Chapter 5: Death in a Box

New York. We did see it with our own eyes. The instrument through which we gazed was like a metal box with a ground-glass top and a mesh of slender wires leading away from the table on which the box rested. Leider touched a button amidst a long row of buttons on the table. All we had to do after that was to look at the ground-glass plate, and the picture was there.

We, in Leider’s private laboratory on Orcon, saw the crowds of a mass meeting of some sort in Union Square, saw a boy and a girl kissing each other in the shadow of bushes in Central Park, saw a little fox terrier watching with only one eye open.

We could not speak, any of the four of us, as we stared at that very simple box which wrought miracles. I stood still, thinking of the things which had happened after our capture, when the cruiser had already seemed to be in our grasp.

First of all, Leider had restored our energy to us by the simple process of turning off the ray which emanated from the tube in his hands. Then a veritable legion of Orconites had come to the cavern in which the cruiser rested, and we had been marched through the very heart of the power rooms, with their hum and clack and dazzle of mighty machinery, to the laboratory. That was all.

The Orconites had left us outside the heavy doors of the private room, but, just as there had been no opportunity to attack while they marched with us, Leider gave us no opportunity to harm him while we were alone. Though he had forgotten once the damage we could do in a fight, he was not going to be fooled again. He kept the great table of the box between ourselves and him, and his wary hands were always closer to a certain row of control buttons than ours were to his.

It was he who broke at last the silence which had fallen as we watched New York from Orcon, and his voice was loud in the hushed laboratory from which the noises of his subterranean power houses were shut out.

“Sit down,” he commanded, “and keep away from the table and the reflector.”

Then, when we had taken chairs beside the table, he began to speak to us.

“That little dog you saw--I have it in my power to withdraw from him in one second all the energy which makes him run, jump about, live. That I can do by touching controls here at my table without even leaving this marvelous, marvelous room.” A frown crossed his forehead above his pop-eyes, and he exclaimed with swift anger, in a croaking voice, “And what I do to the little dog, I can do as easily to the whole population of your loathsome Earth!”

I looked up at him where he stood with the table between us, and at length found my tongue.

“And of course you will do it, you swine!” I burst out.

His momentary anger had passed as swiftly as it had come, and, ignoring my epithet, he rocked smugly on the balls and heels of his feet and smiled.

“Ah, Herr Doktor,” he answered contentedly, “I will destroy Earth, of course! For who has better cause than I, whom Earth would not accept as her master? All of the people there will lose the power to move, and they will die. I am ready now, in the uttermost degree. After you so neatly but uselessly saved yourselves from drowning last night, I finished. As easily can I de-energize the peoples of Earth as I can you--the four of you--if you should make the move to harm me.”

Captain Crane was staring first at Leider, then at me, and her cheeks were gray and ghastly looking. Koto and LeConte were both sitting tight in chairs beside our own, watching me rather than Leider. I looked over the shelves, the whole complex apparatus of that incredible room, but saw no weapon of any kind. And my hands were useless because his were so close to the damnable controls.