Jr. John W. Campbell

“ They must be annulled, deflected, or annihilated by some greater force. Only when we know what to expect can we fight them, and live. Remember, if they once succeeded in getting one weak spot in our armor, we can never have another chance, and the world can never hope to fight them—mere armies and a navy or two, with a couple of air forces thrown in—what would they amount to? The energy of atoms could destroy them like paper in a blow-torch—think what would happen to one of those beautifully absorbing grey battleships if a heat ray touched it! ”

“ You remember that back in 1929 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they had a machine they called the integraph, an electrical machine that could do calculus too complex for Einstein himself to work out, and problems it would take Einstein months to solve, the machine could solve in a few minutes. It could actually do mathematics beyond the scope of the human brain. The calculus is a wonderful tool with which man can dig out knowledge, but he has to keep making his shovel bigger and bigger to dig deeper and deeper into the field of science. ”

“ They are deadly in themselves, and the heat is of course deadly. They will also have heat rays. I can make a heat ray with atomic energy, though mine is derived from material. The only way we can fight them is to know beforehand what we are to meet. This is to be a war for a world, and the war will be a battle of titanic forces. The weaker of the forces will be a million times greater than anything man has ever known before, and either of these two forces would, if fully applied, blast our planet from its place around the sun! Such forces can not be withstood. ”

“ Space isn't empty, it's not cold, in fact it is unusually hot!"
"Now we've started this let's finish it, Dave. It is hot, but not unusually hot—if anything it is unusually cold! The usual, or average temperature of all the matter in the universe is about one million degrees, so space at 15,000 is really far below the average, and so we can say that it is unusually cold. The temperature of the interior of the stars is uniformly forty million degrees, which brings the average up. But it is the unthinkably great quantities of matter in interstellar space that brings the average down. ”

“ 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. ”

“ May God help these twin races, so close both in bodily form and place of birth, to climb on in friendly rivalry toward better things through the æons, as long as our sun can yet support life on the globes that wheel around it, migrating from planet to planet as the race grows, and the planets cool, settling on them as the Martians have settled on Venus. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At that speed any body would have infinite mass, and as you can't produce an infinite force, you certainly can't go any faster, and you can't go that fast in fact. If I accelerated one of the little five gram bullets I use in that machine gun to the speed of an alpha particle such as radium shoots off, not a very high speed in space, it would require as much energy to get it up to that speed, 10,000 miles a second, as five thousand fast freights, each a thousand tons apiece, would require to get up a speed of a mile a minute. ”

“ The effect of a heat ray in water is just that—the water is converted to steam so suddenly that there is a terrific explosion. The cathode rays could sweep an army out of existence as hose might wash away an army of mud soldiers. They won't have gases. They will have no use for them. They could wipe a city off the map, leave only a great crater in the scarred Earth, while men were getting ready to lay a gas barrage. A shell would certainly just bounce off of the armor of my ship and I suspect that it would do the same with the Martian ships. Earth has only one weapon that can even bother them! ”

“ But here and there in this vast space there are a few tiny bits of matter that have cooled down to terrifically frigid temperatures—temperatures within a few degrees of absolute zero, only two or three hundred degrees above; spots of matter so cold that hydrogen and oxygen can unite; so cold that this compound can even condense to a liquid; so cold that life can exist. ”

“ Ten thousand miles out in free space the practice began. As Waterson pointed out, it would require some mighty poor handling to hit the Earth now. For the first time in Gale's life he could practice with a machine with no fear of hitting anything.
When the ship slanted down in a long graceful glide, to enter the hangar doors that noon, Gale was in control. The controls of the ship were remarkably easy to master and extremely simple. The one thing that was hard to master was the tremendous range of power. It could be changed in a smooth climb from a fraction of a horsepower to billions! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The giant seemed an easy victor—but the giant had the forces of atoms—and the smaller had the energy of matter to drive against it. It was a battle of Titanic forces, with space itself the battleground, and the great ship of the Martians was pulling, not against the small ship, but against space itself, for the equalizing space distorting apparatus took all tension from the "Terrestrian" itself. The great cathode ray tubes were working at full power now, yet still, inexorably, the Martian was following the "Terrestrian!" ”

“ 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 ”

