Chapter X

McGinity had lunch with us, on Henry's invitation, on the day following my visit to Dr. LaRauche's house. In the preparation of his story in advance, it was necessary that he should obtain from Henry all the scientific technicalities relating to the discovery. It was his task to make copious notes while Henry talked.

Seated at his desk in the library, Henry talked on and on for several hours; he never seemed to tire. While I sat by an open window, the weather being exceptionally hot, reading and smoking by fits and turns, and occasionally listening in to what Henry was saying. Whenever I turned to gaze at him, it was with frank bewilderment.

Ever since he had announced his discovery, my mind had been led by diverse paths, hither and thither, seeking, not an outlet, but rather a snug corner wherein to rest in the conviction that his and Olinski's claims of having established radio communication with Mars were true. Somehow I just couldn't grasp the idea of an intelligent exchange of ideas with another race of people so far away from us; it was too stupendous. As a matter of fact, I was still a little cynical and suspicious. And yet I knew if anyone had discussed the possibilities of the radio, as we know it today, in the time of General George Washington, as Henry was now agitating wireless communication with Mars, the people of the Colonial era would have thought such a person stark mad.

As McGinity's pencil flew across his note-book like a busy shuttle in a loom, transcribing Henry's utterances, I kept saying to myself: "How can this reporter accept facts that to him must seem perfectly crazy?" Then, suddenly, it came to me that to a reporter all things are either news or nothing. No matter if Henry was inventing something unreal, which, of course, he wasn't, he was giving the reporter news of the greatest magnitude; news backed by the potentialities of Henry's vast wealth and the reputation he had already achieved as a scientist.

Watching them closely, I marveled at that inherent physical virtue in each of them, by which they were enabled to shake off any thought, or mention, of the very recent and unfortunate incident in our midst. McGinity must have found the library infinitely more comfortable than solitary confinement in our cellar. It was also very evident to me that he was going up in Henry's estimation by leaps and bounds.

In repose, McGinity had a shy, reserved look about him that suggested the student. He had proved a perfect guest at lunch. It puzzled me that he should seem so much at home, so much part of our company and our setting. Once the first shock was over, Jane had found him a person of immediate interest and excitement. When she discovered that he loved to poke round art galleries, and liked canary birds and goldfish, as she did, she invited him to lunch with us soon again.

The absurd antagonism of Henry and Jane against reporters now seemed a thing of the past. But not everything of the past, on McGinity's part, was forgotten. There was no mistaking that he missed Pat, who was absent from lunch because Henry had devised a means of preventing a second meeting between them. He had packed her off, with Prince Matani, to a luncheon party at the Sands Cliff Club, after which they were to attend a polo match.

There is, after all, no use trying to go contrariwise to fate. Pat, it seems, was fated to come home alone from the match, after a tilt with the Prince--they quarrelled constantly--and Henry had a bad moment when she breezed into the library a few minutes after he had finished dictating to McGinity.

She was all exclamations and astonishment and delight on seeing the reporter. "Dear old Uncle!" she said, as she hugged and kissed Henry. "Why, on earth, didn't you tell me we were going to have a visitor?"

Henry didn't answer. He sat silent, even when Pat went up to McGinity, and said: "What a piece of luck!" Then: "Lets go out on the terrace, where it's cool."

Thereupon Henry found his tongue. "But it's quite comfortable in the library," he said. "Why not talk to Mr. McGinity here?"

"But I want him to see the Sound and the boats from the terrace," Pat replied. "It's such a beautiful scene."

It wasn't beautiful at all, as she knew, at this time. A mist had come up, and cloaked everything in indistinctness. It wasn't even cool on the terrace; the slight, west breeze that had been stirring, had changed to the south. Nevertheless, she marched him off to the terrace.

Presently, they walked round the terrace extension at the end of the castle, and stood conversing near the open window by which I sat. Fortunately, they did not see me, and I made no move to indicate my near presence. I felt free to listen to their conversation as a matter of protection for Pat. Like my sister, Jane, I watched her out of eyes and listened with ears that saw and heard a great deal more than they pretended.

Pat spoke very fast, so as to leave the reporter little time to interrupt her. "Afraid you wouldn't see me again, you say? Well, I was afraid you'd never want to see me again, after what happened the other night."

"I--I'm glad it happened, now, aren't you?" McGinity ventured.

"Oh, ever so glad," replied Pat. "I'll never forget that night, not as long as I live. Fancy meeting a person for the first time in one's cellar. And, oh! I'm so glad I came home ahead of Prince Matani. We had a terrible spat at the polo game--over you. He detests reporters. Hasn't the slightest sense of humor, and I see fun in everything. And, oh, yes!" she raced on; "there's something I want to ask you. Will you be at Uncle Henry's demonstration in the city, next Tuesday night? Oh, of course, you will! And, please, I'd love to see how a newspaper is made. It must be very thrilling. You want to show me, don't you?"

