Part 1

SILENCE IS--DEADLY

By Bertrand L. Shurtleff

Radio is an absolute necessity in modern organization--and particularly in modern naval organization. If you could silence all radio--silence of that sort would be deadly!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction April 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The hurried _rat-a-tat_ of knuckles hammered on the cabin door. Commander Bob Curtis roused himself from his doze, got up from his chair, stretched himself to his full, lanky height and yawned. That would be Nelson, his navigating officer. Nelson always knocked that way--like a man in an external state of jitters over nothing at all.

Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in the cabin with him--Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser _Comerford_.

The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board. Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his lips relaxed in a faint smile.

Androka had arrived on board the _Comerford_ the day before she sailed from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks, which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his laboratory.

Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky--a scientist whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country under the domination of the Nazi _gestapo_. At other times, the man seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer--a mad genius!

Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.

His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before him. It _was_ Nelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.

The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford--the worst trouble maker on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good navigating officer--dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless, his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner got Curtis' goat.

"Come in, Nelson!" he said.

Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.

Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor Androka, with a quizzical grin. "Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish the Czech Republic!"

Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal of good-natured joking aboard the _Comerford_ ever since the navy department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his experiments.

"I'm worried, sir!" Nelson said. "I'm not sure about my dead reckoning. This storm--"

Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. "Forget it! Don't let a little error get you down!"

"But this storm, sir!" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped out from under his arm. "It's got me worried. Quartering wind of undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea--as if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by observation, and now there is a chance--look at me!"

He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.

"You say there is a chance?" Curtis asked. "Stars out?"

"As if by providence, sir, there's a clear patch. I'm wondering--" His voice trailed off, but his eyes swung toward the gleaming sextant on the rack.

Commander Curtis shrugged good-naturedly and reached for the instrument. "Not that I've lost confidence in you, Nels, but just because you asked for it!"

* * * * *

Curtis donned his slicker and went outside, sextant in hand. In a few minutes he returned and handed Nelson a sheet of paper with figures underlined heavily.

"Here's what I make it," the commander told his navigating officer. "Bet you're not off appreciably."

Nelson stared at the computations with shaking head. Then he mutely held up his own.

Curtis stared, frowned, grabbed his own sheet again. "Any time I'm that far off old Figure-'em Nelson's estimate, I'm checking back," he declared, frowning at the two papers and hastily rechecking his own figures.

"Call up to the bridge to stop her," he told Nelson. "We can't afford to move in these waters with such a possibility of error!"

Nelson complied, and the throbbing drive of the engines lessened at once. Nelson said: "I've been wondering, sir, if it wouldn't be advisable to try getting a radio cross-bearing. With all these rocks and islets--"

"Radio?" repeated the little Czech, thrusting his face between the other two, in his independent fashion that ignored ship's discipline. "You're using your radio?" He broke into a knowing chuckle, his keen old eyes twinkling behind their thick lenses. "Go ahead and try it. See how much you can get! It will be no more than Hitler can get when Zukor Androka decrees silence over the German airways! Try it! Try it, I say!"

Bob Curtis stared at him, as if questioning his sanity. Then he hastened to the radio room, with Nelson at his heels, and the Czech trotting along behind.

The door burst open as they neared it. A frightened operator came out, still wearing his earphones, and stood staring upward incredulously at the aƫrial.

"Get us a radio cross-bearing for location at once," Curtis said sharply, for the operator seemed in a daze.

"Bearing, sir?" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if still dissatisfied. "I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong."

The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and thrust himself into the radio room.

"Try again!" he told the operator. "See what you can get!"

The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels, but there was no answer on any of the bands--not even the blare of a high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of ships or amateurs on the shorter.

"Dead!" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. "Yet not dead, gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages can enter or leave my zone of radio silence--of refracted radio waves, set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!"

* * * * *

There was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him. Curtis was the first to speak.

"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best light cruisers--and us our lives!" he said angrily. "We need that check by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs till we learn just where we are!"

Androka held out his palms helplessly. "I can do nothing. I have given orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!"

As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:

"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_. Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_--"

"U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_ calling Station 297!" the operator intoned, winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for the bearings.

The answer came back: "Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_!"

Curtis sighed with relief. He saw that Nelson was staring fiercely at the radio operator, as the man went on calling: "U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_ calling Station 364. U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_ calling Station 364--"

Then the instrument rasped again: "Station 364 calling U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_. Bearings north west by three west. Bearings north west by three west, U. S. Cruiser _Comerford_ from Cay 364."

