The Amazing Night
The only difference between red and blue light is that the waves of the
red are about twice as long as the others. There must have been a sort
of screen in the ether that somehow intercepted all but a narrow band
of frequencies in the red, the other wave-lengths being either canceled
or converted into vibrations too long or too short to be perceptible.
If there was such a screen, it was slowly altered, so that the lengths
of the penetrating waves became shorter and shorter.
In other words, the color of the sky slowly ran through all the colors
of the spectrum toward the blue! The sun changed from a vast round
blood-ruby to a blazing yellow diamond, flooding the earth with a
sodium light! To an emerald, huge and supernally bright, coloring the
sea and the sky with a dim and ghastly green radiance! The green melted
into a cold and awful blue! The frozen sapphire slowly turned violet!
And the violet sun grew soft and dim--and dim--until it went out
utterly!
The heavens were black at midday!
The sky was an empty, illimitable chasm of darkness! The night was
almost tangible--it seemed to have an oppressive weight. It was blacker
than any photographer's darkroom. Trees, cottage, sounding sea, had
vanished! It made no difference to close my eyes, or to put my hand
before them. A great dizziness came over me, and I groped blindly for
the post of the veranda, and clung to it helplessly when I found it.
The sounds that came to me were oddly reassuring. The rustle of the
wind in the palms, and the plaintive chirp of a few birds in the unseen
trees, and the dull, ceaseless rumble of the waves. Then I heard a
heavy sigh from Sam, and the scraping of his shoe on the floor. Then
a match scratched, and a pitiful little yellow flame lit the veranda,
showing Sam's lean, earnest face very clearly against the wall of night.
"Thank God we can see it burn!" he muttered. "If they had exhausted the
ether here, the jig would have been up with my electrical machinery."
"They! Lord! Do you think somebody--"
He looked toward me, holding up the blazing splinter. "There is the
possibility--even a probability--that we have to deal with a force
directed by intelligence!"
"Who do you think--"
"I didn't say human intelligence."
"You mean Mars or--"
He grinned in the feeble light. "No. Nothing out of your stories. The
human imagination is limited by human experience. And there are plenty
of things possible that human beings have never experienced!"
"What do you mean, Sam?" I gasped in utter bewilderment.
"I don't know what it is that is attacking the earth. Possibly it is
something so strange, so alien to my purely human experience that it
would wreck my mind to know!" Abruptly he turned toward the door. "I
must go in and get to work on the machine."
The match had burned out, and the utter blackness had fallen again.
I heard the old scientist get briskly to his feet and walk into the
house. He reached the light button, and the hall was flooded with cold
white radiance. The bright, slender beam thrown out across the veranda
comforted me immensely; but I still stood against the post, trying
vainly to think out what Sam had said.
The breeze grew cooler. In ten minutes a thin cold wind sprang up from
the north. I drew my light garments close about my body and shivered a
little. For a while I did not go in. Presently I felt a cold mist on
the wind. Suddenly a snowflake splashed chillingly against my face--an
omen of the frigid doom that lay before the earth! I got up and stepped
inside the door, to escape the icy wind. In a few minutes it began to
rain, because, of course, of the chilling of the air and condensation
of the moisture.
Suddenly curious about how the world was taking the weird catastrophe,
and about what was happening elsewhere, I went to the radiophone in the
living room, and switched it on. Not a sound came from it! Not even a
hint of static! The ether was utterly dead! That meant that the strange
force had already cut our civilization up into a thousand helplessly
isolated units!
Then from the rear of the building I heard the peculiar rhythmic
throbbing beat of a hydrodyne power generator. Sam was already at work
in the little room he had always kept locked, even against me. I walked
back to the door and knocked, asking to be allowed to come in.
Sam called out for me to enter, and I stepped inside. I stopped at
the door in amazement. The little space was crowded with intricate
electrical apparatus of modern design--in fact, much of it was new
and unfamiliar to me. There were intra-atomic power generators, huge
electron tubes, coils, switches, loop antennæ, and a wealth of other
material that was strange to me. I saw at once that the laboratory
before me must have represented vast sums of money and years of toil.
Sam, clad in a pair of greasy overalls, with a great smudge of grease
already over half his lean face, was working intently over a huge
complex device in the center of the room. Evidently it had been
recently and hastily assembled from the materials at hand, and was not
yet quite finished. In fact, a desk by the wall was still littered with
the plans and calculations from which it had been set up.
It was evidently founded on an adaptation of Sam's great invention of
forty years before, the hydrodyne sub-atomic engine. The hydrodyne
is based in principle on the catacytic disruption, by means of a
radioactive salt, of water, the products being hydrogen and oxygen
gases, which are burned in the cylinders, the steam formed being
condensed and pumped back into the coils. The actual energy comes from
the disintegration of hydrogen atoms, and the efficiency of the device
is shown by the fact that the great generators on the transoceanic
aerial liners require only a half pint of water as fuel per trip.
At one end of Sam's new machine was the hydrodyne unit. From the size
of the catalyzer coil, it must have been of vast capacity. The conduits
led to the transformer coils, and above the coils were the giant
electron tubes, six feet high, of a novel, horseshoe shape. Sam was
working with deft fingers at the connections.
"It will be hours, yet," he said absently, without looking up.
For a long time I stood looking at him, as he worked with utter
absorption and feverish haste. There was nothing I could do to help
him--I could hardly understand what he was about. How strange it was to
stand there in a freezing world and watch one lone man struggling to
save it!
[Illustration: _For a long time I stood looking at him, as he worked
with utter absorption and feverish haste.... How strange it was to
stand and watch one lone man in a freezing world struggling to save
it!_]
The cold rain was drumming heavily on the roof, and the roar of the sea
had risen. The wind was blowing a gale, but there was no lightning in
the storm that night. The out-of-doors was as dark as Erebus. Presently
it grew cold in the room. I went out and shut the doors, and turned on
the resistance heaters. Then I made a cup of coffee and brought it to
Sam. He gulped it down absently, and went on without a word. I went
back to my chair by the wall, and I think I must have fallen asleep.