_The New York Massacre of 1935_
Dr. Alten recovered consciousness in the back yard of the house on
Patton Place just a few moments after Larry had encountered the
smaller Time-traveling cage and been carried off by Harl and Tina.
Previously to that, of course, the mysterious mechanism in the guise
of a giant man had abducted Mary Atwood and me in the larger
Time-cage.
Alten became aware that people were bending over him. The shots we had
taken at the Robot had aroused the neighborhood. A policeman arrived.
The sleeping neighbors had heard the shots, but it seemed that none
had seen the cage, or the metal man who had come from it. Alten said
nothing. He was taken to the nearest police station where grudgingly,
he told his story. He was laughed at; reprimanded for alcoholism.
Evidently, according to the police sergeant, there had been a fight,
and Alten had drawn the loser's end. The police confiscated the two
rifles and the revolver and decided that no one but Alten had been
hurt. But at best it was a queer affair. Alten had not been shot; he
was just stiff with cold; he said a dull-red ray had fallen upon him
and stiffened him with its frigid blast. Utter nonsense!
Dr. Alten was a man of standing. It was a reprehensible affair, but he
was released upon his own recognizance. He was charged with breaking
into the untenanted home of one Tugh; of illegally possessing
firearms; of disturbing the peace--a variety of offenses all rational
to the year 1935.
* * * * *
But Alten's case never reached even its hearing in the Magistrate's
Court. He arrived home just after dawn, that June 9, still cold and
stiff from the effects of the ray, and bruised and battered by the
sweeping blow of Miguel's great iron arm. He recalled vaguely seeing
Larry fall, and the iron monster bearing Mary Atwood and me away. What
had happened to Larry, Alten could not guess, unless the Robot had
returned, ignored him and taken his friend away.
During that day of June 9 Alten summoned several of his scientific
friends, and to them he told fully what had happened to him. They
listened with a keen understanding and a rational knowledge of the
possibility that what he said was true; but credibility they could not
give him.
The noon papers came out.
NOTED ALIENIST ATTACKED BY GHOST Felled by One of the
Fantastic Monsters of His Brain
A jocular, jibing account. Then Alten gave it up. He had about decided
to plead guilty in the Magistrate's Court to disorderly conduct and
all the rest of it! That was preferable to being judged a liar, or
insane.
* * * * *
And then, at about 9 P.M. on the evening of June 9, the first of the
mechanical monsters came stalking from the house on Patton Place--the
beginning of the revenge which Tugh had threatened when arrested. The
policeman at the corner--one McGuire--turned in the first hysterical
alarm. He rushed into a little candy and stationery store shouting
that he had seen a piece of machinery running wild. His telephone call
brought a squad of his comrades. The Robot at first did no damage.
McGuire later told how he saw it as it emerged from the entryway of
the Tugh house. It came lurching out into the street--a giant thing of
dull grey metal, with tubular, jointed legs; a body with a great
bulging chest; a round head, eight or ten feet above the pavement;
eyes that shot fire.
The policeman took to his heels. There was a commotion in Patton Place
during those next few minutes. Pedestrians saw the thing standing in
the middle of the street, staring stupidly around it. The head
wobbled. Some said that the eyes shot fire; others, that it was not
the eyes, but more like a torch in its mailed hand. The torch shot a
small beam of light around the street--a beam which was dull-red.
The pedestrians fled. Their cries brought people to the nearby house
windows. Women screamed. Presently bottles were thrown from the
windows. One of these crashed against the iron shoulder of the
monster. It turned its head: as though its neck were rubber, some
said. And it gazed upward, with a human gesture as though it were not
angry, but contemptuous.
But still, beyond a step or two in one direction or another, it merely
stood and waved its torch. The little dull-red beam of light carried
no more than twenty or thirty feet. The street in a few moments was
clear of pedestrians; remained littered with glass from the broken
bottles. A taxi came suddenly around the corner, and the driver, with
an almost immediate tire puncture, saw the monster. He hauled up to
the curb, left his cab and ran.
* * * * *
The Robot saw the taxicab, and stood gazing. It turned its torch-beam
on it, and seemed surprised that the thing did not move. Then thinking
evidently that this was a less cowardly enemy than the humans, it made
a rush to it. The chauffeur had not turned off his engine when he
fled, so the cab stood throbbing.
The Robot reached it; cuffed it with a huge mailed fist. The
windshield broke; the windows were shattered; but the cab stood
purring, planted upon its four wheels.
Strange encounter! They say that the Robot tried to talk to it. At
last, exasperated, it stepped backward, gathered itself and pounced on
it again. Stooping, it put one of its great arms down under the
wheels, the other over the hood, and with prodigious strength heaved
the cab into the air. It crashed on its side across the street, and in
a moment was covered with flames.
It was about this time that Patrolman McGuire came back to the scene.
He shot at the monster a few times; hit it, he was sure. But the Robot
did not heed him.
The block was now in chaos. People stood at most of the windows,
crowds gathered at the distant street corners, while the blazing
taxicab lighted the block with a lurid glare. No one dared approach
within a hundred feet or so of the monster. But when, after a time, it
showed no disposition to attack, throngs at every distinct point of
vantage tried to gather where they could see it. Those nearest
reported back that its face was iron; that it had a nose, a wide,
yawning mouth, and holes for eyes. There were certainly little lights
in the eye-holes.
