The Space Visitors
Just as we look upon fish as inhabitants of the ocean, so some beings from outer space may look upon us as being inhabitants at the bottom of an atmospheric ocean.
Such beings, possibly gigantic in size and power, coming in the vicinity of our earth, may, for purposes of curiosity or exploration, decide to discover what we queer beings are, and what this little planet is that we inhabit.
That such beings may have actually come near the earth, is asserted forcibly by Charles Fort in his amazing book, “The Book of the Damned,” in which he brings forward evidence to show that over a period of the past 150 years there has been evidence of strange extra-terrestrial activity, presumably from sentient beings.
As Mr. Hamilton so truthfully points out, we beings of the earth are not at all isolated. Any day we may have plunged upon us an enemy from space that would have no more regard for our civilization than we have for those of the ants and other insects.
How we may combat such enemies, Mr. Hamilton shows in quite a remarkable story.
Because Dr. Howard has asked me to prepare a concise account of the coming of the space-visitors, I, Stanley Ransome, have tried to write a simple record of my own contacts with them. Such a record will necessarily have errors enough; but it seems to me that the facts can be most clearly presented in such a fashion.
It was late in June that I first learned of the affair, through Dr. Howard himself. Dr. Jason Howard was holder of the chair of Aeronautical Science in Gotham University, and his contributions to the progress of aerial navigation had made him renowned in both scientific and commercial circles. For two years I had been an instructor and assistant in his department of the university.
Toward the end of that particular June afternoon he came into the laboratory where I was testing the tensile strength of a new alloy, and handed me a folded newspaper.
“You haven’t seen this, Ransome?” he questioned. “They’re shouting them all over the city.”
“I hope you haven’t ruined a completely good test to call my attention to the latest murder,” I jested, as I unfolded the paper. But when my eyes took in the import of its black headlines my smile vanished. They shrieked their message in the tallest available type:
HUNDREDS SLAIN IN IOWA VILLAGE BY
CATACLYSM! MANNLERTOWN SCENE
OF MYSTERIOUS HORROR!
The story below the headlines described what was then known of the catastrophe which had occurred just before dawn on that day. Mannlertown, an agricultural center of considerable size in eastern Iowa, had been awakened a short hour before daylight by a colossal grinding and roaring sound coming from the east.
Before the startled, half-awakened people had been able to leap from their beds, however, the thing was upon them. It was horror, earthquake, annihilation, all in one, driving across the town with immense speed. A terrific crashing of shattered buildings spread through the community, and for an instant the gigantic grinding roar seemed receding westward. Then it had stopped completely.
It was several minutes before anyone in the stunned city ventured out into the streets, half-curious and half-terrified. But those who finally did so were paralyzed by astonishment and terror. For a colossal path of destruction had been cut straight across the city’s northern section.
It was like a gigantic trench or canal gouged out by a superhuman instrument, being over a quarter of a mile in width and almost as great in depth. It began in an open field three miles east of Mannlertown and ended in a thinly-settled suburban section a mile westward.
Houses, people, trees, fences, roads—everything that had lain in the track of the unknown destroyer had vanished as though it had been whirled into space, and there lay open to the sun nothing but this vast wound in the earth’s surface! Hundreds of people, it was estimated, had gone to death in the moment of the unparalleled cataclysm.