The World Peril of 1910

  CHAPTER XXX

  MR PARMENTER SAYS

  Happily for the defenders of Britain the fleet of aerial submarines,from which so much had been expected for offensive purposes during theproposed "triumphal march" on London, soon became of little or no use inthe field.

  The reason was this: As, day after day and week after week, that awfulstruggle continued, it became absolutely necessary for the Allies toobtain men and material to make good the fearful losses which the valourand devotion of what was now a whole nation in arms had inflicted uponthem, and so all but four were despatched to guard the route betweenDover and Calais--eight under the water and eight in the air--and somake it possible for the transports to cross. Of course, this meant thatthousands of fresh men and hundreds of horses and guns could be pouredinto Kent every day; but it also meant that the greater portion of thedefenders' most terrible foes were rendered harmless--and this was notthe least of the good work that the _Ithuriel_ had done.

  Of course, that famous "sea-devil," as the invaders called her, wasmostly on the spot or thereabouts, and every now and then a crowdedtransport would lurch over and go down, or a silent, flameless shotwould rise up out of some unknown part of the waters and a shell wouldburst with a firmament-shaking concussion close to one of theairships--after which the airship would burst with a still morefrightful shock and distribute herself in very small fragments throughthe shuddering atmosphere; but this only happened every other day or so,for Erskine and his lieutenant knew a good deal better than to run toomany risks, at least just now.

  So, for twelve weeks of bitter, bloody and unsparing strife the grim,unceasing struggle for the possession of the Capital of the World wenton, and when the eighteenth of March dawned, the outposts of the Allieswere still twelve to fourteen miles from the banks of the Thames. Howdesperate had been that greatest of all defences since man had made waron man may be dimly guessed from the fact that it cost the invaders twomonths of incessant fighting and more than a million men before theyplanted their guns along the ridges of the North Downs and the SurreyHills.

  Meanwhile Gilbert Lennard passed his peaceful though anxious daysbetween Bolton and Whernside, while Auriole, Margaret Holker, NorahCastellan and Mrs O'Connor, with hundreds of other heroines, were doingtheir work of mercy in the hospital camps at the different bases behindthe fighting front. Lord Westerham, who had worked miracles in the wayof recruiting, was now in his glory as one of General French's SpecialService Officers, which, under such a Commander, is about as dangerous ajob as a man can find in the whole bloody business of war.

  And still, as the pitiless human strife went on with its ceaselessrattle of rifle fire, and the almost continuous roar of artillery, dayby day the Invader from Space grew bigger and brighter in the greatreflector, and day by day the huge cannon, which, in the decisive momentof the world's fate, was to do battle with it, approached completion.

  At midnight on the twelfth of March Tom Bowcock had announced that allwas ready for the casting. Lennard gave the order by electric signal.The hundred converters belched their floods of glowing steel into whathad once been Great Lever pit; night was turned into day by a vast glowthat shot up to the zenith, and the first part of the great work wasaccomplished.

  At breakfast the next morning Lennard received the following cablegramfrom Pittsburg:

  "All ready. Crossing fourteenth. Give particulars of comet away when you like. Pittsburg Baby doing well. How's yours?--PARMENTER."

  In order to understand the full meaning of Mr Parmenter's curt cablegramit will be necessary to go back for a little space to the day when hemade his hurried departure from the Clyde in the _Minnehaha_. It will beremembered that he had that morning received a cablegram from New York.This message had read thus:

  "Complete success at last. Craft built and tried. Action and speed perfect. Dollars out, hurry up. "HINGESTON."

  Now the signer of this cablegram, Newson Hingeston, was an old collegefriend of Mr Parmenter's, and therefore a man of about his own age. Hewas a born mathematician and engineer, and, like many another beforehim, the dream of his life had been the conquest of the air by means ofvessels which flew as a bird flew, that is to say by their own inherentstrength, and without the aid of gas-bags or buoyancy chambers, whichhe, like all the disciples of Nadar, Jules Verne, Maxim and Langley, hadlooked upon as mere devices of quackery, or at the best, playthings ofrich people, who usually paid for their amusement with their lives.

