Chapter XVIII

History will record that the battle of Great New York began on the morning of June 12, 2445 A.D. For three days it raged. I can give but fragmentary pictures. It whirled Alan and me into a maelstrom. I recall the morning of June 13. A day of the battle passed. Inconceivable events of horror! Inconceivable ramifications of gruesome tragedy!

I recall that that morning Alan and I sat before a mirror-grid in the Westchester section of this monstrous beehive city. The fighting was further south. We could see it s ghastly details mirrored on a score of grids around us. We had been in it at times. And snatched food and sleep. But we were worn now to the verge of exhaustion. And worn with fear. The Turberites could not be stopped. And Nanette? How could we dare hope that we would ever see Nanette again amid this torrent of killing?

The Hoboken area across the lower river had been the scene of bloody fighting all the afternoon of June 12, the evening, and through the night. The Manhattan-Hudson terraces and most of the network of Hudson bridges down near the lowest end were held now by the Turberites. They had penetrated through all the corridors of the Hoboken area south of the power rooms. Factory rooms and offices were here, shops and storage warehouses of local food supplies. The Turberites now swarmed them. The terminus of the north-south traffic artery on the Manhattan side of the river tunnel was taken from us. The city traffic system of internal railways was long since paralyzed. It added to the panic of the people who were caught in the city the morning before, when the fighting so abruptly started, and who had not yet been able to get away. A resident population of thirty millions now in this monstrous city! Ten million more as a daily average of visitors. They, too, were caught in the maelstrom of the panic. And another thirty million who commuted in to work.

Millions had escaped now. Every moment black streams of them came pouring out. But transportation was hourly becoming more difficult.

Inconceivable ramifications of tragedy! The mirrors before us pictured it in a myriad horrible details. My gaze caught one of them and clung, fascinated.

It was a vaulted corridor, with tiers of levels from the ground up to the thousand-foot roof. The loading platforms of the shuttles which normally whirled local travelers away to the main departing stages of the Northbound Local Coast Flyers were on these levels; forty of them, one above the other, on each sideof the corridor. The shuttle cars stood ready on their tracks; the escalators still were in movement. A tremendous throng of people was struggling here, trying to get onto the shuttles which occasionally were departing. The Hudson River—nearly closed over here by the ground tracks, surface viaducts and the network of bridges to the Hoboken terraces— showed occasionally in patches of sullen, yellow-stained water.

The crowd milled and fought for places in the inadequate cars. Every level, every smallest bridge, was thronged. From a line of doorways and trans-corridors up near the roof a horde of advancing Turberites appeared—a mob of bloodstained villains with the bloodlust upon them. They came clambering and leaping through a hundred doors and windows; they spread down the inclines, the stairways, running over the spiderbridges. Within a moment they seemed everywhere.

I saw a low, unroofed kiosk upon the edge of a sidewalk level. Tables and chairs were there, asthough this were astreet café. Itwas black with men and women, thrust in there by the press of others outside. The furniture was overturned.

From twenty feet overhead a dozen figures of the Turberites leaped a rail and plunged down. Men in torn and blood-soaked uniforms of red cloth, grotesque with epaulets and golden braid. Their swords flashed. The little café was in a moment strewn with the mutilated dead and dying. Some of the bodies went like plummets over the low rails. I could see the white splashes as they struck the sullen river. There was a mirror giving a close detail in another section—a room in the honeycomb of cells that occupied an area of southeast Manhattan. The Turberites had reached there now ina drive for the great air-stage where the trans-continental liners were departing.

Our police force still held the roof-tracks and all the arteries were still ours all over Manhattan. But in the metal honeycomb of squalid living quarters which in my day was called the Lower East Side the Turberites had forced us back.

There was, on my mirror, this chance close detail of a single room. A woman in it, thin and pallid and frail; wasted frame—a woman old and haggard at thirty, with wisps of yellow hair turning white. In metal bunks her brood of children were huddled. Cut off here in their home, lost and forgotten in the turmoil. The woman had barred her door—there were no windows; it seemed that perhaps her ventilator had ceased to operate; she huddled, gasping, with a baby against her breast. The door burst inward. A savage who in a different age had stalked the forests of this same space stood expectantly upon the threshold. His painted face was grinning. Other faces behind him peered to watch. He bounded in; his tomahawk whirled. The woman mercifully went down at once; the children lay where he had thrown them in a gruesome little heap. He seized the baby, which still seemed alive. He held it aloft and gestured to his grinning, feathered companions. He tossed its white body toward the ceiling and flung the dripping tomahawk at the falling mark. The weapon cleaved the baby’s head as it fell to the floor.

