Part 2
Never afterward could Worley remember clearly the things that befell him in the next moments. He knew that with that sight a final mad frenzy of utter horror and despair had settled upon him, that with those other fleeing figures he was stumbling through the narrow streets toward the northward and the one chance of escape from the death-trap that the island had become, but his impressions of those mad moments were always hazy, dim. Striking, trampling, pushing, he and the panic-driven mobs about him fought their way through the choked streets, through the darkness of that dread night, while ever behind them, from south and east and west, there glided upon their track the mighty wave of protoplasm, calm, smooth, effortless, sweeping out over the island's tip and up through its narrow streets, absorbing into itself steadily the exhausted fugitives who fled before it, advancing northward and inward from the city's sides with its vast, glistening masses still steadily increased by the floods of protoplasm pouring up from the encircling waters.
To Worley, then, it was as though he was pushing his way onward through the fear-choked nightmares of some terrifying dream. The hoarse shouts of the fleeing thousands who were pouring forth from all the city's buildings to flee northward about him; the frantic clanging of bells and screeching of whistles; the thunder of bombs and crack of rifles as the city's defenders sought in vain to halt those gliding, irresistible masses; the agonized shrieks of those who fell before the great wave of death, of those trapped by it in buildings or in blind streets; the faint, far roar of panic that came from the other cities west and eastward; these merged in his mind into one mighty, unceasing bellow of utter terror.
For how many hours Worley had fought his way northward through the horror-driven millions that surged through the night of the city's streets before he reached at last the island's northern heights, he could not guess. There, pausing and swaying in a doorway while the roaring crowds surged ever by him toward the Harlem River bridges that were the sole gates of escape from the island of death, he peered southward through the darkness. The great city, a far-flung mass of blinking lights, stretched before him, its streets alive here and there with other moving lights, with the mobs that surged wildly northward to escape from it, and from whom arose a dull, far roar of fear. Farther southward, though, in the midtown and lower sections, no lights moved, and there arose no cries, for there, surging up about and across the island like a great tide of utter silence and death, there rolled the mighty protoplasmic masses, sweeping all before them as they poured still up from the bordering seas, gliding onward in a single gigantic, glistening wave. As Worley turned and fought northward again with the crazed mobs that filled the streets, it came to him dully to wonder whether on all earth was any place of refuge from those mighty, mindless masses that had rolled out so suddenly and strangely from the sea.
Had Worley but known it, as he struggled northward through the last hours of that dread night, it was not at New York alone but on all the shores and in all the seaside cities of earth that humanity was fleeing at that moment before the protoplasmic tides of death. Up from all earth's seas at the same hour, the same moment almost, had rolled the same mighty glistening waves, flowing upward and sweeping out over mighty cities, and through tiny villages, and over lonely, barren beaches--gigantic glistening protoplasm masses gliding at the same hour through the streets of London, and of Yokohama, of Copenhagen and of Miami, in a thousand cities sweeping humanity in fear-mad mobs before them.
Doom! It was the word that was flashing already from city and village by the sea to those inland, the word that was bursting across an astounded and horror-stricken world in those dread hours. The mighty waves of protoplasm, whatever their unthinkable origin, were unstopped, were unstoppable. Bullet and bomb and knife were harmless to them. High-explosive shells had scattered the waves only to have them in another moment join again, and military batteries hastily summoned had fired round upon round until they had been wiped out by those calmly advancing floods. Planes had swooped to bomb them with no greater effect than the shells. Gas had no effect upon these living floods. Onward, outward, they rolled, mighty glistening masses flowing upward from the sea to sweep across all the earth.
Doom! Man was facing it, and the reign and existence of man, with every horror-filled message coming by clicking wire or unseen radio-wave. England had become a death-trap, the mighty waves of protoplasm rolling in from all its coasts. India and Malaya were infernos of superstitious fear and horror as their crowded populations fled before the tides of death. African and Australian coasts were overwhelmed with the advancing glistening masses. The Panama isthmus had been covered by the protoplasm, severing the two American continents. Great ships at sea and in port had been dragged down into the depths by the up-reaching, towering masses. Doom! For ever, in those dread hours before the dawn, the calmly advancing waves were sweeping inland from every coast to cover all the world, and ever absorbing into their glistening masses, as a jelly-fish might absorb infusoria, thousands upon hundreds of thousands of fugitives, drawing them within its mindless living masses and rolling remorselessly on. Dawn of day found all the organizations of man crumbled before the doom closing upon them, all the world's millions in blind, horror-stricken flight before the protoplasmic tides of death. The thing was eating up humanity!
