Within twenty-four hours more we knew, and all at the university knew, that Dr. Grant had disappeared. From the meeting he went to his laboratory, burned some papers there and pocketed others. Then he went to his rooms, hastily packed a few bags and departed. He left no note, no message. His action brought to a climax the whole sensation of the controversy he had precipitated and Grant's going was taken by many of his critics as a confession of the falsity of his position. He had had no close relatives to start a search for him, and though to Ferson and me his strange departure seemed astounding, we could explain it no better than others. The sensation subsided, and Ferson was appointed to head the department in place of the vanished scientist. Our own work occupied us once more. And certainly neither Ferson nor I, any more than another, guessed what lay behind Grant's strange action.
It was six months after Grant's departure that the great change began.
The first intimation was brought to the public notice by a New York newspaper. In a sensational article entitled "Is a New Crime Wave Upon Us?" it pointed out that in the last few days an unprecedented number of crimes of violence had taken place.
These were the more appalling in that many seemed quite without motive. In New York alone, in those few days, there had been more than a dozen murders, mostly clubbings and stabbings, which had apparently been provoked by the slightest of causes. In Chicago a respected clerk of middle age had for some annoyance turned suddenly and fractured the skulls of three of his associates with a heavy bar. From San Francisco and Los Angeles had come news of half a dozen holocausts in which one member of a family had slaughtered or attempted to slaughter all the others. From every part of the land there were coming reports of the most horrifying crimes of violence, the great majority of which seemed inspired by the pettiest of causes.
And this same wave of homicidal mania seemed at work over all the world! It was as though hundreds in earth's population had suddenly had their reason dwarfed and their passions magnified. No less than three solid householders in London had run amuck in bursts of sadistic[1] fury that had cost a half-score lives. The Paris police had taken from the Seine more human bodies, many terribly mutilated, than had ever been found in it in a like time before. Germany was aghast over two mass-murders of unexampled fiendishness that had occurred in a Rhenish and a Silesian village. There was news of an even more terrible slaying in Calcutta, and word of murders almost as terrible from almost every country on the globe.
Nor was it murder alone that was stalking the earth, for robberies of the utmost brutality were even more numerous. Overshadowed as they were by the greater horror, they were as astonishing in nature. For all, like the slayings, seemed the result of sudden brutal instincts or desires uncontrolled by reason. Small shopkeepers in American and English towns were struck down for trifles. In the stores of great cities there were those who snatched childishly at desired objects and attempted a hopeless escape to the street. That was the keynote of all these robberies, of all these crimes—the unreasoning childishness of them. For the great part of them were attempted under circumstances which should have shown to even the most dull-witted that there was no chance of success.
It was a wave of strange and terrible crime, indeed, that was sweeping over all the earth. The newspapers concerned themselves with it to the exclusion of all else soon. They sought for explanations. What had caused this sudden release of the most brutal passions of numberless people? Many were the answers. An eminent scientist declared that the nerve-racking strain of modern civilization had reached such a pitch that the human mind could no longer stand it, was giving way beneath it. Many wrote serious letters to the press denouncing the motion pictures as schools of crime. Others defended them. And while the cause was thus argued, the great wave of crime and utter lawlessness that had rolled across earth seemed increasing in volume.
The number of deaths by violence that were each day recorded had grown now to an appalling figure. Murderous attacks were common in every one of earth's great cities. Men hurled themselves at each other's throats, apparently for a word, a gesture. Nor was this all. A strange erratic insanity seemed seizing more and more of earth's millions. Numberless were those reported to the authorities as missing, those who had wandered causelessly away from home and family. The world's roads held an unprecedented number of vagrant wanderers.
But in a few days more even this astounding wave of appalling crime was dwarfed in importance by more astounding and more terrible happenings. Accidents, a great number of them fatal to many, were occurring in every part of earth in an amount that was all but incredible.