The Earth-Tube (7 page)

Many newspapers, at first alarmed and impressed by the pronouncements of Dr. Scott and the corroborating evidence given by the Secretary, were misled by the attitude of the invaders and soon began to laugh at the whole affair. They published long interviews with established scientists, proving that no such thing as a tube through the earth was possible. Anthropologists declared that even if it were, the strange Asians who had conquered the East were incapable of such a feat of engineering.

“The most charitable estimate of these men places them somewhere between the African native and the early American Indian,” one was quoted as saying. “That they overwhelmed the Japanese and Chinese need hardly be taken into account. They did it by sheer force of numbers, not by intelligence or new mechanical appliances. Dr. Scott, it is to be feared, read too closely the more erratic newspaper accounts of the time. He allowed his scientific imagination to run away with him.”

The newspapers made fun of the Secretary of War also, and that was something the Secretary could not stand. Hardly more than a week after the exploring flight to South America he came to Dr. Scott’s laboratory and explained that he no longer cared to be quoted as certifying to the theory of the earth-tube.

“You saw it yourself,” exclaimed Dr. Scott, tartly.

“I thought I saw it,” was the reply, “but since I have had an opportunity to think it over, I have become convinced that what we saw was only some new and unusual volcanic disturbance. You will agree with me, I am sure, that neither of us or any one in the party saw any of the Asians you have referred to. If the island and the shield were the work of men, how does it come that we did not see a single man about the place?”

Dr. Scott expressed his impatience at this reasoning by ignoring the question, to ask a more pointed one.

“Then you intend to abandon your effort to find some way of combating these people?”

“Well,” answered the Secretary hesitantly, “I’ll leave the artillery there for a while.”

“But nothing else?”

“No.”

“Mr. Secretary, you have already delayed for three weeks on this matter though the proof was in your hands. Three weeks ago we might have found them unable to protect themselves. Now they are strongly entrenched. Give them another week and they will be in Montevideo. What will you say to that?”

“Nonsense,” said the Secretary. He took his hat and walked, unaccompanied, to the door.

“Two weeks from now the papers will be calling you worse things than they are to-day,” was the scientist’s parting shot, “and it will be for better reason, too.”

The prediction proved accurate. Amid a constant downpour of warmish rain the coast defense gunners peppered away at the approaching causeway, under orders to stop its advance at any cost. It was like trying to stop a railroad train with spitballs. One morning through the mist they saw that the head of the land-link was half a mile from the shore, and the commander of the artillery company radioed frantically to the South American capital at Rio de Janeiro for re-enforcements and infantry.

Two hours later, when the first of the heavily loaded infantry transports appeared overhead, they saw through the rain that the artillery camp, the guns and ammunition, and the men who had sent too late for aid had been covered with a mountainside of earth. The causeway was complete. Already the overhead protective structure had been brought within a few rods of the shore, and before the planes had landed and the soldiers had disembarked, the defenses of the Asians were complete.

The causeway was nearly a quarter of a mile in width at water level, and the enclosed and armored passageway along its top was more than adequate to cover the movements of armies, machines and whole races of peoples. A long metal box, it stretched from the mouth of the earth-tunnel to the mainland, protected above, below and on all sides by seamless and indestructible plates. While the army of the defense was being hastily formed on the shore, the Asians finished the last of the walls and threw up a sort of circular building at the end, made of the same metallic substance as that which formed the island shield and the walls of the causeway.

Not a single man in the land forces was able to see how the building and armoring of the last of the causeway was done. The defenders did, however, catch glimpses of many men, working in regimented groups, bringing the sections into place. Hastily planted artillery fired a few shots of shrapnel into the breach, and the workers fell on all sides as the shells burst. But fresh hundreds were hurried into their places. Without hesitation the sections were rolled into their places and sealed by men who were apparently slaves and more afraid of the long whips of their overseers than the death-dealing shot of the Americans. The Asians, conquerors of two great races, had, it was clear, learned to make those conquered races useful.

