Part 1

The LIFE-MASTERS

By EDMOND HAMILTON

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales January 1930. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The first intimation the world received of the life-masters and of the doom that they were to loose upon it was contained in a news dispatch sent out by the great press syndicates from New York in the last week of May. That first article, a brief one, stated only that during the last day or so the beaches about the metropolis had been closed to bathers by reason of a thick scum of clear gray, jelly-like substance that had been left upon them by the retreating tides. This clear slime, which exhibited a few signs of rudimentary life and movement, had been deposited also by the tides upon the sea-walls and dock-piles about the city, and had been reported too from a score or more of places along the New Jersey and New England seaboard. These glistening deposits, the dispatch added, were considered to be in all probability the result of some sea-migration of a great mass of minute, jelly-like organisms.

That first dispatch, the true sinister importance of which we can well understand now, was treated at the time as merely one of scores of other reports of mildly interesting incidents. The phenomenon was unusual, certainly, but hardly enough so to merit any special attention. This was evidenced by the small space given the matter by the New York newspapers on that same evening, most of them according it but a few inconspicuous lines; though one went so far as to publish a photograph of the curious onlookers who had gathered to watch the glistening scum of the stuff, slowly moving and flexing a little now and then, that had been deposited on the Battery sea-wall. Save for these casually curious ones, though, and the disgusted bathers who found themselves barred by it from their favorite beaches, it can not be said that any portion of the public, even in such seaside cities as New York, gave the advent of the glistening gray stuff any consideration on that afternoon and evening. It was not until the newspapers of the following morning, the 26th, published their later dispatches on the phenomenon that the world, or the scientific world at least, began to awake to its extraordinary nature.

Those dispatches converted the matter from a mere unusual incident into something like a minor sensation. For, according to them, the deposits of glistening gray slime had been left by the tides not only along the Atlantic coast but along the Pacific also, and not only along American shores but upon those of Europe and Asia and Africa, upon all the shores of all earth's seas, in fact. Upon the jungle-bordered beaches of the Philippines, and the cold gray Norwegian shores, and the shelving sands of the Chilean coast, and the rocky cliffs of England, the retreating tides had left the same thick coatings of jelly-like, living slime. The phenomenon, whatever its cause, was world-wide, as those morning dispatches showed, and because of that world-wide scope was accorded a greatly increased space by the majority of that morning's newspapers, seeming extraordinary enough to call for greater attention. And even more extraordinary was it made, later in that day, by the Barr-McMasters controversy concerning it, that acrid dispute of scientists about the phenomenon's causes that stirred even the public into a somewhat greater interest in it.

The controversy was precipitated, with surprizing abruptness, by the statement made by Dr. Almeric Barr early on the 26th. It was toward Dr. Barr, whose reputation among contemporary biologists was exceeded only by that of the brilliant Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, that the puzzled newspapers had turned when the glistening deposits had first appeared at New York. They had brought him samples of the stuff, asking his opinion of it, and his curiosity had been so stirred that he had undertaken an analysis of it. It had proved, apparently, an interesting enough analysis, for it was not until the next day that he had given to the waiting journals any summary of it. When that summary was published, though, appearing in the noon editions of that day's papers, it proved a startling one.

The glistening deposits, Dr. Barr stated, were nothing more nor less than protoplasm, that gray, jelly-like stuff that is the primal life-substance, the basis of all life upon earth. Protoplasm itself, he explained, composed of an extremely complex mixture of organic compounds, had never been analyzed or even partly analyzed, and no more could these clear deposits be analyzed, but his investigation had proved without doubt that they were living protoplasm, and not the minute organisms that had been supposed. The appearance of these deposits on all earth's shores, he added, meant that great quantities of protoplasm had appeared in all earth's seas, and that could be explained in only one way. Protoplasm, the primal life-stuff, had appeared in earth's seas eons before, its complex compounds built by some force out of the elements of sea-silt and sea-water themselves. And if those protoplasmic masses had formed spontaneously out of the sea's elements eons before, giving rise eventually to all earth's life, it could only be supposed that similar great protoplasmic masses had now suddenly formed again in earth's seas in the same way as in the remote past.

That first report of Dr. Barr's, though puzzling enough to a newspaper reading public but little interested in talk of organic and inorganic compounds, proved a sensation in the scientific and especially in the biological world. The New York biologist's classification of the clear, jelly-like deposits as protoplasm was, it was admitted, correct; since by that time scientists in laboratories at London and Stockholm and Sydney had confirmed independently the fact that the glistening gray stuff was indeed the basic life-substance of earth. What was not admitted, though, and what swiftly became the center of as fiery a scientific controversy as could be recalled, was his contention that the great masses of protoplasm which had apparently appeared throughout the seas had been formed spontaneously from the sea's inorganic elements, as in the remote past. That contention, within hours of the time his statement was published, became a veritable storm-center of conflicting scientific opinion.

