Murray Leinster - The Mole Pirate

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The Mole Pirate

MURRAY LEINSTER

The story of the Mole Pirate properly begins neither with Jack Hill, who built the Mole, nor with

Durran, who stole it and used it to acquire more loot and do more damage than any other pirate

ever managed in an equal length of time.

The records begin with a Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer, who appears only once in the entire affair,

and with Professor Eisenstein who, whatever his prominence in history, vanishes with equal

promptness from this tale.

Really, the career of Durran as the Mole Pirate was simply one long battle between himself, the

scientist-criminal, and Jack Hill, the inventor we remember as the man who made the earth-plane

possible. But the story does begin with Mrs. Hohenstaufer, however briefly she remains in it.

She was, it seems, washing dinner dishes on the screened-in back porch of her home in Wausakkee,

New York. It was three o'clock in the afternoon of June 16, 1935. The sun was hot. The radio in

the dining room droned through a news bulletin, amid sundry cracklings of summer static:

Police have found a hide-out they feel sure was used by James Durran, America's Public Enemy No.

1, for at least two weeks. Durran, formerly one of America's greatest scientists, has been living

in the most squalid surroundings, amid great privation, since be made his cynical statement of his

intention to renounce all ideas of morality and ethics for the so-called natural principle of

living for one's own satisfaction only. Durran's record to date shows that in six months he has

been the cause of eight deaths - two believed to be murders committed by him personally - and

twelve robberies. His loot has totalled more than a hundred thousand dollars, but he lives in

conditions of unbelievable squalidness.

Four members of his gang, recently captured, have been sentenced to life imprisonment and are now

in Sing Sing prison-

Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer dried dishes and meditated piously. It was good that the government

required the broadcasters to emphasize the penalties dealt out to lawbreakers and not to talk

about criminals until they were caught or nearly caught. It would make young men more law-abiding.

She looked complacently through the screening. The Albany highway soared past, not half a mile

from her door. As she looked, a car slowed down and turned off to the county road. It disappeared

from view behind a clump of trees.

Mrs. Hohenstaufer looked for it to reappear with a sensation of mild curiosity. But it did not. It

remained hidden. For three, four, five minutes there was no sign of it. Then it showed again,

sweeping back up on to the highway. Into low speed, racing in second - dodging two heavy trucks

bound for Troy - and then into high, the car shot forward at its maximum speed until it became a

dwindling speck in the distance.

Mrs. Hohenstaufer blinked. That was her clump of trees. These people, these tourists, had no

respect for other people's property. Maybe they came to steal green stuff for a city apartment;

maybe some of the tiny pines and cedars that city people were making a fad of just now.

Indignantly, Mrs. Hohenstaufer took off her apron. She marched the full half mile to the wood lot

in the broiling sun, growing more indignant as she marched. She saw the tyre tracks of the car. It

had crushed ruthlessly through the tender small growths which Mrs. Hohenstaufer expected to sell

at the proper time for transplanting. She followed the tracks, growing more angry by the minute.

Then she saw a man lying on the ground. His sandy-brown whiskers and white hair looked vaguely

familiar to her even at first glance, but then she grew horrified. He was bound hand and foot. He

was quite unconscious, and blood flowed from a nasty blackjack wound on his temple. Mrs.

Hohenstaufer squawked in dismay.

It was half an hour before the police came. In that time Mrs. Hohenstaufer had cut the ropes from

about the man's body. She had carried him, herself, all the way back to the house. There she

telephoned for the police and a doctor and regarded her patient with extreme disfavour. He was

undoubtedly one of these criminals of whom the radio chattered constantly.

She greeted the police with indignant protests against their allowing criminals to clutter Up the

wood lots of law-abiding people with their victims and acquaintances.

Then the officers saw her patient.

'Good Heaven!' said the first. 'It's Professor Eisenstein! What the hell's happened to him ?'

'Prof--' Mrs. Hohenstaufer squeaked. 'The scientist ? The great scientist that all the papers

print pictures of?'

'That's who,' said the cop. 'Here! We got to get him fixed up so he can tell us -'

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The patient's eyes opened vaguely. His whiskers stirred. 'Durran,' said the injured man faintly,

'Durran, you verdammt fool, what is der idea ?'