3
It had been late on the afternoon of the 27th, less than a half-score hours before the breaking of that great terror upon the world, that young Ernest Ralton had sped away to the northeast in his plane, toward the barren little island retreat of Dr. Munson and his associates. It was not primarily to see Munson, of whom he stood in some awe, that Ralton had offered to make the trip, but to visit young Dr. Richard Mallett, his particular friend, whom he had not seen since the departure of the Munson party for the island some months before. The request of the Association had given him a valid excuse for making the trip, however, and so, slanting up above Manhattan's massed and sky-flung towers Ralton had circled once and then headed away into the gray haze northward.
Hour followed hour while the gray New England coast slid back like a great map beneath him, the sun sinking ever to the horizon westward as he roared on. Hardly conscious of more than the steady, even song of the motor and the rush of wind about him, Ralton checked his progress automatically by the natural features of the coast below him, and at last was flying northward over the tangle of deeply indented bays and islands that forms the Maine coast, veering outward from it over the gray waters to the east, and peering intently for Cone Island. The sun had dipped to the horizon, by then, but he knew from Mallett's account that the island should be clearly discernible by reason of the gigantic squat cone of rock that rose from its level sands.
Dusk was dropping upon the world, though, and Ralton had become slightly anxious before he glimpsed it at last, a huge, dark, squat cone, its broad summit flattened as though by some giant hand, that seemed to rise directly out of the gray waters miles from the coast. It was with a feeling of some relief that he sent his plane circling down toward the place, and as it loomed larger beneath him in the failing light he scanned it closely. The island itself, he saw, was roughly circular, perhaps a dozen miles across, a barren, level stretch of sands from whose center the great squat cone of rock arose, a curious formation frequent on such islands and carved out by the wind-driven sands. The cone's steep sides of rock, almost vertical, could not be more than a few hundred feet in height, Ralton estimated, but its broad, flat summit was several times that in diameter. And now, as he wheeled down toward that summit, he saw that upon it were the laboratories of the men he sought, long, low buildings of white concrete grouped in a rough circle about the summit.
The circle enclosed by the buildings, though, save for some great looming object at the center which he could but vaguely make out, was clear and flat, and seemed to Ralton of sufficient extent to permit the landing of his little plane. Carefully wheeling again over the place, he spiraled slowly down toward it. Even through the dusk he could see that no human figures were visible beneath, though from one of the buildings came a white spark of light. Downward still he circled, therefore, until at last he was dipping gently into the open clearing at the summit's center, running along over its smooth rock surface for a few seconds and then coming to a stop just before one of the encircling buildings. A moment more and Ralton had clambered forth and stood gazing into the dusk about him.
It was apparent that his coming had not yet been noticed, since he had cut off the plane's motor high above, and no one had yet emerged from the buildings about him. He glanced around them uncertainly, then started across the open clearing toward one at the opposite side, from whose door and windows came the white light he had glimpsed from above. Half-way across the clearing, though, he slowed, came to a stop. He had halted before the great object at its center which he had but vaguely glimpsed from above, but which now, looming a few feet before him, was so extraordinary in appearance as to turn all his interest and attention upon it for the moment.
It was a great globe, a giant sphere of burnished metal fully fifty feet in diameter, resting upon a massive metal pedestal that had been sunk into the rock. From the top of the great globe a thin, needle-like rod of metal, tapering to a point, projected perpendicularly upward, while from the pedestal-base a network of connections ran to some two or three of the long, low buildings about the summit. From these buildings came the throbbing of unceasing mechanisms of some sort, but from the globe itself arose only a fine, incessant hum, hardly to be heard, though giving to Ralton in some way an impression of terrific power. At the point where the myriad black-covered connections ran into the globe's base there rose beside it, on a tripod of metal standards, a box-like black-gleaming object upon whose face were set a dozen or more glass-fronted dials, their needles trembling with the power racing through them; a series of switches and automatic circuit-breakers; and a single bulbous black knob which moved up and down a vertical slot in the switch-board, apparently.
The sides of that slot, Ralton saw, were finely graduated, the knob-lever resting almost at its bottom. Near the slot's top small white letters inset beside it spelled "Ultra-Hertzian Vibrations." An inch or so beneath, beside the slot in similar lettering, was "Hertzian Vibrations." Beneath that, in turn, "Light Vibrations," "Heat Radiation Vibrations," "Radio-active (Gamma) Vibrations," then "Cosmic Ray Vibrations," at which the black switch-knob rested, and lowest of all a simple zero. Ralton stared at the thing in astonishment. It was the entire range of etheric vibrations that was lettered in order there before him, he knew, from highest to lowest, but for what reason? This great globe-mechanism, what could biologists be doing----
A cry from behind whirled him about, a cry of fierce rage from the door of the white-lit laboratory building beyond him. Framed in that doorway stood a massive-figured, gray-haired man, eyes burning and face contorted as he saw Ralton, while from the white-lit room behind him other figures were surging forward.
