Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (3 page)

“Unless,” said Manning gravely, “it should be the discontinuance of them.”

“One may not live forever,” smiled Bannerman.

But he was struck by something he saw in Manning’s face, in his eyes.

“You will excuse me, all?” he asked. “I must talk with Mr. Manning. We will go into the house.”

V

Manning went to the heart of the matter without preamble. To his amazement, Bannerman knew nothing of the Griffin, save as a name vaguely remembered. He listened gravely as Manning enlightened him, recording briefly the Griffin’s crimes.

“The man is a homicidal maniac,” he concluded. “With a colossal ego. He is in deadly earnest. Your life will be in dire peril from midnight to midnight on the seventeenth. I shall do my utmost to protect you. I believe this, that if the Griffin’s plans should once fail, the man would go stark insane, a raving lunatic, unable to plot with his uncanny faculty, to use his immense resources.”

“What do you propose to do?” asked Bannerman. “If we can circumvent such a monster, it is surely my duty to place myself in your hands—aside from the fact that I am not at all eager to die. I enjoy life. I believe what there is left of it for me may prove useful.”

Manning explained his general plans. Then he showed Bannerman a copy of the letter he had received from the Griffin.

“This time I think he has overreached himself,” he said. “I may be mistaken, but I believe he has trusted too much to his own ingenuity and, I hope, underestimated my intelligence. He has had cause to do so, but it is usually a fatal error.

“He talks of the fatal, frozen finger that neither steel nor stone may deflect or keep out. It is my profound conviction that he anticipates using some sort of death ray. He has unquestionably studied your habits. He knows, for instance, of your custom of sitting here on your lawn at a certain hour. I think he intends to project his ray at that time when you would be in plain view to an operator, either through a telescope or closer at hand, perhaps from an airplane.”

“I have heard something of these death rays,” said Bannerman. “I understood one or more of them were ready, or almost ready, to use in the Great War when the Armistice was signed. Frightful instruments, and examples of man’s inhumanity to man. I had supposed the governments owned them.”

“I think they do—the formulae,” replied Manning. “I know the United States Government has one, Great Britain another, Germany probably a third. But there has been much experimentation, certain publicity, upon which a clever scientist might follow the trail, repeat the result, even improve upon it. It is certain that the Griffin has such men working for him. He has proved it many times with his diabolically ingenious methods.”

“One may not avert one’s destiny,” said Bannerman. “I am in your hands. You will stay here to-night? Do you think it is advisable to tell the rest? I can trust them all. I think they would risk their lives freely to protect me.”

“By all means,” Manning agreed. The more protection the better. But he did not intend to go into the means by which he personally hoped to circumvent the cunning of the Griffin. He did not even explain it to Bannerman. For once he intended not to keep in personal touch with the threatened victim.

He had gone deeply, within the past day or so, into the history, as known, of the various death rays; coming finally down to two inventions, the ray invented by H. Grindell Matthews, an Englishman, and the so-called Odic Ray, invented by a Californian, living in Pasadena. At the time, this Odic Ray was investigated by the Mount Wilson Observatory and finally dismissed as negligible, but its possibilities had later been greatly enhanced by its discoverer.

It was highly plausible that the Griffin’s captive scientists had even outdone the Californian’s results. And it was another name for the Odic Ray that determined Manning on his choice.
The Cold Ray.

Through his previous connections with the Government Secret Service he was able to learn more about it. The object to its use was the fact that it was impossible to generate sufficient power to enable rays of this nature to wipe out an entire city, as claimed by the discoverers; but Manning was told that it was quite feasible for such a ray to be concentrated, focused upon some definite object, and pass through it, breaking down life, producing death and disintegration at considerable distances.

The Cold Ray seemed a fitting synonym for the Griffin’s phrase, “Death’s frozen finger.”

VI

The day of the seventeenth was passing, to all appearances, as quietly as any other. Morning found Bannerman awakening from sound sleep, eating a hearty breakfast, genial and courageous.

