Chapter IV: 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!

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.