Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/72

"Down there, Ralton," he said, pointing downward and outward into the starlit night. "That is what has come—what is coming—out of the thing, in these last hours that you've lain here unconscious. That is what is coming now over all the world."

Ralton stared downward, uncomprehendingly. The building of which the room was a part was located at the very edge of the great cone's summit, and from that window he could look far across the level sands of the little island, lying pale beneath the dim starlight, away to the foam-fringed line of the shore. Up and out from the shore now, though, he discerned what seemed a mighty glistening gray wave creeping in over the level sands, a thick, gleaming, jelly-like mass rolling in toward the central cone. He turned toward Mallett, deeper bewilderment on his countenance.

"That great gray wave, Mallett!" he exclaimed. "It can't be———"

"Protoplasm?" the other said. "Protoplasm like that found on the world's beaches? But it is, Ralton, a great wave of living protoplasm, rolling out of all earth's seas in a great tide of death across the earth! And Munson and the others outside are the ones who have loosed it on the world!"

Ralton felt his already dazed brain turning at the other's words, but before his stunned astonishment could find expression Mallett had gripped his shoulder, was crouching again with him in the room's corner, speaking on.

"You know, Ralton, how Dr. Munson and the other four of us came up here to Cone Island, hardly more than a half-dozen months ago. Surely a strangely variegated assortment of scientists we must have seemed for a biologist to take with him. Labreau, the bio-chemist; Kingsford, the electrical expert; Krauner, the bio-physicist; and I, the cytologist, the cell-specialist; a strange enough quintet we were, but one whose combined knowledge one would think could solve any scientific problem. And it was for that purpose that Dr. Munson had assembled us. He wished to solve a problem, one that is indeed and always has been the greatest of all scientific problems. And that problem was the origin of life itself.

"How did life first originate upon this earth? That is a question to which biology, the science of life, can answer nothing. We know that once the earth was a fiery furnace in which no life could exist, and that somehow after its cooling there rose in its primeval seas the first life, protoplasm, the basic life-stuff of which all earth's living creatures are built, from which all have come on the road of evolution. Protoplasm arose, somehow, from the elements of sea-silt, its complex compounds formed by some strange force out of those elements. What force it was that had driven the process on, that had caused the formation of those first great masses of protoplasm in earth's seas, no biologist has ever been able to say. But Munson believed that he could discover that force and prove his discovery, and when he outlined his plan to us we leapt at the chance. He had fixed upon this island, Cone Island, as the place for our researches, both because of the seclusion we desired and for another reason he disclosed later; so gathering all the equipment and supplies we would need we came here.

"It was in a tug chartered at Boston that we came, bringing with us workmen and supplies for the erection of these laboratory buildings. At Dr. Munson's direction they were built here upon the great cone's summit, though so steep are the rock sides that only by means of metal ladders set in the rock could we ascend and descend from the sands below. The greater part of our time, however, we planned to spend up here, and so the buildings were run up here and all of our great cases of equip-