Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net _The_ MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH By ARTHUR TRAIN AND ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD Reprint Edition 1974 by Arno Press Inc. A New York Times Company New York--1975 SCIENCE FICTION ADVISORY EDITORS _R. Reginald_ _Douglas Menville_ Copyright (C) 1915 by Doubleday, Page & Company _All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_ Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Robert W. Wood Reprinted from a copy in The Library of the University of California, Riverside Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Train, Arthur Cheney, 1875-1945. The man who rocked the earth. (Science fiction) Reprint of the ed. published by Doubleday, Page, Garden City, N. Y. I. Wood, Robert Williams, 1868-1955, joint author. II. Title. III. Series. PZ3.T682Mak6 [PS3539.R23] 813'.5'2 74-16523 ISBN 0-405-06315-6 THE MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH _"I thought, too, of the first and most significant realization which the reading of astronomy imposes: that of the exceeding delicacy of the world's position; how, indeed, we are dependent for life, and all that now is, upon the small matter of the tilt of the poles; and that we, as men, are products, as it were, not only of earth's precarious position, but of her more precarious tilt."_--W. L. COMFORT, Nov., 1914 [Illustration: INSTANTLY THE EARTH BLEW UP LIKE A CANNON--UP INTO THE AIR, A THOUSAND MILES UP] PROLOGUE By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon the globe except the United States of North and of South America, which had up to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, and Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings had been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Ten million had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women and children had been rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none. No crops were harvested or sown. The ocean was devoid of sails. Throughout European Christendom women had taken the place of men as field hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. The amalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than $100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armies continued to slaughter one another. Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians. Northern Africa was a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Paris lay an army of two million Germans, while three million Russians had invested Berlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and fifty thousand men faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring to take the offensive.