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He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast
iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam
that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down
almost to the waterline.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 68
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had
passed and was rushing landward. Big iron 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 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]