A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

History will record that the forces of Graff, the Xenephrene, landed upon earth at 2 A. M., July 9, 1957, in north Brazil, at one degree fourteen minutes north latitude, and sixty-one degrees twenty-two minutes west longitude. There was no one person on earth who saw more than a fragment of what followed during those frightful weeks; out of a myriad accounts, history will piece a pallid, dispassionate vision of the whole.

For myself, I witnessed many horrible things. But only fragments -- as an ant with its tiny viewpoint sees the forest through which it crawls, and might futilely try to describe it. I can only name facts; imagination must supply the rest, and even then inevitably fall far short of the grim, tragic reality.

I was crouching with Graff and Zetta at a floor window of the giant Space liner when, that July 9, we slowly settled to within a thousand feet of the ground. A dark, tropic, overcast night.

From beneath our bow a crimson, howling radiance, one of the barrage projectors, sprang downward. There was no one left alive over the ten-mile circular area around which our barrage was flung that night, to tell what happened. I saw the houses of this newly-settled agricultural area melt and vanish as we swept them with the radiance.

The barrage went up. By dawn, all the country near us was deserted of its people, who fled in terror as far away from us as they could get. The tropic jungle had wilted since the Great Change. The land here was cleared; broad, fertile fields, planted now with grain, corn, and garden produce. Prosperous farms, crowded with settlers in their small, new houses. New villages. Several small cities. Over a hundred mile area they were deserted in a day.

Graff's other vehicles arrived. One was dispatched to Africa. It landed in the French Sudan, in latitude fifteen degrees five minutes north and longitude three degrees nineteen minutes west -- not far south of the city of Timbuktu, which had tripled in size and importance since the Great Change. The red barrage was flung up here, but it was on the flying platforms. Within a day it began moving directly north.

Around our encampment in north Brazil, the barrage projectors were mounted on the ground for a permanent stay. A ten-mile circle. It included a stream. I found Graff had apparatus for distilling the water, for drinking supply. He foraged out for food, even though he had a three months' supply with him. He began building dwelling houses for his women and children -- using materials he had brought, and materials his insects dragged in from neighboring, abandoned villages.

An incredible activity. By the end of July his permanent base was well established. We had been attacked. I can only hint at the surprise, the panic, our landing caused all over the world. Since the Great Change, the last thing that had been thought of was war.

The nations were concerned with their bare existence -- the welfare of their people. War between them was an impossibility. The great battle fleets of Britain, the United States, France and Japan were no longer armed for combat. Most of the vessels had been dismantled of their armament, converted into transports, for the people in distress and for the transportation of food.

Armies were organized now as government industrial and agricultural workers. Every government was in the business of producing, buying, storing, and selling food. The war airplanes were used for transportation; thousands of the great Arctic A type were in commission -- but few of them were armed.

The world was wholly unprepared and unequipped for war. Nevertheless, Graff's base in north Brazil was attacked. Railroad lines were near us. They were abandoned to traffic within fifty miles of us. But an armored train was run up in the night. It shelled us with a long-range gun. One of Graff's foraging parties outside the barrage was struck and most of its members killed. But the screaming shells -- they came all one night at twenty minute intervals -- exploded harmlessly against our barrage.

A few planes came up cautiously to inspect us. One must have risen over the ten mile height of our barrage. It dropped bombs. One of them fell within our lines. It killed a dozen men and working insects, and wrecked some of our apparatus; it barely missed our group of vehicles, lying on the river bank in the center of our encampments. I doubt if that aviator ever knew how true was his aim of that one bomb.

The train with its thirty-mile range gun was gone at dawn. But it came again the next night. I went with Graff, aloft on a small platform, high over our lines. Through the red glow of our barrage we could see the train in the distance -- a blur of moving lights. We carried a single small projector. At dawn we sailed out, through a momentary break in the barrage. The train saw us coming. It retreated, swinging and swaying over its rails at an eighty-mile-an-hour gait. It was a Garga locomotive, and a flat car. Puffing, snorting, careening through the country to avoid us. But we caught it. There was nothing there in a moment but a tumbled heap of its heavier steel parts. We sailed back.

The world during these days must have been frantically assembling its armament. Our Brazil base continued to be harassed. By July 15, our river quite suddenly went dry. We found that some fifty miles up the course on a distant rise of ground they had mounted a queerly-fashioned projector. It might have been from Xenephrene itself!

It was Freddie's heat-projector, sent here from Miami by the United States government. It had an effective range of some two miles, and its heat -- they must have been applying it continuously for several days -- had dried up the small water-course, sending it up in clouds of steam.