The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 05

by Anthology

  "Those sleek-looking scoundrels, they're the cause of half the injustice and the oppression that has made anarchy what it is, and me what I am. Here goes for the Temple and what the canting hypocrites are pleased to call the Royal Courts of Justice. I hope the Courts are sitting. I'll go and serve a notice of ejectment on them, and decline to stay execution, as they say in their pompous jargon."

  With that he sent the Vengeur across the Embankment and the Strand, and placed her over the Law Courts. Then bomb after bomb crashed in quick succession through different parts of the gabled roof of the great building, until it was on fire in a dozen places at once, and there was such a stampede and haste to get out as the law's delay had never known before.

  That afternoon and evening neither flag was hoisted nor light kindled on the Clock Tower of Westminster, for the universal panic had now spread to all ranks of society, and neither Lords nor Commons felt inclined to run the risk of a sitting in a building whose conspicuous position and character marked it out for almost certain destruction at the hands of the enemy of mankind who, for the time being, held London at his mercy.

  Max waited in vain for the signal that Parliament was sitting, still keeping up the terrorism by circling hither and thither high over the vast wilderness of houses, and dropping a bomb or sending a shell here and there as the fancy took him, or any tempting object presented itself. He kept this up until about six o'clock, and then, as his ammunition was beginning to run rather low, he decided to put the finishing touches to his horrible work, and then get away and join Hartog again.

  Going to work with almost diabolical deliberation, he first ran up and down over the river and destroyed the floating fire-engines. Then, hovering over Westminster, he sent bomb after bomb through the roofs of the Houses of Parliament, the Government Offices, the Horse Guards, the Admiralty, and Whitehall. For a moment the thought of destroying Westminster Abbey as well crossed his mind, but a glance at the venerable pile brought back to his well-stored mind all its ancient and splendid traditions, and instead of giving the order, he said to himself-

  "No, I won't do that. It would do no good, and it would take a thousand years to repair the damage. I'll let the old church alone. Who knows but some day we may preach the new Gospel of Man in it. Sacre diable, how the abodes of red tape are burning! It seems to make splendid fuel. I wonder what there is in that fire-mixture of Hartog's? It burns as if it came from the lake of Tophet itself. Fine bonfires those for anarchy to light its pipe at! Ah, they're lighting the street-lamps out yonder to the north. It's time to go and pay the gasworks a visit. I think I've provided London with quite light enough for to-night. It's a waste to burn gas under the circumstances."

  Then the Vengeur ran across to Vauxhall, and a few moments later the shells began bursting among the gasholders, tearing great ragged holes in them, and as the gas came rushing out, fire-bombs were dropped to ignite it, and huge tongues of roaring flame shot up into the air, until one after another the gasometers burst like huge shells. Then came the turn of the Old Kent Road works, and the southern half of London shook to its foundation as the enormous quantities of gas stored up in the holders took fire and then blew up, hurling fragments of iron plate, bricks and coal, and fragments of bodies far and wide over the surrounding streets.

  Every gas light in South London went out within a few minutes, and then the Vengeur headed away north-westward to the works of the Gas Light and Coke Company at Kensal Town. The great "Jumbo," the largest gas-holder in the world, was full, and the huge iron reservoir had been raised to the tops of the iron pillars with which it was surrounded.

  Max turned his attention to the smaller ones first, and sent a shell through the roof of each of them in rapid succession. Then he poised the air-ship exactly above the giant, and dropped first a solid piece of iron weighing about ten pounds on to its roof, and then sent a fire-bomb immediately after this. The piece of iron bored a clean hole, and as the gas came rushing up out of this, the fire-bomb fell and ignited it.

  The next instant a long stream of intensely brilliant flame, almost like the ray of a searchlight, leapt up into the darkening sky hundreds of feet above the gas-holder. Then the volumes of gas escaping from the others caught fire in the air, with which, of course, they made a highly explosive mixture, and exploded with a concussion, the force of which was felt even by the Vengeur, floating nearly three thousand feet above. The great reservoir soon began to subside; its enormous weight driving the gas out with terrific force, sending the long tongue of flame far up into the sky, and casting a parting gleam on the hull and aeroplanes of the Vengeur as she soared away to the westward.

  "Ah!" said Max, as he looked back out of the conning-tower at the dark gulf of London, still lighted up by huge patches of flame covered by enormous canopies of rolling smoke; "the next time you try to hang an anarchist, perhaps you will think twice about it. I hope that will teach you that the centre of power has shifted. The rule of nations is at an end, for I can paralyse those who rule them with a single stroke. What I have done to London to-day it would have taken a besieging army weeks to do. The rule of the world has shifted from the earth to the air, and woe betide the earth as long as I rule the air! How mad Franz will be when he finds he has missed all this fun!"

  So saying, he sent a signal for full speed to the engine-room, and in a few minutes the conflagrations of London were only little points of light on the horizon.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  A REIGN OF TERROR.

