"I don't know just how long a range it has—it affected the sand as far as we could see, and we were using very little power. It is just a modification of the space curving apparatus. It projects a beam of gravity, and theoretically at least it has an infinite range; and it certainly has a whale of a lot of power. I can use a good deal of the power too, for the strain of the attraction is taken off the mountings and the ship, and put on space itself! The gravity projector is double and projects a beam of the gravity ray forward and an equally powerful beam of the space curve behind. The two rays are controlled by the same apparatus, and so are always equal. The result is that no matter how great a load I put on it, the entire load is expended in trying to bend space!"
That night work was carried on under the floodlighting from the ship's great light projectors. The entire region was illuminated, and work was easy. Waterson had been instructed to take a rest when he seemed bent on continuing his work. Even his great body could not keep up that hard labor forever, and forty-eight hours of work will make any man nervous. With a crisis such as this facing him, he certainly needed rest. He agreed, provided they would call him in two hours. Two hours later Gale walked about a mile from the laboratory, and called. He then returned and continued his work on the placement of the shield. It had been placed, polished, and tiny holes bored in it for the heat eliminator inside of four hours. It was operated by an electric motor, controlled from within. It could be lowered and leave the window clear, but when in position its polished surface made it perfectly safe against heat rays. The work had just been completed, when Waterson reappeared looking decidedly ruffled.
"Say, I thought you two promised to call me in two hours! It's been just four, and I woke up myself!"
"But Steve, I did call you and you didn't hear me. I didn't say I'd wake you in two hours."
It was shortly afterwards that news of the coming invasion was made public. And with the news came the wild panics, even mad, licentious outbreaks all over the world. Man saw himself helpless before mighty enemies whom he could not resist. Never had such a complete disruption of business taken place in so short a time. Things were done that night in a terrible spirit of "we die tomorrow, we play today." The terrible jams in the cities caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. They wanted to flee the cities, get into the woods and hide like some animal. Within an hour no news could reach most of them, and though Waterson had told of his ship, told immediately, given every government official announcements concerning it, still the mad dance went on. But to those that had stayed near the radio sets, this news brought relief. No television pictures of it could be broadcast for many hours, as there was no portable equipment within several hundreds of miles, and the men were working on the ship.
That night the three men took turns watching by the radio set for news. The Martians were due to land somewhere on Earth that morning. It would probably be a temporary landing in some land that was just at dawn. And it was so. But the "Terrestrian" must not be taken by surprise.
Waterson was to have the morning watch. Unlike the others, he did not sit by the radio set. He answered the few messages he received, but the entire four hours of his watch he spent working with Bartholemew. The equations he was working with seemed new, strange, and they had terrific import to the understanding. It was but a few minutes before the Martians landed when he had gotten the final result. At once he called the two others.
"Wright, if that equation means what I think it does, we have something that will give us a tremendous advantage! I feel sure that the Martians have actually worked out the problem of the atom by pure brain power—no machines aided them, else they too would have discovered the secret of matter. That machine has made it possible for us to work out problems to meet them. But as they may land any minute now, let's begin on this. We need two of these projectors in front, and two at the stern. If you will start on the actual projectors, I'll start the instrument end. Come on Dave."
And so all three heard the announcement that the Martians had landed. Twenty mighty ships had settled down in the arid land of Nevada. The ships were a bare five hundred miles from them! The dry air of the desert was probably best suited for Martian lungs. Army planes had been cruising about all night waiting for the enemy, waiting to learn definitely what they were to face. It was Lt. Charles H. Austin who sighted them. He first saw them while still on the very outskirts of our atmosphere, and reported them at once, turning his television finder on them. Great balls of purple fire they seemed as they sank rapidly through our atmosphere. The great ships floated down and as they came within a mile or so of him, he was able to see that the great flaming globes of light were beneath them, seemingly supporting them. A breeze was blowing from them to him, and the air, even at that distance, was chokingly impregnated with oxides of nitrogen and ozone, from the forty mighty glowing spheres. They were fully an hundred and fifty feet in diameter, but the ships themselves, illuminated by the weird light of the glow of their sister ships, were far greater. Each was three thousand feet long, and two hundred and fifty feet in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of tons those mighty machines must have weighed, and the fiery globes of ionized air that shone under the impact of the cathode rays alone told how they were supported. Now, two by two they sank, and came to rest on the sands below, and as they came near the ground the glowing ray touched the sand, and for that moment it glowed incandescent, then quickly cooled as the ray was shut off. At last the mighty armada of space had settled on the packed sands, and now there sprang from each a great shaft of light that searched the heavens above for planes. By luck the plane of the observer was missed, and the television set clicked steadily on as the questing beams were reduced to five, and now the ground was flooded with blinding light. A moment later the side of one of the great ships opened, and from it a gangplank thrust itself. Then from it there came a stream of men, but men with great chests, great ears, thin arms and legs; men that must have stood ten feet high. Painfully they scrambled down the plank, toiling under the greater gravity of Earth. But what a thrill must have been theirs! They were the first men of this system to ever have set foot on two planets! And some of those men were to step forth on a third—the first men to visit it too!