The Earth-Tube (9 page)

“All trade was stopped as darkness fell. The population was warned not to try to leave the city upon pain of execution. Complete martial law was established. Lights were permitted in buildings only on the lower floors, behind drawn blinds. Though there was no sign of enemy aircraft, the aerial defenders swarmed over the housetops all night long, adding more than was necessary to the growing nervousness of the citizens.

“Reports intended to be quieting were given out from time to time by the military heads, who asserted that the enemy tanks had proceeded a great way up the river and had stopped there, apparently abandoning the threatened attack upon Buenos Aires. These reports were false,
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however, for at dawn a great clatter of gun-fire was heard west of the city, and daring persons who climbed to the tops of buildings against the orders of the military police saw that the tanks
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of the enemy were already actually at the attack.

“The attackers seemed to pause at the edge of the plain, as if to allow the Americans an opportunity to draw their demoralized troops into line. Staunch as a herd of elephants they stood there, while more than a thousand airplanes: bombers, transports, and small fighting machines, darted at them from fore and aft and above, dropping bombs and naming oil. Nineteen airplanes were wrecked in collisions during this extraordinary display, but their efforts against the enemy were-utterly wasted.

“Suddenly, as if by a signal, the advance began. Deployed in a wedge formation, the enemy tanks advanced slowly and directly toward the edge of the moat, harassed from above by the fighting planes, and from the sides and rear by the fleet of whippet tanks, which charged and charged like Pomeranians attacking a bevy of St. Bernards, and with less effect. The enemy failed to reply even with its steam jets, which had done such destruction in the attack upon Montevideo.

“One unlucky tank, sent by the inspired order of some officer, ran in front of the leading enemy machine and charged it head-on as if pitting its puny strength against that of the enemy. It crumpled and went down with a sickening crunch, and the huge advancing tank, deflected neither to the right nor left, passed over it without a tremble.

“The advance did not long continue, however. While the helpless infantry hastened to points of safety beyond the path of the invaders, the enemy tanks drew up at the lip of the moat in a long, threatening line. and stopped.

“There was a thin, half-hearted cheer from the civilians who had been watching the wasted energy of the whippets with great misgivings. Many shouted across the artificial canyon at the enemy, screaming obscenities and thumbing noses. The whippets renewed their attack from the rear, as if to push the enemy into the ditch where they had refused to go of their own accord.

“There was a sudden, ominous silence. A tall, white stream of smoke went up from the middle tank, and at its head was a rocket, which curved high and gracefully over the city and burst there, with a thunderous crash.

“In a moment the citizens were scurrying for their cellars, fearing a bombardment or poison gas. But the rocket, as it turned out, was harmless enough in itself. It was only a signal. The fragments burst into flames and disappeared long before they touched the ground.

“Perceiving this, the civilians again set up a great shouting and catcalling, hooting their derision across the canal at the passive tanks. It was, for many of them, the last sound they ever uttered, for at that moment the whole terrain rose violently into the air, accompanied by such a crash that trees were mown to the ground for miles away by the explosion. It was as if a great finger had punched through the earth from underneath and had thrown the buildings and the pavements into the sea and left nothing of the city in its place. Out of the crater that was left of the artificial island came screaming demons of escaping steam, tongues of fire, and armies of Asian men, in scarlet coats.

“Civilians who were lucky enough to be thrown into the water by the first explosion escaped the flames and the steam. Every one else in the city was either killed outright by the blast or scalded by the steam, which covered the place for more than an hour. Of the thousands who went into the water, many were drowned, but hundreds who kept their heads and could swim eventually escaped scalding and reached the shore of the mainland.

“Upon the instant of the explosion the enemy tanks, instead of continuing their advance, turned swiftly and charged the ranks of the astonished infantry. What followed was too gruesome and horrible to recount. About four hours later a few hundred persons, many of them badly burned and virtually in rags, reached a little outlying station on the Trans-Andean railroad and were taken aboard a train there for Valparaiso. Among them was your correspondent.

“How many other persons were safe it was impossible to tell. Advices and stories told by refugees indicate that a large part of the infantry escaped the first onslaught of the enemy by scattering and taking to their heels, but they have not yet reached a telegraph station from which they can report their safety.

“A military officer who was among the refugees declared that the commanding officers in the American camp had been warned of the Asian tunneling operations under the city several days before the attack. A civilian had insisted that he heard the drilling of the sappers underneath his house. Instead of placing any credence in his story, however, the officers had laughed at the poor fellow for his pains, and he had been locked up later as a dangerous radical.”
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CHAPTER III

ONE MUST DARE

THE clayey ball of the earth had passed another milestone in its yearly course around the sun. Now spring was coming in the northern hemisphere, and under the benign influence of the warm yellow rays the grass and buds and all manner of living things were stirring to life again.

In the brown fields where snow had lain for many weeks the soil was fresh again with the spring, and farmers were preparing anew to plant their crops for another year’s food. In towns and cities where the gray mantle of winter had locked the smoky air in frosty embrace, the sky was clear and warm again. All life stretched out to greet the coming of the warm summer months.

It was as all the springs had been for countless years. except that now the chill of winter had been replaced by a chill more dreadful still in the hearts of men. The danger of destruction was still to be viewed from afar, to be sure; it was a remote and by no means certain doom. But the fact that an alien race, equipped with machines capable of withstanding artillery and flame and heat, had set about it to conquer the continents of the West was, at the least, disquieting. Millions of persons, who had heard how all the armies and resources of the Americans had crumpled before the savage onslaughts of this determined foe, were puzzled and terrified.