The opinion of a great mass of biologists was curtly summed up late in that afternoon by Professor Theodore McMaster, biologist-in-chief of one of the great Massachusetts universities. "While Dr. Barr is undoubtedly right in assuming that great quantities of protoplasm have in some way appeared in all earth's seas," he stated, "his theory that those masses have formed suddenly out of the sea's inorganic elements is, with all respect, a crazy one. It is true that in the earth's youth such great protoplasmic masses did form thus from the elements of sea-silt, but we know that their process of formation, their change from inorganic to organic living matter, required eons in itself to complete, so slow was it. This hypothesis, therefore, that the same great process has taken place on a world-wide scale within a day or so is patently absurd. My own theory is that great masses of protoplasm have existed from the remote past on the sea's floor, and that some subterranean or submarine convulsion has thrown them up to be scattered by the tides upon all earth's coasts."

This new theory, it must be admitted, found much greater support in biological circles than the more radical one of Dr. Barr, but it was roundly criticized by the latter. The presence of protoplasm in great masses on the sea's floor, he pointed out, had never been detected by any of the great oceanographic expeditions of the past, and the stupid hypothesis of a submarine convulsion could hardly be held when there was no slightest seismographic evidence of such a convulsion having taken place within the last weeks. Dr. Barr was supported in these criticisms by a number of fellow biologists, and so acrid had become the exchange of opinions by the next day, the 27th, that one of the great scientific societies, the World Science Association, stepped in. It proposed to settle the question of the phenomenon's causes to the satisfaction of public and scientists alike by appointing a committee of research to investigate it, to be headed by Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, the most noted biologist of the day.

This was a proposition acceptable to all, for the cold, massive Dr. Munson's competence and scientific impartiality were unquestioned. The World Science Association found, however, to its disappointment, that the brilliant biologist had been absent from the Starford Foundation for some months. He had established a laboratory at Cone Island, a little isle of rock and sand off the north Maine coast, it was stated, and was engaged in research there with a small group of scientists, which included Dr. Albert Labreau, a famous bio-chemist; Harlan Kingsford, electro-dynamics expert of the American Electric Company; Dr. Herman Krauner, the noted German bio-physicist, whose studies of the biological effects of radio-active vibrations had been the subject of much discussion; and Dr. Richard Mallett, a rising young cytologist, who was also of the Starford Foundation.

It was from another of the younger scientists at the Foundation, Dr. Ernest Ralton, that the Association had secured this statement of Dr. Munson's whereabouts, and Ralton had offered, moreover, to fly north in his plane to the island and lay the Association's request before the famous biologist. This offer had been at once accepted, for it was not doubted that Dr. Munson's passion for experimentation would cause him to accept the chief place on the committee of research. Late on the afternoon of the 27th, therefore, announcement was made from the World Science Association's office that Ralton had left in his plane for the island, and that when he returned with Dr. Munson the Association's committee of research would be formed and would start its investigations.

This announcement, though it caused the disputing biologists to await keenly Dr. Munson's return, proved unexciting to newspapers and public, whose first half-interest in the phenomenon had begun to wane. The newspapers, indeed, in publishing the Association's announcement humorously suggested that the whole controversy over the origin of some slime on the world's beaches was a battle between tweedledum and tweedledee. And the public, with a guffaw or a smile, assented. The whole thing merely went to show the craziness of scientists--thus did common sense deliver itself, that evening. Common sense was not to suspect, certainly, what strange craziness it was that lay behind the appearance of that glistening slime. Common sense was not to dream, until it awoke to the thunder of crashing worlds, what terrible craziness it was that had loosed upon humanity with that glistening scum a titanic tide of dreadful death which even at that moment was surging slowly upward to sweep across all the world.

2

Just before midnight on that same night it was, less than a dozen hours after the Association's announcement, that the horror broke upon the world. Had the thing come gradually upon us, place by place and event after event, it would be possible to give some consecutive account of it, now. But, crashing down upon almost all the astounded world at the same moment as it did, the very scope of it makes futile any efforts to describe completely the terror of that world when it awoke to doom. It is enough, indeed, if we can give some impression of its action at such a city as New York, for there, of all places, its horror was the most intensified.

The accounts of the thing's coming to New York are almost numberless, and it is from one of these, that of Edward Worley, that we find what is perhaps our most vivid picture of the thing. Worley's account, to which he has given the somewhat banal title of _My Experiences in the Life Horror_, not only gives us a description of the first coming of the horror at New York, but summarizes in fact the action of the thing over all the world. For as it was in New York that night, so it was in a thousand seaside cities in that same hour, and what Worley saw in its streets was seen by millions of horror-stricken men in that same night. The magnitude of the thing was greater at New York, but the horror was the same, as Worley indeed points out.

