_The Devastation of New York_
That night of May 19th and 20th in New York City will go down in
history as the strangest, most terrible ever recorded. The panics
caused by the gathering apparitions of the previous days were nearly
over now. The city was under martial law, most of it deserted by
civilians, save for the dead who still lay strewn on the streets.
Lower and mid-Manhattan were an empty shell of deserted structures,
and silent, littered streets, which at night were dark, and through
which criminals prowled, braving the unknown terror to fatten upon
this opportunity.
Soldiers and police patrolled as best they could all of Manhattan,
trying to clear the streets of the crushed and trampled bodies;
seeking in the deserted buildings those who might still be there,
trapped or ill, or hurt so that they could not escape; protecting
property from the criminals who en masse had broken jail and were
lurking here.
Warships lay in the harbor and the rivers. The forts on Staten
Island and at Sandy Hook were ready with their artillery to attack
anything tangible. Airplanes sped back and forth overhead. Troops
were marching from outlying points--lines of them coming in over all
the bridges.
By midnight of May 19th and 20th there were groups of ghosts visible
everywhere about the city. They lurked in the buildings, permeating
the solid walls, stalking through them, or down through the
foundations; they wandered upon invisible slopes of their own world,
climbing up to gather in groups and hanging in mid-air over the city
rooftops. In the Hudson River off Grant's Tomb two or three hundred
of the apparitions were seemingly encamped at a level below the
river's surface. And others were in the air over the waters of the
upper bay.
* * * * *
Toward midnight, from the open ocean beyond Sandy Hook spectral
vehicles came winging for the city. Rapidly decreasing what had at
first seemed a swift flight, they floated like ghostly dirigibles
over the bay, heading for Manhattan. The forts fired upon them;
airplanes darted at them, through them. But the wraiths came on
unheeding. And then, gathering over Manhattan at about Washington
Square, they faded and vanished.
Within thirty minutes, though the vehicles never reappeared, it was
seen that the spectral invaders were now tremendously augmented in
numbers. A line of shapes marched diagonally beneath the city
streets. Patrolling soldiers in the now deserted subways saw them
marching past. The group in the air over the harbor was augmented.
In Harlem they were very near the street levels, a mass of a
thousand or more strung over an area of forty blocks.
In mid-Manhattan soldiers saw that Tiffany's jewelry store housed
the lurking shapes. Some were lower, others higher; in this section
around Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street the apparitions were at
tremendously diverse levels. There were some perched high in the air
more than half way up the gigantic Empire State Building; and still
others off to the west were in the air fifteen hundred feet or more
above the Pennsylvania Station.
* * * * *
At Tiffany's--as indeed in many other places--the soldiers made
close visual contact with the apparitions. A patrolling group of
soldiers entered Tiffany's and went to the second floor. They
reported a seated group of "ghosts," with numbers of white shapes
working near them at a lower level which brought them into Tiffany's
basement.
The soldiers thought that what was seated here might be a leader.
Apparitions rushed up to him, and away. And here the soldiers saw
what seemed the wraiths of two girls, seated quietly together,
helmeted and garbed like the men. And men seemed watching them.
By one-thirty there was great activity, constant movement of the
apparitions everywhere. Doing what? No one could say. The attack, so
closely impending now, was presaged by nothing which could be
understood.
There was one soldier who at about one-thirty A.M. was watching the
spectres which lurked seemingly in the foundations of Tiffany's. He
was called to distant Westchester where the harried Army officials
had their temporary headquarters this night. He sped there on his
motorcycle and so by chance he was left alive to tell what he had
seen. The wraiths under Tiffany's were placing little wedge-shaped
ghostly bricks very carefully at different points. It occurred to
this soldier that they were putting them in spaces coincidental with
the building's foundations.
And then came the attack. The materialization bombs--as we knew them
to be--were fired. Progressively over a few minutes, at a thousand
different points. The area seemed to be from the Battery to
Seventy-second Street. Observers in circling airplanes saw it
best--there were few others left alive to tell of it.
* * * * *
The whole thing lasted ten minutes. Perhaps it was not even so long.
It began at Washington Square. The little ghostly wedges which had
been placed within the bricks of the arch at the foot of Fifth
Avenue began materializing; turning solid. From imponderability they
grew tangible; demanded free empty space of their own. Wedged and
pushed with solidifying molecules and atoms, each demanding its
little space and finding none. Encountering other solidity.
Outraged nature! No two material bodies can occupy the same space at
the same time!
The Washington Arch very queerly seemed to burst apart by a
strangely silent explosion. The upper portion toppled and fell with
a clatter of masonry littering the avenue and park.
Then a house nearby went down; then another. Everything seemed to be
crumbling, falling. That was the beginning. Within a minute the
chaos spread, running over the city like fire on strewn gasoline.
Buildings everywhere came crashing down. The street heaved up,
cracking apart in long jagged lines of opening rifts as though an
earthquake were splitting them. The subways and tubes and tunnels
yawned like black fantastic chasms crossed and littered by broken
girders.
The river waters heaved with waves lashed white as the great bridges
fell into them; and sucked down and closed again with tumultuous
whirlpools where the water had rushed into the cracked tunnels of
the river bed.
