The Black Star Passes | Page 5

when he entered the ship, he found a
small piece of wire securing the air lock from the outside. This had
certainly been put on while the ship was in flight, and that meant that
whoever had done this, had landed on the great ship with a small plane,
had somehow anchored it, then had entered the plane through the air
lock at the ten mile height. He had probably flown across the path of
the plane, leaving a trail of gas in its way to be drawn in through the
ventilator pumps. It had been washed out by the incoming good air
later, for the emergency pilot had not been affected.
Now the investigation led them to the mail-room. Despite the refractory
nature of the metal, the door had been opened by melting or burning
out the lock. And an opening had been burned into the safe itself!
Opened by melting it through!
A bond shipment was due the next day, and the airline officials planned
to be on the watch for it. It would get through safely, they were sure,
for men were put on board in steel chambers hermetically welded
behind them, with oxygen tanks and automatic apparatus sealed within
to supply them with clean air. The front of the tanks were equipped
with bullet-proof glass windows, and by means of electrically operated

controls the men inside could fire machine guns. Thus they were
protected from the Pirate's gas and able to use their weapons.
The ship was accompanied by a patrol of Air Guardsmen. Yet, despite,
this, cancer cases were aboard with the hope of being gassed.
When the plane reached the neighborhood of San Francisco, there had
been no sign of an attack. The Pirate might well retire permanently on a
million, if he were alone, as the singular signature indicated; but it
seemed much more probable that he would attempt another attack in
any case. Well, that just meant watching all the planes from now on, a
tremendous job for the Air Guard to handle.
The leader of the patrol turned in an easy bank to descend the ten miles
to Earth, and his planes followed him. Then suddenly through the
communicator came an unmistakable sound. The plane automatically
signaling for an emergency pilot! That could only mean that the plane
had been gassed under the very eyes of his men!
The bonds were gone and the passengers gassed, and incredibly, the
men in the steel tanks were as thoroughly gassed as the rest.
The note was brief, and as much to the point as was the absence of the
bonds.
To the Officials of the Airport:
Restore as usual. The men in the tanks are asleep also--I said the gas
would penetrate any material. It does. A mask obviously won't do any
good. Don't try that C-32L mask. I warn you it will be fatal. My gas
reacts to produce a virulent poison when in contact with the chemicals
in the C-32L.
The Pirate

I.

On the thirty-ninth floor of a large New York apartment two young
men were lounging about after a strenuous game of tennis. The blue
tendrils of smoke from their pipes rose slowly, to be drawn away by the
efficient ventilating system. The taller of the two seemed to be doing
most of the talking. In the positions they had assumed it would have
been rather difficult to be sure of which was the taller, but Robert
Morey was a good four inches taller than Richard Arcot. Arcot had to
suffer under the stigma of "runt" with Morey around--he was only six
feet tall.
The chosen occupation of each was physical research, and in that field
Arcot could well have called Morey "runt", for Arcot had only one
competitor--his father. In this case it had been "like father, like son".
For many years Robert Arcot had been known as the greatest American
physicist, and probably the world's greatest. More recently he had been
known as the father of the world's greatest physicist. Arcot junior was
probably one of the most brilliant men the world had ever seen, and he
was aided in all his work by two men who could help him in a way that
amplified his powers a thousand fold. His father and his best friend,
Morey, were the complimentary and balancing minds to his great
intelligence. His father had learned through years of work the easiest
and best ways of performing the many difficult feats of laboratory
experimentation. Morey could develop the mathematical theory of a
hypothesis far more readily than Arcot could. Morey's mind was more
methodical and exact than Arcot's, but Arcot could grasp the broad
details of a problem and get the general method of solution developed
with a speed that made it utterly