CHAPTER XXXV.
TERROR AND RETREAT.
When, despite Flint's imperative orders, Slade failed to reopen thelines of communication for him, before nightfall, and when PresidentSupple wired in code for a little more time in obeying Air Trust orders,the Billionaire recognized that something of terrible menace now hadsuddenly broken in upon his dream of universal power.
He summoned Waldron and Herzog for another conference and together theyfeverishly planned to put the works under defense, until such time astroops could be got through to them.
The plant regiment was mustered and the Cosmos mercenaries and scabswere made ready. The machine-guns were unlimbered for action and largequantities of ammunition were delivered to them and to the aerial-bombguns, as nightfall lowered. Herzog set eight hundred men to workcovering all the tanks possible, with wire netting of heavy steel. Thesearch-lights were all ordered into use; steam and electricalconnections were made, the air-fleet was manned, and everything was donethat unlimited wealth and bitter hate of the Workers could suggest.
With curses on the fog, which hid the upper air from view, the old mannow stood at one of the west windows of his inner office--the office onthe top floor of the main Administration Building, overlooking nearlythe whole Plant.
"Damn the weather!" he snarled, his gold teeth glinting. "In addition toall this mist from the Falls, there's a regular cloud-bank settlingdown, tonight! Under cover of it, what may not happen? Nothing couldhave been worse, Waldron. Though we shall soon control the air, thatwon't be enough, so long as fogs and mists escape us. Our nextproblem--hello! Now what the devil's _that_?"
"What's what?" retorted Waldron, testily. He had been drinking rathermore heavily than usual, that day, both because of the dull weather andbecause the Falls invariably got on his nerves, during his briefsojourns there. Away from New York and his favorite haunts, Waldron waslost. "What's what?" he repeated with an ugly look. "This roaring,glaring, trembling place gives me--"
"That! That light in the sky!" cried Flint, excitedly pointing. "See?No--it's gone now! But it looked like--like a rocket! A signal, of somekind, thrown from an aeroplane! A--"
Waldron laughed harshly.
"Seeing things, eh?" he sneered, coming across to the window, himself,and peering out. "_I_ don't see anything! Nothing here to worry about,Flint. With all these walls and guns, and netting, and air-ships and aprivate army and all, what more do you want? Not getting nervous in yourold age, are you, eh?" he gibed bitterly. "Or is your consciencebeginning to wake up, as the graveyard becomes more a probabilitythan--"
"Enough!" Flint snapped at him. "When you drink, Waldron, you're anidiot! Now, forget all this, and let's get down to work. I tell you, Ijust now saw a signal-light up there in the mist. There's trouble comingtonight, as sure as we own the earth. Trouble, maybe big trouble.Merciful God, I--I rather think we oughtn't to be here, in person, eh?We'd be much better off out of here. If there--there should be anyfighting, you know--"
His voice broke in a falsetto pipe. Waldron laughed brutally.
"Bravo!" cried he, with flushed and mottled face. "You'll do, Flint! Isee, right now, the firing-line is the life for you! Well, let the rowcome, and devil take it, say I. Better anything than--"
The sentence was never finished, For suddenly a shattering explosionhurled a vast section of the western encircling wall outward, out intothe River, and, where but a moment before, the partners had been gazingat a high concrete-and-steel barrier, with electric lights on top, nowonly a huge gap appeared, through which the foam-tossed current could beseen leaping swiftly onward toward the Falls.
Hurled back from the window by the force of the explosion, both men werestruck dumb with terror and amaze. Flint rallied first, and with a cryof rage, inarticulate as a beast's howl, sprang to the window again.
Outside, a scene of desolation and wild activity was visible. The great,paved courtyard, flanked by the turbine houses and the wall, on onehand, and on the other by the oxygen tanks' huge bulk that loomedvaguely through the electric-lighted mist, now had begun to swarm withmen.
Flint saw a few forms lying prone under the hard glare of the arcs andvacuum lights. Others were crawling, writhing, making strangecontortions. Here, there, men with rifles were running to take theirposts. Hoarse orders were shouted, and shrill replies rang back.
Then, all at once, a kind of sputtering series of small explosions beganto rip along the edge of the south wall. And now, machine-guns began totalk, with a dry, hard metallic clatter. And--though whence these came,Flint could not see--grenades began flying over the wall and bursting inthe court. Though unwounded, men fell everywhere these gas-projectilesexploded--fell, stone dead and stiffening at once--fell, in strange,monstrous, awful attitudes of death.
