Painfully now they were coming from their huge interplanetary cruisers, slowly they plodded across the intervening space to their comrades, pouring from their sister ships.
Then suddenly the television screen was white—a blinding searchlight had at last picked up the plane. Wildly the pilot dived, and now there came a picture of all those men looking upward, their first glimpse of the works of man perhaps. But the beam that had been eluded was reinforced in a moment—then there came a dull red beam—a flash—and the screen was smoothly dark.
Waterson and his friends feverishly worked at their tasks. There was no doubt about the inimical intentions of the Martians now. They had destroyed a man without reason. And the projectors were rapidly taking shape under the practiced hands of Wright. Dawn broke, and the men stopped for breakfast, but still the work on the projectors was not done. Many parts were so similar to those of the other projectors that they could use the spare projectors for parts, many others were new. It was shortly after breakfast that the news of the Martians' landing came. They had started now on the famous Day of Terror. But still the men in the laboratory worked at their tasks. The "Terrestrian" had been christened according to plan, and was now ready to start at any moment, but the new projectors were an additional weapon—a mighty weapon.
All matter is made of atoms, grouped to form molecules, combinations of atoms, or a molecule may contain but one atom, as is the case of helium. The atoms within the molecule are held to each other by electrostatic attraction. The molecules of substances like wood are very large, and hold to each other by a form of gravity between the molecules. These are called amorphous substances. Water is a liquid, a typical liquid, but we have many things that we do not recognize as liquids. Asphalt may be so cold that it will scarcely run, yet we can say it is a liquid. Glass is a liquid. It is a liquid that has cooled till it became so viscous it could not run. Glass is not crystalline, but after very many years it does slowly crystallize. The molecules of a liquid are held together by a gravitational attraction for each other. But in crystals we have a curious condition. The atoms of salt, sodium chloride, do not pair off one sodium and one chlorine atom when they crystallize; perhaps a million sodium atoms go with a million chlorine atoms, and give a crystal of sodium chloride. Thus we have that a crystal is not n(NaCl) but it is NanCln. Thus a crystal of salt is one giant molecule. This means then that the crystal is held together by electrostatic forces and not gravitational forces. The magnitude of these forces is such that if equivalent weights of sodium and chlorine atoms could be separated and placed at the poles, the chlorine atoms at the north and, eight thousand miles to the south, the sodium, over all that distance the twenty-three pounds of sodium would attract the thirty-five pounds of chlorine atoms with a force of forty tons!
So it is that in all crystals the atoms are mutually balancing, and balanced by perhaps a dozen others. The electrostatic forces hold the crystals together, and the crystals then hold together by gravity in many cases; otherwise they don't hold together at all. A block of steel is made of billions of tiny crystals, each attracting its neighbor, and thus are held together. But this force is a gravitational force.
Now what would happen if the force of gravity between these crystals were annihilated? Instantly the piece of metal would cease to have any strength; it would fall to a heap of ultra-microscopic crystals, a mere heap of impalpably fine dust! The strongest metal would break down to nothing!
Such was the ray that Waterson had developed. It would throw a beam of a force that would thus annul the force of gravity, and the projector had been made of a single crystal of quartz. Its effects could be predicted, and it would indeed be a deadly weapon! The hardest metals fell to a fine powder before it. Wood, flesh, liquids, any amorphous or liquid substance was thrown off as single molecules. It would cause water to burst into vapor spontaneously, without heat, for when there is no attraction between the molecules, water is naturally a gas. Only crystals defied this disintegration ray, and only crystals could be used in working with it.
But while the men in the lonely laboratory in Arizona were finishing the most terrible of their weapons, the Martians were going down the Pacific coast.
When morning dawned on our world, it found a wild and restless aggregation of men fleeing wildly from every large city, and with dawn came the news that the Martian armada had risen, taking all its ships, and was heading westward. Straight across Nevada they sailed in awful grandeur, the mighty globes of blazing cathode rays bright even in the light of the sun.