5
Standing in the submarine’s narrow control room, Clinton gazed intently at the dials before him, then out of the port-holes in the wall. “We’re there, Stevens,” he said, quietly, gesturing toward the little windows through which the great fleet behind could be seen, each of its scores of craft resting motionless on the surface. And now the submarine’s commander, Evans, who had been lost and prisoned with Clinton, came toward them.
“Our craft will descend first,” he told them, “the others following in close formation. Our plan is to descend to an elevation of a few thousand feet above the city and attempt to cripple or destroy the generator beneath it with our torpedoes and bomb-charges.”
While he spoke he had twisted around the signal-lever on the dial before him, and a moment later, in answer to his signal, the boat’s electric motors again took up their powerful hum. At the same time it began to move forward through the waters, slanting downward. Stevens had a last glimpse through the port-holes of the sea and sky outside, warmly lit by the sun that blazed above, and then the long green waves were washing up over the glass and over the submarine’s conning-tower as it slanted downward, in a great spiral. And soon the green waters outside, alive with shoals of silvery fish, were darkening, changing, as the needle on the bathometer dial crept slowly around.
He looked up suddenly as he glimpsed through the port-holes a dark shape passing above, and then saw that it was but one of the submarines of the fleet above, descending after them and following them, score upon score of long, dark, fishlike hulls, that circled and dipped and sank after them, down toward the fate of a world. Surely in all the record of battles had men never gone toward battle like this, with no shouts or cheers or flying flags or defiant shots, but only the dark, grim shapes that sank gently down and down into the peaceful, darkening depths of the sea.
Down, down, down—a thousand feet the dial registered, and the waters about the submarine had become dark blue, all but lightless, and darkening still more as they steadily dropped lower. There were no lights turned on, nothing to betray their presence, and into a still deeper darkness the great fleet sank, while Clinton and Evans and the seamen in the little room stared from the dials to the dark port-holes with strange, set faces. Great currents had begin to rock and sway the submarine as it dropped on, currents from the mighty generator below, Stevens knew, but still they held to their downward progress until the bathometric dial showed a depth of a mile—a mile and a half—two miles——
Abruptly Clinton, at the port-holes, made a sudden gesture, and pointed downward. Stevens gazed intently down into the blackness that seemed to press against the glass, and then he uttered a low exclamation. For he could make out, far below, a ghostly white radiance that filtered faintly up toward them through the filmy depths. Stronger and stronger it was growing as they sank down toward it, and he saw Evans turn, give swift orders through the speaking-tube by his side, and heard the clang and clash of metal somewhere in the submarine as its great torpedo and bomb tubes were made ready. In an instant, it seemed, while they dropped downward still, the stillness of the submarine had been replaced by swift activity. And then, cutting abruptly across the sounds of that activity, came a sharp cry from Clinton.
“Those globes!” he cried. “They are coming up! Look!”
But Stevens, too, had seen. Outlined dark against the growing white light beneath them he had glimpsed a dark, round object that was moving steadily and swiftly up toward them from beneath, that moved up with ever-increasing speed like the reversal of some object falling downward. Swiftly it came, and now he could see that it was a black metal globe perhaps a yard in diameter. He felt the submarine swerve sharply as Evans abruptly spun its wheel, glimpsed the uprushing globe grazing past its side, and then the thing had passed above them, and had struck full on the bottom of a submarine just above. There was a flash of intense purple light, flaring out through the waters in blinding intensity, and then the submarine rocked and spun like a leaf in a gale, while the great flash and the craft above which it had enveloped vanished together.
“Bombs!” shouted Clinton. “Bombs of some kind that they release from beneath, to rise and strike us—and look, more——”
Even as he spoke there was rushing up toward them from beneath an immense mass of the round black globes, seeming in that moment to fill the waters about them.
Stevens remembered the next few moments only as a timeless period of flashing action. He felt the submarine dive steeply downward under the hand of its commander, saw through the glass scores of the deadly globes flashing up past them, and then the submarine again was rocked by titanic convulsions of the waters about it as craft after craft of the fleet above them vanished in blinding flashes of the purple light. In those few minutes, he knew, scores of the submarines that followed them had fallen victim to the deadly spheres.
But now the great fleet, diving sharply amid that deadly uprush of globes, was within a few thousand feet of the sea’s floor, was slanting down through the white radiance toward the city below, which Stevens saw for the first time. A moment, as the fleet seemed to pause above the city, he saw it all plain—the multitudes of ranked great globular structures, stretching away as far as the eye could see, the dark, slug-like beings that hastened through their streets and squares, the vast pit at the city’s center from which arose the mighty, half-glimpsed current of waters, and the towering spire near that pit’s edge, the tiny bulbular room at its top a point of green radiance, around which were grouped scores of the vast, thousand-foot striding-machines. Then that one moment of pause was over and the whole great fleet was swooping down upon the city below, releasing a shower of great torpedoes and bombs as it did so.
The next moment there came a hundred flashes of fire beneath them as the torpedoes and depth-charges struck, and then it seemed as though in a score of places beneath them the city was crumbling, disintegrating, beneath the force of the great explosions. The submarine was rocking and swaying perilously from the effect of those explosions, only the super-resistant hulls of the new-type craft enabling them to endure the shock, but even while Stevens heard the men near him shouting hoarsely he was aware that the massed boats were diving again, and again the thunderous detonations below came dully to their ears through the waters about them.
