Project Gutenberg's Edison's Conquest of Mars, by Garrett Putman Serviss

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Title: Edison's Conquest of Mars

Author: Garrett Putman Serviss

Release Date: August 29, 2006 [EBook #19141]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Edison's Conquest of Mars

by

Garrett P. Serviss

1898

Chapter I.

It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous
invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and
circumstances having placed the facts at my disposal, I deem it a duty,
both to posterity and to those who were witnesses of and participants
in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless
enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form.

The Martians had nearly all perished, not through our puny efforts, but
in consequence of disease, and the few survivors fled in one of their
projectile cars, inflicting their cruelest blow in the act of departure.

Their Mysterious Explosive.

They possessed a mysterious explosive, of unimaginable puissance, with
whose aid they set their car in motion for Mars from a point in Bergen
County, N. J., just back of the Palisades.

The force of the explosion may be imagined when it is recollected that
they had to give the car a velocity of more than seven miles per second
in order to overcome the attraction of the earth and the resistance of
the atmosphere.

The shock destroyed all of New York that had not already fallen a prey,
and all the buildings yet standing in the surrounding towns and cities
fell in one far-circling ruin.

The Palisades tumbled in vast sheets, starting a tidal wave in the Hudson
that drowned the opposite shore.

Thousands of Victims.

The victims of this ferocious explosion were numbered by tens of
thousands, and the shock, transmitted through the rocky frame of the
globe, was recorded by seismographic pendulums in England and on the
Continent of Europe.

The terrible results