CHAPTER XIV
THE MOVING LIGHTS
Panting with exhaustion and excitement, Stern made his way backto the engine-room. It was a strangely critical moment when he seizedthe corroded throttle-wheel to start the dynamo. The wheel stuck, andwould not budge.
Stern, with a curse of sheer exasperation, snatched up his longspanner, shoved it through the spokes, and wrenched.
Groaning, the wheel gave way. It turned. The engineer hauled again.
"Go on!" shouted the man. "Start! Move!"
With a hissing plaint, as though rebellious against this awakeningafter its age-long sleep, the engine creaked into motion.
In spite of all Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed inanguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed.The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal.The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp strained and quivered, but held.
And like the one-hoss shay about to collapse, the whole fabric of theresuscitated plant, leaking at a score of joints, creaking, whistling,shaking, voicing a hundred agonized mechanic woes, revived in agrotesque, absurd and shocking imitation of its one-time beauty andpower.
At sight of this ghastly resurrection, the engineer (whose whole lifehad been passed in the love and service of machinery) felt a strangeand sad emotion.
He sat down, exhausted, on the floor. In his hand the lamp trembled.Yet, all covered with sweat and dirt and rust as he was, this momentof triumph was one of the sweetest he had ever known.
He realized that this was now no time for inaction. Much yet remainedto be done. So up he got again, and set to work.
First he made sure the dynamo was running with no serious defect andthat his wiring had been made properly. Then he heaped the furnacefull of coal, and closed the door, leaving only enough draft to insurea fairly steady heat for an hour or so.
This done, he toiled back up to where Beatrice was eagerly awaitinghim in the little wireless station on the roof.
In he staggered, all but spent. Panting for breath, wild-eyed, hiscoal-blackened arms stretching out from the whiteness of thebear-skin, he made a singular picture.
"It's going!" he exclaimed. "I've got current--it's good for a while,anyhow. Now--now for the test!"
For a moment he leaned heavily against the concrete bench to which theapparatus was clamped. Already the day had drawn close to its end. Theglow of evening had begun to fade a trifle, along the distant skyline;and beyond the Palisades a dull purple pall was settling down.
By the dim light that filtered through the doorway, Beatrice looked athis deep-lined, bearded face, now reeking with sweat and grimed withdust and coal. An ugly face--but not to her. For through that mask sheread the dominance, the driving force, the courage of this versatile,unconquerable man.
"Well," suddenly laughed Stern, with a strange accent in his voice,"well then, here goes for the operator in the Eiffel Tower, eh?"
Again he glanced keenly, in the failing light, at the apparatus therebefore him.
"She'll do, I guess," judged he, slipping on the rusted head-receiver.He laid his hand upon the key and tried a few tentative dots anddashes.
Breathless, the girl watched, daring no longer to question him. In thedielectric, the green sparks and spurts of living flame began tocrackle and to hiss like living spirits of an unknown power.
Stern, feeling again harnessed to his touch the life-force of theworld that once had been, exulted with a wild emotion. Yet,science-worshiper that he was, something of reverent awe tinged thekeen triumph. A strange gleam dwelt within his eyes; and through hislips the breath came quick as he flung his very being into thissupreme experiment.
He reached for the ondometer. Carefully, slowly, he "tuned up" thewave-lengths; up, up to five thousand metres, then back again; he ranthe whole gamut of the wireless scale.
Out, ever out into the thickening gloom, across the void and vacancyof the dead world, he flung his lightnings in a wild appeal. His facegrew hard and eager.
"Anything? Any answer?" asked Beatrice, laying a hand upon hisshoulder--a hand that trembled.
He shook his head in negation. Again he switched the roaring currenton; again he hurled out into ether his cry of warning and distress,of hope, of invitation--the last lone call of man to man--of thelast New Yorker to any other human being who, by the merest chance,might possibly hear him in the wreck of other cities, other lands."S. O. S.!" crackled the green flame. "S. O. S.! _S. O. S.!_--"
Thus came night, fully, as they waited, as they called and listened;as, together there in that tiny structure on the roof of thetremendous ruin, they swept the heavens and the earth with their wildcall--in vain.
Half an hour passed and still the engineer, grim as death, whirled thechained lightnings out and away.
"Nothing yet?" cried Beatrice at last, unable to keep silence anylonger. "Are you quite sure you can't--"
The question was not finished.
For suddenly, far down below them, as though buried in the entrails ofthe earth, shuddered a stifled, booming roar.
Through every rotten beam and fiber the vast wreck of the buildingvibrated. Some wall or other, somewhere, crumbled and went crashingdown with a long, deep droning thunder that ended in a slidingdiminuendo of noise.
"The boiler!" shouted Stern.
Off he flung the head-piece. He leaped up; he seized the girl.
Out of the place he dragged her. She screamed as a huge weight fromhigh aloft on the tower smashed bellowing through the roof, and with ashower of stones ripped its way down through the rubbish of the floorsbelow, as easily as a bullet would pierce a newspaper.
The crash sent them recoiling. The whole roof shook and trembled likehoney-combed ice in a spring thaw.
Down below, something rumbled, jarred, and came to rest.
Both of them expected nothing but that the entire structure wouldcollapse like a card-house and shatter down in ruins that would betheir death.
But though it swayed and quivered, as in the grasp of an earthquake,it held.
Stern circled Beatrice with his arm.
"Courage, now! Steady now, _steady!_" cried he.
The grinding, the booming of down-hurled stones and walls died away;the echoes ceased. A wind-whipped cloud of steam and smoke burst up,fanlike, beyond the edge of the roof. It bellied away, dim in thenight, upon the stiff northerly breeze.
"Fire?" ventured the girl.
"No! Nothing to burn. But come, come; let's get out o' this anyhow.There's nothing doing, any more. All through! Too much risk staying uphere, now."
Silent and dejected, they made their cautious way over the shakenroof. They walked with the greatest circumspection, to avoid fallingthrough some new hole or freshly opened crevasse.
To Stern, especially, this accident was bitter. After nearly afortnight's exhausting toil, the miserable fiasco was maddening.
"Look!" suddenly exclaimed the engineer, pointing. A vast, gapingcanyon of blackness opened at their very feet--a yawning gash fortyfeet long and ten or twelve broad, with roughly jagged edges, leadingdown into unfathomed depths below.
Stern gazed at it, puzzled, a moment, then peered up into the darknessabove.
"H-m!" said he. "One of the half-ton hands of the big clock up therehas just taken a drop, that's all. One drop too much, I call it. Nowif we--or our rooms--had just happened to be underneath? Someexcitement, eh?"
They circled the opening and approached the tower wall. Stern pickedup the rough ladder, which had been shaken down from its place, andonce more set it to the window through which they were to enter.
But even as Beatrice put her foot on the first rung, she started witha cry. Stern felt the grip of her trembling hand on his arm.
"What is it?" exclaimed he.
"Look! _Look!_"
Immobile with astonishment and fear, she stood pointing out and away,to westward, toward the Hudson.
Stern's eyes followed her hand.
He tried to cry out, but only stamm
ered some broken, unintelligiblething.
There, very far away and very small, yet clearly visible in swarmsupon the inky-black expanse of waters, a hundred, a thousand littlepoints of light were moving.