_THE DISINTEGRATOR_
This enthusiasm would have had but little justification had Mr. Edison
done nothing more than invent a machine which could navigate the
atmosphere and the regions of interplanetary space.
He had, however, and this fact was generally known, although the details
had not yet leaked out--invented also machines of war intended to meet
the utmost that the Martians could do for either offence or defence in
the struggle which was now about to ensue.
Acting upon the hint which had been conveyed from various investigations
in the domain of physics, and concentrating upon the problem all those
unmatched powers of intellect which distinguished him, the great
inventor had succeeded in producing a little implement which one could
carry in his hand, but which was more powerful than any battleship that
ever floated. The details of its mechanism could not be easily
explained, without the use of tedious technicalities and the employment
of terms, diagrams and mathematical statements, all of which would lie
outside the scope of this narrative. But the principle of the thing was
simple enough. It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have
since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of
harmonic vibrations, extending from atoms and molecules at one end of
the series up to the worlds and suns at the other end, that Mr. Edison
based his invention.
Every kind of substance has its own vibratory rhythm. That of iron
differs from that of pine wood. The atoms of gold do not vibrate in the
same time or through the same range as those of lead, and so on for all
known substances, and all the chemical elements. So, on a larger scale,
every massive body has its period of vibration. A great suspension
bridge vibrates, under the impulse of forces that are applied to it, in
long periods. No company of soldiers ever crosses such a bridge without
breaking step. If they tramped together, and were followed by other
companies keeping the same time with their feet, after a while the
vibrations of the bridge would become so great and destructive that it
would fall in pieces. So any structure, if its vibration rate is known,
could easily be destroyed by a force applied to it in such a way that it
should simply increase the swing of those vibrations up to the point of
destruction.
Now Mr. Edison had been able to ascertain the vibratory swing of many
well known substances, and to produce, by means of the instrument which
he had contrived, pulsations in the ether which were completely under
his control, and which could be made long or short, quick or slow, at
his will. He could run through the whole gamut from the slow vibrations
of sound in air up to the four hundred and twenty-five millions of
millions of vibrations per second of the ultra red rays.
Having obtained an instrument of such power, it only remained to
concentrate its energy upon a given object in order that the atoms
composing that object should be set into violent undulation, sufficient
to burst it asunder and to scatter its molecules broadcast. This the
inventor effected by the simplest means in the world--simply a parabolic
reflector by which the destructive waves could be sent like a beam of
light, but invisible, in any direction and focused upon any desired
point.
I had the good fortune to be present when this powerful engine of
destruction was submitted to its first test. We had gone upon the roof
of Mr. Edison's laboratory and the inventor held the little instrument,
with its attached mirror, in his hand. We looked about for some object
on which to try its powers. On a bare limb of a tree not far away, for
it was late in fall, sat a disconsolate crow.
"Good," said Mr. Edison, "that will do." He touched a button at the side
of the instrument and a soft, whirring noise was heard.
"Feathers," said Mr. Edison, "have a vibration period of three hundred
and eighty-six million per second."
He adjusted the index as he spoke. Then, through a sighting tube, he
aimed at the bird.
"Now watch," he said.
Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close
around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black to white!
"Its feathers are gone," said the inventor; "they have been dissipated
into their constituent atoms. Now, we will finish the crow."
Instantly there was another adjustment of the index, another outshooting
of vibratory force, a rapid up and down motion of the index to include a
certain range of vibrations, and the crow itself was gone--vanished in
empty space! There was the bare twig on which a moment before it had
stood. Behind, in the sky, was the white cloud against which its black
form had been sharply outlined, but there was no more crow.
"That looks bad for the Martians, doesn't it?" said the Wizard. "I have
ascertained the vibration rate of all the materials of which their war
engines, whose remains we have collected together, are composed. They
can be shattered into nothingness in the fraction of a second. Even if
the vibration period were not known, it could quickly be hit upon by
simply running through the gamut."
"Hurrah!" cried one of the onlookers. "We have met the Martians and they
are ours."
Such in brief was the first of the contrivances which Mr. Edison
invented for the approaching war with Mars.
And these facts had become widely known. Additional experiments had
completed the demonstration of the inventor's ability, with the aid of
his wonderful instrument, to destroy any given object, or any part of an
object, provided that that part differed in its atomic constitution, and
consequently in its vibratory period, from the other parts.
A most impressive public exhibit of the powers of the little
disintegrator was given amid the ruins of New York. On lower Broadway a
part of the walls of one of the gigantic buildings, which had been
destroyed by the Martians, impended in such a manner that it threatened
at any moment to fall upon the heads of the passersby. The Fire
Department did not dare touch it. To blow it up seemed a dangerous
expedient, because already new buildings had been erected in its
neighborhood, and their safety would be imperilled by the flying
fragments. The fact happened to come to my knowledge.
"Here is an opportunity," I said to Mr. Edison, "to try the powers of
your machine on a large scale."
