This fifth catastrophe marked the beginning of the terror's last
period. Until then earth's peoples had hoped against hope that in some
unexplained way the whole business was the result of natural forces,
but now they could no longer doubt that far overhead were hovering
vessels or vehicles dragging their trawls here and there over the
earth's surface for their own unfathomable purposes. Dread was upon the
earth! At any moment of day or night the giant trawl might crash down
in terrible annihilation.
It was the sword of Damocles, suspended over a helpless world!
The days after the Scarsdale terror saw the world's activities at their
most intense pitch. Dr. Howard and I were occupied without end in the
direction of the manufacture and distribution of the air-mines. For
he was now having them released, not at the factories where they were
assembled, but at various points over the earth, so that they would
cover more uniformly the surface of the atmospheric ocean.
Day after day we sent them out. I know that to me those days were part
of a dream of nightmare activity and tension. Again the world was
waiting in dread for the coming of the great trawl. It did not come
again, for reasons which we shall never guess, until the 19th. That
interval of three days between trawlings was the longest that had yet
elapsed. We owe much to it. Perhaps our world.
For in those days the air-mines were whizzing upward in fast-increasing
numbers. By the 19th they were ascending at the rate of more than a
thousand a day. All of earth's peoples, in the industrial regions at
least, seemed toiling upon the one task of making the great globes. The
world's hopes were raised. We were winning, it seemed, by sowing the
atmosphere's surface thick with air-mines that sooner or later must
demolish all or part of the space invaders. We were exultant, even. And
then--
Shortly after dark on the 19th a trawl flashed down to gouge most of
the town of Martiana, in southern Norway, from the face of the earth.
On the morning of the 20th another trawl, or the same one, descended
and gouged the bed of the Mediterranean just off Capri and in full
sight of its shore.
A little before noon on the 21st a trawl was glimpsed plowing a vast
wound in the Sudan desert near a British outpost. And three hours later
a trawl cut a terrific trail of annihilation squarely across the city
of Algiers.
Earth and the races of the earth rocked beneath those fearful
cataclysms, striking in such swift succession. With them the activities
upon which our races of man had been so fearfully bent--the manufacture
of the air-mines--began to dwindle. By the 20th the number of air-mines
released had fallen off a little, and after the catastrophes of that
and the next day it was even smaller. Dr. Howard's reports showed that
on the 22nd but four hundred air-mines had been released in comparison
with the twelve hundred released but three days before.
Mankind was giving up the battle in despair!
Panic was breaking loose over the earth, a panic and dread that nothing
could restrain. Toiling thousands quit their work upon the manufacture
of air-mines in hopeless despair. Mobs began to appear in the streets
of London, New York, Shanghai, and Sydney, and rioting became general.
The world was going mad with fear!
Dr. Howard strove above all else to keep the manufacture of the
air-mines going. Under his urgent pleadings the governments of earth
used their troops to protect and continue that manufacture as well as
might be, instead of using them to suppress the growing riots. The
production of the globes leaped again to almost a thousand a day. Each
day saw them whizzing up to join the thousands upon thousands already
floating at the surface of earth's atmosphere.
And yet it seemed all so futile. It was not like striking back at a
visible enemy, this frantic manufacture and release of the mines. Men
would have been happier by far, I think, had they faced more terrible
enemies in the plain light of day. I know that in those last days of an
apparently disintegrating world I would have been easier in mind.
"It's a race against time now, Ransome," said Dr. Howard. "We cannot
continue the production of air-mines much longer--and civilization is
crashing now!"
"But is there no other way?" I cried. "My God, Howard, these air-mines
are useless--we've sent up tens of thousands and they can be no more
than a sprinkling in the vast extent of the atmosphere's surface. To
try some other way--"
"There is no other!" he exclaimed. "Ransome, we must fight it out to
the end! The air-mines--they're our one chance!"
"But we can't send up many more," I said. "The rioting in Germany has
become so bad that all the factories save two that were making mines
there have quit. We've no more than a dozen factories left in Europe
and hardly more than that in America!"