  His father died soon after he left college, and left him a comfortablelittle estate on the north-western slopes of the Alleghanies, and afortune in cash and securities of a million dollars. The estate gave himplenty to live upon comfortably, so he devoted his million to therealisation of his ideal. Ratliffe Parmenter, who only had a few hundredthousand dollars to begin with, laughed at him, but one day, after along argument, just as a sort of sporting bet, he signed a bond to paytwo million dollars for the first airship built by his friend thatshould fly in any direction, independently of the wind, and carry a deadweight of a ton in addition to a crew of four men.

  Newson Hingeston registered the bond with all gravity, and deposited itat his bank, and then their life-ways parted. Parmenter plunged into thevortex of speculation, went under sometimes, but always came to the topagain with a few more millions in his insatiable grasp, and thesemillions, after the manner of their kind, had made more millions, andthese still more, until he gave up the task of measuring the giganticpile and let it grow.

  Meanwhile, his friend had spent the best twenty-five years of his life,all his fortune, and every dollar he could raise on his estate, inpursuit of the ideal which he had reached a few minutes later than theeleventh hour. Then he had sent that cable. Of course, he wanted the twomillions, but what had so suddenly happened in England had instantlyconvinced him that he was now the possessor of an invention which manymillions would not buy, and which might decide the fate of the world.

  Within twelve hours of his arrival at his friend's house, RatliffeParmenter was entirely convinced that Newson Hingeston had beenperfectly justified in calling him across the Atlantic, for the verygood reason that he spent the greater part of the night taking flyingleaps over the Alleghanies, nerve-shuddering dives through valleys andgorges, and vast, skimming flights over dim, half-visible plains andforests to the west, soaring and swooping, twisting and turning atincredible speeds, in fact, doing everything that any bird that everflew could do.

  When they got back to the house, just as dawn was breaking, and MrParmenter had shaken hands with Hiram Roker, a long, lean, slab-sidedYankee, who was Hingeston's head engineer and general manager, and hadfought the grim fight through failure to success at his side for twentyyears, he said to his friend:

  "Newson, you've won, and I guess I'll take that bond up, and I'd like todo a bit more than that. You know what's happening over the other side.There's got to be an Aerial Navigation Trust formed right away,consisting of you, myself and Hiram there, and Max Henchell, my partner,and that syndicate has to have twenty of these craft of yours, bigger ifpossible, afloat inside three months. The syndicate will commence atonce with a capital of fifty millions, and there'll be fifty more behindthat if wanted."

  "It's a great scheme," Hingeston replied slowly, "but I'm afraid thetime's too short."

  "Time!" exclaimed Mr Parmenter. "Who in thunder thinks about time whendollars begin to talk? You just let me have all your plans and sections,drawings and the rest of your fixings in time to catch the ten o'clocktrain to Pittsburg. I'll run up and talk the matter over with Henchell.We'll have fifty workshops turning out the different parts in a week,and you shall have a staff of trustworthy men that we own, body andsoul, down here to assemble them, and we'll make the best of those chapsinto the crews of the ships when we get them afloat.

  "Now, don't talk back, Newson, that's fixed. I'm sleepy, and that triphas jerked my nerves up a bit. Give me a drink, and let's go to bed fortwo or three hou
rs. You'll have a cheque for five millions before Istart, and we shall then consider the _Columbia_ our private yacht.We'll fly her around at night, and just raise Cain in the way ofmysteries for the newspapers, but we won't give ourselves awayaltogether until the fleet's ready."

