The LIFE-MASTERS
By EDMOND HAMILTON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales January 1930.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
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 reports of mildly interesting incidents. The phenomenon was unusual, certainly, but hardly enough so to merit any special attention. This was evidenced by the small space given the matter by the New York newspapers on that same evening, most of them according it but a few inconspicuous lines; though one went so far as to publish a photograph of the curious onlookers who had gathered to watch the glistening scum of the stuff, slowly moving and flexing a little now and then, that had been deposited on the Battery sea-wall. Save for these casually curious ones, though, and the disgusted bathers who found themselves barred by it from their favorite beaches, it can not be said that any portion of the public, even in such seaside cities as New York, gave the advent of the glistening gray stuff any consideration on that afternoon and evening. It was not until the newspapers of the following morning, the 26th, published their later dispatches on the phenomenon that the world, or the scientific world at least, began to awake to its extraordinary nature.
Those dispatches converted the matter from a mere unusual incident into something like a minor sensation. For, according to them, the deposits of glistening gray slime had been left by the tides not only along the Atlantic coast but along the Pacific also, and not only along American shores but upon those of Europe and Asia and Africa, upon all the shores of all earth's seas, in fact. Upon the jungle-bordered beaches of the Philippines, and the cold gray Norwegian shores, and the shelving sands of the Chilean coast, and the rocky cliffs of England, the retreating tides had left the same thick coatings of jelly-like, living slime. The phenomenon, whatever its cause, was world-wide, as those morning dispatches showed, and because of that world-wide scope was accorded a greatly increased space by the majority of that morning's newspapers, seeming extraordinary enough to call for greater attention. And even more extraordinary was it made, later in that day, by the Barr-McMasters controversy concerning it, that acrid dispute of scientists about the phenomenon's causes that stirred even the public into a somewhat greater interest in it.
The controversy was precipitated, with surprizing abruptness, by the statement made by Dr. Almeric Barr early on the 26th. It was toward Dr. Barr, whose reputation among contemporary biologists was exceeded only by that of the brilliant Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, that the puzzled newspapers had turned when the glistening deposits had first appeared at New York. They had brought him samples of the stuff, asking his opinion of it, and his curiosity had been so stirred that he had undertaken an analysis of it. It had proved, apparently, an interesting enough analysis, for it was not until the next day that he had given to the waiting journals any summary of it. When that summary was published, though, appearing in the noon editions of that day's papers, it proved a startling one.
The glistening deposits, Dr. Barr stated, were nothing more nor less than protoplasm, that gray, jelly-like stuff that is the primal life-substance, the basis of all life upon earth. Protoplasm itself, he explained, composed of an extremely complex mixture of organic compounds, had never been analyzed or even partly analyzed, and no more could these clear deposits be analyzed, but his investigation had proved without doubt that they were living protoplasm, and not the minute organisms that had been supposed. The appearance of these deposits on all earth's shores, he added, meant that great quantities of protoplasm had appeared in all earth's seas, and that could be explained in only one way. Protoplasm, the primal life-stuff, had appeared in earth's seas eons before, its complex compounds built by some force out of the elements of sea-silt and sea-water themselves. And if those protoplasmic masses had formed spontaneously out of the sea's elements eons before, giving rise eventually to all earth's life, it could only be supposed that similar great protoplasmic masses had now suddenly formed again in earth's seas in the same way as in the remote past.
That first report of Dr. Barr's, though puzzling enough to a newspaper reading public but little interested in talk of organic and inorganic compounds, proved a sensation in the scientific and especially in the biological world. The New York biologist's classification of the clear, jelly-like deposits as protoplasm was, it was admitted, correct; since by that time scientists in laboratories at London and Stockholm and Sydney had confirmed independently the fact that the glistening gray stuff was indeed the basic life-substance of earth. What was not admitted, though, and what swiftly became the center of as fiery a scientific controversy as could be recalled, was his contention that the great masses of protoplasm which had apparently appeared throughout the seas had been formed spontaneously from the sea's inorganic elements, as in the remote past. That contention, within hours of the time his statement was published, became a veritable storm-center of conflicting scientific opinion.