A Thousand Degrees Below Zero Page 6

  CHAPTER VI.

  Teddy Gerrod straightened up and beat his hands together.

  "Forty-seven below," he said to the soldier behind him. "Put a markerhere."

  He moved off to the right. Already a dozen little flags showed wherethe temperature reached that degree. Teddy was drawing what he wouldhave termed an isothermal line--a line where the temperature was thesame. He was making a circle about a large part of the open clearingon the ice floe. Other flags led back into the mist, marking a path,and from time to time a party of four or five fur-clad soldiers arrivedfrom the fort, dragging a loaded sledge behind them. They emptied theload from the sled, turned, and vanished into the mist again. A smallpile of drills, explosives, and two of the squat trench mortars hadalready been made.

  When the circle of little red flags had been completed, twosignal-corps men set up their instruments and accurately located thecenter. Directly under that spot, if Teddy's reasoning was correct,the new cold bomb was resting. The sledge from the fort arrived again,bearing a curious trench catapult for flinging bombs. Four long stripsof black cloth were unrolled, under direction of the signal-corps men,pointing accurately to the center of the circle. No one had been ableto approach nearer, thus far, than thirty yards from the center. Atthat distance Teddy's thermocouple indicated a temperature of morethan seventy-two degrees below zero, and flesh exposed to the air wasfrostbitten on the instant. What the temperature of the air might bedirectly above the cold bomb could only be conjectured.

  One of the infantry men from the fort, the best grenade man in thegarrison, now picked up a Mills grenade, and after carefully pickingout the target with his eye, aided by the strips of black cloth, flungthe small missile. A hole perhaps four feet deep and twice as muchacross was blasted in the brittle ice. A second, third, and fourthgrenade followed. At the end of that time the size and depth of thehole had been doubled.

  The trench catapult was set up. Half a dozen grenades were bundledtogether and flung into the now much enlarged opening in the surfaceof the ice. There was no explosion. One automatically braced oneselffor the report, and the utter silence that succeeded the disappearanceof the grenades came as a peculiar shock.

  "Too cold," remarked Teddy to the young lieutenant in charge.

  The lieutenant nodded stiffly.

  "We'll try again."

  A second batch of grenades was flung into the hole, and the same quietresulted.

  "I would suggest----" Teddy begin.

  "We'll fire a trench-mortar bomb," said the young lieutenant.

  The heavy winged projectile flew up into the air, and then descendedsquarely into the opening in the ice. Those standing fifty yards awaycould hear the crash as it struck, and then a sound as of musicalsplintering. The young lieutenant swore.

  "The fuses are no good. Try once more."

  "You can shoot all day and they won't go off," said Teddy mildly. "It'stoo cold down there."

  The officer said nothing, but supervised the firing of a second mortarbomb with precisely the same result. He swore again.

  "It's probably quite as cold as liquid air down there," said Teddy."In fact, there's quite possibly a pool of liquified air at the bottomof the hole. Your bombs fall into that air and are frozen so solidlybefore they strike that the metal gets brittle and simply falls topowder from the shock. You can't do anything going on this way."

  The young lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Teddy somewhat sulkily.

  "What do you suggest, then?"

  "We'd better enlarge the hole first. Blast down the walls of thepresent cavity, then use wrapped dynamite until we have a shallowcrater. Then we'll place our explosives by long poles, keepingthem warm by running resistance wires around them and heating themelectrically."

  The young lieutenant considered and agreed. Teddy went back to the fortto arrange for the heated bombs and the long poles. When he returnedthere was only a saucerlike depression in the ice clearing. It wasquite fifty yards across, but no more than twenty deep. Standing nearthe edge, one could see the ice near the bottom glistening liquidly.Air, liquified by the intense cold at the bottom of the crater, wet thesurface of the ice there.

  "And that means the temperature down there is three hundred andtwenty-five degrees or more below zero Fahrenheit," explained Teddycasually. "Here's where we use our heated explosives."

  For an hour the party worked busily. Storage batteries brought out onsledges furnished the current that kept the explosives from becominginert through cold. Charge after charge was fired, and the bottom ofthe crater grew steadily deeper. At the lowest point a little puddle ofliquified air collected.

  "We must be pretty nearly at the cold bomb now," said Teddythoughtfully. "There's a mass of liquid air at the bottom of ourcrater, and something tells me there's solidified air at the bottom ofthat puddle. That means seven hundred-odd degrees below zero."

  He was clad in the warmest garments that could be found, and every oneof the others working in the clearing was quite as warmly clothed,but the cold was intense. One of the soldiers by the small pile ofexplosives was chewing a cud of tobacco. He spat. The brownish liquidfroze in mid-air and bounced merrily away across the ice. The soldierlooked at it with his mouth open, then shut it quickly. A thin filmof ice had formed from the moisture on his teeth. The breast of everymember of the party was covered with sparkling snow crystals from thecongealed moisture of their breath.

  "I begin to doubt if we can keep our stuff from freezing much deeper,"Teddy commented. "We want to go down as deep as we can before we useour Dewey bulbs, though. I've only two of them."

  The young lieutenant bustled away, and presently returned.

