Breakthrough Page 5

  “But how much would such a thing cost?”

  “Probably not much more than a warship of comparable size. We hope to have some more accurate figures for you soon.”

  “And you say the navy is planning to build these?”

  “That’s what they have said.”

  “Huh.” If the navy was going to build them, it was inevitable that the army would want them, too! “Can I have copies of these to show General Crozier?”

  “Certainly. We have them all ready for you, Major. Oh, and by the way, we will be moving our planning and development offices to our new facility in Eddystone over the next several months. We’ll have a lot more room there - and if your bosses approve these new designs, we’ll certainly need it!”

  They provided him with a bundle of documents and he thanked them and stepped outside into the stifling heat. It wasn’t quite as bad as Washington, but the air was filled with smoke and coal dust. Washington hadn’t acquired much industry yet, but Philadelphia had been a major manufacturing center even before the war and now was second only to New York. Hundreds of tall chimneys spewed their black clouds into the mid-morning sky. He looked back at the Baldwin facility, which covered over eight city blocks, and admitted that there wasn’t much spare room for building enormous tanks. Their new facility in Eddystone, just south of Philadelphia, was on the Delaware River, which would prove convenient if those land battleships had to be transported by water.

  Broad Street was as busy as ever, but many of the people were wearing uniforms like himself. On one street corner, a military band was blaring patriotic music and a recruiting stand had been set up. A small crowd had gathered, but it didn’t look like the recruiters were doing much business. The initial wave of volunteering had dwindled as more and more men took up the good paying factory jobs that were appearing due to the massive armaments programs. Congress had just approved a conscription bill to help make up the deficiency. Just as had happened during the Civil War, some men were volunteering to avoid the stigma that went with being a draftee.

  Andrew swung aboard a south-bound street car that carried him down to the enormous Broad Street Station which dominated the center of the city. It had been built by the famous Philadelphia architect Frank Furness in a Gothic style which didn’t really appeal much to Andrew. The upper floors held the office of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a tower reared up from the top floors that rivaled that of the much more attractive city hall two blocks away. Swarms of people milled about the street level entrances. Again, a lot of the men were in uniform. As he walked toward the entrance, Andrew was interested to see several men with signs protesting the new U.S. Military Railroad that had been put into effect. The big railroad owners, men like J.P. Morgan, were not happy with the measure, which not only created an actual branch of the army with its own trains and personnel, but also gave the government enormous control over the civilian railroads and the prices they could charge. Even so, it was surprising to see a protester here. So far, the USMRR trains were only being used in the areas close to the Martians; Andrew had yet to see one this Far East.

  Inside the station, he retrieved his valise from the baggage room and headed for the platform where his train would arrive. Pausing, he managed to stuff all the documents Baldwin had given him inside his bag without rumpling them too much. He really ought to get an aide to carry things. I’m a major now, after all! As a lieutenant fresh from West Point he’d been assigned as Hawthorne’s aide when his future father-in-law had only been a lieutenant colonel. Perhaps he could get a lieutenant of his own…

  As he crossed the crowded lobby, he noticed a small commotion; a man and two women were being escorted out by police. With a start, he realized they were more protesters, although of an entirely different sort than the ones outside. The man carried a sign which read: The Wages of Sin is Death! One of the women began shouting: “This is God’s punishment of a sinful world! Repent or die in the flames of the Martian rays!”

  Andrew stopped to watch as the trio were ejected. He’d read in the papers about some religious zealots claiming that the Martian invasion was a judgment from God, but this was the first time he’d encountered such people himself. Were they actually serious? And if they were, did they think the Martians were God’s righteous agents? Was it therefore a sin to fight them? Did they think that if everyone did cleanse themselves and turn to God that the Martians would miraculously vanish? Andrew’s thoughts went back to the day he saw the Martians slaughter General Sumner’s army. A lot of those men had probably been praying for God’s help—seconds before they were burned to ash. I bet if Martian tripods were marching down Market Street those people would be screaming for the army instead of praying! But the bottom line, as far as Andrew could see, was that they were telling people to pray for help rather than help themselves.

  Shaking his head in disgust, he trudged up two flights of stairs to the elevated platform in the great train shed. Colonel Hawthorne, who held the most amazing store of facts and figures in his head, had once told him it had the largest open span - over three hundred feet - of any train shed in the world. Looking at the graceful iron trusses, Andrew felt a small thrill of pride. Humans could do some amazing things. Suddenly the notion of building land-going battleships didn’t seem so outrageous after all. We can, we really can do this!

  The place was bustling with trains arriving and leaving almost constantly. His own train arrived only a few minutes late and he climbed aboard the second class car and found a seat next to the window. The breeze would feel good once they got moving. The car was crowded and a family of what he assumed were Mennonites, straw hats, old fashioned bonnets and all, took several of the seats across the aisle and apologetically plunked a little girl down on the seat next to him. She appeared to be about six and she looked at him with curious eyes. Andrew wasn’t comfortable around children, but he forced himself to give her a friendly smile.

  “Are you a soldier?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Andrew. What’s yours?”

  “Rachel. Do you fight the… the M-Martians?”

