Terrors (10 page)

Nzambi, the Golden Saint, shook her head. “I’ve long known of you, The Scorpion Queen. I’ve known you as a master criminal and I’ve known
of your cruelty and your duplicity, but I never thought that even the likes of you would stoop to treason!”

“Treason? I owe no loyalty to this fat, soft country you call America. I am strong. I am cruel. And I stand in alliance with the strongest and cruelest man on this planet. I am sure you know of whom I speak.”

“Yes.”

Before Nzambi could say anything further, the snake-haired image of The
Scorpion Queen faded from the surface of the tube.

Without hesitating, Nzambi switched on a two-way microphone mounted before her. She spoke a series of low commands.

Although she was alone in her laboratory atop the Central Railroad Tower, other women and men dedicated to the cause of justice worked to support her efforts. In a brightly-lit chamber not far from Nzambi’s laboratory, a young
woman responded to the commands her mentor had spoken. She obeyed, operating a complex device, the only one of its kind. Moments passed, lights blinked and dials spun.

“Please proceed,” the young woman murmured into a microphone of her own.

Nzambi, the Golden Saint, watched as a different face took form on the surface where The Scorpion Queen had previously snarled her threats. This time, the
face was that of a gray-haired man, his features hardened and honed by a lifetime of service to his country. He wore a
military jacket and cap. Silver stars glittered on his uniform shoulders. His weary face bore an expression of stress and fatigue.

“Hopkins here, Saint.”

“Thank you, General. I have urgent information for you.”

The military man grunted his readiness to hear the Golden Saint’s
news. In succinct and powerful terms she described her conversation with The Scorpion Queen and sketched for the officer the threat that faced the nation.

General Hopkins pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. “This information should go to the President himself, Nzambi.”

“I trust you to get word to the President,” she replied. “But urgent action is called for,”

“You have a plan, then?”

“I have.” The Saint told the general what she had in mind.

“You’re sure that will work?”

“No, sir, I cannot make such a promise. But I think it’s our best chance to nip this scheme in the bud. If we don’t try it, I shudder to think of what will happen next.”

The general consulted a sheaf of papers that lay before him, barely visible in the image Nzambi was studying. After a moment the general
raised his eyes, peering directly into those of the Golden Saint, or seeming to do so. “What,” he asked, “are the white specks that appear after each murder?”

“I don’t know,” the Golden Saint replied. “I have a theory. I think they have something to do with the transformation of the murder victims into hollow, icy replicas of themselves. As for what they are, I’d rather keep my notion to myself
until I find out whether I’m right or not.”

General Hopkins nodded. “Very well. I’m sure the President will approve of your plan. Where do you wish to rendezvous, Nzambi?”

“Five thousand feet in the air, General Hopkins. Five thousand feet, directly above Poseidon Pond. How long will it take your men to fly the B-16’s there?”

“They’ll be coming from North Orion Airfield. They should be over
Poseidon Pond in an hour.”

“I’ll meet them there, General.”

Nzambi clicked off, lifted an ordinary telephone and placed a call to the office of Seacoast City’s Police Chief, Alfred O’Brien.

Within minutes, uniformed officers were clearing children from
the icy surface of Poseidon Pond. Once the ice-skaters and sledders had been sent packing, the police proceeded to evacuate Molly Pitcher Park
and close it to the public for the first time in its history.

In her headquarters atop the Central Railroad Tower, the brilliant scientist known to her colleagues as Nzambi, to the patrons of Madame Cerise’s Salon of Beauty as the shy manicurist Ruby Mae Jones, and to the admiring public as the Golden Saint, prepared herself for what must surely be the most dangerous enterprise of her action-
and peril-filled career.

Not very long afterwards, had a Cierva Gyroplane passed the Central Railroad Tower, its pilot might have beheld a strange sight.

A door opened from the penthouse suite of the Tower and a startling apparition stepped onto the broad balcony. It was the figure of a woman. Tall and willowy, she wore a costume that seemed almost alive, a shimmering integument of sheerest
gold. Gauntlet-like gloves covered her hands and extended to her elbows. Spike-heeled boots added further to her height.