"As long as we can release one mine we'll do so!" he declared. "Man's
crisis is here--and he's got to have the courage now to fight in the
dark against an unknown foe for his existence!"
Somehow Dr. Howard's indomitable will held together in those last days
the thread of organization between the factories and their sources of
supply, despite the wide-spread outbreaks that were going on. Fewer and
fewer were becoming the air-mines released, but still they were being
made and sent whizzing upward.
But on the 25th it became apparent to all that our last efforts were
flickering out. Then late on that day came news of the tenth trawl. It
had descended a hundred miles south of Rio de Janeiro to crash across a
plantation with the loss of a score of lives. And hardly had that dread
news spread around the earth than came word that the trawl had again
flashed down a few hours later to gouge a terrific scar from the side
of one of the peaks of the Peruvian Andes.
The end! With the spreading of those two reports it seemed so. For they
so deepened the blind and unreasoning fear that had gripped mankind
that the production of air-mines all but ceased on that day, only a few
dozens continuing to be assembled and released. Panic-mad mobs caused
chaos in the greater cities. Every organization of civilization seemed
breaking down, and troops called to suppress wild outbreaks fought
pitched battles with the mobs.
On the night of the 26th came the crisis for mankind. For it was known
that all man's efforts to halt the menace from above had failed, that
mankind lay defenseless beneath the grim and terrible invaders from
beyond, who might at any time loose even greater horrors upon us. Man
had fought an enemy he had never even seen and had lost! He had fought
an enemy who apparently cared no more for the wrecking of mankind far
beneath than we do of the insects beneath our feet!
Victory?
Through the hours of that dread night I sat with Dr. Howard and with
the last of our remaining organization in the Washington office.
Outside, to the east the sky was red with the glow of flames, where a
mob had set fire to looted buildings. From afar we heard the crackle
of shots, the rumble of hurrying tanks, and the wild uproar of cries
as troops sought to bring order out of the chaos of a dissolving
civilization. We were silent, in a silence that made each minute
age-long. And it was there, silent, almost toward morning, that the
last messenger of mankind's hope found us.
He was a dishevelled young radio operator and it was some moments
before we comprehended what he was babbling frantically forth to us.
When we did, twenty minutes saw us in the air and speeding southward
through the night with an army aviator.
Over the fear-mad, riot-blazing city and through the night out over
other cities we sped, at the plane's utmost velocity, Dr. Howard
peering ahead with face set, I gripping the cockpit's rim with nervous,
trembling fingers. We were still speechless as our plane raced
southward. It was not until dawn was streaking the sky eastward that
the plane bumped down into a field a few miles from a little Georgia
village.
We found men awaiting us, in uniform and civilian clothes, and all were
half-hopeful, half-awed. Swiftly they told us what had happened.
Shortly after midnight citizens near the village had heard a faint,
almost inaudible but clear sound of detonation, coming as though from
far above. Almost in the next instant had come another detonating
sound, as faint as the first, and then silence. But a few instants
later, coming from the west of the village, they heard in quick
succession two terrific prolonged crashings as of some thing or things
falling from an immense height.
They had thought the trawl was descending on them, at first, and had
fled from it for some distance. But after moments of hesitation they
had made their way to the scene of the crashes, and what they found had
made them get word quickly to the soldiers in a near-by town, whose
first act had been to radio Dr. Howard.
The captain, who was the commanding officer, told this much to Dr.
Howard; together we went across the grassy fields. Before us, as we
rose over a slope, there loomed a great column of steam going up
into the sparkling light of day. We went very near to it before we
halted. So near that we could see even through its veiling mists great
shattered masses of glittering metal, buried almost completely in the
soft earth, from which they had smashed a huge crater in striking. We
stared at it for a time, not daring to go nearer for the heat that had
caused the steam still radiated intensely from the shattered metal. Not
far across the fields was a thinner steam-column, and they told us that
the colossal metal mass that caused it was buried even deeper in the
earth, so deep that hardly any part of it could be distinguished.
