The aero started almost as soon as Turber and Nanette came aboard. It flashed forward in Time; and flew slowly in Space. Not far in Space—south down the Hudson River, across the harbor until it poised over Staten Island.
Turber sat with Nanette in the control room. She heard Josefa's voice, but Turber ordered the woman away. Bluntnose was at the controls. How Josefa explained our escape Nanette never knew. Perhaps by blaming it upon the Indian—her word was as good as his. Turber with his treasure, and having recovered Nanette, was in too good a humor to bother with probing it.
Nanette knew that they were upon the last of the voyage now. Headed for the Great City of New York in the Time-world of 2445. Their permanent home.
"No more traveling, Nanette. We will conquer the world, you and I, and rule it together."
Nanette was frightened, but she would not let him see it. Alone now. Alan and I, she thought, were gone from her forever.
It was a brief trip. They stopped, just for a moment, in the year 1779. It was a fairly large settlement here now on Staten Island, and the aero, selecting a safe landing place, came down in a field near it.
A Colonial settlement, they called it; but it was in the hands of the enemy. Sir William Howe had landed in the Narrows two years before, and now held all the island.
It was night again when the aero stopped.
Nanette sat in the control room and attentively listened to the new voices. All English now.
"Wolf Turber, we failed—"
"Yes?" His quiet voice was unruffled. "Did the sloop get in?"
"Last week. I have been here every night since—you come late, tonight of all nights! They're fighting over in the marshes—this traitorous Mercer and his men."
Turber interrupted: "About the sloop, Atwood! Who cares about Mercer?"
"Gad! You can brush me aside, but I've had a hellish time."
"All right, Tony, I believe you."
"It's well you should. I had thought if you did not come tonight, by tomorrow Mercer's troops might be here. And where would I be? Not here—that I promise you. As it is, Sir William does not think any too much of me. He called me somewhat of an ugly name last week. I think I am insulted."
"Well, you didn't get the gold?"
"No. The sloop got in—ninety days from the Bermudas in weather of the vilest sort. And then the blockade—but it got through. I have Somerset's letter. Your money was spent—"
Turber laughed. "I fancy it was!"
"—spent in what I warrant must have been no less than a digging up of all the beach on Cooper's Island. Treasure there was none." He added: "I did what I could. I hope this is your last passing, egad, it had better be, and take me with you. They'll be sending me on a still longer journey if I stay around here."
They took him aboard. The aero hung over Staten Island and sped forward again in Time. Through the 1800's. The 1900's. And then, while the huge city grew under it, sped on five hundred years farther. It took only half an hour.
Turber said: "We are here." The aero had settled—a phantom settling down in a shadowy city. It rested on that same rise of ground on Staten Island which in 1945 held the Turber Hospital.
It flashed to a halt in 2445. Through the windows Nanette heard the tumultuous roar of the monstrous city. Turber led her from the aero.
CHAPTER XVIII
TURBER'S ULTIMATUM
Alan and I, in the tower with Lea and San, were simultaneously heading for the same Time-place to which Turber now took Nanette. We did not know that Turber stopped in 1779. It would have availed us nothing. But we did know his final destination. The knowledge was poor consolation. Turber was practically impregnable in that giant city. Old Powl had said it; we knew that Lea and San thought so. All our efforts had been to keep Turber from taking Nanette there. It was his final strong-hold.
As our tower sped forward in Time from the forests of little New Amsterdam, Alan and I found ourselves again with the barrier of language between us and Lea and San. Lea was beginning to talk a little. Her ability to learn was far in excess of what was normal to Alan and me. Already she seemed to understand much of what we said. But it was still an awkward barrier.
We made them understand that we would stop in the giant city. San would land us there at a time similar to Turber's arrival.
Alan said: "We'll go to the authorities, Ed. They will be intelligent, scientific people. They'll understand this tower—it won't be magic to them. We'll make them organize an expedition against Turber. Rescue Nanette—get her back safely."
My heart was heavy. It was all the rational plan we could make. But that giant city! What new conditions with which we would have to cope! A new civilization, all strange to us.
Lea said: "Yes. That best." She indicated 2445 A.D. on the dial. "You and Alan there. San and I got to—"
She indicated the year 5000 A.D. Alan knew what she meant. She and San would make a hurried trip on to that Time when the city was in ruins, and would search in the ruins for that super-powerful weapon. They would get it and bring it back to us.