  As they say on the other side of the Atlantic, what Ratliffe Parmentersaid, went. He wielded the irresistible power of almost illimitablewealth, and during the twenty-five years that Hingeston had been workingat his ideal, he and Maximilian Henchell, who was a descendant of oneof the oldest Dutch families in America, and one of its shrewdestbusiness men to boot, had built up an industrial organisation that wasperhaps the most perfect of its kind even in the United States. It wasrun on lines of absolute despotism, but the despotism was at onceintellectual and benevolent. To be a capable and faithful servant ofParmenter and Henchell, even in the humblest capacity, meant, not onlygood wages and provision for life, but prospects of advancement to thehighest posts in the firm, and means of investing money which nooutsider would ever hear of.

  Wherefore those who worked for Parmenter and Henchell formed anindustrial army, some fifty thousand strong, generalled, officered anddisciplined to the highest point of efficiency, and faithful to thedeath. In fact, to be dismissed from any of their departments orworkshops was financial death. It was like having a sort of commercialticket-of-leave, and if such a man tried for work elsewhere, the answerwas "If you can't work for P. and H. you must be a crook of some sort. Iguess you're no good to us." And the end of that man was usually worsethan his beginning.

  This was the vast organisation which, when the word went forth from theheadquarters at Pittsburg, devoted the best of its brains and skill tothe creation of the Aerial Fleet, and, as Mr Parmenter had said, thatFleet was ready to take the air in the time he had allowed for itsconstruction.

  But the new ships had developed in the course of making. They were halfas long again as the _Columbia_, and therefore nearly twice as big, withengines four times the power, and they carried three guns ahead andthree astern, which were almost exact reproductions of those of the_Ithuriel_, the plans of which had been brought over by the _Minnehaha_on her second trip.

  The _Columbia_ had a speed of about one hundred miles an hour, but thenew models were good for nearly a hundred and fifty. In appearance theywere very like broad and shallow torpedo boats, with three aeroplanes oneither side, not unlike those of the _Flying Fishes_, with three liftingfans under each. These could be driven vertically or horizontally, andso when the big twin fans at the stern had got up sufficient way to keepthe ship afloat by the pressure under the aeroplanes the lifting fanscould be converted into pulling fans, but this was only necessary when avery high speed was desired.

  There was a signal mast and yard forward, and a flagstaff aft. The gunswere worked under hoods, which protected the gunners from the rush ofthe wind, and just forward of the mast was an oval conning-tower, notunlike that of the _Ithuriel_, only, of course, unarmoured, from whicheverything connected with the working of the ship could be controlled bya single man.

  Such is a brief description of the Aerial Fleet which rose from theslopes of the Alleghanies at ten o'clock on the night of the fourteenthof March 1910, and winged its way silently and without lights eastwardacross the invisible waters of the Atlantic.

  There is one other point in Mr Parmenter's cablegram to Lennard whichmay as well be explained here. He had, of course, confided everythingthat he knew, not only about the war, but also about the approachingWorld Peril and the means that were being taken to combat it, to hispartner on his first arrival in the States, and had also given him acopy of Lennard's calculations.

  Instantly Mr Max Henchell's patriotic ambition was fired. Mr Lennard hadmentioned that Tom Bowcock, Lennard's general manager, had proposed tochristen the great gun the "Bolton Baby." He had spent that night incalculations of differences of latitude and longitude, time, angles ofinclination of the axis of the orbit, points and times of orbitalintersection worked out from the horizon of Pittsburg, and when he hadfinished he solemnly asked himself the momentous question: Why shouldthis world-saving business be left to England alone? After all the"Bolton Baby" might miss fire by a second or two. If it was going to bea matter of comet-shooting, what had America done that she could nothave a gun? Were there not hundreds of eligible shafts to be boughtround Pittsburg? Yes, America should have that gun, if the last dollarhe possessed or could raise by fair means or foul was to be thrown downthe bore of it.

  And so America had the gun, and therefore in after days the rival of the"Bolton Baby" came to be called the "Pittsburg Prattler."