And there were other scenes, indescribable. Rooms of small factories. I saw one of them, where for this whole day a group of young girls had been trapped. The swinging viaduct leading from their doorway had fallen with the press of a fleeing mob; a girder had fallen, pinning their door so that they could not open it. They were trapped; and though the official safety emergency station in that area was still in our hands, it was too flooded with similar calls, and too disorganized to heed this one. A room of young girls. And by some chance, when the Tur-berites advanced, a leering giant had peered through a narrow ventilator orifice and seen them. With his huge stone axe he hacked away at the ventilator. Others took his place when he was winded. They came through at last into the room—

A news-mirror beside us—one of the few circuits still in operation—flashed a message:

“Turber attacking the local ventilating powerhouse. To shut off our power—paralyze our ventilating system.

So, with that done, he could use his gas fumes! I had not heard of an attack at the ventilation powerhouse. The one mentioned was in Lower Manhattan—local to that area. It was far underground. The subterranean city was a vast catacomb with a depth everywhere of several hundred feet. We still held our sections of it.

“Alan! What will Central Headquarters do about that? Has it been moved yet? Central Headquarters moved?”

No one near us seemed to know. Every city function was disorganized. The government archives were at this moment being transported with difficulty from the financial area into new quarters beyond the Spuyten Duyvil floodgates. From the subterranean treasury vaults the tremendous gold reserve was being moved northward. All our instrument-room headquarters were being shifted to the northern outskirts. It was almost a flight—a rout. But our massed fighters in all the important corridors were still holding firm. The day wore on. We slept for a few hours, and awoke to find the situation immeasurably worse. San and Lea had not come. And now our tower Space was menaced! A mob of Turberites—there must have been ten thousand of them—had broken through our men inthe tiers of Lower Manhattan. They swarmed therein all the vacant rooms and corridors and pedestrian viaducts. The lifting shafts were out of operation now; the moving sidewalks were stilled. They swarmedup the inclines, the emergency stairs and ladders.

The city forces were driven back, and the local machinery rooms, where the ventilating system of this area was controlled, fell to the Turberites. They had been after it all day. They smashed it. The air currents were stilled.

It was as though all this vital section of the city structure had ceased to breathe. The foul air pouring into the chemical vats was not renewed; it surged in for a time and burst the coils. The pumps used up their reserve pressure and stopped. The emergency system operated for another hour, then they too went dead.

The first Turberites attacking here were armed with pikes and swords—sidearms of ancient fashion. Sabers, the cutlass, broadswords, muskets, useless to fire, but used as bludgeons, or fitted with bayonets, spears and lances of every type. Lurid cutthroats they were, slashing their way in a bloody torrent of hand-to-hand fighting.

Our police held them at occasional points of vantage. There were rooms in which the police entrenched themselves; there were cannons set upfrom which great balls of steel where hurledbycom-pressed air and huge coiled springs.

But these Turberites fought with a recklessness that the police of this modern business era could not equal. They slashed and plunged and flung themselves to wage always a combat at close quarters. A myriad hand-to-hand encounters. Needle blades and polished clubs of the city police. Lengths of steel wire with small metal balls at the ends; the police were expert at throwing them to lasso the legs of running criminals. Small knives, tipped with harmless anesthetic, to be thrown like a dart. Or bombs of sleeping gas which in days of peace could be flung in a well ventilated street at an escaping criminal—but could not be used here.

Almost everywhere the city forces were worsted. But it took time. It was not an utter rout. A hundred thousand personal combats. Inconceivable sanguinary warfare this! All indoors!

When the local ventilating system was broken, Turber must have known at once. Within an hour the type of fighting in this section was wholly changed. The Turberites had fought their way northward up Broadway with the city forces scattering east and west as they advanced. The attackers permeated every passage and tunnel and room. Thousands of them must have wandered aimlessly, lost. Wandering—killing and plunging as they went. The civilians were nearly all out of this area now. A wedge of the Turberites reached what in my day was Columbus Circle. There seemed leaders among them to direct what they were after. They worked their way northward, and then shifted to the east—toward the corridor-street where our tower space was located.

The danger was recognized by the high command. Police troops were withdrawn from the Hoboken section, where similar scenes were transpiring south of the main city power station, and troops were brought from other sections. Our lines on the roof over the harbor were weakened—but there seemed little activity up there.

