Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 22
We were brought to a New York astounded and stunned; the wharves were lined, the streets swarmed with people awaiting the sorry ships bearing the rescued and the dead of the disaster.
Every now and then, in a strange, mass terror, they all looked up and searched the sky to see what there might be threatening them.
The newspapers bore broad, black edges and printed page after page of lists of the lost.
The alarm was on everyone's lips: "Is it just the start? What next?"
I was taken at once into conference with the Army and Navy Intelligence to whom I told, of course, all I knew. Helen was able, on that same day, to relate her experience.
In return I was told that the chateau and establishment at the lake in the mountains had been taken in charge. No one but servants had been found, except a man of fifty discovered locked in a room and dead. No sign of violence; heart-failure, apparently. They described him.
"Her father," I said; and they left it to me when to tell her.
Cawder, in Chicago, had escaped; his offices were cleared; no one was caught there; and from offices discovered to have been corresponding with him from Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, San Francisco and a half dozen other cities, everyone was fled. A radio warning early must have reached them.
The extent of their organization was stupendous.
I told Helen of her father, soon after I rejoined her; for she asked and asked of him. "Do you suppose he's heard of the ship? He'll not want to live."
"He never heard, I think," said I; and my news was small shock to her. "I hope it happened when they went away," said she. "He was to blame—he and I!"
At this, I caught her in my arms and pleaded with her. "Never say that again! You did nothing throughout it all, nothing but good. Even if you take upon yourself responsibility for your father's act, you did nothing but good!"
She tried to push herself free from me. "How can you say that?"
"Because it's true! It's true!" I cried and held her as though with my arms I could save her sanity. "Your father was responsible, at the worst, for no more than Bane."
"But he did it all; he led them!"
"In a premature, poorly planned raid which did little in comparison with what they might have done. Your madman Bane had to go ahead at once when Cawder would have waited for full preparation of a tremendous plan. So Bane destroyed one ship when Cawder would have struck with a great airfleet at the nation's greatest cities!
"And in what was done, you were always a check upon Bane; but for you, he would have been more merciless; and but for you, no warning would have gone to the navy airplanes. For Sally Gessler sent it to destroy Bane, and you, in her jealousy of you."
She quivered, small and lovely in my arms; and more quietly I held her against me as some of her agony, for her father's guilt, was gone.
"What does it all mean?" she questioned me, able for a moment to forget her personal place in it. "What does it all mean?"
I played with a lock of her hair and looked into her wide grey eyes and I touched the smoothness of her cheek.
"It may mean that at last," I said, "at last the day has come for the destruction which men have looked for and feared since someone first struck a spark from flint or rubbed together two dry sticks to start a fire. You find the day described, my dear," I said, "in the legends of every people, in one form or another. It goes far, far back before the beginning of history when the Gods, but not man, had fire.
"The Gods, you know, argued whether to give it to man; and most of them were against it. But one God, with an overtrust in man, gave it away; or in some stories, man stole it; and so started the creation of instruments which man had not the moral equipment to rightly control and which therefore destroy him.
"Doubt of man's ability to acquire the character of Gods as swiftly as he can acquire their powers, and dread of the certain consequences, runs on the tongue of every people."
"This means we've come to the day at last?"
I shook my head. "Not quite, I think—though never a race of men ever lived who have stolen as many material powers from the Gods as Americans. Beyond any doubt, the day can come. But I won't have it yet—please."
My hand again was at her hair.
"Nor I," she whispered.
"For first, we want to live, you and I, don't we?"
"Yes; I do want to live."
"And love?"
"Yes; and love. For I do love; I love you."
The end.