At a word from Professor Whiteman, the operator threw over his rheostat and the hum of the rotary spark filled the room. Then his fingers played on the key while he sent out a few signals.
“I’m letting them—him—know you’re ready, sir,” the operator explained to the astronomer, in a tone filled with awe.
A few moments slipped by. Everyone waited breathlessly, all eyes glued upon the apparatus, as if to read the momentous message that was expected to come from—no one knew where.
Suddenly there was an involuntary movement of the muscles of the operator’s face, as if he were straining to hear something very faint and far away; then he began writing slowly upon a pad that lay on his desk. At his elbow the scientists unceremoniously crowded each other in their eagerness to read:
“To the Presiding Officer of the International Scientific Congress, Washington,” he wrote. “I am the dictator of human destiny. Through control of the earth’s internal forces I am master of every existing thing. I can blot out all life—destroy the globe itself. It is my intention to abolish all present governments and make myself emperor of the earth. As proof of my power to do this, I”—there was a pause of several seconds, which seemed like hours in the awful stillness—“I shall, at midnight tomorrow, Thursday (Washington time), cause the earthquakes to cease until further notice.
“KWO.”
CHAPTER II.
THE DICTATOR OF DESTINY.
By the next morning the entire civilized world knew of the strange and threatening communication from the self-styled “dictator of human destiny.”
The members of the scientific congress had sought to keep the matter secret, but all the larger wireless stations of North America had picked up the message, and thence it found its way into the newspapers.