asteroids.

The diagram quite distinctly proved, to Soames' satisfaction, that the
hypothetical Fifth Planet had existed, with four moons, and that the
children had come out of time rather than across space. And he was now
grimly sure about the reason for the children's coming to Earth of here
and now.

Bombardment from space is not unknown. In 1914 there was a meteoric fall
in Siberia which knocked down every tree for fifty miles around. A few
thousand years earlier, eight or ten, Canon Diablo crater was formed in
Colorado by a missile from the heavens which wiped out all life within a
thousand-mile radius. Earlier still a much larger crater was formed in
Canada, and there are yet traces of an even more remote monster-missile
landing in South Africa. The ring-mountain there is largely worn away,
but it was many miles across.

* * * * *

The situation of the children's race amounted to an infinitely
speeded-up bombardment instead of a millennial sniping from the sky. The
Fifth Planet was newly shattered into bits. Its fragments plunged upon
Earth and moon as they had weeks earlier battered Mars, and as
fortnights later they would devastate Venus and plunge upon Mercury.
Jagged portions of the detonated planet filled the sky of Earth with
flames.

The ground shook continuously. With a mad imprecision of timing,
mountain-ranges plummeted out of the sky at utterly unpredictable times
and places. Anywhere on Earth, at night-time, living creatures might
look upward and see the stars blotted out in irregularly-shaped, swiftly
enlarging areas which would grow until there was only blackness
overhead. But that could not last. It turned abruptly to white-hot
incandescence as the falling enormity touched atmosphere, and crashed
down upon them.

No living thing which saw the sky all turned to flame lived to remember
it. Not one survived. Obviously! They were turned to wisps of
incandescent gas, exploding past the normal limits of Earth's air. Some
may have seen such plungings from many miles away and died of the
concussion. The ground heaved in great waves which ran terribly in all
directions. Vast chasms opened in the soil, and flames as of hell flowed
out of them. Seashores were overwhelmed by mountainous tidal waves,
caused by cubic miles of seawater turned to steam when islands fell into
the ocean at tens of miles per second.

This was what happened to Earth in the time from which the ch