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upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels
projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram,
Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened
shipping.
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother
looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the
three of them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their
tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in
remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk
in whose wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were
regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may
be, the giant was even such another as themselves. The Thunder Child fired no
gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing
that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what
to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom
forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway between
the steamboat and the Martians -- a diminishing black bulk against the
receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of
the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an
inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke,
from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in
the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she were already
among the Martians.
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they
retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the
Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang
from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the
ship's side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.
A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martian
reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body of
water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the Thunder Child sounded
through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashed the
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying ships to
the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's collapse the
captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers
on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then they yelled again. For,
surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long and black, the
flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting
fire.
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her engines
working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundred
yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with a violent thud, a
blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggered
with the violence of her explosion, and in another moment the flaming
wreckage, still driving forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him
and crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard: My brother shouted
involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam hid everything again.
"Two!" yelled the captain.
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with frantic
cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the crowding
multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third Martian and
the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was paddling steadily out to
sea and away from the fight; and when at last the confusion cleared, the
drifting bank of black vapour intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child
could be made out, nor could the third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to
seaward were now quite close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads
receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled bank of
vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in the strangest
way. The fleet of refugees was scattering to the northeast; several smacks
were sailing between the ironclads and the steamboat. After a time, and before
they reached the sinking cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then
abruptly went about and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward.
The coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of
clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun.
Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the vibration of
guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the rail of
the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of the west, but nothing was
to be distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose slanting and barred the face
of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its way through an interminable
suspense.
The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the evening star [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]