commissioner strode to the door. Kathryn looked appealingly at
Schaaf.

"It is working like a well-oiled clock. We go down and follow der
darkness, and maybe we see Hines, eh?"

The elevator was brightly lighted, now, and descended with a cheery
hum. And the street was bright, though it was a ghastly brightness.
They emerged to the sidewalk. An ambulance clanged up and stopped. Men
had come out of the armored car and were bending over the writhing
figures beside it.

"Sneeze-gas," said Schaaf quietly, "it is terrible. It produces a
horrible exhaustion. But it is not fatal."

The still figures a little distance off were gangsters, with gas-masks
adjusted in marked incongruity to their loudly checked and now
soaked and draggled clothing. Uniformed figures were moving about,
investigating. The firemen were cheerfully coiling up their hose and
preparing a return trip to their engine-houses. Two more bodies of
gangsters. A man in a rubber suit--one of Hines' men. Twenty yards on,
another gangster.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were seven gangsters and two police in the space of a block.
Beyond that the pavement was blessedly bare. Schaaf looked east at the
first side street.

"Der sky is lightening. Day will soon be here," he said quietly. "I
think we get Breston."

They walked quietly after the slowly moving mass of darkness. On
the ground-level, here, it looked vastly different. It rose in an
irregular, clumsy curve. Seen from behind it looked oddly like some
monstrous, prehistoric monster edging itself painfully down a cañon
whose walls closed tightly upon its sides.

Four blocks down they found two policemen carrying off a figure on a
litter.

"Lefty Dunn, sir," said one of them, satisfiedly. "Lieutenant Hines
shot him, sir. He's dead."

Two blocks further a policeman was beaming as he inserted his key into
the police telephone box.

"Just taking up cordon work here, sir," he reported happily. "The
darkness is dwindling fast. It's hardly more than two blocks long and
wide, sir."

"His batteries are running low," observed Schaaf. "Soon he is in der
soup."

They hurried a little, now. It seemed as if the two fleeing men were
guiding themselves by the trolley-tracks and could make better time in
the horrible darkness all about them. A little farther on there was a
clatter and clanging, and a chemical engine appeared where a policeman
was playing a hand fire-extinguisher on the awning of a corner cigar
store.

"Ah," said Schaaf pleasantly. "They are getting desperate. They tried
to make a diversion by starting a fire. That is foolishness. It only
adds arson to der charges of robbery and murder."

The cigar store was at the corner of Wall Street and Trinity churchyard
showed a certain duskiness at its southern edge, but that was all.

And five minutes later they were able to view the darkness as a whole.
It had moved out into the clear space which is Battery Park. The
flagpole of the Aquarium rose above it. It was a circular, flattened
mass of black with ragged, hazy edges. It stood like some monstrosity
in the mass of green things. It was hardly more than two hundred feet
in diameter, and it was certainly not thirty feet high. And it seemed
to be still dwindling slowly.

Hines came up, with sweat-streaks on his face and powder-marks on his
hands. He was wrapping his handkerchief around one wrist, which was
bleeding.

"Cut it," he said quietly, "breaking in a door to get at a telephone
booth. I called up Governor's Island, sir," he added to the
commissioner of police. "They have some army planes there."

The sky was getting lighter and lighter. The harbor spread out as a
lucent gray, and ships at anchor began to take definite shapes through
the morning air. The Statue of Liberty rose gray and misty from its
base.

The ominous mass of blackness was the only incongruous thing in the
whole spectacle of the sunrise. That pancake of malevolent darkness
was still, clinging to the outer edge of the park, with nearly half
its diameter spreading out over the waves of the harbor. A sudden
chug-chugging arose. The blackness began to move. It swept out over
the water, moving steadily and doggedly.

"_Himmel!_" snapped Schaaf, his mouth dropped open. "They found a
launch! Breston will make for der Jersey shore and land, and der Jersey
police cannot make a cordon in time to stop him from landing and hiding
himself."

"Don't worry," said Hines grimly. "Look there!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A little dark speck detached itself from the earth of Governor's
Island. It rose and rose, and a dull muttering drew nearer and nearer.
The noise rose to a roar, and an army plane swept above the moving
monstrosity of blackness. It circled and swooped.

Something dropped. There was a heavy concussion, a vast and crackling
detonation.

And then there was abruptly nothing upon the water, anywhere, except
a spouting mass of spray and smoke, and a few remnants of a boat that
swirled about and sank as the plume of spray subsided. The blackness
had gone out like a blown-out candle.

"Good shooting," said Schaaf comfortably. "That must haff been a big
bomb. Now we will haff difers hunt for der fragments of Breston's
apparatus, and we will find that we can't do a damned thing with them.
Which from der scientific standpoint, is a fery great pity."

Hines unconsciously brushed his hands together.

"It's finished," he said, suddenly very tired.

The commissioner of police coughed. "Inspector Hines," he said,
"I--er--I may not have co-operated with you as fully as I should when
you first reported this matter; but--er--in the future you will find no
cause for complaint. Come in to see me to-morrow."

He moved abruptly away. Hines stared after him.

"Inspector?" Kathryn gasped.

"Yes," said Schaaf placidly. "Inspector Hines. The commissioner is like
Napoleon in his promotions. Yes. All of us haff our Napoleonic moments,
and he did this fery nicely. You are Police Inspector Hines hereafter
and I congratulate you. And I think, Miss Bush, that as a fery good
friend of his, if I were you I would take der moment of congratulation
as an opportunity to kiss him. It might not be unpleasant."

Kathryn swallowed something.

Hines flushed a little. "You've got your scoop," Hines said awkwardly,
ignoring Schaaf, "and this time there is nothing to regret about it."

"I--I don't care!" said Kathryn firmly. "About the scoop, that is. It
doesn't matter. But I am going to kiss you."

And she did.


                                THE END



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