Then he looked bewildered.

The cops snapped phrases of explanation.

'An' you were talkin' about Durran,' said one of the two feverishly. 'Did he sock you, professor

'To be sure.' The white-baked man blinked and said angrily: 'I came out of my house and got in my

car. I had an appointment to visit der American Electric laboratories, where Jack Hill is going to

show off a most remarkable infention today. And halfway there, my chauffeur turned around, and he

was not my chauffeur. He was Durran, whom I knew. And he hit me with a blackjack. I suppose he has

stolen my car.'

'Right!' snapped the cop. 'Brady, you got it? Phone in an' give the alarm. Durran's in Professor

Eisenstein's car, an' it's a blue Diessel, licence number is -'

The other cop snapped into the telephone. Plugs clicked. A smoothly running organization moved

swiftly into action. Short radio waves carried a brisk, curt order into every police car in New

York, and to police-car headquarters in at least two adjoining States. In fifteen minutes, by

actual timing, there were more than two hundred police cars, at least a hundred traffic posts, and

even a few stray members of the general public feverishly on the lookout for Professor

Eisenstein's blue Diessel, because it contained America's Public Enemy No. 1.

And all that effort and all that searching was in vain; Because the blue Diessel was parked

outside the American | Electric laboratories, where Professor Eisenstein had an appointment, and

nobody thought of noticing it.

It was not until Professor Eisenstein's secretary was notified of his whereabouts and telephoned

an apologetic message to the laboratory that the blue Diesel was noticed. The professor and Mrs.

Hohenstaufer immediately vanished from the tale of the Mole Pirate. But in the meantime things had

happened.

Jack Hill was talking to reporters in the machine-shop section of the American Electric

laboratories. The lathes and machine tools were covered over, for the moment, and there were a

dozen or more of folding chairs in view. On the table before Jack there was a large sheet of white-

painted metal, on which stood a block of brass and a small but intricate contrivance of radio

tubes and the like. Behind him a wide curtain hid the farther wall.

'I'll give you a part of the idea now,' said Jack. 'Professor Eisenstein is late, but I don't want

to start the apparatus until he gets here.'

'What's all this performance about, anyway?' demanded a man from the Mirror. 'Somebody said you

had some kind of gadget that made you able to walk through walls.'

Td hate to tell you what I can do," returned Jack. 'You wouldn't believe me. I'd rather show you.

I've been experimenting on a rather neglected aspect of the atom. You know, of course, that the

atom is regarded today as a sort of miniature solar system, a nucleus like a sun with a greater or

lesser number of electrons revolving around it like planets?'

'Yeah.' The Minor man had appointed himself spokesman. 'We know all that stuff.'

'Good!' said Jack. 'Then we can talk about magnets first. In ordinary iron the molecules have

north and south poles, like all other molecules, but they point in every possible direction,

helter-skelter. They have magnetism in them, but it isn't organized. Pointing haphazard, though

each one is a miniature magnet, in the mass they neutralize each other. It's only when the whole

mass of iron is magnetized that all the poles point in the same direction - or only when they all

point in the same direction that it's magnetized. Is that clear, too?'

'Yeah! I hadda do an interview with Eisenstein once,' said the Mirror man. 'He said I had a brain

for that stuff.'

'Kind of him,' observed Jack. 'Now I've been trying to carry the idea of organization a bit

further. Not only molecules but atoms have poles, and they point helter-skelter in every

direction, too. Suppose I got them all to point in one direction. What would happen then?'

'You could walk through walls?' hazarded the Mirror man.

Jack grinned. 'Not so fast! Let's think it over first. An atom is a miniature solar system. That

means it's practically flat. But with such flatnesses pointing in every direction - well, an

enlarged picture of any sort of matter would be just about like a dozen packs of cards being

poured from one basket to another and back again. They'd be fluttering every which way. You

couldn't swing a stick through those falling cards without hitting a lot of them.'

'Not unless you were pretty good,' conceded the Mirror man.

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'But if you had the same number of cards falling, only in a neat and orderly fashion, every one

parallel, so they'd stack up all face down in the bottom basket. It's a standard card trick to

spring a pack of cards from one hand to the other like that. You could swing a stick through that

bunch.'