Steam began billowing up; and crackling electrical discharges leapedalong the naked wires of the outer barricades.
The whole Plant shook and rattled with the violent concussions of theaerial-bomb guns, already searching the upper air with shrapnel.
Somewhere, out of the range of vision, another terrible shock made thebuilding tremble to its nethermost foundation; and wild yells and cries,as of a charge, a repulse, a savage and determined rush, echoed throughthe vast enclosure. Came a third detonation--and, blinding in itsintensity, a globe of fire burst almost beneath the window, five storiesbelow.
The partners, shaking and pale, retreated hastily. A swift,upward-rising shape swept over the courtyard and was gone--one of theair-fleet now launched to meet the attackers.
Far below a sudden crumbling shudder of masonry told the Billionairenot a moment was to be lost, for already one wing of the AdministrationBuilding was swaying to its fall.
"Quick, Waldron! Quick!" he shouted, in the shrill treble of senility,and ran into the corridor that led to the north wing. Waldron, suddenlysobered, followed; and from the offices, where the night-shift of clerkswere laboring (or had been, till the first explosion), came crowdingpale and frightened men. Not the fighting cast of Air Trust slaves,these, but the anaemic chemists and experimenters and clerical workers,scabs, to a man. Now, in the common sentiment of fear, they jostledFlint and Waldron, as though these plutocrats had been but common clay.And in the corridor a babel rose, through which fresh volleys and evermore and more violent explosions ripped and thundered.
Flint struck savagely at some who barred his way; and Waldron elbowedthrough, with curses.
"Get out of the way, you swine!" shrilled the old Billionaire. "Makeway, there! Way!"
The two men reached a door that led by a private passage, through to thesteel-and-concrete laboratories.
"Here, this way, Flint!" shouted Waldron. "If those Hell-devils drop abomb on us, this building will cave in like jackstraws! Our only safetyis here, _here_!"
Thoroughly cowed now, with all the brutal bluster and half-drunkenswagger gone, Waldron whipped out a bunch of keys, tremblingly unlockedthe door and blundered through. Flint followed. Behind them, otherstried to press, on toward the armored laboratories; but with vileblasphemies the plutocrats beat them back and slammed the door.
"To Hell with _them_!" shouted Flint, perfectly ashen now and shakinglike a leaf, the fear of death strong on his withered soul. "We've gotall we can do to look after ourselves! Quick, Waldron, quick!"
Both men, sick with panic, with fear of the unknown terror from above,stumbled rather than ran along the passage, and presently reached thelaboratory.
Here Waldron unlocked another door, this time a steel one, and--as theyboth crowded through--pressed a hand to his dizzy head.
"Safe!" he gulped, slamming the door again. "They can't get us _here_,at any rate, no matter what happens! This place is like a fort, and--"
His speech was interrupted by a dazing, deafening tumult of sound. Theearth trembled, and the laboratory, steel though it was, with concretefacing, rocked on its foundation. A glare through the windows, quicklyfading, told them the building they had just quitted was now but asmoking pile of ruin.
Flint gasped, unable to speak. Waldron, shaking and cowed, tried tomoisten his dry lips with a thick tongue.
"We--we weren't any too soon!" he gulped, without one thought of thedoomed scabs in the Administration Building. Stern justice was nowovertaking these wretches. False to the working-class, and eager toserve the Air Trust--not only eager to serve, but zealous in any attackon the proletariat, and by their very employment serving to rivet theshackles on the world--now they were abandoned by their masters.
Between upper and nether millstone, moving with neither, they werecaught and crushed. And as the great building quivered, gaped wideopen, swayed and came thundering down in a vast pile of flame-lit ruin,whence a volcanic burst of fire, smoke and dust arose, they perishedmiserably, time-servers, cowards and self-seekers to the last.
But Flint and Waldron still survived. Though the very earth shook andtrembled with the roar of bombs, the crumbling of massive walls, therattle of volley-fire and the crashing of the terrible grenades thatmowed down hundreds as they spread their poisonous gas abroad--thoughthe shriek of projectiles, the thunder of the air-ship guns now sweepingthe sky in blind endeavor to shatter the attackers all swelled thetumult to a frightful storm of terror and of death; they still lived,cowered and cringed there in the bomb-proof steel-and-concrete of theinner laboratories.
