Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 Read Online Free Page A

turned to afternoon, the tension increased with every hour, every minute. How would the Griffin strike, and whence?
    No visitors were permitted, no tradesmen. No one left. The poet’s disciples had gathered at Windy Ridge the evening before. Few of them had slept.
    At his usual hour, Bannerman came out to his seat. He was to read his latest poem. The pupils gathered round. They watched as they listened. Manning’s experts were alert. Bannerman had agreed to go inside on request. The terrace was spacious, with its open view of the Sound. Every covert that bordered it was guarded; so was the house behind.
    It did not seem credible that such a peaceful scene could become an arena for murder. Its serenity was the same as that of the first afternoon when Manning had visited Windy Ridge. The air was still. The breeze was failing toward sunset. The trees were silent. The Sound looked like a stretch of ribbon, deep blue. The atmosphere was crystalline. Details stood out startlingly on Long Island; houses were distinct. The sky held little vapor.
    Bannerman delivered his poem, not reading it, but giving it from memory, his voice like organ tones for depth and strength and clarity. He was, of all of them, serene and unafraid, citing his creed.
“From the sea we came;
Clinging and creeping, crawling and inanimate;
Sexless and formless;
Knowing not life, nor love.
Motes on a mote that swung in awful space.
Atoms of vaguely groping ignorance;
But quick with cosmic urge,
Journeying—whither?
Yet this is known:
We have that within us is immortal.
It may not perish….”
    A faint and far off drone came out of the sky. It was like the hum of a bee. It came from a speck that soared at a ceiling of five thousand feet, a plane chartered by Manning, in which he sat behind the most expert pilot who had experienced, and survived, the Great War. He was an Ace of Aces who had volunteered with alacrity for the chase of the monster.
    It was not Manning’s first flight, by a hundred times. The pilot had a machine gun synchronized to his propeller. His ship was fast—faster than anything he had ever flown in France. It could make well over two hundred miles an hour. In Manning’s cockpit there were grenades, specially weighted, finned for accurate flight.
    Manning could have secured fifty ships, but he feared to arouse the suspicions of the Griffin’s agents. Even though they masked their flight by seeming to go through regular maneuvers, the Griffin might defer his attack until after dark. Manning could not tell how far the Griffin’s experts might have perfected the Cold Ray. But, with Bannerman in the open, they would strike now; unless Manning’s theory was wrong.
    And he knew it was not. This time the Griffin would fail—if Manning could find the projector of the Odic Beam.
    It was no easy matter, and yet the problem was not too hard. The Griffin had tipped off his opening moves by his phrasing, his mention of “the frozen finger of Death.” Manning’s careful survey of the grounds at Windy Ridge had narrowed his search.
    The ray might be able to traverse timber, but, unless the wise men in Washington were all wrong and Manning’s own deductions and inferences false, the use of the ray was as yet so limited that the object of its destruction must be sighted, must be properly focused.
    They had come in the plane from the north, as if a casual air-traveler, making for a Long Island landing. The flight had been timed to fit Bannerman’s emergence on the lawn, his reading of the poem. Too premature an appearance would spoil everything.
    Manning had glasses of powerful magnification, as he did not doubt the Griffin’s fiendish executioners also held. There was no other plane in sight. There were vessels in the Sound, but perfect aim could hardly come from those. He looked to find the base of the Griffin’s operations on shore, on the shore of Long Island Sound, at some point nearly opposite Windy Ridge, some place where they could focus