CHAPTER XXX

_The World at Bay_

I can give only a broad picture of those events which followed during May. They are history today. I saw them, as presently I will explain, from an inside viewpoint; a narrow viewpoint indeed. But as the world saw them, so were they now unfolded to father.

The dawn of May 21 showed giants rising from King's Cove. The first reports were contradictory and confused. But the giants were there! They were apparently about two hundred feet tall. A score of them at first. Then more--a hundred or so.

The few people who lived in the vicinity of King's Cove took instant flight. There were at first no casualties except a woman who fainted and an aged man who died of heart failure running with his family along the road toward Elton.

The giants did nothing menacing. They seemed busy moving about the neighborhood. They trampled it. Cleared it. Spreading out over a mile or so of territory along the water front. A plane passed overhead and reported that they appeared to be occupying the territory, not in haphazard fashion, but with a rational, methodical planning.

By noon the reports were coming in with more coherency. There had been a few ships in the channel. They had seen the giants, and had hastily steamed away. The passing planes brought the most detailed news. By noon, no airplane passed King's Cove at its accustomed level. They all were bending aside and flying high. But one or two of the passengerless mail planes flew low enough for close observation, and within a few hours both the American and Canadian governments were sending out official flyers to observe and report.

There was chaos that morning. No official orders were given to attack the giants--indeed there was no force available which dared attack them. By noon, it was father's opinion that any organized attack, until more was known of the conditions, would be a mistake.

The Togarites quite evidently were proceeding with definite purpose. By noon, a line of two-hundred-foot giants were stationed at intervals along the shore front. They stood, or sat calmly upon the cliffs. They were half a mile apart--ten of them over a five-mile length.

Then their line turned inward. At half mile intervals they took up their posts. A curving line, embracing the town of Elton and several others. There had been an encounter at Elton. All the towns were within a few hours abandoned. The whole of this five-mile area--and ten or fifteen miles shoreward--was abandoned. But at Elton some stray group of people had been trapped. A giant ahead of his fellows, had come wandering up. He was shot at by rifles and shot-guns. And hit, evidently, for he raised his leg, and he let out a cry of pain. He kicked at a house and demolished it. But he made no effort to fight. He stood nursing his leg where the bullets had stung it, and watched the people as they fled away.

There was a giant stationed up every road where it entered the Togarite territory. For a few hours, automobiles with panic-stricken refugees occasionally dashed out. The giants let them pass unmolested.

Such were the reports that first morning. The observation planes told that the captured area was bustling with activity. The giants seemed unarmed, and without belts of drugs. There were not many of them. But around King's Cove were throngs of Togarites in a smaller size--a size, it was said, about normal to earth. They occupied our house and all the other houses of the neighborhood. By evening they had marched to the deserted towns.

A rational occupation of this captured territory. And it was said that they seemed moving, and installing equipment, erecting their own dwellings. What seemed brown, conical tents were appearing. Firewood was being gathered. An encampment of war; with families of men, women and children--noncombatants making themselves comfortable for a permanent stay.

A thousand people. But soon it was obvious that they were far more numerous than that. All day they were appearing--growing from a tiny size. Hordes of them. By nightfall it was said that there were several thousand. Presently it was identified that the source of them was the Ferrule boathouse on the shore of King's Cove.

The night of May 21-22 would have been moonlit, but the moon and stars were obscured by clouds. But the Togarites' territory was not dark. Floodlights of some unknown current brightened it with spots of yellow from wire grids which the giants set up at intervals. The lighting systems of the captured towns were out of commission, but the Togarites quite evidently had their own power.

A weird scene of activity by night. There were camp fires everywhere. The area was thronged with the arriving enemy. Unearthly, fantastic scene! It was an encampment of little people, patrolled by watchful giants.

By the morning of the twenty-second, the Togarite lines had spread. A single giant--five hundred feet tall perhaps--made a rush southward. As though to clear the territory, he ran toward Portland--came to its outskirts, stopped and strode back. There had been an exodus from Portland the day before, and few were left in the city. The giant did not enter. He went back the way he had come--along the coast--leaving a trail of devastated towns in his wake.

I think that this giant may have been Togaro himself, for the reports said that he wore a belt of drugs--and several times was observed to change his size. His foray was doubtless to make sure that the territory southward was clear of inhabitants. Then his lines came down. The giants marched calmly along the coast--with a similar line of them some ten miles inland.

The city of Portland was occupied by the Togarites on the 23rd of May. It was an orderly advance, made during the night.

