"You know, Ralton, how Dr. Munson and the other four of us came up here to Cone Island, hardly more than a half-dozen months ago. Surely a strangely variegated assortment of scientists we must have seemed for a biologist to take with him. Labreau, the bio-chemist; Kingsford, the electrical expert; Krauner, the bio-physicist; and I, the cytologist, the cell-specialist; a strange enough quintet we were, but one whose combined knowledge one would think could solve any scientific problem. And it was for that purpose that Dr. Munson had assembled us. He wished to solve a problem, one that is indeed and always has been the greatest of all scientific problems. And that problem was the origin of life itself.
"How did life first originate upon this earth? That is a question to which biology, the science of life, can answer nothing. We know that once the earth was a fiery furnace in which no life could exist, and that somehow after its cooling there rose in its primeval seas the first life, protoplasm, the basic life-stuff of which all earth's living creatures are built, from which all have come on the road of evolution. Protoplasm arose, somehow, from the elements of sea-silt, its complex compounds formed by some strange force out of those elements. What force it was that had driven the process on, that had caused the formation of those first great masses of protoplasm in earth's seas, no biologist has ever been able to say. But Munson believed that he could discover that force and prove his discovery, and when he outlined his plan to us we leapt at the chance. He had fixed upon this island, Cone Island, as the place for our researches, both because of the seclusion we desired and for another reason he disclosed later; so gathering all the equipment and supplies we would need we came here.
"It was in a tug chartered at Boston that we came, bringing with us workmen and supplies for the erection of these laboratory buildings. At Dr. Munson's direction they were built here upon the great cone's summit, though so steep are the rock sides that only by means of metal ladders set in the rock could we ascend and descend from the sands below. The greater part of our time, however, we planned to spend up here, and so the buildings were run up here and all of our great cases of equipment, and supplies swung up. Then, with the leaving of the tug, we put our equipment in order and began our work, on the plan that Dr. Munson had outlined to us.
"It was Dr. Munson's belief that the change from the inorganic element of sea-silt into the organic, living compounds of protoplasm had been accomplished by the driving force of certain etheric vibrations. You know, of course, that the chemical combinations of elements are profoundly affected in myriad ways by such vibrations. The vibrations of radiant heat, for instance, will break many compounds down into their original elements, or build up new ones. Those of light will affect others in the same way, and as Professor Baly of Liverpool showed in his famous experiments, are responsible more or less for the change from inorganic to organic living matter in the case of plants. Electro-magnetic, that is Hertzian or radio vibrations, can affect the very atomic structure of certain metals. Radio-active or gamma vibrations have a profound power of disintegrating or breaking down the great majority of chemical compounds. All these we tested, but in none of them did we find the vibration whose force would cause the building up of protoplasm's organic compounds from the sea-silt inorganic elements. It was only when we tried the last remaining etheric vibration known, the most recently discovered of all, the cosmic ray vibrations, that we succeeded at last.
"You know, Ralton, that the cosmic ray vibrations are the shortest in wave-length of all the etheric vibrations, ranking just below the radio-active waves. First comprehensively studied but a few years ago by Dr. Millikan, the cosmic rays have been found to permeate all space, shot forth from the white-hot furnaces of stars just as heat-vibrations and light-vibrations are shot forth. And it was the cosmic ray vibrations, we found, that had in past ages built up the organic compounds of living protoplasm from inorganic elements of sea-silt. To prove that, we had devised a mechanism, or rather it had been devised by Kingsford and Krauner, which condensed and concentrated any etheric vibration. It was a small globe-condenser, and when set to the correct wave-length would attract and concentrate all vibrations of that wave-length for a great space around it. If we set it to the wave-length of Hertzian vibrations, for instance, it attracted and condensed them into a concentrated ray; the same with radio-active vibrations; the same with cosmic ray vibrations. And it was this we used to produce a concentrated shaft of the cosmic ray vibrations, turning it upon a container of sea-silt and sea-water from the island's beach. In the remote past, we reasoned, the cosmic ray at its natural intensity had during long ages formed protoplasm out of the sea's elements. Now, using a cosmic vibration millions of times concentrated by the condenser, the process should take but a proportionate time, should require but days instead of ages.
"We succeeded, Ralton! Almost at once the sea-silt in the container began to change beneath the concentrated vibrations, giving forth a thin, clear slime that gradually began to show signs of life, of movement. But a day or two it had taken that slime to form from the sea-silt, and in another day or two it was no longer slime but living protoplasm, a mass of it there in the container. And when it had developed under the concentrated vibrations to a certain stage of life, of power, it began to flow from the container, moving blindly out of it in search of food, a mindless thing of protoplasm that we had created out of inorganic matter! By concentrating the cosmic ray vibrations we had done within days what had required eons in the past!
"Upon that protoplasm mass we experimented for days. We found that just as the cosmic ray vibrations could build its complex compounds up from the sea's elements, so could the radio-active vibrations disintegrate it, break its compounds down again into those elements. When we turned with our condenser a concentrated radio-active vibration upon the mass of protoplasm it crumbled and shriveled away almost instantly into gray powder, its original elements lying before us in the form of that powder. The radio-active vibrations, indeed, when concentrated, could disintegrate the protoplasm in a moment, whereas it required days for the cosmic ray vibrations to build it up, and this greater power we held to be due to the greater wave-length of the radio-active impulses. We saw, too, that that accounted for the fact that during the ages no great masses of protoplasm had been built up by the cosmic rays, since the radio-active vibrations counteracted them enough to prevent the forming of such masses.
"We had succeeded, and I was eager to return to the world with our success, but Dr. Munson refused! The long, intense work of years that he had gone through, the super-human eagerness with which he had sought this success, the killing strain of our toil for it—all these I think had unhinged his brain, had changed him into a monomaniac, and the other three with him. 'We five are the masters of life!' he told us. 'We have done what only gods were ever thought to do, have created life from the non-living! We can, by building a greater condenser, concentrate the cosmic ray vibrations from a vast part of space on earth, and cause protoplasm floods to form in all earth's seas in giant masses, protoplasm masses that will inevitably, when they reach a certain development of life and power, sweep out over earth in blind movement and search of food, wiping out forever all the blotches of flesh that make up humanity! Then we can destroy all those protoplasm floods in a moment by switching the condenser to the radio-active vibrations, and can people the world with the forms of life that we think best, can people it with beings over whom we shall reign supreme—the life-masters—the creators—the gods!'
"The thing was madness, madness the more terrible because we could actually do the thing, and I recoiled in horror. The other three, though, driven on by the strange craziness of soul, the monomania, that filled Munson, like him regarded themselves as gods, as life-masters, and agreed to his mad plan. Before I could more than protest, before I could even attempt escape from the island, they had seized me, had prisoned me in this empty storeroom, guarding its windows with metal bars and assuring me that I was only preserved until they might need me for further experimentation. They were mad, Munson and the others, yet it was even to me an explicable madness, for I too had felt the same terrific pride as they at the thought that we had actually created life from the non-living, and that terrific pride it was that had driven them now on their evil plan to become life-masters of all the world.