The MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH
By ARTHUR TRAIN AND ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD
Reprint Edition 1974 by Arno Press Inc.
A New York Times Company
New York—1975
SCIENCE FICTION ADVISORY EDITORS
R. Reginald
Douglas Menville
Copyright © 1915 by Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreignlanguages, including the Scandinavian
Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Robert W. Wood
Reprinted from a copy in The Library of the University of California, Riverside
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Train, Arthur Cheney, 1875-1945.
The man who rocked the earth.
(Science fiction)
Reprint of the ed. published by Doubleday, Page,
Garden City, N. Y.
I. Wood, Robert Williams, 1868-1955, joint author.
II. Title. III. Series.
PZ3.T682Mak6 [PS3539.R23] 813'.5'2 74-16523
ISBN 0-405-06315-6
THE MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH
"I thought, too, of the first and most significant realizationwhich the reading of astronomy imposes: that of the exceedingdelicacy of the world's position; how, indeed, we are dependentfor life, and all that now is, upon the small matter of the tiltof the poles; and that we, as men, are products, as it were, notonly of earth's precarious position, but of her more precarioustilt."—W. L. Comfort, Nov., 1914
INSTANTLY THE EARTH BLEW UP LIKE A CANNON—UP INTO THEAIR, A THOUSAND MILES UP
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon theglobe except the United States of North and of South America, which hadup to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium,Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, andServia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings hadbeen exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Tenmillion had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women andchildren had been rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none.No crops were harvested or sown. The ocean was devoid of sails.Throughout European Christendom women had taken the place of men asfield hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. Theamalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than$100,000,000,000, had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armiescontinued to slaughter one another.
Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians.Northern Africa was a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Pari