The next day, the lines again moved southward.

I find it difficult in these limited pages, to portray a broad enough picture. A myriad abnormal events were taking place throughout the world. I can only sketch them at random. The organized dissemination of news, for which our age is famous, proved now a grave menace to public safety. The giants, in those first few days, probably actually killed not more than a few hundred people. But the broad-casted news that giants were upon earth--human enemies capable of growing to limitless size--that fact publicly known was responsible for the death of many thousands.

There were panics--street crowds trampling their fellows--thousands of miles from any giants. A disorganization of all normal activity. But it was worst, of course, in eastern Canada, and the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. In New England it was chaos. A flight, with cities abandoned, roads thronged with refugees, transportation overloaded.

Trains, vessels, and the air lines struggled to cope with broken schedules and a mad rush of frenzied passengers. Accidents of every sort were reported--but in the mass of extraordinary happenings with which the news-tape was jammed, they passed almost unnoticed.

Within a few days, when it became evident that the enemy was moving southward, Boston was depopulated, as was all of Cape Cod, and every city and village along the coast.

Father stayed in Washington. He had immediately advised against a premature attack of Togaro. Even had Washington overruled him, no attack could have been made in those first days, for every official thought and effort was absorbed by the need of transportation. Millions of people were routed from the threatened territory. This was unlike any war the world had ever known. Advancing enemy armies had always found the great bulk of the civilians remaining in captured territory.

But there was no living soul willing to remain within a hundred miles of these giants. A psychological terror--and the very real danger of being trampled upon.

Transportation was of vital importance. Government airplanes, ships, soldiers and police were all absorbed in helping the people to escape. There was little thought of attacking this enemy.

Yet there had been sporadic encounters. A battleship had put into Boston harbor, with the intention of helping transport the people. A giant, ahead of his fellows, had come wading down the coast. There were still some people in the city of Lynn. He stamped upon them, and wrecked the snug little city, green and beautiful in the spring sunlight. Within five minutes it was a burning mass of wreckage. Then the lone giant came on southward.

The battleship, whose commander perhaps felt that he was trapped, turned and steamed out of Boston harbor. Then it faced the giant, and shelled him from a distance of a few miles.

The giant, whose head and shoulders were some fifty feet above the ocean as he waded near shore, was struck and killed. His body stained the water, lashed it to bloody foam with his dying struggles.

But from the north another giant rose. Again I think it must have been Togaro. He grew to a size monstrous and came leaping down the coast. Some reports have it that he was a thousand feet tall; others say still higher. He bounded from one village to another in a single leap. Then he dived into the ocean and swam.

The battleship was trapped by the hook of Cape Cod. It fired a single broadside--and missed, for the swimming Togaro saw the smoke-puff of the guns, and dived in a watery cataclysm.

He came up close to the ship. He flung an arm over it. Like a toy, the great battleship up-ended, was heaved up into the air, and sank.

There were a few survivors, for Togaro ignored them as though they were ants struggling in a pond. He turned, swam north--waded ashore and dwindled into the northern distance.

No more attacks were made on the Togarites by sea. This act of reprisal--so obvious, and so successful--gave the government pause.

But there was, that same day, an attack by a group of Canadian planes. Whether it was officially planned or not I cannot say. A group of planes, six or eight of them, came down from the border and flew over the enemy territory.

This was now about five o'clock in the afternoon. The giants stared up at the invading planes, but did not seem to heed them. The planes were emboldened. Perhaps the pilots figured that these giants could not grow upward fast enough to overtake them. A plane could rise in a few moments to a height of fifteen or twenty thousand feet. No giant could do that.

The little squadron of lead-colored war planes flew into the heart of the Togarite territory. The center of it, at this time, was inland from Portland. The planes came low--and one of them dropped a bomb from a height of under a thousand feet. It struck one of the standing giants. Wounded but probably did not kill him.

The planes zoomed up and away. They dropped other bombs. One fell into the city of Portland.

But none of the planes escaped. These supposedly unarmed giants were most efficaciously armed--with the sling-shot! I have already had occasion to mention it. In the hands of a two-hundred-foot giant, it was a sling thirty or forty feet long. It flung, not a pebble, but a rock huge as a bowlder, with a speed almost of a bullet.

Giants leaped into action beneath the soaring planes. To them, the planes were toys, flying only a few times higher than the length of their own bodies. With skilled marksmanship they flung their rocks. The planes were struck. One by one they came crashing down.