BOOK ONE: THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS
CHAPTER 17: THE "THUNDER CHILD"
(continued)
He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a
hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron
bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water,
tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leaped
towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the
air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the waterline.
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment.
When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had
passed and was rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose
out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels
projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the
torpedo ram, THUNDER CHILD, steaming headlong, coming to
the rescue of the threatened shipping.
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the
bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at
the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close
together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod
supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and
seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable
than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding
this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence,
it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves.
The THUNDER CHILD fired no gun, but simply drove full speed
towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled
her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know
what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent
her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she
seemed halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a
diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal
expanse of the Essex coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her
larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away
to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which
the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer,
low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed
as though she were already among the Martians.
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