"Capital," he instantly replied. "I shall go at once."
For the work now in hand it was necessary to employ a battery of
disintegrators, since the field of destruction covered by each was
comparatively limited. All of the impending portions of the wall must be
destroyed at once and together, for otherwise the danger would rather be
accentuated rather than annihilated. The disintegrators were placed upon
the roof of a neighboring building, so adjusted that their fields of
destruction overlapped one another upon the wall. Their indexes were all
set to correspond with the vibration period of the peculiar kind of
brick of which the wall consisted. Then the energy was turned on, and a
shout of wonder arose from the multitudes which had assembled at a safe
distance to witness the experiment.
The wall did not fall; it did not break asunder; no fragments shot this
way and that and high in the air; there was no explosion; no shock or
noise disturbed the still atmosphere--only a soft whirr, that seemed to
pervade everything and to tingle in the nerves of the spectators;
and--what had been was not! The wall was gone! But high above and all
around the place where it had hung over the street with its threat of
death there appeared, swiftly billowing outward in every direction, a
faint bluish cloud. It was the scattered atoms of the destroyed wall.
And now the cry "On to Mars!" was heard on all sides. But for such an
enterprise funds were needed--millions upon millions. Yet some of the
fairest and richest portions of the earth had been impoverished by the
frightful ravages of those enemies who had dropped down upon them from
the skies. Still, the money must be had. The salvation of the planet, as
everyone was now convinced, depended upon the successful negotiation of
a gigantic war fund, in comparison with which all the expenditures in
all of the wars that had been waged by the nations for 2,000 years would
be insignificant. The electrical ships and the vibration engines must be
constructed by scores and thousands. Only Mr. Edison's immense resources
and unrivaled equipment had enabled him to make the models whose powers
had been so satisfactorily shown. But to multiply these upon a war scale
was not only beyond the resources of any individual--hardly a nation on
the globe in the period of its greatest prosperity could have undertaken
such a work. All the nations, then, must now conjoin. They must unite
their resources, and if necessary, exhaust all their hoards, in order to
raise the needed sum.
Negotiations were at once begun. The United States naturally took the
lead, and their leadership was never for a moment questioned abroad.
Washington was selected as the place of meeting for a great congress of
nations. Washington, luckily, had been one of the places which had not
been touched by the Martians. But if Washington had been a city composed
of hotels alone, and every hotel so great as to be a little city in
itself, it would have been utterly insufficient for the accommodation of
the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks of the Potomac.
But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis? The necessary
hotels, lodging-houses and restaurants were constructed with astounding
rapidity. One could see the city growing and expanding day by day and
week after week. It flowed over Georgetown Heights; it leaped the
Potomac; it spread east and west, south and north; square mile after
square mile of territory was buried under the advancing buildings, until
the gigantic city, which had thus grown up like a mushroom in a night,
was fully capable of accommodating all its expected guests.
At first it had been intended that the heads of the various governments
should in person attend this universal congress, but as the enterprise
went on, as the enthusiasm spread, as the necessity for haste became
more apparent through the warning notes which were constantly sounded
from the observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding new
evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens of
the old world felt that they could not remain at home; that their proper
place was at the new focus and center of the whole world--the city of
Washington. Without concerted action, without interchange of suggestion,
this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs at once.
Suddenly cablegrams flashed to the government at Washington, announcing
that Queen Victoria, the Emperor William, the Czar Nicholas, Alphonso of
Spain, with his mother, Maria Christina; the old emperor Francis Joseph
and the empress Elizabeth, of Austria; King Oscar and Queen Sophia, of
Sweden and Norway; King Humbert and Queen Margherita, of Italy; King
George and Queen Olga, of Greece; Abdul Hamid, of Turkey; Tsait'ien,
Emperor of China; Mutsuhito, the Japanese Mikado, with his beautiful
Princess Haruko; the President of France, the President of Switzerland,
the First Syndic of the little republic of Andorra, perched on the crest
of the Pyrenees, and the heads of all the Central and South American
republics, were coming to Washington to take part in the deliberations,
which, it was felt, were to settle the fate of earth and Mars.
One day, after this announcement had been received, and the additional
news had come that nearly all the visiting monarchs had set out,
attended by brilliant suites and convoyed by fleets of warships, for
their destination, some coming across the Atlantic to the port of New
York, others across the Pacific to San Francisco, Mr. Edison said to me:
"This will be a fine spectacle. Would you like to watch it?"
"Certainly," I replied.
The Ship of Space was immediately at our disposal. I think I have not
yet mentioned the fact that the inventor's control over the electrical
generator carried in the car was so perfect that by varying the
potential or changing the polarity he could cause it slowly or swiftly,
as might be desired, to approach or recede from any object. The only
practical difficulty was presented when the polarity of the electrical
charge upon an object in the neighborhood of the car was unknown to
those in the car, and happened to be opposite to that of the charge to
which the car, at that particular moment was bearing. In such a case, of
course, the car would fly toward the object, whatever it might be, like
a pithball or a feather, attracted to the knob of an electrical machine.
