Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/19

the polar ice, nothing further could be done. The matter was already disappearing from the newspapers, by that time, passing simultaneously from the fickle public interest. Even in scientific circles the loss of the brilliant McQuirk occasioned only a few expressions of polite regret. The sensation, like all sensations of yesterday, was already all but forgotten.

Forgotten—and in street and building, factory and office, theater and school, the life of the busy world hummed on—a life, a civilization, so complex and broad-based and well ordered that it was incredible that it could ever be shaken or destroyed by any force or forces. So it must have seemed, then. Certainly none there was who guessed that even at that moment an ancient menace was rising and gathering and growing beneath which that civilization would crash like a flimsy toy. None there was who dreamed that the only warning of the coming terror that was ever to be received had been disregarded, misunderstood, and that away in the icy north the events of eons were rushing toward a climax which would mark the end forever of the age-old reign of man.

It seems probable now that no complete history of the coming of the terror will ever be written. The very scope and magnitude of the thing make that impossible. One could as well write a history of an earthquake, for there is no visible chain of cause and effect, no sequence of rationally connected events to be detailed. Nothing but panic, ruin, death, smiting suddenly out of the unknown and then receding into the unknown again before their nature had ever been suspected by the dazed and staggering world.

The best that can be done, indeed, is to make some attempt at picturing the thing as it appeared at the time, on that fateful evening of September 20th, when it burst first upon the world. And one begins such an attempt, inevitably, with the striking of the thing at Winnipeg, since it was there that the first blow fell.

The sources of our information concerning the attack on the northern city are unsatisfactory in the extreme, being mostly garbled and distorted accounts of terror-stricken survivors, which contradict each other at a score of points. Even seen through these conflicting stories, though, the main phases of the thing are clear enough, though some minor features of it are subjects of dispute to this day.

It seems established now that it was some few minutes past 7 o'clock when the thing first struck, just at sunset of the long September day—a sunset that flamed crimson and gold in the west, its last glowing rays falling upon the city’s streets, in which the ever-moving life and traffic seemed to have lessened for a moment. The last crowds of homeward-bound workers had surged through those streets an hour before, and now there were only a few chance pedestrians hurrying toward an awaiting dinner, and a thin last trickle of automobiles hastening toward the suburbs. The evening theater rush had not yet begun, and for the moment the streets lay comparatively empty beneath the waning westward light. And it was then that there came the terror.

There was, a sudden startled cry from one of the pedestrians, a cry that spread along the street like flame, that was taken up and repeated by a score of voices almost instantly. And simultaneously there was a craning of necks toward the sky, as those in the streets gazed up in response to that shout. But as they looked, they fell suddenly silent.

Sweeping above the city from the north, a score of dark, mighty shapes were speeding smoothly through the air a thousand feet above the streets—shapes that were each a score of feet