By the time the flame-throwers were ready, the guns all in place, and the infantrymen aligned ready for a rush upon the enemy, it was too late. Only a blank and rounded wall faced them on the shore, and shelling it was wasted effort. Batteries of red-ray guns were mounted on concrete bases around the fortress by nightfall, and all through the hours of the dark they poured their burning energy on the metal before them. The flickering surfaces merely mocked the rays which had previously destroyed battleships and burned stone buildings to the ground. By morning the defense troops were ready to admit that they had been balked. They sat down glumly around the armored garrison to await the next move.

It came suddenly, a little over twenty-four hours later, and strangely enough, caught the defenders completely off their guard.

After surveying the bare rounded wall before them for a night and a day, they lost their fear of it, and under permission from the commander, a stocky, blunt fellow with more courage than strategy, a small group went forward to make a closer inspection. They took hammers with them to see if they could break off a piece of the metal for examination in the government laboratories, and pounded away on the structure for several hours without result.

The hammers proving useless, they sent back to the base for an electric drill, and when it had been brought attempted to bore a hole in the fortress, setting up a great clatter and shouting among themselves, like boys on a picnic.

Without warning a window suddenly opened toward the top of the wall. The squad of mechanics and the handful of uniformed men who had accompanied them stared upward in amazement, for they had pounded that very spot not an hour earlier and had found it as solid and unyielding as the rest of the structure.

The little door slid open as easily as a pantry window, and out of it came a long, movable nozzle. It was then that hesitation proved fatal to the squad and its guard. Without further warning a jet of steamy vapor, hot and scalding, poured from the nozzle on the Americans. Shouting, they dropped their tools and began to run, but it was too late. Horrified observers farther away saw the hurrying figures go down one by one, writhing and screaming in pain and terror. A moment later large portions of the metal fortress, forming a complete row of square portholes near the top of the wall, had opened, and thin nozzles were searching the whole hillside with the scalding vapor.

The commander, who had witnessed the performance from his station half a mile away, clapped his aide on the shoulder.

“So they think they can drive us out with steam, do they?” he shouted. “They must think the whole army is as dumb as that squad of mechanics!”

Searching the terrain again with his glasses, he was about to order a round of shrapnel fired into the upper portion of the fortress when he saw something that amazed him. The rounded metal surface of the causeway head was moving. slowly turning, as if on a pivot. A rift appeared at one side, where the circular wall had turned past an overlapping plate to make a gateway, and behind the opening there appeared the vanguard of an army of metallic monsters, bearing a resemblance to old-fashioned military tanks, but much larger and showing at the front certain terrifying and mysterious features. When the deliberate gate had opened sufficiently, the first of them came out, lumbering across the broken ground at the head 01" the causeway with the hum of well-made machinery. Behind it came the others, spreading out fan-wise and falling automatically into a curious staggered war formation, like teeth in a gigantic harrow.

It was the beginning of the first Asian assault. The terrible armored tanks of the invaders were at last on the continent, the vanguard of that weird and bloody brood which later laid waste to cities and forests and blackened the meadows where cattle had once fed and tortured and captured the thousands of luckless men and women who were unable to get out of their way. As if with some realization, as they gazed at the ghoulish faces of these gleaming monsters, of the horror that was to come, the officers of the pitiful garrison which had been drawn up along the shore to defend the Americas stood spellbound. The artillerymen, acting upon impulse without the orders which their commanders had been too stupefied to give, opened up a wild and undirected fire at the foremost of the approaching tanks.

The shells crashed as they struck or went zooming off to burst in mid-air harmlessly over the armored causeway. Still the tanks came on, their high turrets glistening brightly in the sun, their broad cleated treads churning the muddy earth as they climbed steadily the rising ground toward the entrenched Americans.

The ray-guns, higher than the artillery, concentrated upon the foremost of the monsters, which flickered with heat and reflected light, but did not hesitate. Thirty of the metal fortresses had issued from the causeway before the sleevelike, rounded gate, working on smooth bearings in a groove at top and bottom, closed again. With the dull clash of the closing gate, the commander regained control of himself and ordered a full retreat. The Asian tanks, in full formation and moving at a moderate pace, plowed after the frenzied army as it crawled from its entrenched position to form hastily in line for marching.

