THE BATTLE OF GREAT NEW YORK
History will record that the battle of Great New York began on the
morning of June 12, 2445 A.D. For three days it raged. I can give but
fragmentary pictures. It whirled Alan and me into a maelstrom. I recall
the morning of June 13. A day of the battle was passed. Inconceivable
events of horror! Inconceivable ramifications of gruesome tragedy!
I recall that that morning Alan and I sat before a mirror-grid in the
Westchester section of this monstrous beehive city. The fighting was
farther south. We could see its ghastly details mirrored on a score
of grids around us. We had been in it at times. And snatched food and
sleep. But we were worn now to the verge of exhaustion. And worn with
fear. The Turberites could not be stopped.
And Nanette? How could we dare hope that we would ever see Nanette
again amid this torrent of killing?
The Hoboken area across the lower river had been the scene of bloody
fighting all afternoon of June 12, the evening, and through the night.
The Manhattan-Hudson terraces and most of the network of Hudson bridges
down near the lower end were held now by the Turberites. They had
penetrated through all the corridors of the Hoboken area south of the
power rooms. Factory rooms and offices were here, shops and storage
warehouses of local food supplies. The Turberites now swarmed them. The
terminus of the north-south traffic artery on the Manhattan side of the
river tunnel was taken from us.
The city traffic system of internal railways was long since paralyzed.
It added to the panic of the people who were caught in the city the
morning before, when the fighting so abruptly started, and who had not
yet been able to get away. A resident population of thirty million
now in this monstrous city! Ten million more as a daily average of
visitors. They, too, were caught in the maelstrom of the panic. And
another thirty million who commuted in to work.
Millions had escaped now. Every moment black streams of them came
pouring out. But transportation was hourly becoming more difficult.
Inconceivable ramifications of tragedy! The mirrors before us pictured
it in a myriad horrible details. My gaze caught one of them and clung,
fascinated.
It was a vaulted corridor, with tiers of levels from the ground up to
the thousand-foot roof. The loading platforms of the shuttles which
normally whirled local travelers away to the main departing stages of
the Northbound Local Coast Flyers were on these levels; forty of them,
one above the other, on each side of the corridor. The shuttle cars
stood ready on their tracks; the escalators still were in movement.
A tremendous throng of people was struggling here, trying to get
onto the shuttles which occasionally were departing. The Hudson
River--nearly closed over here by the ground tracks, surface viaducts
and the network of bridges to the Hoboken terraces--showed occasionally
in patches of sullen, yellow-stained water.
The crowd milled and fought for place in the inadequate cars. Every
level, every smallest bridge, was thronged. From a line of doorways
and trans-corridors up near the roof a horde of advancing Turberites
appeared--a mob of bloodstained villains with the blood-lust upon
them. They came clambering and leaping through a hundred doors and
windows; they spread down the inclines, the stairways, running over the
spider-bridges. Within a moment they seemed everywhere.
I saw a low, unroofed kiosk upon the edge of a sidewalk level. Tables
and chairs were there, as though this were a street cafe. It was black
with men and women, thrust in there by the press of others outside.
The furniture was overturned.
From twenty feet overhead a dozen figures of Turberites leaped a rail
and plunged down. Men in torn and blood-soaked uniforms of red cloth,
grotesque with epaulets and golden braid. Their swords flashed. The
little cafe was in a moment strewn with the mutilated dead and dying.
Some of the bodies went like plummets over the low rails. I could see
the white splashes as they struck the sullen river.
* * * * *
There was a mirror giving a close detail in another section--a room in
the honeycomb of cells that occupied an area of southeast Manhattan.
The Turberites had reached there now in a drive for the great air-stage
where the transcontinental liners were departing.
Our police forces still held the roof-tracks and all the arteries of
official travel up there; and the subterranean arteries were still
ours all over Manhattan. But in the metal honeycomb of squalid living
quarters which in my day was called the lower East Side the Turberites
had forced us back.
There was, on my mirror, this chance close detail of a single room. A
woman in it, thin and pallid and frail; wasted frame--a woman old and
haggard at thirty, with wisps of yellow hair turning white. In metal
bunks her brood of children were huddled. Cut off here in their home,
lost and forgotten in the turmoil. The woman had barred her door--there
were no windows; it seemed that perhaps her ventilator had ceased to
operate; she huddled, gasping, with a baby against her breast.
The door burst inward. A savage who in a different age had stalked the
forests of this same space stood expectantly upon the threshold. His
painted face was grinning. Other faces behind him peered to watch. He
bounded in; his tomahawk whirled. The woman mercifully went down at
once; the children lay where he had thrown them in a gruesome little
heap. He seized the baby, which still seemed alive. He held it aloft
and gestured to his grinning, feathered companions. He tossed its white
body toward the ceiling and flung the dripping tomahawk at the falling
mark. The weapon cleaved the baby's head as it fell to the floor.