  “Well, yes, that’s part of my job.”

  “Are they around here?” She looked about as if one might spring out of the woodwork.

  “No, no, they are out west, a long ways away. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “My pa can’t fight, my brothers neither. It’s against the Book.”

  “Well, not everyone needs to fight. Your pa and brothers grow food and that’s important, too. Soldiers need to eat.”

  “I guess that’s right, isn’t it? But why…?”

  “Rachel! Leave the poor man alone!” scolded the child’s mother suddenly. “Mind your manners!”

  “Yes’m,” said the girl, inching away from Andrew and staring down at the floor of the rail car. Andrew looked at the mother and was about to say that it was all right, but the stern expression on the woman’s face made him decide to leave well enough alone. He looked out the window instead.

  The train lurched into motion and was soon chugging down the enormous viaduct that the locals called the ‘Chinese Wall’ until it reached the bridge over the Schuylkill River. Usually when Andrew passed through Philadelphia he’d be taking the line south back to Washington, but today he was heading west. The train was switched onto what was called the Main Line and soon left the city behind. As the train picked up speed the breeze felt wonderful despite the occasional bits of coal smoke and embers that found their way in along with it. Ahead lay a series of fashionable suburban towns where many of the city’s well-to-do had estates. Wynnewood, Ardmore, Bryn Mawr…

  They weren’t quite so fashionable now as they once were, of course. The train had barely left the city behind when they passed through the muddy and overgrown remains of the fortifications that had been hastily thrown up in the first panic after the launch of the Martian cylinders in ’07. When the Martians had all landed out west, work had been hal
ted. One line of earthworks went right through what had once been a golf course. Further on, there were tent cities and drill fields; training camps for the army that, unlike the fortifications, were in full use.

  More camps were scattered on either side of the tracks as they moved out into the Pennsylvania countryside. Once away from Philadelphia, the landscape became a patchwork of farms and small towns. The corn was nearly head-high and the wheat turning gold. It looked like it would be a good harvest this year. The train stopped a number of times, and the Mennonite family got off at Lancaster. Andrew watched the little girl walk away and he pondered what it would be like to have one of those. Marriage tended to lead to children after all. He had trouble picturing himself as a father.

  They reached Harrisburg in the early afternoon and Andrew bought a newspaper from a boy on the platform. He breezed through the national news since it was mostly about the war and he had much better information from his own briefings. He was more interested in the international situation, and there were a number of stories from foreign press services. Overall the news was pretty bad. The Martian strategy of landing in hard to reach areas, then expanding out from there had worked perfectly. Central Asia, north of the Himalayas, had been lost; South America, Mexico, most of Australia, all gone.

  Africa, south of the Sahara, had been mostly overrun - at least it seemed to have been; how could you really tell? Only a few coastal towns were still in human hands and these were being flooded by waves of refugees from the interior who spoke of metal giants killing everything in their path. Capetown and a fair chunk of Britain’s South African colony were being held stubbornly, but there were rumors that no more troops would be sent there because they were needed to defend Egypt and the Suez Canal. So far, British gunboats on the Nile along with a mixed army of regulars and colonial troops had been able to keep the Martians at bay. There were frustratingly vague mentions in the paper of ‘new’ British weapons being used, but no details.

  Andrew frowned. The damn British! They had been jealously guarding the Martian machines they had captured in the first invasion and sharing almost nothing with anyone else. And one of the few things they had been willing to show to outsiders, a power generator of some sort, had exploded disastrously in Liverpool, killing over a thousand people—including Andrew’s father who was there to observe the test. But apparently they had learned some things from their captures and were now putting them to use—and still not sharing anything!

  Well, we have our own captured equipment now! We don’t need help from the damn Limeys!

  While he read and fumed, the train turned north and wound its way along the Susquehanna River, through tidy Williamsport, charming Lock Haven, and then on toward Buffalo. Andrew was, in fact, on his way to see for himself what had been learned from some of the equipment that had been captured in New Mexico.

  North of Lock Haven the countryside changed dramatically. He was in the heart of coal country now and it looked little different than the blasted landscape the Martians had made around Gallup. The hills and ridges had been denuded of trees, new hills of tailings had grown up around every mine head. Lifeless ponds, black and greasy, seemed to soak up the last rays of the setting sun, and streams choked with trash trickled forlornly toward the Susquehanna. Andrew looked in revulsion as lines of figures, as black as the mounds of coal, trudged away from the mines, toward ramshackle homes, while other lines of not-quite-so-black figures trudged the other way. The mines were working around the clock these days. Three shifts a day. Over and over.

  A different group caught his eye: men in uniform, leaning on their rifles. Soldiers. A few years back, before the new invasion threat, there had been strikes and disruptions in coal country. That couldn’t be allowed to happen again.

  The train rolled on; past villages and towns and mines, and always there were the lines of trudging figures with the change of shifts. And some of those figures were far too small. Just boys. Andrew thought of the little girl on the train. Her older brothers were about this size. They were lucky to have a farm to work instead of a mine. What sort of a future did these boys have? Well, if we don’t win the war, they won’t have any future at all. The country ran on coal, so Andrew couldn’t see anything for it. He pulled the newspaper out again and stopped looking out the window until it was too dark to see.

