, that it was nothing less awful than the Destroying Angel
himself _in propria persona_.

At length, when excitement had developed into frenzy, and frenzy into an
almost universal delirium, two cablegrams crossed each other along the
bed of the Atlantic Ocean. One was to say that the Pittsburg gun was
ready, and the other that the loading of the Bolton Baby--feeding, some
callous humorist of the day called it--was to begin the next morning.
This meant that there was just a week--an ordinary working week, between
the human race and something very like the Day of Judgment.

The next day Lennard set all the existing wires of the world thrilling
with the news that the huge projectile, charged with its thirty
hundredweight of explosives, was resting quietly in its place on the top
of a potential volcano which, loosened by the touch of a woman's hand,
was to hurl it through space and into the heart of the swiftly-advancing
Invader from the outmost realms of Space.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE LAST FIGHT

It so happened that on the first night the German Emperor saw the comet
without the aid of a telescope he was attacked by one of those fits of
hysteria which, according to ancient legend, are the hereditary curse of
the House of Brandenburg. He had made possible that which had been
impossible for over a thousand years--he had invaded England in force,
and he had established himself and his Allies in all the greatest
fortress-camps of south-eastern England. After all, the story of the
comet might be a freak of the scientific imagination; there might be
some undetected error in the calculations. One great mistake had been
made already, either by the comet or its discoverer--why not another?

"No," he said to himself, as he stood in front of the headquarters at
Aldershot looking up at the comet, "we've heard about you before, my
friend. Astronomers and other people have prophesied a dozen times that
you or something like you were going to bring about the end of the
world, but somehow it never came off; whereas it is pretty certain that
the capture of London will come off if it is only properly managed. At
anyrate, I am inclined to back my chances of taking London against yours
of destroying it."

And so he made his decision. He sent a telegram to Dover ordering an
aerogram to be sent to John Castellan, whose address was now, of course,
anywhere in the air or sea; the message was to be repeated from all the
Continental sta