Her face was not covered by a mask, nor her hair by a hood, and yet had that hypothetical aviator studied the woman, even had he made an especial effort to record her facial features, he would have found that had somehow failed to take note. Was she dark or fair, young or old;
were her eyes of blue or brown, gray or green; was her hair blonde or dark, worn in flowing waves or close-cropped curls—he would have no inkling.

The graceful figure paused and surveyed the sky.

A thick blanket of gray covered all of Seacoast City, as it had for day after day, ever since the unseasonable descent of frigid air and unbelievable precipitation had attacked the metropolis. Snowflakes
large, heavy, and moist, fell at a slow, steady pace. The blare of automobile horns, the clank of chains, and the clash and clatter of snowplows rose from the street below.

Above the great city the sun made its presence known in the form of a faint, blurred disk of light.

The woman on the balcony reached behind herself, adjusting some object attached at one shoulder blade, then at the other.

There was a sound, something between the unfurling of sails on an elegant clipper ship and the hum of an insect’s wings. The woman checked the objects projecting from her shoulder blades, then did something that caused them to furl once again and virtually disappear.

The woman leaped into the air, propelling herself with the muscles of her well-formed legs.

Had that imaginary Gyroplane pilot
been present to see what happened next, he might well had thought himself witness to a tragedy, for the graceful woman plunged headfirst from the terrace of the Central Railroad Tower through the heavily falling snow and toward the busy traffic below.

Within seconds giant wings seemed to sprout from the shoulders of the falling woman. Membranes so thin they might have been invisible, yet remarkably
strong. The woman’s trajectory was altered from a plunge to seemingly inevitable doom to a graceful, curving swoop.

An office worker in one of the many commercial enterprises housed in the Central Railroad Tower happened to raise her eyes from the document she was typing. She peered through the heavy plate-glass window and was astonished to behold a shimmering figure plunge past, then rise once
more on shimmering membranous wings that gave her the appearance of nothing less than a gigantic, gorgeous dragon-fly.

The Golden Saint rose above the Central Railroad Tower and turned her course toward the snow-covered Molly Pitcher Park. She passed above streets clogged with snowbound vehicles, office buildings and department stores whose appearance was more suggestive of midwinter than Seacoast
City’s summertime. In the distance she could see the city’s normally busy harbor, its usual traffic of heavily-laden freighters and gaily festooned ocean liners reduced to a bare minimum by the ice floes that clogged its channels.

As the Golden Saint reached Molly Pitcher Park she could not help noting the strange, unseasonable beauty of its trees and meadows. They were like a scene from a Christmas
card. In the very center of the park lay the flat, white, frozen surface of Poseidon Pond. The air above Seacoast City was unnaturally silent, the usual hum of commerce damped to a mere whisper by the overlarge soft snowflakes that fell so steadily from layers of dark gray clouds. The atmosphere itself felt heavy and moist.

From the direction of North Orion Field the Golden Saint detected the
faint, distant drone of mighty engines.

Her all but invisible wings whirring above her, she rose through layers of snow-laden clouds. Soon her rising spiral brought her to the highest cloud layer. As she broke through it the sun shone brilliantly from a sparkling clear blue sky. Here the air was colder than it was
either within the cloud layers or beneath them, but it was a brisk, refreshing,
dry cold. Accumulated snow fell from the Saint’s translucent, membranous wings.

Here the drone of approaching airplanes was louder, and the Golden Saint’s clear, rich brown eyes picked up a cluster of tiny specks approaching from North Orion. In mere minutes the specks resolved into miniature images of airplanes, flying at breakneck speed but in precise, disciplined formation.

Soon the aircraft
reached their appointed place of rendezvous. It was obvious that the lead pilot and commander of the squadron communicated with his comrades, for the aircraft broke their formation of ranked chevrons and instead formed an immense circle, their engines setting up a mighty droning roar.

The command pilot must have been fully prepared by General Hopkins, for he remained calm when his co-pilot nudged
him and pointed through the cockpit window.

There, hovering on oversized wings of translucent membrane, he could see what appeared to be a gigantic, golden-bodied dragonfly. But instead of the segmented body and faceted eyes of the insect, he beheld a graceful, feminine form and a striking countenance that, strangely, he would be unable to describe after the events of this remarkable day.