This Edward Worley figures unconsciously in his own narrative as a somewhat commonplace individual, a middle-aged person, the greater part of whose days had been spent in the adding and subtracting of figures in a Broad Street broker's office. To avoid crowded subways, as he tells us, Worley had taken rooms in one of the narrow lodging-houses jammed in here and there east of the financial section, at Manhattan's lower extremity. It was this fact that conspired with circumstances to project Worley into the very heart of the terror's first coming. For, a half-hour before midnight on that fateful night of the 27th, he had decided that a short stroll through the warm spring air would be a pleasant one, and his steps had led him southward toward the Battery's little open park.

It was an hour, that just before midnight, when the southern end of that great island-mass of structures that is New York lies beneath a silence and a loneliness supernatural, almost. So it seemed to Worley, at least, strolling southward in the warm spring night through the silent streets, from one pool of corner lamplight to another, between the towering, vast buildings that loomed into the darkness on either side. Those buildings, the center of unparalleled activity in the hours of day, lay as silent beneath the white spring stars as though they were the still unbroken ruins of some mighty, deserted city. Northward, from the midtown section, a glow of light against the sky told of the life that still surged through the crowded streets there, but Worley, strolling on, met none save an occasional policeman who eyed him keenly beneath the corner lights. Then within moments more puffs of fresh salt air came to his nostrils, and he was passing out between the last of the great buildings, out beneath the looming tracks of the elevated and into the silent little park.

As Worley tells it, he had strolled half-way across the darkened park, toward its southern sea-wall's rail, before he sensed that anything unusual lay before him. The gleaming waters stretching out into the darkness, the gliding lights of small craft here and there upon them, the other far-flung blinking lights of Brooklyn and the Jersey cities, away to left and to right--these were all that engrossed his attention in those first moments. Then, as he drew within yards of the southern rail, he stopped abruptly short. He had glimpsed, suddenly, a great glistening wet mass that lay at the sea-wall's edge, ahead of him, and that seemed to be slowly moving.

"It was," he says, "just as though someone had dumped a great mass of glistening gelatin at the park's edge, wet and gleaming there in the light of the few scattered bulbs about me. All along the park's edge, along its sea-wall, that glistening mass stretched, hanging down over the wall into the lapping sea-waters, and as the stuff seemed slowly moving I thought it for that moment to be pouring down into the sea beneath. Then as I stood there, gazing at that smooth-flowing movement of the gleaming stuff, I saw something that made me rub my eyes in amazement. The glistening masses were not flowing down into the sea at all, I saw, but instead were flowing _up_ from it!"

For a moment of utter astonishment Worley stood still, gazing toward the stuff. A gray, glistening mass, it was pouring slowly and smoothly up over the wall's edge, from the sea beneath, flowing steadily up onto the surface of the park and adding to the great, gleaming mass of the stuff that lay already all around that park's sea-edge! The thing was unprecedented; it was incredible, and for a moment that seemed unending to Worley, he stared toward those shining, gathering jelly-like masses that were flowing and flexing and writhing a few feet before him. Then suddenly a great, thick loop of the glistening jelly--a great _arm_--projected itself out from the gliding masses and darted straight toward him!

It was that that finally broke the spell of Worley's stupefaction, for as the great arm looped toward him he staggered back, giving unconscious utterance to a high scream. At that same moment of utter horror, he says, by some strange trick of the mind there had flashed across his brain remembrance of the feebly moving clear slime that had been found on beach and sea-wall in the last days, but that fleeting thought dissolved for the moment in the stark horror that now filled him. Another great looping arm had shot out beside the first, lengthening smoothly and swiftly toward him, while the gliding, jelly-like masses from which both projected were flowing toward him, across grass and paving--great glistening, amorphous bulks a full yard in height, now, gathering greater bulk each moment by the masses that still were flowing up from the waters over the park's wall to add to them. Worley, though, had seen this in but a single dazed glimpse, for as the second arm had shot toward him he had stumbled backward again, crying out, and then was running weakly toward the park's north end.

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From beneath the overhung elevated tracks, as he ran toward them, there leapt to meet him two blue-coated figures, one with a pistol gleaming in his hand, and at sight of the policeman whom his cries had summoned Worley became incoherent in his horror.

