A hand grenade went off behind him. Earth spattered him. Something stung his leg, numbing it. Warm stuff flowed down it. Then he was at a car. He flung Gail inside, jammed on the starter, and jerked it into first. The phantom of the Mole was turning. It came toward him again. And he shot away at forty-five miles an hour which became fifty and then sixty as he got on to a dear straight road.
'Your father,' said Jack coolly, as he pushed the car to a higher speed yet, 'may think I'm a coward. But Durran has destroyed nearly or quite every record of how the Mole was built. I'm the only man who can build another force-field generator without those destroyed drawings and figures. I simply have to save that knowledge until I can get it down on paper.'
Then Gail said in a rather choked voice: 'I'm wondering about my father.'
For answer, Jack swung right, left, right again. He drew to a stop before a drug store. He called the gate watchman at the laboratory from the phone booth. In seconds, Gail was talking to her father.
'He says you did the right thing,' she reported an instant later. 'Durran did intend to get you. But - my father thinks that if he saw that you picked me up, he may think that the best way to handle you is to be able to threaten me. So I'm forbidden to go home. Dad's going to get a fast car and meet us. He's going to send me away. You, too, most likely. You're important.'
Jack grunted. 'Where do we meet your father ?' he demanded.
When she told him, he swung the car and headed that way.
They were three hundred miles away by dawn, and Jack flung himself headlong into the tedious, exacting work of drafting new plans from memory, building a new force-field generator also from memory, and of necessity for its construction determining all over again the constants needed for the calculation of certain of its parts.
He barely took time to eat and sleep, but in seven days he was ready to install new force-field generators as fast as they could be built in the new and faster earth-ships already taking shape in a dozen widely separated machine shops.
Three of those days were taken up by the need to repeat work already done, the results of which had been destroyed with the American Electric laboratory.
During that week, however, Durran progressed from the status of front-page news to a point where he was practically all the news there was. For one day after the American Electric fire, there was no report of his activity anywhere.
No authentic report, that is. A hysterical public reported the presence of the Mole from something like one hundred and fifty different points within a three-hundred-mile radius of its last appearance, and declared Durran busy at crimes ranging from the setting of forest fires and wholesale kidnappings to the robbery of a chicken coop in East Orange, New Jersey.
Actually Durran was still trying to reach and kill Jack Hill, as his solitary dangerous opponent. He had materialized a part of the Mole in the cellar of the house next to Jack's home. He hoped that Jack would return to his home, if only momentarily, to secure personal possessions or records. With the Mole part phantom and part real in the cellar of the house next door, his followers seized and bound and gagged the occupants of that house and watched comfortably for Jack's return.
He did not appear, though Durran waited for him for twelve hours. At the end of that time he took on board the men who had been watching, dematerialized the Mole, and moved away. But he left an incendiary bomb under Jack's house, and the firemen who vainly fought the blaze it started discovered the helplessness and the sufferings of the people next door.
Then the Mole began its career - the part for which it is remembered, at any rate. At dawn it was sighted in Troy, crawling deliberately out of a national bank building. A policeman shot at it and blew his whistle frantically. It swam indifferently for two blocks along the trolley tracks of Troy's main street.
While twenty police made frantic, helpless gestures, it crawled into another bank. It remained there for half an hour, its blunt nose thrust through the solid metal of a vault and its sustaining screws turning lazily. Then it sank abruptly into the ground. Its exit from town was unobserved. Both banks were looted.
At nine o'clock the Merchants' National Bank in Albany was open for business. There were a few more than the normal number of customers inside. The Mole swam through the walls and came into view. A stenographer saw it and screamed. There was a sudden glow of eerie whitish light at its snout.
A round ring of solid matter appeared, incredibly floating in mid-air at the forefront of a monster which seemed made of the most tenuous of fog. Something hard and round and quite solid dribbled out of that ring. It fell to the floor and exploded into a blinding haze of tear gas. More flares of eerie whitish light. More solidity appeared. Men got out and worked swiftly.
Police charged in from the street and were met by machine-gun fire. A hand grenade followed. The list of dead and injured was horrifying. Presently the Mole swam deliberately out into the street. It passed through a trolley-car, in which women fainted. It turned into the town's greatest jewellery store. Another tear-gas bomb. Ten minutes, and it came out again. Crowds swarmed about the scene of excitement. The Mole insolently moved upon and through the helpless police.
And in Albany Durran or one of his men committed a wholly causeless atrocity. A hand grenade dropped from the solidifying ring where the crowd was thickest. There was no reason or excuse for it. The hospitals of Albany were crowded with injured, alike those directly mangled by the grenade and in the panic which followed its explosion.
The Mole went on, insolently and deliberately looting bank after bank before the eyes of the police. There was no defence against it. Treasure locked in the bank vaults was but made more convenient for Durran's men. Left elsewhere, they drove out or blinded would-be defenders with tear-gas and machine-gun fire, with hand grenades always in reserve.
The Mole stayed two hours and a half in Albany. Its loot was something over three-quarters of a million dollars.
It reached Poughkeepsie at dusk. But here it was expected. A radium paint concern supplied the police with radioactive material. Daubed on bullets, the paint did all that Jack Hill had promised. A storm of paint-smeared lead poured upon the misty monster at its first sighting. Direct hits, instead of going harmlessly through a phantom, seemed to encounter resistance. Some punctured the nearly invisible steel plates when fired at sufficiently close range. Glancing hits - glanced. Several police were injured by ricochets.
The Mole dived at the first sign of injury. In seconds its shimmering, unreal rounded back was sinking into the pavement, which stopped what bullets seemed to penetrate rather than pass harmlessly through its impalpable armour. Rather quaintly, too, the painted bullets seemed likely to be effective in an unexpected way.
Once having punctured the Mole's hull, it was of course as difficult for them to get out as to get in. And they were 'real' in both the actual world and the strange universe of the Mole. They caught at once in the pavement and the hull and prevented the Mole from sinking out of sight. For minutes, the Mole seemed to be held fast. Then a terrific explosion underground flung up the street. A second, a third.
Otherwise unable to escape, Durran had materialized high explosives in the solid earth and set them off. He blasted away the roadway in which the bullets were caught. They undoubtedly remained inside the hull, but when no longer held fast by real matter, they could be gathered up and thrown outside one of the Mole's phantom ports. The Mole went on, still underground.
For a time, despite the terrific losses from those blasts, the police of Poughkeepsie were almost jubilant. Remembering Jack Hill's statement that violent explosions would come of the materialization of one solid body inside of another, it was thought that the explosions came from some such occurrence.