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  _The_ MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH

  By ARTHUR TRAIN AND ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD

  Reprint Edition 1974 by Arno Press Inc. A New York Times Company New York--1975

  SCIENCE FICTION ADVISORY EDITORS _R. Reginald_ _Douglas Menville_

  Copyright (C) 1915 by Doubleday, Page & Company

  _All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_

  Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Robert W. Wood

  Reprinted from a copy in The Library of the University of California, Riverside

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Train, Arthur Cheney, 1875-1945. The man who rocked the earth.

  (Science fiction) Reprint of the ed. published by Doubleday, Page, Garden City, N. Y.

  I. Wood, Robert Williams, 1868-1955, joint author. II. Title. III. Series. PZ3.T682Mak6 [PS3539.R23] 813'.5'2 74-16523 ISBN 0-405-06315-6

  THE MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH

  _"I thought, too, of the first and most significant realization which the reading of astronomy imposes: that of the exceeding delicacy of the world's position; how, indeed, we are dependent for life, and all that now is, upon the small matter of the tilt of the poles; and that we, as men, are products, as it were, not only of earth's precarious position, but of her more precarious tilt."_--W. L. COMFORT, Nov., 1914

  INSTANTLY THE EARTH BLEW UP LIKE A CANNON--UP INTO THEAIR, A THOUSAND MILES UP]

  PROLOGUE

  By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon theglobe except the United States of North and of South America, which hadup to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium,Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, andServia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings hadbeen exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Tenmillion had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women andchildren had been rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none.No crops were harvested or sown. The ocean was devoid of sails.Throughout European Christendom women had taken the place of men asfield hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. Theamalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than$100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armiescontinued to slaughter one another.

  Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians.Northern Africa was a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Paris lay an armyof two million Germans, while three million Russians had investedBerlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and fifty thousandmen faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring totake the offensive.

  The inventive genius of mankind, stimulated by the exigencies of war,had produced a multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which hadin turn been rendered ineffective by some counter-invention of anothernation. Three of these products of the human brain, however, remainedunneutralized and in large part accounted for the impasse at which thehostile armies found themselves. One of these had revolutionized warfarein the field, and the other two had destroyed those two most importantfactors of the preliminary campaign--the aeroplane and the submarine.The German dirigibles had all been annihilated within the first tenmonths of the war in their great cross-channel raid by Pathe contactbombs trailed at the ends of wires by high-flying French planes. This,of course, had from the beginning been confidently predicted by theFrench War Department. But by November, 1915, both the allied and theGerman aerial fleets had been wiped from the clouds by Federston'svortex guns, which by projecting a whirling ring of air to a height ofover five thousand feet crumpled the craft in mid-sky like so manybutterflies in a simoon.

  The second of these momentous inventions was Captain Barlow's device fordestroying the periscopes of submarines, thus rendering them blind andhelpless. Once they were forced to the surface such craft were easilydestroyed by gun fire or driven to a sullen refuge in protectingharbours.

  The third, and perhaps the most vital, invention was Dufay'snitrogen-iodide pellets, which when sown by pneumatic guns upon theslopes of a battlefield, the ground outside intrenchments, or round theglacis of a fortification made approach by an attacking army impossibleand the position impregnable. These pellets, only the size of No. 4 birdshot and harmless out of contact with air, became highly explosive twominutes after they had been scattered broadcast upon the soil, and anyfriction would discharge them with sufficient force to fracture ordislocate the bones of the human foot or to put out of service the legof a horse. The victim attempting to drag himself away inevitablysustained further and more serious injuries, and no aid could be givento the injured, as it was impossible to reach them. A field well plantedwith such pellets was an impassable barrier to either infantry orcavalry, and thus any attack upon a fortified position was doomed tofailure. By surprise alone could a general expect to achieve a victory.Offensive warfare had come almost to a standstill.

  Germany had seized Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. Italy had annexedDalmatia and the Trentino; and a new Slav republic had arisen out ofwhat had been Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Servia, Roumania,Montenegro, Albania, and Bulgaria. Turkey had vanished from the map ofEurope; while the United States of South America, composed of theSpanish-speaking South American Republics, had been formed. Themortality continued at an average of two thousand a day, of which 75 percent. was due to starvation and the plague. Maritime commerce had ceasedentirely, and in consequence of this the merchant ships of all nationsrotted at the docks.

  The Emperor of Germany, and the kings of England and of Italy, had allvoluntarily abdicated in favour of a republican form of government.Europe and Asia had run amuck, hysterical with fear and blood. As welltry to pacify a pack of mad and fighting dogs as these frenzied myriadswith their half-crazed generals. They lay, these armies, across the fairbosom of the earth like dying monsters, crimson in their own blood, yetstill able to writhe upward and deal death to any other that mightapproach. They were at a deadlock, yet each feared to make the firstovertures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an Englishor a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best ofmankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, thefeeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate the race.