* * * * *
[Sidenote: Only two small groups of people--enemies--survive the vast
desolation of the Final War.]
"Prepare for battle!" The command crackled in Allan Dane's helmet.
"Enemy approaching from southeast! Squadron commanders execute plan
two!" Allan settled back in the seat of his one-man helicopter, his
broad frame rendered even bulkier by the leather suit that incased
it. He was tensed, but quiescent. Action would be first joined sixty
miles away, and his own squadron was in reserve.
Over New York and its bay the American air fleet was in motion.
Suddenly movement ceased, and the formation froze. Ten flying forts
were each the apex of a far-spread cone, axis horizontal, whose body
was the fanned back-ranging of its squadron of a thousand helicopter
planes. The cones bristled oceanward from the sea-margin of New York,
their points a fifty-mile arc of defiance, their bases tangent to one
another, almost touching the ground at their lower edges, then
circling upward for ten thousand feet. From van to rear each formation
was five miles in length.
Behind and above, the main body of the fleet sloped in echeloned
ranks, hiding the threatened city with an impenetrable terraced wall
of buzzing helios and massive forts. Up, back, up, back, the serried
masses reached, till the rearmost were twenty-five thousand feet
aloft. And farther behind, unmoving on their six-mile level, were the
light 'copters of the reserve. Dane gazed down that tremendous vista
to the far-off front line, and swore softly. Just his luck to be out
of the scrap: the enemy would never penetrate to these northern
out-skirts of New York.
"Men of the fleet!" General Huntington's voice sounded from his
flagship, the _Washington_. Somehow its gruffness overrode the
mechanical quality of the intra-fleet radio transmission. Almost it
seemed he was there in the tiny cabin. "Reports have at this moment
been received that our attack fleets have been everywhere successful.
Our rocket ships have destroyed Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Odessa, Peiping
and Cape Town, and are now ranging inland through enemy territory."
Even through the double leather of his helmet a roar came to Allan. He
felt his craft vibrate to the exultant cheers of the fleet. His own
mouth was open, and his throat rasping....
"_But_"--the single syllable choked the surge of sound--"London,
Paris, and Berlin have fallen to the enemy." The words thudded in the
pilot's ear-phones. "San Francisco is being attacked. Communication
with New Orleans has failed. The enemy are in sight of Buenos Aires--"
The general broke off, and Allan sensed dully that there was other
news, news that he dared not give the fleet.
The gruff voice changed. "Men of the fleet, New York is in our charge.
The enemy is upon us, the battle is commencing. The issue is in your
hands."
* * * * *
Pat on his last word, a dark cloud spread along the south-eastern
horizon. From the spear-heads of the cone formations great green beams
shot out across the sea. Orange flame flared in answer, all along the
black bank that was the enemy fleet. Where the green beams struck the
orange blinked out, and the blue of sky showed through. And the
American ships were as yet untouched. A great shout rose to Allan's
lips--that they had the range on the enemy, and the attack defeated
before it was well begun.
But was it? Swift as the American rays scythed destruction along the
enemy line, the gaps filled and lethal orange leaped out again. Now
the black cloud was piling up, was rising till it was a towering
curtain against the sky. On it came, like some monstrous tidal wave.
Great rents were torn through it by the stabbing beams of the flying
forts, holes where ships and men had been whiffed into dust by the
hundred. But the attack came on.
Now all the great defensive cones burst into an emerald blaze as the
smaller ships loosed their bolts. And from the terraced slope of the
supporting fleet a hundred steel ovoids lumbered forward to meet the
threat. All the vast space between the hosts, mountain-high from the
sea's surface, was filled with dazzling light, now green, now orange,
as the conflicting beams crossed and mingled. There were gaps in the
advancing curtain that did not fill, but the defending cones were
melting away, were disappearing, were gone.
"Flight ZLX prepare for action!" Dane's eyes flicked over the gages,
checking in routine precaution. He started when he saw the V of the
chronometer's hands. Only six minutes had passed since the battle's
start--it seemed hours. And already the reserve was being called on!
