Miles John Breuer

“ There was endless machinery, large and small, everywhere.
Finally, at the end of a climb up a long stairway, they came to an open space, at what they guessed to be about the middle of the ship. It looked as though they had found the "living quarters" at last. They were in a vestibule. In front of them was a metal door with a glass window, through which they could look into a vast, ovoid, rotunda-like room or hall.
All efforts to open the door failed. There seemed to be no lock against which to direct operations. The metal of the door was firm as a mountain against all their blows. ”

“ He claimed the privilege of being the first to walk into danger. The men with grenades and hand-machine guns crowded behind him. The General found himself walking down a small corridor, and the men filed behind him. The corridor soon became a bridge out in a vast void, black and filled with machinery of enormous proportions. Then again it became a corridor, and the bright surface was a wall turning at right angles.
It seemed that they spent hours walking about with pounding hearts and thumping heads, expecting every moment to be attacked in some unknown way from dark ambush. ”

“ Take no action against them unless they try to rise."
Now, those men who had filtered up to their positions at night with pounding hearts, expecting to be suddenly wiped out at any moment, were getting tired of week after week of inactivity. Army discipline, always irksome, was doubly so in the heat and the sand. There was sand in their clothes, sand in their hair, sand in their ears, sand in their food. There were hot winds, and nothing to do but wait all day and wonder what the airplanes above had to report. The enlisted personnel were not the only ones who were restless. ”

“ In fifteen minutes, a dozen swift cars filled with officers and men, two high-speed tanks, and two high-speed four-inch field-pieces, were headed toward the Martian ship. They covered the ground rapidly, and by noon were on the site of the previous camp from which they had besieged the Martian vessel. The field-guns were set up and trained; a dozen men climbed into the two tanks, loaded with machine guns and hand grenades. Above, a dozen airplanes droned, and made swooping circles, much like hawks. ”

“ We shall not permit them to rise, and shall simply lay siege to them until they starve. Do not be alarmed when we put a small shell through the skin of their vessel; that will be to keep them from rising out into space. Advise them again, that they will be better off if they surrender."
The cw spoke again for a period; and again the boy spoke, with some excitement in his voice:
"Apparently the shell has arrived, and blown a hole in the nose of their ship. Dragstedt didn't think it did any damage. But the Martians have become very busy about something, moving jerkily about. ”

“ The gist of it is, that Dragstedt and the Martians got up a scheme, where he is to steer them to the caches of radium when they come to Earth in a space ship. In return, they will cure his heart disease and give him everlasting life. Dragstedt has been all over the country, getting the layouts of hospitals and universities, which he could easily do, for he is a well known physicist himself. ”

“ Deaths occurred in such numbers that the laboratories could not replace them by a sufficient number of births; their mathematicians predicted the early extinction of the race. Their physicists said that the disease was due to the complete loss of radioactive minerals, due to the old age of the planet itself. I saw some of the sick ones on the television screen, and it must have been some kind of cancer.
"What did Dragstedt do, but describe radium to them, and ask them if they knew what it was, and if they thought it would cure their stuff. ”

“ IN one of the homes on a modest residence street in Lincoln, Nebraska, a sixteen-year old boy walked into the living-room, where his father was reading a newspaper, and turned off the radio. By the door, at the foot of the hat-rack, a physician's emergency bag and two canvas paper-carriers' bags showed plainly that both father and son were busy men.
"Dad," the boy inquired earnestly, "would it be a good or a bad thing for the human race if someone discovered how to make people live forever?" ”

“ Sometimes one of the windows went funny colors in the night, as I went by with my paper-bags. He's got a crazy chimney on his house, like a tall pipe, and shiny, like polished metal.
"Although it is against the rules of the paper, one morning I couldn't resist trying a peek in at one of his windows. I tiptoed up on the porch, but the minute I stepped on his rug, an alarm went off somewhere in the house. The door opened, and he started to roar at me, and then collapsed on the floor. He has heart disease, and gets attacks when he gets sore. ”

“ At a height of about 3,000 feet, he flew away to the distance of a half mile, and then dived steeply downward, toward the Martian vessel. A few hundred feet above it, he turned sharply upward again, making a sort of V. At the bottom of the V, a small black object left the scout plane, and described a parabola, striking the Martian vessel amidships. A ragged hole appeared, and then a dull explosion.
"Swoop" Martin was climbing fast, and thinking every moment was his last one; expecting to be blown to atoms any second. ”

“ You can fancy, after a few generations, the horrible crowding up of the earth. Think of the pressure, the competition, the lowered standard of living, worse than anything in India or China—and growing worse and no end to it. ”

“ They had learned among other things, the secret of preventing death, or at least of putting it off indefinitely. As their births were regulated in the laboratory merely to replace rare losses by death, the race was stable. ”

“ But it was still there, and the shell-holes all repaired.
So, the Tenth Division moved up to fill the place of the Eighth. A few scouts first took their posts. As nothing happened, more and more men trickled in, and were slowly followed by heavy equipment. ”