It was the sword of Damocles, suspended over a helpless world!
The days after the Scarsdale terror saw the world's activities at their most intense pitch. Dr. Howard and I were occupied without end in the direction of the manufacture and distribution of the air-mines. For he was now having them released, not at the factories where they were assembled, but at various points over the earth, so that they would cover more uniformly the surface of the atmospheric ocean.
Day after day we sent them out. I know that to me those days were part of a dream of nightmare activity and tension. Again the world was waiting in dread for the coming of the great trawl. It did not come again, for reasons which we shall never guess, until the 19th. That interval of three days between trawlings was the longest that had yet elapsed. We owe much to it. Perhaps our world.
For in those days the air-mines were whizzing upward in fast-increasing numbers. By the 19th they were ascending at the rate of more than a thousand a day. All of earth's peoples, in the industrial regions at least, seemed toiling upon the one task of making the great globes. The world's hopes were raised. We were winning, it seemed, by sowing the atmosphere's surface thick with air-mines that sooner or later must demolish all or part of the space invaders. We were exultant, even. And then—
Shortly after dark on the 19th a trawl flashed down to gouge most of the town of Martiana, in southern Norway, from the face of the earth.
On the morning of the 20th another trawl, or the same one, descended and gouged the bed of the Mediterranean just off Capri and in full sight of its shore.
A little before noon on the 21st a trawl was glimpsed plowing a vast wound in the Sudan desert near a British outpost. And three hours later a trawl cut a terrific trail of annihilation squarely across the city of Algiers.
Earth and the races of the earth rocked beneath those fearful cataclysms, striking in such swift succession. With them the activities upon which our races of man had been so fearfully bent—the manufacture of the air-mines—began to dwindle. By the 20th the number of air-mines released had fallen off a little, and after the catastrophes of that and the next day it was even smaller. Dr. Howard's reports showed that on the 22nd but four hundred air-mines had been released in comparison with the twelve hundred released but three days before.
Mankind was giving up the battle in despair!
Panic was breaking loose over the earth, a panic and dread that nothing could restrain. Toiling thousands quit their work upon the manufacture of air-mines in hopeless despair. Mobs began to appear in the streets of London, New York, Shanghai, and Sydney, and rioting became general. The world was going mad with fear!