CHAPTER FIFTEEN
_VENGEANCE IS OURS_
"Sweep them! sweep them!" shouted Colonel Smith, as he brought hisdisintegrator to bear. Mr. Phillips and I instantly followed hisexample, and thus we swept the Martians into eternity, while Mr. Edisoncoolly continued his manipulations of the wheel.
The effect of what he was doing became apparent in less than half aminute. A shiver ran through the mass of machinery and shook the entirebuilding.
"Look! Look!" cried Sydney Phillips, who had stepped a little apart fromthe others.
We all ran to his side and found ourselves in front of a great windowwhich opened through the side of the engine, giving a view of what layin front of it. There, gleaming in the electric lights, we saw SyrtisMajor, its waters washing high against the walls of the vast powerhouse. Running directly out from the shore, there was an immensemetallic gate at least 400 yards in length and rising three hundred feetabove the present level of the water.
This great gate was slowly swinging upon an invisible hinge in such amanner that in a few minutes it would evidently stand across the currentof the Syrtis Major at right angles.
Beyond was a second gate, which was moving in the same manner. Furtheron was a third gate, and then another, and another, as far as the eyecould reach, evidently extending in an unbroken series completely acrossthe great strait.
As the gates, with accelerated motion when the current caught them,clanged together, we beheld a spectacle that almost stopped the beatingof our hearts.
The great Syrtis seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then itleaped upon the obstruction and buried its waters into one vast foaminggeyser that seemed to shoot a thousand feet skyward.
But the metal gates withstood the shock, though buried from our sight inthe seething white mass, and the baffled waters instantly swirled aroundin ten thousand gigantic eddies, rising to the level of our window andbeginning to inundate the power house before we fairly comprehended ourperil.
"We have done the work," said Mr. Edison, smiling grimly. "Now we hadbetter get out of this before the flood bursts upon us."
The warning came none too soon. It was necessary to act upon it at onceif we would save our lives. Even before we could reach the entrance tothe long passage through which we had come into the great engine room,the water had risen half-way to our knees. Colonel Smith, catching Ainaunder his arm, led the way. The roar of the maddened torrent behinddeafened us.
As we ran through the passage the water followed us, with a wickedswishing sound, and within five seconds it was above our knees; in tenseconds up to our waists.
The great danger now was that we should be swept from our feet, and oncedown in that torrent there would have been little chance of our evergetting our heads above its level. Supporting ourselves as best we couldwith the aid of the walls, we partly ran, and were partly swept along,until when we reached the outer end of the passage and emerged into theopen air, the flood was swirling about our shoulders.
Here there was an opportunity to clutch some of the ornamental worksurrounding the doorway, and thus we managed to stay our mad progress,and gradually to work out of the current until we found that the water,having now an abundance of room to spread, had fallen again as low asour knees.
But suddenly we heard the thunder of the banks tumbling behind us, andto the right and left, and the savage growl of the released water as itsprang through the breaches.
To my dying day, I think, I shall not forget the sight of a great fluidcolumn that burst through the dike at the edge of the grove of trees,and, by the tremendous impetus of its rush, seemed turned into a solidthing.
Like an enormous ram, it plowed the soil to a depth of twenty feet,uprooting acres of the immense trees like stubble turned over by theplowshare.
The uproar was so awful that for an instant the coolest of us lost ourself-control. Yet we knew that we had not the fraction of a second towaste. The breaking of the banks had caused the water again rapidly torise about us. In a little while it was once more as high as our waists.
In the excitement and confusion, deafened by the noise and blinded bythe flying foam, we were in danger of becoming separated in the flood.We no longer knew certainly in what direction was the tree by whose aidwe had ascended from the electrical ship. We pushed first one way andthen another, staggering through the rushing waters in search of it.Finally we succeeded in locating it, and with all our strength hurriedtoward it.
Then there came a noise as if the globe of Mars had been split asunder,and another great head of water hurled itself down upon the soil beforeus, and, without taking time to spread, bored a vast cavity in theground, and scooped out the whole of the grove before our eyes as easilyas a gardener lifts a sod with his spade.
Our last hope was gone. For a moment the level of the water around ussank again, as it poured into the immense excavation where the grove hadstood, but in an instant it was reinforced from all sides and began oncemore rapidly to rise.