"I should like to very much," said McGinity. "But I can't understand, with all the interests you have in life, what it is you want of me. I can't understand yet why you take so much interest in me, or trouble yourself with me at all."

She gazed at him, half laughing. "Are you really so stupid as all that?" Then she quickly added: "Perhaps I don't want anything. What then?" And, before he could reply, she flew at him: "At least I want you to stop calling me 'Miss'."

"What am I to call you?"

"Pat."

"Very well--Pat," he smiled, "let me talk to you a little about myself, of what I want of you." But he got no further; he became curiously bereft of speech.

"Well--Bob?" Pat said, after a period of silence.

"It's no good," he said at last. "Since I met you the other night, I've been thinking of what I'd like to say to you--and, now, it's best that I forget it."

He turned half away from her as he continued to speak. "I'd better go now."

Pat looked at him in astonishment. "Oh, please, Bob! Get it off your mind, whatever it is," she begged.

"The truth is," he began, "what embarrasses me most--"

"There you go!" she interrupted. "I know exactly what you're going to say, and to me it's such a silly thing."

"Will you explain just what you mean?"

"I mean, well, that I'm not a snob. I've never boasted about my position, about having everything I want. The most exciting thing in the world to me is meeting new people--nice people--and expecting one doesn't know what. I don't expect you to hand me any credentials; that would be odious. Of course, to you, I must appear disgustingly idle and useless. But it just happens that I like you very much, and--and I would like to be your friend."

McGinity grinned. "I think I can arrange that all right," he said.

"I'm very glad you can," she said. "And, please, get the other thing off your mind, whatever it is, and don't let it come back again, at any rate, not so--so overwhelmingly." She laughed out loud as she stretched forth her hand.

It was pretty hard to believe my eyes in the unexpected scene which swiftly followed. Prince Matani must have been in very bad humor to do what he did. I gathered that he had been standing in concealment, round the corner of the castle, for several minutes, listening in to the conversation, and nursing his jealousy and suspicion.

McGinity had just taken Pat's hand in his own when I saw the Prince's slim figure come round the corner suddenly, and upon them. Without uttering a word, he struck at the reporter. Of all expressions in the English language, I think "come-back" is one of the most significant. The Prince had no sooner planted a glancing blow on McGinity's jaw, still slightly discolored from Niki's knockout punch, when the reporter, with a quick come-back, swung a mighty right that sent the Prince backwards, reeling. It excited me almost to laughter to think that the reporter felt the same impulse towards the Prince as I.

Pat could be as cool as a cucumber when it was necessary. Turning to the Prince, she said, her face painfully drawn: "Why did you do this?"

The Prince made no reply. He gave her a sullen look and walked away.

McGinity met the situation good-naturedly. "If this keeps up," he remarked, working his jaw, "I'll have to wear a baseball catcher's mask whenever I come here, or ask for special police protection."

"It's extraordinary," said Pat, laughing in spite of herself, "that you should get two smacks in the face in succession. You must think we're a crazy lot. Anyway, that was a beautiful crack you gave His Highness, and he deserved it."

That practically ended the conversation. As they walked off, I turned in my chair to see the Prince in whispered conversation with Henry, obviously airing his grievances in connection with Pat and McGinity. I was rather surprised, but delighted, to hear Henry say to him: "This is your funeral, Your Highness. Your eye looks terrible. Better go upstairs, and have Niki put a cold compress on it."

The Prince had no sooner left the room to carry out Henry's suggestion when Pat and McGinity strolled in. I was uneasy for a moment, but Henry gave no indication that he knew what had just happened on the terrace. In matter-of-factness, he gave McGinity some final instructions, and dismissed him. Then the reporter left, and there was silence. Henry looked very grave.

"What's on your mind, Uncle Henry?" Pat asked, as she subsided into a chair.

Henry blew his nose, a trick he had when his feelings were disturbed. "I'm not angry, my dear," he began, and then paused to blow his nose again. "It isn't that I mind so much this extraordinary encounter between His Highness and Mr. McGinity--the reporter had every right to strike out in self-defense--but you cannot go on in this way. I know--"

"Oh, so the Prince told you, did he?" she interposed. Then she added: "What do you know?"

"That you are in love with this young reporter."

Pat gasped. "Oh, you ought not to have said that, Uncle! You've spoiled it all now. It was such a beautiful thing--our friendship."

