"Very well, Uncle." Pat's voice sounded tired and bored. After giving me an appealing, helpless look, she went briskly out of the room.
That night, Thursday, to be exact, Henry woke me out of the deepest slumber. He had stayed up late, at his telescope, and had come to tell me of a meteoric shower, the most amazing he had ever witnessed, he said. I dressed quickly, and accompanied him to the observatory. There I saw the most astounding spectacle. Swarms of fire-balls, they looked like, sweeping across the heavens. Many were hissing to the earth. It was like a celestial bombardment of the world.
The meteoric showers, transiently brilliant, continued the next night, and the next. Astronomers all over the country were mystified; Henry equally so. No one could seem to account for them; they were out of season; the whole thing was freakish.
The last shower of meteors of any note occurred in November, 1833, when swarms of shooting stars fell in North America. They fell then, I found in our encyclopedia, like flakes of snow, to the number, as was estimated, of 240,000 in the space of nine hours, varying in size from a moving point to globes of the moon's diameter.
The earth in its orbit is constantly encountering meteors, which are accepted by scientists as the debris of comets, Henry explained, but this encounter was—well, inexplicable and bewildering. Remnants of the metallic bodies were falling in all sections of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Some were dropping in populous centers, bringing death and disaster; some at sea, and in the Great Lakes, sinking ships. Seemingly there was no let-up to this weird and dangerous phenomenon of the heavens.
On the following Sunday night, while the presses of the Daily Recorder were grinding out, by the hundreds of thousands, McGinity's exclusive, front-page story on Henry's and Olinski's scientific feat, which meant the linking of the earth and Mars by radio, a discovery almost beyond human conception, a great ball of blinding, bluish fire, giving off a trail of sparks, hissed down out of the heavens, and fell in Times Square.
A messenger of death from space, this red-hot metallic wanderer of the skies, crashed into the small triangle, formed by the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets. It tore through the surface into the subway, just missing a passing train, and was imbedded in a mass of tangled steel rails and cement ten feet under the level of the underground railway.
Smaller fragments in its wake rattled down like hail on streets and housetops within a radius of a mile. Hardly a window-pane within this area that was not shattered to bits by the explosion, which lighted the entire city in a bluish glare. All taxicabs parked, or moving, in the square were overturned and wrecked; pedestrians were thrown to the ground, stunned, many lying unconscious. Sixteen persons were killed outright.
The gilt minute hand of a huge, electrically-illuminated clock overlooking the scene of disaster, was torn off by the explosion; the hour hand was untouched. When the mechanism of the clock was put out of business, the hour hand was pointing exactly at two. Had the meteor fallen a few hours earlier, the loss of life no doubt would have been appalling.
The scene of terror and confusion that followed the fall of the meteor, according to eye-witnesses, was indescribable. Many persons on Broadway, women of the street, mendicants, fell down on their knees, and prayed, believing that the end of the world had come. One man went raving mad. He ran through the streets, shouting: "The stars of heaven are falling unto the earth! Hide yourselves in the mountains! Hide from the wrath of the Lamb!"