Lords of the Stratosphere Read online

  CHAPTER II

  _The Ghostly Columns_

  Franz Kress had been gone a week, when all the world knew that hecouldn't possibly have stayed aloft that length of time. Yet no word wasreceived from him, no report received from any part of the world that hehad returned. Various islands which he might have reached were scouredfor traces of him. The lighter vessels of most of the navies of theworld joined in the search to no avail. Kress had merely mounted intothe sky and vanished.

  The world's last word from him had been a few words on theradio-telephone:

  "Have reached sixty thousand feet and--"

  There the message had ended, as though the speaker, eleven miles abovethe earth, had been strangled. Yet he didn't drop, as far as anybody inthe world knew.

  Lucian Jeter and Tema Eyer worked harder than ever, remembering thepromise they had made Kress at his take-off. Whatever had happened tohim, he seemingly in part had anticipated. And now the partners wouldgo up, too, seeking information--perhaps to vanish as Kress hadvanished. They were not afraid. They shared the world's feeling ofdread, but they were not afraid. Of course death would end their labors,but there were many scientists in the world to take up where they mightleave off.

  There were, for example, Sitsumi of Japan, rumored discoverer of asubstance capable of bending light rays about itself to render itselfinvisible; Wang Li, Liao Wu, Yung Chan, of China--three who had degreesfrom the world's greatest universities and had added miraculously to thestore of knowledge by their own inspired research. These three werepatriotically eager to bring China back to her rightful place as theleader in scientific research--a place she had not held for a thousandyears. It was generally agreed among scientists that the three wouldshortly outstrip all their contemporaries.

  As Jeter thought of these four men, Orientals all, it suddenly occurredto him to communicate with them. He talked it over with Eyer and decidedto send carefully worded cables to all four.

  In a few hours he received answers to them:

  From Japan: "Sitsumi does not care to communicate." There was a world ofcold hostility in the words, Jeter thought, and Eyer agreed with him.

  From China came the strangest message of all:

  "Wang, Liao and Yung have been cut off from world for past four months,conducting confidential research in Gobi laboratories. Impossible tocommunicate because area in which laboratories situated in Japanesehands and surrounded by cordon of guards."

  Jeter and Eyer stared at each other when the cable had been read anddigested.

  "Queer, isn't it?" said Eyer.

  Jeter didn't answer. That preoccupied expression was on his face, thatdistant look which no man could erase from his face by any interruptionuntil Jeter had finished his train of thought.

  "Queer," thought Jeter, "that Sitsumi should be so snooty and the threeChinese totally unavailable."

  * * * * *

  There were many strange things happening lately, too, and the queerthings kept on happening, and in ever-increasing numbers, during thesecond week of Kress' impossible absence in the stratosphere. Or was hethere? Had he ever reached it? Had he--Jeter and Eyer had noticed hisutter gloom at the take-off--merely, climbed out of sight of the Earthand then slanted down to a dive into the ocean? Maybe he was a suicide.But some bits of wreckage of his plane had many unsinkable parts aboutit--the parachute ball for instance.

  No, the solemn fact remained that Kress had simply flown up and hadn'tcome down again. It would have sounded silly and absurd if it hadn'tbeen so serious.

  And strange stories were seeping into the press of the world.

  Out in Wyoming a cattleman had driven a herd of prime steers into theround-up corral at night. Next morning not one of the steers could befound. No tracks led away from the corral. The gates were closed,exactly as they had been left the night before. There had been nocowboys watching the steers, for the corral had always been strongenough to hold the most rambunctious.

  The tale of the missing steers hit the headlines, but so far nobody hadthought of this disappearance in connection with Kress'. How could anyone? Steers and scientists didn't go together. But it still was strange.

  At least so Jeter thought. His mind worked with this and other strangehappenings even as he and Eyer worked at top speed.

  A young fellow in Arizona told a yarn of wandering about the crater of ameteor which had fallen on the desert thousands of years before. Theplace wasn't important nor did it seem to have anything to do with thecrater or meteors--but the young fellow reported that he had seen afaded white column of light, like the beam of a great searchlight,reaching up into the sky from somewhere on the desert.

  When people became amazed at his story he added to it. There had beenfive columns of light instead of one. The one he had first mentioned hadtouched the Earth, or had shot up from the Earth, within several milesof his point of vantage. A second glowed off to the northwest, a thirdto the southwest, a fourth to the southeast, the fifth to the northeast.The first one seemed to "center" the other four--they might have beenthe five legs of a table, according to their arrangement....

