removing every single scrap of the contents of every building upon which their choice fell. In the first few raids, everyone in or near the raided places was killed, death being caused by some high frequency radiation that caused air to fluoresce a brilliant violet in its presence. The government, however, was soon able to make up a list of places likely to be raided, such was the system with which this work was carried out, and after that, everyone cleared out of dangerous buildings when a raider appeared.
Naturally every effort was made to destroy these unwelcome guests, but neither bombs nor artillery could penetrate the protecting and invisible shells to any depth. There was nothing to do but hope that the visitors would get tired of this sport and go away.
Finally, it seemed that this hoped for end had arrived. Gorged with plunder, practically all of the ships left for parts unknown, leaving only a few of the ten foot variety behind.
But the following jubilation was not long lived. After a few weeks, the raindrop ships returned in full force, and began to prepare for a new phase of activity. This had just recently gotten under way, and was quite in keeping with the previous, heartlessly logical methods of the invaders.
The large ships gathered at the equator and formed a ring which completely encircled the earth, the individual ships being about two thousand miles high and about twenty miles apart. Then each ship turned on two wide, flat fans of that violently fluorescing radiation that meant instant death for any living thing that came within its scope. These individual rays, joining those of the ships to either side, coalesced into two solid walls of impossible radiation.
Each ship then began to increase the angle between the two rays it contributed, one to each wall. As a result, the walls moved along the surface of the earth, one from the equator to the south, the other to the north.
The purpose of this plan was plain enough. Evidently the invaders had decided that the earth would suit them as an abode, but had found that certain organisms would be unhealthy. The answer lay in a complete and systematic sterilization of the whole earth, since the harmful organisms were spread all over its surface, and probably lived as parasites in animals and plants. The system they had adopted left a sterile zone of gradually increasing width on the earth's surface, far below its surface, and in the air above. The zone was completely closed, since the two ray walls intersected below the points of coalescence, and since the radiations had such a tremendous penetration that the effect could be noticed after the wall had gone completely through the earth and emerged on the other side.
By a strange coincidence, the rays had begun to separate only a few hours before my arrival. Travelling at over 100 miles per hour, the walls had already sterilized a zone 1,500 miles on each side of the equator. A small portion of the population ran before the ray-walls, but the rest calmly declined to move merely for the purpose of prolonging life for a few hours, and died in their homes when the walls swept over them. I thought how this courageous good sense was unlike the wild panic that would have seized the humanity of my time under similar circumstances. In some way, the human stock must have been improved greatly in the intervening six thousand years.
There was no chance of stopping the ray walls. Of course, scientists had been working, since the first advent of the invaders, for an offensive or defensive weapon that would prove effective. Their efforts had been unproductive for ten years, so that there was little chance that a few hours more would bring any help from this direction.
My companion had been visiting near the equator, and when the purpose of the invaders became clear, had left to join her family, which lived in the far northern part of North America. On the way, she had noticed a giant transport plane following one of the scout raindrops and keeping about three miles above it. Her curiosity aroused, she had joined the procession, flying low and off to one side. Then the transport had plunged, and the rest I knew. The girl, hoping against hope that the pilot of the plane which had made the first successful assault against the invaders was still alive, had landed her plane as near as possible to the scene of the crash and started on foot for the wreck. So came about our meeting and the mistaken identification of myself with the pilot of the diving plane.
When the girl came to this point in her story, she asked me whether I had hoped to accomplish anything in addition to just destroying one of the enemy. Now, my business in the future, and a serious and urgent one it was too, was to get hold of the secret of atomic disintegration. As soon as I had heard of the unpleasant attitude of the invaders, who alone possessed the secret, I had begun searching about for a way to crack the hard shells of their protective screens, so that I could get at the machinery. Evidently the very extraordinary man who had piloted the rocket plane had set the same problem before himself, and solved it, too, and in a very brilliant way. So that when the question of motive was put up to me, I was able to reveal my real purpose, the filching of the secret of atomic power. Very fortunately, my mission and the only salvation for this future world both led in the same direction.
Strange as it may seem, when I thought of this world of 8,000 A. D., I did not picture the teeming millions of inhabitants, but thought rather of the one who was with me in the plane, talking bravely, even lightly, of the things that spelled almost immediate death for her and for those she loved. I suppose the reason for this line of thought was that she was the only representative of this world I had yet seen, the others were still hard to imagine as actually existing, real people.
Success and Failure
UNFORTUNATELY, it would be impossible to duplicate the diving assault. The invaders had paid no attention to the people of earth because they thought them incapable of either harming them or delaying their program. Now, they had found one of their ships wrecked by violence, exactly how, they could only guess. Radio reports confirmed my earlier judgment that the scout raindrops would try to find out what it was that had done the damage. Report after report came in, giving eyewitnesses' accounts of the sweeping of an earth plane with the fluorescent ray, followed by the capture of the plane with some sort of force projection, and its removal to a quiet section for examination.
Try as I would, I could think of no way to break the
