Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/74

"Upon that protoplasm mass we experimented for days. We found that just as the cosmic ray vibrations could build its complex compounds up from the sea's elements, so could the radio-active vibrations disintegrate it, break its compounds down again into those elements. When we turned with our condenser a concentrated radio-active vibration upon the mass of protoplasm it crumbled and shriveled away almost instantly into gray powder, its original elements lying before us in the form of that powder. The radio-active vibrations, indeed, when concentrated, could disintegrate the protoplasm in a moment, whereas it required days for the cosmic ray vibrations to build it up, and this greater power we held to be due to the greater wave-length of the radio-active impulses. We saw, too, that that accounted for the fact that during the ages no great masses of protoplasm had been built up by the cosmic rays, since the radio-active vibrations counteracted them enough to prevent the forming of such masses.

"We had succeeded, and I was eager to return to the world with our success, but Dr. Munson refused! The long, intense work of years that he had gone through, the superhuman eagerness with which he had sought this success, the killing strain of our toil for it—all these I think had unhinged his brain, had changed him into a monomaniac, and the other three with him. 'We five are the masters of life!' he told us. 'We have done what only gods were ever thought to do, have created life from the non-living! 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 botches of flesh that make up humanity! 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. Before I could more than protest, before I could even attempt escape from the island, they had seized me, had prisoned me in this empty storeroom, guarding its windows with metal bars and assuring me that I was only preserved until they might need me for further experimentation. They were mad, Munson and the others, yet it was even to me an explicable madness, for I too had felt the same terrific pride as they at the thought that we had actually created life from the non-living, and that terrific pride it was that had driven them now on their evil plan to become life-masters of all the world.

"Swiftly then they went about their work, building up a great condenser many times larger than our small one but similar in design, a great globe-condenser that stands in the center of the clearing there and that took them weeks to complete. Through one of my windows here I watched it growing beneath their hands, while night and day, four burning-eyed madmen, they labored upon it, driven on by Munson's mad purpose of soul. At last, days ago, it was completed, and at once they put it into operation. The great knob-switch, on its switch-board, regulated the wave length of the etheric vibration it attracted and condensed, I could see. While at the bot-