  THE excitement produced by the terrible events of Death Tuesday, as the fatal day of the anarchists' revenge had been promptly and permanently named, was completely indescribable. Not only England but the Continent - indeed, it might almost be said the whole civilised world - was convulsed by it.

  Nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the world before. The ocean terrorism maintained by the Destroyer on the Atlantic was as nothing to it. From under the very shadow of the scaffold, in the centre of the most populous city in the world, a notorious criminal had been snatched from the grasp of justice by means so unheard-of and marvellous, that only the awful reality of what had followed made it impossible to doubt the fact that it had occurred.

  This man, arraigned at the bar of English justice to answer for the most terrible of crimes, had calmly admitted them, and then, snapping his fingers at the majesty of the law, he had threatened to take a tremendous vengeance even for the indignity of having sentence of death passed upon him - and he had kept his monstrous threat to the letter.

  There could be no doubt about that. The blackened and smoking ruins of the most important buildings in London, of the very seat of Government itself, the darkened and wreck-strewn streets, the thousands of human bodies, torn and mangled almost beyond recognition, and the mutilated remains of men, women, and children who had perished in the burning houses or been crushed to death by the panic-stricken throngs in the streets - all these were evidence, too fearfully unmistakable, of the fact that the enemy of society had, for the tune being at least, armed himself with a power superior to anything that the forces of law and order could bring against him.

  In what had been to him merely the pastime of a spring day, this one man, with half a dozen followers, had done what it would have taken the leagued armies and fleets of the Continent weeks of the most appalling strife and bloodshed to do. He had bombarded London, and the amount of damage he had done had been limited only by his inclination or the failure of his ammunition. What had happened to London might happen to Paris the next day, to Berlin the next, to St. Petersburg the next, and so on. It was only a question of time and ammunition. From the monarch in his palace to the peasant in his cottage, no one was safe, and no one had the remotest idea where the next blow would fall.

  To say that a reign of terror, a condition of almost universal panic, had been established at one stroke by the anarchists, would be simply to state the bare facts of the case. Men were afraid to meet anywhere in large numbers, lest, as in London, destructi
on swift and inevitable should be hurled upon them from the sky.

  The Parliaments of the world met in scanty numbers, and in fear and trembling. They passed their resolutions hurriedly, and separated as soon as possible, for politics had suddenly become invested with an actual personal danger, and as politicians and heroes are seldom made of the same stuff, legislators mostly preferred the safer obscurity of their own homes to the perilous prominence of their official positions.

  Suppose the British Houses of Parliament had been sitting when the Vengeur made her attack on the Palace of Westminster, how many members of either House would have escaped death or mutilation? What was there to prevent a similar assault to be made at any moment on any other of the Parliament Houses of the world, from the Chamber of Deputies in Paris to the House of Representatives in Washington? There was nothing, and so it came to pass that the parliamentary Governments of the world were half paralysed by the terrorism of anarchy in its most frightful form.

  But, although this was primarily due to the assault of the air-ship on London, it was not wholly caused by it. While Renault had been at work in the air, Lea had been no less active on land. Through her agency, all the anarchist groups in the world had been prepared beforehand for the startling events of Death Tuesday, and they had unanimously resolved to celebrate the rescue of the man they now looked up to as their leader and chief, in spite of their rigidly individualistic principles, in a fashion worthy of themselves and their horrible creed.

  The result had been that there was hardly a great centre of population in the civilised world that had not been the scene of some explosion, assassination, or other outrage.

  Within a week, the war party in France was in the ascendant, and before another week had passed, France had joined hands with Russia, and declared war on Britain, as the harbourer of anarchists, and the enemy of the peace of Europe. By this time, too, the Baltic was clear of ice, and the Russian northern fleet was only waiting for the cooperation of the French Channel squadron to force the British blockade of the Sound, and carry the war to the shores of Britain.

  Such was the general position of affairs on the 12th of May, when a meeting of the directors of the Aerial Navigation Syndicate took place at the offices of the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Company in Victoria Street, Westminster. Mr. Maxim himself was in the chair, and others present were Mr. Austen, Sir Harry, Edward Adams, and Lieutenant Wyndham. The proceedings had opened with a terse comprehensive view of the position of the Syndicate by the chairman, and, in concluding this, he said-

  Now, gentlemen, from what I have said and you already know, I think you will agree with me that it won't be very long now before the old order of things is completely done away with, and all the fighting of the future, if there is to be any, will have to be done either by semi-submarine craft of the type of the Nautilus and the Aries, or else by means of air-ships.

  "That scoundrel Renault has proved that against a properly managed air-ship, carrying guns and a fair amount of ammunition, there is practically no defence. Now, he and ourselves are the only people in the world who possess these ships. We don't know how many he's got by this time, because he hasn't given any sign of his existence since his attack on London. But, however many or few he has, we know how he'll use them.