"Come, come!" Flint quavered, peering about him at the deserted room,still glaring with electric light--the room now abandoned by all itsworkers, who, members of Herzog's regiment, had run to take their postsat the first signal of attack. "Come--this isn't safe enough, even here.In--in there!"
He pointed toward a vault-like door, leading to the subterranean steelchambers where Herzog eventually counted on storing some hundreds ofthousands of tons of liquid oxygen--the reserve-chambers, impregnable tolightning, fire, frost or storm, to man's attacks or nature's--thechambers blasted from the living rock, deep as the Falls themselves,vacuum-lined, wondrous achievement of the highest engineering skill theworld could boast.
"There! There!" repeated Flint, plucking at the dazed Waldron's sleeve."Tool-steel and concrete, twenty-five feet thick--and vacuum chambersall about--_there_ we can hide! There's safety! Come, come quick!"
Staring, white-faced (he who had been so red!) and dumb, Waldronyielded. Together, furtive as the criminals they were, these twoworld-masters slunk toward the steel door, while without, their empirewas crashing down in smoke, and flame, and blood!
They had almost reached it when a smash of glass at the far end of thelaboratory whipped them round, in keener terror.
Staring, wild-eyed, they beheld the crouching figure of Herzog. Running,even as he cringed, he had upset a glass retort, which had shattered onthe concrete floor. And as he ran, he screamed:
"_They're in! They're coming! Quick--the steel vaults! Let me in, there!Let me in!_"
The coward was now a maniac with terror, his face perfectly white,writhen with panic, and with staring eyes that gleamed horribly underthe greenish vacuum-lights.
"Back, you! Get out!" roared Waldron, raising a fist. "We--"
A sudden belch of flame, outside, split the night with terriblevirescence. The whole steel building trembled and swayed. Some of itsgirders buckled; and the east wall, nearest the oxygen-tanks, cavedinward as a mass of many tons was hurled against it.
A stunning concussion flung all three men to the floor; and, as theyfell, a withering heat-wave quivered through the place.
"The oxygen-tanks!" gasped Flint. "They're blown up--they'reburning--God help us!"
Scorching, yet still eager to live, he crawled on hands and knees towardthe steel door. Waldron dragged himself along, half-dead with terror.Now, dripping gouts of inextinguishable fire were raining on the roof ofthe building. A whirlwind of flame was sweeping all its eastern side;and a glare like that of Hell itself seared the eyes of the fugitives.
Quivering, trembling, slavering, the old man and Waldron wrenched thesteel door open.
"_Me! Me! Let me in! Me! Save me!_" howled Herzog, dragging himselftoward them.
They only laughed derisively, with howls of demoniacal scorn.
"You slave! You cur!" shouted Waldron, and spat at him as he drew thevault door shut. "You cringing dog--stay there, now, and face it!"
The great door boomed shut. In the cool of the winding stairway of steelwhich led, lighted by electricity, to the trap-door and the ladder downinto the tremendous vaults, the world-masters breathed deeply once more,respited from death.
Herzog, screaming like a fiend in torment, clawed at the impenetrablesteel door, raved, begged, entreated, and tore his fingers on the lock.
No answer, save the muffled echo of a jeer, from within.
_Boom!_
What was that?
Mad with terror though he was, he whirled about, and faced the room nowquivering with heat.
Even as he looked, a great gap yawned in the western wall, farthest fromthe flame-belching oxygen-tank that had been struck.
Through this gap, pouring irresistibly as the sea, swept a tide ofattackers, storming the inner citadel of the infernal, world-stranglingAir Trust.
At the head of this victorious army, this flood triumphant of theembattled proletaire, Herzog's staring eyes caught a moment's glimpse ofa dreaded face--the face of Gabriel Armstrong.
Gasping, the coward and tool of the world-masters made one supremedecision. Close by, a rack of vials stood. He whirled to it, snatchedout a tiny bottle and waiting not even to draw the cork--craunched thebottle, glass and all, in his fang-like, uneven teeth.
An instant change swept over him. His staring eyes closed, his head fellforward, his whole body collapsed like an empty sack. He fell, twitchedonce or twice, and was dead--dead ere the attackers could reach the doorof steel where his bestial masters had betrayed him.
Thus perished Herzog, coward and tool, a victim of the very forces hehimself had helped create.
And at the moment of his death, the masters he had cringed to and hadserved, sneering with scorn at him even in their mortal terror, weretremblingly descending the long metal ladder to the impregnable vaultsof steel below.