Commander and navigator had both scribbled verifications of the numbers. Ignoring the gibbering Androka, who was wailing his disappointment that messages had penetrated his veil of silence, they raced for the chart room.

Quickly the parallels stepped off the bearing from the designated points. Light intersecting lines proclaimed a check on their position.

Curtis frowned and shook his head. Slowly he forced a reluctant grin as he stuck out his hand.

"Shake, Nels," he said. "It's my turn to eat crow. You and the radio must be right. Continue as you were!"

"I'm relieved, sir, just the same," Nelson admitted, "to have the radio bearings. We'd have piled up sure if you'd been right."

They went on through the night. The starlit gap in the clouds had closed. The sky was again a blanket of darkness pouring sheets of rain at them.

Nelson went back to the bridge, and Androka returned to the commander's cabin. Curtis lingered in the wireless room with the radio operator.

"It's a funny thing," the latter said, still dialing and grousing, "how I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of her. I'm wondering if that old goat really _has_ done something to the ether. The set seems O. K."

He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted; wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.

Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.

"You have seen a miracle, commander!" he shouted at Curtis. "_My_ miracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts hopelessly."

"Seems to me," Curtis said dryly, "this invention can harm your friends as much as your enemies."

The scientist drew himself up to his full height--which was only a little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. "Wait! Just wait! There are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!"

Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.

"Those tanks you have below," Curtis said, "have they some connection with this radio silence?"

A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear the question. He lowered his voice: "My daughter is still in Prague. So are my sister and her husband, and _their_ two daughters. If the _gestapo_ knew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You understand--better dead?"

Curtis said: "I understand."

"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone of silence is projected--" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side, as if he were listening to something--

* * * * *

On deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.

"Breakers ahead!"

He was beside Navigating Officer Nelson on the bridge, and saw the helmsman climbing the rapidly spinning wheel like a monkey as he put it hard aport.

Then the ship struck. Everything movable shot ahead until it brought up at the end of a swing or smacked against something solid.

Curtis felt Nelson's hand grip his shoulder, as he put his lips close to his ear and shouted: "You must have been right, sir, and the radio bearings and my reckoning wrong. We've hit that reef a terrific smack. I'm afraid we're gored!"

"Get out the collision mat!" Curtis ordered. "We ought to be able to keep her up!"

And then he became aware of a deadly stillness. A vast wall of silence enveloped the entire cruiser. Looking over the side, he could no longer see the waves that a few minutes before had beaten savagely against the ship.

The _Comerford_ was shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and more of it was coming up from below--from ventilators and hatchways and skylights--as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.

Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into the inner compartments of their strongholds.

There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible explanations--

The vapor clouds that enveloped the _Comerford_ were becoming thicker. All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the deck--forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he recognized them for what they were--men wearing gas masks.

Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.

Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses swimming.

Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion--guttural voices that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.

Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was "_Carethusia_"; the other was "convoy." But gradually his eardrums began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until it swept over his brain--

He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of anything--

* * * * *

The rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the _Comerford_ in a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.

From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked figures moving about the decks, descending companionways--like goblins from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side, stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a gas mask.

Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. "It worked, Joe!"

"Yeah!" Bradford agreed. "It worked--fine!"

The limp bodies of the _Comerford's_ crew were being carried to the lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.

Nelson swore under his breath. "Reckon it'll take a couple of hours before the ship's rid of that damn gas!"

Bradford shook his head in disagreement. "The old geezer claims he's got a neutralizing chemical in one of them tanks of his that'll clear everything up inside half an hour."

"I'd rather get along without Androka, if we could!" Nelson muttered. "He's nothing but a crackpot!"

"It was a crackpot who invented the gas we used to break up the Maginot Line," Bradford reminded him. "It saved a lot of lives for the _Fuehrer_--lives that'd have been lost if the forts had to be taken by our storm troopers!"

Nelson grunted and turned away. A short, thick-set figure in the uniform of a German naval commander had ascended the accommodation ladder and was mounting to the bridge. He, too, was equipped with a respirator.

He came up to Nelson, saluted, and held out his hand, introducing himself as Herr Kommander Brandt. He began to speak in German, but Nelson stopped him.

"I don't speak any German," he explained. "I was born and educated in the United States--of German parents, who had been ruined in the First World War. My mother committed suicide when she learned that we were penniless. My father--" He paused and cleared his throat.

