"They! Lord! Do you think somebody—"
He looked toward me, holding up the blazing splinter. "There is the possibility—even a probability—that we have to deal with a force directed by intelligence!"
"Who do you think—"
"I didn't say human intelligence."
"You mean Mars or—"
He grinned in the feeble light. "No. Nothing out of your stories. The human imagination is limited by human experience. And there are plenty of things possible that human beings have never experienced!"
"What do you mean, Sam?" I gasped in utter bewilderment.
"I don't know what it is that is attacking the earth. Possibly it is something so strange, so alien to my purely human experience that it would wreck my mind to know!" Abruptly he turned toward the door. "I must go in and get to work on the machine."
The match had burned out, and the utter blackness had fallen again. I heard the old scientist get briskly to his feet and walk into the house. He reached the light button, and the hall was flooded with cold white radiance. The bright, slender beam thrown out across the veranda comforted me immensely; but I still stood against the post, trying vainly to think out what Sam had said.
The breeze grew cooler. In ten minutes a thin cold wind sprang up from the north. I drew my light garments close about my body and shivered a little. For a while I did not go in. Presently I felt a cold mist on the wind. Suddenly a snowflake splashed chillingly against my face—an omen of the frigid doom that lay before the earth! I got up and stepped inside the door, to escape the icy wind. In a few minutes it began to rain, because, of course, of the chilling of the air and condensation of the moisture.