Waterson asked me to accompany him to the System Capital on Venus, and I was present at that first Cabinet meeting, and at each succeeding meeting. Again I was close to the facts—and again Waterson has asked me to write a chronicle of that terrible War.
It was not till the signals had definitely been located as originating far out in space that man began to take more than a mildly curious interest in them. They were coming from the Metal Horde that was even then sweeping across space at a thousand miles a second to the planets ahead.
Their goal of ages was in sight. Sixteen hundred years of ceaseless rushing flight had at last brought them near.
When our ancestors were beginning to grumble under their Roman lords, in the time of Horlak San, when his mighty armies were sweeping their way across Mars under the newly developed heat rays, spreading death and civilization at one time, that menace started on its expedition.
When the Normans invaded England, when the mighty empire that the San dynasty had maintained over all Mars was crumbling, that journey was half done.
When Columbus first set foot on the shores of America, when Koral Nas formed the great union of the federated nations of Mars, that trip was three-quarters done.
But it was seven-eighths completed when Mars developed the first crude atomic engines, and when Priestly of England discovered oxygen. And during the two centuries of flight that remained before they reached their goal, there developed on those tiny planets the instruments that were to throw that mighty force down to defeat.
But I am to tell you of that war as I saw it; we have all seen it—all too closely! It was really but a little more than a month that that Menace of Metal hung over us there on Mars, but to us it seemed years, except to the frantically working scientists, striving desperately to discover some weapon to defeat them. David Gale.
A tiny glistening mote in space it was, as it sped toward the shining planet before it—the rapid flight of the car aided by the gravity of Venus. The call had been urgent, and the Earth had been in superior conjunction, that meant a full twenty-hour trip, even at 1000 miles a second, but now they were approaching the planet and the pilot was losing speed as rapidly as possible. There was a limit to what he could stand, though, and it took him many thousands of miles to bring the machine down to a speed compatible with atmospheric conditions of the planet.