We gave ourselves up for lost, and, indeed, there did not seem anypossible hope of salvation.
Even in the extremity I saw Colonel Smith lifting the form of Aina, whohad fainted, above the surface of the surging water, while SydneyPhillips stood by his side and aided him in supporting the unconsciousgirl.
"We stayed a little too long," was the only sound I heard from Mr.Edison.
The huge bulk of the power house partially protected us against theforce of the current, and the water spun us around in great eddies.These swept us this way and that, but yet we managed to cling together,determined not to be separated in death if we could avoid it.
Suddenly a cry rang out directly above our heads:
"Jump for your lives, and be quick!"
At the same instant the ends of several ropes splashed into the water.
We glanced upward, and there, within three or four yards of our heads,hung the electrical ship, which we had left moored at the top of thetree.
Tom, the expert electrician from Mr. Edison's shop, who had remained incharge of the ship, had never once dreamed of such a thing as desertingus. The moment he saw the water bursting over the dam, and evidentlyflooding the building which we had entered, he cast off his moorings, aswe subsequently learned, and hovered over the entrance to the powerhouse, getting as low down as possible and keeping a sharp watch for us.
But most of the electric lights in the vicinity had been carried down bythe first rush of water, and in the darkness he did not see us when weemerged from the entrance. It was only after the sweeping away of thegrove of trees had allowed a flood of light to stream upon the scenefrom a cluster of electric lamps on a distant portion of the bank on theSyrtis that had not yet given way that he caught sight of us.
Immediately he began to shout to attract our attention, but in the awfuluproar we could not hear him. Getting together all the ropes that hecould lay his hands on, he steered the ship to a point directly over us,and then dropped down within a few yards of the boiling flood.
Now as he hung over our heads, and saw the water up to our very necksand still swiftly rising, he shouted again:
"Catch hold, for God's sake!"
The three men who were with him in the ship seconded his cries.
But by the time we had fairly grasped the ropes, so rapidly was theflood rising, we were already afloat. With the assistance of Tom and hismen we were rapidly drawn up, and immediately Tom reversed the electricpolarity, and the ship began to rise.
At that same instant, with a crash that shivered the air, the immensemetallic power house gave way and was swept tumbling, like a hill tornloose from its base, over the very spot where a moment before we hadstood. One second's hesitation on the part of Tom, and the electricalship would have been battered into a shapeless wad of metal by thecareening mass.
When we had attained a considerable height, so that we could see a greatdistance on either side, the spectacle became even more fearful than itwas when we were close to the surface.
On all sides
banks and dykes were going down; trees were being uprooted;buildings were tumbling, and the ocean was achieving that victory overthe land which had long been its due, but which the ingenuity of theinhabitants of Mars had postponed for ages.
Far away we could see the front of the advancing wave crested with foamthat sparkled in the electric lights, and as it swept on it changed theentire aspect of the planet--in front of it all life, behind it alldeath.
Eastward our view extended across the Syrtis Major toward the land ofLibya and the region of Isidis. On that side also the dykes were givingway under the tremendous pressure, and the floods were rushing towardthe sunrise, which had just began to streak the eastern sky.
The continents that were being overwhelmed on the western side of theSyrtis were Meroc, Aeria, Arabia, Edom and Eden.
The water beneath us continually deepened. The current from the meltingsnows around the southern pole was at its strongest, and one couldhardly have believed that any obstruction put in its path would havebeen able to arrest it and turn it into these two all-swallowingdeluges, sweeping east and west. But, as we now perceived, the level ofthe land over a large part of its surface was hundreds of feet below theocean, so that the latter, when once the barriers were broken, rushedinto depressions that yawned to receive it.
The point where we had dealt our blow was far removed from the greatcapitol of Mars, around the Lake of the Sun, and we knew that we shouldhave to wait for the floods to reach that point before the desiredeffect could be produced. By the nearest way, the water had at least5,000 miles to travel. We estimated that its speed where we hung aboveit was as much as a hundred miles an hour. Even if that speed weremaintained, more than two days and nights would be required for thefloods to reach the Lake of the Sun.
But as the water rushed on it would break the banks of all the canalsintersecting the country, and these, being also elevated above thesurface, would add the impetus of their escaping waters to hasten theadvance of the flood. We calculated, therefore, that about two dayswould suffice to place the planet at our mercy.