Lea added: "Tell them—not yield to Turber. Weapon coming—Lea and San bring it in tower."
We sped forward—a trip of much less than an hour. The Indian forests melted away. The city flowed up around the tower. Central Park was here. We saw the city flow over it. We saw huge streets about us. Then a roof over us, with our tower set in a monstrous metal street.
Lea shook our hands. "Good-by, Alan—until we come with weapon."
The tower lurched to a halt. A surge of noises flooded in through the windows. The noise of the huge city. And there were shouts of human voices. And dazzling lights everywhere. Turber was here in this same city, now, with Nanette. We were to make our last desperate play against Turber here.
San flung the door open. Alan and I leaped from the tower steps. Behind us, the tower flashed into a phantom and was gone.
The city street was a roaring torrent of voices, human and electrical; a confusion of strange sounds and stranger sights. The street was solid metal. Traffic levels rose in tiers one above the other. Vehicles were passing: scurrying cars on wheels; a monorail hanging from a trellis, with dangling cars showing as a string of lights high overhead. And a great translucent spread of roof like glass above it all.
A blare of blue and yellow lights. A moving sidewalk on one of the lower tiers was jammed with human figures. They craned down to see the commotion we were causing.
The empty street space showed a mangled vehicle which had evidently been too close when the tower materialized. Twisted, blackened metal; and there were three human bodies lying dead in the street.
"Stand still, Ed! Let them take us!"
I clung to Alan. A crowd of strangely garbed figures rushed at us. But they did not approach too close; a ring of them, milling about; shouting—but too fearful to seize us.
We stood confused. Out of a million new impressions, my mind grasped so few! Mechanisms everywhere; gleaming mirrors with moving images; traffic lights and signals; clanking, clattering mechanisms; movement everywhere.
I saw fifty feet up the tiers of sidewalks, a street of open-faced shops with merchandise on display. The narrow viaducts were a lacework of metal overhead. The city roof above them glowed with light—I think it was daytime.
Alan said: "There ought to be an official."
The milling crowd was mostly men. All garbed in sober colors—black and grays. Hatless, with close-clipped bullet heads. Close-fitting trousers with legs like jointed stove-pipes; short black jackets. Women with dark skirts like inverted funnels; hair close-clipped.
An official in white appeared. A roaring electrical megaphone on his chest magnified his voice. The crowd scattered obediently. He waded through it. He stood near us and roared at the congesting traffic. A halted swinging train above us, moved along. Signal lights flashed. The tangle of vehicles began struggling to sort itself out. Other officials—all in white uniforms—showed on the bridges, and in small rostrums on the different levels. A magnetic crane swung out into the air. It seized an offending vehicle—lifted it clear of the jam.
The officer gripped us. "Come with me."
English, readily understandable, yet wholly strange. I cannot set it down here. I cannot approximate its swift brevity—its suggestion of eliminated syllables; its close-clipped intonations. Compared with it, our own speech was ancient, flowing and flowery.
"Come—"
"We're friends," said Alan hastily. "Don't hurt us—take us to your government headquarters. You can do that, can't you?"
The fellow stared. Astonished, I think, at Alan's strangely antiquated English.
"They have already sent for you," he said. "Come."
He led us swiftly away. The crowd stared after us.
Into a small tunnel. A lighted car whirled us aloft. It passed endless floors—or streets, or tiers. People everywhere. The car stopped its vertical movement; it rolled sidewise upon a track. Our captor spoke into a mouth-piece on his chest. I heard the answering voice.
"Room 400—tier 8 Tappan Government House, Westchester, Section 6 N. W."
"Yes," he said. He repeated it to the operator of our car who sat at a switch.
The microscopic voice added: "Bring them."
"Coming now."
Our car whirled off, along a track; went over bridges of glaring, tumultuous streets; through vaulted passages of buildings where behind transparent panes I could see what seemed busy commercial offices; up a long incline until I fancied we were almost under the roof—
Looming spires were now beneath us—streets and house-tops; then a great building through which we plunged along a lighted passage. Rooms with busy workers were everywhere.
This giant beehive!
