Never afterward could Worley remember clearly the things that befell him in the next moments. He knew that with that sight a final mad frenzy of utter horror and despair had settled upon him, that with those other fleeing figures he was stumbling through the narrow streets toward the northward and the one chance of escape from the death-trap that the island had become, but his impressions of those mad moments were always hazy, dim. Striking, trampling, pushing, he and the panic-driven mobs about him fought their way through the choked streets, through the darkness of that dread night, while ever behind them, from south and east and west, there glided upon their track the mighty wave of protoplasm, calm, smooth, effortless, sweeping out over the island's tip and up through its narrow streets, absorbing into itself steadily the exhausted fugitives who fled before it, advancing northward and inward from the city's sides with its vast, glistening masses still steadily increased by the floods of protoplasm pouring up from the encircling waters.
To Worley, then, it was as though he was pushing his way onward through the fear-choked nightmares of some terrifying dream. The hoarse shouts of the fleeing thousands who were pouring forth from all the city's buildings to flee northward about him; the frantic clanging of bells and screeching of whistles; the thunder of bombs and crack of rifles as the city's defenders sought in vain to halt those gliding, irresistible masses; the agonized shrieks of those who fell before the great wave of death, of those trapped by it in buildings or in blind streets; the faint, far roar of panic that came from the other cities west and eastward; these merged in his mind into one mighty, unceasing bellow of utter terror.
For how many hours Worley had fought his way northward through the horror-driven millions that surged through the night of the city's streets before he reached at last the island's northern heights, he could not guess. There, pausing and swaying in a doorway while the roaring crowds surged ever by him toward the Harlem River bridges that were the sole gates of escape from the island of death, he peered southward through the darkness. The great city, a far-flung mass of blinking lights, stretched before him, its streets alive here and there with other moving lights, with the mobs that surged wildly northward to escape from it, and from whom arose a dull, far roar of fear. Farther southward, though, in the midtown and lower sections, no lights moved, and there arose no cries, for there, surging up about and across the island like a great tide of utter silence and death, there rolled the mighty protoplasmic masses, sweeping all before them as they poured still up from the bordering seas, gliding onward in a single gigantic, glistening wave. As Worley turned and fought northward again with the crazed mobs that filled the streets, it came to him dully to wonder whether on all earth was any place of refuge from those mighty, mindless masses that had rolled out so suddenly and strangely from the sea.
Had Worley but known it, as he struggled northward through the last hours of that dread night, it was not at New York alone but on all the shores and in all the seaside cities of earth that humanity was fleeing at that moment before the protoplasmic tides of death. Up from all earth's seas at the same hour, the same moment almost, had rolled the same mighty glistening waves, flowing upward and sweeping out over mighty cities, and through tiny villages, and over lonely, barren beaches—gigantic glistening protoplasm masses gliding at the same hour through the streets of London, and of Yokohama, of Copenhagen and of Miami, in a thousand cities sweeping humanity in fear-mad mobs before them.
Doom! It was the word that was flashing already from city and village by the sea to those inland, the word that was bursting across an astounded and horror-stricken world in those dread hours. The mighty waves of protoplasm, whatever their unthinkable origin, were unstopped, were unstoppable. Bullet and bomb and knife were harmless to them. High-explosive shells had scattered the waves only to have them in another moment join again, and military batteries hastily summoned had fired round upon round until they had been wiped out by those calmly advancing floods. Planes had swooped to bomb them with no greater effect than the shells. Gas had no effect upon these living floods. Onward, outward, they rolled, mighty glistening masses flowing upward from the sea to sweep across all the earth.
Doom! Man was facing it, and the reign and existence of man, with every horror-filled message coming by clicking wire or unseen radio-wave. England had become a death-trap, the mighty waves of protoplasm rolling in from all its coasts. India and Malaya were infernos of superstitious fear and horror as their crowded populations fled before the tides of death. African and Australian coasts were overwhelmed with the advancing glistening masses. The Panama isthmus had been covered by the protoplasm, severing the two American continents. Great ships at sea and in port had been dragged down into the depths by the up-reaching, towering masses. Doom! For ever, in those dread hours before the dawn, the calmly advancing waves were sweeping inland from every coast to cover all the world, and ever absorbing into their glistening masses, as a jelly-fish might absorb infusoria, thousands upon hundreds of thousands of fugitives, drawing them within its mindless living masses and rolling remorselessly on. Dawn of day found all the organizations of man crumbled before the doom closing upon them, all the world's millions in blind, horror-stricken flight before the protoplasmic tides of death. The thing was eating up humanity!
3
It had been late on the afternoon of the 27th, less than a half-score hours before the breaking of that great terror upon the world, that young Ernest Ralton had sped away to the northeast in his plane, toward the barren little island retreat of Dr. Munson and his associates. It was not primarily to see Munson, of whom he stood in some awe, that Ralton had offered to make the trip, but to visit young Dr. Richard Mallett, his particular friend, whom he had not seen since the departure of the Munson party for the island some months before. The request of the Association had given him a valid excuse for making the trip, however, and so, slanting up above Manhattan's massed and sky-flung towers Ralton had circled once and then headed away into the gray haze northward.
Hour followed hour while the gray New England coast slid back like a great map beneath him, the sun sinking ever to the horizon westward as he roared on. Hardly conscious of more than the steady, even song of the motor and the rush of wind about him, Ralton checked his progress automatically by the natural features of the coast below him, and at last was flying northward over the tangle of deeply indented bays and islands that forms the Maine coast, veering outward from it over the gray waters to the east, and peering intently for Cone Island. The sun had dipped to the horizon, by then, but he knew from Mallett's account that the island should be clearly discernible by reason of the gigantic squat cone of rock that rose from its level sands.