In this way, considerable danger was occasionally encountered, and a few
accidents could not be avoided. Fortunately, however, such cases were
rare. It was only now and then that, owing to some local cause,
electrical polarities unknown to or unexpected by the navigators,
endangered the safety of the car. As I shall have occasion to relate
however, in the course of the narrative, this danger became more acute
and assumed at times a most formidable phase, when we had ventured
outside the sphere of the earth and were moving through the unexplored
regions beyond.
On this occasion, having embarked, we rose rapidly to a height of some
thousands of feet and directed our course over the Atlantic. When
half-way to Ireland, we beheld, in the distance, steaming westward, the
smoke of several fleets. As we drew nearer a marvelous spectacle
unfolded itself to our eyes. From the northeast, their great guns
flashing in the sunlight and their huge funnels belching black volumes
that rested like thunder clouds upon the sea, came the mighty warships
of England, with her meteor flag streaming red in the breeze, while the
royal insignia, indicating the presence of the ruler of the British
Empire, was conspicuously displayed upon the flagship of the squadron.
Following a course more directly westward there appeared, under another
black cloud of smoke, the hulls and guns and burgeons of another great
fleet, carrying the tri-color of France, and bearing in its midst the
head of the magnificent republic of western Europe.
Further south, beating up against the northerly winds came a third fleet
with the gold and red of Spain fluttering from its masthead. This, too,
was carrying its King westward, where now, indeed, the star of empire
had taken its way.
Rising a little higher, so as to extend our horizon, we saw coming down
the English channel, behind the British fleet, the black ships of
Russia. Side by side, or following one another's lead, these war fleets
were on a peaceful voyage that belied their threatening appearance.
There had been no thought of danger to or from the forts and ports of
rival nations which they had passed. There was no enmity, and no fear
between them when the throats of their ponderous guns yawned at one
another across the waves. They were now, in spirit, all one fleet,
having one object, bearing against one enemy, ready to defend but one
country, and that country was the entire earth.
It was some time before we caught sight of the emperor William's fleet.
It seems that the Kaiser, although at first consenting to the
arrangement by which Washington had been selected as the assembling
place for the nations, afterwards objected to it.
"I ought to do this thing myself," he had said. "My glorious ancestors
would never have consented to allow these upstart Republicans to lead in
a warlike enterprise of this kind. What would my grandfather have said
to it? I suspect that it is some scheme aimed at the divine right of
kings."
But the good sense of the German people would not suffer their ruler to
place them in a position so false and so untenable. And swept along by
their enthusiasm the Kaiser had at last consented to embark upon his
flagship at Kiel, and now he was following the other fleets on their
great mission to the Western Continent.
Why did they bring their warships when their intentions were peaceable,
do you ask? Well, it was partly the effect of ancient habit, and partly
due to the fact that such multitudes of officials and members of ruling
families wished to embark for Washington that the ordinary means of
ocean communications would have been utterly inadequate to convey them.
After we had feasted our eyes on this strange sight, Mr. Edison suddenly
exclaimed: "Now let us see the fellows from the rising sun."
The car was immediately directed toward the west. We rapidly approached
the American coast, and as we sailed over the Allegheny Mountains and
the broad plains of the Ohio and the Mississippi, we saw crawling
beneath us from west, south and north, an endless succession of railway
trains bearing their multitudes on toward Washington. With marvelous
speed we rushed westward, rising high to skim over the snow-topped peaks
of the Rocky Mountains and then the glittering rim of the Pacific was
before us. Half-way between the American Coast and Hawaii we met the
fleets coming from China and Japan. Side by side they were plowing the
main, having forgotten, or laid aside, all the animosities of their
former wars.
I well remember how my heart was stirred at this impressive exhibition
of the boundless influence which my country had come to exercise over
all the people of the world, and I turned to look at the man to whose
genius this uprising of the earth was due. But Mr. Edison, after his
wont, appeared totally unconscious of the fact that he was personally
responsible for what was going on. His mind, seemingly, was entirely
absorbed in considering problems, the solution of which might be
essential to our success in the terrific struggle which was soon to
begin.
"Well, have you seen enough?" he asked. "Then let us go back to
Washington."
As we speeded back across the continent we beheld beneath us again the
burdened express trains rushing toward the Atlantic, and hundreds of
thousands of upturned eyes watched our swift progress, and volleys of
cheers reached our ears, for everyone knew that this was Edison's
electrical warship, on which the hope of the nation, and the hopes of
all the nations, depended. These scenes were repeated again and again
until the car hovered over the still expanding capitol on the Potomac,
where the unceasing ring of hammers rose to the clouds.
[Illustration: _A consultation in Wizard Edison's laboratory
between him and Professor Serviss on the best means of repaying the
damage wrought upon this planet by the Martians._]