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.