“ But we are near my laboratory now, Dave, and I want to introduce you to Wright, my laboratory assistant, a brilliant student, and an uncannily clever artisan. He made Bartholemew, as I call the mathematics machine, and most of the parts of this ship. He had heat rays to work with, and had iridium metal as his material, and plenty of any element. He had a fine time working out the best alloy, and the best treatment. The shell of the car is made of an alloy of tungsten, iridium and cobalt. It is exceedingly tough, very strong, and very hard. ”

“ Temperature is a condition of matter, and if there is no matter, there can be no temperature. But space is quite full—about one atom per cubic inch. There is so much matter between us and the fixed stars that we can actually detect the spectrum of space superposed on the spectrum of the star. The light that the stars send us across the intervening spaces comes to us laden with a message of the contents of space—and tells of millions of tons of calcium and sodium. ”

“ As a last precaution—a bit grim—I will arrange it so that if the 'Terrestrian' is damaged to the point of utter helplessness we can, by pushing a single button, explode the entire car—as material energy. It will utterly destroy everything within a radius of a hundred miles, and damage everything within a much greater radius. I believe it will not be serious enough to change the Earth's orbit, though. ”

“ Mass is just as truly a measure of energy as ergs, as foot-pounds or as kilo-watt hours. You might buy your electricity by the pound. If you had five hundred million dollars or so, you could buy a pound. You have heard of atomic energy, of how terrifically powerful it is. It is just about one million times as great as the energy of coal. ”

“ Our heat ray is considerably more powerful, I imagine. It is generated by a force ten thousand times as great. Our bombs will be worse. Wright, I wish you would make about a hundred shells that will explode with the full thirty-five thousand ton equivalent of dynamite. And then we will have everything they have that is going to be effective, and have it in a more concentrated form. Can any of you suggest anything else?"
"Steve, you said that your car was nearly pure iridium on the outside, and that is very inert. The outside of their ship will be polished too, won't it?" ”

“ The trouble is we need one that transmits the visible portion of the spectrum and—boy—that's it, Wright, that's it—spectrum—take a totally reflecting diffraction grating, reflect out all that part of the spectrum that we don't want, take what we do, pass it through a prism to recombine it to white light, then through lenses so we can see as if through a telescope! ”

“ The sound of the explosion can travel through air, but we are in free space."
But nine ships still remained active of the original twenty of the Martian Armada, and these nine seemed bent on an immediate end to this battle. This tiny thing was deadly! Deadly beyond their wildest dreams—if it continued to operate, they wouldn't—it must be destroyed.
Again they attacked, but now the cathode rays were streaming before them, a great shield of flaming blue light. Again the thin red beam of death reached out, caressed the ships—and the pilot room became a mass of flames. ”

“ The difficulty will be that the heat will fuse the window, and thus attack us. The quartz glass is nearly opaque to heat rays, as is all glass. Being opaque, it absorbs it, 'cuts it out' as we say. The result will be that the glass will melt instantly, whereupon we will go very quickly. The idea of putting a polished metal shutter before the window is the one we will have to adopt, but we must modify it somehow. The heat rays will be turned back all right—and so will the light rays. The question is to shut out heat and let in light. ”

“ They had a terrible time with their rockets because the heat of one set off the next. The result was a disastrous explosion—and they had a whole ocean of air to cool them! What would a rocket do in free space? Also remember the principle of a rocket is that you shoot particles out of the rear at a very high speed and thus impart the kick to the ship. The electronic rocket does the same thing—but instead of shooting molecules of hot gas, it shoots electrons, a giant cathode ray tube such as Coolidge had in 1927, but his was so small that the kick was immeasurable. ”

“ Really there are over a hundred different kinds of atoms. In my work on this ship I found it made quite a difference which kind of chlorine atom I had."
"Well, how does this machine work, and what do you mean by saying that a machine invented it?"
"Dave, you know that for a number of years the greatest advances in physics have been made along the lines of mathematical work in atomic structure. Einstein was the greatest of the mathematicians, and so the greatest of the atomicists. ”

“ Remember that as the velocity of the electrons approaches that of light, the mass increases and so the electrons as shot from a cathode ray rocket may weigh as much as a milligram. The problem of propulsion then is not hard with atomic energy to supply the terrific voltages needed to run the tube. But the cathode rays are going to be their first weapon. Cathode rays are absorbed by any object they hit, and their terrific energy is converted to heat. ”

“ Just a very small fraction less than half of the Earth's surface layers is oxygen. It forms over forty-nine per cent of it to a depth of ten miles at least. It is the second most active element on Earth—in the universe for that matter, and of the active elements there is only one with which it can't combine, namely, fluorine. ”