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When, despite Flint's imperative orders, Slade failed to reopen the lines of communication for him, before nightfall, and when President Supple wired in code for a little more time in obeying Air Trust orders, the Billionaire recognized that something of terrible menace now had suddenly broken in upon his dream of universal power.
He summoned Waldron and Herzog for another conference and together they feverishly planned to put the works under defense, until such time as troops could be got through to them.
The plant regiment was mustered and the Cosmos mercenaries and scabs were made ready. The machine-guns were unlimbered for action and large quantities of ammunition were delivered to them and to the aerial-bomb guns, as nightfall lowered. Herzog set eight hundred men to work covering all the tanks possible, with wire netting of heavy steel. The search-lights were all ordered into use; steam and electrical connections were made, the air-fleet was manned, and everything was done that unlimited wealth and bitter hate of the Workers could suggest.
With curses on the fog, which hid the upper air from view, the old man now stood at one of the west windows of his inner office—the office on the top floor of the main Administration Building, overlooking nearly the whole Plant.
"Damn the weather!" he snarled, his gold teeth glinting. "In addition to all this mist from the Falls, there's a regular cloud-bank settling down, tonight! Under cover of it, what may not happen? Nothing could have been worse, Waldron. Though we shall soon control the air, that won't be enough, so long as fogs and mists escape us. Our next problem—hello! Now what the devil's that? "
"What's what?" retorted Waldron, testily. He had been drinking rather more heavily than usual, that day, both because of the dull weather and because the Falls invariably got on his nerves, during his brief sojourns there. Away from New York and his favorite haunts, Waldron was lost. "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 some kind, 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 a private army and all, what more do you want? Not getting nervous in your old age, are you, eh?" he gibed bitterly. "Or is your conscience beginning to wake up, as the graveyard becomes more a probability than—"
"Enough!" Flint snapped at him. "When you drink, Waldron, you're an idiot! Now, forget all this, and let's get down to work. I tell you, I just now saw a signal-light up there in the mist. There's trouble coming tonight, 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 any fighting, you know—"
His voice broke in a falsetto pipe. Waldron laughed brutally.
"Bravo!" cried he, with flushed and mottled face. "You'll do, Flint! I see, right now, the firing-line is the life for you! Well, let the row come, and devil take it, say I. Better anything than—"
The sentence was never finished, For suddenly a shattering explosion hurled a vast section of the western encircling wall outward, out into the River, and, where but a moment before, the partners had been gazing at a high concrete-and-steel barrier, with electric lights on top, now only a huge gap appeared, through which the foam-tossed current could be seen leaping swiftly onward toward the Falls.
Hurled back from the window by the force of the explosion, both men were struck dumb with terror and amaze. Flint rallied first, and with a cry of 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 one hand, and on the other by the oxygen tanks' huge bulk that loomed vaguely through the electric-lighted mist, now had begun to swarm with men.
Flint saw a few forms lying prone under the hard glare of the arcs and vacuum lights. Others were crawling, writhing, making strange contortions. Here, there, men with rifles were running to take their posts. Hoarse orders were shouted, and shrill replies rang back.
Then, all at once, a kind of sputtering series of small explosions began to rip along the edge of the south wall. And now, machine-guns began to talk, with a dry, hard metallic clatter. And—though whence these came, Flint could not see—grenades began flying over the wall and bursting in the court. Though unwounded, men fell everywhere these gas-projectiles exploded—fell, stone dead and stiffening at once—fell, in strange, monstrous, awful attitudes of death.
Steam began billowing up; and crackling electrical discharges leaped along the naked wires of the outer barricades.
The whole Plant shook and rattled with the violent concussions of the aerial-bomb guns, already searching the upper air with shrapnel.
Somewhere, out of the range of vision, another terrible shock made the building tremble to its nethermost foundation; and wild yells and cries, as of a charge, a repulse, a savage and determined rush, echoed through the vast enclosure. Came a third detonation—and, blinding in its intensity, a globe of fire burst almost beneath the window, five stories below.
The partners, shaking and pale, retreated hastily. A swift, upward-rising shape swept over the courtyard and was gone—one of the air-fleet now launched to meet the attackers.
Far below a sudden crumbling shudder of masonry told the Billionaire not a moment was to be lost, for already one wing of the Administration Building 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, suddenly sobered, followed; and from the offices, where the night-shift of clerks were laboring (or had been, till the first explosion), came crowding pale 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 jostled Flint and Waldron, as though these plutocrats had been but common clay. And in the corridor a babel rose, through which fresh volleys and ever more and more violent explosions ripped and thundered.
Flint struck savagely at some who barred his way; and Waldron elbowed through, with curses.
"Get out of the way, you swine!" shrilled the old Billionaire. "Make way, there! Way!"
The two men reached a door that led by a private passage, through to the steel-and-concrete laboratories.
"Here, this way, Flint!" shouted Waldron. "If those Hell-devils drop a bomb on us, this building will cave in like jackstraws! Our only safety is here, here! "
Thoroughly cowed now, with all the brutal bluster and half-drunken swagger gone, Waldron whipped out a bunch of keys, tremblingly unlocked the door and blundered through. Flint followed. Behind them, others tried to press, on toward the armored laboratories; but with vile blasphemies the plutocrats beat them back and slammed the door.