  Arrangement! Jeter wondered how that word had happened to come to him.

  * * * * *

  The story of the fellow who had seen the columns of light might havebeen believed if he had stuck to his first yarn of seeing but one. Butwhen he mentioned five ... well, he didn't have any too good areputation for veracity and wasn't regarded as being overly bright.Besides, he had stated that the thickness of the columns of light seemedto be the same from the ground as far as his eyes could follow themupward. Everybody knew that a searchlight's beams spread out a bit.

  "I wonder," thought Jeter, "why the kid didn't say he saw those fivecolumns move--like a five-legged animal, walking."

  Silly, of course, but behind the silliness of the thought Jeter thoughtthere might be something of interest, something on which to work.

  The Jeter-Eyer space ship still was not finished--though almost--whenthe world moved into the third week since the disappearance of FranzKress.

  An Indian in the Southwest had reported seeing one of those columns oflight. However, this merited just a line on about page sixteen, even ofthe newspaper closest to the spot where the redskin had seen the column.

  "Eyer," said Jeter at last, "we've got to start digging into newspaperstories, especially into stories which deal with unusually queerhappenings throughout the world. I've a hunch that the keys to Kress'disappearance may be found in some of them, or a combination of a greatmany of them."

  "How do you mean, Lucian?"

  "Don't you notice that all this queer stuff has been happening sinceKress left? It sounds silly, perhaps, but I feel sure that thedisappearance of those steers in Wyoming, the story the boy told aboutthe columns of light--yes, all five of them!--and the Indian's partialconfirmation of it, are all tied up together with the disappearance ofKress."

  * * * * *

  Eyer started to grin his disbelief, but a look at his partner's tenseface stopped him.

  "What could want all those steers, Lucian?" said Eyer softly. "I can'tthink of anything or anybody disposing of such a bunch on such shortnotice, except a marching army, a marching column of soldier ants, orall the world's buzzards gathered together at one place. In any casethe animals themselves would have created a fuss, would have kicked upso much noise that somebody would have heard. But this story of thesteers seems to suggest, or say right out loud--though I know you can'tbelieve everything in the newspapers--that the steers vanished in uttersilence."

  "Doesn't it also seem funny to you," went on Jeter, "that the vanishingof the herd wasn't discovered until next morning? I've read enoughWestern stuff to know that a herd always makes noise. Yes, even atnight. The cowhands wouldn't have lost a wink of sleep over that. But,listen, Tema, suppose you lived in New York City near some busyintersection which was always noisy, even after midnight--and all thenoise suddenly st
opped. Would you sleep right on through it?"

  "No, I'd wake up--unless I were drunk or doped."

  "Yet nobody seems to have wakened at that ranch when--and it must havehappened--the herd stopped making any noise whatever. The utter silence_should_ have wakened seasoned cowhands. It didn't. Why? What happenedto them that they slept so soundly they heard nothing?"

  Eyer did not answer. It wasn't the first time he had been called upon tohear Jeter think out loud.

  "It all ties up somehow," repeated Jeter, "and I intend to find outhow."

  But he didn't find out. Strange stories kept appearing. The threeChinese scientists still had not communicated with the outside world.The chap out in Arizona had now so elaborated on his yarn that nobodybelieved him and the public lost interest--all save Jeter, who was onthe trail of a queer idea.

  Nothing happened however until near the end of the third week afterKress' disappearance.

  Then, out of a clear sky almost, Kress came back.

  He came down by parachute, without the ball in which he should havesealed himself. His return caused plenty of comment. There was goodreason. He had been gone the impossibly long period of three weeks.

  He was dead--but _had_ been for less than seventy-two hours!

  His body was frozen solid.

  It landed on the roof of the Jeter-Eyer laboratory; had he been alive hecouldn't possibly have maneuvered his chute to land him on such a smallplace.

  The partners stared at each other. It seemed strange to them indeed thatKress should have come back to land on the roof of the two who hadpromised to follow him into the stratosphere if he didn't return.

  Very strange indeed.

  He had returned, though, releasing Jeter and Eyer from their promise.Strangely enough that fact made them all the more determined to go. Andwhile the newspaper reporters went wild over Kress' return, the partnersstarted making additional plans.