And China smiled and waited.  On her land side, along her boundaries, were millions of the warriors of Europe.  She mobilized five times as many millions of her militia and awaited the invasion.  On her sea coasts she did the same.  But China was puzzled.  After all this enormous preparation, there was no invasion.  She could not understand.  Along the great Siberian frontier all was quiet.  Along her coasts the towns and villages were not even shelled.  Never, in the history of the world, had there been so mighty a gathering of war fleets.  The fleets of all the world were there, and day and night millions of tons of battleships ploughed the brine of her coasts, and nothing happened.  Nothing was attempted.  Did they think to make her emerge from her shell?  China smiled.  Did they think to tire her out, or starve her out?  China smiled again.

But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed a curious sight.  He would have seen the streets filled with the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant eye turned skyward.  And high up in the blue he would have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would have identified as an airship.  From this airship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles—­strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house-tops.  But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass.  Nothing happened.  There were no explosions.  It is true, three Chinese were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from so enormous a height; but what were three Chinese against an excess birth rate of twenty millions?  One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a garden and was not broken.  It was dragged ashore by the master of the house.  He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of the district.  The latter was a brave man.  With all eyes upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe.  Nothing happened.  Of those who were very near, one or two thought they saw some mosquitoes fly out.  That was all.  The crowd set up a great laugh and dispersed.

As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China.  The tiny airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each, and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved, one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass tubes.