by Robert Reed
which will soon be a billion . Thanks to you, we are equipped with
all modern war-machinery . Send your navies . We will not notice
them. Send your punitive expeditions, but first remember France.
To land half a million soldiers on our shores would strain the re-
sources of any of you . And our thousand millions would swallow
them down in a mouthful. Send a million; send five millions, and
we will swallow them down just as readily . Pouf! A mere nothing, a
meagre morsel . Destroy, as you have threatened, you United States,
the ten million coolies we have forced upon your shores—why, the
amount scarcely equals half of our excess birth rate for a year .”
So spoke Li Tang Fwung . The world was nonplussed, helpless,
terrified. Truly had he spoken. There was no combating China’s
amazing birth rate . If her population was a billion, and was increas-
ing twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would be a billion
and a half—equal to the total population of the world in 1904 . And
nothing could be done . There was no way to dam up the over-spilling
monstrous flood of life. War was futile. China laughed at a blockade
of her coasts . She welcomed invasion . In her capacious maw was
room for all the hosts of earth that could be hurled at her . And in
the meantime her flood of yellow life poured out and on over Asia.
China laughed and read in their magazines the learned lucubrations
of the distracted Western scholars .
But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on—Jacobus
Laningdale . Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense .
Primarily, Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to that time,
a very obscure scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of
the Health Office of New York City. Jacobus Laningdale’s head was
very like any other head, but in that head was evolved an idea . Also,
in that head was the wisdom to keep that idea secret . He did not
write an article for the magazines . Instead, he asked for a vacation .
On September 19, 1975, he arrived in Washington . It was evening,
but he proceeded straight to the White House, for he had already
arranged an audience with the President . He was closeted with
President Moyer for three hours . What passed between them was
not learned by the rest of the world until long after; in fact, at that
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 243
time the world was not interested in Jacobus Laningdale . Next day
the President called in his Cabinet . Jacobus Laningdale was present .
The proceedings were kept secret . But that very afternoon Rufus
Cowdery, Secretary of State, left Washington, and early the follow-
ing morning sailed for England . The secret that he carried began to
spread, but it spread only among the heads of Governments . Pos-
sibly half-a-dozen men in a nation were entrusted with the idea that
had formed in Jacobus Laningdale’s head . Following the spread of
the secret, sprang up great activity in all the dockyards, arsenals, and
navy-yards . The people of France and Austria became suspicious,
but so sincere were their Governments’ calls for confidence that they
acquiesced in the unknown project that was afoot .
This was the time of the Great Truce . All countries pledged
themselves solemnly not to go to war with any other country . The
first definite action was the gradual mobilization of the armies of
Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey . Then began
the eastward movement . All railroads into Asia were glutted with
troop trains . China was the objective, that was all that was known .
A little later began the great sea movement . Expeditions of war-
ships were launched from all countries. Fleet followed fleet, and
all proceeded to the coast of China . The nations cleaned out their
navy-yards . They sent their revenue cutters and dispatch boots and
lighthouse tenders, and they sent their last antiquated cruisers and
battleships . Not content with this, they impressed the merchant ma-
rine . The statistics show that 58,640 merchant steamers, equipped
with searchlights and rapid-fire guns, were despatched by the vari-
ous nations to China .
And China smiled and waited . On her land side, along her bound-
aries, were millions of the warriors of Europe. She mobilized five
times as many millions of her militia and awaited the invasion . On
her sea coasts she did the same . But China was puzzled . After all
this enormous preparation, there was no invasion . She could not
understand . Along the great Siberian frontier all was quiet . Along
her coasts the towns and villages were not even shelled . Never, in
the history of the world, had there been so mighty a gathering of
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 244
war fleets. The fleets of all the world were there, and day and night
millions of tons of battleships ploughed the brine of her coasts, and
nothing happened . Nothing was attempted . Did they think to make
her emerge from her shell? China smiled . Did they think to tire her
out, or starve her out? China smiled again .
But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of
Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have
witnessed a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with
the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, ev-
ery slant eye turned skyward . And high up in the blue he would
have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolu-
tions, he would have identified as an airship. From this airship, as it
curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles—strange,
harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thou-
sands of fragments on the streets and house- tops . But there was
nothing deadly about these tubes of glass . Nothing happened . There
were no explosions . It is true, three Chinese were killed by the tubes
dropping on their heads from so enormous a height; but what were
three Chinese against an excess birth rate of twenty millions? One
tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a garden and was not
broken . It was dragged ashore by the master of the house . He did
not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded
by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the
magistrate of the district . The latter was a brave man . With all eyes
upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled
pipe . Nothing happened . Of those who were very near, one or two
thought they saw some mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd
set up a great laugh and dispersed .
As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China .
The tiny airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two
men each, and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and
curved, one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the
glass tubes .
Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would
have looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants . So
me few of
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 245
them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their
carcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and piled
high on the abandoned death-waggons . But for the rest he would
have had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire . And
not all would he have found fleeing from plague-stricken Peking,
for behind them, by hundreds of thousands of unburied corpses by
the wayside, he could have marked their flight. And as it was with
Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, and villages of the Em-
pire . The plague smote them all . Nor was it one plague, nor two
plagues; it was a score of plagues . Every virulent form of infectious
death stalked through the land . Too late the Chinese government
apprehended the meaning of the colossal preparations, the marshal-
ling of the world-hosts, the flights of the tin airships, and the rain of
the tubes of glass . The proclamations of the government were vain .
They could not stop the eleven million plague-stricken wretches,
fleeing from the one city of Peking to spread disease through all
the land. The physicians and health officers died at their posts; and
death, the all- conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and
Li Tang Fwung . It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died
in the second week, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer
Palace, died in the fourth week .
Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it . But
from a score of plagues no creature was immune . The man who
escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever . The man who
was immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he
were immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic
plague, swept him away . For it was these bacteria, and germs, and
microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that
had come down upon China in the rain of glass .
All organization vanished . The government crumbled away . De-
crees and proclamations were useless when the men who made them
and signed them one moment were dead the next . Nor could the
maddened millions, spurred on to flight by death, pause to heed any-
thing. They fled from the cities to infect the country, and wherever
they fled they carried the plagues with them. The hot summer was
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 246
on—Jacobus Laningdale had selected the time shrewdly—and the
plague festered everywhere . Much is conjectured of what occurred,
and much has been learned from the stories of the few survivors .
The wretched creatures stormed across the Empire in many-mil-
lioned flight. The vast armies China had collected on her frontiers
melted away . The farms were ravaged for food, and no more crops
were planted, while the crops already in were left unattended and
never came to harvest . The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the
flights. Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds of
the Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of the
West . The slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries was stupen-
dous . Time and again the guarding line was drawn back twenty or
thirty miles to escape the contagion of the multitudinous dead .
Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German
and Austrian soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan .
Preparations had been made for such a happening, and though sixty
thousand soldiers of Europe were carried off, the international corps
of physicians isolated the contagion and dammed it back . It was dur-
ing this struggle that it was suggested that a new plague- germ had
originated, that in some way or other a sort of hybridization between
plague-germs had taken place, producing a new and frightfully viru-
lent germ . First suspected by Vomberg, who became infected with
it and died, it was later isolated and studied by Stevens, Hazenfelt,
Norman, and Landers .
Such was the unparalleled invasion of China . For that billion of
people there was no hope . Pent in their vast and festering charnel-
house, all organization and cohesion lost, they could do naught but
die. They could not escape. As they were flung back from their
land frontiers, so were they flung back from the sea. Seventy-five
thousand vessels patrolled the coasts . By day their smoking fun-
nels dimmed the sea-rim, and by night their flashing searchlights
ploughed the dark and harrowed it for the tiniest escaping junk . The
attempts of the immense fleets of junks were pitiful. Not one ever
got by the guarding sea-hounds . Modern war- machinery held back
the disorganized mass of China, while the plagues did the work .
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 247
But old War was made a thing of laughter . Naught remained to
him but patrol duty . China had laughed at war, and war she was
getting, but it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the war
of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale .
Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro- organic pro-
jectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of death, the
destroying angels that stalked through the empire of a billion souls .
During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno .
There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the
remotest hiding-places . The hundreds of millions of dead remained
unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last,
millions died daily of starvation . Besides, starvation weakened the
victims and destroyed their natural defences against the plagues .
Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned . And so perished China .
Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were the
first expeditions made. These expeditions were small, composed of
scientists and bodies of troops; but they entered China from every
side . In spite of the most elaborate precautions against infection,
numbers of soldiers and a few of the physicians were stricken . But
the exploration went bravely on . They found China devastated, a
howling wilderness through which wandered bands of wild dogs
and desperate bandits who had survived . All survivors were put to
death wherever found . And then began the great task, the sanita-
tion of China . Five years and hundreds of millions of treasure were
consumed, and then the world moved in—not in zones, as was the
idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, according to the demo-
cratic American programme . It was a vast and happy intermingling
of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years
that followed—a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-
fertilization . We know to-day the splendid mechanical, intellectual,
and art output that followed .
It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that the
ancient quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine
recrudesced . The war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April,
and on Apri
l 17 the Convention of Copenhagen was called . The
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 248
representatives of the nations of the world, being present, all nations
solemnly pledged themselves never to use against one another the
laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the invasion of
China . —Excerpt from Walt Mervin’s “Certain Essays in History .”
THE UNPARALLELED INVASION, by Jack London | 249
THE 4TH PLAGUE, by
Edgar Wallace (Part 1)
Originally published in 1913.
PROLOGUE
South of Florence by some sixty miles, and west of Rome by al-
most thrice the distance, upon three hills, is Siena, the most equable
of the cities of Tuscany .
On the Terzo di Città in I know not what contrada, is the Palazzo
Festini .
It stands aloof in its gloomy and dilapidated magnificence, and
since it dates from the adjacent Baptistery of S . Giovanni, it leaves
the impression of being a crumbling and disgruntled fragment of the
sacred edifice that has wandered away in sullen rage to decay at its
leisure .
Here, in penurious grandeur, dwelt the Festinis, who claimed de-
scent from none other than Guido Novello, of whom Compagni, the
arch-apologist, wrote: “Il conte Guido non aspettò il fine, ma senza
dare colpo di spada si parti. ”1
The Festini was a family to the name of which the Italian nobility
listened with immobile faces . And if you chose to praise them they
would politely agree; or if you condemned them they would listen
in silence; but if you questioned them as to their standing in the
hierarchy, you might be sure that, from Rome to Milan, your inquiry
would be met by an immediate, but even, change of subject .
1
Count Guido did not wait for the end, but departed without a
stroke of his sword .
THE 4TH PLAGUE, by Edgar Wallace (Part 1) | 250
The Festinis, whatever might be their relationship with Guido
the Coward, effectively carried on the methods of the Polomei, the
Salvani, the Ponzi, the Piccolomini, and the Forteguerri .
The vendettas of the middle ages were revived and sustained by
these products of nineteenth century civilization, and old Salvani
Festini had, as was notoriously evident, gone outside the circum-
scribed range of his own family grievances, and had allied himself,