  "The men say that the last bomb won't go off," he said aggrievedly."Your heating plan doesn't work."

  "I didn't expect it to work indefinitely," said Teddy mildly. "We wantto clear out that liquid air and shoot our two Dewey globes before it'shad time to reform. Will you please have a charge made ready to befired just above the surface of that puddle? That should clear it away.Immediately after that charge has gone off we'll drop our two T. N. T.charges in the Dewey bulbs. They ought to show us the cold bomb."

  The dynamite charge was suspended about a foot above the surface of thewatery, bubbling pool. Air was in that pool, air turned to transparentliquid by the intense cold. At -325? Fahrenheit air becomes a liquid.Here, exposed to the sunlight and the blue sky, a pool of liquifiedgas had collected from the incredible cold of the cold bomb below. Thecharge of explosive burst with a shattering roar. The echoes of theexplosion had not died away when the two Dewey bulbs filled with T. N.T. fell into the bared ice cavity. A Dewey bulb is a combination ofsix vacuum bottles placed one outside the other. They are used for thekeeping of liquid gases at a low temperature, but are obviously justas effective in protecting their contents from exterior cold. Theyfell some five yards apart and rolled, then were still. Their fusessputtered. They went off together. A huge mass of shattered ice wasthrown aside, and a dark, globular mass was exposed to view. Almost assoon as it was exposed to the air a crust of frozen air coated it, andliquified air began to trickle down its misshapen sides. There could beno doubt but that it was the cold bomb, invented by an insane genius tomake him master of the world.

  Those about the rim of the crater looked at it and turned away. Just asthe intense heat of a blast furnace sears unprotected flesh even yardsfrom its flame, so the incredible cold of the dark object pinched andwrung with its freezing rays. Not one man who looked upon the cold bombbut suffered from a deep frostbite.

  "We can't approach that thing," said Teddy, with his hand over hiseyes. "I'd just as soon, or sooner, try to tinker with burningthermite. We'll have to shoot armor-piercing shells at it. They'llfreeze when they get near it, but the impact ought to crack the thing."

  He motioned to the fur-clad soldiers to move back from the crater, andafter a hasty consultation with the lieutenant went off toward the fortto ask for a small-caliber field gun.

  The lieutenant paced back and fo
rth restlessly. He was an ambitiousyoung man. He did not relish taking orders from a civilian like Teddy.His eye fell on the heap of equipment that had been brought out fromthe fort. Two trench mortars, a trench catapult, a liquid-flameapparatus--one of the American inventions that had far outdone theoriginal German _flamenwerfers_! There had been some thought of tryingto reach a point just above the cold bomb and melting the ice down toit with liquid flame. That had been quickly proven impracticable, butthe liquid-fire apparatus had not been sent back. The young lieutenantwas not stupid. On the contrary, he was a singularly intelligent man.In a flash he saw how the liquid flame could have been used much moreefficiently than Teddy's resistance coils about his explosive charges.The idea simply had not occurred to Teddy, or the young lieutenant,either. Now, however, he became all eagerness. If he succeeded inbreaking up the cold bomb during Teddy's absence it would be a featherin his cap. If, in addition, he pointed out a method of dealing withthe cold bombs superior to Teddy's plodding system, it would certainlymean his promotion and a very desirable reputation for himself in hisprofession.

  He gave his orders briskly. The liquid-flame tank was set up, and beganto spray out its stream of fire. The young lieutenant had it trained sothat it passed just above the top of the ungainly cold bomb and grazedthe upper edge. Then the two trench mortars were made ready for firing.The young lieutenant set them at their proper elevation himself. Hewas tremendously excited. He pointed the two mortars with the mostmeticulous precision. To aim them properly he had to expose his faceagain and again to the direct rays from the cold bomb, but he paid noattention to the searing, freezing rays.

  The stream of liquid fire shot upward in a perfect parabola, and fellevenly, exactly, where it was aimed. The young lieutenant knew that amortar bomb would be frozen by the intense cold if it were fired atthe cold bomb direct, but his plan got around that difficulty. Withthe liquid fire playing just above and grazing the cold bomb, when theshell from the mortar struck the incredibly cold surface, both theshell and the cold bomb would be bathed in flame.

  All was ready. The lieutenant fixed his eyes on the cold bomb and gavethe signal. The two small trench mortars spouted flame. Two ungainlybombs rose high in the air and fell hurtling down toward the strange,frosted object at the bottom of the crater. One of the bombs wouldfall a little to the left. The other--squarely on top!

  The cracking explosion of the bomb from the trench mortar was lost inthe greater roar that followed it. Before the young lieutenant or anyof his men could lift a finger they were enveloped by a colossal sheetof vaporized metal that seemed to fill the earth, the air, and all thesky. Of a weird and unearthly tint, the white-hot flame leaped into theair. It sprang up three thousand feet in hardly more than two seconds.The blast had the velocity of many rifle balls, and the withering heatof molten metal. The young lieutenant and his men were swept intonothingness in the fraction of a second. The crater they had workedfor hours to blast out was as a puny ant hole beside the vast chasmthat opened in the ice down to the red clay far beneath the bed of theNarrows. And New York shook and trembled from the shock of the terrificexplosion.