"To Hell with them! " shouted Flint, perfectly ashen now and shaking like a leaf, the fear of death strong on his withered soul. "We've got all 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 the laboratory.
Here Waldron unlocked another door, this time a steel one, and—as they both 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. The earth trembled, and the laboratory, steel though it was, with concrete facing, rocked on its foundation. A glare through the windows, quickly fading, told them the building they had just quitted was now but a smoking pile of ruin.
Flint gasped, unable to speak. Waldron, shaking and cowed, tried to moisten his dry lips with a thick tongue.
"We—we weren't any too soon!" he gulped, without one thought of the doomed scabs in the Administration Building. Stern justice was now overtaking these wretches. False to the working-class, and eager to serve the Air Trust—not only eager to serve, but zealous in any attack on the proletariat, and by their very employment serving to rivet the shackles on the world—now they were abandoned by their masters.
Between upper and nether millstone, moving with neither, they were caught and crushed. And as the great building quivered, gaped wide open, swayed and came thundering down in a vast pile of flame-lit ruin, whence a volcanic burst of fire, smoke and dust arose, they perished miserably, time-servers, cowards and self-seekers to the last.
But Flint and Waldron still survived. Though the very earth shook and trembled with the roar of bombs, the crumbling of massive walls, the rattle of volley-fire and the crashing of the terrible grenades that mowed down hundreds as they spread their poisonous gas abroad—though the shriek of projectiles, the thunder of the air-ship guns now sweeping the sky in blind endeavor to shatter the attackers all swelled the tumult to a frightful storm of terror and of death; they still lived, cowered and cringed there in the bomb-proof steel-and-concrete of the inner laboratories.
"Come, come!" Flint quavered, peering about him at the deserted room, still glaring with electric light—the room now abandoned by all its workers, who, members of Herzog's regiment, had run to take their posts at 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 steel chambers where Herzog eventually counted on storing some hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid oxygen—the reserve-chambers, impregnable to lightning, fire, frost or storm, to man's attacks or nature's—the chambers blasted from the living rock, deep as the Falls themselves, vacuum-lined, wondrous achievement of the highest engineering skill the world could boast.
"There! There!" repeated Flint, plucking at the dazed Waldron's sleeve. "Tool-steel and concrete, twenty-five feet thick—and vacuum chambers all about— there we can hide! There's safety! Come, come quick!"
Staring, white-faced (he who had been so red!) and dumb, Waldron yielded. Together, furtive as the criminals they were, these two world-masters slunk toward the steel door, while without, their empire was crashing down in smoke, and flame, and blood!
They had almost reached it when a smash of glass at the far end of the laboratory 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 on the 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 under the greenish vacuum-lights.
"Back, you! Get out!" roared Waldron, raising a fist. "We—"
A sudden belch of flame, outside, split the night with terrible virescence. The whole steel building trembled and swayed. Some of its girders buckled; and the east wall, nearest the oxygen-tanks, caved inward as a mass of many tons was hurled against it.
A stunning concussion flung all three men to the floor; and, as they fell, a withering heat-wave quivered through the place.
"The oxygen-tanks!" gasped Flint. "They're blown up—they're burning—God help us!"
Scorching, yet still eager to live, he crawled on hands and knees toward the steel door. Waldron dragged himself along, half-dead with terror. Now, dripping gouts of inextinguishable fire were raining on the roof of the 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 the steel door open.
" Me! Me! Let me in! Me! Save me! " howled Herzog, dragging himself toward them.
They only laughed derisively, with howls of demoniacal scorn.
"You slave! You cur!" shouted Waldron, and spat at him as he drew the vault door shut. "You cringing dog—stay there, now, and face it!"
The great door boomed shut. In the cool of the winding stairway of steel which led, lighted by electricity, to the trap-door and the ladder down into the tremendous vaults, the world-masters breathed deeply once more, respited from death.
Herzog, screaming like a fiend in torment, clawed at the impenetrable steel 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 now quivering with heat.
Even as he looked, a great gap yawned in the western wall, farthest from the flame-belching oxygen-tank that had been struck.
Through this gap, pouring irresistibly as the sea, swept a tide of attackers, storming the inner citadel of the infernal, world-strangling Air Trust.
At the head of this victorious army, this flood triumphant of the embattled proletaire, Herzog's staring eyes caught a moment's glimpse of a dreaded face—the face of Gabriel Armstrong.
Gasping, the coward and tool of the world-masters made one supreme decision. Close by, a rack of vials stood. He whirled to it, snatched out a tiny bottle and waiting not even to draw the cork—craunched the bottle, glass and all, in his fang-like, uneven teeth.
An instant change swept over him. His staring eyes closed, his head fell forward, his whole body collapsed like an empty sack. He fell, twitched once or twice, and was dead—dead ere the attackers could reach the door of steel where his bestial masters had betrayed him.
Thus perished Herzog, coward and tool, a victim of the very forces he himself had helped create.
And at the moment of his death, the masters he had cringed to and had served, sneering with scorn at him even in their mortal terror, were tremblingly descending the long metal ladder to the impregnable vaults of steel below.