"It has been said, and very truthfully so," Henry observed, "that mere friendship is impossible between a man and a woman. Now, Mr. McGinity is a very smart and capable young person," he went on, "and I have nothing to say against your being friendly with him, but I do object to your flaunting him, on such short acquaintance, made under such unusual circumstances, in the face of His Highness as a possible rival."

"What do you mean?" Pat asked, as she rose out of her chair, and moved slowly towards Henry.

"I mean it is intolerably annoying to me that you should allow a nondescript person to come between you and this distinguished representative of the Georgian principality."

"Mr. McGinity is not nondescript," Pat retorted, "and--and I have no intention of marrying Prince Matani." There was a look of fear growing in her eyes. "Why, I don't love him, Uncle, well enough to marry him. I'd rather marry a counter-jumper in a Broadway haberdashery store. Oh, I couldn't--couldn't!"

"You know, and I know," said Henry, firmly, "that you've given the Prince every encouragement. My principle heretofore has been to leave you alone. But, now, it has become a different matter. Your growing interest in Mr. McGinity makes it necessary for me to show my authority."

"You mean that I can't see as much of Mr. McGinity as I have a mind to?"

"Just so long as it is within the bounds of discretion," Henry answered. "But I repeat, you shall not allow this reporter to come between you and the young nobleman you're destined to marry. I'll admit that I've encouraged the Prince's attentions towards you. In fact, I think it's about time that I announced your betrothal to him. Now, as we've both given him encouragement, we can't break faith with him as easily as all that--now, can we?"

"Very well, Uncle." Pat's voice sounded tired and bored. After giving me an appealing, helpless look, she went briskly out of the room.

That night, Thursday, to be exact, Henry woke me out of the deepest slumber. He had stayed up late, at his telescope, and had come to tell me of a meteoric shower, the most amazing he had ever witnessed, he said. I dressed quickly, and accompanied him to the observatory. There I saw the most astounding spectacle. Swarms of fire-balls, they looked like, sweeping across the heavens. Many were hissing to the earth. It was like a celestial bombardment of the world.

The meteoric showers, transiently brilliant, continued the next night, and the next. Astronomers all over the country were mystified; Henry equally so. No one could seem to account for them; they were out of season; the whole thing was freakish.

The last shower of meteors of any note occurred in November, 1833, when swarms of shooting stars fell in North America. They fell then, I found in our encyclopedia, like flakes of snow, to the number, as was estimated, of 240,000 in the space of nine hours, varying in size from a moving point to globes of the moon's diameter.

The earth in its orbit is constantly encountering meteors, which are accepted by scientists as the debris of comets, Henry explained, but this encounter was--well, inexplicable and bewildering. Remnants of the metallic bodies were falling in all sections of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Some were dropping in populous centers, bringing death and disaster; some at sea, and in the Great Lakes, sinking ships. Seemingly there was no let-up to this weird and dangerous phenomenon of the heavens.

On the following Sunday night, while the presses of the Daily Recorder were grinding out, by the hundreds of thousands, McGinity's exclusive, front-page story on Henry's and Olinski's scientific feat, which meant the linking of the earth and Mars by radio, a discovery almost beyond human conception, a great ball of blinding, bluish fire, giving off a trail of sparks, hissed down out of the heavens, and fell in Times Square.

A messenger of death from space, this red-hot metallic wanderer of the skies, crashed into the small triangle, formed by the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets. It tore through the surface into the subway, just missing a passing train, and was imbedded in a mass of tangled steel rails and cement ten feet under the level of the underground railway.

Smaller fragments in its wake rattled down like hail on streets and housetops within a radius of a mile. Hardly a window-pane within this area that was not shattered to bits by the explosion, which lighted the entire city in a bluish glare. All taxicabs parked, or moving, in the square were overturned and wrecked; pedestrians were thrown to the ground, stunned, many lying unconscious. Sixteen persons were killed outright.

The gilt minute hand of a huge, electrically-illuminated clock overlooking the scene of disaster, was torn off by the explosion; the hour hand was untouched. When the mechanism of the clock was put out of business, the hour hand was pointing exactly at two. Had the meteor fallen a few hours earlier, the loss of life no doubt would have been appalling.

The scene of terror and confusion that followed the fall of the meteor, according to eye-witnesses, was indescribable. Many persons on Broadway, women of the street, mendicants, fell down on their knees, and prayed, believing that the end of the world had come. One man went raving mad. He ran through the streets, shouting: "The stars of heaven are falling unto the earth! Hide yourselves in the mountains! Hide from the wrath of the Lamb!"

