Part 3
Even now that dread has not disappeared, wholly. For never again will earth seem to us the isolated globe that it once was. We know now that there are ships that come and go out there in the great void, ships from some near or far planet. They came once to visit the earth, to trawl in its air-ocean with their giant scoops, and they may come again. We cannot say that they will not. We can but pray that they will not.
Of their nature we know no more than before. Dr. Howard and the greatest scientists of the world have examined with the utmost minuteness the two great metal wrecks in Georgia, but have been able to learn comparatively little from them, so fused into molten metal were they by their plunge down through the atmosphere. The glittering metal of which they were constructed has proved quite strange and impossible to produce on earth. There have been found half-melted instruments or mechanisms in small number, whose purpose we cannot as yet understand.
What of the beings who manned those mighty ships? That is perhaps the greatest question of all, and the most insoluble. A thin coat of strange glistening slime was found on a few parts of the two wrecks not melted. Whether that is all that remains of the space-visitors of those ships, whether their bodies were solid or liquid or even gaseous or merely force emanations, we can offer only theories.
The world has recovered fully from those days of horror, and in recovering has given to Dr. Howard the honors due him. He is beyond all question the greatest figure in the world today and even on myself, as his companion and assistant, some of his fame has fallen. For he is the hero not of any single group or nation or race of men, but of all mankind.
He has used the tremendous influence that is his alone to urge preparation upon the world, preparation for emergencies of a similar nature that may again arise.
"Out of the unknown came these dread space-visitors to earth," he warns in an article, "and who knows but that somewhere in the unknown even today other grim vessels are winging through the void toward the earth? It may even be that our present peace is only a respite and that we have repelled the first attack of these unknown beings only to have them coming again upon us in infinitely greater numbers. Sometime in the future, I think, man will have advanced in knowledge to the point where he too will venture into the void, will be able to meet his attackers face to face. But until then the air-mines are our only protection.
"I want to see vast fields of them floating on the surface of earth's atmosphere, fields through which no invading space-ships from the void outside can make their way. For Providence may not again aid our efforts. Man is probably but one being among the universe's countless races of living creatures, and he can only hold his planet against others by his own wisdom and strength. Never again can he feel the false security that was ours before these space-visitors came."
This warning, surely, we are heeding; yet even with the loss of that old false security, we do not face the future with fear. Whatever beings of power the universe holds, we realize now that we too are beings of power. We have fought for our planet against the space visitors and have held it. As a race we have come of age.
THE END