Upon the top of each tank there were three guns mounted, operating independently upon a revolving turret. The central gun, higher and longer than the other two, was shaped not unlike the nozzle-end of a common garden hose. From this weapon only did the approaching monsters shoot as they bore down upon the now defenseless artillery. They jetted from the nozzles such tremendous clouds of the vapor which had overcome the mechanics at the wall that the hillside was all but obscured; they sent it searching after the scurrying figures of the retreat with a force that carried it nearly a quarter of a mile.

As the tanks approached the gun placements in their deliberate fashion, the ineffectual shell fire ceased. The guns were swallowed up by the clouds of bluish-white vapor. There was suddenly a clatter as the artillery was overthrown and demolished by the weight of the attackers, and the Pan-American troops, thrown into a panic, broke formation and ran for safety in all directions. It was then that the tanks, for the first time, bestirred themselves to great activity, themselves breaking formation to charge with great ferocity among the helpless fighting men. Man after man came into contact with puffs of the whirling vapor. Like insects caught suddenly in the mist of certain volatile oils, the victims seemed immediately to lose muscular control, to fall grotesquely, writhing and screaming. It was not as if they had been scalded by steam, but rather as if they had been
entangled
in the air, snarled in invisible bonds which held them all the tighter as they struggled to be free.

As abruptly as they had begun the attack, the tanks, as if in accordance with a prescribed plan, wheeled and gave up the chase. They turned, instead, toward Montevideo, and struck off across the country in a long curved line, back some distance from the shore, but following it. Villages, farmsteads, and trees crumpled like paper before them; they were turned aside by nothing.

Overhead a single military observation plane reported their progress. In five minutes the pilot had aroused the world with his vehement messages.

“Thirty Asian tanks now bearing down on Montevideo,” he radioed. “They are about five hundred feet long and more than a hundred broad.
⁷
They have crushed our artillery and routed the small defense force sent to guard the head of the causeway. Shell fire and ray-guns useless. Send help for Montevideo and Buenos Aires!”

The messages were relayed from the South American capital to Washington, the capital of North America and the seat of the Pan-American Government. The Secretary of War received notification of the Asian advance. All available troops were placed on fast transports and sent to give aid to the doomed cities. Montevideo’s police force and local military guard were rapidly mustered, and civilians equipped themselves with a variety of weapons for the defense of their homes.

A fleet of airplanes was sent out to bomb the approaching enemy and to send full reports of the size and strength. The air over the crawling fortresses of the Asians was soon filled with hostile craft, which kept up a steady but useless shower of explosive. The Asians made no effort to reply, but like great, dignified dogs assailed by gnats, they continued their advance upon Montevideo without checking their movement or speeding it.

“The tanks appear to be exceedingly heavy,” was the report radioed by the observation planes. “They move in formation, rolling out a broad path, deeply scored in the ground.”

The defenders demanded more accurate information as to the size of the machines, with the idea of digging a trench large enough and deep enough to trap them. But when they had been apprised that such a trench would have to be at least a tenth of a mile wide, a hundred feet deep, and long enough to entirely surround the city on the land side, they abandoned the plan. A steel wall was suggested instead. something against which it was” hoped the monsters would butt their heads in vain. But it was found that so much steel was not available.

Gradually the fine spirit of the defenders melted away. As the planes reported the enemy drawing closer and closer, great numbers of people began to leave the city, by rail and on foot, running for safety to the hills. Toward evening whole sections of Montevideo had been deserted, and part of it was on fire. A troop of disheartened gunners first sighted the approaching tanks from a point outside the city and greeted them with a fusillade of shells which had no effect. The object of explosive attack from above and on the surface, the enemy monsters approached as through a haze. They loomed up at Montevideo suddenly, like casual and horrendous creatures of the ocean floor, weird and unreal. The useless guns of the defenders were rooted off their mountings after they had fired only three or four rounds of shots. One of the tanks turned aside abruptly from its course to sweep them away with a contemptuous gesture.