THE EARTH AT BAY!
History will record that the forces of Graff, the Xenephrene, landed
upon earth at 2 A.M., July 9, 1957, in north Brazil, at one degree
fourteen minutes north latitude, and sixty-one degrees twenty-two
minutes west longitude. There was no one person on earth who saw more
than a fragment of what followed during those frightful weeks; out of a
myriad accounts, history will piece a pallid, dispassionate vision of
the whole.
For myself, I witnessed many horrible things. But only fragments--as
an ant with its tiny viewpoint sees the forest through which it
crawls, and might futilely try to describe it. I can only name facts;
imagination must supply the rest, and even then inevitably fall far
short of the grim, tragic reality.
I was crouching with Graff and Zetta at a floor window of the giant
Space liner when, that July 9, we slowly settled to within a thousand
feet of the ground. A dark, tropic, overcast night.
From beneath our bow a crimson, howling radiance, one of the barrage
projectors, sprang downward. There was no one left alive over the
ten-mile circular area around which our barrage was flung that
night, to tell what happened. I saw the houses of this newly-settled
agricultural area melt and vanish as we swept them with the radiance.
The barrage went up. By dawn, all the country near us was deserted of
its people, who fled in terror as far away from us as they could get.
The tropic jungle had wilted since the Great Change. The land here
was cleared; broad, fertile fields, planted now with grain, corn, and
garden produce. Prosperous farms, crowded with settlers in their small,
new houses. New villages. Several small cities. Over a hundred mile
area they were deserted in a day.
Graff's other vehicles arrived. One was dispatched to Africa. It landed
in the French Sudan, in latitude fifteen degrees five minutes north
and longitude three degrees nineteen minutes west--not far south of
the city of Timbuktu, which had tripled in size and importance since
the Great Change. The red barrage was flung up here, but it was on the
flying platforms. Within a day it began moving directly north.
Around our encampment in north Brazil, the barrage projectors were
mounted on the ground for a permanent stay. A ten-mile circle. It
included a stream. I found Graff had apparatus for distilling the
water, for drinking supply. He foraged out for food, even though he had
a three months' supply with him. He began building dwelling houses for
his women and children--using materials he had brought, and materials
his insects dragged in from neighboring, abandoned villages.
An incredible activity. By the end of July his permanent base was well
established. We had been attacked. I can only hint at the surprise, the
panic, our landing caused all over the world. Since the Great Change,
the last thing that had been thought of was war.
The nations were concerned with their bare existence--the welfare of
their people. War between them was an impossibility. The great battle
fleets of Britain, the United States, France and Japan were no longer
armed for combat. Most of the vessels had been dismantled of their
armament, converted into transports, for the people in distress and for
the transportation of food.
Armies were organized now as government industrial and agricultural
workers. Every government was in the business of producing,
buying, storing, and selling food. The war airplanes were used
for transportation; thousands of the great Arctic A type were in
commission--but few of them were armed.
The world was wholly unprepared and unequipped for war. Nevertheless,
Graff's base in north Brazil was attacked. Railroad lines were near us.
They were abandoned to traffic within fifty miles of us. But an armored
train was run up in the night. It shelled us with a long-range gun. One
of Graff's foraging parties outside the barrage was struck and most of
its members killed. But the screaming shells--they came all one night
at twenty minute intervals--exploded harmlessly against our barrage.
A few planes came up cautiously to inspect us. One must have risen over
the ten mile height of our barrage. It dropped bombs. One of them
fell within our lines. It killed a dozen men and working insects, and
wrecked some of our apparatus; it barely missed our group of vehicles,
lying on the river bank in the center of our encampments. I doubt if
that aviator ever knew how true was his aim of that one bomb.
The train with its thirty-mile range gun was gone at dawn. But it came
again the next night. I went with Graff, aloft on a small platform,
high over our lines. Through the red glow of our barrage we could see
the train in the distance--a blur of moving lights. We carried a single
small projector. At dawn we sailed out, through a momentary break
in the barrage. The train saw us coming. It retreated, swinging and
swaying over its rails at an eighty-mile-an-hour gait. It was a Garga
locomotive, and a flat car. Puffing, snorting, careening through the
country to avoid us. But we caught it. There was nothing there in a
moment but a tumbled heap of its heavier steel parts. We sailed back.