The
Golden Saint gestured and the command pilot nodded his agreement, signaling with a thumbs-up and speaking into the radio microphone that connected him with the crews of his squadron.

As the Saint’s membranous wings whirred more rapidly she rose above the droning aircraft, studying their design from her advantaged position. The bombers had the distinctive twin tail booms of the B-16 model. Four
mighty engines mounted on the leading edge of each bomber’s wings pulled it forward and two more on the trailing edge added their push. The twin tails of each aircraft bore a single vertical blue stripe and thirteen alternating red and white horizontal bands. The wing surfaces and fuselages bore the Air Corps’ marking of a blue disk with a white star and a smaller red disk in its center.

The
Golden Saint smiled. These were the markings of her nation. For all the problems that remained to be solved, for all the struggle that she knew lay ahead, this was her nation.

From specially fitted vents in the fuselages of the bombers a fountain of sparkling diamonds rose to converge and form a rotating disk
above the circling monoplanes. Sparkling diamonds, that is, or what appeared to be diamonds,
for these were actually tiny ice crystals, specially formed by scientific experimenters.

The crystals whirled in a disk-like formation, disappearing as they fell into the uppermost layer of snow clouds above Seacoast City but constantly renewed as the bombers continued to spew forth more crystals.

Now the Golden Saint moved more rapidly, circling above the rotating disk. As she did so the brilliant
rays of the summer sun—for, remember, although it was false winter in Seacoast City it was midsummer above and around that metropolis—those brilliant rays were bent and focused by the Saint’s membranous wings.

Focused on the whirling disk of ice crystals, the sun’s rays were further focused, bent and directed downward. Under the impact of this concentrated solar energy the heavy gray clouds broke
apart almost as if they had been intelligent beings. A great clear shaft opened in the topmost layer of clouds. The focused energy reached the next layer of gray, which responded as had the first. And then the energy reached the bottommost layer and split it, flooding Poseidon Pond with a rush of life-giving light and warmth.

It was fortunate now that Seacoast City’s uniformed guardians of justice
had cleared the surface of the pond and the pathways of the park of all legitimate visitors, for as the rays reached the icy pond its surface cleared.

Peering down through aerial telescopes from an altitude of more than a mile, the crews of the army bombers were astonished to perceive a battlemented structure. Until now it had been hidden beneath the ice of Poseidon Pond and the snow that had
accumulated on top of the ice. But it could now be seen with increasing clarity.

The structure resembled a fairy tale castle, nor did it remain submerged for long, as the waters of the pond rose in vaporous clouds until the castle stood in the center of a miniature dry plain.

Their mission accomplished, the air corps bombers broke their circle and once more assumed a chevron formation that turned
and droned majestically away from Seacoast City and toward North Orion Field.

The Golden Saint swooped low over the structure then dropped gently into its courtyard. Her wings furled swiftly, like living things, and all but disappeared behind her shoulder blades. A replica of a medieval portcullis stood open, two guards stationed beside it. The Saint smiled grimly at their costumes. They wore
the chain mail of
mock-medieval villains; their chest cloths bore the ugly insignia of the European dictator.

The guards escorted the Golden Saint to a modern laboratory concealed within the false antiquity of the castle. Its vaulted ceiling rose fully fifty feet above its flagstone floor. Its tapestry-covered walls made a room that seemed as large as Seacoast City’s world-famed indoor botanical
garden. Here at last she confronted the woman with whose image she had previously conversed.

“Yes,” the snake-haired woman hissed, “I am The Scorpion Queen. And you, I see, are the Golden Saint. It was inevitable that we should meet, soon or late. Very well, let it be now.”

The Scorpion Queen’s eyes were like cold emeralds, her skin was of an icy perfection, her hair arranged to create the illusion
of a nest of writhing vipers.

Or was it an illusion?

The only other person in the room was a small, cowering male. Both he and the Scorpion Queen wore laboratory white, but while the woman made her costume look like the brilliant uniform of a monarch, the male’s tunic and trousers had the appearance of a shabby, defeated weakling. Each of them wore high boots of a strange looking metallic material.