Manning’s men, relieving each other in four-hour watches, swarmed in the grounds, were posted in the house. As the morning turned to afternoon, the tension increased with every hour, every minute. How would the Griffin strike, and whence?

No visitors were permitted, no tradesmen. No one left. The poet’s disciples had gathered at Windy Ridge the evening before. Few of them had slept.

At his usual hour, Bannerman came out to his seat. He was to read his latest poem. The pupils gathered round. They watched as they listened. Manning’s experts were alert. Bannerman had agreed to go inside on request. The terrace was spacious, with its open view of the Sound. Every covert that bordered it was guarded; so was the house behind.

It did not seem credible that such a peaceful scene could become an arena for murder. Its serenity was the same as that of the first afternoon when Manning had visited Windy Ridge. The air was still. The breeze was failing toward sunset. The trees were silent. The Sound looked like a stretch of ribbon, deep blue. The atmosphere was crystalline. Details stood out startlingly on Long Island; houses were distinct. The sky held little vapor.

Bannerman delivered his poem, not reading it, but giving it from memory, his voice like organ tones for depth and strength and clarity. He was, of all of them, serene and unafraid, citing his creed.

“From the sea we came;

Clinging and creeping, crawling and inanimate;

Sexless and formless;

Knowing not life, nor love.

Motes on a mote that swung in awful space.

Atoms of vaguely groping ignorance;

But quick with cosmic urge,

Journeying—whither?

Yet this is known:

We have that within us is immortal.

It may not perish….”

A faint and far off drone came out of the sky. It was like the hum of a bee. It came from a speck that soared at a ceiling of five thousand feet, a plane chartered by Manning, in which he sat behind the most expert pilot who had experienced, and survived, the Great War. He was an Ace of Aces who had volunteered with alacrity for the chase of the monster.

It was not Manning’s first flight, by a hundred times. The pilot had a machine gun synchronized to his propeller. His ship was fast—faster than anything he had ever flown in France. It could make well over two hundred miles an hour. In Manning’s cockpit there were grenades, specially weighted, finned for accurate flight.

Manning could have secured fifty ships, but he feared to arouse the suspicions of the Griffin’s agents. Even though they masked their flight by seeming to go through regular maneuvers, the Griffin might defer his attack until after dark. Manning could not tell how far the Griffin’s experts might have perfected the Cold Ray. But, with Bannerman in the open, they would strike now; unless Manning’s theory was wrong.

And he knew it was not. This time the Griffin would fail—if Manning could find the projector of the Odic Beam.

It was no easy matter, and yet the problem was not too hard. The Griffin had tipped off his opening moves by his phrasing, his mention of “the frozen finger of Death.” Manning’s careful survey of the grounds at Windy Ridge had narrowed his search.

The ray might be able to traverse timber, but, unless the wise men in Washington were all wrong and Manning’s own deductions and inferences false, the use of the ray was as yet so limited that the object of its destruction must be sighted, must be properly focused.

They had come in the plane from the north, as if a casual air-traveler, making for a Long Island landing. The flight had been timed to fit Bannerman’s emergence on the lawn, his reading of the poem. Too premature an appearance would spoil everything.

Manning had glasses of powerful magnification, as he did not doubt the Griffin’s fiendish executioners also held. There was no other plane in sight. There were vessels in the Sound, but perfect aim could hardly come from those. He looked to find the base of the Griffin’s operations on shore, on the shore of Long Island Sound, at some point nearly opposite Windy Ridge, some place where they could focus Bannerman between the trees. He would make a perfect target. The sprawled disciples in front of him would not be hurt. It was the Griffin’s boast to get only his man—with Manning occasionally included.

The plane went swooping down, perfectly flown. Its actions were natural enough, so far.

Beneath them were scattering estates, most of them grouped about havens and inlets. A few abandoned farms not yet sold to the New Yorkers who would make them over into pseudo-Colonial homes. Strips of beach. Hillsides, covered with light growth of trees.