And there were other scenes, indescribable. Rooms of small factories.
I saw one of them, where for this whole day a group of young girls
had been trapped. The swinging viaduct leading from their doorway had
fallen with the press of a fleeing mob; a girder had fallen, pinning
their door so that they could not open it. They were trapped; and
though the official safety emergency station in that area was still in
our hands, it was too flooded with similar calls, and too disorganized,
to heed this one.
* * * * *
A room of young girls. And by some chance, when the Turberites
advanced, a leering giant had peered through a narrow ventilator
orifice and seen them. With his huge stone ax he hacked away at the
ventilator. Others took his place when he was winded. They came through
at last into the room--
A news-mirror beside us--one of the few circuits still in
operation--flashed a message:
"Turber attacking the local ventilating power-house. To shut off our
power--paralyze our ventilating system."
So, with that done, he could use his gas fumes! I had not heard of an
attack at the ventilating power-house. The one mentioned was in Lower
Manhattan--local to that area. It was far underground.
The subterranean city was a vast catacomb with a depth everywhere of
several hundred feet. We still held our sections of it.
"Alan! What will Central Headquarters do about that? Has it been moved
yet? Central Headquarters moved?"
No one near us seemed to know. Every city function was disorganized.
The government archives were at this moment being transported with
difficulty from the financial area into new quarters beyond the
Spuyten Duyvil flood gates. From the subterranean treasury vaults
the tremendous gold reserve was being moved northward. All our
instrument-room headquarters were being shifted to the northern
outskirts. It was almost a flight--a rout. But our massed fighters in
all the important corridors were still holding firm.
* * * * *
The day wore on. We slept for a few hours, and awoke to find the
situation immeasurably worse. San and Lea had not come. And now our
tower Space was menaced! A mob of Turberites--there must have been ten
thousand of them--had broken through our men in the tiers of Lower
Manhattan. They swarmed there in all the vacant rooms and corridors
and pedestrian viaducts. The lifting shafts were out of operation now;
the moving sidewalks were stilled. They swarmed up the inclines, the
emergency stairs and ladders.
The city forces were driven back, and the local machinery rooms,
where the ventilating system of this area was controlled, fell to the
Turberites. They had been after it all day. They smashed it. The air
currents were stilled.
It was as though all this vital section of the city-structure had
ceased to breathe. The foul air pouring into the chemical vats was not
renewed; it surged in for a time and burst the coils. The pumps used up
their reserve pressure and stopped. The emergency systems operated for
another hour, then they too went dead.
The first Turberites attacking here were armed with pikes and
swords--side-arms of ancient fashion. Sabers; the cutlass;
broad-swords; muskets, useless to fire, but used as bludgeons,
or fitted with a bayonet; spears and lances of every type. Lurid
cutthroats they were, slashing their way in a bloody torrent of
hand-to-hand fighting.
Our police held them at occasional points of vantage. There were rooms
in which the police intrenched themselves; there were cannons set up
from which great balls of steel were hurled by compressed air and huge
coiled springs.
But these Turberites fought with a recklessness that the police of this
modern business era could not equal. They slashed and plunged and flung
themselves to wage always a combat at close quarters.
A myriad hand-to-hand encounters. Needle blades and polished clubs of
the city police. Lengths of steel wire with small metal balls at the
ends; the police were expert at throwing them to lasso the legs of a
running criminal. Small knives, tipped with harmless anesthetic, to be
thrown like a dart. Or bombs of sleeping gas which in days of peace
could be flung in a well ventilated street at an escaping criminal--but
could not be used here.
Almost everywhere the city forces were worsted. But it took time.
It was not an utter rout. A hundred thousand personal combats.
Inconceivable sanguinary warfare this! All indoors!
* * * * *
When the local ventilating system was broken, Turber must have known it
at once. Within an hour the type of fighting in this section was wholly
changed. The Turberites had fought their way northward up Broadway
with the city forces scattering east and west as they advanced. The
attackers permeated every passage and tunnel and room. Thousands
of them must have wandered aimlessly, lost. Wandering--killing and
plundering as they went. The civilians were nearly all out of this area
now.
A wedge of the Turberites reached what in my day was Columbus Circle.
There seemed leaders among them to direct what they were after. They
worked their way northward, and then shifted to the east--toward the
corridor-street where our tower-space was located.
The danger was recognized by the high command. Police troops were
withdrawn from the Hoboken section, where similar scenes were
transpiring south of the main city power station, and troops were
brought from other sections. Our lines on the roof over the harbor were
weakened--but there seemed little activity up there.
The strengthened police squads fought their way into mid-Broadway.
