Wonder Stories Super Pack. Fletcher PrattЧитать онлайн книгу.
was a resounding crash, the car reeled perilously on the edge of the steep road, then righted and drove on with a clattering bang. Looking over the side Vanderschoof could see where the big rock had struck the right running board, tearing a foot or two of it loose to trail on the road.
“Wait,” he cried, but Stevens shook his head.
They had a bit of luck at this point. The hunt for more stones or something of the kind delayed their enemies, and when they next saw the birds winging up behind them, the white classical lines of the West Point administration building already loomed ahead, clear in the gathering gloom.
Stevens turned in, swung the car around at the door, and halted it with screaming brakes, just as the first of the birds overhead overshot the mark and turned to come back. In an instant the banker was out of the car, dragging at Marta Lami’s hand. Vanderschoof climbed numbly out the other side, and ran around the car toward the door of the building, but the Greek missed his footing where the running board should have been and fell prone, just as one of the birds dived down with a yell of triumph and dropped his stone accurately onto the struggling man.
“Run!” shouted Stevens.
“But—the Greek,” panted Vanderschoof as they climbed the steps.
“Hell with him. Or here—wait.” Stevens turned and thrust his fist through the glass upper portion of the door. Out in the dusk the three bird-forms were settling round their fallen foe. The flash of the banker’s gun stabbed the night and was answered by a scream. Before he could take aim again, with a quick beat of wings, they were gone and when, daring greatly, he ran out a few moments later, he found that Pappagourdas was gone also.
*
He found the others on one of the benches in the outer office of the building, the girl with her face buried in her hands in an agony of fright and reaction. Vanderschoof, too old and cool a hand to give way in this fashion, looked up.
“What are they, Stevens?” he asked.
The Wall Street man shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some new kind of high-power bird that developed while we were all being made into machines by that comet, I suppose. It’s terrible.... They’ve got the Greek.”
“Can’t we get after them? There ought to be airplanes here.”
“In this light? Can you fly one? I can’t and I don’t imagine the little girl here can.”
The “little girl” lifted her head. She had recovered. “What did we come to this joint for, anyhow?” she asked. “To hang crêpe on the chandeliers?”
The words had the effect of an electric shock.
“Why, of course,” said Stevens, “we did come here to see if we could find someone, didn’t we?” and turning round he pushed open the door into the next room. Nothing.
“Wait,” he said. “Not much use trying to do anything tonight. We haven’t any flashlights.”
“Aw, boloney,” said the dancer, “what do you want us to do? Sit here and count our fingers? Go on, big boy, find a garage, you can get a light from one of the cars.”
“Won’t those birds see it?”
“You got a yellow streak a mile wide, haven’t you? Birds sleep at night.”
Stevens took a half-unwilling step toward the door. “Let me come with you,” said Vanderschoof, rising.
“What’s the matter, papa? You got a little yellow in you, too?”
He was dignified. “Not at all. Here I’ll leave my gun with you, Miss Lami.”
“We’ll be seeing you,” said Stevens, over his shoulder. “Don’t worry.” And they were gone.
To the dancer their absence was endless. She would have given anything for the velvet kick of a good drink of gin—” but I suppose it would burn out my bearings,” she mused ruefully. Heavens, she must spend the rest of her days as a robot. In the fading light she ruefully contemplated the legs that had delighted the audiences of two continents, now become ingenious mechanical devices beyond the power of delighting anyone but their owner.
More clearly than the rest, she realized that very little was left of the old relation between the sexes. What would happen when the forceful Stevens made the discovery also? Probably he would make a thinking robot of her to serve his ambition. Well, she had chosen to go with them—they seemed to offer more amusement than the stuffy prigs of the colony....
What was that?
She listened intently. A subdued rattling, slightly metallic in character. It might be a rat—no, too mechanical. The men—probably it was them, or one of them, returning. She glanced out of the window. Not there. The sound again—not from outdoors, but behind her—within the room? She gripped the gun Vanderschoof had given her. Rattle, rattle. She wished furiously for a light.
The birds? No—birds sleep at night. Rattle, rattle. Persistently. She stood up, trying to pierce the gathering dimness. No, the birds would make more noise. They moved surely, with hoarse screams, as though they thought themselves the lords of the world. This sound was small, like the chatter of a mechanical rat. What new horror in this strange world might it not conceal? On slenderest tiptoes she backed cautiously across the rug toward the outer door. Better the chance of the birds than this unknown terror of the darkness.
Holding the gun before her firmly, she stepped back, back, feeling with one hand for the door. Her hand met its smooth surface, then clicked as the metallic joints came in contact with the doorknob. She paused, breathless. Rattle, rattle, went the small sound, undiscouraged.
With a sudden jerk she flung the door open and tumbled down the steps, half-falling, and as she fell, as though in answer to the metallic clang of her body on the stone, a long pencil of violet light sprang silently out from somewhere back in the hills, moved thrice across the sky and then faded as swiftly as it had come.
She felt the beam of a flashlight in her eyes, and got up, hearing her voice with a sort of inward surprise as it babbled something slightly incoherent about “things—in there.”
Stevens’ voice, rough with irritation. “What is it you’re saying?” He shook her arm. “Come on, little woman, pull yourself together.”
“There must be someone else around here,” remarked Vanderschoof, irrelevantly. “Did you see that searchlight?”
Marta Lami pulled herself up short, shaking loose the hand with a touch of the arrogance that had made her the queen of the night life of New York.
“Something in there gives me the heeby-jeebies,” she said, pointing. “Sounds like some guy shooting craps with himself.”
*
Stevens laughed, somewhat forcedly. “Well, it’s nothing to be scared of, unless it’s one of those damn birds, and if it was that he’d be taking us apart now. Come on!”
He flung the door open and plunged in, the flashlight flickering before him. Empty.
There was a door at the further end, next to the one they had investigated before. Toward this he strode, clump, clump on the carpet, and flung it open likewise. Empty again. No, there was something. The questing beam came to rest on a brown army tunic behind the desk, followed it up quickly to the face and there held. For, staring at them with mechanical fixity was another of those simulations of the human face in metal with which they were by now, so familiar. But this one was different.
For it held the balance between the walking cartoons of men in metal, such as they themselves were, and the ugly and solid statues they had seen strewn about the streets of New York. It had the metal bands across the forehead that they possessed, above which issued the same wiry hair, but in this case curiously interwoven as though subjected to some great heat and melted into a single mass. And the nose was all of solid metal, and the eyes—the eyes ... were the eyes of a statue, giving back no lustrous reflexion of glass.