Half way from the Syrtis Major to the Lake of the Sun another greatconnecting link between the Southern and Northern ocean basins, calledon our maps of Mars the Indus, existed, and through this channel we knewthat another great current must be setting from the south toward thenorth. The flood that we had started would reach and break the banks ofthe Indus within one day.
The flood traveling in the other direction, toward the east, would haveconsiderably further to go before reaching the neighborhood of the Lakeof the Sun. It, too, would involve hundreds of great canals as itadvanced and would come plunging upon the Lake of the Sun and itssurrounding forts and cities, probably about half a day later than thearrival of the deluge that traveled toward the west.
Now that we had let the awful destroyer loose we almost shrank from thethought of the consequences which we had produced. How many millionswould perish as the result of our deed we could not even guess. Many ofthe victims, so far as we knew, might be entirely innocent of enmitytoward us, or of the evil which had been done to our native planet. Butthis was a case in which the good--if they existed--must suffer with thebad on account of the wicked deeds of the latter.
I have already remarked that the continents of Mars were higher on theirnorthern and southern borders where they faced the great oceans. Thesenatural barriers bore to the main mass of land somewhat the relation ofthe edge of a shallow dish to its bottom. Their rise on the land sidewas too gradual to give them the appearance of hills, but on the sidetoward the sea they broke down in steep banks and cliffs several hundredfeet in height. We guessed that it would be in the direction of theseelevations that the inhabitants would flee, and those who had timelywarning might thus be able to escape in case the flood did not--as itseemed possible it might in its first mad rush--overtop the highestelevations on Mars.
As day broke and the sun slowly rose upon the dreadful scene beneath us,we began to catch sight of some of the fleeing inhabitants. We hadshifted the position of the fleet toward the south, and were nowsuspended above the southeastern corner of Aeria. Here a high bank ofreddish rock confronted the sea, whose waters ran lashing and roaringalong the bluffs to supply the rapid drought produced by the emptying ofSyrtis Major. Along the shore there was a narrow line of land, hundredsof miles in length, but less than a quarter of a mile broad, which stillrose slightly above the surface of the water, and this land of refugewas absolutely packed with the monstrous inhabitants of the planet whohad fled hither on the first warning that the water was coming.
In some places it was so crowded that the later comers could not findstanding ground on dry land, but were continually slipping back andfalling into the water. It was an awful sight to look at them. Itreminded me of pictures I had seen of the deluge in the days of Noah,when the waters had risen to the mountain tops, and men, women andchildren were fighting for a foothold upon the last dry spots the earthcontained.
We were all moved by a desire to help our enemies, for we wereoverwhelmed with feelings of pity and remorse, but to aid them was nowutterly beyond our power. The mighty floods were out, and the end was inthe hands of God.
Fortunately, we had little time for these thoughts, because no soonerhad the day begun to dawn around us than the airships of the Martiansappeared. Evidently the people in them were dazed by the disaster anduncertain what to do. It is doubtful whether at first they comprehendedthe fact that we were the agents who had produced the cataclysm.
But as the morning advanced the airships came flocking in greater andgreater numbers from every direction, many swooping down close to theflood in order to rescue those who were drowning. Hundreds gatheredalong the slip of land which was crowded as I have described, withrefugees, while other hundreds rapidly assembled about us, evidentlypreparing for an attack.
We had learned in our previous contests with the airships of theMartians that our electrical ships had a great advantage over them, notmerely in rapidity and facility of movement, but in the fact that ourdisintegrators could sweep in every direction, while it was only withmuch difficulty that the Martian airships could discharge theirelectrical strokes at an enemy poised directly above their heads.
Accordingly, orders were instantly flashed to all the squadrons to risevertically to an elevation so great that the rarity of the atmospherewould prevent the airships from attaining the same level.
This maneuver was executed so quickly that the Martians were unable todeal us a blow before we were poised above them in such a position thatthey could not easily reach us. Still they did not mean to give up theconflict.
