Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/61

"A great wave of living protoplasm swept through the streets, licking them clean of life."

The first intimation the world received of the life-masters and of the doom that they were to loose upon it was contained in a news dispatch sent out by the great press syndicates from New York in the last week of May. That first article, a brief one, stated only that during the last day or so the beaches about the metropolis had been closed to bathers by reason of a thick scum of clear gray, jelly-like substance that had been left upon them by the retreating tides. This clear slime, which exhibited a few signs of rudimentary life and movement, had been deposited also by the tides upon the sea-walls and dock-piles about the city, and had been reported too from a score or more of places along the New Jersey and New England seaboard. These glistening deposits, the dispatch added, were considered to be in all probability the result of some sea-migration of a great mass of minute, jelly-like organisms.

That first dispatch, the true sinister importance of which we can well understand now, was treated at the time as merely one of scores of other re-