"_Ja!_ Your father?" the German officer prompted, dropping into accented English. "Your father?"

"My father dedicated me to a career of revenge--to wipe out his wrongs," Nelson continued. "If America hadn't gone into the First World War, he wouldn't have lost his business; my mother would still be living. When he joined the Nazi party, the way became clear to use me--to educate me in a military prep school, then send me to Annapolis, for a career in the United States navy--and no one suspected me. No one--"

"Sometimes," Bradford put in, "I think Curtis suspected you."

"Maybe Curtis'll find out his suspicions were justified," Nelson said bitterly. "But it won't do Curtis any good--a commander who's lost his ship." He turned to Brandt. "You have plenty of men to work the _Comerford_?"

Brandt nodded his square head. "We have a full crew--two hundred men--officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!"

* * * * *

The three--Brandt, Nelson and Bradford--stood on the bridge and talked, while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove the limp bodies of the _Comerford's_ unconscious crew and row them ashore.

And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those Androka had brought aboard the _Comerford_ with him, and dynamos and batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.

And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German, pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!

"The professor's in his glory!" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.

"Funny thing about him," Bradford put in, "is that his inventions work. That zone of silence cut us off completely."

Kommander Brandt nodded. "Goodt! But you got your message giving your bearings--the wrong ones?"

"Yes," Nelson said. "That came through all right. And won't Curtis have a time explaining it!"

"Hereafter," Brandt said solemnly, "the zone of silence vill be projected from the _Comerford_; and ve have another invention of Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the _Carethusia_ out of her convoy."

"The _Carethusia_?" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.

Brandt said: "She's a freighter in a convoy out of St. Johns--twelve thousand tons. The orders are to take her; not sink her."

"What's the idea?"

"Her cargo," Brandt explained. "It iss more precious than rubies. It includes a large shipment of boarts."

"Boarts?" Nelson repeated. "What are they?"

"Boarts," Brandt told him, "are industrial diamonds--black, imperfectly crystallized stones, but far more valuable to us than flawless diamonds from Tiffany's on Fift' Avenue. They are needed for making machine tools. They come from northern Brazil--and our supply is low."

"I should think we could get a shipment of these boarts direct from Brazil--through the blockade," Nelson said, "without taking the risk of capturing a United States navy cruiser."

"There are other things Germany needs desperately on board the _Carethusia_," Brandt explained. "Vanadium and nickel and hundreds of barrels of lard oil for machine-tool lubrication. Our agents have been watching the convoys closely for weeks for just such a cargo as the _Carethusia_ is taking over."

"Can we trust Androka?" Nelson asked, with a sudden note of suspicion in his voice.

"Yes," Brandt assured him. "Of all men--we can trust Androka!"

"But he's a Czech," Nelson argued.

"The _gestapo_ takes care of Czechs and Poles and Frenchmen and other foreigners whom it chooses as its agents," Brandt pointed out. "Androka has a daughter and other relations in Prague. He knows that if anything misfires, if there is the slightest suspicion of treachery on his part, his daughter and the others will suffer. Androka's loyalty is assured!"

Nelson turned to watch the forward fighting top of the _Comerford_. The masked German seamen were installing some sort of apparatus up there--a strange-looking object that looked something like an old-fashioned trench mortar, and which connected with cables to the room that served as Androka's laboratory and workshop.

Another crew was installing radio apparatus in the mizzentop turret.

Descending a companionway to see what was going on below, Nelson found that portholes were being opened, and men were spraying chemical around to rid the below-decks atmosphere of the lethal gas that had overcome the _Comerford's_ American crew.

Returning to the bridge, he found that the tide in the inlet had risen considerably, and that the cruiser was riding more easily at her anchor.

Then, at Brandt's orders, the anchor was hauled in, and lifeboats and a motor launch were used as tugs to work the vessel entirely free of the sand bar. This was accomplished without difficulty.

Brandt came over to where Nelson was standing on the bridge and held out his hand.

"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!" he said. "Ve have stolen one of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!" He made a gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. "_Prosit!_" he added.

"_Prosit!_" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.

* * * * *

Stars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the rain--now a light, driving mist--beating on his face. He was chilled; his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside, as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.

According to his last calculations, the _Comerford_ had been cruising off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that region, or it might be the mainland.

It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand, he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully a minute, like a child learning to walk.

All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about, exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted cigarettes.

A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon spoke: "Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?"