Edmond Hamilton

“ You try to wreck the greatest scientific experiment ever conducted on this earth; try to save a humanity, a race, as trivial as yourselves from the doom which we, the masters of life, have decreed for them; try to make impossible the new races which we life-masters shall give earth when the protoplasm floods have swept all other life away! ”

“ It was not those glistening floods on the barren island below, however, that were central in the thoughts of Mallett and Ralton as they worked on at the bar, bloody and blind with sweat, all but exhausted; it was those other gigantic floods that both knew were even then sweeping over coasts and islands, engulfing the peoples of earth as they rolled on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Open and unprotected lay the great condenser at the clearing's center, its vast globe gleaming dully, its glass-faced dials on the black switch-box reflecting the starlight faintly. As they watched, one of those from the laboratory, a dark, intent figure that Ralton recognized as Kingsford, the electrical expert, approached the box, inspected the dials, and then as though satisfied turned back to the laboratory building from which he had come, and from which in another moment they could make out his voice again. Mallett turned swiftly toward his friend. ”

“ For a moment of utter astonishment Worley stood still, gazing toward the stuff. A gray, glistening mass, it was pouring slowly and smoothly up over the wall's edge, from the sea beneath, flowing steadily up onto the surface of the park and adding to the great, gleaming mass of the stuff that lay already all around that park's sea-edge! The thing was unprecedented; it was incredible, and for a moment that seemed unending to Worley, he stared toward those shining, gathering jelly-like masses that were flowing and flexing and writhing a few feet before him. ”

“ We can, by building a greater condenser, concentrate the cosmic ray vibrations from a vast part of space on earth, and cause protoplasm floods to form in all earth's seas in giant masses, protoplasm masses that will inevitably, when they reach a certain development of life and power, sweep out over earth in blind movement and search of food, wiping out forever all the blotches of flesh that make up humanity! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the narrow, barred opening of one of them, gazing downward they could see vast masses of the gray, glistening protoplasm towering upward against the great cone's steep, smooth sides of rock, rolling upward and falling back in vain endeavor to flow up over the sides and summit of the cone as they had done over the rest of the island, in their blind, mindless search for food. ”

“ Slowly, carefully they crept on, out from the shelter of their prison and the long building beside it, into the great circular clearing. Ralton's blood was pounding through his veins, for now the gleaming condenser lay but a few hundred feet ahead, at the clearing's center. Should he make a rush for it and trust to chance to get him to the condenser's control in time? He discarded the idea, even as Mallett and he crept forward; for within moments more their stealthy, silent progress would bring them to their goal. ”

“ For, according to them, the deposits of glistening gray slime had been left by the tides not only along the Atlantic coast but along the Pacific also, and not only along American shores but upon those of Europe and Asia and Africa, upon all the shores of all earth's seas, in fact. Upon the jungle-bordered beaches of the Philippines, and the cold gray Norwegian shores, and the shelving sands of the Chilean coast, and the rocky cliffs of England, the retreating tides had left the same thick coatings of jelly-like, living slime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then we can destroy all those protoplasm floods in a moment by switching the condenser to the radio-active vibrations, and can people the world with the forms of life that we think best, can people it with beings over whom we shall reign supreme—the life-masters—the creators—the gods!'
"The thing was madness, madness the more terrible because we could actually do the thing, and I recoiled in horror. The other three, though, driven on by the strange craziness of soul, the monomania, that filled Munson, like him regarded themselves as gods, as life-masters, and agreed to his mad plan. ”

“ Barr is undoubtedly right in assuming that great quantities of protoplasm have in some way appeared in all earth's seas," he stated, "his theory that those masses have formed suddenly out of the sea's inorganic elements is, with all respect, a crazy one. It is true that in the earth's youth such great protoplasmic masses did form thus from the elements of sea-silt, but we know that their process of formation, their change from inorganic to organic living matter, required eons in itself to complete, so slow was it. ”

“ My own theory is that great masses of protoplasm have existed from the remote past on the sea's floor, and that some subterranean or submarine convulsion has thrown them up to be scattered by the tides upon all earth's coasts. ”

“ Ralton staggered to Mallett's side, half led and half dragged his friend, still dazed, toward his plane that stood still untouched at the clearing's other side. Into its front cockpit he helped him, turned a switch and whirled the propeller. Another moment, and with motor roaring the little plane was speeding across the clearing, lifting sharply upward into the growing light of dawn, speeding away from the giant cone and island, over the gray waters toward the south. ”

“ And at last, when the dawn-light was strengthening swiftly eastward, they had scratched away the cement from one side of the bar's base, and straightened up, all but exhausted.
"It's all we can do!" panted Mallett. "Our only chance is to get the bar out now—if we wait longer it'll be broad day." ”

“ Striving to escape from my prison, knowing that if I could but smash or turn off the great condenser I might yet prevent the loosing of those protoplasm floods, I worked desperately with the bars of one of my windows. They had been hastily set into the concrete wall with cement, and now with odd bits of metal left to me I chipped and scratched at that cement, endeavoring to loosen one of the bars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The New York biologist's classification of the clear, jelly-like deposits as protoplasm was, it was admitted, correct; since by that time scientists in laboratories at London and Stockholm and Sydney had confirmed independently the fact that the glistening gray stuff was indeed the basic life-substance of earth. ”

“ Save for these casually curious ones, though, and the disgusted bathers who found themselves barred by it from their favorite beaches, it can not be said that any portion of the public, even in such seaside cities as New York, gave the advent of the glistening gray stuff any consideration on that afternoon and evening. It was not until the newspapers of the following morning, the 26th, published their later dispatches on the phenomenon that the world, or the scientific world at least, began to awake to its extraordinary nature. ”