It was these copses that Manning and his pilot watched most carefully, suspecting camouflage. They had only a few precious minutes to find their objective. It was well masked.

It was a desperate hazard. Manning could imagine the Griffin’s men hidden below, their powerful generators set up and invisible in some barn or house, or among the woods, sighting the superbly serene Bannerman, concentrating the ray until, like a pencil, like a long finger, it touched that noble heart, passed on and left it still.

Bannerman had said that one might not avert his fate. Perhaps fate would be kind. There was one thing in their favor. A race of sloops was in progress, half a score of dainty yachts tacking, reaching, directly off Windy Ridge and occasionally passing in front of the target. This gave them more time to search.

They saw nothing. Manning spoke through the audiphones and they swung back.

And
then
—

He saw gulls wheeling, skimming, rising and falling in their search for food, their pursuit of a surface school of fish. And even as the test-doves had dropped in the Griffin’s secret room, so a gull dropped, wings outspread; then another. They had not been shot. But something had killed them. The ray!

Manning took swift bearings, called through his phone, sighting a glint of metal, something that looked like an averted eye, leveling from the preliminary projection that had killed the gulls.

Out of a barn, half hidden by trees, a long slit cut in the clapboards!

The pilot stepped on his foot controls, thrust his wheel-stick forward, worked his ailerons. They swooped, as a sea-eagle spreads its pinions and swoops to rob a lesser bird. They zoomed in a sharp upcurve not twenty feet above the treetops, seventy above the shingled barn.

There was a futile spatter of shots from flurried men, suddenly aroused and alarmed. They ceased. Manning had flung his bombs in swift succession, winged darts charged with destruction.

The barn fell apart. Plumes of yellow smoke rose, then scarlet streaks of fire.

The pilot swung the plane in a sheer bank. Three men, two of them injured, scurried to a car, got into it and sent it hurtling along a lane. The barn was burning. The infernal projector was destroyed.

“We’ve got to get those men,” said Manning.

The pilot nodded, but misunderstood. He roared down, soared above the car, behind it for the moment. Then he took part in the proceedings with the loosing of his machine gun. The car swerved, lolled into a ditch, lay there, with three dead men inside of it under the riddled top.

“I meant alive,” Manning said to himself, but did not speak to the pilot now.

The Griffin had been foiled. Bannerman was saved. And, unless he was mistaken, the already diseased reason of the Griffin would totter on its throne, his colossal ego unable to accept failure.

Quantro quailed before the frightful fury of his master, for once unmasked, mouthing, frothing at the lips, his eyes aglare with absolute madness as he howled into the brazen disk.

Manning sat in his library, listening, accepting the final challenge, knowing the Griffin utterly insane at last, his powers unhinged.

“Next time I shall not fail, Manning. Luck was on your side. Curse you! I was watching. It was the gulls, the cursed gulls! Now you no longer amuse me. I have upset the board, the men are scattered. It is the end—for you—and for Eleanor!”

A giant hand seemed to constrict Manning’s heart. For himself he was not afraid. But for Eleanor, the girl he loved, as the Griffin knew. He blanched.

Then he pulled himself together. Deliberately he set down his telephone, cut off the talk. The Griffin was a raving maniac. Dangerous in purpose, but no longer the supreme antagonist. Manning had a clew to the whereabouts of his aerie, or his lair. He could take immediate measures to protect Eleanor.

And then?

He took a deep breath. The deeply sunk lines in his face shallowed. Here was the chance of fairly even combat. Once routed, the Griffin, even if he did not realize it, was in retreat, in confusion. Now was the time to strike.

The Menace of the Monster

In the Heart of the Madman’s Lair Manning at Last Meets the Griffin Face to Face

As he picked up the too familiar gray envelope with the purple script sprawling over the heavy weave, Manning saw that his long held expectation of the Griffin’s mania turning to a violent dementia had come to pass.