Tommy nodded, his eyes keen and thoughtful. Denham hurried out.
Minutes later, only, they heard the roar of a car motor going down the long lane away from the laboratory. Evelyn tried to smile at Tommy.
“It seems terrible, dangerous.”
Tommy considered and shrugged.
“This news is old,” he observed. “This paper was printed last night. I think I’ll make a couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden City’s had trouble with Jacaro, it’s going to make things bad for us.”
He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle. He put it convenient to Evelyn’s hand and made for the dwelling-house and the telephone. It was odd that as he emerged into the open air, the familiar smells of Earth struck his nostrils as strange and unaccustomed. The laboratory was redolent of the tree-fern forest into which the Tube extended. And Smithers was watching amid those dank, incredible carboniferous-period growths now.
Tommy put through calls, seeing all his and Denham’s plans for a peaceful exploration party and amicable contact with the civilization of that other planet, utterly shattered by presumed outrages by Jacaro. He made call after call, and his demands for information grew more urgent as he got closer to the source of trouble. His cause for worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.
The early-morning editions had termed it a “poisonous fog.” The breakfast editions spoke of it as a “poison fog.” But it grew and moved and by the time Tommy had a clear line to get actual information about it, a tabloid had christened it the “Death Mist” and there were three chartered planes circling about it for the benefit of their newspapers. State troopers were being reinforced. At ten o’clock it was necessary to post extra traffic police to take care of the cars headed upstate to look at the mystery. At eleven it began to move! Sluggishly, to be sure, and rather raggedly, but it undoubtedly moved, and as undoubtedly it moved independently of the wind.