The upflung wedge of Turberites was cut off. Inhuman with their
heedlessness, their reckless thirst for blood; but here for the first
time we saw them falter. Cut off from possible retreat, a panic swept
them. A thousand or more of them tried to get back. The city troops
drove them out of the Broadway corridor and hunted them down as they
tried to escape into the honeycomb of the city. We gained ground here
for a time. But new mobs of the enemy came pouring northward.
All this within an hour or two. The ventilating system of Mid-Manhattan
was failing. Turber knew it--and presently the whole character of the
fighting there changed. The Turber mobs began withdrawing from this
newly captured area. The air was turning fetid, but the police pursued
the retreating Turberites as best they could.
* * * * *
The Manhattan exits of the vehicular tunnels under the harbor network
of islands were all held by Turber now. From them a new horde of his
fighters began pouring. Strange figures in black hoods with goggling
mouth tubes. They came prowling in the north-south corridors. They
worked their way north. The fetid air did not seem to impede them. They
held strange round objects in their hands. They threw the objects,
which shattered and spread heavy-lying chlorine gas. And mustard gas.
The corridors and rooms choked up--with fumes and the fallen bodies of
our police. The strange Turberite figures prowled like ghouls among
them.
Strange familiar warfare! Alan and I recognized it. These grenade-like
missiles--these gas bombs--these figures with gas masks--
The Great War of 1940-42 flashed to our memory.
The air throughout the levels of Park-Circle 90 was maintained fairly
clear. The city troops made a stand there, in a great amphitheater of
local tracks where many corridors converged. In my day it was called
the Grand Central region.
The Turberites had stormed the eastern warehouse depots of what was
once Long Island City. Hordes of them began spreading west. It was part
of this drive toward our tower-space.
A message now came:
"Turberites making drive in Van Cortlandt tubes toward our main
dynamos."
Had they got up that far? It seemed incredible. An attack in the
subterranean northern city toward the main lighting plant! If
successful it would plunge us into darkness. And these Turberites had
obsolete flash lights from my own age, no doubt, with which our forces
were not equipped.
* * * * *
I saw upon the mirrors later a few scenes of this attack. The vast
buried bowels of the city. The upright girders drilled and set deep
into the rocks; the deep-set foundations of the pneumatic lifts; the
gigantic sewerage system; the underground traffic tubes; the storage
vats of chemicals. Narrow, gloomy tunnels of streets; vertical ladders;
pneumatic tubes for freight transfer strung everywhere like capillaries
in a section of flesh laid bare.
The Turberites came prowling; and finding the ventilation still
working, brought hordes of their fellows.
I saw, in the subterranean city, in a dark open area of tracks on a
viaduct beneath the Hudson River, where a hundred or two of the city
troops were making a stand. In my day, this was about Dyckman Street.
The city forces had set up a battery of air-cannons on a metal
terrace; the missiles rained down; but as though the terrace were some
ancient rampart, the Turberites stormed it. Gas bombs were thrown by
both sides, but the ventilation cleared the fumes away quickly. The
terrace, with its northward underground corridor toward the light
plant, was stormed and taken, after a siege of half an hour. A rain
of missiles--nondescript chunks of metal thrown by hand; spears and
javelins and darts--a cloud of poisoned arrows from a band of Indians
posted at a distance; and arrows flaming with fire. Scaling ladders
such as firemen of my day might have used came up from below and
swarmed with men carrying dirks in their teeth as they climbed.
The terrace was finally carried. The Turberites ran northward to where
at some other point the police were making a stand. Or climbed up the
spirals into the city overhead. It was difficult to keep track of them.
Groups appeared suddenly in many sections well within our safely held
areas. They had to be hunted down and killed.
Of what use to mention my own and Alan's futile parts? There was a
time, near the evening of this second day, when for hours I stood only
a few hundred feet south of our tower-space--stood at one of the top
levels, where I had been told to guard an isolated transverse corridor.
Occasional Turberites, lost from their fellows, wandered through.
My part to stand in ambush and dispatch them with a rapier, as they
appeared. Gruesome business! Like a sharp-shooter of our Civil War
posted in the bushes.
Or again, for a time I fed round steel bullets to an air-cannon where
a battery of ours was intrenched on a bridge. A horde of savages with
flying arrows and tomahawks assaulted us there, from the network of
overhead tracks along which they had climbed.
There were times when Alan was sent off on other duties, and I watched
at our tower-space and prayed for the tower to come. One time Alan was
so long gone that I feared he might not return; and then he joined me,
bleeding, torn from combat.
* * * * *
I have hardly mentioned the panics that swept the civilian population
which was caught in the city. The panics were worst the first day.
Millions everywhere trying to get away into the north rural sections.
The panics killed far more, that day, than did the fighting. For a
time the authorities tried to cope with them. The traffic squads were
on duty. The moving sidewalks, elevators--escalators--the trams and
monorails--were moving. But it was soon all paralyzed. Most of the main
vehicular arteries were soon in a tangle. Abandoned cars. Accidents
everywhere.