Ralton took a quick step toward them. "Dr. Munson!" he said, eagerly, advancing toward that massive figure, then stopped. For Munson and the others, with inarticulate cries of rage, had leapt forward toward him! He shrank instinctively back, heard the massive leader of the group crying, "Get him back--back from that condenser!" Then before his dazed understanding could credit what was happening the others were upon him, and flung him sidewise to the ground. Ralton, uncomprehending still but in an instinctive revulsion of antagonism, struck fiercely out at them, felt one or two give back before his blows, strove to struggle up to his feet. Then he heard another commanding shout from Munson, in the background; something hard crashed down upon his head and sent blinding light through his brain, and he knew no more.
* * * * *
Consciousness, when it finally came back to him, informed him first of two things, that his head was aching violently, and that he was lying on some hard surface in a dark and quiet place. He stirred a little, opened his eyes. It was a corner of a bare and empty concrete-walled room that he lay in, a dim radiance of starlight coming in through two barred windows in its walls. Then, as he strove to sit erect, he glimpsed a dark figure gazing outward through one of those windows, a figure that turned at his sound of movement and came swiftly across the room toward him, crouching down beside him and supporting him. Even in the dimness of the room and through his dazed senses Ralton recognized the other, and he gasped at sight of him.
"Mallett!" he whispered. "Good God, Mallett--what has happened here?"
The other's voice was high and strange. "Steady, Ralton," he told him. "You've come into the heart of a hell, here--and Munson and the rest the fiends."
"But what are they doing--Munson and the others?" Ralton asked dazedly. "I came up here in my plane--hours ago, it seems--to bring a message to Munson----"
And briefly he told Mallett of the phenomenon of the protoplasm deposits that had brought him north to the island.
Mallett listened, silently, broodingly. "That protoplasmic slime," he said, finally, "you knew of it, the world knew of it, but who knew what lay behind it, what was to come of it, what has already come of it?"
The face of Ralton expressed his bewilderment, and the other lifted him suddenly to his feet, toward one of the metal-barred little windows at the room's corner.
"Down there, Ralton," he said, pointing downward and outward into the starlit night. "That is what has come--what is coming--out of the thing, in these last hours that you've lain here unconscious. That is what is coming now over all the world."
Ralton stared downward, uncomprehendingly. The building of which the room was a part was located at the very edge of the great cone's summit, and from that window he could look far across the level sands of the little island, lying pale beneath the dim starlight, away to the foam-fringed line of the shore. Up and out from the shore now, though, he discerned what seemed a mighty glistening gray wave creeping in over the level sands, a thick, gleaming, jelly-like mass rolling in toward the central cone. He turned toward Mallett, deeper bewilderment on his countenance.
"That great gray wave, Mallett!" he exclaimed. "It can't be----"
"Protoplasm?" the other said. "Protoplasm like that found on the world's beaches? But it is, Ralton, a great wave of living protoplasm, rolling out of all earth's seas in a great tide of death across the earth! _And Munson and the others outside are the ones who have loosed it on the world!_"
Ralton felt his already dazed brain turning at the other's words, but before his stunned astonishment could find expression Mallett had gripped his shoulder, was crouching again with him in the room's corner, speaking on.
"You know, Ralton, how Dr. Munson and the other four of us came up here to Cone Island, hardly more than a half-dozen months ago. Surely a strangely variegated assortment of scientists we must have seemed for a biologist to take with him. Labreau, the bio-chemist; Kingsford, the electrical expert; Krauner, the bio-physicist; and I, the cytologist, the cell-specialist; a strange enough quintet we were, but one whose combined knowledge one would think could solve any scientific problem. And it was for that purpose that Dr. Munson had assembled us. He wished to solve a problem, one that is indeed and always has been the greatest of all scientific problems. And that problem was the origin of life itself.
"How did life first originate upon this earth? That is a question to which biology, the science of life, can answer nothing. We know that once the earth was a fiery furnace in which no life could exist, and that somehow after its cooling there rose in its primeval seas the first life, protoplasm, the basic life-stuff of which all earth's living creatures are built, from which all have come on the road of evolution. Protoplasm arose, somehow, from the elements of sea-silt, its complex compounds formed by some strange force out of those elements. What force it was that had driven the process on, that had caused the formation of those first great masses of protoplasm in earth's seas, no biologist has ever been able to say. But Munson believed that he could discover that force and prove his discovery, and when he outlined his plan to us we leapt at the chance. He had fixed upon this island, Cone Island, as the place for our researches, both because of the seclusion we desired and for another reason he disclosed later; so gathering all the equipment and supplies we would need we came here.
"It was in a tug chartered at Boston that we came, bringing with us workmen and supplies for the erection of these laboratory buildings. At Dr. Munson's direction they were built here upon the great cone's summit, though so steep are the rock sides that only by means of metal ladders set in the rock could we ascend and descend from the sands below. The greater part of our time, however, we planned to spend up here, and so the buildings were run up here and all of our great cases of equipment, and supplies swung up. Then, with the leaving of the tug, we put our equipment in order and began our work, on the plan that Dr. Munson had outlined to us.
"It was Dr. Munson's belief that the change from the inorganic element of sea-silt into the organic, living compounds of protoplasm had been accomplished by the driving force of certain etheric vibrations. You know, of course, that the chemical combinations of elements are profoundly affected in myriad ways by such vibrations. The vibrations of radiant heat, for instance, will break many compounds down into their original elements, or build up new ones. Those of light will affect others in the same way, and as Professor Baly of Liverpool showed in his famous experiments, are responsible more or less for the change from inorganic to organic living matter in the case of plants. Electro-magnetic, that is Hertzian or radio vibrations, can affect the very atomic structure of certain metals. Radio-active or gamma vibrations have a profound power of disintegrating or breaking down the great majority of chemical compounds. All these we tested, but in none of them did we find the vibration whose force would cause the building up of protoplasm's organic compounds from the sea-silt inorganic elements. It was only when we tried the last remaining etheric vibration known, the most recently discovered of all, the cosmic ray vibrations, that we succeeded at last.
"You know, Ralton, that the cosmic ray vibrations are the shortest in wave-length of all the etheric vibrations, ranking just below the radio-active waves. First comprehensively studied but a few years ago by Dr. Millikan, the cosmic rays have been found to permeate all space, shot forth from the white-hot furnaces of stars just as heat-vibrations and light-vibrations are shot forth. And it was the cosmic ray vibrations, we found, that had in past ages built up the organic compounds of living protoplasm from inorganic elements of sea-silt. To prove that, we had devised a mechanism, or rather it had been devised by Kingsford and Krauner, which condensed and concentrated any etheric vibration. It was a small globe-condenser, and when set to the correct wave-length would attract and concentrate all vibrations of that wave-length for a great space around it. If we set it to the wave-length of Hertzian vibrations, for instance, it attracted and condensed them into a concentrated ray; the same with radio-active vibrations; the same with cosmic ray vibrations. And it was this we used to produce a concentrated shaft of the cosmic ray vibrations, turning it upon a container of sea-silt and sea-water from the island's beach. In the remote past, we reasoned, the cosmic ray at its natural intensity had during long ages formed protoplasm out of the sea's elements. Now, using a cosmic vibration millions of times concentrated by the condenser, the process should take but a proportionate time, should require but days instead of ages.
"We succeeded, Ralton! Almost at once the sea-silt in the container began to change beneath the concentrated vibrations, giving forth a thin, clear slime that gradually began to show signs of life, of movement. But a day or two it had taken that slime to form from the sea-silt, and in another day or two it was no longer slime but living protoplasm, a mass of it there in the container. And when it had developed under the concentrated vibrations to a certain stage of life, of power, it began to flow from the container, moving blindly out of it in search of food, a mindless thing of protoplasm that we had created out of inorganic matter! By concentrating the cosmic ray vibrations we had done within days what had required eons in the past!
* * * * *
"Upon that protoplasm mass we experimented for days. We found that just as the cosmic ray vibrations could build its complex compounds up from the sea's elements, so could the radio-active vibrations disintegrate it, break its compounds down again into those elements. When we turned with our condenser a concentrated radio-active vibration upon the mass of protoplasm it crumbled and shriveled away almost instantly into gray powder, its original elements lying before us in the form of that powder. The radio-active vibrations, indeed, when concentrated, could disintegrate the protoplasm in a moment, whereas it required days for the cosmic ray vibrations to build it up, and this greater power we held to be due to the greater wave-length of the radio-active impulses. We saw, too, that that accounted for the fact that during the ages no great masses of protoplasm had been built up by the cosmic rays, since the radio-active vibrations counteracted them enough to prevent the forming of such masses.