Edisons Conquest of Mars | Page 6

an opportunity," I said to Mr. Edison, "to try the powers of your machine on a
large scale."
"Capital!" he instantly replied. "I shall go at once."
Disintegrating a Building.
For the work now in hand it was necessary to employ a battery of disintegrators, since the
field of destruction covered by each was comparatively limited. All of the impending
portions of the wall must be destroyed at once and together, for otherwise the danger
would rather be accentuated than annihilated. The disintegrators were placed upon the
roof of a neighboring building, so adjusted that their fields of destruction overlapped one
another upon the wall. Their indexes were all set to correspond with the vibration period
of the peculiar kind of brick of which the wall consisted. Then the energy was turned on,
and a shout of wonder arose from the multitudes which had assembled at a safe distance
to witness the experiment.

Only a Cloud Remained.
The wall did not fall; it did not break asunder; no fragments shot this way and that and
high in the air; there was no explosion; no shock or noise disturbed the still
atmosphere--only a soft whirr, that seemed to pervade everything and to tingle in the
nerves of the spectators; and--what had been was not! The wall was gone! But high above
and all around the place where it had hung over the street with its threat of death there
appeared, swiftly billowing outward in every direction, a faint, bluish cloud. It was the
scattered atoms of the destroyed wall.
And now the cry "On to Mars!" was heard on all sides. But for such an enterprise funds
were needed--millions upon millions. Yet some of the fairest and richest portions of the
earth had been impoverished by the frightful ravages of those enemies who had dropped
down upon them from the skies. Still, the money must be had. The salvation of the planet,
as everybody was now convinced, depended upon the successful negotiation of a gigantic
war fund, in comparison with which all the expenditures in all of the wars that had been
waged by the nations for 2,000 years would be insignificant. The electrical ships and the
vibration engines must be constructed by scores and thousands. Only Mr. Edison's
immense resources and unrivaled equipment had enabled him to make the models whose
powers had been so satisfactorily shown. But to multiply these upon a war scale was not
only beyond the resources of any individual--hardly a nation on the globe in the period of
its greatest prosperity could have undertaken such a work. All the nations, then, must
now conjoin. They must unite their resources, and, if necessary, exhaust all their hoards,
in order to raise the needed sum.
The Yankees Lead.
Negotiations were at once begun. The United States naturally took the lead, and their
leadership was never for a moment questioned abroad.
Washington was selected as the place of meeting for a great congress of the nations.
Washington, luckily, had been one of the places which had not been touched by the
Martians. But if Washington had been a city composed of hotels alone, and every hotel so
great as to be a little city in itself, it would have been utterly insufficient for the
accommodation of the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks of the
Potomac. But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis? The necessary hotels,
lodging houses and restaurants were constructed with astounding rapidity. One could see
the city growing and expanding day by day and week after week. It flowed over
Georgetown Heights; it leaped the Potomac; it spread east and west, south and north;
square mile after square mile of territory was buried under the advancing buildings, until
the gigantic city, which had thus grown up like a mushroom in a night, was fully capable
of accommodating all its expected guests.
At first it had been intended that the heads of the various governments should in person
attend this universal congress, but as the enterprise went on, as the enthusiasm spread, as
the necessity for haste became more apparent through the warning notes which were
constantly sounded from the observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding

new evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens of the old world
felt that they could not remain at home; that their proper place was at the new focus and
centre of the whole world--the city of Washington. Without concerted action, without
interchange of suggestion, this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs at
once. Suddenly cablegrams flashed to the Government at Washington, announcing that
Queen Victoria, the Emperor William, the Czar Nicholas, Alphonso of Spain, with his
mother, Maria Christina; the old Emperor Francis Joseph and the Empress Elizabeth, of
Austria;