* * * * *
The world during these days must have been frantically assembling its
armament. Our Brazil base continued to be harassed. By July 15, our
river quite suddenly went dry. We found that some fifty miles up the
course on a distant rise of ground they had mounted a queerly-fashioned
projector. It might have been from Xenephrene itself!
It was Freddie's heat-projector, sent here from Miami by the United
States government. It had an effective range of some two miles, and
its heat--they must have been applying it continuously for several
days--had dried up the small water-course, sending it up in clouds of
steam.
Graff ordered an attacking platform out. It never returned.
Miraculously, a long-range gun must have hit it. Then we found that,
still farther up, they were damming our stream. Graff let them alone.
We sent out foraging parties at intervals for water. They were
frequently attacked.
From Zetta, I sometimes had translated accounts of these hand-to-hand
engagements. Graff had a variety of small hand weapons with which
his foraging men were generally armed. Hand batteries of the purple
Reet-current. They shot very short, purple stabs of flame. I recalled
seeing the guards use them that night in the Garla Stadium.
There were hand knives, not unlike the Spanish machete. And
occasionally Graff used a lethal gas. It clung its weight close to the
ground. The wind would sometimes sweep it over a village.
The small purple flame projectors interested me particularly. I
persuaded Graff to show me one. The crimson barrage was a form of Reet;
so was this purple light. The one a low vibration rate; the other, a
high. Both, of course, were akin to the Control-globes. I tried again
to mention the Control, but Graff shut me up. He was not using it, as
yet. I found out soon afterward that, by every artifice in her power,
Zetta was holding him back.
But he explained the purple flame. It stabbed into the crimson barrage,
neutralized it. With one of these small projectors, a man at a distance
of ten feet or so could stab a small hole through our red radiance.
Graff used this small hand projector to blind the earthmen at short
range, and to explode their gunpowder weapons in their hands--both of
which it evidently did with great efficacy.
I said casually: "The Garlands had these purple projectors?"
"Of course, Peter."
"And, Graff, why couldn't that be made in a larger form? A giant purple
beam?"
"It could. The Garlands have it."
My thoughts were running tumultuously. Father, Dan, and Freddie were up
there in Garla. I said, still casually: "Then the Garlands could have
penetrated our barrage--neutralized it?"
He smiled lugubriously. "Yes. That is what they did to me when I
attack' them years ago."
Graff was in a good mood this day. He showed me some of the defensive
apparatus he had brought along. "I do not need it here, Peter. But I
have it, jus' the same."
Insulated garments which one might wear and be protected, at least
partially, from the red barrage. Infra-red goggles to protect the
sight; ear-grids to bar out the sound--to raise it again to the normal
vibration to which our human ears are accustomed.
"Why," I said, "with these one might walk through our barrage!"
"Yes," he agreed, "I should not care to try it--but one might get
through safely."
He put them away.
* * * * *
We had no reports from Africa. But it was over there that in these
early days the greatest damage to earth was done. The flying ring of
platforms, with the vehicle in their midst, had immediately begun
moving northward.
Slowly some two or three hundred miles a day, but inexorably,
impervious to every attack that could be sent against them, they blazed
a ten-mile twisting trail, northward across Africa--a trail of queerly
blank, dead-gray surface of empty earth.
It was as though some giant finger of death were dragging, trailing
itself over the continent. It cut a swath through Timbuktu, trailed
over the newly settled, newly fertile Sahara, swung east over the
mountains into the erstwhile Libyan desert; then north over the
Mediterranean. It was there by July 20.
A fleet of warships, hastily assembled from every nation, was in the
Mediterranean. The red enemy flew high. Its barrage was downward. The
ships, at a fair distance, withstood the red glow. Especially at night.
The world was learning the nature of this gruesome enemy.
The crimson screaming radiance seemed more deadly, more uncanny in the
darkness of night. But it was not. Our sunlight was favorable to it; by
day its range was greatly increased. Graff knew it. He had told me he
would follow the daylight northward!
The great steel ships in the Mediterranean--if they kept off several
miles--were safe, especially at night. Safe from annihilation! But on
them must have been queer, uncanny scenes!
