Hope and Fear
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!