He was suddenly cold. Out there, over the bay, the enemy forces had
ceased their advance. The American first line cones were gone--true
enough, but the support fleet was still intact. Some new element had
entered the battle, visible as yet only in the _Washington's_ powerful
television view-screens. The flight adjutant's voice again snapped a
command:
"Direction vertical. Thirty thousand feet. Full speed. Go!"
Dane jerked home his throttle. The battle shot down, and his seat
thrust up against him. Something hurtled past, blurred by the speed of
its descent. The plane rocked to a sudden detonation, and Allan fought
to steady it. Then he had reached the commanded height. At sixty
thousand feet the helio vanes were useless, only the power of the
auxiliary rocket-tubes maintained his altitude.
"Formation B. Engage the enemy!" came the order.
* * * * *
They were just ahead, a dozen giant craft, torpedo-shaped and
steel-incased, the scarlet fire of their gas blasts holding them
poised steady in their fifty-mile-long line. From curious swellings
that broke the clean lines of their under-bodies black spheres were
dropping in steady streams. Allan knew then whence came the crash that
had rocked his ship as she rose. These were bombs, huge bombs,
charged with heaven alone knew what Earth-shaking explosive. They were
catapulting down, an iron death hail, on the fleet and the city twelve
miles below!
The enemy's strategy was clear. While his main fleet was engaging the
American defense in a frontal attack, these huge rocket-bombers had
looped unseen through the stratosphere to this point of vantage. The
planes that had leaped to this new menace swept toward the bombers in
three parallel lines, above, to right and left of them. Allan's plane
leaping to position at the very end of one long line. The three
leaders reached the first rocket-ship, and their green beams shot out.
In that instant the enemy craft seemed to explode in intense blue
light. Then the awful dazzle was gone. The rocket ship was there, just
as before, but the American helio-planes were gone, were wiped out as
though they had never been. The next trio, and the next, rushed up.
Again and again came that flash of force, annihilating them. Superbly
the tiny gnats that were the American planes plunged headlong at the
hovering Leviathan of the air and were whiffed into nothingness. Sixty
brave men were dancing motes of cosmic dust before the shocked
commander could sound the recall.
The helicopter squadron curved away, still keeping its ordered lines,
but orange flame leaped out from all twelve of the enemy vessels,
orange flame that caught them, that ran along their ranks and sent
them hurtling Earthward--blackened corpses in blazing coffins.
"Abandon ships!" The adjutant's last order crisped, coldly metallic,
soldierly as ever. In the next breath, as Allan reached for the lever
that would open the trapdoor beneath him, he saw the command-ship
plunge down, a flaring comet.
* * * * *
Above Allan Dane, the twenty-foot silk of his parachute bellied out in
the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in
his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety
suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of the
stratosphere. He looked south.
All the proud thousands of the defense fleet were gone, blown to
fragments by the time bombs from above. The city was hidden in a
thick, muddy-yellow fog. "Queer," the thought ran through his brain,
"that there should be fog in mid-afternoon, under a blazing sun." Then
he saw them, the circling black ships of the enemy, trailing behind
them long wakes of the drab yellow vapor that drifted heavily down to
shroud New York with--gas!
Allan felt nauseated as he imagined a fleeting picture of the
many-leveled city, of its mist-darkened streets with swarming myriads
of slumped bodies clogging the conveyor belts that still moved because
no hand was left to shut them off; of women and children, and aged or
crippled men strewn in tortured, horrible attitudes in all the
roof-parks, in their homes, in every nook and cranny of the murdered
city. He looked beneath his drifting descent and saw roads that were
rivers, alive with every manner of fleeing conveyance, and he groaned,
knowing that in moments the pursuing ships would send down their
lethal mist to put an end to that futile flight.