One, just south of Malta, was caught in a fringe of outflung red beam.
Those on board have told what for a minute or two they went through. It
was night. The ship's lights went out. Its dynamos were burned. There
were several explosions aboard. But the ship escaped. Its men were
half deafened; eyes red, smarting and strained; a queer irritation of
the skin. And many were laughing with an hysteria which no one could
explain.
The invaders turned east from Malta. They were never unduly aggressive,
the barrage generally was closely held for defense--save that over
the land it blighted always that ten-mile swath. They passed over the
isles of Greece and again turned north. Heading up into mid-Europe.
Before them--as well as their course could be guessed for it always
was erratic--the country was deserted. A rout, with occasionally an old
fortress, or a group of armed earth planes, or a railroad line with an
armored train, making a brief, futile stand.
During this period the few Brauns whom Graff had sent previously
to earth now began to make their appearance. A few, scattered
individuals; they were found in various localities, and by the earth
people summarily killed. In mid-Europe a group of them--a hundred or
more--suddenly appeared and made a stand. Graff's expedition rescued
them, took them aboard the flying platforms. They were the last, I
think, of the scattered Xenephrenes; no others ever appeared, anywhere
on earth.
The last week in July saw us spreading out in South America. Our
permanent camp housed the women, children and the older men. They
maintained the barrage. The insects were working with the men building
the town.
With a ring of flying platforms, we made a sortie north. A week up and
back. We laid waste a swath through central Venezuela to the coast; we
returned with a western swing, through Colombia, Ecuador, north Peru
and back to our base. By July 30 it was evident that the earth people
were doing their best to evacuate all the territory inclosed by the
circle we had cut. Graff saw it; a new idea gripped him.
"We can patrol it, Peter. With a few platforms I can hold this
territory--and spread farther."
It was an area roughly from five degrees south to seventeen degrees
north latitude, and from sixty degrees to seventy-eight degrees west
longitude. A small Space-flying globe was now dispatched with a message
to the east. It joined Graff's other force in mid-Europe. Together they
moved in one leap to the Orient, landed in Java, and began sweeping the
East Indies. They attacked the rich Dutch islands near the equator,
which with the new climate we Dutch had proudly thought would become
the fairest places of the earth.
From an island there was no swift escape for the multitudes of
panic-stricken people--I have read that they flung themselves into the
sea by thousands.
I have seen the great Javan temples, which in the 1940's before the
Great Change, we Dutch were using as a lure for the tourist trade--seen
them in ruins as they looked when the Xenephrenes had passed. They say
that the Banda Sea, in August, reeked with the bodies floating in it.
Fair, green islands, metamorphosed from the tropic to a temperate
zone, were laid waste without a living human remaining. From twenty
degrees north to twenty degrees south--down into the best land of
the Australian continent, up beyond the Philippines--the East was
devastated.
Graff's plan was to drive the world's people away from the equator.
There was only mid-Africa left, and his force now went back there.
* * * * *
"We'll see," said Graff. "Perhaps--long ago, who knows, they are
willing to yield. You can go with me, Peter. We will deliver them a
message and see what they have to say."
It was the first week in August. We took a small Space-flying globe.
Just Graff and I, with three or four of his men to handle it. Then
Zetta wanted to go. Graff agreed. He was always pleased to have her
with him; his vanity was pleased that she should see his triumphs.
I think, too, that he would not have cared to leave her in the camp
with Brea. The woman was a snake-like menace. Graff seemed contemptuous
of her. He told me once he had promised long before, to marry her, but
had since decided it was not to his liking.
We started in the globe, and sailing high, watchful that no airplane
could get up to attack us, we went to Miami. At a twenty-mile height,
we waited for nightfall. The nights were brief now in this northern
latitude. We had prepared a small metal cylinder. I wrote the message
to go in it.
"_To the governments of the earth, from Graff, the Xenephrene._"
We told them that if they wished to yield, we would name our terms, and
give directions for the destroying of all their armament. One condition
of surrender we named now, in advance.
From ten degrees north to ten degrees south latitude, all the land
in the world was permanently to be evacuated--to be held by the
Xenephrenes.