But now he heard a sudden cry of alarm, taken up and repeated by all in the control room. From far away, all around the great city, there were hastening toward the attacking submarines scores of the giant striding-machines, their vast steps whirling them across the city with inconceivable swiftness, the great arm of each outstretched toward the submarines. An order was barked, and the craft’s propellers spun swiftly as it headed upward to avoid those reaching, menacing arms, while the whole great fleet headed up also with the same purpose. The next moment, however, a spark of more brilliant white light broke into being in the city below them—a great, erect cylinder, they saw, that was suddenly shining with a dazzling radiance that darkened the white luminosity of the waters about it. And as it broke into being the submarine below seemed suddenly to waver, to halt, and then to be pulled slowly, steadily downward by great unseen hands, toward that shining cylinder.
Stevens heard the motors throbbing in his own craft, its spinning propellers only serving to hold it in the same position, and heard a shout from Evans.
“That cylinder!” he cried. “It’s a great magnet of some kind—it’s pulling our ships downward!”
For now by dozens, by scores, by hundreds, the fleet’s massed ships were being pulled downward, their screws thrashing the waters in vain, pulled down toward that mighty, dazzling beacon of light. The next moment the great striding-machines had reached them, were grasping them, crushing them, whirling them about like toys and hurling them far away to break and smash upon the globes below, spilling forth men and air-bubbles and great clouds of oil. Ever downward, downward, the mighty magnet of light pulled the helpless craft, while Stevens’ own craft, highest of them all, could only resist that terrific pull by all the power of its humming motors. And among the helpless craft below he could see the great machines of the slug-people stalking about in terrific destruction, crushing and smashing the defenseless boats as they sought vainly to escape while Stevens’ own craft sought frenziedly to win out of the remorseless grip that held it.
But now, below, the doomed submarines seemed suddenly to cease their efforts to escape from the great magnet’s grip, and abruptly turned, paused, and then hurtled down with all their own force and that of the attracting magnet toward the giant machines below them whose great arms were destroying them. Stevens cried out hoarsely as he saw torpedo and bomb flash down and send a half-dozen of the great machines reeling and crashing down upon the city in flashes of bursting fire. At the same moment he was aware that their own craft was winning slowly out of the giant grip of the magnet, inch by inch, foot by foot, creeping upward and outward from that grip, while below the last scores of the attacking submarines were meeting their doom, crushed by the arms of the giant machines and annihilated by the purple-flaring bombs that rushed up toward them from the city below.
And now the great machines were striding toward his own craft, the last remaining one except for a few far across the city that were battling their way upward against others of the machines. Slowly, slowly, the submarine crept upward, while the mighty shapes whirled across the streets and globes of the city toward it. They were below it, now, were reaching up with gigantic arms, and Stevens stared down upon those upward-reaching arms in a strange apathy of despair. The battle was over, he knew, humanity’s battle, lost now forever, its last chance flickered out. Up came the whirling arms, up, while still the submarine crept higher, and then one of them had struck it a great, glancing blow, in reaching for it, had knocked all in it to the floor, stunning Evans and his seaman and Stevens himself against the metal walls, and knocking, too, the submarine out of the last limits of the magnet’s giant grip.
Its propellers whirling with sudden power, it shot out of that unseen hold, over the city, and Stevens raised his head, stunned and bleeding, to see Clinton standing at the wheel, to hear his wild shout as he sent the submarine racing above the city toward the great pit and the uprushing current at its center, toward the towering spire at that pit’s rim, and the round, green-lit little control room at its top. Straight toward that ball-like room at the great spire’s tip flashed the racing submarine, and Stevens glimpsed the mighty striding-machines, far across the city, abandoning the battle with the remaining few submarines, which shot sharply upward, to whirl after their own; saw rushing toward them from around the spire others of the giant machines, their vast arms upraised to grasp and crush the hurtling craft. But before they could grasp it, before their great arms could do ought more than graze along its sides, Clinton had sent the submarine flashing past them with a hoarse cry and had crashed it straight into the little room at the mighty tower’s tip.
Through the metal walls of that room the hurtling submarine crashed as though through walls of paper, speeding still straight up and outward with the force of its tremendous impetus. To the half-conscious Stevens, crouched there. It seemed that for a single moment the whole world held its breath, and then he saw a fountain of brilliant green fire burst out and upward from the little control room at the great spire’s top, felt a mighty, thundering detonation shake the waters about him, and then half glimpsed below him the sea’s bottom and the great city upon it heaving, rumpling, breaking and crashing, as that city broke up and was annihilated by a tremendous uprush of dazzling fires from beneath it—broke up and was annihilated, as he knew, by the explosion of the mighty generator beneath it, whose titanic, pent-up energies the wrecking of the little control room had released—broke up and was annihilated, Stevens knew, as all the cities of the slug-people had been in that moment, when the mighty generators beneath each of those cities exploded likewise, the prisoned energies of all of them released by the wrecking of the little room from which all had been controlled. In all the far-flung deeps of earth’s seas the cities of the slug-people and all their hideous hordes had met annihilation in that tremendous moment, he knew. The earth shuddered and swayed beneath those simultaneous, titanic cataclysms; the sea’s whole floor rolled and shook; and then, as the submarine was flung wildly upward by the terrific convulsions of the waters, the vast fiery uprush of destruction beneath faded from his eyes.
Then Stevens felt his senses failing him, sank backward and was but dimly conscious of the waters outside the submarine roaring wildly as it shot upward with terrific speed. For a time that seemed endless to his darkened mind that roaring continued, and then abruptly came silence, and a great shock and splash. Then he felt hands upon him, and hoarse voices shouting in his ears, heard the doors above clanging open, admitting a flood of sunlight and clean fresh air upon him, and then he knew no more.