He found his latchkey and fumblingly inserted it, but, even while he did so, the state of the planet at the moment poured into his mind with swift, concentrated detail; he remembered the wireless excitement of the instant—and smiled. Not that way would it come. The new order was of a spiritual kind. It would steal into men's hearts, not splutter along the waves of ether, as the "dead" are said to splutter to the "living." The great impulse, the mighty invitation Nature sent out to return to simple, natural life, would come, without "phenomena" from within.... He remembered Relativity—that space is local, space and time not separate entities. He understood. He had just experienced it. Another, a fourth dimension! Space as a whole was annihilated! He smiled.
His latchkey turned.
The transmutation of metals flashed past him—all substance one. His latchkey was upside down. He turned it round and reinserted it, and the results of advanced psychology rushed at him, as though the sun rushed over the horizon of some Eastern clime, covering all with the light of a new, fair dawn.
In a few seconds this accumulation of recent knowledge and discovery flooded his state of singular receptiveness—as thinker and as poet. The Age was crumbling, civilization passing like its predecessors. The little planet lay certainly in distress. No true help lay within it; its reservoirs were empty. No adequate constructive men or powers were anywhere in sight. It was exhausted, dying. Unless new help, powers from a new, an inexhaustible source, came quickly ... a new vehicle for their expression....
And wonder took him by the throat ... as the key turned in the lock with its familiar grating sound, and the door, without actual pressure on his part, swung open.
Paul Devonham, a look of bright terror in his eyes, stood on the threshold.
The expression, not only of the face but of the whole person, he had seen once only in another human countenance—a climber, who had slipped by his very side and dropped backward into empty space. The look of helpless bewilderment as hands and feet lost final touch with solidity, the air of terrible yet childlike amazement with which he began his descent of a thousand feet through a gulf of air—the shock marked the face in a single second with what he now saw in his colleague's eyes. Only, with Devonham—Fillery felt sure of his diagnosis—the lost hold was mental.
His outward control, however, was admirable. Devonham's voice, apart from a certain tenseness in it, was quiet enough: "I've been telephoning everywhere.... There's been a—a crisis——"
"Violence?"