Graff, with his fifteen or eighteen thousand people, could not possibly
be expected to use or need more than a fraction of this land area,
as I had pointed out to him. But he had great, if somewhat nebulous,
colonization plans. Earth men and women from several different earth
races chosen by him, were to be sent, to be selected and judged by him
as the old Eugenic sect once thought to judge the applicants for future
parenthood.
A hundred thousand such earth people would come and swear allegiance
to his ruling government. With his Brauns they would build new cities;
populate this most benign central region of earth; build their new and
greater civilization--breed their new race, the best of the two worlds.
We directed the Miami authorities that if this message were received,
they should notify us by a swaying white searchlight beam from Miami
Beach the following night. We would then wait another two nights.
Then, the night of August 7, if the beam showed again, swaying, we
would know they desired to yield. But if it stood straight up into the
sky, motionless, we would understand they still defied us. We made no
threats--our deeds, not our words, would speak for us.
We dropped the cylinder into the outskirts of Miami. It went down,
flaming like a beacon from the blazing gas we had ignited in its top.
It fell, as close as I could judge, near the Greater Miami--Fort
Lauderdale line. By daylight we hung fifty miles high, waiting.
* * * * *
I have been told, and I can fairly imagine, the scene at the conference
which was held in the Miami War Department during those three following
long days with the brief nights between them.
At this daylight season there was a freight and passenger air line
flying from Miami to the Canaries, with connections at the Canaries for
the recently established capitals of Great Britain and France, near the
Barbary Coast.
Upon one of these liners representatives of all the European
governments came hastily to assemble at Miami; from Japan came leaders
of the Oriental powers; and from Caracas--greatest capital now of Latin
America--came the newly elected President of the Pan American Union.
Graff and I, in our devastating swing up through Venezuela late in
July, had passed not far west of Caracas; those had been anxious
moments for me.
I need not picture that grave, solemn conference of the World Powers in
Miami that August 6. I understand it lasted without intermission for
some thirty-six hours. They had determined to yield.
A giant searchlight was erected at Miami Beach. It swayed its answer
that the cylinder had been found--that Graff's message was being
considered. We saw it. We hung far, inaccessibly far aloft, waiting for
the decision.
The night of August 7 came. The conference was ending. The definite
decision to yield had been reached. From the War Department a telephone
was connected with the little house at the beach where the operator was
ready to flash the signal. Our War Secretary rose to his feet.
"Shall I phone him now, gentlemen?" They say his voice nearly broke.
There was a silent assent. From the adjoining room a telephone rang
sharply; then another. A confusion in there. Telephones ringing, and
the government radio sounding a peremptory incoming call. A confusion,
while the War Secretary stood irresolute. Then an Under Secretary burst
into the room. "A globe from Space has landed in the Everglades!"
A few moments, and fromen sources came the details. Professor
Vanderstuyft had arrived from Xenephrene! With his daughter, and Daniel
Cain, Frederick Smith--and a young man, a Xenephrene friendly to
earth--named Kean. They had weapons with them with which to fight this
invader! They were no more than fifty miles from Miami, and were being
rushed to the conference by a government Arctic A.
* * * * *
We were crouching over the floor of our hovering globe, gazing down at
the shadowy outlines of the Florida coast. The twilight of August 7
deepened into night. No searchlight beam showed. We waited. We did not
see father's globe come down: I did not know anything about it until
afterward.
The hours passed. "They will yield," said Graff confidently. "They
postpone now the humiliating hour. But before the dawn we will see
their searchlight beam. It will waver, tremble--jus' as in their own
hearts they are wavering and trembling."
And Zetta and I thought so, too. The short night passed; the twilight
of dawn began showing. And then the white beam from down there sprang
up. It stood vertical. Motionless!
For a moment we stared at it, almost unbelieving. Moisture clouded my
sight of it; my brave world, firmly shining its defiance!
Graff sprang to his feet. "Why! Incredible! They have not yielded?"
Anger contorted his face--chagrin was in his voice. I think he felt the
chagrin more strongly from Zetta's presence.
"So they will not yield? The worse for them! You shall see now the Red
Control, Peter!"
"No!" burst out Zetta. "You mus' not do that, Graff!"
His laugh was grim.
"You shall see! The Red Control--I will loose it now upon them!"