Morale | Page 3

combers that came rolling in. It was being deliberately run ashore.
It struck, and its fore-mast crumpled up and fell forward, carrying its
derrick-booms with it. There was the squeal of crumpled metal plates.
"Flyin' a yeller flag just now," panted one of the two privates. "We
started poppin' hexynitrate bullets at her an' she flung a shell at us.
She's a enemy ship. But what the hell?"
Smoke spurted up from the beached ship. Her stern broke off and
settled in the deeper water out from the shore. More smoke spurted out.
Her bow split wide. There were the deep rumbles of black-powder
explosions. Sergeant Walpole and his two followers stared blankly.
More explosions, and the ship was hidden in smoke, and when it blew
away her funnel was down and half or more of her upper works was
sliding into the sea, and she had listed suddenly.

* * * * *
Sergeant Walpole gazed upward. Futilely, of course; there was nothing
in sight overhead. But these explosions did look like the hexynitrate
stuff they put in small-arm bullets nowadays. A thirty-caliber bullet had
the explosive effect of an old-style six-pound T.N.T. shell. Only,
hexynitrate goes off with a crack instead of a boom. It wasn't an
American plane opening up with a machine-gun.
Then the beached ship seemed to blow up. A mass of thick smoke
covered her from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through
the air, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpole
suddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn't
seen anybody diving overboard to try to get ashore. He half-started
forward....
Then the sea-breeze blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage.
And the tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its
place--so that Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a
non-existent something that came up instantly into his throat again, and
remembered the urgent thing he had to do.
"Pete," he said calmly, "you hunt up the Area Officer an' tell him what
you seen. Here! I'll give you a report that'll keep 'em from slammin' you
in clink for bein' drunk. Grab a monocycle somewheres. It's faster than
a car, the way you'll be travelin'. First telephone you come to that's
workin', make Central put you in the tight beam to head-quarters. Then
go on an' report, y'self. See?"
Pete started, and automatically fumbled with his limp and useless arm.
Then he carefully tucked the unmanageable hand in the pocket of his
uniform blouse.
"That don't matter now," he said absurdly.
He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as Sergeant
Walpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the Eastern
Coast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upset

anybody.
* * * * *
Where the tramp had been there was a single bit of bow-plating
sticking up out of the surf, and a bunch of miscellaneous floating
wreckage drifting sluggishly toward the beach. And there was a solid,
rounded, metallic shape apparently quite as long as the original tramp
had been. There was a huge armored tube across its upper part, with
vision-slits in two bulbous sections at its end. There were gun-ports
visible here and there, and already a monstrous protuberance was
coming into view midway along its back, as if forced into position from
within. Where the bow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads
now visible. There was a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim.
There was a ghastly steel beak. The thing was a war-machine of
monstrous size. It emitted a sudden roaring sound, as of
internal-combustion engines operating at full power, and lurched
heavily. The steel plates of the tramp still visible above water,
crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. The thing came toward
the shore. It slithered through the shallow sea, with waves breaking
against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach, its wet sides
glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it looked somehow like a
gigantic centipede.
It was a tank, of sorts, but like no tank ever seen on earth before. It was
the great-grandfather of all tanks. It was so monstrous that for its
conveyance a ship's hull and superstructure had been built about it, and
its own engines had been the engines of that ship. It was so huge that it
could only be landed by blasting away a beached ship from about itself,
so it could run under its own power over the fragments to the shore.
Now it stopped smoothly on the sandy beach, in which its
eight-foot-wide steel treads sank almost a yard. Men dropped down
from ports in its swelling sides. They made swift, careful inspections