I heard once above the mingled commotion of sounds: "Turberites expect to buy city—" A broadcasting voice; and as we sped over a bridge, dangling now from a single overhead track, I saw in the blur of light far beneath us a giant oblong area of light, with moving letters. A news-bulletin. I read:
Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand Billions—Wolf Turber's price—payable in minted gold, silver, platinum and ancient jewels.
And then:
Council of Ten in Session. Turberites' Ultimatum expected soon.
We flashed into a black vacuum tube. It was a trip of perhaps ten minutes. We emerged into an area where the city was less congested. Descended to a trestle near the ground. The roof was lower. In places it was gone. I saw the daylight—a gray overcast summer day. This was the morning of June 12, 2445 A.D.
Alan whispered: "This must be about Tarrytown. There's the river."
To the left we saw the Hudson. A solid ground level of metal buildings spread beneath us. Only the streets were roofed over here. Streets were laid out in orderly parallels. Our single car sped above them, flashing over switches.
I saw that there were no docks along the river. No sign of boats; occasional low covered bridges crossed over to the other shore which was solid with houses.
"Say, look behind us," Alan murmured.
A glare of light was back there. The roof seemed nearly a thousand feet up; tracks and viaducts and traffic levels came from it like a tangle of exposed veins and arteries spreading out over this wider northern area.
Our guard said: "Here."
The car stopped within a towering building near the river. We emerged into a lighted metal corridor. Guards passed us along it; we went through great swinging baize doors.
We stood in the presence of the government council.
I think most strange of all this age, was its rapidity. Its machine-made precision permeating every detail. Within half an hour, at this council of the Anglo-Saxon Republic, of which Great New York and Great London were twin capitals, we were understood and accepted; the part we might play in this crisis Turber was precipitating was grasped by these leaders.
I recall now our amazement at the dispatch with which fundamentals were reached. The arrival of our tower had already been investigated; witnesses in some local court near the scene had been interrogated; the reports transmitted to scientific authorities—and the whole lay now before this council.
Turber had carefully guarded his aero in that portion of the city which he owned. It had never been seen by the governmental authorities. But its existence was suspected and understood as an explanation of the presence of Turber's rabble.
Within half an hour the main details of what we had to tell were drawn from us by swift questions. There were no by-paths. No astonishment; no theories. Half a dozen men of science arrived shortly after we were brought in. They listened; they stated the scientific laws—well known in this age—which made credible what we had to say.
It was a narrow room of metallic, vaultlike aspect. Ten men sat around a table littered with documents, reports and summaries of the Turber affair; and the more recently compiled data on us. Mirrors and grids with moving images of distant scenes were on the walls; ovals of windows and a swinging door disclosed an adjacent room humming with the sounds of instruments; messengers passed in and out. There was a table in a corner with instruments and two intent operators.
The business concerning us was dispatched with a celerity that left us both confused. The interrogation of us was suddenly nearly over. The president of the Great New York Branch of Anglo-Saxonia demanded of Alan:
"You say your tower will return with a weapon for us to use against Turber?"
"Yes. That is, we hope so."
"What sort of a weapon?"
"We don't know. A projector—"
"Electronic, probably." He was obviously greatly interested.
I said: "But you must have such weapons here."
"No. Our world aerial power makes them inoperative. There was a class of weapons up to the years around 2000, called explosives. And then came the electronic weapons. We have none of them. They would not operate—and war itself is obsolete—"
Was it? I doubted that, with the menace of Turber here. The president seemed to read my thoughts. He said:
"We are business men. We know nothing of war." His grave face clouded with anxiety. He repeated as though to himself: "We know nothing of war."
I regarded Alan. Then I said: "We have come here to have you help us. And to help you. My friend's sister is held by Turber—"
An expedition against Turber to release Nanette. We urged it.
The president said impatiently: "You know nothing of what you talk. That is utterly impossible of success."
Alan said: "We know nothing of your conditions—that's true. But we must release my sister. Our purpose is the same as yours—if we can kill Turber—his Empire, as you call it, would go to pieces with his death. That's obvious from what you say."
We listened while the council went on with its business. Gradually it was growing upon us how impregnable was Turber in this Time-world. This was only five hundred years in the future of our own world of 1945! And less than eight hundred years in the future of that little New Amsterdam! My mind went back to those forests with their roving Indians. This same Space which now was this giant city! Eight hundred years is not a long time in history.
