Astounding Stories, June, 1931 Part 20

_By Charles Willard Diffin_

[Ill.u.s.tration: It pa.s.sed beneath the planes, that were motionless by contrast.]

[Sidenote: The extraordinary story of "Paul," who for thirty days was Dictator of the World.]

I am more accustomed to the handling of steel ingots and the fabrication of s.h.i.+ps than to building with words. But, if I cannot write history as history is written, perhaps I can write it the way it is lived, and that must suffice.

This account of certain events must have a t.i.tle, I am told. I have used, as you see: "Holocaust." Inadequate!--but what word can tell even faintly of that reign of terror that engulfed the world, of those terrible thirty days in America when dread and horror gripped the nation and the red menace, like a wall of fire, swept downward from the north? And, at last--the end!

It was given to me to know something of that conflict and of its ending and of the man who, in that last day, took command of Earth's events and gave battle to Mars, the G.o.d of War himself. It was against the background of war that he stood out; I must tell it in that way; and perhaps my own experience will be of interest. Yet it is of the man I would write more than the war--the most hated man in the whole world--that strange character, Paul Stravoinski.

You do not even recognize the name. But, if I were to say instead the one word, "Paul"--ah, now I can see some of you start abruptly in sudden, wide-eyed attention, while the breath catches in your throats and the memory of a strange dread clutches your hearts.

'Straki,' we called him at college. He was never "Paul," except to me alone; there was never the easy familiarity between him and the crowd at large, whose members were "Bill" and "d.i.c.k" and other nicknames unprintable.

But "Straki" he accepted. "_Bien, mon cher ami_," he told me--he was as apt to drop into French as Russian or any of a dozen other languages--"a name--what is it? A label by which we distinguish one package of goods from a thousand others just like it! I am unlike: for me one name is as good as another. It is what is here that counts,"--he tapped his broad forehead that rose high to the tangle of black hair--"and here,"--and this time he placed one hand above his heart.

"It is for what I give to the world of my head and my heart that I must be remembered. And, if I give nothing--then the name, it is less than nothing."

Dreamer--poet--scientist--there were many Paul Strakis in that one man. Brilliant in his work--he was majoring in chemistry--he was a mathematician who was never stopped. I've seen him pause, puzzled by some phase of a problem that, to me, was a blank wall. Only a moment's hesitation and he would go way down to the bed-rock of mathematics and come up with a brand new formula of his own devising. Then--"_Voila!

C'est fini!_ let us go for a walk, friend Bob; there is some poetry that I have remembered--" And we would head out of town, while he spouted poetry by the yard--and made me like it.

I wish you could see the Paul Straki of those days. I wish I could show him to you; you would understand so much better the "Paul" of these later times.

Tall, he seemed, though his eyes were only level with mine, for his real height was hidden beneath an habitual stoop. It let him conceal, to some extent, his lameness. He always walked with a noticeable limp, and here was the cause of the only bitterness that, in those days, was ever reflected in his face.

"Cossacks!" he explained when he surprised a questioning look upon my face. "They went through our village. I was two years old--and they rode me down!"

But the hard coldness went from his eyes, and again they crinkled about with the kindly, wise lines that seemed so strange in his young face. "It is only a reminder to me," he added, "that such things are all in the past; that we are entering a new world where savage brutality shall no longer rule, and the brotherhood of man will be the basis upon which men shall build."

And his face, so homely that it was distinctive, had a beauty all its own when he dared to voice his dreams.

It was this that brought about his expulsion from college. That was in 1935 when the Vornikoff faction brought off their coup d'etat and secured a strangle hold on Russia. We all remember the campaign of propaganda that was forced into the very fibre of every country, to weaken with its insidious dry-rot the safe foundations of our very civilization. Paul was blinded by his idealism, and he dared to speak.

He was conducting a brilliant research into the structure of the atom; it ended abruptly with his dismissal. And the accepted theories of science went unchallenged, while men worked along other lines than Paul's to attempt the release of the tremendous energy that is latent in all matter.

I saw him perhaps three times in the four years that followed. He had a laboratory out in a G.o.d-forsaken spot where he carried on his research. He did enough a.n.a.lytical work to keep him from actual starvation, though it seemed to me that he was uncomfortably close to that point.

"Come with me," I urged him; "I need you. You can have the run of our laboratories--work out the new alloys that are so much needed. You would be tremendously valuable."

He had mentioned Maida to me, so I added: "And you and Maida can be married, and can live like a king and queen on what my outfit can pay you."

He smiled at me as he might have done toward a child. "Like a king and queen," he said. "But, friend Bob, Maida and I do not approve of kings and queens, nor do we wish to follow them in their follies.