The whole city was aroused. Thousands came pouring in from the outlying districts by subway, and in motor cars, to visit the scene of disaster. The police were helpless. Many women and children were trampled to death in the crush of the thousands who fought and pressed their way into Times Square. Efforts were made to bring the crowd to its senses, to distract the people's attention from the scene of the catastrophe; sirens sounded, the deep, booming note of bells came from the church towers, but to no avail.

When dawn broke at last, it was estimated that one million persons were massed in and about Times Square. All the diverging cross-town streets were choked with people and traffic. While above the silent hush of the terrified masses, milling about in the sepulchral gray light of dawn, rose the strident voices of news-boys:

"Wuxtra! Wuxtra! Planet Mars speaks to the earth! All about radio communication between earth and Mars! Wuxtra! Wuxtra!"

Thus, upon a sky-minded people, made conscious for the first time, it seemed, of the strange and powerful forces that lurk in the upper regions, by the awe and terror caused by the falling stars, descended the news of Henry's triumphant accomplishment.

A new world of people had been discovered. The inhabitants of Mars were no longer a mythical race. Radio, girdling the earth as quick as thought, had drawn all nations closer together; now, bridging the abyss of outer space, it had drawn into its friendly relationship a new human race. To a nation-wide, or world-circling, hook-up of the radio, Mars could now be included. Mars was now our neighbor, as convenient to reach by wireless as London, Rome or Peiping; made more accessible really than either the Arctic or Antarctic zones.

Our telephone at the castle began to trill about eleven-thirty o'clock, shortly after McGinity's story had been run off the presses and the paper was on the street. The central operator reported "no answer" to hundreds of calls, made by curious-minded people, until a little after two in the morning, when she reported "Busy." Henry, it seems, had seen the meteor fall in New York through his telescope. Immediately he had phoned to Olinski, who was in the city, and Olinski had hurried to Times Square to investigate. The next day, when he came down to the country, to assist Henry in his preparations for the public demonstration, he was able to give us first-hand information of the occurrence.

As early as eight o'clock that morning, reporters swarmed about our lodge-gate. Having no head, or inclination, for handling the press representatives en masse, Henry phoned to McGinity to come down and help him out. McGinity came in a hurry, and took control of the situation in a masterly way. The other reporters, including many foreign correspondents, all seemed to like him.

Pat remained aloof from all the hurly-burly and excitement. Once she got a good look at McGinity from the head of the staircase, as he stood talking to a group of reporters in the entrance hall; but she took care that he did not see her. The situation in which she now found herself was like something read in childhood, a romantic fairy-story; and Henry, to her, was the ogre. What saved her in the whole miserable affair was her superb common-sense. Henry didn't have to explain things to her any further; she instantly realized that, still under his authority, she must obey him, and marry Prince Matani.

Late in the afternoon she came downstairs, on the pretense of getting a book, to have a better look at him, so she told me afterwards, just to make sure he was no different from the time when she first had got him by heart. All the reporters had gone, and McGinity was sitting at the big desk in the library, engaged in writing his follow-up story of Henry's discovery. He was alone, Henry having gone to the observatory.

She looked at him through the open door, from the far side of the dining room. He had his face to her, and his head was bent over his work. Presently he looked up and saw her, but that was all. There was a worried expression on his face; he seemed afraid to smile. What a fool she was to expect anything to happen in the way she made it up in her own mind! So she turned away, and started to leave the room.

When he called after her, she stopped and looked back. He had risen, and had come to the library doorway. "Don't run away like that, please," he implored.

"You seem to be awfully busy," said Pat. "I didn't mean to disturb you. I was just coming in to get a book."

"What book?"

Pat was puzzled for a moment. "Oh, just a mystery book--anything," she said, finally.

"Did you read my story in this morning's Recorder?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes; it was fine. Uncle Henry said it was magnificent. Just enough play of the imagination to give it color, and told with such simplicity that everyone could understand."

"Thanks," he said. "I'm glad you liked it. At first, I was afraid the falling of that meteor in Times Square would kill it. But it didn't. It has made the New York public more open-minded for what your Uncle Henry is going to spring on them tomorrow night, at Radio Center. You'll be there, of course. Shall I see you?"

"If I'm free," Pat replied.

"Meaning that you're not free," he remarked. He passed into a thoughtful mood but quickly snapped out of it. "Yes; I--I understand perfectly. Your Uncle Henry told me about the Prince and yourself this afternoon--about your coming engagement--and I'm afraid I'm not able to take it in yet. I don't see why you ever bothered about me at all." He stopped short, and began staring at the floor in deep contemplation.

"I don't know myself why I ever did--why I ever bothered about you," she returned, in a low, tremulous voice. "I had a feeling--well, I had a sort of feeling--" She, too, stopped short.

When McGinity glanced up, she was walking away. Then he heard Henry's voice, and went quickly back to his work.