The Dirigibles of Death Read Online Free Page A

to learn the secrets of their mechanisms and to install some device for controlling them from our end so as to deflect them and force them to drop into the sea. Possibly I have not made my meaning clear, for being so accustomed to writing in purely technical terms, I find it a bit difficult to express myself in ordinary popular language. What I mean to say is this: we all (meaning the officials of the Air Ministry and of the R. A. F.) were convinced that the damnable ships with their living cargoes of fiends were being sent with devilish ingenuity and intention to England; that they were being dispatched from some one point abroad, by some enemy of the British, and were of course propelled and directed by some form of vibratory wave. Hence, if we could learn the secret of these waves; if we could, by intensive study and observation, discover how to transmit them, and how to operate the ships from our station, we could—being nearer them—divert them, and then, when over the sea, force them down. It must not, however, be assumed that we had gone about solving this problem without taking every precaution and availing ourselves of every resource to combat and destroy the things before they dropped on England. From the very first—or rather after the second and third ships had arrived—the entire available air forces of Great Britain had been ordered into active service. Hundreds, thousands of planes cruised over England day and night constantly searching for the black, metallic, death-carrying dirigibles. Great searchlights played constantly upon the sky from dark until dawn. A cordon of swift destroyers had been drawn about the coasts, and every effort had been made to detect and destroy the terrible things before they dropped to the earth. And although two of the dirigibles had been spotted and brought down—one off Deal and the other between Chichester and Midhurst—others got safely through our lines. Being black, carrying no light, emitting no roar of motor-exhausts, the things were next to invisible at night. And they moved with incredible speed.
    Several that were spotted and chased outdistanced our fastest scout planes as if they had been standing still, and Captain Morris, who sighted one of the things over Maidstone and gave chase in his Napier Rocket (capable of traveling more than three hundred miles an hour), reported that the dirigible gained on him rapidly and soon vanished in the darkness.
    The two that had been brought down were destroyed more by accident than by design. The one over Deal had been sighted by an anti-aircraft crew and by a very lucky shot had been brought down to fall into the sea. The other had been spotted by a bomber, whose crew, by the merest chance, had dropped a bomb upon the thing as it had flashed, at terrific speed, beneath the plane.
    But even though the dirigible crashed to the earth in a deserted part of the South Downs, its destruction was of no avail, for when the plane that had destroyed the thing landed, the gondola was found intact with the door open and the occupants gone.
    Our only hope then, lay in either tracing the dirigibles to their source or in discovering their secrets, both matters that would necessitate slow, patient, unremitting study, and that would require a great deal of time. And time was most important, for nightly more and more of the things were landing, daily more and more people were being murdered, mutilated. Although, by the end of the first week, the fiendish maniacs who arrived in the night seldom remained alive more than a few hours—so well was the country patrolled by police, armed citizens and the army—still, in the few hours they were at large they murdered hundreds of people, wounded hundreds more and committed every conceivable atrocity.
    Inspector Maidstone Tells the Story
    As Doctor Grayson and Major Leighton have mentioned, I was called to Ripley in Surrey, by the local constable, Robert Moore, who reported the arrival of a mysterious,