The news of fresh advances had come day by day, leaking through the absurd wall of silence which the military had tried to throw around the entire zone of the invasion. Now the Asians had captured the Trans-Andean railroad and following it to the western end had taken Valparaiso against the strongest defense force that had ever been mustered for battle on the Western Hemisphere. It was with their giant tanks that they still advanced; they had augmented by hundreds
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the original number released from the mouth of the causeway on the day they stormed Montevideo. Now, with the capture of the railroad and the cities at either end, they had cut off the southern part of the South American continent and were already assimilating it, running their huge pump of an earth-car through and through the globe to bring fresh armies of strange inhabitants for the new soil.

That their next move would be northward was evident. The Asians were sure of themselves: steady, deliberate. When they were ready their juggernaut tanks would bear down upon some city along the coast and would capture and destroy it as mercilessly and as completely as if there were no army in the whole Western World to make defenses or plan strategies. Fortunately, the cold months of the year were coming to the southern continent, and with them, it was assumed by many, the invasion would go more slowly, or perhaps cease entirely until spring should come again. They were deliberate, the Asians; no man could stand against them, and they need not hurry with their conquest if they chose otherwise.

If, by chance, news of the army’s reverses had not leaked out to spread dismay in the north, the good citizens of the continent had always the earth’s tremors to remind them of the ever-present activities of the Asians. Everybody, from the greatest statesman to the humblest worker in mines or fields, knew about those tremors now and often imagined he could feel or hear them as in the dead of night the heavy metal car of the Asians passed through the center of the earth, flying with express speed for the Western Hemisphere with new supplies and armies and weapons, perhaps of unknown design and newly horrible portent.

In the cities the situation was particularly bad, for the constant tremors had begun to have their effect on buildings; so at least persons in the cities had come to believe. Whenever a window shattered suddenly or a stone dropped from its lofty perch or a brick edifice cracked and began to crumble, they blamed it on the giant earth-car of the Asians. In vain builders pointed out that the tremors, strong enough to be measured by delicate instruments as they were, could hardly be responsible for these phenomena. There had been buildings collapsing before the Asians built their tube, statesmen pointed out. Falling stones were no new things, asserted the scientists. Cracks might more commonly be caused by poor workmanship than by tremors, it was said.

Nevertheless, the terror spread. All through the early spring those persons who could leave New York and Chicago, where the tallest buildings were, began to move. In New York financiers and brokers began to think of what might happen to the financial structure of the world if the Wall Street buildings should collapse, and gradually they built up a new financial center inland, in Pennsylvania, to which bankers commuted every day by airplane and where the height of buildings, made of reenforced concrete and heavy steel, was strictly limited.

Theaters and amusement centers depending upon great crowds for prosperity almost ceased to exist. The strong machinery of civilization, which a year before had hummed at its highest pitch, had now begun, to crumble before that steady tremor in the earth. Whether real or imaginary, it made no difference. Here, almost before the real struggle had begun, the northern continent was already demoralized and fearful, smitten by its own imagination to such an extent that the mere appearance of an armored enemy would have sufficed to frighten men into the open fields.

It was because of this situation that on the first of April, when the world should have been glowing with promise for the new year of productivity, that the extraordinary session of the Pan-American Congress was called at Washington by the President of the Pan-Americas. To his mind the demoralization of the country had grown intolerable. There was no intelligent support behind the Government in the fighting of the war. Some drastic measure must be taken to enable the Government to renew its grip. The age-old forms of democracy must, for a time, relinquish their claims in the interests of national safety and the continued union of the Western continents.

He had taken counsel of military chiefs, financiers, statesmen, and scientists as to what might be done to save the Western Hemisphere from the invaders. The Secretary of War had admitted that his puny efforts had been vain and foolish and that his knowledge of war was nothing against the grave and measured advances of the new enemy. Financiers and scientists and lesser leaders in political affairs had promised to support the government in whatever measures it chose to further the military resistance offered the invaders. A crisis had come in the affairs of America; it was no longer a time for theories and speculation; the hour had come when a strong central power must act and act quickly. Such unification of control could be obtained in only one way: by the appointment of an extraordinary War Council of five, under the never before used provisions of Article 17 of the Pan-American Constitution.

It was for this reason that the President had summoned the Congress: to obtain from it the necessary permission to appoint the council, with unlimited and absolute power to plan, prosecute, and direct the defense, a power extending even to the life and death of military men and civilians. It would be a revolutionary request to make of a democratic body of representatives; the President expected a stiff fight, and for that reason called upon all his supporters to attend the session: Senor Ramon Garcia, the governor of South America, Hugh Frazer, the governor of North America, Exegon Pelal, the Secretary of the Treasury of the Pan-Americas, as well as bankers and manufacturers and merchant kings whose word, he felt, would have great weight with the congressmen.

“It is the curse of democracy,” he said on the eve of the convocation of the Congress, “that in an emergency such as this we cannot act, but must, instead, spend all our energy cutting the strings of legal tape which bind us down. While our devouring enemy comes northward with fire and steel, we must be wasting time here on the debating floor, begging permission to defend our country from its enemies with unfettered hands.

“The debate in Congress will be a long one, I’m afraid. Though the fists of foes are already beating on our doors, there will be backward representatives and senators who cannot see!”

In this prediction he was not disappointed. When the President, flanked by the influential men he had summoned to Lis aid, had presented his proposition, a debate broke out which promised to last for weeks. Senators and representatives, puzzled, suspicious, and jealous, began a great hubbub of questionings and denunciations. Led by the veteran Senator Hamblin, from the Pacific Northwest, the obstructionists cast aspersions and indulged in innuendo.

“Shall we,” asked their leader, “surrender thus lightly human rights which have come down to us from the Magna Carta? Should we not, gentlemen, rather strike back in resentment at those who, seeking perhaps to further their own ambitions,
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would become members of this autocratic board?”