* * * * *
Of the towering skyscrapers the Woolworth was the first to crumble;
it split into sections as it fell across the wreckage which already
littered City Hall. Then the Bank of Manhattan Building, crumbling,
partly falling sidewise, partly slumping upon the ruins of itself.
Simultaneously the Chrysler Building toppled. For a second or two it
seemed perilously to sway. Breathless, awesome seconds. It swayed
over, lurched back like a great tree in a wind. Then very slowly it
swayed again and did not come back. Falling to the east, its whole
giant length came down in a great arc. The descent grew faster,
until, in one great swoop it crashed upon the wreckage of the Grand
Central Station. The roar of it surged over the city. The crash of
masonry; the clatter of its myriad windows, the din of its rending,
breaking girders.
The giant buildings were everywhere tumbling like falling giants;
like Titans stricken by invisible tumors implanted in their vitals.
It lasted ten minutes. What infinitude of horror came to proud and
lordly Manhattan Island in those momentous ten minutes!
Ten thousand patrolling soldiers and police, bands of lurking
criminals, and men, women and children who still had not left the
city, went down to death in those ten minutes. Yet no observer could
have seen them. Their little bodies, so small amid these Titans of
their own creation, went into oblivion unnoticed in the chaos.
* * * * *
The little solidifying bombs of the White Invaders did their work
silently. But what a roar surged up into the moonlit night from the
stricken city! What tumult of mingled sounds! What a myriad of
splintering, reverberating crashes, bursting upward into the night;
echoing away, renewed again and again so that it all was a vast
pulsing throb of terrible sound. And under it, inaudible, what faint
little sounds must have been the agonized screams of the humans who
were entombed!
Then the pulse of the great roaring sound began slowing. Soon it
became a dying roar. A last building was toppling here and there.
The silence of death was spreading over the mangled litter of the
strewn city. Dying chaos of sound; but now it was a chaos of color.
Up-rolling clouds of plaster dust; and then darker, heavier clouds
of smoke. Lurid yellow spots showed through the smoke clouds where
everywhere fires were breaking up.
And under it, within it all, the vague white shapes of the enemy
apparitions stood untouched, still peering curious, awed triumphant
at what they had done.
Another ten minutes passed; then half an hour, perhaps. The
apparitions were moving now. The many little groups were gathering
into fewer, larger groups. One marched high in the air, with faint
lurid green beams slanting down at the ruins of the city; not as
weapons this time, but as beams of faint light, seemingly to
illuminate the scene, or perhaps as signals to the ghostly army.
The warships in the Hudson were steaming slowly toward the Battery
to escape. Searchlights from them, from the other ships hovering
impotent in the bay, and from a group of encircling planes, flashed
their white beams over the night to mingle with the glare of the
fires and the black pall of smoke which was spreading now like a
shroud.
* * * * *
There were two young men in a monoplane which had helplessly circled
over mid-Manhattan. They saw the city fall, and noticed the lurking
wraiths untouched amid the ruins and in the air overhead. And they
saw, when it was over, that one great building very strangely had
escaped. The Empire State, rearing its tower high into the serene
moonlight above the wreckage and the rising layers of smoke, stood
unscathed in the very heart of Manhattan. The lone survivor,
standing there with the moonlight shining upon its top, and the
smoke gathering black around its spreading base.
The two observers in the airplane, stricken with horror at what they
had seen, flew mechanically back and forth. Once they passed within
a few hundred feet of the standing giant. They saw its two hundred
foot mooring mast for dirigibles rising above the eighty-five
stories of the main structure. They saw the little observatory room
up there in the mooring mast top, with its circular observation
platform, a balcony around it. But they did not notice the figures
on that balcony.
Then, from the top of the Empire State Building--from the circular
observation platform--a single, horribly intense green light-beam
slanted out into the night! A new attack! As though all which had
gone before were not enough destruction, now came a new assault. The
spectral enemies were tangible now!
* * * * *
The single green light-beam was very narrow. But the moonlight could
not fade it; over miles of distance it held visible. It struck first
a passing airplane. The two observers in the monoplane were at this
time down near the Battery. They saw the giant beam hit the
airplane. A moment it clung, and parts of the plane faded. The plane
wavered, and then, like a plummet, fell.
The beam swung. It struck a warship lying in the upper bay.
Explosions sounded. Puffs of light flared. The ship, with all its
passengers vanished and gone, lay gutted and empty.
The source of the light moved rapidly around the circular balcony.
The light darted to every distant point of the compass. The
surprised distant ships and forts, realizing that here for the first
time was a tangible assailant, screamed shots into the night. But
the green beam struck the ships and forts and instantly silenced
them.
Now the realization of this tangible enemy spread very far. Within a
few minutes, planes and radio communication had carried the news.
From distant points which the light could not or did not reach,
long-range guns were firing at the Empire State. A moment or two
only. The base of the building was struck.
Then, frantically, observing planes sent out the warning to stop
firing. The green beam had for a minute or two vanished. But now it
flashed on again. What was this? The spectral wraiths of ten
thousand of the enemy were staring. The observers in the planes
stared and gasped. What fantasy! What new weird sight was this,
stranger than all that had preceded it!