  "We have two, the Volante and the War-Hawk, ready to take the air to-morrow. I fancy they're swifter and more powerful as fighting machines than his, and I don't know that any of us will have any reason to wish any alteration in the original plan, that they should be devoted to hunting this scoundrel down, and, if possible, destroying him. It is also agreed, I think, that the Volante shall be commanded by Mr. Adams, and the War-Hawk by Mr. Austen, and that each of these gentlemen will choose their own officers and crew."

  A general nod of assent went round the table as Mr. Maxim paused for a moment, and then he went on-

  "With regard to the rest of the fleet, I am happy to say we have so far repaired the damage caused by those rascals with their bombs, that we shall have twenty more ships ready for work in a fortnight from now, and this will bring us face to face with a question, if possible, more important than anarchist-hunting, and that is our attitude with regard to the war.

  "As you no doubt know, we have received some very tempting offers for the use of our ships, not only from the British Government, but from France and Russia as well. But I think you'll agree with me that the services in warfare of such an engine of destruction as our air-ships will undoubtedly be, are not to be measured by a few thousand pounds a month that a Government would pay for the hire of them."

  "Most assuredly!" said Mr. Austen, as the chairman paused as if awaiting a reply. " I think, at any rate, speaking for myself and my immediate friends, that the very worst policy would be to place the air-ships at the disposal of any Government. To do so would be to give them the means of tyrannising over other Powers, and subjecting them to an almost irresistible temptation to embark upon a career of indiscriminate conquest, which might end in enslaving the liberties of the world.

  "For my own part, I don't believe that any government, whether despotic or democratic, is sufficiently civilised to be entrusted with such a power as that. The world is not ready for aerial navigation yet, and I have never ceased to regret, since Renault stole the air-ship from Utopia, that I did not keep my son's secret and let it die with me."

  "You'd have been something more than mortal if you had done that, Mr. Austen," said Mr. Maxim drily. "Besides, you know, if your air-ships hadn't been built, my aeroplanes would have been nearly as dangerous to the peace of the world; and, as it was then just a matter of business with me, I should have sold them or hired them out to anyone who'd have paid for them, and left them to fight it out amongst themselves, just as they do with the Maxim gun."

  "But as a matter of business," chimed in Sir Harry, "and humanity as well, I certainly think that our original plan will be by far the best so far as the war is concerned. What do you think, Mr. Adams?"

  "Oh, undoubtedly," replied Adams. "Once we have driven the anarchists from the air and given that blackguard, Renault, his deserts, I hope we shall carry it out as quickly as possible; but I am certainly of opinion that we ought to use every effort to hunt Renault and his accomplices down first. We really have nothing to do with the quarrel with France and Russia, and it is of very little moment to us which is in the right or the wrong.

  "My voice will certainly be for hunting the anarchists down first with every ship that we can get afloat, and then carrying out the original plan on the basis of which this Syndicate was formed."

  "And that is my view, too," said Sir Harry, as Adams ceased speaking. "On both public and private grounds, I think we are bound to put a stop to the terrorism which this Renault, unfortunately, has it in his power to exercise. I think that if England, France, and Russia are foolish enough to go to war about matters which they could settle in a few hours with a little common sense and fair play, we may as well leave them to fight it out for the present.

  "But even if the whole of Europe were at war, it would be of less importance than exterminating Renault and his accomplices, because it stands to reason that if we give them time to build a large fleet of air-ships, they will simply take advantage of the war to increase its horrors a hundredfold and spread their terrorism round the whole world, and, in that case, civilisation will simply come to an end, and the anarchists will soon gain command of the world- and a very nice prospect that would be."

  "Very well, then," said the chairman. "We will consider that as settled, and so this will be the last meeting of the Syndicate for the present. We have done our talking and our thinking, and now we shall go to work. You gentlemen will go on active service, and I shall remain here to superintend building operations and business in general. I hope our next meeting will be to arrange terms of peace, and put international matters on a little more satisfactory basis than they are now. I think that is everything, isn't it?"

  "No," said Mr. Austen, taking a sealed envelope fro
m his breast pocket. "There is one thing more. Mr. Adams and I start to-morrow upon what may be a very perilous undertaking. All warfare is uncertain, and this warfare will probably be the most uncertain of all; and therefore, Mr. Maxim, we have decided to leave with you the formula for the preparation of the motor-fuel, so that you may have it prepared in proper quantities, and, of course, with due regard for secrecy, for the supply of the fleet.

  "All we shall ask in return will be your word of honour that you will learn the formula by heart, and at once destroy this paper, that you will never disclose it to anyone, and that you will supply none of the fuel on any conditions to anyone outside the Syndicate."

  "You have my word on all these points, I can assure you," replied the chairman, as he took the priceless envelope. "If ever I let it out, you are at liberty to blow me to smithereens with one of my own guns."

  After this, a few more minor details of business were arranged, and the meeting broke up. That evening the members of the Aerial Navigation Syndicate dined together at the Hotel Victoria, in company with several old friends from Utopia, and not the least hearty of their toasts was that in which they drank "Success to the cruise of the Volante and the War-Hawk."