Standing there with Macklin in the bridge-room as we shot eastward, though, my thoughts were grave enough despite the exciting quality of the news we had just heard. War!—the war that we of the American Federation had expected, had feared for decades. It had not been more than thirty years since the third Air War of 2039. Three mighty nations alone now shared the world between them; the American Federation, comprising the whole North and South American continents, with New York as its capital; the European Federation, which included all Europe west of Caucasus and all Africa, its center at Berlin; and the Asiatic Federation, which held all Asia and Australasia for the brown and yellow races, with Peking as its capital.
And though for three decades now there had been peace between them, it had been an uneasy peace dictated by the fact that each feared to attack another lest he be attacked by the third. The great navies of air-cruisers of the three mighty Federations had patrolled the air in ceaseless vigilance, their air-forts ever watchful. Lately, however, it had become apparent to all that a rapprochement had taken place between the European and Asiatic Federations, and such an alliance could only mean an attack upon our own, the American. So we had stood even more vigilantly upon the watch, and now that for which we had waited had come at last, and the two great Federations had launched their two mighty fleets upon us.
Gazing ahead, as our cruiser drove onward, I was as silent as Macklin, at the wheel beside me, and as young Hilliard, who had come up into the bridge-room from beneath. Far beneath us the green plains were rolling swiftly backward, as our motors hummed their unceasing song of power. Those great electric motors drew their current in limitless quantities from the electrostatic or atmospheric electricity surrounding the earth, by means of great transformers that changed it from electrostatic to current electricity to give us a power that could hurl us forward with almost unlimited endurance and speed. Connected as they were to our great horizontal tube-propellers, which were set in the cruiser's walls and which moved it forward by drawing immense volumes of air at vast speed through themselves from ahead, those motors could fling us on at more than a thousand miles an hour. This utmost force, as our indicators told us, was shooting us eastward now.
Beneath us the green plains had given way to the great tumbled folds and peaks of the Alleghanies. Somewhere to the south lay Pittsburgh, and to the north Cleveland and Buffalo, but being headed directly to New York, we therefore did not see them. Beneath us we could make out in swift flashes of vision masses of the air-traffic between those cities, great passenger-liners and bulky freight-carriers and slender private craft, but in our own military-craft level there moved only a few cruisers like our own racing eastward toward New York in answer to the alarm. With these, however, there was small danger of collision.
Now the Alleghanies had dropped behind and we were rocketing over the rolling, pleasant countryside that lies between them and the eastern Appalachians. As we shot on I gazed downward, over the green and silent and empty landscape rushing beneath us, and wondered momentarily what a citizen of fifty years ago would have thought to see this once-populous land over which we were speeding lying as lifeless and deserted beneath us as it was now. Then it had given way to the greater folds and ridges of the Appalachians, and then, as we shot on and over their tumbled masses, Macklin lifted his hand from the wheel to point ahead.
"The air-forts!" he said.
On to New York
Swiftly they were looming before us as we rushed on toward them, giant domed cubes of dull metal, each five hundred feet in width, that hung in a great, curving line in mid-air before us, five miles above the green land. At intervals of five miles they hung, floating motionless there in a great grim chain or ring, the metal sides and dome of each bristling with great heat-guns like those of our own cruisers, and with narrow openings from which the occupants could gaze forth. Each of these great air-forts, we knew, was suspended thus high above the ground by the gravity-repelling effect of the cosmic rays. It had been but fifty years since the machinery had been discovered which directed the great power of the cosmic rays to overcome the force of gravity. It had been found that the rays could be collected and their power concentrated in the structures that they were to support. Dynamic towers were used for the collection of this great limitless energy.
In a great ring they hung before us, the line of them curving away vastly to right and left, a great ring that encircled and defended New York, as air-forts hang in rings about all air-cities for defence. Then as we drove toward the nearest of these great fortresses of the air, there came from the distance-phone before me its sharp challenge.