What a stupendous change!
The Council was discussing the aerial power-vibrations broadcast over the world from the main power plant in Scotland. The city comptroller said: "The Turberites refused today to pay the rental fees." He gestured to the table before him. "Here is the report—a protest from the Great London office. The Turberites are pirating the power now. Stealing it—the Wolves!
"How can we stop them? We cannot, without war."
My mind clung to Nanette. Cut off from us. No chance to get to her—it would start the warfare, which of everything else I understood at once was what this Council feared. There were mirrors here—and hundreds more in the adjoining room—picturing present scenes all over the city, and over the world. But none from the Turber area—that was insulated against them.
How changed was this world from ours of 1945! Changed in every smallest detail. Our familiar nations were gone. White, Yellow and Black nations now, in a trinity of alliance. The White Nation was headed by Anglo-Saxonia.
It was a vast world of business unified by transportation. There were no ships, it seemed, on the seas, save perhaps locally in very small areas. No great railroads. The age of the air.
Power was universally distributed by aerial vibrations. It was broadcast by a central plant in Scotland. Transformers were at Niagara, the Iguazu in South America, and Victoria Falls in Africa. The power was tapped by air-liners; by the city trains; by the factories which now were spread over every rural district; it operated all lights—all motors down to the smallest.
There was now spread before us, in terms of this super-modern world, the culmination of Turber's plans. There was a Turber Empire here now.
He had brought, with many trips of his aero, a constant stream of villains gathered from the Past. How many thousands of them, we never knew. And brought his treasure.
The city here knew him first as a wealthy man with a business organization, buying up small sections of the city. His wealth and his power grew, until now, ten years after his appearance in this Time-world, he was a figure gigantic. He and his followers—his organization—owned now all the southern area of the city. In ancient terms: Staten Island—New York Harbor—a portion of Brooklyn—and adjacent New Jersey.
Outside the city the Turberites owned and had colonized a strip of land some twenty miles wide by six hundred miles long. Bought with gold—like a gigantic railroad right-of-way. The strip ran from the New Jersey edge of the city southward through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and into the Carolina Mountains. All ancient terms, these, of course.
An agricultural section; and factories; and mines. A wall of metal and masonry, huge as the old Great Wall of China, hemmed in this Turber Colony. Food and all the supplies necessary to life were produced by Turberites for their section of Great New York. They had organized their own air transportation.
And now, the Turberites were ready to show their true colors! They stopped paying for the use of the aerial power. That was just today—June 12, 2445. They had flung up insulation a week ago—against the government news mirrors. They demanded—the demand had come today—that the city sell itself for the sum of four hundred and fifty thousand billions of dollars. The government was to sell for this sum, incredibly too small; to pay the citizens, each for his proportionate property ownership, what would be a mere pittance; and order every one to leave the city. In one transaction, they were to abandon this world capital; disorganize its business; fling thirty million people into unemployment!
It was unthinkable. And it had given to the world a hint of the real menace of Turber. This was the beginning of his intended ruling of the world. By money power, and by force of arms, he meant to extend his despotism over all humanity.
We heard it all discussed, now at this Council meeting. And I saw these men, gigantic governmental Captains of Industry. Men of business, nothing more. Business men, trying to meet a crisis of war and handling it by business principles. An impossibility!
The president's thin face was haggard and harassed. His stiff circular coat was rumpled; he passed a hand over his face and dropped his close-clipped gray head. An old man, utterly tired. But in a moment he looked up again. He spoke, more vehemently than I had heard any of these men speak before.
"We must learn what weapons the Turberites have. If he is to attack us—when? We have plenty of men—the city police army—"
"Armed how?" asked Alan.
"With the needle-swords. And the steel slingshots—our men are very expert—and they have projectors of compressed air, and sleeping gas."
Primitive weapons, modernized! My heart sank.
"How many of the police are available?" I asked.
"We have some two hundred thousand here. And Great London will send us by liner all the police we need."
"Are your air-liners armed?" Alan asked.
"No. How could they be? Except with short-range slings."
Another man said: "If Turber cuts off the incoming supply ships—if his ships are armed—our city here will starve in a day."
A commotion in the adjoining room interrupted us. A messenger came out.
"A communication from Turber!"
The president read the document.
