Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 07.djvu/93

668 struggling further, he lay quietly, and just before they focused the transmitter on his head he prayed aloud, not for deliverance, but for the destruction of his captors.

Stevens had replaced the disrupted tube with a new one, and the horrendous screech that now arose as he closed the circuit seemed almost to have something human in its terrible protest.

Within a quarter of an hour from the time he had attempted the lives of the scientists, Gary Mason, the one-time brilliant archaeologist had become metamorphosed into an adult with the mentality of a three year old child—a sleepy child, at that. Doctor Santurn called for Suki to put him to bed.

"Now, gentlemen," he said to his dishevelled assistants, "Science can proceed unhampered by fanatics. It is perhaps fortunate that our guest knew nothing of the mines placed under our buildings, nor of the bombs charged with Bridges' gas which is as deadly as Lewisite. Our knowledge is to be devoted to one great purpose, and rather than let our achievements fall into the hands of lily-livered gentry who might convert it to their own maudlin aims, I repeat our pledge to destroy, should it become necessary, the Plateau and all it houses. Remember, I I" He paused, his face distorted by a spasm of pain.

Swiftly he ripped his surgeon's gown from his body and bared his torso to the gaze of his startled assistants.

"What do you see, Bridges?" he asked in a low tone of alarm. "Quick!"

Bridges, pressing his own face as if in pain, peered intently at the Doctor's neck.

"There's a peculiar enlargement under the angle of the jaw," he said. "Why! It's swelling as I watch!"

"Quick! Trace down the lymph nodes in the neck," the Doctor commanded, his face contorted.

Bridges did so. "Swelling too," he announced, "They're like marbles. It's almost like—I should say like;—"

"Go on, man!"

"Like metastasis in cancer, when the infection spreads."

"Good Lord!" blurted forth Stevens, inconsistently calling on One he had long scorned. "We never thought these currents would act like X-Rays! Simple high frequency! Who'd have thought—!"

AMN your ignorance!" said the Doctor bitterly. "Ordinarily cancer takes up to a couple of years to kill, and here you've saddled me with an unknown hothouse variety that's killing me in minutes! You gaping fools! Haven't you ever heard of the cumulative effect of Roentgen Bays and Radium Rays? Well, now you know the Neo Wave is similar. Oh, yes, now you'll know! Mark you my lads, I'm going fast, and I know it; but you'll follow soon yourselves!

"You, Johnssen! What're you looking at on your arm? What's the trouble with your face, Bridges? Nose seems badly off center. Hi, Stevens, you blighted nincompoop! Do your feet hurt? Poor Trilbys!" He laughed ironically.

With faltering steps he dragged his pain-wracked body to the far corner of the room, and pressed against the wall next a hexagonal panel set invisibly in the tiles.

Bridges was running about like one blinded, futilely wringing his hands.

Johnssen gazed with terrible fixety at his forearm, feeling the chain of nodes that were swelling, up to the arm pit.

And Stevens was crying, frankly and unashamedly as he clutched at his ankle.

"Boys," said the Doctor in a sibilant whisper, "We're beaten! We have no remedy for this sort of venom. It we'd have studied diseased tissues for the sake of Humanity, as our friend Mason might say, there'd be a fighting chance for us. Oh, well! It was fun while it lasted; but something's beaten us.

"Something? Is there a Something?"

The hexagonal pane! was open, and deep into the recess in the wall the Doctor inserted his arm. Summoning his waning strength, he managed by a tremendous effort to force a raucous croak through his contracted larynx.

"Allons! Mes enfants!" he called to the heedless trio absorbed in their own separate purgatories. "A short life, and a merry one!"

His arm, sunk, to the shoulder in the wall recess, turned slowly.

HE proprietor of the Travelers' Hotel in the village, growing talkative, occasionally, to some favored guest these days, may point toward the Plateau, just as nightfall enshrouds it, and describe it as a place beloved of the Devil.

"Nothing but ruins are standing there since the night of the big explosion," he explains. "Two men who went up to investigate, dropped in their tracks the moment they entered the gate, and the rest of us at a distance held back a good ways. No one 'ud dare go near the place. Finally the War Department sent an expert. He said the Plateau was chock full of some sort o' poison that'd settled down and blighted everything. 'Nothing can live there for years,' says he.

"So we went and put up a high wall with plenty of warning signs, clear around the old wall; but 'tain't necessary, really. Ha! Try an' get some one who knows to go there for love'r money!

"Would you like to explore," he asks pointedly, "Where no green grass grows, nor no vines cover the rums? Where birds never rise no more once they light there? Sure you wouldn't! The place is damned and haunted, I tell you!"

And then the genial proprietor grows thoughtful.

"There was a kind of elderly fellow stopped here on his way up there, 'most a year ago. Said his friend up there on the Plateau was perfectly all right and aboveboard. I wonder what happened to that there feller?"

He shivers slightly.

"Let's go in an' turn on the light," he suggests. "The durn subjec' gives me the creeps!"