'You might knock one of 'em away,' said the Mirror man cautiously, 'but you wouldn't mess up the

whole works. They wouldn't block up the whole distance between the baskets.'

'Just so!' said Jack approvingly. 'Professor Eisenstein was right. You do have a head for this

stuff. Now the object of my experiments has been to arrange the atoms in a solid object like the

second bunch of cards. They're flat. And it turns out that when they're arranged that way, all

parallel, they block so small a proportion of the space they ordinarily close up, that they will

pass right through ordinary matter with only the slightest of resistance. And that resistance

comes from just such accidental collisions as you suggested.'

There was a stirring at the door. The snow-white hair and bushy, sandy whiskers of Professor

Eisenstein came into the room. He beamed at Jack and the reporters. He spoke separately to Gail

Kennedy, bending over her hand. The girl looked at him queerly. She was here because she intended

to marry Jack and wanted to share in this triumph.

Her father and half the higher-ups of American Electric came in after the professor. Gail's face

stiffened when her father's eyes fell upon her. He did not approve of Jack Hill.

'Ach, my young friend!' said Professor Eisenstein blandly.

A flash bulb flared as he shook hands with Jack. A news photographer changed plates in his camera

and abstractly envisioned the caption. It would be 'Eisenstein Congratulates Youthful American

Scientist', if this demonstration came out all right, and 'Eisenstein Condoles' if it didn't.

'You go on with your explanation,' said Eisenstein cordially. 'I sit at your feet and listen.

Presently I make an announcement which will surprise eferybody.'

He sat down benignly. Gail looked at him, at her father, and back to Eisenstein. A moment later

she appeared to be puzzled and uneasy. Her eyes remained on Eisenstein.

'I had just explained to these gentlemen,' said Jack, 'the object of my experimenting, the co-

ordination of atom poles and what might be expected to result. I think all of you are familiar

with the reasoning, since there's been a good deal of controversy about it. It was suggested that

any co-ordinated matter would collapse into something like neutronium. Fortunately, it doesn't.'

He flung a switch and vacuum tubes glowed. A curious, ghostly light appeared above the white-

painted sheet of metal on the table.

"The field of force,' he explained, 'which arranges the atoms in any substance so that they all

point the same way.'

He switched off the tubes. The light died. He picked up the block of brass that was on the table.

He placed it where the light had been.

'I am going to co-ordinate all the atom poles in this piece of brass,' he observed. 'Around the

shop, here, the men say that a thing treated in this way is dematerialized. Watch!'

He flung the switch again and as the eerie white light flared on, the solid mass of brass seemed

to glow of itself. Its surfaces ceased to reflect a brazen colour. They emitted the ghostly hue of

the field light. Then it seemed that the block glowed within. The light seemed to come from inside

the block as well as from its outer edge.

The whole thing took place in only the part of a second. A swift, smooth, soundless glowing of the

block, which began at the outside and seemed to move inward - and cease. Then there was nothing

visible at all but the queer glow itself.

Jack turned off the field. The light vanished. But the metal block did not spring back into view.

Instead of a solid cube of polished brass there was the tenuous, misty outline of a cube. It

looked unsubstantial, fragile. It looked like the ghost of a block of metal.

'It's still there,' said Jack, 'but you're looking past the edges of the atoms, so it's very

nearly transparent. It's just as solid, in its way, as it ever was. It weighs as much. It conducts

electricity just as well. But it's in a state that isn't usual in nature, just as megnetism isn't

usual. The poles of its atoms all point the same way. Now look!'

He swept his hand through the misty block. He lighted a match and held it in the middle of the

phantom. It burned, where Jack had claimed there was solid brass. A sceptical silence hung among

the reporters.

Then the Mirror man said: 'That's a good trick, but if it wasn't phony -'

'What?'

'If that brass were still there, an' it would pass through anything else, it'd slide right through

that sheet metal an' drop through the floor!'

'Radioactivity,' said Jack. 'The only exception. When coordinated matter is bombarded by

radioactive particles, some of the atoms are knocked halfway back to normal. This paint has

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Murray Leinster - The Mole Pirate

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