Dr. Howard and I stared at the two giant geysers of white vapor. It
was victory, we knew. Victory, whether partial or complete, over the
space-visitors who had held earth beneath such a spell of terror. Far
above, cruising on the surface of earth's atmosphere, two of their
mighty vessels had struck a field of the air-mines we had released, had
crashed in shattering annihilation through the dark night!
Victory! Yet it was not as I had dreamed the victory would be. I had
thought of a wild climax after a terrific battle. It was so strange, so
different. Just Dr. Howard and I and the khaki-clad soldiers and the
wondering villagers, standing there in the soft light of the Georgia
dawn, in the quiet fields with only the sound of birds about us, gazing
so quietly toward those twin gigantic steam-columns. Then realization
of what it meant struck through to my terror-numbed heart. Victory,
whether partial or complete--it meant the dissolution of the spell
of horror that had gripped earth, the gathering of earth's forces to
carry on the struggle, if need be, against foes whom we now knew were
not invincible. Victory, and in a few moments the word of it would be
flashing out around the earth....
Our victory proved complete after all, at least in so far as it marked
the end of the terrible trawlings. Whether the two huge space-ships
that had met their end over Georgia were the only ones to come to
earth, or whether there were others that were forced to flee by this
destruction of their fellows, we cannot say. We know only that after
the fall of those two through the night, the colossal trawls did not
descend again. But for days, weeks, and months, the world waited in
anxious dread for their reappearance.
"We Have Come of Age"
Even now that dread has not disappeared, wholly. For never again will
earth seem to us the isolated globe that it once was. We know now that
there are ships that come and go out there in the great void, ships
from some near or far planet. They came once to visit the earth, to
trawl in its air-ocean with their giant scoops, and they may come
again. We cannot say that they will not. We can but pray that they will
not.
Of their nature we know no more than before. Dr. Howard and the
greatest scientists of the world have examined with the utmost
minuteness the two great metal wrecks in Georgia, but have been able to
learn comparatively little from them, so fused into molten metal were
they by their plunge down through the atmosphere. The glittering metal
of which they were constructed has proved quite strange and impossible
to produce on earth. There have been found half-melted instruments or
mechanisms in small number, whose purpose we cannot as yet understand.
What of the beings who manned those mighty ships? That is perhaps
the greatest question of all, and the most insoluble. A thin coat of
strange glistening slime was found on a few parts of the two wrecks
not melted. Whether that is all that remains of the space-visitors of
those ships, whether their bodies were solid or liquid or even gaseous
or merely force emanations, we can offer only theories.
The world has recovered fully from those days of horror, and in
recovering has given to Dr. Howard the honors due him. He is beyond all
question the greatest figure in the world today and even on myself, as
his companion and assistant, some of his fame has fallen. For he is
the hero not of any single group or nation or race of men, but of all
mankind.
He has used the tremendous influence that is his alone to urge
preparation upon the world, preparation for emergencies of a similar
nature that may again arise.
"Out of the unknown came these dread space-visitors to earth," he
warns in an article, "and who knows but that somewhere in the unknown
even today other grim vessels are winging through the void toward the
earth? It may even be that our present peace is only a respite and
that we have repelled the first attack of these unknown beings only to
have them coming again upon us in infinitely greater numbers. Sometime
in the future, I think, man will have advanced in knowledge to the
point where he too will venture into the void, will be able to meet
his attackers face to face. But until then the air-mines are our only
protection.
"I want to see vast fields of them floating on the surface of earth's
atmosphere, fields through which no invading space-ships from the
void outside can make their way. For Providence may not again aid our
efforts. Man is probably but one being among the universe's countless
races of living creatures, and he can only hold his planet against
others by his own wisdom and strength. Never again can he feel the
false security that was ours before these space-visitors came."
This warning, surely, we are heeding; yet even with the loss of that
old false security, we do not face the future with fear. Whatever
beings of power the universe holds, we realize now that we too are
beings of power. We have fought for our planet against the space
visitors and have held it. As a race we have come of age.