The strengthened police squads fought their way into mid-Broadway. The upflung wedge of Turberites was cut off. Inhuman with their heedlessness, their reckless thirst for blood; but here for the first time we saw them falter. Cut off from possible retreat, a panic swept them. A thousand or more of them tried to get back. The city troops drove them out of the Broadway corridor and hunted them down as they tried to escape the honeycomb of the city. We gained ground here for a time. But new mobs of the enemy came pouring northward.

All this within an hour or two. The ventilating system of Mid-Manhattan was failing. Turber knew it—and presently the whole character of the fighting was changed. The Turber mobs began withdrawing from this newly captured area. The air was turning fetid, but the police pursued the retreating Turberites as best they could.

The Manhattan exits of the vehicular tunnels under the harbor network of islands were all held by Turber now. From them a new horde of his fighters began pouring. Strange figures in black hoods with goggling mouth tubes. They came prowlingin the north-south corridors. They worked their way north. The fetid air did not seem to impede them. They held strange round objects in their hands. They threw the objects, which shattered and spread heavy chlorine gas. And mustard gas.

The corridors and rooms choked up—with fumes and the fallen bodies of our police. The strange Turberite figures prowled like ghouls among them.

Stranger familiar warfare! Alan and I recognized it. These grenade-like missiles—these gas bombs—these figures with gas masks—

The First World War flashed in our memory.

The air throughout the levels of Park-Circle 90 was maintained fairly clear. The city troops made a stand there, in a great amphitheater oflocal tracks where many corridors converge.In my dayit was called the Grand Central region.

The Turberites had stormed the eastern warehouse depots of what was once Long Island City. Hordes of them began spreading west. It was part of this drive towards our tower space. A message now came:

“Turberites making drive in Van Cortlandt tubes toward our main dynamos.”

Had they got up that far? It seemed incredible. An attack in the subterranean northern city toward the main lighting plant! If successful it would plunge us into darkness. And these Turberites had obsolete flashlights from my own age, no doubt, with which our forces were not equipped. I saw upon the mirrors later a few scenes of this attack. The vast buried bowels of the city. The upright girders drilled and set deep into the rocks, the deep-set foundations of the pneumatic lifts, the gigantic sewerage system, the underground traffic tubes, the storage vats of chemicals. Narrow, gloomy tunnels of streets, vertical ladders, pneumatic tubes for freight transfer strung everywhere like capillaries in a section of flesh laid bare.

The Turberites came prowling, and, finding the ventilation still working, brought hordes of their fellows. I saw in the subterranean city, in a dark open area of tracks on a viaduct beneath the Hudson River, where a hundred or two of the city troops were making a stand. In my day, this was about Dyck-man Street.

The city forces had set up a battery of air-cannons on a metal terrace; the missiles rained down, but as though the terrace were some ancient rampart, the Turberites stormed it. Gas bombs were thrown by both sides, but the ventilation cleared the fumes away quickly. The terrace, with its northward underground corridor towards the light plant, was stormed and taken after a siege of half an hour.Arainofmissiles—nondescript chunks of metal thrown by hand: spears and javelins and darts—a cloud of poisoned arrows from a band of Indians posted at a distance, and arrows flaming with fire. Scaling ladders, such as firemen of my day might have used, came up from below and swarmed with men carrying dirks in their teeth as they climbed.

The terrace was finally carried. The Turberites ran northward to where at some other point the police were making a stand. Or climbed up the spirals into the city overhead. It was difficult to keep track of them. Groups appeared suddenly in many sections well within our safety held areas. They had to be hunted down and killed.

Of what use to mention my own and Alan’s futile parts? There was a time, near the evening of the second day, when for hours I stood only a few hundred feet south of our tower space—stood at one of the top levels, where I had been told to guard an isolated transverse corridor. Occasional Turberites, lost from their fellows, wandered through. My part was to stand in ambush and dispatch them with a rapier, as they appeared. Gruesome business! Like a sharp-shooter of our Civil War posted in the bushes. Or again, for a time I fed round steel bullets to an air-cannon where a battery of ours was entrenched on a bridge. A horde of savages with flying arrows and tomahawks assaulted us there, from the network of overhead tracks along which they had climbed.

There were times when Alan was sent off on other duties, and I watched at our tower space and prayed for the tower to come. Once Alan wasso long gone that I fearedhemight not return; and then he joined me, bleeding, torn from combat.

I have hardly mentioned the panics that swept the civilian population which was caught in the city. The panics were worst the first day. Millions everywhere trying to get away into the north rural sections. The panics killed far more, that day, than did the fighting. For a time the authorities tried to cope with them. The traffic squads were on duty. The moving sidewalks, elevators—escalators—the trams and monorails—were moving. But it soon all paralyzed. Most of the main vehicular arteries were soon in a tangle. Abandoned cars. Accidents everywhere.