"It has come!" He spoke with a strained hush to his voice. "He gives us but half an hour. An ultimatum! He says we vacillate like children all this morning, and give him no answer to his business proposal. Either we accept his purchase price—and our citizens must start leaving the city within thirty minutes—or he will begin war! We must tell him now. He gives us just sixty seconds to answer!"
Some one said huskily: "We shall have to yield."
The president looked at Alan. "That projector which your tower went to get—if we had it we could ask that the world-power be shut off. Then we could use it, against Turber."
No one answered him. He added:
"Do you think your tower will bring it?"
"Yes," said Alan.
Messages were flooding in from the other world governments. Demands for details. They passed ignored.
The president stood up; his slim figure wavered. "I think—I think, gentlemen, we should not yield. If you are against defending ourselves—defending the world from these wolves, stand up now and say so."
No one moved. He turned suddenly; his voice rang out:
"Tell the Wolves we are not afraid."
He stood listening for the answer. It came within a few seconds. Clattering messages from the southern—the Manhattan section of the city.
Turber's attack had started!
CHAPTER XIX
THE BATTLE OF GREAT NEW YORK
History will record that the battle of Great New York began on the morning of June 12, 2445 A.D. For three days it raged. I can give but fragmentary pictures. It whirled Alan and me into a maelstrom. I recall the morning of June 13. A day of the battle was passed. Inconceivable events of horror! Inconceivable ramifications of gruesome tragedy!
I recall that that morning Alan and I sat before a mirror-grid in the Westchester section of this monstrous beehive city. The fighting was farther south. We could see its ghastly details mirrored on a score of grids around us. We had been in it at times. And snatched food and sleep. But we were worn now to the verge of exhaustion. And worn with fear. The Turberites could not be stopped.
And Nanette? How could we dare hope that we would ever see Nanette again amid this torrent of killing?
The Hoboken area across the lower river had been the scene of bloody fighting all afternoon of June 12, the evening, and through the night. The Manhattan-Hudson terraces and most of the network of Hudson bridges down near the lower end were held now by the Turberites. They had penetrated through all the corridors of the Hoboken area south of the power rooms. Factory rooms and offices were here, shops and storage warehouses of local food supplies. The Turberites now swarmed them. The terminus of the north-south traffic artery on the Manhattan side of the river tunnel was taken from us.
The city traffic system of internal railways was long since paralyzed. It added to the panic of the people who were caught in the city the morning before, when the fighting so abruptly started, and who had not yet been able to get away. A resident population of thirty million now in this monstrous city! Ten million more as a daily average of visitors. They, too, were caught in the maelstrom of the panic. And another thirty million who commuted in to work.
Millions had escaped now. Every moment black streams of them came pouring out. But transportation was hourly becoming more difficult.
Inconceivable ramifications of tragedy! The mirrors before us pictured it in a myriad horrible details. My gaze caught one of them and clung, fascinated.
It was a vaulted corridor, with tiers of levels from the ground up to the thousand-foot roof. The loading platforms of the shuttles which normally whirled local travelers away to the main departing stages of the Northbound Local Coast Flyers were on these levels; forty of them, one above the other, on each side of the corridor. The shuttle cars stood ready on their tracks; the escalators still were in movement.
A tremendous throng of people was struggling here, trying to get onto the shuttles which occasionally were departing. The Hudson River—nearly closed over here by the ground tracks, surface viaducts and the network of bridges to the Hoboken terraces—showed occasionally in patches of sullen, yellow-stained water.
The crowd milled and fought for place in the inadequate cars. Every level, every smallest bridge, was thronged. From a line of doorways and trans-corridors up near the roof a horde of advancing Turberites appeared—a mob of bloodstained villains with the blood-lust upon them. They came clambering and leaping through a hundred doors and windows; they spread down the inclines, the stairways, running over the spider-bridges. Within a moment they seemed everywhere.
I saw a low, unroofed kiosk upon the edge of a sidewalk level. Tables and chairs were there, as though this were a street cafe. It was black with men and women, thrust in there by the press of others outside. The furniture was overturned.
From twenty feet overhead a dozen figures of Turberites leaped a rail and plunged down. Men in torn and blood-soaked uniforms of red cloth, grotesque with epaulets and golden braid. Their swords flashed. The little cafe was in a moment strewn with the mutilated dead and dying. Some of the bodies went like plummets over the low rails. I could see the white splashes as they struck the sullen river.
