The other's voice was high and strange. "Steady, Ralton," he told him. "You've come into the heart of a hell, here—and Munson and the rest the fiends."
"But what are they doing—Munson and the others?" Ralton asked dazedly. "I came up here in my plane—hours ago, it seems—to bring a message to Munson——"
And briefly he told Mallett of the phenomenon of the protoplasm deposits that had brought him north to the island.
Mallett listened, silently, broodingly. "That protoplasmic slime," he said, finally, "you knew of it, the world knew of it, but who knew what lay behind it, what was to come of it, what has already come of it?"
The face of Ralton expressed his bewilderment, and the other lifted him suddenly to his feet, toward one of the metal-barred little windows at the room's corner.
"Down there, Ralton," he said, pointing downward and outward into the starlit night. "That is what has come—what is coming—out of the thing, in these last hours that you've lain here unconscious. That is what is coming now over all the world."
Ralton stared downward, uncomprehendingly. The building of which the room was a part was located at the very edge of the great cone's summit, and from that window he could look far across the level sands of the little island, lying pale beneath the dim starlight, away to the foam-fringed line of the shore. Up and out from the shore now, though, he discerned what seemed a mighty glistening gray wave creeping in over the level sands, a thick, gleaming, jelly-like mass rolling in toward the central cone. He turned toward Mallett, deeper bewilderment on his countenance.
"That great gray wave, Mallett!" he exclaimed. "It can't be——"
"Protoplasm?" the other said. "Protoplasm like that found on the world's beaches? But it is, Ralton, a great wave of living protoplasm, rolling out of all earth's seas in a great tide of death across the earth! And Munson and the others outside are the ones who have loosed it on the world!"
Ralton felt his already dazed brain turning at the other's words, but before his stunned astonishment could find expression Mallett had gripped his shoulder, was crouching again with him in the room's corner, speaking on.