"It is hard waiting,"--I saw his eyes cloud for a moment--"but Maida is willing. She is working, too--she is up in Melford as you know--and she has faith in my work. She sees with me that it will mean the release of our fellow-men and women from the poverty that grinds out their souls. I am near to success; and when I give to the world the secret of power, then--" But I had to read in his far-seeing eyes the visions he could not compa.s.s in words.

That was the first time. I was flying a new s.h.i.+p when next I dropped in on him. A sweet little job I thought it then, not like the old busses that Paul and I had trained in at college, where the top speed was a hundred and twenty. This was an A. B. Clinton cruiser, and the "A.B.C.'s" in 1933 were good little wagons, the best there were.

I asked Paul to take a hop with me and fly the s.h.i.+p. He could fly beautifully; his lameness had been no hindrance to him. In his slender, artist hands a s.h.i.+p became a live thing.

"Are you doing any flying?" I asked, but the threadbare suit made his answer unnecessary.

"I'll do my flying later," he said, "and when I do,"--he waved contemptuously toward my s.h.i.+ning, new s.h.i.+p--"you'll sc.r.a.p that piece of junk."

The tone matched the new lines in his face--deep lines and bitter.

This practical world has always been hard on the dreamers.

Poverty; and the grinding struggle that Maida was having; the expulsion from college when he was a.s.sured of a research scholars.h.i.+p that would have meant independence and the finest of equipment to work with--all this, I found, was having its effect. And he talked in a way I didn't like of the new Russia and of the time that was near at hand when her communistic government should sweep the world of its curse of capitalistic control. Their propaganda campaign was still going on, and I gathered that Paul had allied himself with them.

I tried to tell him what we all knew; that the old Russia was gone, that Vornikoff and his crowd were rapacious and bloodthirsty, that their real motives were as far removed from his idealism as one pole from the other. But it was no use. And I left when I saw the light in his eyes. It seemed to me then that Paul Stravoinski had driven his splendid brain a bit beyond its breaking point.

Another year--and Paris, in 1939, with the dreaded First of May drawing near. There had been rumors of demonstrations in every land, but the French were prepared to cope with them--or so they believed.... Who could have coped with the menace of the north that was gathering itself for a spring?

I saw Paul there. It lacked two days of the First of May, and he was seated with a group of industrious talkers at a secluded table in a cafe. He crossed over when he saw me, and drew me aside. And I noticed that a quiet man at a table nearby never let us out of his sight. Paul and his companions, I judged, were under observation.

"What are you doing here _now_?" he asked. His manner was casual enough to anyone watching, but the tense voice and the look in his eyes that bored into me were anything but casual.

My resentment was only natural. "And why shouldn't I be here attending to my own affairs? Do you realize that you are being rather absurd?"

He didn't bother to answer me directly. "I can't control them," he said. "If they would only wait--a few weeks--another month! G.o.d, how I prayed to them at--"

He broke off short. His eyes never moved, yet I sensed a furtiveness as marked as if he had peered suspiciously about.

Suddenly he laughed aloud, as if at some joking remark of mine; I knew it was for the benefit of those he had left and not for the quiet man from the _Surete_. And now his tone was quietly conversational.

"Smile!" he said. "Smile, Bob!--we're just having a friendly talk. I won't live another two hours if they think anything else. But, Bob, my friend--for G.o.d's sake, Bob, leave Paris to-night. I am taking the midnight plane on the Transatlantic Line. Come with me--"

One of the group at the table had risen; he was sauntering in our direction. I played up to Paul's lead.

"Glad I ran across you," I told him, and shook his extended hand that gripped mine in an agony of pleading. "I'll be seeing you in New York one of these days; I am going back soon."

But I didn't go soon enough. The unspoken pleading in Paul Stravoinski's eyes lost its hold on me by another day. I had work to do; why should I neglect it to go scuttling home because someone who feared these swarming rats had begged me to run for cover? And the French people were prepared. A little rioting, perhaps; a pistol shot or two, and a machine-gun that would spring from nowhere and sweep the street--!

We know now of the doc.u.ment that the Russian Amba.s.sador delivered to the President of France, though no one knew of it then. He handed it to the portly, bearded President at ten o'clock on the morning of April thirtieth. And the building that had housed the Russian representatives was empty ten minutes later. Their disguises must have been ready, for if the sewers of Paris had swallowed them they could have vanished no more suddenly.

And the doc.u.ment? It was the same in substance as those delivered in like manner in every capital of Europe: twenty-four hours were given in which to a.s.sure the Central Council of Russia that the French Government would be dissolved, that communism would be established, and that its executive heads would be appointed by the Central Council.

And then the bulletins appeared, and the exodus began. Papers floated in the air; they blew in hundreds of whirling eddies through the streets. And they warned all true followers of the glorious Russian faith to leave Paris that day, for to-morrow would herald the dawn of a new heaven on earth--a Communistic heaven--and its birth would come with the destruction of Paris....