There was a mirror giving a close detail in another section—a room in the honeycomb of cells that occupied an area of southeast Manhattan. The Turberites had reached there now in a drive for the great air-stage where the transcontinental liners were departing.
Our police forces still held the roof-tracks and all the arteries of official travel up there; and the subterranean arteries were still ours all over Manhattan. But in the metal honeycomb of squalid living quarters which in my day was called the lower East Side the Turberites had forced us back.
There was, on my mirror, this chance close detail of a single room. A woman in it, thin and pallid and frail; wasted frame—a woman old and haggard at thirty, with wisps of yellow hair turning white. In metal bunks her brood of children were huddled. Cut off here in their home, lost and forgotten in the turmoil. The woman had barred her door—there were no windows; it seemed that perhaps her ventilator had ceased to operate; she huddled, gasping, with a baby against her breast.
The door burst inward. A savage who in a different age had stalked the forests of this same space stood expectantly upon the threshold. His painted face was grinning. Other faces behind him peered to watch. He bounded in; his tomahawk whirled. The woman mercifully went down at once; the children lay where he had thrown them in a gruesome little heap. He seized the baby, which still seemed alive. He held it aloft and gestured to his grinning, feathered companions. He tossed its white body toward the ceiling and flung the dripping tomahawk at the falling mark. The weapon cleaved the baby's head as it fell to the floor.
And there were other scenes, indescribable. Rooms of small factories. I saw one of them, where for this whole day a group of young girls had been trapped. The swinging viaduct leading from their doorway had fallen with the press of a fleeing mob; a girder had fallen, pinning their door so that they could not open it. They were trapped; and though the official safety emergency station in that area was still in our hands, it was too flooded with similar calls, and too disorganized, to heed this one.
A room of young girls. And by some chance, when the Turberites advanced, a leering giant had peered through a narrow ventilator orifice and seen them. With his huge stone ax he hacked away at the ventilator. Others took his place when he was winded. They came through at last into the room—
A news-mirror beside us—one of the few circuits still in operation—flashed a message:
"Turber attacking the local ventilating power-house. To shut off our power—paralyze our ventilating system."
So, with that done, he could use his gas fumes! I had not heard of an attack at the ventilating power-house. The one mentioned was in Lower Manhattan—local to that area. It was far underground.
The subterranean city was a vast catacomb with a depth everywhere of several hundred feet. We still held our sections of it.
"Alan! What will Central Headquarters do about that? Has it been moved yet? Central Headquarters moved?"
No one near us seemed to know. Every city function was disorganized. The government archives were at this moment being transported with difficulty from the financial area into new quarters beyond the Spuyten Duyvil flood gates. From the subterranean treasury vaults the tremendous gold reserve was being moved northward. All our instrument-room headquarters were being shifted to the northern outskirts. It was almost a flight—a rout. But our massed fighters in all the important corridors were still holding firm.
The day wore on. We slept for a few hours, and awoke to find the situation immeasurably worse. San and Lea had not come. And now our tower Space was menaced! A mob of Turberites—there must have been ten thousand of them—had broken through our men in the tiers of Lower Manhattan. They swarmed there in all the vacant rooms and corridors and pedestrian viaducts. The lifting shafts were out of operation now; the moving sidewalks were stilled. They swarmed up the inclines, the emergency stairs and ladders.
The city forces were driven back, and the local machinery rooms, where the ventilating system of this area was controlled, fell to the Turberites. They had been after it all day. They smashed it. The air currents were stilled.
It was as though all this vital section of the city-structure had ceased to breathe. The foul air pouring into the chemical vats was not renewed; it surged in for a time and burst the coils. The pumps used up their reserve pressure and stopped. The emergency systems operated for another hour, then they too went dead.
The first Turberites attacking here were armed with pikes and swords—side-arms of ancient fashion. Sabers; the cutlass; broad-swords; muskets, useless to fire, but used as bludgeons, or fitted with a bayonet; spears and lances of every type. Lurid cutthroats they were, slashing their way in a bloody torrent of hand-to-hand fighting.
Our police held them at occasional points of vantage. There were rooms in which the police intrenched themselves; there were cannons set up from which great balls of steel were hurled by compressed air and huge coiled springs.
