The opinion of a great mass of biologists was curtly summed up late in that afternoon by Professor Theodore McMaster, biologist-in-chief of one of the great Massachusetts universities. "While Dr. Barr is undoubtedly right in assuming that great quantities of protoplasm have in some way appeared in all earth's seas," he stated, "his theory that those masses have formed suddenly out of the sea's inorganic elements is, with all respect, a crazy one. It is true that in the earth's youth such great protoplasmic masses did form thus from the elements of sea-silt, but we know that their process of formation, their change from inorganic to organic living matter, required eons in itself to complete, so slow was it. This hypothesis, therefore, that the same great process has taken place on a world-wide scale within a day or so is patently absurd. My own theory is that great masses of protoplasm have existed from the remote past on the sea's floor, and that some subterranean or submarine convulsion has thrown them up to be scattered by the tides upon all earth's coasts."
This new theory, it must be admitted, found much greater support in biological circles than the more radical one of Dr. Barr, but it was roundly criticized by the latter. The presence of protoplasm in great masses on the sea's floor, he pointed out, had never been detected by any of the great oceanographic expeditions of the past, and the stupid hypothesis of a submarine convulsion could hardly be held when there was no slightest seismographic evidence of such a convulsion having taken place within the last weeks. Dr. Barr was supported in these criticisms by a number of fellow biologists, and so acrid had become the exchange of opinions by the next day, the 27th, that one of the great scientific societies, the World Science Association, stepped in. It proposed to settle the question of the phenomenon's causes to the satisfaction of public and scientists alike by appointing a committee of research to investigate it, to be headed by Dr. Herbert Munson of the Starford Foundation, the most noted biologist of the day.
This was a proposition acceptable to all, for the cold, massive Dr. Munson's competence and scientific impartiality were unquestioned. The World Science Association found, however, to its disappointment, that the brilliant biologist had been absent from the Starford Foundation for some months. He had established a laboratory at Cone Island, a little isle of rock and sand off the north Maine coast, it was stated, and was engaged in research there with a small group of scientists, which included Dr. Albert Labreau, a famous bio-chemist; Harlan Kingsford, electro-dynamics expert of the American Electric Company; Dr. Herman Krauner, the noted German bio-physicist, whose studies of the biological effects of radio-active vibrations had been the subject of much discussion; and Dr. Richard Mallett, a rising young cytologist, who was also of the Starford Foundation.
It was from another of the younger scientists at the Foundation, Dr. Ernest Ralton, that the Association had secured this statement of Dr. Munson's whereabouts, and Ralton had offered, moreover, to fly north in his plane to the island and lay the Association's request before the famous biologist. This offer had been at once accepted, for it was not doubted that Dr. Munson's passion for experimentation would cause him to accept the chief place on the committee of research. Late on the afternoon of the 27th, therefore, announcement was made from the World Science Association's office that Ralton had left in his plane for the island, and that when he returned with Dr. Munson the Association's committee of research would be formed and would start its investigations.
This announcement, though it caused the disputing biologists to await keenly Dr. Munson's return, proved unexciting to newspapers and public, whose first half-interest in the phenomenon had begun to wane. The newspapers, indeed, in publishing the Association's announcement humorously suggested that the whole controversy over the origin of some slime on the world's beaches was a battle between tweedledum and tweedledee. And the public, with a guffaw or a smile, assented. The whole thing merely went to show the craziness of scientists—thus did common sense deliver itself, that evening. Common sense was not to suspect, certainly, what strange craziness it was that lay behind the appearance of that glistening slime. Common sense was not to dream, until it awoke to the thunder of crashing worlds, what terrible craziness it was that had loosed upon humanity with that glistening scum a titanic tide of dreadful death which even at that moment was surging slowly upward to sweep across all the world.
2
Just before midnight on that same night it was, less than a dozen hours after the Association's announcement, that the horror broke upon the world. Had the thing come gradually upon us, place by place and event after event, it would be possible to give some consecutive account of it, now. But, crashing down upon almost all the astounded world at the same moment as it did, the very scope of it makes futile any efforts to describe completely the terror of that world when it awoke to doom. It is enough, indeed, if we can give some impression of its action at such a city as New York, for there, of all places, its horror was the most intensified.
The accounts of the thing's coming to New York are almost numberless, and it is from one of these, that of Edward Worley, that we find what is perhaps our most vivid picture of the thing. Worley's account, to which he has given the somewhat banal title of My Experiences in the Life Horror, not only gives us a description of the first coming of the horror at New York, but summarizes in fact the action of the thing over all the world. For as it was in New York that night, so it was in a thousand seaside cities in that same hour, and what Worley saw in its streets was seen by millions of horror-stricken men in that same night. The magnitude of the thing was greater at New York, but the horror was the same, as Worley indeed points out.
This Edward Worley figures unconsciously in his own narrative as a somewhat commonplace individual, a middle-aged person, the greater part of whose days had been spent in the adding and subtracting of figures in a Broad Street broker's office. To avoid crowded subways, as he tells us, Worley had taken rooms in one of the narrow lodging-houses jammed in here and there east of the financial section, at Manhattan's lower extremity. It was this fact that conspired with circumstances to project Worley into the very heart of the terror's first coming. For, a half-hour before midnight on that fateful night of the 27th, he had decided that a short stroll through the warm spring air would be a pleasant one, and his steps had led him southward toward the Battery's little open park.