Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/69

over lonely, barren beaches—gigantic glistening protoplasm masses gliding at the same hour through the streets of London, and of Yokohama, of Copenhagen and of Miami, in a thousand cities sweeping humanity in fear-mad mobs before them.

Doom! It was the word that was flashing already from city and village by the sea to those inland, the word that was bursting across an astounded and horror-stricken world in those dread hours. The mighty waves of protoplasm, whatever their unthinkable origin, were unstopped, were unstoppable. Bullet and bomb and knife were harmless to them. High-explosive shells had scattered the waves only to have them in another moment join again, and military batteries hastily summoned had fired round upon round until they had been wiped out by those calmly advancing floods. Planes had swooped to bomb them with no greater effect than the shells. Gas had no effect upon these living floods. Onward, outward, they rolled, mighty glistening masses flowing upward from the sea to sweep across all the earth.

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. The Panama isthmus had been covered by the protoplasm, severing the two American continents. Great ships at sea and in port had been dragged down into the depths by the up-reaching, towering masses. Doom! 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. The thing was eating up humanity!

It had been late on the afternoon of the 27th, less than a half-score hours before the breaking of that great terror upon the world, that young Ernest Ralton had sped away to the northeast in his plane, toward the barren little island retreat of Dr. Munson and his associates. It was not primarily to see Munson, of whom he stood in some awe, that Ralton had offered to make the trip, but to visit young Dr. Richard Mallett, his particular friend, whom he had not seen since the departure of the Munson party for the island some months before. The request of the Association had given him a valid exeuse for making the trip, however, and so, slanting up above Manhattan's massed and sky-flung towers Ralton had circled once and then headed away into the gray haze northward.

Hour followed hour while the gray New England coast slid back like a great map beneath him, the sun sinking ever to the horizon westward as he roared on. Hardly conscious of more than the steady, even song of the motor and the rush of wind about him, Ralton checked his progress automatically by the natural features of the coast below him, and at last was flying northward over the tangle of deeply indented bays and islands that forms the Maine coast, veering outward from it over the gray waters to the east, and peering intently for Cone Island. The sun had dipped to the horizon, by then, but he knew