But these Turberites fought with a recklessness that the police of this modern business era could not equal. They slashed and plunged and flung themselves to wage always a combat at close quarters.
A myriad hand-to-hand encounters. Needle blades and polished clubs of the city police. Lengths of steel wire with small metal balls at the ends; the police were expert at throwing them to lasso the legs of a running criminal. Small knives, tipped with harmless anesthetic, to be thrown like a dart. Or bombs of sleeping gas which in days of peace could be flung in a well ventilated street at an escaping criminal—but could not be used here.
Almost everywhere the city forces were worsted. But it took time. It was not an utter rout. A hundred thousand personal combats. Inconceivable sanguinary warfare this! All indoors!
When the local ventilating system was broken, Turber must have known it at once. Within an hour the type of fighting in this section was wholly changed. The Turberites had fought their way northward up Broadway with the city forces scattering east and west as they advanced. The attackers permeated every passage and tunnel and room. Thousands of them must have wandered aimlessly, lost. Wandering—killing and plundering as they went. The civilians were nearly all out of this area now.
A wedge of the Turberites reached what in my day was Columbus Circle. There seemed leaders among them to direct what they were after. They worked their way northward, and then shifted to the east—toward the corridor-street where our tower-space was located.
The danger was recognized by the high command. Police troops were withdrawn from the Hoboken section, where similar scenes were transpiring south of the main city power station, and troops were brought from other sections. Our lines on the roof over the harbor were weakened—but there seemed little activity up there.
The strengthened police squads fought their way into mid-Broadway. The upflung wedge of Turberites was cut off. Inhuman with their heedlessness, their reckless thirst for blood; but here for the first time we saw them falter. Cut off from possible retreat, a panic swept them. A thousand or more of them tried to get back. The city troops drove them out of the Broadway corridor and hunted them down as they tried to escape into the honeycomb of the city. We gained ground here for a time. But new mobs of the enemy came pouring northward.
All this within an hour or two. The ventilating system of Mid-Manhattan was failing. Turber knew it—and presently the whole character of the fighting there changed. The Turber mobs began withdrawing from this newly captured area. The air was turning fetid, but the police pursued the retreating Turberites as best they could.
The Manhattan exits of the vehicular tunnels under the harbor network of islands were all held by Turber now. From them a new horde of his fighters began pouring. Strange figures in black hoods with goggling mouth tubes. They came prowling in the north-south corridors. They worked their way north. The fetid air did not seem to impede them. They held strange round objects in their hands. They threw the objects, which shattered and spread heavy-lying chlorine gas. And mustard gas.
The corridors and rooms choked up—with fumes and the fallen bodies of our police. The strange Turberite figures prowled like ghouls among them.
Strange familiar warfare! Alan and I recognized it. These grenade-like missiles—these gas bombs—these figures with gas masks—
The Great War of 1940-42 flashed to our memory.
The air throughout the levels of Park-Circle 90 was maintained fairly clear. The city troops made a stand there, in a great amphitheater of local tracks where many corridors converged. In my day it was called the Grand Central region.
The Turberites had stormed the eastern warehouse depots of what was once Long Island City. Hordes of them began spreading west. It was part of this drive toward our tower-space.
A message now came:
"Turberites making drive in Van Cortlandt tubes toward our main dynamos."
Had they got up that far? It seemed incredible. An attack in the subterranean northern city toward the main lighting plant! If successful it would plunge us into darkness. And these Turberites had obsolete flash lights from my own age, no doubt, with which our forces were not equipped.
I saw upon the mirrors later a few scenes of this attack. The vast buried bowels of the city. The upright girders drilled and set deep into the rocks; the deep-set foundations of the pneumatic lifts; the gigantic sewerage system; the underground traffic tubes; the storage vats of chemicals. Narrow, gloomy tunnels of streets; vertical ladders; pneumatic tubes for freight transfer strung everywhere like capillaries in a section of flesh laid bare.
The Turberites came prowling; and finding the ventilation still working, brought hordes of their fellows.
I saw, in the subterranean city, in a dark open area of tracks on a viaduct beneath the Hudson River, where a hundred or two of the city troops were making a stand. In my day, this was about Dyckman Street.