Presently we saw one of the largest of their ships maneuvering in a verypeculiar manner, the purpose of which we did not at first comprehend.Its forward portion commenced slowly to rise, until it pointed upwardlike the nose of a fish approaching the surface of the water. The momentit was in this position, an electrical bolt was darted from its prow,and one of our ships received a shock which, although it did not provefatal to the vessel itself, killed two or three men aboard it,disarranged its apparatus, and rendered it for the time being useless.
"Ah, that's their trick, is it?" said Mr. Edison. "We must look out forthat. Whenever you see one of the airships beginning to stick its noseup after that fashion blaze away at it."
An order to this effect was transmitted throughout the squadron. At thesame time several of the most powerful disintegrators were directed uponthe ship which had executed the stratagem and, reduced to a wreck, itdropped, whirling like a broken kite until it fell into the floodbeneath.
Still the Martian ships came flocking in ever greater numbers from alldirections. They made desperate attempts to attain the level at which wehung above them. This was impossible, but many, getting an impetus by aswift run in the denser portion of the atmosphere beneath, succeeded inrising so high that they could discharge their electric artillery withconsiderable effect. Others, with more or less success, repeated themaneuver of the ship which had first attacked us, and
thus the battlegradually became more general and more fierce, until, in the course ofan hour or two, our squadron found itself engaged with probably athousand airships, which blazed with incessant lightning strokes, andwere able, all too frequently, to do us serious damage.
But on our part the battle was waged with a cool determination and aconsciousness of insuperable advantage which boded ill for the enemy.Only three or four of our sixty electrical ships were seriously damaged,while the work of the disintegrators upon the crowded fleet that floatedbeneath us was terrible to look upon.
Our strokes fell thick and fast on all sides. It was like firing into aflock of birds that could not get away. Notwithstanding all theirefforts they were practically at our mercy. Shattered intounrecognizable fragments, hundreds of the airships continually droppedfrom their great height to be swallowed up in the boiling waters.
Yet they were game to the last. They made every effort to get at us, andin their frenzy they seemed to discharge their bolts without much regardto whether friends or foes were injured. Our eyes were nearly blinded bythe ceaseless glare beneath us, and the uproar was indescribable.
At length, after this fearful contest had lasted for at least threehours, it became evident that the strength of the enemy was rapidlyweakening. Nearly the whole of their immense fleet of airships had beendestroyed, or so far damaged that they were barely able to float. Justso long, however, as they showed signs of resistance we continued topour our merciless fire upon them, and the signal to cease was not givenuntil the airships, which had escaped serious damage began to flee inevery direction.
"Thank God, the thing is over," said Mr. Edison. "We have got thevictory at last, but how we shall make use of it is something that atpresent I do not see."
"But will they not renew the attack?" asked someone.
"I do not think they can," was the reply. "We have destroyed the veryflower of their fleet."
"And better than that," said Colonel Smith, "we have destroyed theirclan; we have made them afraid. Their discipline is gone."
But this was only the beginning of our victory. The floods below wereachieving a still greater triumph, and now that we had conquered theairships we dropped within a few hundred feet of the surface of thewater and then turned our faces westward in order to follow the advanceof the deluge and see whether, as we hoped, it would overwhelm ourenemies in the very center of their power.
In a little while we had overtaken the first wave, which was stilldevouring everything. We saw it bursting the banks of the canal,sweeping away forests of gigantic trees, and swallowing cities andvillages, leaving nothing but a broad expanse of swirling and eddyingwaters, which, in consequence of the prevailing red hue of thevegetation and the soil, looked, as shuddering we gazed down upon it,like an ocean of blood flecked with foam and steaming with the escapinglife of the planet from whose veins it gushed.
As we skirted the southern borders of the continent the same dreadfulscenes which we had beheld on the coast of Aeria presented themselves.Crowds of refugees thronged the high borders of the land and struggledwith one another for a foothold against the continually rising flood.
We saw, too, flitting in every direction, but rapidly fleeing before ourapproach, many airships, evidently crowded with Martians, but not armedeither for offense or defense. These, of course, we did not disturb, formerciless as our proceedings seemed even to ourselves, we had nointention of making war upon the innocent, or upon those who had nomeans to resist. What we had done it had seemed to us necessary to do,but henceforth we were resolved to take no more lives if it could beavoided.
Thus, during the remainder of that day, all of the following night andall of the next day, we continued upon the heels of the advancing flood.
Edison's Conquest of Mars Page 16