"Coming out of the water over the park!" he could only tell them hoarsely, gesturing toward the southern end. "Gray jelly-stuff--protoplasm like it said in the newspapers--masses of it coming out----"

The two surveyed him doubtfully a moment, then, peering into the darkness at the park's lower end, began to walk slowly in that direction, their weapons outstretched. His heart pounding rapidly Worley watched them vanishing into the darkness. There was a moment of silence, a silence in which the rattle of a train far to the north came preternaturally loudly to his ears. Then he heard a sudden sharp exclamation from the darkness southward, and the next moment the darkness was split by a spurt of flame and the deafening rattle of shots. Then, against the gleaming waters beyond, he glimpsed great arms flashing upward like dark, mighty tentacles, and as they flashed down again the shots ceased, there were sharp screams, suddenly cut off, and then silence again. Worley, trembling, gazed still down into the little park, and after a moment saw movement there, a slow movement approaching him. Finally it came within the radiance of the nearer lights, and he saw that it was the great, glistening, gray masses, flowing smoothly across the park toward him, flowing up as smoothly still from the waters around it, and that in the clear, jelly-like bulk gliding toward him were held, like flies in amber, the dark, twisted bodies of two men!

With that sight a daze of horror settled upon Worley's brain. He was dimly aware that he was racing unsteadily northward from the park, through the darkened, silent streets, that from somewhere else behind him were coming other screams, the high screams of a woman, this time, and that from away across the waters to the east had come suddenly other faint, agonized cries. He heard as though from a great distance a sudden babel of shouts and screams that swept along the great city's edges like spreading flame, heard bells jangling suddenly out to add to that uproar. By then he had staggered eastward into the district of his own lodgings, moved by unconscious habit, but as he stumbled down one of those narrow streets eastward a sudden rising uproar a few blocks ahead of him brought him to a stand-still. Then, the first swirling mists of horror lifting from his brain, he stared down along the narrow street.

Along its darkened length only circular patches of light at intersections were visible to him but now he saw, fleeing into those light-areas toward him, a growing mob of half-dressed people who were pouring from the bordering buildings into the street, running wildly with gesticulating hands and with hoarse cries of animal fear. Far down the street, almost to the waterfront eastward, Worley could see that growing mob pouring forth, fleeing toward him, and then he saw, too, what was behind them and what they fled from so wildly. For at the narrow street's eastern end there was rolling smoothly toward him, and after those fleeing figures, a great, glistening gray wave, waist-high, a gliding mass of gleaming jelly-stuff that stretched across the street's width and flowed effortlessly after the fugitives, great looping arms forming from it and reaching forth to draw them back into its glistening masses, that flowed smoothly onward with those fugitives' bodies in their grip!

Remembrance of half-read newspaper articles flashed again over Worley's brain in that moment. "Protoplasm!" he cried, unconsciously, again. "Masses of it--and sweeping-up over all the city!"

For in ever-increasing floods the gray, glistening masses of protoplasm were rolling forward, from the waters eastward; were surging through the narrow streets with that fear-crazed mob fleeing before them; were flowing swiftly and smoothly into buildings, from the interior of which came terrible shrieks; were shooting forth great tentacle-arms of their own jelly-like substance to catch and draw back the weeping little figures that fled before it. A mighty, mindless, brainless, nerveless monster, a great wave of living protoplasm that was sweeping-up and flowing through streets and buildings to lick them clean of all life! From southward, and from westward, were coming screams and cries as other great waves poured through the streets, as out over the doomed great city there poured from the waters about it that mighty tide of death!

[Illustration: "A great wave of living protoplasm swept through the streets, licking them clean of life."]

Worley leapt back, suddenly, as down the street from behind him there roared a long police-car, the fleeing mob ahead splitting to both sides as it thundered through. It skidded to a stop but yards from that advancing, glistening wave, and Worley saw blue-coated figures tumbling from it, staring in an amazement of horror at the great gleaming wave of protoplasm rolling toward them, then recovering themselves and lining swiftly across the street before it. Then there came the swift sharp drumming of powerful riot-guns, spraying tearing steel bullets into that advancing wave. At the same time came the dull detonation of grenades, hurled into the glistening masses, and for a moment Worley stared down toward them in sudden leaping hope.

But the flood of protoplasm rolled onward, unchecked, unheeding. The bullets that tore through its jelly-like masses left holes that closed instantly of themselves. The bombs that exploded in those masses splashed them violently to every side, but in the next moment the glistening fragments had flowed smoothly forward of themselves; had joined together again in a solid flood; were sweeping resistlessly forward. Before the men lined across the street could comprehend the fact that the thing before them could not be killed, or even hurt, by human means, the wave had advanced upon them; a myriad tentacle-arms had whipped out of it toward them; and then it had gripped and had rolled over them, was gliding still smoothly on with their dark bodies visible in its clear gray masses.

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