The city forces had set up a battery of air-cannons on a metal terrace; the missiles rained down; but as though the terrace were some ancient rampart, the Turberites stormed it. Gas bombs were thrown by both sides, but the ventilation cleared the fumes away quickly. The terrace, with its northward underground corridor toward the light plant, was stormed and taken, after a siege of half an hour. A rain of missiles—nondescript chunks of metal thrown by hand; spears and javelins and darts—a cloud of poisoned arrows from a band of Indians posted at a distance; and arrows flaming with fire. Scaling ladders such as firemen of my day might have used came up from below and swarmed with men carrying dirks in their teeth as they climbed.
The terrace was finally carried. The Turberites ran northward to where at some other point the police were making a stand. Or climbed up the spirals into the city overhead. It was difficult to keep track of them. Groups appeared suddenly in many sections well within our safely held areas. They had to be hunted down and killed.
Of what use to mention my own and Alan's futile parts? There was a time, near the evening of this second day, when for hours I stood only a few hundred feet south of our tower-space—stood at one of the top levels, where I had been told to guard an isolated transverse corridor. Occasional Turberites, lost from their fellows, wandered through. My part to stand in ambush and dispatch them with a rapier, as they appeared. Gruesome business! Like a sharp-shooter of our Civil War posted in the bushes.
Or again, for a time I fed round steel bullets to an air-cannon where a battery of ours was intrenched on a bridge. A horde of savages with flying arrows and tomahawks assaulted us there, from the network of overhead tracks along which they had climbed.
There were times when Alan was sent off on other duties, and I watched at our tower-space and prayed for the tower to come. One time Alan was so long gone that I feared he might not return; and then he joined me, bleeding, torn from combat.
I have hardly mentioned the panics that swept the civilian population which was caught in the city. The panics were worst the first day. Millions everywhere trying to get away into the north rural sections. The panics killed far more, that day, than did the fighting. For a time the authorities tried to cope with them. The traffic squads were on duty. The moving sidewalks, elevators—escalators—the trams and monorails—were moving. But it was soon all paralyzed. Most of the main vehicular arteries were soon in a tangle. Abandoned cars. Accidents everywhere.
A wandering, milling jam of people, mad with panic, their screams rang throughout all the rooms and every smallest corridor of the monstrous beehive—a pandemonium of horror. Soon there were dead everywhere. Millions died—but millions got away. Millions wandering on in a frenzy until they got northward to the open air.
A million must have walked through the tubes. They were always flooded with people; the East and West Side bridges were black with fighting mobs. A million climbed on foot up the Hoboken terrace area and wandered in the city sections there. And other millions fought their way to the north roof and embarked on the departing air-liners.
The business of the city had ceased within an hour that first morning when the battle began. Inconceivable industrial details all were abruptly at a standstill. Food gave out. The Turberites captured many of the city's food depots. The incoming freight liners found no one to receive them. No further orders were issued. They soon stopped coming.
Gigantic business ramifications of Great New York. When they ceased, within a day disorganization spread over the world like waves in a pond. Confusion of industry everywhere. Everything to its smallest detail was interwoven with Great New York. The world was in confusion. The gigantic world-business machine of perfection was well oiled in its every smooth-running part; but the paralyzation of Great New York threw it all into disorder.
The world governments watched with amazement this sudden tragedy. Food was brought by liners from Great London. There was one arriving at the Tappan Terminal nearly every hour. Food, and fighting men, and such weapons as this era provided.
I saw the mirrored scene as the sleek silver body of one of these liners came in sight over the Long Island coast. The air over the city roof had been occasionally invaded by marauding Turber ships. They had dropped missiles, but with little damage. But they had frightened off the food freighters and greatly impeded the local passenger ships which—the first and second days of the battle—stood bravely trying to transport the fleeing millions.
The transatlantic liner came like a giant silver flying-fish with glistening outspread wings. Alan and I watched it on the mirror as its image grew. This was at sunset of the battle's second day. The sky in the mirrored scene was red and gold. Great fleecy clouds lined with the vivid colors, with a background of deepening purple. I had almost forgotten that there was a sky! The liner came speeding. But from the south a Turber ship loomed up—a narrow thing of black, a ship, fleet and darkly piratical of aspect. Like a wasp it came. Catapulted missiles preceded it, but they fell upon the transport liner comparatively harmlessly.