Sugar Loaf Mountain rose toward him. At its very summit was a clearing
among the trees, and, incongruously motionless in that world where
every one was rushing from inescapable death, a man stood calmly
there, gazing up at him. Allan screamed down to him! "Run! You fool.
Run or the gas will get you!"
Of course the man could not hear that cry, but one tiny arm rose and
pointed south. Allan followed the direction of the gesture and saw a
black plane veering toward him. Then orange flared from it, though it
was distant, and a wave of intolerable heat enveloped him. Something
cried within him: "Too far--he's too far off to kill me with his
beam!" Then he knew no more.
* * * * *
From New York, from devastated San Francisco, from Rio, from Buenos
Aires, from fifty other desolated points along the seaboards of the
Americas, the black fleets swept along the coasts and inland, vomiting
their yellow death till all the continents were blanketed with
life-destroying gas. And in Europe and Australasia the destroying
hordes, having smashed the proud defenses of the coastlines, engaged
in the same pursuit, till in one short week all the lands of the
Western Allies were swept clear of life. Then the Eastern ships turned
homeward, to wait until the vapor they had strewn had lost its
virulence, and the teeming masses of the East might take possession of
the half world the ebony-painted destroyers had conquered. The black
fliers turned homeward, but there was no homeland left for them to
seek!
For though the defense fleets of the Western Coalition had been
everywhere beaten, their attack squadrons had been everywhere
successful. All Asia and Africa lay under a pall of milky emerald gas
as toxic, as blasting, as the Easterners' yellow.
And the Westerners were returning too!
In their teleview screens the commanders of the black swarms, and of
the white thousands, sought their home ports, and saw the world to be
a haze-covered sphere where not even a fly could live. Then, as if by
common accord, the white ships and the black sped across lifeless
hemispheres to meet in mid-air over the long green swells of the
Pacific. They met, and on the instant they were at each others'
throats like two packs of wild dogs, killing, killing, killing till
they themselves were killed. No quarter was asked in that fight, and
none given. No hope of victory was there, nor fear of defeat. Better
swift death in the high passion of combat, than slow, hopeless
drifting over a dead world.
But there was one black ship that slunk out of that mass suicide of
man's last remnant. Within its long hulk three motionless forms lay in
a welter of blood that smeared their officers' badges, and a dozen
gibbering men labored at the controls of their craft. The long black
shadows came at last to veil an empty sky, and a sea whereon there was
drifting wreckage but not one sign of any life. And as far to the
north a shadowed airship sped athwart the moon, searching for one
spot, one tiny patch of solid ground, that was free from the dread
gas.
* * * * *
Consciousness came slowly back to Allan Dane. At first he was aware,
merely, that he was alive. That was astonishing enough. Even if the
orange beam had not killed him with its heat, the gas should have
struck his leather suit. The Easterners could not be behind his own
forces in their development of that terrible weapon.
Allan felt a coolness on his face, his hands, that could mean only
that his helmet and gloves had been removed. He heard movement, and
opened his eyes.
At first he could see only blueness, pale and lambent. He gazed dully
up at a lustrous, glasslike substance that arched above him. The sound
of some one moving came again, and Allan turned his head to it. His
neck muscles seemed stiff, that simple motion drew tremendously on his
strength.
About fifteen yards away, a man bent over a transparent, boxlike
contrivance in which something fluttered. From this device a metal
tube angled away into the wall. There was other apparatus on the long
table at which the man was--
"At last! Clear at last!" a mellow, rounded voice exclaimed
jubilantly.
"Clear? Are you sure, Anthony, are you sure?" This other voice,
throbbing with vibrant repression as if its owner feared to believe
longed-for tidings come at last, was a woman's. As the man half
turned, its owner came between him and Allan. All he could see of them
was that the one called Anthony was very tall, and thin, and the woman
almost as tall, and that both wore hooded white robes, the woman's
falling to her heels, the man's to his knees, waist-girdled with black
cords.
"Look for yourself, Helen."