In a muffled, unlighted plane, selecting a dark night, Freddie and Dan could get within a few miles of the barrage; the heat might wreck some of the barrage mechanism. There was no one to say whether these heat vibrations would penetrate the crimson glow or not. It had never been tried. And at least it would create a diversion which Graff would think a normal earth attack. He would expect none other for a time. Freddie and Dan planned to start on the night of August 15. By evening of August 14 they were in the Miami War Department, receiving last admonitions. The official radio was droning its routine messages. * * * * * There was a sudden interference. A chaos of weird voices such as only the radio--particularly in the old pioneer days--could produce. The interference grew worse; then the radio went dead. The telegraphs, telephones and undersea cables all had sudden interference, but they kept in operation. The new "Invisible light-beam" phones, as they were popularly called, withstood it, but service was maintained under difficulty. The electric lights went dim, almost out; then brightened suddenly; and dimmed again. This, all within a few minutes, that evening of August 14. In Miami, and all over the world it was the same. And then, almost unnoticed at first, slowly, insidiously, inexorably, the reign of the Red Madness began. The great mass of people throughout the world did not understand it, had no idea what was happening to them. They called it, they still call it, the Red Madness. It began with a feeling of uneasiness. An oppression. The feeling one has sometimes when the barometer falls in the lull before a coming storm; the feel, as they would say, of electricity in the air. Thousands said that, undoubtedly. A growing uneasiness. The countries in the daylight felt it most. The sick, the weak, the nervous, were most quickly affected. In hospitals there was a sudden hysteria among the patients. In a Miami hospital early that evening an old woman patient ran screaming and laughing, screaming that red demons were after her. Perhaps, of all the millions, she was the first. She leaped into the street; Freddie and Dan recall her shuddering scream and eerie laughter as it floated into the open windows of the War Department. At the War Department the reports from abroad were increasingly alarming. Within an hour every official channel of communication was cluttered with news. A diversity impossible to picture! At first, abnormality in the sick, the old, and the very young. Infants wailing, unable to sleep; old people stricken with hysteria, a morbid, weeping melancholia, or a wild frenzy of madness. A lone old man suddenly gone mad; then, not only old people--a mob rushing screaming down a city street; a great airliner very nearly plunging into the China Sea because its pilot was laughing uncontrollably, and then weeping with realization of the tragedy he had so nearly caused.