  It was after nine by the time he reached Buffalo and then another hour to get the train for the short run to Niagara Falls. He could hear the roar of the falls from his hotel. He fell into bed, exhausted, but mused for a few minutes until sleep took him. Niagara Falls was a favorite spot for honeymooners. Would he and Victoria even have time for a proper honeymoon? Maybe they could come here…

  The next morning he was pleased and a little surprised to find a motor staff car waiting for him, exactly on time, outside the hotel. The private driving it looked very young and even though he knew how to operate the vehicle, he was very sketchy on military courtesy. Instead of getting out and opening the door for him, he just yelled: “You Major Comstock? Well, hop in!” The kid had probably been in the army about six weeks, so he decided not to make an issue of it.

  “I’m taking you to Fort Niagara, right?” asked the driver as he pulled away from the hotel with a lurch.

  “That’s right. You know the way?”

  “’Course I do! Just came from there!” The driver made several turns and then they were on a road leading north out of town. The falls were behind them now and Andrew could catch glimpses of the Niagara River far below to the left. The road was following the river down to Lake Ontario, but it could not make the drop of one hundred and seventy feet in one leap the way the river could, so there were several switchbacks and a few hair-raising slopes on the way. The paving stopped only a mile or two north of the town and they were on rutted dirt after that.

  “You here to see them fire the Martian ray?” asked the driver after a while.

  Andrew jerked upright. “What?!”

  “The ray! The thing they captured out west. That Doctor Tesla fella has been playing with it all week! Helluva thing!”

  Andrew forced himself to close his mouth. This was supposed to be a secret! And Tesla was supposed to have waited for Andrew to get here before he made the first test firing! Blast the man! But he supposed he should have expected this. He’d met Tesla a number of times and it was clear that he had no respect for any authority but his own.

  Still, once they started firing tests there would be no keeping the secret. The army would have preferred to do this in some location away from prying eyes, but the device required such an enormous amount of electrical power that there were few places which could supply it. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara along with the open waters of Lake Ontario made this the best location available.

  They finished the long descent and after a few more miles came to a tall fence with a gate in it. A large sign proclaimed it to be Fort Niagara with the familiar flaming bomb emblem of the Ordnance Department on either side. Soldiers were guarding the gate and to Andrew’s surprise there was a small crowd of civilians just outside. Reporters, from the look of them.

  The auto stopped just outside the gate and a sergeant demanded Andrew’s identification. He produced it, and while the sergeant was examining it, the reporters crowded around the car and began shouting: “Is that Comstock?” “Yes, I think that’s him!” “Major! Is the ray device here the one you captured in New Mexico?” “How soon until we can make rays of our own?” “How long will your tests continue to interrupt the local power supply?”

  Andrew didn’t reply. After a moment, he had his papers back and the guards let the car pass through the gate. The reporters continued to shout at him until he was out of earshot. The driver looked back at him with a strange expression. “You captured the ray gadget?”

  “No, we couldn’t carry the one we captured. This is one that they captured at the Battle of Prewitt.”

  “Huh, I’ll be damned.”

  To the left, the land slope
d up to a rocky prominence where the Colonial-era fort that gave the place its name was situated, but Andrew’s destination was the cluster of newly-constructed wooden buildings and sheds along the low ridge that overlooked the lake. The driver deposited him at the headquarters building, but he was informed by a clerk that everyone was down at the testing range by the lake.

  Just then, the electric lights in the building flickered and dimmed down to a faint glow. At the same time, Andrew heard that awful buzz-saw snarl of a Martian heat ray. Even though he knew it was just the captured device, it set every nerve tingling as he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. Images of men and horses being burned to ash flashed through his mind. The screams… the smell… The noise cut off and he breathed again.

  “Sir? You all right, sir?” He looked and saw the clerk eyeing him with a worried expression.

  “What? Oh, sure.” He unclenched his fists, but his hands were shaking. He put them behind his back. “How do I get down to the firing range?”

  “Just follow the road to the right. It will take you there.”

  He nodded and made a hurried exit. The road was as described and in a few moments he was past the buildings and on the edge of the low bluffs above the lake. There were several trucks and a crowd of people on the beach and they were all looking at a cloud of mist - steam? - drifting above the lake a few hundred yards off shore. He hurried down and soon recognized the tall, gangly shape of Nikola Tesla in the midst of the crowd, which was gathered around the heat ray device. As always, Tesla was impeccably dressed, even his knee-high rubber boots were custom made.

  Tesla was grinning like a loon and somehow his smile grew even broader when he caught sight of Andrew. “Ah! Captain Comstock…”

  “It’s major, Mister…”

  “…you just missed it. Beautiful! Such amazing power! But do not worry. After it cools down for a few minutes I will show you. Gentlemen! Gentlemen! This is Captain Comstock, the man who so kindly provided us with this magnificent device! I’m sure you’ve read about his heroics in the papers.” Everyone turned to face him and he had to resist the urge to smile and wave. Tesla had a well-known aversion to shaking hands, so Andrew didn’t offer him his.