"Benford-ParisConquersAll" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

of M. Beauchamp, a gentleman scientist, that pale afternoon less than an hour
before I had my first contact with the horrible Martian machines. Naturally, I
had been following the eye-witness accounts which first told of plunging
fireballs, striking the Earth with violence that sent gouts of soil and rock
spitting upward, like miniature versions of the outburst at Krakatau. These
impacts had soon proved to be far more than mere meteoritic phenomena, since
there soon emerged, like insects from a subterranean lair, three-legged beings
bearing incredible malevolence toward the life of this planet. Riding gigantic
tripod mechanisms, these unwelcome guests soon set forth with one sole purpose
in mind -- destructive conquest!

The ensuing carnage, the raking fire, the sweeping flames -- none of these
horrors had yet reached the fair country above the river Loire . . . not yet.
But reports all too vividly told of villages trampled, farmlands seared black,
and hordes of refugees cut down as they fled.

Invasion. The word came to mind all too easily remembered. We of northern
France knew the pain just twenty-eight years back, when Sedan fell and this
sweet land trembled under an attacker's boot. Several Paris quarters still bear
scars where Prussian firing squads tore moonlike craters out of plaster walls,
mingling there the ochre life blood of communards, royalists and bourgeois
alike.

Now Paris trembled before advancing powers so malign that, in contrast, those
Prussians of 1870 were like beloved cousins, welcome to town for a picnic!

All of this I pondered while taking leave, with Beauchamp, of the Ecole
Militaire, the national military academy, where a briefing had just been given
to assembled dignitaries, such as ourselves. From the stone portico we gazed
toward the Seine, past the encampment of the Seventeenth Corps of Volunteers,
their tents arrayed across trampled grass and smashed flower beds of the
ironically named Champ-de-Mars. The meadow of the god of war.

Towering over this scene of intense (and ultimately futile) martial activity
stood the tower of M. Eiffel, built for the recent exhibition, that marvelously
fashioned testimonial to metal and ingenuity . . . and also target of so much
vitriol.

"The public's regard for it may improve with time," I ventured, observing that
Beauchamp's gaze lay fixed on the same magnificent spire.

My companion snorted with derision at the curving steel flanks. "An eyesore, of
no enduring value," he countered, and for some time we distracted ourselves from
more somber thoughts by arguing the relative merits of Eiffel's work, while
turning east to walk toward the Sorbonne. Of late, experiments in the
transmission of radio-tension waves had wrought unexpected pragmatic benefits,
using the great tower as an antenna. I wagered Beauchamp there would be other
advantages, in time.

Alas, even this topic proved no lasting diversion from thoughts of danger to the