The Man Who Rocked the Earth

The Man Who Rocked the Earth, by

Arthur Train Robert Williams Wood
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Title: The Man Who Rocked the Earth
Author: Arthur Train Robert Williams Wood
Release Date: September 4, 2006 [EBook #19174]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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 ? 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
[Illustration: INSTANTLY THE EARTH BLEW UP LIKE A CANNON--UP INTO THE AIR, A THOUSAND MILES UP]

PROLOGUE
By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon the globe except the United States of North and of South America, which had up to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, and Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings had been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Ten million had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women and children 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 as field hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. The amalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than $100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armies continued 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 army of two million Germans, while three million Russians had invested Berlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and fifty thousand men faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring to take the offensive.
The inventive genius of mankind, stimulated by the exigencies of war, had produced a multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which had in turn been rendered ineffective by some counter-invention of another nation. Three of these products of the human brain, however, remained unneutralized and in large part accounted for the impasse at which the hostile armies found themselves. One of these had revolutionized warfare in the field, and the other two had destroyed those two most important factors of the preliminary campaign--the aeroplane and the submarine. The German dirigibles had all been annihilated within the first ten months of the war in their great cross-channel raid by Path�� contact bombs trailed at the ends of wires by high-flying French planes. This, of course, had from the beginning been confidently predicted by the French War Department. But by November, 1915, both the allied and the German aerial fleets had been wiped from the clouds by Federston's vortex guns, which by projecting a whirling ring of air to a height of over five thousand feet crumpled the craft in mid-sky like so many butterflies in a simoon.
The second of these momentous inventions was Captain Barlow's device for destroying the periscopes of submarines, thus rendering them blind and helpless. Once they were forced to the surface such craft were easily destroyed by gun fire or driven to a sullen refuge in protecting harbours.
The third, and perhaps the most vital, invention was Dufay's nitrogen-iodide pellets, which when sown by pneumatic guns upon the slopes of a battlefield, the ground outside intrenchments, or round the glacis of a fortification made approach by an attacking army impossible and the position impregnable. These pellets, only the size of No. 4 bird shot and harmless out of contact with air, became highly explosive two minutes