A wandering, milling jam of people, mad with panic, their screams rang throughout all the rooms and every smallest corridor of the monstrous beehive—a pandemonium of horror. Soon there were dead everywhere. Millions died—but millions got away. Millions wandering on in a frenzy until they got northward to the open air.

A million must have walked through the tubes. They were always flooded with people, the East and West Side bridges were black with fighting mobs. A million climbed on foot up the Hobo-ken terrace area and wandered the city sections there. And other millions fought their way to the north roof and embarked on the departing airliners.

The business of the city had ceased within an hour that first morning when the battle began. Inconceivable industrial details all were abruptly at a standstill. Food gave out. The Turberites captured many of the city’s food depots. The incoming freightliners found no one to receive them. No further orders were issued. They soon stopped coming.

Gigantic business ramifications of Great New York. When they ceased, within a day disorganization spread over the world like waves in a pond. Confusion of industry everywhere. Everything to the smallest detail was interwoven with Great New York. The world was in confusion. The gigantic world-business machine of perfection was well oiled in its every smooth-running part, but the paraly-zation of Great New York threw it all into disorder.

The world governments watched with amazement this sudden tragedy. Food was brought by liners from Great London. There was one arriving at the Tappan Terminal nearly every hour. Food, and fighting men, and such weapons as this era provided.

I saw the mirrored scene as the sleek silver body of one of these liners came in sight over the Long Island coast. The air over the city roof had been occasionally invaded by marauding Turber ships. They had dropped missiles, but with little damage. But they had frightened off the food freighters and greatly impeded the local passenger ships which—the first and second days of the battle—stood bravely trying to transport the fleeing millions.

The transatlantic liner came like a giant silver flying fish with glistening outspread wings. Alan and I watched it on the mirror as its image grew. This was at sunset of the battle’s second day. The sky in the mirrored scene was red and gold. Great fleecy clouds lined with the vivid colors, with a background of deepening purple. I had almost forgotten that there was a sky! The liner came speeding. But from the south a Turber ship loomed up—a narrow thing of black, a ship, fleet and darkly piratical of aspect. Like a wasp it came. Catapulted missiles preceded it, but they fell upon the transport liner comparatively harmlessly.

The Turber ship circled, but the transport came steadily on. We could see its decks thronged with troops. It had been hastily armed in Great London. Its cannon answered the Turber fire. But presently it came over the city roof, and ceased its fire that the balls might not fall and do damage. It slowed into a great lazy circle, preparing to land on the Tappan stage.

The Turber pirate ship followed it. We gasped. The Turber ship plunged for the liner; it kept on coming. They collided! Alan exclaimed: “Look at this other mirror.”

A telescopic image of the scene, greatly magnified, showed on another mirror. We saw the decks of the Turber ship. No one was there! Its control room held mechanisms only! There was no living soul on this Turber ship!

A vessel, like the crude steering devices of my own time, automatically controlled! Within some instrument room in the Turber section of the city the helmsman sat. We had no such ships. There was no need for such mechanism in this age. It had been lost and forgotten now with the passing centuries. But Turber had located it and brought it here—adapted it to this world-power with which the ether was flooded and which all ships used.

We saw the collision. The great white liner turned over. The two ships, locked together with broken girders, wavered and fell. We turned away as the mirrors showed us close views of the strewn human forms on the rooftop.

That was the first of the Turber suicide ships. He had others. One more was used when the next liner appeared. After that Great London ordered the others back. We were cut off from the world. That night of June 13, when the battle had been raging some thirty-eight hours, found Alan and I quartered for needed sleep in a building of northern Westchester. Exhausted beyond all ability to talk or even to think, we slept.

Late in the evening we awoke. The tower still had not come. The battle raged everywhere with undiminished fury. The Turber-ites now had more than doubled their original area. The Hoboken powerhouse still held on; but in all the rest of the Jersey section the enemy was in full possession. Our forces at the powerhouse were surrounded, they could not hold it much longer. The harbor islands were all Turber’s now. And the Brooklyn and Queens sections. Lower Manhattan, without local lights, with its ventilation gone, was a tomb of black corridors and rooms strewn with the dead, while Turberites with gas masks and flashlights prowled among them. Broadway, and all to its west toward the Hudson River, was taken, nearly up to the Van Cortlandt region. But we still held the mid-section, which once had been Central Park; and Harlem, with widening lines into the Bronx. Still held the vital space of the tower.

But it could not be held much longer!