A small, fluffy white dog went dashing up to the monster and barked
bravely at its heels. It leaped nimbly away when the Robot stooped to
seize it. Then, from the Robot's chest, the dull-red torch beam leaped
out and down. It caught the little dog, and clung to it for an
instant. The dog stood transfixed; its bark turned to a yelp; then a
gurgle. In a moment it fell on its side; then lay motionless with
stiffened legs sticking out.
* * * * *
All this happened within five minutes. McGuire's riot squad arrived,
discreetly ranged itself at the end of the block and fired. The Robot
by then had retreated to the entryway of the Tugh house, where it
stood peering as though with curiosity at all this commotion. There
came a clanging from the distance: someone had turned in a fire alarm.
Through the gathered crowds and vehicles the engines came tearing up.
Presently there was not one Robot, but three: a dozen! More than that,
many reports said. But certain it is that within half an hour of the
first alarm, the block in front of Tugh's home held many of the iron
monsters. And there were many human bodies lying strewn there, by
then. A few policemen had made a stand at the corner, to protect the
crowd against one of the Robots. The thing had made an unexpected
infuriated rush....
There was a panic in the next block, when a thousand people suddenly
tried to run. A score of people were trampled under foot. Two or three
of the Robots ran into that next block--ran impervious to the many
shots which now were fired at them. From what was described as slots
in the sides of their iron bodies they drew swords--long, dark,
burnished blades. They ran, and at each fallen human body they made a
single stroke of decapitation, or, more generally, cut the body in
half.
The Robots did not attack the fire engines. Emboldened by this,
firemen connected a hose and pumped a huge jet of water toward the
Tugh house. The Robots then rushed it. One huge mechanism--some said
it was twelve feet tall--ran heedlessly into the firemen's
high-pressure stream, toppled backward from the force of the water and
very strangely lay still. Killed? Rather, out of order: deranged: it
was not human, to be killed. But it lay motionless, with the fire hose
playing upon it. Then abruptly there was an explosion. The fallen
Robot, with a deafening report and a puff of green flame, burst into
flying metallic fragments like shrapnel. Nearby windows were broken
from the violent explosion, and pieces of the flying metal were hurled
a hundred feet or more. One huge chunk, evidently a plate of the
thing's body, struck into the crowd two blocks away, and felled
several people.
At this smashing of one of the mechanisms, its brother Robots went for
the first time into aggressive action. A hundred or more were pouring
now from the vacant house of the absent Tugh....
* * * * *
The alarm by ten o'clock had spread throughout the entire city. Police
reserves were called out, and by midnight soldiers were being
mobilized. Panics were starting everywhere. Millions of people crowded
in on small Manhattan Island, in the heart of which was this strange
enemy.
Panics.... Yet human nature is very strange. Thousands of people
started to leave Manhattan, but there were other thousands during that
first skirmish who did their best to try and get to the neighborhood
of Patton Place to see what was going on. They added greatly to the
confusion. Traffic soon was stalled everywhere. Traffic officers,
confused, frightened by the news which was bubbled at them from every
side, gave wrong orders; accidents began to occur. And then, out of
the growing confusion, came tangles, until, like a dammed stream, all
the city mid-section was paralyzed. Vehicles were abandoned
everywhere.
Reports of what was happening on Patton Place grew more confused. The
gathering nearby crowds impeded the police and firemen. The Robots, by
ten o'clock, were using a single great beam of dull-red light. It was
two or three feet broad. It came from a spluttering, hissing cylinder
mounted on runners which the Robots dragged along the ground, and the
beam was like that of a great red searchlight. It swung the length of
Patton Place in both directions. It hissed against the houses;
penetrated the open windows which now were all deserted; swept the
front cornices of the roofs, where crowds of tenants and others were
trying to hide. The red beam drove back the ones near the edge, except
those who were stricken by its frigid blast and dropped like plummets
into the street, where the Robots with flashing blades pounced upon
them.
Frigid was the blast of this giant light-beam. The street, wet from
the fire-hose, was soon frozen with ice--ice which increased under the
blast of the beam, and melted in the warm air of the night when the
ray turned away.
From every distant point in the city, awed crowds could see that great
shaft when it occasionally shot upward, to stain the sky with blood.
* * * * *
Dr. Alten by midnight was with the city officials, telling them what
he could of the origin of this calamity. They were a distracted group
indeed! There were a thousand things to do, and frantically they were
giving orders, struggling to cope with conditions so suddenly
unprecedented. A great city, millions of people, plunged into
conditions unfathomable. And every moment growing worse. One calamity
bringing another, in the city, with its myriad diverse activities so
interwoven. Around Alten the clattering, terrifying reports were
surging. He sat there nearly all that night; and near dawn, an
official plane carried him in a flight over the city.
The panics, by midnight, were causing the most deaths. Thousands,
hundreds of thousands, were trying to leave the island. The tube
trains, the subways, the elevateds were jammed. There were riots
without number in them. Ferryboats and bridges were thronged to their
capacity. Downtown Manhattan, fortunately comparatively empty, gave
space to the crowds plunging down from the crowded foreign quarters
bordering Greenwich Village. By dawn it was estimated that five
thousand people had been trampled to death by the panics in various
parts of the city, in the tubes beneath the rivers and on departing
trains.
And another thousand or more had been killed by the Robots. How many
of these monstrous metal men were now in evidence, no one could
guess. A hundred--or a thousand. The Time-cage made many trips between
that night of June 9 and 10, 1935, and a night in 2930. Always it
gauged its return to this same night.
The Robots poured out into Patton Place. With running, stiff-legged
steps, flashing swords, small light-beams darting before them, they
spread about the city....