THE Secret Agent looked quickly across the street toward a window where a clock giving U. S. Naval Observatory time was visible. He watched the minute hand crawl around its arc till it touched the exact hour of four. Then he glanced back at the parked truck again. One of the men, as the Agent stared, disappeared inside.
A moment passed, and the Agent stiffened. A sharp tingle shot along his nerves. It was getting dark now. A cloud seemed to have passed over the sun, a gloom like twilight was settling down. And in the Agent’s head was the strange buzzing that foretold the coming of synthetic night.
Grimly, tensely, he stepped into a doorway out of sight and drew a piece of rubberized fabric from a pocket. It was the helmet mask de Graf had given him the night before, the mask that represented hours of patient, secret research on the part of the murdered physicist.
The Agent knew now, had known for many hours, since the unfailing eye of Hobart’s movie camera had made its record, that the darkness had no external existence, but was in the eyes of human beings alone. It was a force, a ray probably, that temporarily paralyzed the optic nerve. No wonder that the darkness seemed more complete than any night. No wonder that criminals could work beneath it with impunity — criminals equipped with insulating helmets which made their own eyes impervious to the ray.
There was sweat on the Agent’s forehead as he adjusted the strange mask over his head. A great crime was about to take place — and the safety of thousands depended on him alone. The police were coming. Detectives were already in the store; but police and detectives would be helpless against the blinding dark. They would flounder as futilely as they had on other occasions when it had fallen. Whips would be plied by the raiders, men and women would stampede, horror would be repeated perhaps.
Yet to trap the criminals red-handed, to expose them for the fiends they were, “X” had been forced to wait until the darkness fell before he acted, forced to let the first fearful horror of the thing descend.
The mask of de Graf, fashioned of gum rubber impregnated with lead sulphide and the rare metal, thorium, had goggles of pressed mica and glass. It was almost a perfect insulator. Already the buzzing in the Agent’s brain had diminished, as the action of the invisible, nerve-paralyzing rays was lessened. The lights before his eyes had ceased to dance. The twilight grew brighter.
But pandemonium had arisen in the street, and the scene he saw before him was like a glimpse into some unearthly hell — a nightmare of horror that the Secret Agent was never to forget. On all sides people were floundering, pushing against each other. Their eyes, though blinded by the devilish ray, were wide with terror. The hoarse cries of men mingled with the piercing screams of women in a shrill tumult. Hysteria quivered like jagged lightning through the crowds.
The Agent turned his helmeted head toward the electric truck. The two workmen were carrying on their task quite calmly in the midst of mad confusion. How they could do this was plainly evident to “X” now. They, too, had helmets on their heads — helmets which proved their guilt as members of the devil-dark gang.
“X” SAW other helmeted figures slip from the two cars that had so quietly parked. Whips and canvas sacks were in these men’s hands. They pushed their way through the staggering, milling crowds toward the department store’s front. They entered as the Agent watched. He knew that others were entering through other doors that he could not see; knew that the raiders were gathering to do their work of looting. In a moment more, when the dark had so frightened the crowds inside that panic swept among them, those cruel, metal-tipped whips would begin to descend.
A second longer the Agent crouched in the doorway, looking both ways along the street. He hoped somewhere to see the directing genius of all this, the mysterious Chairman whose identity he did not know. But if he was here he was well hidden — hidden even from the Agent’s searching gaze.
Glancing back at the truck again, he saw one of the workmen strike out with a whip. A man and a girl had stumbled over the cable on the pavement, and were being lashed out of the way.
The whip curled around the girl’s body like a snake, its metal tip tearing at her dress. The workman drew it back, lashed again, ripping the clothing in great jagged seams, baring the white skin beneath. The girl screamed wildly, and ran headlong from the vicinity of the truck. The young man with her tried to follow, but stumbled against the vehicle instead, and a shower of stinging strokes sent him cowering back.
With breath hissing between clenched teeth, with fury lying hot against his heart, the Secret Agent fought his way through the seething mass of humanity about him. It was time for him to strike, time for him to make good his promise to the police.
People flung themselves against him, clawed at him blindly as he circled and made for the truck. He slipped like a ghost in that black gloom through crowds now almost mad with fear.
Feeling themselves secure, not knowing that anyone had guessed their secret, the men by the truck did not see the weirdly helmeted form until “X” was within twenty feet of them.
A startled cry came from behind one of the helmeted heads then. The man shouted something to his companion above the uproar. Both men stared. Then suddenly they dropped their whips, and automatics gleamed dully in their straining hands. Like weird monsters they crouched to fire.
Only rarely did the Secret Agent carry deadly weapons. But against this hideous band of whip-torturers who had killed women and robbed innocent children of their lives he had come armed. The weapon in his hand spoke quickly now. With the gun held close against his hip, not even taking aim along the sights, he fired twice, at the same instant that the others shot.
Bullets whistled close by his head, slapped against a building behind him. But the Agent had ducked the moment after he fired, and his own shots had found their mark. One of the helmeted men cried out and pitched forward. His hands dropped at his sides. Like a puppet with suddenly severed strings he collapsed. The other man staggered, his gun clattering to the street. He was not mortally hit like his companion, for he plunged to the back of the truck, his hand flew forward to a hidden switch, and an instant later a blast of blue and orange flame came from the truck’s interior.
The wounded man leaped back from the vehicle with a cry of pain. His plunging body struck the Agent. Both went down, and scorching heat funneled out from the burning truck, singeing their clothes. The wounded man groaned and went limp.
Agent “X” dropped his gun and pulled the man away from the hungry heat of the fire. For a moment he went dangerously close himself, trying to get a look inside the truck, and glimpse the mysterious mechanism. But it was hopeless. Some violently inflammable substance had obviously been planted to make the complete destruction of the mechanism possible in case of emergency. White-hot flames hissed and interlaced, as though a hundred blow torches had been fired at once. Glass tubes were popping in a series of miniature explosions. Lead connections were melting away. Metal was fusing into a bubbling, shapeless mass.
THE Agent backed away from the mystery truck and looked around the street. A change was already beginning to make itself apparent in those about him. The excited, terrified milling of the crowd was beginning to cease. Suddenly a man screamed and pointed toward the fire. There was a note of hysterical joy in his voice.
“Light! Light!” he shouted. “Light again — thank God!”
The fierce white-hot glare of the inflammable material planted in the car had broken through the blinding darkness of the Stygian night. Did that mean — As though in answer to the Agent’s unfinished thought others around began to shout: