THE MOST TERRIFIC MOMENT IN HISTORY
Still the great ball of Opalescence brooding over the Sargasso. Europe
now was frozen, and though it was midsummer had gone into winter
quarters. The Straits of Dover were no more. The waters had receded
and one could walk, if careful, dryshod from the shores of France to
the chalk cliffs of England. The Straits of Gibraltar had dried up.
The Mediterranean completely land-locked, was cut off forever from the
tides of the mother ocean.
The whole world going dry; not in ethics, but in reality. The great
Vampire, luminous, beautiful beyond all ken and thinking, drinking up
our lifeblood. The Atlantic a vast whirlpool.
A strange frenzy had fallen over mankind: men fought in the streets
and died in madness. It was fear of the Great Unknown, and hysteria.
At such a moment the veil of civilization was torn to tatters. Man was
reverting to the primeval.
Then came the word from Charley Huyck; flashing and repeating to every
clime and nation. In its assurance it was almost as miraculous as the
Vampire itself. For man had surrendered.
To the People of the World:
The strange and terrible Opalescence which, for the past
seventy hours, has been playing havoc with the world, is
not miracle, nor of the supernatural, but a mere
manifestation and result of the application of celestial
kinetics. Such a thing always was and always will be
possible where there is intelligence to control and
harness the forces that lie about us. Space is not space
exactly, but an infinite cistern of unknown laws and
forces. We may control certain laws on earth, but until we
reach out farther we are but playthings.
Man is the intelligence of the earth. The time will come
when he must be the intelligence of a great deal of space
as well. At the present time you are merely fortunate and
a victim of a kind fate. That I am the instrument of the
earth’s salvation is merely chance. The real man is Dr.
Robold. When he picked me up on the streets I had no idea
that the sequence of time would drift to this moment. He
took me into his work and taught me.
Because he was sensitive and was laughed at, we worked in
secret. And since his death, and out of respect to his
memory, I have continued in the same manner. But I have
written down everything, all the laws, computations,
formulas—everything; and I am now willing it to mankind.
Robold had a theory on kinetics. It was strange at first
and a thing to laugh at; but he reduced it to laws as
potent and as inexorable as the laws of gravitation.
The luminous Opalescence that has almost destroyed us is
but one of its minor manifestations. It is a message of
sinister intelligence; for back of it all is an
Intelligence. Yet it is not all sinister. It is
self-preservation. The time is coming when eons of ages
from now our own man will be forced to employ just such a
weapon for his own preservation. Either that or we shall
die of thirst and agony.
Let me ask you to remember now, that whatever you have
suffered, you have saved a world. I shall now save you and
the earth.
In the vaults you will find everything. All the knowledge
and discoveries of the great Dr. Robold, plus a few minor
findings by myself.
And now I bid you farewell. You shall soon be
free. Charley Huyck.
A strange message. Spoken over the wireless and flashed to every
clime, it roused and revived the hope of mankind. Who was this Charley
Huyck? Uncounted millions of men had never heard his name; there were
but few, very few who had.
A message out of nowhere and of very dubious and doubtful explanation.
Celestial kinetics! Undoubtedly. But the words explained nothing.
However, man was ready to accept anything, so long as it saved him.
For a more lucid explanation we must go back to the Arizona
observatory and Professor Ed. Williams. And a strange one it was
truly; a certain proof that consciousness is more potent, far more so
than mere material; also that many laws of our astronomers are very
apt to be overturned in spite of their mathematics.
Charley Huyck was right. You cannot measure intelligence with a
yard-stick. Mathematics do not lie; but when applied to consciousness
they are very likely to kick backward. That is precisely what had
happened.
The suddenness of Huyck’s departure had puzzled Professor Williams;
that, and the note which he found upon the table. It was not like
Charley to go off so in the stress of a moment. He had not even taken
the time to get his hat and coat. Surely something was amiss.
He read the note carefully, and with a deal of wonder.
“Look these up. Keep by the lens. If the world goes up you will know I
have not reached the mountain.”
What did he mean? Besides, there was no data for him to work on. He
did not know that an errant breeze had plumped the information behind
the bookcase. Nevertheless he went into the observatory, and for the
balance of the night stuck by the lens.
Now there are uncounted millions of stars in the sky. Williams had
nothing to go by. A needle in the hay-stack were an easy task compared
with the one that he was allotted. The flaming mystery, whatever it
was that Huyck had seen, was not caught by the professor. Still, he
wondered. “If the world goes up you will know I have not reached the
mountain.” What was the meaning?
But he was not worried. The professor loved Huyck as a visionary and
smiled not a little at his delightful fancies. Doubtless this was one
of them. It was not until the news came flashing out of Oakland that
he began to take it seriously. Then followed the disappearance of
Mount Heckla. “If the world goes up”—it began to look as if the words
had meaning.
There was a frantic professor during the next few days. When he was
not with the lens he was flashing out messages to the world for
Charley Huyck. He did not know that Huyck was lying unconscious and
almost dead upon the desert. That the world was coming to catastrophe
he knew full well; but where was the man to save it? And most of all,
what had his friend meant by the words, “look these up”?
Surely there must be some further information. Through the long, long
hours he stayed with the lens and waited. And he found nothing.
It was three days. Who will ever forget them? Surely not Professor
Williams. He was sweating blood. The whole world was going to pieces
without the trace of an explanation. All the mathematics, all the
accumulations of the ages had availed for nothing. Charley Huyck held
the secret. It was in the stars, and not an astronomer could find it.
But with the seventeenth hour came the turn of fortune. The professor
was passing through the office. The door was open, and the same fitful
wind which had played the original prank was now just as fitfully
performing restitution. Williams noticed a piece of paper protruding
from the back of the bookcase and fluttering in the breeze. He picked
it up. The first words that he saw were in the handwriting of Charley
Huyck. He read:
“In the last extremity—in the last phase when there is no longer any
water on the earth; when even the oxygen of the atmospheric envelope
has been reduced to a minimum—man, or whatever form of intelligence is
then upon the earth, must go back to the laws which governed his
forebears. Necessity must ever be the law of evolution. There will be
no water upon the earth, but there will be an unlimited quantity
elsewhere.
“By that time, for instance, the great planet, Jupiter, will be in
just a convenient state for exploitation. Gaseous now, it will be, by
that time, in just about the stage when the steam and water are
condensing into ocean. Eons of millions of years away in the days of
dire necessity. By that time the intelligence and consciousness of the
earth will have grown equal to the task.
“It is a thing to laugh at (perhaps) just at present. But when we
consider the ratio of man’s advance in the last hundred years, what
will it be in a billion? Not all the laws of the universe have been
discovered, by any means. At present we know nothing. Who can tell?
“Aye, who can tell? Perhaps we ourselves have in store the fate we
would mete out to another. We have a very dangerous neighbor close
beside us. Mars is in dire straits for water. And we know there is
life on Mars and intelligence! The very fact on its face proclaims it.
The oceans have dried up; the only way they have of holding life is by
bringing their water from the polar snow-caps. Their canals pronounce
an advanced state of cooperative intelligence; there is life upon Mars
and in an advanced stage of evolution.
“But how far advanced? It is a small planet, and consequently eons of
ages in advance of the earth’s evolution. In the nature of things Mars
cooled off quickly, and life was possible there while the earth was
yet a gaseous mass. She has gone to her maturity and into her
retrogression; she is approaching her end. She has had less time to
produce intelligence than intelligence will have—in the end—upon the
earth.
“How far has this intelligence progressed? That is the question.
Nature is a slow worker. It took eons of ages to put life upon the
earth; it took eons of more ages to make this life conscious. How far
will it go? How far has it gone on Mars?”
That was as far the the comments went. The professor dropped his eyes
to the rest of the paper. It was a map of the face of Mars, and across
its center was a black cross scratched by the dull point of a soft
pencil.
He knew the face of Mars. It was the Ascræus Lucus. The oasis at the
juncture of a series of canals running much like the spokes of a
wheel. The great Uranian and Alander Canals coming in at about right
angles.
In two jumps the professor was in the observatory with the great lens
swung to focus. It was the great moment out of his lifetime, and the
strangest and most eager moment, perhaps, ever lived by any
astronomer. His fingers fairly twitched with tension. There before his
view was the full face of our Martian neighbor!
But was it? He gasped out a breath of startled exclamation. Was it
Mars that he gazed at; the whole face, the whole thing had been
changed before him.
Mars has ever been red. Viewed through the telescope it has had the
most beautiful tinge imaginable, red ochre, the weird tinge of the
desert in sunset. The color of enchantment and of hell!
For it is so. We know that for ages and ages the planet has been
burning up; that life was possible only in the dry sea-bottoms and
under irrigation. The rest, where the continents once were, was
blazing desert. The redness, the beauty, the enchantment that we so
admired was burning hell.
All this had changed.
Instead of this was a beautiful shade of iridescent green. The red was
gone forever. The great planet standing in the heavens had grown into
infinite glory. Like the great Dog Star transplanted.
The professor sought out the Ascræus Lucus. It was hard to find. The
whole face had been transfigured; where had been canals was now the
beautiful sheen of green and verdure. He realized what he was
beholding and what he had never dreamed of seeing; the seas of Mars
filled up.
With the stolen oceans our grim neighbor had come back to youth. But
how had it been done. It was horror for our world. The great
luminescent ball of Opalescence! Europe frozen and New York a mass of
ice. It was the earth’s destruction. How long could the thing keep up;
and whence did it come? What was it?
He sought for the Ascræus Lucus. And he beheld a strange sight. At the
very spot where should have been the juncture of the canals he caught
what at first looked like a pin-point flame, a strange twinkling light
with flitting glow of Opalescence. He watched it, and he wondered. It
seemed to the professor to grow; and he noticed that the green about
it was of different color. It was winking, like a great force, and
much as if alive; baneful.
It was what Charley Huyck had seen. The professor thought of Charley.
He had hurried to the mountain. What could Huyck, a mere man, do
against a thing like this? There was naught to do but sit and watch it
drink of our lifeblood. And then—
It was the message, the strange assurance that Huyck was flashing over
the world. There was no lack of confidence in the words he was
speaking. “Celestial Kinetics,” so that was the answer! Certainly it
must be so with the truth before him. Williams was a doubter no
longer. And Charley Huyck could save them. The man he had humored.
Eagerly he waited and stuck by the lens. The whole world waited.
It was perhaps the most terrific moment since creation. To describe it
would be like describing doomsday. We all of us went through it, and
we all of us thought the end had come; that the earth was torn to
atoms and to chaos.
The State of Colorado was lurid with a red light of terror; for a
thousand miles the flame shot above the earth and into space. If ever
spirit went out in glory that spirit was Charley Huyck! He had come to
the moment and to Archimedes. The whole world rocked to the recoil.
Compared to it the mightiest earthquake was but a tender shiver. The
consciousness of the earth had spoken!
The professor was knocked upon the floor. He knew not what had
happened. Out of the windows and to the north the flame of Colorado,
like the whole world going up. It was the last moment. But he was a
scientist to the end. He had sprained his ankle and his face was
bleeding; but for all that he struggled, fought his way to the
telescope. And he saw:
The great planet with its sinister, baleful, wicked light in the
center, and another light vastly larger covering up half of Mars. What
was it? It was moving. The truth set him almost to shouting.
It was the answer of Charley Huyck and of the world. The light grew
smaller, smaller, and almost to a pin-point on its way to Mars.
The real climax was in silence. And of all the world only Professor
Williams beheld it. The two lights coalesced and spread out; what it
was on Mars, of course, we do not know.
But in a few moments all was gone. Only the green of the Martian Sea
winked in the sunlight. The luminous opal was gone from the Sargasso.
The ocean lay in peace.
It was a terrible three days. Had it not been for the work of Robold
and Huyck life would have been destroyed. The pity of it that all of
their discoveries have gone with them. Not even Charley realized how
terrific the force he was about to loosen.
He had carefully locked everything in vaults for a safe delivery to
man. He had expected death, but not the cataclysm. The whole of Mount
Robold was shorn away; in its place we have a lake fifty miles in
diameter.
So much for celestial kinetics.
And we look to a green and beautiful Mars. We hold no enmity. It was
but the law of self-preservation. Let us hope they have enough water;
and that their seas will hold. We don’t blame them, and we don’t blame
ourselves, either for that matter. We need what we have, and we hope
to keep it.
(The End.)