A wandering, milling jam of people, mad with panic, their screams rang
throughout all the rooms and every smallest corridor of the monstrous
beehive--a pandemonium of horror. Soon there were dead everywhere.
Millions died--but millions got away. Millions wandering on in a frenzy
until they got northward to the open air.
A million must have walked through the tubes. They were always flooded
with people; the East and West Side bridges were black with fighting
mobs. A million climbed on foot up the Hoboken terrace area and
wandered in the city sections there. And other millions fought their
way to the north roof and embarked on the departing air-liners.
The business of the city had ceased within an hour that first morning
when the battle began. Inconceivable industrial details all were
abruptly at a standstill. Food gave out. The Turberites captured many
of the city's food depots. The incoming freight liners found no one to
receive them. No further orders were issued. They soon stopped coming.
Gigantic business ramifications of Great New York. When they ceased,
within a day disorganization spread over the world like waves in a
pond. Confusion of industry everywhere. Everything to its smallest
detail was interwoven with Great New York. The world was in confusion.
The gigantic world-business machine of perfection was well oiled in its
every smooth-running part; but the paralyzation of Great New York threw
it all into disorder.
The world governments watched with amazement this sudden tragedy. Food
was brought by liners from Great London. There was one arriving at the
Tappan Terminal nearly every hour. Food, and fighting men, and such
weapons as this era provided.
* * * * *
I saw the mirrored scene as the sleek silver body of one of these
liners came in sight over the Long Island coast. The air over the city
roof had been occasionally invaded by marauding Turber ships. They
had dropped missiles, but with little damage. But they had frightened
off the food freighters and greatly impeded the local passenger ships
which--the first and second days of the battle--stood bravely trying to
transport the fleeing millions.
The transatlantic liner came like a giant silver flying-fish with
glistening outspread wings. Alan and I watched it on the mirror as
its image grew. This was at sunset of the battle's second day. The
sky in the mirrored scene was red and gold. Great fleecy clouds
lined with the vivid colors, with a background of deepening purple. I
had almost forgotten that there was a sky! The liner came speeding.
But from the south a Turber ship loomed up--a narrow thing of black,
a ship, fleet and darkly piratical of aspect. Like a wasp it came.
Catapulted missiles preceded it, but they fell upon the transport liner
comparatively harmlessly.
[Illustration: _Turber indicated high points of the vast
future-city._]
The Turber ship circled, but the transport came steadily on. We could
see its decks thronged with troops. It had been hastily armed in Great
London. Its cannon answered the Turber fire. But presently it came over
the city roof, and ceased its fire that the balls might not fall and do
damage. It slowed into a great lazy circle, preparing to land on the
Tappan stage.
* * * * *
The Turber pirate ship followed it. We gasped. The Turber ship plunged
for the liner; it kept on coming. They collided! Alan exclaimed:
"Look at this other mirror!"
A telescopic image of the scene, greatly magnified, showed on another
mirror. We saw the decks of the Turber ship. No one there! Its control
room held mechanisms only! There was no living soul on this Turber ship!
A vessel, like the crude steering devices of our own time, aerially
controlled! Within some instrument room in the Turber section of
the city this helmsman sat. We had no such ships. There was no need
for such mechanism in this age. It had been lost and forgotten now
with the passing centuries. But Turber had located it and brought it
here--adapted it to this world-power with which the ether was flooded
and which all ships used.
We saw the collision. The great white liner turned over. The two ships,
locked together with broken girders, wavered and fell. We turned away
as the mirrors showed us close views of the strewn human forms on the
roof-top.
That was the first of the Turber suicide ships. He had others. One more
was used when the next liner appeared. After that Great London ordered
the others back. We were cut off from the world.
That night of June 13, when the battle had been raging some
thirty-eight hours, found Alan and me quartered for needed sleep in a
building of northern Westchester. Exhausted beyond all ability to talk
or even to think, we slept.
Late in the evening we awoke. The tower still had not come. The battle
raged everywhere with undiminished fury. The Turberites now had more
than doubled their original area. The Hoboken power-house still held
out; but in all the rest of the Jersey section the enemy was in full
possession. Our forces at the power-house were surrounded; they could
not hold it much longer.
The harbor islands were all Turber now. And the Brooklyn and Queens
sections. Lower Manhattan, without local lights, with its ventilation
gone, was a tomb of black corridors and rooms strewn with the dead,
while Turberites with gas masks and flash lights prowled among them.
Broadway and all to its west toward the Hudson River was taken, up
nearly to the Van Cortlandt region. But we still held the mid-section,
which once had been Central Park; and Harlem, with widening lines into
the Bronx. Still held the vital space of the tower.
But it could not be held much longer!