The Mole Pirate

The Mole Pirate Murray Leinster

I

The story of the Mole Pirate properly begins neither with Jack Hill, who built the Mole, nor with Durran, who stole it and used it to acquire more loot and do more damage than any other pirate ever managed in an equal length of time.

The records begin with a Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer, who appears only once in the entire affair, and with Professor Eisenstein who, whatever his prominence in history, vanishes with equal promptness from this tale.

Really, the career of Durran as the Mole Pirate was simply one long battle between himself, the scientist-criminal, and Jack Hill, the inventor we remember as the man who made the earth-plane possible. But the story does begin with Mrs. Hohenstaufer, however briefly she remains in it.

She was, it seems, washing dinner dishes on the screened-in back porch of her home in Wausakkee, New York. It was three o'clock in the afternoon of June 16, 1935. The sun was hot. The radio in the dining room droned through a news bulletin, amid sundry cracklings of summer static:

Police have found a hide-out they feel sure was used by James Durran, America's Public Enemy No. 1, for at least two weeks. Durran, formerly one of America's greatest scientists, has been living in the most squalid surroundings, amid great privation, since be made his cynical statement of his intention to renounce all ideas of morality and ethics for the so-called natural principle of living for one's own satisfaction only. Durran's record to date shows that in six months he has been the cause of eight deaths - two believed to be murders committed by him personally - and twelve robberies. His loot has totalled more than a hundred thousand dollars, but he lives in conditions of unbelievable squalidness.

Four members of his gang, recently captured, have been sentenced to life imprisonment and are now in Sing Sing prison-

Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer dried dishes and meditated piously. It was good that the government required the broadcasters to emphasize the penalties dealt out to lawbreakers and not to talk about criminals until they were caught or nearly caught. It would make young men more law-abiding.

She looked complacently through the screening. The Albany highway soared past, not half a mile from her door. As she looked, a car slowed down and turned off to the county road. It disappeared from view behind a clump of trees.

Mrs. Hohenstaufer looked for it to reappear with a sensation of mild curiosity. But it did not. It remained hidden. For three, four, five minutes there was no sign of it. Then it showed again, sweeping back up on to the highway. Into low speed, racing in second - dodging two heavy trucks bound for Troy - and then into high, the car shot forward at its maximum speed until it became a dwindling speck in the distance.

Mrs. Hohenstaufer blinked. That was her clump of trees. These people, these tourists, had no respect for other people's property. Maybe they came to steal green stuff for a city apartment; maybe some of the tiny pines and cedars that city people were making a fad of just now.

Indignantly, Mrs. Hohenstaufer took off her apron. She marched the full half mile to the wood lot in the broiling sun, growing more indignant as she marched. She saw the tyre tracks of the car. It had crushed ruthlessly through the tender small growths which Mrs. Hohenstaufer expected to sell at the proper time for transplanting. She followed the tracks, growing more angry by the minute.

Then she saw a man lying on the ground. His sandy-brown whiskers and white hair looked vaguely familiar to her even at first glance, but then she grew horrified. He was bound hand and foot. He was quite unconscious, and blood flowed from a nasty blackjack wound on his temple. Mrs. Hohenstaufer squawked in dismay.

It was half an hour before the police came. In that time Mrs. Hohenstaufer had cut the ropes from about the man's body. She had carried him, herself, all the way back to the house. There she telephoned for the police and a doctor and regarded her patient with extreme disfavour. He was undoubtedly one of these criminals of whom the radio chattered constantly.

She greeted the police with indignant protests against their allowing criminals to clutter Up the wood lots of law-abiding people with their victims and acquaintances.

Then the officers saw her patient.

'Good Heaven!' said the first. 'It's Professor Eisenstein! What the hell's happened to him ?'

'Prof--' Mrs. Hohenstaufer squeaked. 'The scientist ? The great scientist that all the papers print pictures of?'

'That's who,' said the cop. 'Here! We got to get him fixed up so he can tell us -'

The patient's eyes opened vaguely. His whiskers stirred. 'Durran,' said the injured man faintly, 'Durran, you verdammt fool, what is der idea ?'

Then he looked bewildered.

The cops snapped phrases of explanation.

'An' you were talkin' about Durran,' said one of the two feverishly. 'Did he sock you, professor ?'

'To be sure.' The white-baked man blinked and said angrily: 'I came out of my house and got in my car. I had an appointment to visit der American Electric laboratories, where Jack Hill is going to show off a most remarkable infention today. And halfway there, my chauffeur turned around, and he was not my chauffeur. He was Durran, whom I knew. And he hit me with a blackjack. I suppose he has stolen my car.'

'Right!' snapped the cop. 'Brady, you got it? Phone in an' give the alarm. Durran's in Professor Eisenstein's car, an' it's a blue Diessel, licence number is -'

The other cop snapped into the telephone. Plugs clicked. A smoothly running organization moved swiftly into action. Short radio waves carried a brisk, curt order into every police car in New York, and to police-car headquarters in at least two adjoining States. In fifteen minutes, by actual timing, there were more than two hundred police cars, at least a hundred traffic posts, and even a few stray members of the general public feverishly on the lookout for Professor Eisenstein's blue Diessel, because it contained America's Public Enemy No. 1.

And all that effort and all that searching was in vain; Because the blue Diessel was parked outside the American | Electric laboratories, where Professor Eisenstein had an appointment, and nobody thought of noticing it.

It was not until Professor Eisenstein's secretary was notified of his whereabouts and telephoned an apologetic message to the laboratory that the blue Diesel was noticed. The professor and Mrs. Hohenstaufer immediately vanished from the tale of the Mole Pirate. But in the meantime things had happened.

II

Jack Hill was talking to reporters in the machine-shop section of the American Electric laboratories. The lathes and machine tools were covered over, for the moment, and there were a dozen or more of folding chairs in view. On the table before Jack there was a large sheet of white-painted metal, on which stood a block of brass and a small but intricate contrivance of radio tubes and the like. Behind him a wide curtain hid the farther wall.

'I'll give you a part of the idea now,' said Jack. 'Professor Eisenstein is late, but I don't want to start the apparatus until he gets here.'

'What's all this performance about, anyway?' demanded a man from the Mirror. 'Somebody said you had some kind of gadget that made you able to walk through walls.'

Td hate to tell you what I can do," returned Jack. 'You wouldn't believe me. I'd rather show you. I've been experimenting on a rather neglected aspect of the atom. You know, of course, that the atom is regarded today as a sort of miniature solar system, a nucleus like a sun with a greater or lesser number of electrons revolving around it like planets?'

'Yeah.' The Minor man had appointed himself spokesman. 'We know all that stuff.'

'Good!' said Jack. 'Then we can talk about magnets first. In ordinary iron the molecules have north and south poles, like all other molecules, but they point in every possible direction, helter-skelter. They have magnetism in them, but it isn't organized. Pointing haphazard, though each one is a miniature magnet, in the mass they neutralize each other. It's only when the whole mass of iron is magnetized that all the poles point in the same direction - or only when they all point in the same direction that it's magnetized. Is that clear, too?'